Check out a cool blog that Kristen Dickie of New Jersey is writing.  It’s called The Omnivore’s Experiment. She will be doing her best to eat additive free and mostly local for the month of august and posting about her experiences and what she learns.  She draws some of her inspiration from Michael Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. We think it’s great work.  Check her out!

Barbara Kingsolver did a similar experiment, and wrote about it in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which you might find interesting.

Cheers!

Father’s Day was a scorcher in Charlottesville this year, and we started off the workday spraying each other (and the bus) down with hoses.  Soon, though, we set to work- and accomplished a lot!

We began to paint Sidney, using a watered-down latex paint-the impermanance of which adds to the constantly-evolving look the bus will take on during the journey.  Patterns of lines in white, green, and blue soon exploded into a beautiful chaos when Kayla and Liam, two kids graham nannies for, showed up.

The kids, their parents Gabe and Elaine, and our friends Julie, Jason, Evan, and Shannon, also helped with running errands, finishing off interior woodworking, and *trumpet fanfare* planting the rooftop garden!  We hauled soil (a gorgeous 60% compost, 40% topsoil mix graciously donated by Panorama Farm in Charlottesville) up to the roof one bucket at a time, mixing Perlite in for lightness.  After about 10 inches went into the 3′x6′ box, we planted!  We now have a dense polyculture crop of lettuce, radishes, kale, cherry tomatoes, cucumber, squash, basil, parsley, marigolds, and nasturtium.

The day concluded with a delicious meal of quinoa, beans, and greens followed by a workshop on companion planting.

Thanks to all for help and hard work!

It’s been an exciting week for Nourish(meant), full of momentum and energy!  Lots of people showed up for both workdays, and the bus is starting to feel like a home.  It now sports a cutting board/stove space made from a dresser pulled out of the nearby frat dumpster, most of a sink (thanks Habitat!), some new storage space, and the most beautiful library bookcase you ever saw!

On wednesday, we ate the first gift a of Nourish(meant) – a tomato.  A cucumber, lettuce and basil are set for picking.

This week, we are working hard to pull together the components for veggie oil conversion, while we continue to finish current projects.  The other major order of business is to get soil and compost to plant our rooftop garden.  Today we made a video for kickstarter.  A post about that project is just around the corner.

Another piece of exciting news is that today we were interviewed by Erika Howsare from the Cville – our new favorite journalist.  Check out her blogpost here: http://www.c-ville.com/index.php?cat=1990309083055403&act=post&pid=12171506090587769 .

Thank you SO much to everyone who has supported us thus far.  We are inspired, energized and grateful!

Today, emily and i spent the afternoon with our new worm mama, Jessalyn.  Jessalyn contacted us to let us know that she wanted to donate worm castings to the project.  She then said that if we helped her sort it from the worms, we could have some of them too.  We jumped on that in a hot second, as we had been seeking worms to buy to build our vermiculture compost.

Worms are great.  They eat your food scraps, producing some of the richest soil known to man or plant.  We call this worm castings or worm poop.  Unlike heat composting, where bacteria do the work (this is the kind of compost we usually think about when we talk about composting), vermiculture composting does not stink.  As a result, it can be done indoors.  If this didnt convince you as to the joy of worms, know that they are also prolific producers and can do their work in small spaces.  Our worm bin is a 18 gallon blue storage bin.  Jessalyn’s bin is of similar size.  She says her worms effectively compost her and both her room mates scraps with relative ease.

Jessalyn welcomed us to her home, then pulled out her bin, which had been composting since January.  She showed us how to scoop out worm castings on to cardboard, then pick through the castings and occasional scraps to find the hiding worms.  We split the worms into two boxes and moved the castings to bags which would soon be fertilizing our plants.  The process took about 3 hours.  We easily sorted several thousand worms, along with countless eggs.  Pictures of the process as well as our workday will soon come!

Thank to our worm mama, we are now happy caretakers of our first livestock.  We will keep you posted as to their growth and habits.

p.s. random worm fact that emily shared while sorting today: worms are hermaphoditic and copulate by hooking anterior ends, then cross-fertilizing each other.  They then go their separate ways and lay eggs like the thousands of ones we saw in our compost!