Seen a Bee Lately?

Well have you?

My chimney has always been a bizarre hive-magnet. Like clockwork every spring bees moved in as if their only purpose in this life was the singular intention to scare the living hell out of me by spinning an ominous droning hum inside my fireplace grate, like teeny tiny cultists chanting as they waited to steal my soul out of my mouth while I was sleeping. Also, bees would crawl out of the fireplace grate and swarm over it and my patio door handle purposely so that when I'd come home from work I'd first look with dread to see whether or not they were writhing all over the fireplace (they were) and then I'd run to the door to shoo them out hoping the handle wasn't covered and similarly writhing (it was) and decide whether to spend the afternoon trapped inside, miserably huddling by the door, waiting for them to fly off (I would).

I swear to God, Candyman, I did not say your name. Now will you please just go. I'm supposed to get a pedicure later. 

That's a lot, bees. That's a lot to ask. I'm on your side but that's really a pretty big violation of my personal space.

Somewhere in the last few years the bee-chimney occupations ended without me really realizing it. I was just grateful not to come home to little crawling, flying, stinging machines. I've never really returned to trusting bees after they killed Macaulay Culkin in "My Girl."

"Where are his glasses? He can't see without his glasses!"
*ugly cry* Why, cruel world? Why!?

Makes sense that I stopped seeing bees nesting in my chimney around 2013 because in the six years leading up to that, more than 10 million beehives were lost, nearly twice normal rates, to, among other things, a phenomenon scientists are calling Colony Collapse Disorder. Basically, for no known reason, the adult worker bees just pick up and take off, leaving behind a queen and plenty of food. It's sad, actually; there's often capped off baby bees waiting to hatch, sugar syrup all warm and waiting, and the queen, of course, waiting forever for her knights to return. Without sufficient worker bees the colony can't sustain itself and the bees die.

Scientists started noticing the disappearance of bees in 2006; by 2008 the loss was at around 35% in the European Union, 40% in the United States. Theories abounded: pesticides, varroa mites, habitat destruction, environmental stresses, malnutrition were all suspected contributing factors to the decline of bees in some combination. In 2012, European scientists published several independent peer-reviewed studies showing that neonicotinoids (basically a nicotine-based pesticide from Bayer pharmaceuticals that farmers were spraying on their rapeseed, maize, and cereals) were contributing to the shortened lifespans of bees, if not Colony Collapse Disorder itself; the European Food Safety Authority decided in 2013 that these pesticides were an unacceptable risk to bees (who, let's not forget, we rely on to pollinate 75% of every single food source on the planet) and in April of that year, banned those pesticides. Meanwhile in the same year in the United States, the EPA along with the Department of Agriculture (who has absolutely no vested interests in the continued use of pesticides on major cash crops like, oh, say, CORN) formed a task force to really, for reals you guys, look into the issue because it's for serious. Our Congress continues to debate the bill introduced in 2013 (Saving America's Pollinators) asking for these same pesticides to be suspended until their effect on pollinators can be fully studied.  Ultimately, though, scientists haven't agreed on what definitively causes Colony Collapse Disorder or what is causing the huge drop in bee mortality to the point that the words "Bee Extinction" are being bandied around. 

Wait. What?

Damn. "Extinction" is a really big word.

Scientists are also asking whether monoculture and nutrition have an effect on bee health. The California almond orchards alone ship in 1.6 million honey bee colonies every year to pollinate their crops; hives that are fed corn syrup or sugar during the winter to sustain them and then survive on a single crop type of pollen for the spring. Except the University of Jerusalem says that colonies that are kept on farms for crop pollination suffer from nutritional deficiencies because of the low diversity of flowers; and those deficiencies lead to lower life expectancy for bees. The study found that bees will attempt to not only find more varied types of pollen to make up for their nutritional deficiencies, but they also work as a colony to fill in nutritional gaps for the colony as a whole. Wellesley College also found that bees with poor nutrition in the larval stages have poor pollination abilities (foraging and waggle dancing) as adults.  As more and more farms combine into mega-acreages of a single crop, bees face journeys of more and more miles to gain access to different flowers; while drought conditions in California especially have robbed the bees of the water sources they need to make such long journeys.

Honey bees are big business. The government estimates that honey bee pollination alone is responsible for over $15 billion in fruits, nuts, and vegetables. A presidential Pollinator Health Task Force has been given the mission to study the decline of the bee populations and determine definitively the cause, as well as come up with solutions for its reversal. We're at such a crisis with our pollinators that the Federal Budget for 2016 includes $82 million in funding just for studies into pollinator health, including Colony Collapse Disorder. The Federal Action Plan, meanwhile, calls for "all hands on deck"--meaning that while the federal government works to increase habitat for bees on federal lands and continues to look for causes, the rest of us have to do our part to ensure that the little bug that's so intrinsic to the survival of our way of life doesn't vanish. Honeybees, like so many of our food crops we've brought from other countries, aren't native to the Americas; so without them we not only lose entirely kiwis, brazilnuts, watermelon, squash, pumpkins, zucchini, macadamia nuts and passion fruit, but we drastically decrease productivity of fruit and nut trees like pears, cherries, apples, avocado and cashews. Not only that, honeybees help pollinate key foraging crops used to feed beef cattle--alfalfa (hay) and clover; and oil-producing crops like rapeseed (the source of canola/vegetable oil), coconut, and safflower. (You can click HERE for a full list of crops pollinated by bees.) They also help pollinate potatoes. Which means a world without honeybees means making fries without potatoes. Or canola oil.

What are you even talking about. 

There's a few ways we can all do our part to save the french fries and the fruit salads, no matter where you live.

--Plant a pollinator garden. Sunflowers especially are awesome sources of bee pollen and their bright yellow color is easy for bees to spot from a long way off. They're easy to grow and don't take up much space, and will give you a good crop of sunflower seeds at the end of the season as a bonus. Lots of seed companies now market special sunflower seeds with extra pollen just for bees; make sure you aren't getting a pollen-free variety (used for floral arrangements). For resources to plant your own pollinator garden click HERE.
--Leave out a little bee bath on hot days. A dish of water with a stone in the center that bees can land on and walk down to sip the water gives far-traveling urban bees a chance to rehydrate and continue foraging.
--Limit your use of pesticides. Soap and water solution (1 tbl castille or other natural soap to 1 gallon of water) is cheaper, more effective against all kinds of creepy crawlies, and won't harm the bees flying in to pollinate roses. You can also use companion planting in your flower beds; rue is effective against Japanese beetles, marigolds and garlic work well against aphids from the roots of the plant up.
--Call a bee removal expert if you find a hive too close to your living areas rather than trying to dispose of the hive yourself. You can call a pest service and have them come out for a fee, but a quick search of Craig's List in my area popped up about 100 entries for free bee removal services--basically, home beekeepers and beekeeping societies looking for hives. They remove the danger to you at no cost and gain free bees for their backyard hives; win-win.

I have to admit, I have changed my tune about bees. When I was just out of college I went over to a friend's house and while we were enjoying our delicious fresh-from-the-garden mojitos in their freaking gorgeous, flower-filled backyard I noticed a wooden structure in the corner. "What's that?"

"Oh, that's our beehive."

I have never thrown down a drink with more fluster and indignant betrayal than at the moment I realized my supposedly well-meaning friends had actually lured me into their potentially lethal killer-bee killing zone. I was horrified and flabbergasted and though I pulled myself together enough to laugh it off while I hustled my little heels right out of the out and into the in, I could not believe the stupidity of my highly educated friends for not only thinking I'd be okay with eating next to a vicious hive of aggressive stinging insects but for purposely keeping one right by their back door. I liked them a lot, but not enough to ever EVER go back to their house after that.

Face palm.

Yeah. I'm the stupid one now. I have of late been plagued by the obsessive desire to have my own beehive and with it, free raw honey, whipped honey, honey on the comb, beeswax candles, beeswax lip balm, and all the pollination I can get so my Big Mac pumpkins actually turn into something beyond huge water sucking yellow flowers that never fruit. Sadly, when I sneakily tried to slip the idea of bees in the backyard into conversation to my chicken-coop-tolerating next door neighbor, she reacted exactly like I did at the mojito-hive party.

A bee stung me and I'm pretty sure it was probably your bee. 

Okay fine. No bees.

My contribution to the local bees this year is a packet of borage seeds I planted out in my beds.

My companion planting books ("Carrots Love Tomatoes" and "Companion Planting") kept recommending borage as a pollinator plant; once I looked into it a little more I found out beekeepers today actually plant borage specifically to attract bees. It's known as a honey plant, giving about 30 kg of honey per acre; it repels tomato hornworms, and it's not demanding on the soil. You can eat it--it's high in gamma-linolenic acid (an omega-6 fatty acid called GLA that's an anti-inflammatory), decorate ice cubes with the pretty, edible, blue-purple star flowers, and it's supposed to also support endocrine health and the ancient Romans used it as an anti-depressant. I put out a handful of seeds in the corners of my strawberry and tomato beds and they sprouted quickly and consistently with no work at all beyond the initial planting. They haven't bloomed yet but the fuzzy leaves are about the size of my palm and fingertips after only about a month. I have crappy luck with starting from seed so I planted a lot, expecting most wouldn't come up, but they sprouted so easily and are growing so vigorously I'll have to transplant before they reach their full 24-36" height and shade my food plants too much. For apartment dwellers, these seeds would certainly bloom in a pot on the patio.

I think about bees a lot these days. When I hear them high up in the trees it doesn't make me nervous, it absurdly reassures me, knowing they're working furiously to assure their survival and ours. When I see them in my roses, busying themselves industriously around the creamy white petals like little liveried servants smoothing a lady's satin skirts, I leave them to it and save my pruning for later in the day, when they've retired to the honey combs. They dance around my lavender. They get drunk on scented geraniums, indulging themselves luxuriously in pinks and pale violet and fuchsia. They are the bards of my garden, humming the same song they sang for da Vinci and Catherine de Medici, connecting my backyard to the gardens of Monet and Van Gogh. They fill the quiet with the fervent sound of their wings, tiny cupids romancing squash blossoms to each other, engendering life within the cherry petals.

Thinking about bees and how much they used to freak me out, the 90's horror movie "The Candyman" popped into my head--a ghost with a ribcage wreathed in bees who appeared if you said his name five times into the mirror. He'd open his mouth and bees would pour out.

Hmm.

Candyman. Candyman. Candyman. Candyman...

Personal Growth in Heels: from Lettuce Seeds to Ecoterrorist

A year ago, I had messed things up, as usual.

Like an idiot I went to the nursery just to, you know, see what they had--you know, in April, in Southern California. Yeah. They had everything. I immediately started running around with my little cart picking up six packs of pumpkins and cilantro and pineapple sage and tomatillos and about nine thousand packets of seeds because I had one 2'x6' bed in my backyard and it could obviously sustain all the edible plant life necessary for a complete food forest. 

I have to admit the people at the nursery were complete freaking enablers holding the end of my tourniquet so I could shoot myself up with my drug of choice because at no time did anyone stop me and say hey loser. Are you a farmer? Are you a commercial poppy grower? Do you own an estate in Columbia where you anticipate having to support the entirety of a vast army of rebels? Because you will one hundred percent never in life ever be able to find places with enough sun and enough space for like, a fraction of what you have in your cart right now. Unless you plan on stealing this shopping cart and making it into a planter, in which case then yes, you can go ahead and take that tomato plant. 

Worst was all the packets of seeds. Once I got home and started looking more closely at the spacing requirements for all my six packs I realized I had room for exactly one six pack of plants. The rest I dug into odd places here and there and put into pots for the time being and then looked forlornly at my packets of seeds. I distributed about half a packet of green bean seeds into an enormous, ridiculously expensive set of peat pots seed starters and then looked at the other like, ten thousand seed packets and went to go look for a mirror so I could punch myself in the face. Goddammit. I was never going to have blue pumpkins. 

I was just going to have to come up with a solution, so I left all the expensive seed packets sitting on the backyard table to make sure that I didn't forget about them.

Since I usually mess up in clusters, I forgot all about them.

Until it rained during the night. During a drought. In April. It does not rain in April in So Cal, much less during an historic drought but it rained that night in a torrential downpour that promptly ruined all my heirloom seeds.

I swear to God. I'm gonna punch you in the freaking face.

Desperately I turned to google and amid a sea of laughing actual gardeners who just shook their heads at questions posted by dumbasses like me, one guy was like, "Sure. Throw them out in the garden. What do you have to lose?" Clinging to those heartfelt words of encouragement and support, I pathetically salvaged one packet of butter lettuce seeds and scraped them out of the soggy clump in the bottom of the envelope, not so much carefully sprinkling them evenly over the ground as like, flicking them off the side of my fingers in slimy clots. I put them in where other stuff was already growing so I could pretend like I was still successful even as I watched to see how much of a failure I really was. 

They. Came. Up. 

Lettuce. At last. The one thing even I can't mess up.

Except I read something in passing about something called bolting. Lettuce bolted if it got too hot. Huh. Not sure what bolting is. Also, lettuce could "go to seed" if planted too late. This seemed unlikely. First of all, where are there freaking seeds on a lettuce? And also, if it just rained in the middle of a damn drought, it definitely was not going to get too hot for the lettuce to bolt. Whatever that might be. They grow lettuce in fields in full sun in, like, Fresno. My lovely shady backyard is not going to be too hot for a lettuce.

Oh. Bolting MEANS "go to seed."
 Like, become inedible and send up crazy cell phone towers out of the center of the lettuce.

So my lettuce bolted because obviously I did exactly zero of the sun research you're supposed to do to map out the zones of your house, the compass directions, and the hours of sun each area of the garden gets each day. We had about a week of beautiful wonderful lettuce and then it bolted. Each head shot up on stalks about three feet high and sent up yellow flowers that turned into little dandelion fluff. The stalks extrude a milky sap that seeps into the leaves, making them bitter and inedible to protect the plant once it starts trying to set seed.

Ever practical, my husband listened to me wail about the turning of the tides and how fate was intervening in our destinies for a minute before asking, "If it's setting seed, shouldn't you be able to collect it?"

Hmm. Back to google. Aha, YES, you can collect lettuce seed (waiting until the yellow flowers turn to little brown pods and then breaking them open). After a few minutes of doing so I was startled to realize I'd collected at least a couple hundred seeds from a single plant. I went and got an envelope. Holy crap. Thousands. Of seeds. 

I planted our harvested seeds last fall and though birds got them, bugs got them, weather got them, somehow, miraculously, I ended up with a bed full of lettuce again this winter that cost me nothing. An unseasonable hot spell sent them bolting again, and they've already reseeded the bed and the lawn around the bed. Lettuce heads are cropping up everywhere and we're back to gathering seeds, though for what I'm not sure. The seeds are in every inch of dirt on my property by now, blowing here and there on the wind by the dandelion fluff parachutes they sprout. My little son comes out to pop seeds heads open and empty the seeds into envelopes with me. "Let's have a seed sale," he suggests. "We can have like a lemonade stand but with lettuce seeds. For ten or fifteen dollars." 

I'm not sure the demand for heirloom butter lettuce is quite THAT high yet. We do have so much seed though, and I'm a little smug every time I go to the nursery now and shake the $3 packet of lettuce seeds. If that was really how much those seeds were worth I could retire on what I'm pulling out of my lettuce bed. 

"What are you going to do with all of it?" my neighbor Suzy asks. 

"I don't know. Maybe just scatter it into people's lawns at night and run away shouting 'Grow Food! Not Lawns!' like an ecoterrorist ninja." I laugh, but my daughter looks sideways at me. 

"Shh, mom. Now they know our plans."

Forest Bathing to Reinspire Creativity

When I first read about Shinrin-Yoku, the Japanese art of Forest Bathing, since I'm a big nerd I immediately imagined myself languidly draped in the butterfly boughs of the pygmy oaks of the Elfin Forest, with the sunlight filtering flaxen light through my golden hair. 

And wardrobe provided by Harper's Bazaar, obvs.

I tried taking a selfie to capture the moment but it didn't really come out.

Is this it? Am I doing it? 

Even if you don't have a disconnect between fantasy and reality (okay, I KNOW I AM A BRUNETTE!) taking a selfie would actually never have worked. See, Forest Bathing is rooted in the idea that our constant exposure to and immersion in technology is literally making us sick. Too much time in front of the computer, tv, and smart phones in addition to our extremely stimulating daily lives--we drive in five lanes of traffic, we manage tight timetables, we negotiate music and shock jocks and small talk--has left us distracted, impatient, forgetful. We blow off bad judgement from stress and the stress itself as just another part of our urban life; but in fact, scientists with the Neuroscience division of the CDC have found these symptoms so pervasive in city dwellers that they've dubbed it "Directed Attention Fatigue". Researchers at the University of Michigan found that even a few minutes of the intensity of a city street can affect focus and self-control--so what is it doing to us when we live in it?

Talk to a parent in their thirties of a young kid these days and you'll realize that little kids are the canaries in the coal mine for this phenomenon, displaying more openly the stresses we've learned to hide and accept. We all grew up with Nintendo controllers in our hands and had access to computers for typing up essays; but pre-millenial kids didn't suffer from anger and depression as a result of it. Today's kids are "Wired and Tired"--chronically tired, apathetic, or prone to irrational mood swings and rages because their screentime is radically different than ours was, not just in amount of time but in intensity. Hard core gamers of the 90s would have spent after school time on Nintendo games with limited directionality: Mario went forward, backward, jumped, shot fire or ran. Now Mario goes forward, backward, jumps and runs; but also swims, flies, jumps high, propels, propels in mid-air, jumps and then can propel on the downward arch; climbs vines, shoots fire, shoots ice, bounces off walls, can miniaturize, swims as a penguin, breaks through lateral blocks, can pick things up and throw them, can do a spinning downward jump to destroy objects. The Mario universe is interactive, with objects hiding behind the clouds, secret entrances, secret tunnels, mazes that have to be completed in a certain order. Expert gamers learn to look for clues simultaneous to completing the basic shoot-jump-run level so they can find the coins to get into to the final secret levels that only open after you complete the game. Small kids have no problem with this game--why should they? Today's kids have tablets in the classroom and they complete their homework online. They have computer lab time at school and required educational computer games for homework. Grade school kids have phones and tablets of their own. Psychology Today says their chronically high mental arousal levels have left them agitated but exhausted, suffering with memory problems, and with symptoms that mimic ADHD and bipolar disorder.

I'm so sorry, kids. I've failed you. 

Forest Bathing, or what the Japanese call Shinrin-yoku, is the idea that going for a walk in the forest is a form of preventative and healing medicine. The principles of "Breathe, Relax, Wander, Touch, Listen, and Heal" were developed in the 80's in Japan as a way for city dwellers to deal with the intense pace of modern life, and since then, study after study have shown an increase in both physical and mental health. Now Shinrin-yoku is a specific engagement of the five senses, requiring a total unplugging of technology and immersion in a gentle, guided walk through nature (the official U.S. site for shinrin-yoku HERE will send you a free starter kit to help you guide your own forest walks); but Stanford University researchers have also found that just walking for 90 minutes in nature lowered anxiety and depression versus people who walked in urban settings. Patients having undergone surgery recovered more quickly, had shorter hospital stays and had less pain when they had a view of trees. A view of nature helps in the workplace too, leading to lowered stress and higher work satisfaction, better productivity, improved concentration, increased creativity. Most telling, though, is the Japanese study that specifically measured something called NK cells--Natural Killer cells. These building blocks of the immune system help pregnant women carry to term, control innate immunity to HIV, and have been used in anti-cancer therapies. Spending a day out in nature significantly increased these NK cells, and that boost? Stuck around for a week after the trip. 

On a recent trip to Mexico I found myself fascinated with the waves. Yeah, I get it, that's not really newsworthy...waves and beach vistas are actually pretty hypnotic but I'm from San Diego, home of some of the most beautiful beaches in the world, with dramatic promontories, dynamic waves, and spectacular dragon cloud sunsets. This beach was not that. It was plain and flat and straight, with the horizon stretching out somewhat monotonously in every direction. Because of the bay we were in, the waves came in with a predictable height and regularity, and being located on the eastern coast of Baja, the sunset was diluted and moved from pastel shades of peach and pale ochre to a starry night in quick succession. Still, I couldn't stop walking out to the beach to watch the waves. Why? The sea was a different shade of green than the deep blue I was used to in San Diego but it wasn't a gemstone; it was a soft bottle glass green. If you watched long enough the waves would pull back against the tide enough to clear the foam and the wave would rear up perfectly green and translucent enough to see the flat triangular shapes of surfing manta rays silhouetted in the curl before it crashed. The sand was alternately pillowy soft and absurdly fluffy or painfully gritty and crystalline; either way there was no ignoring what was under my bare feet. The drop off from the dunes to the beach to the shelf where the waves crashed was steep, too dangerous to swim; maybe that was why the waves crashed with a thunderous boom like I've never heard before, a violent explosion of salt spray fireworks that diffused to butterfly kisses on our cheeks. I watched and walked and lost myself in thought. I tried to take pictures to capture what I was feeling, the release, the relaxation, but they were just plain and ordinary pictures of a somewhat cloudy day on an uninteresting stretch of beige beach. No one could make a postcard out of this vista, and yet I found myself drawn again and again away from the pulsing club remix of Adele and Taylor Swift songs out onto that beach, with my senses restored. 

I started to understand why gardeners can lose themselves for afternoons at a time; why hiking is addictive; and why watching chickens peck blades of grass while sipping margaritas is totally a thing. A party-worthy thing. A party full of academics and brilliant thinkers, creators and engineers, thing. It'd be great if we all had a nearby forest where we could immerse ourselves for 90 minutes in the middle of the work day five days a week. It'd be great if there was a local Shinrin-Yoku forest therapy group on the block that met conveniently after dinner at the forest at the end of the cul de sac. But it'd be really great if there was some way we could deal with the stress of city life, jobs, driving, technology and horrible people driven crazy by the same forces pressing in on us at all times that was free and sustainable--and it sounds like getting out into the natural world is the cheapest and most effective therapy there is.

My personal hell is people who small talk because they can't stand silence. I hear them while I'm getting my pedicure, chattering away about the intimate details of their lives and their soap operas for 45 minutes to a total stranger. I hear them at the theatre, stage whispering their commentary in the uncomfortable silences. I hear them whenever some unfortunate secretary or waitress gamely asks "How was your weekend?" and it all comes tumbling out. If I get out into the sunshine more often will my vitamin D depletion reverse itself and the increased air quality around green and living things improve my bad attitude toward annoying people, until I just hear them as babbling brooks or a gently bubbling Roman fountain? 

I can only hope. At least if I'm walking, I'll be looking good doing it.

Cuba's Forced Urban AgroEcology

When I think of Cuba, urban farming isn't the first thing that comes to mind. Pastel colored antique cars, certainly; forbidden cigars; garlicky lime-marinated pork sandwiches...but ask anyone my age about the Cuban missile crisis and the longest trade embargo in history and we only vaguely know what we've seen on TV. And by TV I mean that one episode of Seinfeld where they got all excited about smoking some Cuban cigars.

I want this to not be the place I get my information, but I'm pretty sure this episode is literally the only reason I know about the embargo.

In 1958, with armed conflicts between the Cuban government and Fidel Castro's rebels escalating, the United States imposed an arms embargo between ourselves and Cuba. In response, Castro's new regime purchased their armaments from the Soviet Union; the United States in turn greatly reduced the number of tons of brown sugar Cuba could import to the United States, prompting the Soviet Union to buy the sugar instead. In October 1960, with tensions rising in the Cold War, an American-owned oil refinery in Cuba refused to refine a shipment of Soviet crude oil. The Cuban government responded by nationalizing all three oil refineries in the country (which all happened to be American owned) without compensation to the owners; and the Eisenhower administration responded in turn by imposing the trade embargo that has endured for nearly sixty years.

From an American point of view, life didn't change much. For Cuba, largely reliant on a super power that dissolved in the 1990's in the fall of the Soviet Union, life came grinding to a halt. The bulk of Cuba's agricultural industry was devoted to the export of sugarcane, with 57 percent of food production being imported from the Soviet Union. Cuba was reliant on massive amounts of pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and machinery, all supplied by the Soviet Union; but in turn, soil quality was degrading, key crops like rice were declining, and agricultural pests were on the rise.

Ah, the 1990's. Makes me nostalgic for the days Monsanto could spray the endless fields of corn with thousands of tons of caustic pesticides and no one would say boo. 

When the Soviet Bloc collapsed, so did food production in Cuba. Tractors couldn't function without petroleum; crops couldn't thrive without fertilizer; insects took over entire fields. Cuba showed the worst growth in per capita food production in all of Latin America.

With no other choice but to adapt an urban agroecology, the Cuban government turned to its people. Oxen took over the plowing of fields; green crop manures like peas, oats, and clover replaced chemical fertilizers. Policy reforms helped farmers form co-ops and made it easier for small farmers to market their crops. The Ministry of Agriculture started making it easier for urban farmers to grow food on their lots and not only allowing farming on unused state lands but distributing those lands to potential urban farmers, to the tune of over 1 million hectares of land. In short, the government GAVE AWAY over 100,000 farms. Urban farming exploded, with close to 400,000 urban farms total, and production exploded: by 2006 peasant farmers owned 25% of the land and provided 65% of the food for the country. Using 72% less chemical fertilizers and pesticides than under the Soviet partnerships of 1988, Cuban farmers now produce 145% more vegetables, roots and tubers and 351% more beans.

Forced to survive without chemicals, isolated from genetically modified seeds, pushed to develop artisanal insecticides and sustainable ways to enrich the soil, Cuba handed the reins of the cart driving food production over to its people--and thrived. Using unused land and no chemicals, the people of Cuba produced 20kg of green material per square meter.

I have to stop and think about that in terms of my formerly grassy lawn. I probably produced one pound of grass clippings per square meter in a year, maybe, and that's with regular applications of chemical fertilizers and the huge can of Roundup spray we used to keep in the garage, not to mention the water usage that collectively has bankrupted California's water reservoirs.

With President Obama starting the process of lowering the trade embargo, American companies are eager to get into Cuba and start imposing our agricultural model: moving the bulk of food production into a few, large scale commercial farms that will turn a profit, and out of the hands of the small urban and suburban farmers. Export crops like sugarcane would likely again replace consumable food crops. And while the United States uses data from 2008, after three consecutive devastating hurricanes destroyed Cuban crops, to support the idea that Cuba cannot feed its people and therefore needs U.S. trade to survive? The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization lists Cuba's average per capita food production at well over 3,200 kcal.

Yesssss. But just think of all that lovely pristine farmland that could be put to...better use. 

Cuba's victory gardens inspire me that given sufficient time and rest from chemicals, with natural, sustainable amendments, my lawn and garden will continue to provide more and more of our food and gives me hope for what we urban and suburban farmers may be able to achieve. As the American urban farming movement grows, and with it the demand for local produce in our grocery stores and on our restaurant tables, we come closer to reaching what Cuban urban farming has already accomplished. If we think of Cuba at all, its to picture how quaintly backward they are, with their 1950's cars, trapped picturesquely in the ending of a Godfather movie, all jazz clubs and saxophones and sexy women in clinging dresses. It never occurred to me that in embracing the past, Cuba would have quietly developed a model for nation-wide sustainable organic agriculture that successfully feeds its people. Vintage never went out of style in Havana.