Shaz Jameson

I would like to back the kickstarter.

Problem with kickstarter is it only accepts credit cards.

I live in the Netherlands and here it's very common for people *not* to have credit cards. Nobody I know has one. We do everything by debit, or paypal. Which kickstarter doesn't accept.

So I would happily pledge $10. I'm not sure that helps the cause on kickstarter, though it helps permies. So what can we do? Can a permies team member pledge for me and I pay em through paypal?

Henri, that's an interesting idea and it makes sense, thanks! I will probably put in some of hte organic jaggery I still have lying around, less processed.

Heather Kolankowski wrote:
Question: Has anyone ever tried a "Boat Garden"?

I live in the Netherlands, and on the canals in Amsterdam you see a lot of floating gardens. See google image result for ideas.

There is also some places that are experimenting with growing food on/near water --  see de Ceuvel, not floating food per se, but interesting experiment in metabolisms and closing nutrient loops, doing onsite composting etc..

Heather Kolankowski wrote:
Suggestions are most welcome, or is this a new thread?

Definitely a new thread

Dave de Basque wrote:

I would appreciate a more "normal" PayPal experience where after pressing the button to purchase, I'm sent to a PayPal page that confirms the purchase went through and gives me the option to return to the originating site. This was too efficient and caused momentary freakout syndrome.

Actually, I agree very much with this. I was expecting to see a 'return to permies' or something and when I didn't, I had to do a double take and search for some sort of confirmation that it worked, or that it didn't work. And hten I found the box with the download file. I use paypal for almost everything in terms of online purchases so I guess it's also to do with the hidden expectations I had.

Bought it with paypal. went so smoothly that i had to do ad ouble take to check that something actually happened.
such beautiful cards, i'm so happy i finally get to look at them cause being in europe shipping's a bee-yotch!

Thank you very much!

Wow, what an outpouring of support, thank you everybody!

The overall gist I got from you guys was to be patient and add more dry material.

This I have done! I added a lot more dry bedding - mostly strips of cardboard from toilet rolls (cause that's what I have lying around) and a layer of coconut coir on the bottom and a layer of coconut coir on the top. I've upped my game in terms of feeding them omre regularly, and I checked yesterday and there's been an explosion of baby worms! So, indeed, they are going well. Thank you so much everybody!

@Marco, I realyl like your idea of Pace Space and Grace - something that can be applied in all areas of life really.

@John, I do have red wigglers, and so they seem to be ok

Kyle Neath wrote:A couple things that come to mind:

- Selling high-quality compost (vermicompost especially tends to have higher returns)
- Breeding composting worms
- Selling pre-made planters, raised bed frames

Thanks Kyle! The last point is probably great for our community garden organisation, the first two I think are more on the individual level (i.e. me). Purely because the vast majority of the gardeners are beginners who find it 'cute' to potter around in the garden with the family and grow a few vegetables, rather than hardcore gardeners / eco-warriors. Now that's not a problem, but many haven't even heard of vermicomposting and still give me funny looks when I say I have a worm farm in the back.

R Ranson wrote:How about saving and selling your own seeds?  This could be combined with a series of workshops where the students come and learn about pollination styles, isolation methods, harvesting, drying, processing, sorting, storing, and doing germination tests with seeds.  

Maybe the class itself would be fairly cheap to cover expenses, but at the end of the season, you'll have extra seeds which you can packet and sell the next spring.  

This is a brilliant idea, thank you R Ranson!

We do have a seed-swap bank, so I wonder how these two would work together and not in conflict. Need to think through this some more.

Joel Bercardin wrote:I've visited the Netherlands, but not for long enough to have a good grasp of the various realities there.  I'm sure one factor for food gardens is the length of the actual growing season.

I'm supposing that the people growing food in the gardens have modest money incomes, from whatever sources.  They may feel they need every bit of food their individual plots can produce.

So I don't know how acceptable the idea I'll propose will be, because it depends on the attitudes and mindset of the gardeners.  But could you request that the gardeners grow a specified marketable/profitable crop that could be combined into a sufficient output to be of interest to food sellers?  So that you would have a "cash crop" that the community garden would wholesale, and it would be available to the retailers in a reasonably predictable rate or quantity through the maturity season of that crop.

Perhaps you could think of more than one such crop, so that as one crop's maturity season declines, another comes into season.

The idea here would be for the individual gardeners to contribute to the sustaining of the community-garden system.

Joel, this is a brilliant idea!! It is exactly the kind of thing that makes me excited about permaculture thinking; taking the problem - decentralised, loose network of gardens - and turning it into a solution - join forces for a cash crop that grows in small places in each garden but combines for a larger bulk. This is great, thank you very much. I'm not sure how many people would be willing ot put in the hours, but it's definitely something we can work on!

I will have to look at marketing in the sense of what types of crops would people want to buy, and to whom - the Netherlands is one of hte most agricultural countries in the world and there's no way we can compete with large-scale growing operations, but perhaps on a more local level there is something / somewhere we can fill a gap.

Thank you James and Todd!

Those are great ideas. Because I don't have 'land' as such, I was thinking more of things I could suggest to the city council to use the wood productively. Somebody else suggested woodchips, which is great but also not honouring the chestnut as 'special', as we you say. I will contact the city council and see what they're doing with it.