I just returned from a brief holiday which included a stay at Portland's Ace Hotel (locations also in Seattle, New York & Palm Springs).
While most hotel lobbies are dead zones - with very little community or activity aside from the drab lounge or utilitarian Starbucks bar, the Ace Hotel in Portland breaks the rule, providing a warm community space across two levels (some pics here, here and here).
The Ace Hotel Lobby has an open doorway to Stumptown Coffee and a large comfy U-shaped sofa to sit, sip, socialize or relax on. It's regularly populated with well-caffeinated hipsters. There's free wi-fi for all comers. The lobby also offers an old fashioned photo booth and easily accessible public restrooms. The check in desk is actually way in the back corner - but the staff is still friendly and helpful.
Upstairs, there's a quieter comfy reading area with a shared work table, free postcards and a shared Mac with Internet access (which wasn't working on our visit).
Instead of trying to move people through a space and keep the public out, the Ace creates a space for the community to gather, drink coffee, browse the Web and hang out. It's welcoming. If Americans had more spaces like this to gather in, we'd watch less TV and come together to change the world.
Before you complete your Thanksgiving plans this year, I encourage you to read author Gary Steiner's essay in The New York Times (Animal, Vegetable, Miserable) on our collective dismissal of animal slaughter. Here are some excerpts:
[How] can people continue to eat meat when they become aware that nearly 53 billion land animals are slaughtered every year for human consumption? The simple answer is that most people just don’t care about the lives or fortunes of animals.
The most penetrating and iconoclastic response to this sort of reasoning came from the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer in his story “The Letter Writer,” in which he called the slaughter of animals the “eternal Treblinka.”
These uses of animals are so institutionalized, so normalized, in our society that it is difficult to find the critical distance needed to see them as the horrors that they are: so many forms of subjection, servitude and — in the case of killing animals for human consumption and other purposes — outright murder.
We have been trained by a history of thinking of which we are scarcely aware to view non-human animals as resources we are entitled to employ in whatever ways we see fit in order to satisfy our needs and desires.
Mostly, I encourage you to look at ways you can gradually reduce your reliance on slaughtered animals in your diet. I'll be posting some suggestions on the blog soon.
I stopped eating meat products about fifteen years ago and seafood about ten years ago. It began for me as an experiment in healthful eating but gradually fostered a stronger awareness and concern for animal welfare and the environment.
Steiner's arguments that cultural frames create the norms with which we assess the morality of our behaviors are compelling - and can be applied to all areas of our lives. Why is it okay for us to walk by homeless people day in and day out doing nothing? Why is it okay for me to have health care but not the poor? Why is it okay that poor minorities don't have computers and Internet access at home - in a world that increasingly requires such? There is so much we accept because it's been passed down to us as "the way things are".
Listen for the entitlement argument and you'll find it almost everywhere in our culture.
Starting a garden as an adult seemed intimidating. The more I gathered from friends, the more it seemed like rocket science. My worst fears were confirmed upon reading the opening sentence of The Maritime Northwest Garden Guide (a guide for beginners): "Well, it isn't rocket science - organic gardening is a lot more complex." How did they know what I was thinking?
I hadn't had a garden since I was a child. I remember planting a sunflower and having it grow bigger than my head. Similar success followed with my first Zucchini (will spare you the anatomical comparison). The California sun definitely had a lot to do with it but gardening seemed easy back then.
Why Garden?
I've been a vegetarian for nearly fifteen years. I stopped eating seafood about ten years ago. But, I never learned how to cook very well.
I enrolled in a wonderful series of courses at PCC called The Main Course, taught by Omid Roustaei and programmed by The Boulder School of Natural Cookery (Omid's cooking classes are one of the Northwest's best kept secrets - mention his name to a fellow student and an animated conversation is sure to follow). Through The Main Course, I learned the basics of cooking with oils, grains, vegetables, salts and herbs and spices.
Now, I knew how to shop for vegetables and turn them in to delicious meals. Gradually, I found myself wanting to start an herb garden and then grow more of my own ingredients at home.
My 2009 Garden Experiment
I decided to start small, building a single raised bed from concrete blocks and planting some lettuce starts from Swanson's nursery. I also planted some herbs and tomatoes in a couple of containers.
But soon, I decided to build two raised beds and place them on the front lawn where the sun shined brightest. I used How to build raised beds (Sunset Magazine) to help me construct them. Building the beds was easy but a good stretch of my weak construction skills. I used soybean oil to finish the wood. I bought organic soils from nearby nurseries and hardware stores. By the end of summer, I had built a third raised bed, started two compost bins (more on this later), planted a row of seven blueberry bushes, two fig trees (with my girlfriend's help and encouragement) and an indoor greenhouse of seed starts!
On the suggestion of friends and neighbors, I installed a timed, drip irrigation system. Installing it was also not very hard. Once it was set up, I no longer needed to be actively involved in daily watering.
Bird netting kept out the crows and my irrational fears of pilfering neighbors. In reality, the garden turned out to be a great way to meet dozens of neighbors who stopped to chat and comment on the garden. It also turned out to be quite satisfying to share the harvest with them!
The Harvest
The bountiful harvest I've had this summer has been quite amazing. You can see a bit from the slideshow above. This year's hot summer in Seattle definitely helped.
Here's a summary of what we harvested:
Vegetables: blonde cucumbers, golden cherry, green zebra, roma and two kinds of heirloom tomatoes, carrots, peas, green beans, shiso, kale, mustard greens, golden and purple beets, two different kinds of eggplant, a number of kinds of salad greens, onions, delicata squash, acorn squash, buttercup squash, cayenne and sweet orange peppers, chocolate and green bell peppers, chard and endless zucchini.
Fruits: Melons, alpine strawberries (yum!), standard strawberries and blueberries. Fig trees in the ground for next year!
Herbs:several kinds of basil, coriander, mint, several kinds of Sage, rosemary, lavendar
Cooking What You Grow
It was quite an experience gathering food in the early evening, then cooking meals made up primarily of items from the garden. Usually, salt, oil, garlic and tofu or field roast might be all that was added from the store.
In general, the home grown foods tasted better than what I could find at the store. Highlights were the salad greens, blonde cucumbers, heirloom tomatoes, sweet peas, green beans, alpine strawberries, beets and delicata squash.
You Can Do This!
I'm hooked and plan to garden year round. This weekend I harvested beets and prepared some of my beds for winter with coffee chafe picked up from my local coffee roaster (totally not telling). Gardening is fun and incredibly satisfying. You can start small and do more if you the urge gets you.
Growing your own food can be one part of building sustainable cities:
"Most produce in the US is picked 4 to 7 days before being placed on supermarket shelves, and is shipped for an average of 1500 miles before being sold. We can only afford to do this now because of the artificially low energy prices that we currently enjoy, and by externalizing the environmental costs of such a wasteful food system. We do this also to the detriment of small farmers by subsidizing large scale, agribusiness-oriented agriculture with government handouts and artificially cheap energy." via Local Harvest
Still Not Sure?
If starting a garden still seems intimidating to you, try taking a course from a local nursey. In Seattle, we're lucky to have Seattle Tilth (the rocket scientists).
Sign up for a CSA (community supported agriculture) box or hire Seattle MicroFarm to set up and manage your home garden.
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