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Circle School in Richmond, Virginia, USA
It is an honor for the city park project by Circle School to be included in this list of Fukuoka-inspired projects.
Circle School, in Richmond, Virginia, is a vegetarian families' cooperative, serving some 50 children, infants through
high school, from all spiritual paths, all walks of life. The school is a placement site for Virginia Commonwealth
University work-study student teachers, so we are all students here, learning together, from nursery through college through
parenting. We love our adjacent half block of city park, which is itself a piece of an urban greenway, the historic
River Access Trail that connects VCU to the James River.
Under a Department of Parks & Recreation program called Adopt-a-Spot, with a proposal that we called Wildflower Walk, &
a paper called "More Green than Gasoline" we were granted permission to keep areas of the park unmowed. At that point,
maybe eight years ago, we did not know about the work of Mr. Masanobu Fukuoka. Then we talked with a neighbor in the
community organization, a landscape designer, who had read One Straw Revolution. From first hearing, the ideas
resonated with what the park cried out for, & what the school had advocated: to free the land from spraying broadleaf
weed-killer, from dangerous steep hill mowing in frequent fumy, disruptive racket, & from wasteful spending on
maintenance that rotated, rather than interplanted, seasonal flower groupings. We sought design that eliminates
driving expensive labor crews over to the park in city equipment, digging up & throwing away the seed bearing spent
flower heads, only to replace them with skimpy rows of the next round of blooms, all descendants of which are laid to
waste in spring tilling. Then we began to learn from Fukuoka about the damage to the earth itself from that pattern.
At last, we were given the opportunity to plant a steep strip along the alley at the top of the hill. Attitudes in the
Parks Department have grown in support for our first trial at unmowed raised beds. At first, the issue was that our
randomly scattered flower seeds, collected by the children on walks, interspersed with what-have-you, created an
"eyesore". We respond in the belief that manicured lawn on the steep hillside in the park creates a "nosesore" & an
"earsore" from regularly scheduled gasoline powered mowing.
When a company came through to trim the trees under the power lines, we asked if we could please have a load from their
branch chipper. They were pleased to oblige, which saved them the long run out of town to dump the chip. The symbiotic
relationship has continued. Two years ago, our neighborhood Open High School joined us in the project of spreading the
chip into a serpentine deep mulch berm along the alley, so far a hundred feet long, two to four feet wide, & up to three
feet high. We began to chop the contents of the school cafeteria's honorable daily compost bowl to scatter along the
berm, rather than to pile up in the straw bale bin that we had been using for the compost. (The chopped scraps are
still called the compost, or, to the wittle ones, the pompos' bowl).
As the chip & compost has broken down over the past seasons, we have made an informal study of the plants that take hold
& carry on here, those that come up & last but unpredictably, & those that vanish without high maintenance. As we
study, especially through specific questions asked within this newsgroup, we have learned steps that make the polluted
urban soil safer, as well as more productive, how to know what to expect it to produce, & how to continuously surprise
ourselves with fresh insight from respectful observation of nature. Next up: making seedballs with our mud pies.
Respectfully submitted,
NAPI IPPOLITO, Principal
Robert Monie, Louisiana, USA
Robert "Bob" Monie grew up in musical, multicultural New Orleans, Louisiana, where he played clarinet in marching bands,
jazz groups, and classical ensembles. He majored in English and American Literature in college, eventually becoming
something of a specialist in Henry David Thoreau. He works for a community college as a "generalist." On his own time,
he tutors elementary math and advanced English composition, ghost writes, and researches inveterately in a multitude of
fields. An avid architecture fan, he especially enjoys the light tensile structures of Buckminster Fuller, Horst Berger,
and others working to "dematerialize" shelter. Like Thoreau, he walks almost everywhere, does not own a car, and follows
the vegetarian way. He eagerly awaits the first generation of inexpensive organic solar cells made from carbon fullerines
or sustainable plastics and believes that humankind is indissolubly bound to both nature and technology. He suspects
that most plants used by humankind for food are naturally amphibious; that is, they can be grown either geoponically
(in soil) or hydroponically (in water or mist), and he admires such farmers as Fukuoka and Wes Jackson who recognize
the natural fertility of the Earth and hope to preserve it.
ROBERT MONIE
Larry Haftl in Pleasant Hill, Oregon, USA
Freelance journalist, photographer, and videographer trying to convert about one acre of land into a
natural garden and self-sufficient homestead. Documentation of his efforts, along with information and analysis of
Fukuoka's method and principles, is available on-line at
HIS PERSONAL/PROFESSIONAL WEBSITE. Larry is also
webmaster of the Fukuoka Farming Website.
LARRY HAFTL
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