Greywater Guerillas

Please RSVP to: crittersalon@gmail.com or 415.674.2861
www.crittersalon.blogspot.com

CRITTER presents the Greywater Guerrillas, an Oakland-based collaborative group of educators, designers, builders and artists who educate and empower people to build sustainable water culture and infrastructure.

Greywater is water that flows down sink, shower, and washing machine drains–but not the toilet. It may contain traces of dirt, food, grease, hair, and household cleaning products. While greywater may look “dirty,” it is a safe and even beneficial source of irrigation water. If released into rivers, lakes, or estuaries, the nutrients in greywater become pollutants, but to garden plants, they are valuable fertilizer. Aside from the obvious benefits of saving water (and money on your water bill), reusing your greywater keeps it out of the sewer or septic system, thereby reducing the chance that it will pollute local water bodies.
Participants will learn how the water in our lives is connected to local and global water struggles, look at rainwater as a resource, explore options of reusing greywater, and contemplate waterless (composting) toilets. Interested in cutting your water use in half while growing a beautiful garden? Learn how as we explore rainwater catchment, greywater reuse, and waterless composting toilets. We’ll focus on low-tech, simple options for greywater reuse.

The Urban Homestead

The Studio for Urban Projects presents

The Urban Homestead
a hands-on workshop with Erik Knutzen, co-author of  The Urban Homestead

Sunday, April 5 2:00 pm
at the Studio for Urban Projects
3579 17th St., San Francisco (located between Dolores & Guerrero)

Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen grow food, keep chickens, brew, bike, bake and plot revolution from their 1/12th acre farm in the heart of Los Angeles. They are keepers of the popular DIY blog, Homegrown Evolution. Their first book, The Urban Homestead, a primer on urban self-reliance, was released by Process Media In May of 2008. Since then it’s sold over 6,500 copies. The New York Times magazine called it “Home Economics as our great-grandparents knew it.”

In this workshop Knutzen will discuss urban agriculture. How do you grow food when you don’t have soil? We’ll take a look at a couple of strategies, from window gardening to foraging. In the hands-on portion of our presentation we’ll build the most important tool of the urban food gardener: the self irrigating planter (SIP). A few years ago Josh Mandell, of Seattle Peak Oil Awareness, distributed plans for how to make your own SIPS out of easily scavenged materials. Using his plans, we’ll construct a SIP with two five gallon buckets and a yogurt cup. Armed with this knowledge, you’ll soon have a farm on your balcony!

As we look toward ways of developing sustainable cities, urban homesteading offers us strategies for becoming self-reliant. It takes us back to the gratifying everyday rituals celebrated by many of our parents and grandparents before food traveled an average of 1,500 miles to reach our plates. As Coyne and Knutzen write,”Urban homesteading is an affirmation of the simple pleasures of life. When you spend a Saturday morning making a loaf of bread, or go out on a summer evening after work to sit with your chickens, or take a deep breath of fresh-cut basil, you unplug yourself from the madness. Many of us spend a lot of each day in front of a computer. Homesteading hooks us into the natural world and the passing of the seasons, and reminds us of our place within the greater cycle of life.”

Please join us.
Space is limited. Please RSVP to info@studioforurbanprojects.org.
Suggested donation $5-$15.