Community News: Exciting News from Planting Justice!

COMMUNITY NEWS

We are thrilled to present this amazing video to all of you! It's a fantastic video that provides an in-depth look at Planting Justice’s Nursery and the valuable insights about permaculture ethics such as Earth Care, People Care, and Fair Share. We are committed to building a sustainable future where people's needs are met with compassion and dignity, allowing individuals to grow from their past experiences and pass on knowledge and wisdom to their communities.

We had the honor of hosting Andrew Millison, a permaculture teacher, practitioner, media maker, and video producer, at our Nursery. Andrew recently visited us and dedicated an entire video on his popular YouTube channel to showcase our Nursery and our incredible staff!

Our staff emphasize the importance of living wage employment opportunities, dignified work that goes beyond a paycheck, the chance to become leaders in their communities, and the significance of giving back.

We invite you to join us in watching, liking, and sharing this captivating content with your family, friends, and followers. If you haven't already, make sure to follow us on social media to stay informed about offers, nursery coupon codes, and the latest news about Planting Justice!

For more information on our current projects, visit us at plantingjustice.net or feel free to pay us a visit at 319 105th Ave. Oakland, CA 94603.


There are many ways to support Planting Justice!

You can make a one time, monthly, quarterly, or annual donation to Planting Justice all donations are 100% tax-deductible

Planting Justice also accepts Stock Donations!

Ameritrade DTC#: 0188

Account #: 488498580

Account Name: Planting Justice

Not able to contribute financially? No problem! There are still many ways to support us, such as volunteering or sharing our work. Every bit helps and we appreciate your support!

Gardening Tip: Edible Landscaping in the East Bay

Gardening Tip

Springtime in the East Bay offers the perfect opportunity to immerse yourself in the wonders of edible landscaping. By combining ornamental plants with edible varieties, you can create a visually captivating landscape that also provides an abundant harvest. From native flora to fruitful orchards, diverse vegetable gardens, aromatic herbs, and the beauty of edible flowers, the East Bay's spring landscape becomes a canvas for both aesthetic beauty and culinary exploration. So, roll up your sleeves, dig into the soil, and let the colors of spring inspire you to create a vibrant and fruitful edible oasis right in your own backyard!

Embracing Native Flora:
Springtime brings forth an abundance of native plants that thrive in the East Bay’s Mediterranean climate. Incorporating these native species into your home not only adds aesthetic appeal but also helps support local ecosystems and wildlife. Consider planting California poppies, wild lilac, and California sagebrush, which offer stunning blooms while attracting pollinators to ensure a fruitful garden.

Fruitful Orchard Delights:
May typically marks the awakening of fruit trees, making it an ideal time to cultivate an orchard within your backyard. The East Bay boasts a favorable climate for a wide variety of fruit trees, such as persimmon, apple, apricot, plum, and lemon. Blossoms fill the air with their sweet fragrance, creating a sensory delight. From the moment delicate buds appear to the joyous occasion of harvesting juicy fruits, an orchard provides an ever-changing visual feast.

Diverse Vegetable Gardens:
Take advantage of the mild temperatures and ample sunlight to grow an array of delicious and nutritious crops. Plant cool-season vegetables like lettuce, spinach, kale, and radishes, which thrive in the region's springtime climate. Additionally, consider companion planting to enhance pollination, deter pests, and improve overall garden health.

Herbs for Flavor and Fragrance:
No edible landscape is complete without an assortment of aromatic herbs. Plant rosemary, sage, thyme, oregano, and mint to infuse your outdoor space with delightful scents. Not only will these herbs enhance the flavors of your dishes, but they are also great at both attracting beneficial insects and repelling undesirable pests, making them an invaluable addition to your backyard.

The Beauty of Edible Flowers:
Incorporating edible flowers like nasturtiums, calendula, and pansies into your landscape adds a pop of color to your garden beds, mixed drinks, and salads. These blooms bring a touch of whimsy and gastronomic delight to your springtime outdoor experience.

A Sensible Connection to Nature:
The convenience of having fresh herbs, fruits, and vegetables at your fingertips can enhance your culinary experiences, promote healthier eating habits, and save money on your grocery bills. But perhaps most importantly, a home garden encourages a deeper connection with nature as you witness the growth and transformation of plants throughout the seasons which can foster a sense of self-sufficiency, leading to a greater appreciation for the Earth's abundant gifts.

Recipe: Creamy Vegan Potato Salad

Recipe

No special occasion or equipment is needed for such undetectably vegan goodness. Bring it to a potluck or party or serve it with homemade mayo during your next BBQ!

Link to the Original Recipe from nutriciously.com

Ingredients

2 lbs white potatoes, peeled and chopped (900 g)

  • ¾ cup celery, chopped (170 g)

  • ½ cup parsley, finely chopped (15 g)

  • ½ cup dill pickles, chopped (77 g)

  • 1 green bell pepper, finely chopped

  • 2 green onions, finely chopped

  • 1 tbsp mustard (optional)

  • Radishes, chopped (optional)

  • ¾-1 cup vegan mayo

Instructions

Place the peeled and cubed potatoes into a large pot and cover with water. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and let them cook for 15 minutes.

  1. Once the potatoes are fork-tender, drain and let them cool.

  2. Meanwhile, prepare the rest of your ingredients.

  3. Make the cashew mayo by placing all ingredients in a high-speed blender and blend until smooth. Adjust to taste with salt and nutritional yeast; add more water if you want a thinner consistency.

  4. Add cooked potatoes, celery, parsley, pickles, bell pepper, and green onion to a large bowl.

  5. Top with your vegan mayo and mix until well combined with a large spoon. Adjust to taste with salt, lemon juice and mustard.

  6. Serve immediately or cover and refrigerate for at least an hour to allow the flavors to blend and taste even better!

Notes

  • If you don’t like dill pickles, celery or bell peppers, you can go straight to a potato-and-onion-version instead or choose different veggies to add into your potato salad.

  • To add a bit more zing, use some pickle juice to thin out the mayo.

  • This vegan potato salad keeps in the fridge for up to 5 days but tastes best within the first 3-4 days.

  • Feel free to use store-bought vegan mayo for this recipe.

Meet Your Tablemates: Sally Dunham

IN THE COMMUNITY

Meet Sally Dunham a longtime El Sobrante resident and community volunteer. She shares some her family history and expresses her excitement about the Cafe and Plant Nursery's opening! Special thanks to Jacob Day for conducting and editing the video, and to Sally for chatting with us!

Join us for our next Work + Fun Day!

When: Saturday, April 29th from 12-3 PM

Where: 5166 Sobrante Ave, El Sobrante 94803

Sat. April 29th will be our Community Work + Fun Day @ 5166 Sobrante Ave, 12- 3p. Wear sturdy shoes and clothing and bring work gloves and favorite gardening tools. And please bring a good quality mask so we can all stay safe from COVID and construction dust.

Help us share the Good word by following us on Facebook and Instagram

Jacob DayComment
Recipe: Mashed Potato Pizza Crust (Vegan & Easy)

Recipe

Do you love pizza and are ready for a twist on the Italian classic? Try this vegan mashed potato pizza crust! It takes only 10 minutes of hands-on prep time, is really low in calories and totally grain-free.

Link to the Original Recipe from nutriciously.com

Ingredients

Potato Pizza Crust

  • 1 ½ lb potatoes, peeled and cubed (680 g)

  • 2 cups cauliflower florets (200 g)

  • 5 tablespoons potato starch

  • Salt and pepper to taste

  • Pinch of nutritional yeast (optional)

Toppings

  • Green hummus

  • ½ cup cooked chickpeas (80 g), drained

  • ½ medium zucchini (100 g), thinly sliced

  • 1 large tomato, thinly sliced

  • 1-2 button mushrooms, thinly sliced

  • ½ red onion, thinly sliced

  • 1 cup fresh arugula (20 g)

  • Salt and pepper to taste

Instructions

Make the Potato Pizza Crust

  1. Using a medium-sized pot, steam your cubed potatoes and cauliflower florets for around 25 minutes until soft and fork-tender. 

  2. Then, preheat the oven to 430° F (220° C) and line two baking sheets with parchment paper.

  3. Once the potatoes and cauliflower are done cooking, drain them well. Using an immersion blender, fork or food processor, mash them until completely smooth.

  4. Add potato starch, salt, pepper and mix until well-combined.

  5. Using a wet spatula, thinly spread the potato mixture onto your prepared baking sheets, forming two pizza crusts.

  6. Place the baking sheets into the oven and bake your potato crust for 15-20 minutes until lightly golden.

Assemble the Veggie Pizza

  1. Once this time has elapsed, remove the potato pizza crust from the oven. Spread with hummus and top with chickpeas, zucchini, tomato, mushrooms and onion.

  2. Lightly season your potato veggie pizza with salt and pepper and return to the oven to bake for another 15 minutes.

  3. Top with fresh arugula, nutritional yeast or vegan parmesan if desired, then serve immediately. Enjoy

Community News: Creeks and Community Cleanup and Celebration

Community News

Saturday, April 22, El Sobrante Public Library, 4191 Appian Way, 9:30 to 2 PM. 

Be part of the Creeks and Community Cleanup and Celebration in the local El Sobrante/Richmond 94803 area to honor and care for Mother Earth. We hope to get lots of volunteers to pick up litter and trash from our community’s creeks and streets to make our environment cleaner, healthier, and more beautiful for all to enjoy. 

9:30 AM: Sign in, get grabbers, vests, bags, gloves, and pick a location to clean. Join Green Teams to clean up streets, SPAWNERS to cleanup creeks. There will also be a team to help with the library’s garden. Return equipment and bags to the library by Noon. 

Noon - 2 PM: Celebration of our efforts. Community info tables, food, library book displays and art installation, children’s art activities, entertainment, speakers, entertainment, electric bike and car demonstrations, and more. The Good Table will have a table at the celebration.

It’s fun and free! Meet your neighbors. Build our community! Celebrate our wonderful planet! Hope to see you there.

KeepElSobranteBeautiful.info

Spring Gardening with Kids In the East Bay

Here is some great advice for working on your home garden with kids. Whether they are your own kids, grandkids, or if you just need some great advice for working on your first home garden, this article pulled from 510families.com has you covered!

Tips to start an East Bay garden with kids:

  1. Designate some garden real estate for kids, let them own the space. Try to find the sunniest spot, somewhere that gets 6+ hours of sunlight outdoors, or in a south-facing windowsill. Our yard allowed us to reuse an outgrown sandbox as a new raised planter bed. Maybe you have a wagon or busted wheelbarrow.

  2. Give kid helpers jobs and goals

    • Weeding: We like to have a contest to see who can get the longest weed with seeds in it. Sure a flower might get picked here or there, but we use those as our countertop bouquets.

    • Digging holes and planting: We use starters or seedlings, which are much easier than seeds and just as fun.

    • Reseeding lawns and sprinkling grass seeds.

    • Fertilizing: Using organic fertilizer is important because we can’t over-fertilize and it’s safer for little ones.

    • Watering: If you give your kids the hose, be prepared to be sprayed every now and then.

    • Composting: Kids can collect meal scraps each day for the compost bins.

    • Gathering earthworms: Collect worms for your outdoor garden or compost. Both my daughters love inspecting all the critters we come across.

    • Mulching: Good for any age — and relaxing, too.

  3. Germinate seeds indoors: Our seed germination activities are a functional science experiment to sprout hearty garden seedlings. Pro tip: use cardboard egg cartons for sprouting and transferring seedlings to an outdoor garden (here’s how).

  4. Find non-toxic pest control when little hands will be digging in treated yards and gardens. Check out these home remedies. We crush egg shells (with gloves on) around the base of our young plants to keep slugs at bay. Reflecting ribbons and a scarecrow also help to keep the birds and squirrels from eating our blueberries (for now).

  5. After everything is planted and weeded, I keep my kids engaged by decorating your garden with DIY gnomes and scarecrows (scarecrows are super easy to make with clothes my kids have outgrown and some sticks).

  6. Further reading and resources: Based in Berkeley, the Edible Schoolyard has designed a suite of lessons and activities to teach kids about growing food in the garden.

Best things to plant in the East Bay during spring

I’ve had the most success with the following in Oakland’s zone 10a (a numeric gardening zone based on the average temperatures across the US). It’s fun to figure out what zone you live in and discover what might grow in your garden.

  • Lettuce: the easiest, edible and most rewarding because it grows quickly

  • Sunflowers: heat and drought tolerant, durable and wonderful to look at

  • Nasturtiums: this vibrant, edible flower can be for beauty or consumption

  • Peppers or chilies: thrive in 510 climate (think jalapeños and bell peppers)

  • Collard greens

  • Mint: can also be a natural deterrent for vermin

  • Basil & parsley: with fewer trips to the grocery store, herbs can add great flavor to meals

  • Rosemary & lavender: thrive in a pot or in the ground

  • Can’t find seeds or plants of what you’re looking for? Oakland mom, Carol, recommends trying a plant or seed exchange with a neighbor. Everyone wins!

Tools suggestions for gardening with kids

  • Gloves: while tiny gloves are probably cute, I just let my daughter use my adult gloves, she doesn’t mind that they’re a little baggy. Besides they’re only worn 25% the time.

  • Buckets: for collecting weeds, mulching, fertilizing.

  • Shovel: My four year old uses a regular gardening hand-held trowel, my one-year old uses a plastic sand shovel.

  • Kid scissors: used like gardening shears, but safer.

  • Recycled containers for watering: my youngest daughter can stay busy walking water from a large bucket to the plants, with a smaller used yogurt container.

  • Books: though libraries are closed, there are a handful of excellent Bay Area specific gardening books. (I included a list of bookstores further down that have new and used local gardening books for social distancing sale.)

Click HERE to read the original article from 510Families.com!

Spiritual Touchstone: The Lure of Elegant Solutions

The Lure of Elegant Solutions
By Rev. Dr. Melinda V. McLain

In science - especially in mathematics – an elegant solution is “a solution to a question or a problem that achieves the maximally satisfactory effect with minimal effort, materials, or steps.” While I’m not a mathematician, I admit that I am always looking for elegant solutions to problems.

I’m not sure when or how I got lured into desiring elegant solutions for everything, but I do know that I have often told myself to “work smart, not hard”. Also, I may have unintentionally tattooed the “KISS” principle (keep it simple stupid) on the inside of my eyelids.

But here’s the crazy part. My primary work for many years has been to nurture and/or create diverse human communities designed to serve neighbors in need. And the moment you start working with humans - forget simple solutions, it will always be an exercise in balancing various individual needs with the needs of the group. Plus, the complexity grows if the group also wants to serve and be accountable to the wider community - especially marginalized communities. 

As complex and difficult as it can be to work in human community, I have sadly discovered that managing a construction project in California (and perhaps other places too) isn’t just inelegant, it’s downright ugly. The process has been byzantine, bureaucratic, and wicked expensive. And we’ve lost time (and money) due to the pandemic, conflicting requirements by government agencies, a massive burglary in June 2021, and a stretched way too thin management team that is deeply committed to maximizing every dollar spent.

Our vision for creating a pay-what-you-can and pay-it-forward community cafe, organic tree and plant nursery, and gathering space for community arts and education is multi-faceted, but elegant in its design. We just want to provide a place where community can gather freely and get a good cup of coffee too. This simple vision is also desperately needed in the little town of El Sobrante that currently has none of the above. Even though the process hasn’t been pretty, we will someday get The Good Table open and it will be an elegant solution for creating a more resilient and just community.

When working in human community, I have found that loving kindness is the elegant solution to just about any problem that arises. It isn’t always easy for everyone to commit to this solution, but when they/we/I do, it works every time. While choosing loving kindness is always the solution to most human problems, the individual path varies over time. Some folks get there via spiritual practice and others through education and ethical commitment. I think the most elegant path is through gratitude. Take time to be grateful and soon the loving kindness will flow. 

Thank you for your support and patience as we continue to create The Good Table Café and Planting Justice Nursery in El Sobrante. And if you have any elegant suggestions to help us, be in touch, or stop by any last Saturday of the month from 12-3 for our Community Work + Fun day.

Jacob DayComment
Meet Your Tablemates: Sharon Miller

IN THE COMMUNITY

Meet Sharon Miller a longtime El Sobrante resident and community volunteer. She shares some of the work she's been doing in the community and expresses her excitement about the Cafe and Plant Nursery's opening!

Special thanks to Jacob Day for conducting and editing the video, and to Sharon for chatting with us!

Join us for our next Work + Fun Day!

When: Saturday, March 25th from 12-3 PM

Where: 5166 Sobrante Ave, El Sobrante 94803

Sat. March 25th will be our Community Work + Fun Day @ 5166 Sobrante Ave, 12- 3p. Wear sturdy shoes and clothing and bring work gloves and favorite gardening tools. And please bring a good quality mask so we can all stay safe from COVID and construction dust.

Help us share the Good word by following us on Facebook and Instagram

Jacob DayComment