Getting Dirty: The Joy Of Growing Food In Your Own Backyard with Rachel Kaplan

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The Urban Homesteading Movement is a do-it-yourself people’s movement that is happening all around the country, where people with no previous experience of farming are starting to grow their own food and take care of what we think of as farm animals: chickens, goats, bees, rabbits, and quail. Rachel Kaplan says of this movement, “People are learning to preserve and keep their bounty in ways that were once traditional and common place, but have lost their appeal in our 'convenient' culture. This is not only a food movement but also a movement of people who are about conservation of energy, water, and waste. It is a movement of learning to live with less impact on the earth, with a greater sense of what it means to be part of the place where we live, and to be thinking ecologically.” (hosted by Justine Willis Toms)

Bio

Rachel Kaplan is a gardener, somatic psychotherapist, and educator who offers consultation with a permaculture focus for businesses, non-profits, schools and community groups. Rachel lives in Petaluma, California with her partner and their daughter on a little homestead they call Tiny Town Farm.

Her books include:

• Urban Homesteading: Heirloom Skills for Sustainable Living (with K. Ruby Blume) (Skyhorse Publishing 2011)
• Moving Toward Life: Five Decades of Transformational Dance (editor, with Anna Halprin) (Wesleyan University Press 1995)

To learn more about the work of Rachel Kaplan and K. Ruby Blume, please go to www.urban-homesteading.org, www.RachelKaplanMFT.net, or www.iuhoakland.com.

Topics Explored in This Dialogue

• What is urban homesteading
• How gardening can alleviate fear and anxiety
• How can we transform our hard-packed and rubbled backyards into beautiful gardens
• What can we do to help the bees avoid colony collapse
• How can gardening create community resilience
• What are the advantages of composting our human manure, and how to do it
• How no civilization has survived the loss of its soil fertility

Host: Justine Willis Toms         Interview Date: 7/5/2011         Program Number: 3408

Music Playlist

From Album: American Acoustic
Artist: Nancy Rumbel and Eric Tingstad
1998 Narada #72438-45862-2-5

Opening Essay: Track 08 Secrets of the Big Sky
Music Break 1:Track 02 Alligator Alley
Music Break 2: Track 03 Give and Take
Music Break 3: Track 01 Sheenandoah