DryStoneGarden

Something a little more positive about my neighborhood, a video taken at Bridges (technically across the border in El Cerrito, rather than Richmond Annex), the newish climbing gym near our house. Instead of roped climbing, the climbing walls are for bouldering and give a longer and more-highball climb than the bouldering walls at other gyms; you have to top out on all the climbs instead of just jumping down.

Along with climbing, the focus of the gym is slacklining, which is basically tight rope walking except that it’s done on climbing webbing which flexes and is more dynamic than a tight rope, dynamic enough, evidently, to use as a trampoline. Personally, I’m terrible at it; Anita’s pretty good, though not yet at the backflip stage. Slacklining used to just be something that climbers did on their rest days, but some of the people at Bridges are more interested in it than climbing, and I think now there are starting to be competitions for it.

A recent documentary about Dean Potter, the most famous slackliner, has a lot of footage and talks a bit about the origins of slacklining. Shorter scenes of Potter slacklining can be seen with soothing musical accompaniment or with an Aussie narrator and some entertaining quotes.

…if we never got our computer stolen. Or something like that. It seems to be one of the realities of our neighborhood. Several of our neighbors were robbed a couple of years ago, another one last year, and I guess now it was our turn. While we were in Baja last month someone carried off the copper trellis from our front yard, and now this past week the same person or someone else has taken our computer. The joys of urban living.

It could have been worse I guess. The copper trellis was a leftover item that got installed temporarily in our garden, and we always knew it was something of a risk. I don’t even have any photos of it, actually, because I was never enthusiastic about how it was sited. Losing the computer is a much bigger drag, but we had it synched up with our office computer and backed up online, so we didn’t lose many files or photos. Three cheers for cloud computing.

We didn’t seem to have a theft problem while we were fostering pit bulls, so we’ll probably be getting another dog soon, and definitely before we get another computer. In the meantime, blogging will be less convenient, as I can only do it from our office computer now. If anyone knows of a scary-looking barker in need of a good home, let us know.

Galleta/Bibi

We’ve fostered a couple of dogs this year, first Galleta/Bibi and now Prudence. (Galleta didn’t recognize her name if you pronounced it with the ‘Y’ sound, and didn’t respond all that well if you said it with a hard ‘L;’ so w changed it to Bibi. Not sure where that name came from, but it stuck. Apparently the shelter volunteers aren’t Spanish speakers.) Both have been female pitbulls, as most of the dogs in shelters around here seem to be pits.

Fostering, we found, really does help the dogs. Bibi/Galleta had been in the shelter for six months without anyone expressing interest in adopting her, but she found a permanent home only a few weeks after we took her. Getting out of the kennel de-stressed her and made her noticeably more sociable, and then the photos of her lounging in our garden made for good marketing, much better than a mugshot from the kennel. After all, it’s not just a dog they’re adopting, it’s a lifestyle, right? She nailed the interview and was gone, off to live with a family. We discovered then that the hardest part about fostering is when you give up the dog at the end. Sad times for a while; you miss the dog more than the dog misses you.

Prudence

Prudence is our second foster. Everyone seems to think her name is Brutus, but, no, it’s Prudence like the song; one of the shelter volunteers is apparently a Beatles fan. Very sweet dog, knocks things over with manic tail-wagging, doesn’t trample the garden like we thought she would. Garden photos have again done the trick, bringing in three different people who wanted to adopt her, but the adoption place is acting fussy and has turned them all down. I’m not sure why. There are tons of dogs out there in need of a home, and the people who wanted Prudence all seemed plenty nice and responsible to me. But the shelter people inspect your house and interview you, and if you don’t give the right answers, they turn you down, zero tolerance. Eventually, someone will get approved to adopt her, but if we have her for much longer it will be hard when we give her up. There’s another prospect who wants to meet her; we’ll see what happens.

Point Isabel Dog Park

While fostering these dogs, we discovered that Richmond has the biggest and, according to some sources, best dog park in the country, Point Isabel Dog Park. Way to go Richmond; you’re not just the murder capital of California. The dog park is pretty impressive: 23 acres right on the water with views of Angel Island and the Golden Gate Bridge and Mt. Tam and the city. There are places for your dog to swim, hoses to wash the bay mud off, a grooming shop if the hose isn’t good enough, a cafe to get coffee while you watch your dog run around, bags and trash cans everywhere for picking up after your dog, and dogs, dogs, dogs for your dog to run with. Also, the designers did a nice job of using berms to create separate spaces so the park doesn’t just feel like a single expanse and the dogs aren’t all clustered together in a single insane pack. An organization, Point Isabel Dog Owners, has been a big player in the development and maintenance of the park.

PIDO says the park gets 800,000 dog visits a year and I can believe it. I’ve counted a hundred people there at one time, and Anita says she’s seen more than that, that on a Sunday afternoon it can look like the Embarcadero. It’s a destination for dog owners all over the Bay Area, like Disneyland for the dogs. Prudence was totally overwhelmed the first time she was there, like she couldn’t believe that such a perfect place existed in this world. Photos of her enjoying the park are below. (more…)

Pineapple?

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Pineapple

I’ve been meaning to try running a poll. I might play around with the styling and other options a bit, so bear with me. Let me know if anything gets funky or explodes.

dodge vegematic with winter squash

Rumors have been circulating that fruits and vegetables might be illegal to grow in the front yards and hellstrips of some Bay Area cities, but the city of Richmond investigated and found that there are no ordinances against them. The investigation came from the top, from our mayor, Gayle Mclaughlin.

‘“If it is indeed a Richmond law, I would like to ask the city attorney’s office to change/cancel this ordinance and bring it to council for a vote ASAP. I would be happy to sponsor such an ordinance change.” 

Assistant City Attorney Mary J. Renfro came up with the definitive answer, reached after consulting the city’s Health, Public Safety and Welfare and Zoning codes. 

While some legal provisions require yard maintenance and “prohibit nuisance conditions that might attract trespassers and vermin,” none of them suggests that it is impermissible to grow fruit or other edible plants in the front yard.

It’s good that the mayor checked on vegi gardens and established that they’re okay, because there has been a front yard vegi garden movement in my Richmond Annex neighborhood for the last couple of years. Six gardens within a block of each other grow vegetables (these are small blocks with 2-5 houses per block, so that’s a high percentage) and, a couple of blocks away from them, another one converted their lawn to vegetables three months ago. 

onions and juniper

The first of the gardens, the one that began the trend, is a front yard of veggies grown in raised beds of mortared stonework from the juniper/ivy era of California landscaping. It is far and away the tidiest of the gardens, and it produces an impressive quantity of food throughout the year. Even when large sections are only bare dirt and small seedlings or when the plants get raggedy at the end of their harvest period, the walls and the orderly planting style and to some extent the pom-pommed junipers always make it clear that this is a well-maintained garden.

carrots and juniper

Photos of more gardens are below.

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Photo from Pogo Park Photovoice

“Beautiful community garden that Iron Triangle has.  I’d really like to see more gardens, more flora, in the city of Richmond.” Click over to Pogo Park Photovoice to hear the speaker’s voice.

I was going to post some more content from Anita’s class about grasses, but an article in this week’s East Bay Express caught my attention with the mention of a photovoice project in the Iron Triangle of Richmond. (The Iron Triangle was originally defined as the area between three old railroad lines, but now refers more generally to the area between highways 80 and 580. Urban problems affect the area much more heavily than they do other parts of Richmond such as Richmond Annex where I live.) I complained recently about how there is sometimes a disconnect between designers and the communities they design for. Photovoice, where members of a community are given cameras to make their own document about their community, is a method to try to overcome that disconnect. It’s not so different from what garden designers do whenever they try to design for a new client, but photovoice projects are usually with communities that don’t often get their voices heard and don’t always get to participate in the design process for their own communities. I don’t know much about the Iron Triangle, even though I live in Richmond, so it was good to see the photos and hear the voices of the people who took them. I’ll be interested to see how the park turns out.