Collaboration Chronicles

I’ll be hosting a workshop at my apartment this Saturday to teach how to extract honey from frames and put in jars. The process is really simple, but I thought it would be a great excuse to hang out with people and talk about gardening and urban beekeeping.

So, if you’re interested in tasting some San Francisco honey right from the comb before it goes into jars, stop by my place this Saturday.

450 S. Van Ness, #1
SF, CA 94103

This weekend I hosted a garden party at my house. Coby, Mei and Pat showed up to help out. Pat and my backyard is half concrete and half earth. Pat helped me finish off the fence by nailing it to the existing posts. Those are going to have to be changed next season. Coby and Mei helped pull out the top half of the compost and cut down ivy and all of the overgrowth on the south side of the garden, which can be used for the now 6 dogs that live in our building. The plan is to clear out the three smaller patches for the dogs, because that one sliver is hardly enough for them to play in.

After that, I sat down and took an account of the state of seeds. I have tons of various seeds hanging out, some I’ve saved from things that have grown, and most others I’ve purchased. Figuring out what to plan and how is the next challenge with planning.

When I first started gardening, I didn’t know what to do really (when, how, where, why?), so I found a recommended gardening book. This has totally saved my garden:

I knew that I wanted to plant the following because of the season:

• Artichoke
• Cabbage
• Cauliflower
• Kale
• Lettuce
• Chard
• Potatos
• Onions
• Leeks
• Garlic
• Beets
• Carrots
• Radish
• Parsnips
• Peas
• Lima Beans
• Strawberry
• Parsley, Rosemary and Oregano
• Tea herbs and other flowers to help with insect control

There were missing seeds, so I made a trip to Flowercraft with Pat. There, we got seeds for onions, leeks and some more kale. We also got seedlings for artichoke, cauliflower, cabbages and rosemary. When we got back, I planted the seedlings in appropriate spots and watered them. They’re all around where Mei had planted her strawberry plant. Then Pat and I started seedlings for Luciano Kale, onions, leeks, two other types of kale and oregano. All of these need at least three and up to 12 weeks indoors before they’re transplanted into spring soil. This seems to work out perfectly for San Francisco’s weather.

Lastly, I put parsnip and parsley seeds in water over night, which I planted the next day. I put all of the parsley into pots and the parsnip out of the way of the bigger plants and perennials, so that I can dig them up when they’re ready. Parsnips need about 3″ of clearance between mature plants, so I planted them in triangles and took up a 2 sq. ft. area, where if all germinate and grow, we’ll have 23 parsnips in a season. I think that’s enough for two people to eat with friends .

Dictionary.com defines “survivalist” as follows:

sur-viv-al-ist??[ser-vahy-vuh-list] Show IPA
–noun
a person who makes preparations to survive a widespread catastrophe, as an atomic war or anarchy, esp. by storing food and weapons in a safe place.

I’ve been telling people lately that Collab21 is going to start hosting workshops and videos on survivalism. When I talk about this, I am not in agreement with the definition above. This definition is solely in regards to a person who “make preparations to survive a… catastrophe.” I’m not thinking about any specific events that could case one to have to be prepared. I’m thinking about acquiring this knowledge to add to my arsenal. What happens if you are found quitting your job to follow a dream of living in the country?

A true survivalist knows that the food and ammo runs out, that using a weapon too much will cause it to degrade and become useless. They know that storing food, ammunition and weapons will be of less value when it’s needed than when it was stored. A true survivalist thinks about how to forage foods, how to build fires, how to find water in the desert, how to live underground or under water and how to build communities so that they won’t have to do all of the tasks necessary to sustain humanity.

But at it’s most basic, survival is doing what you know to stay alive. We all do this every day. We buy food and we work to pay for the other things we need: water, shelter, clothing. Possibly more importantly – we build and maintain relationships.

In the book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, I read that agriculture is one of the man’s original inventions. Without it, we couldn’t have had written language. Agriculture allows non-farmers to do things outside of farming. At first, this was helping the farmer trade and sell his crops by providing technology, commerce and accounting. I cannot imagine any of this being possible without the right relationships.

What I mean when I tell you that we are planning workshops relating to survivalism, I’m talking about what would happen if you were one of two people left on the entire planet, and nothing that you knew today existed. How could you maintain humanity? I know this will never happen, but I think the knowledge required to be self sufficient, collaborate affectively and of the fundamentals of society are key to knowing how to succeed in other areas of life.

I am not the type to wax poetic on existentialism. Self reflection is at such an exponentially greater state than is self sufficiency that it’s not worth combining the two (although they are closely related). I think if we stick to sharing knowledge and in rediscovering lost knowledge, that we’ll be moving to a good place.

What do we expect to gain? It’s simple. I’m not the only teacher here. All of us has some knowledge that not everyone else has that can be examined, recorded and shared. When I saw the movie Walkabout, I realized that people you think least likely to help can help the most. In the movie, a native was able to find water in the desert. I don’t know how to do that, but I’d love to find out.

The things I know I can teach people about are things like fermenting foods to preserve them, beekeeping and some level of vegetable gardening. The skills I’d like to know more about are community fundamentals, building houses from scratch (trees and rocks, clay and water), first aid, hunting and field dressing and animal husbandry. There are plenty of other subjects I’d like to have covered in our Survivalism workshop series, but we’ll be moving slowly for now.

This is a compilation of the videos I took last Tuesday. If you’d like to know how I made the beer, check it out!

I thought I would include the recipe for this beer as well. Here it is!

This Tuesday, I’m going to be brewing a Belgian style golden ale. This is part of a workshop series that we’re still formulating, but which will focus on survivalism and green design/manufacturing. The first few workshops will focus on being self sufficient and making things from scratch.

If you’re interested in learning how to make beer, or just want to take part, stop by my house at 6:30pm or after this Tuesday.

If you want to reserve a couple bottles, sign up for our mailing list, or leave a donation using the link on our home page.

See you there!

Last night was the first return Workshop Wednesday after a long hiatus. My friend, Jeremy, and I ate bread, cheese, shawarma and homemade salsa with chips while we worked together on software for a couple hours at my house.

Jeremy is an mechanical engineer. We share the same day job. He has an iPhone app that is on the iPhone Store, but it’s not doing well mainly due to the plethora of bugs and his unwillingness to update. He’s moved onto better things. Like what we worked on last night. I haven’t spent much time with the iPhone development environment (XCode) or Objective C programming, but the syntax is somewhat familiar. It’s like a cross between ActionScript and C++. Needless to say, I was able to clear up some of the important parts of his code quickly and get what he wanted. The result was a program that echoed back through the speakers whatever came in through the microphone.

We spent more than half of the time talking about the reasons to use threads and how to use them properly. We did this while talking about what we were going to do next on this project. I can’t wait for the next Workshop Wednesday so that we can start writing some real code for the ideas we keep spouting out on paper, and the prototypes we keep making in Flash.

If you have something to work on, but need some inspiration or just people to work around, stop by at our next Workshop Wednesday. This is an incubation program for propagating our ideas and inspiring new ideas.