Plan B

Rich and I have been collaborating with the Beerhorst family on an Artprize entry this year! It has been an exciting opportunity to put on public display some of the practices we have been learning and exploring in our lives over the past few years. Here is the link to the artist Bio on the Artprize website.

Our Artprize 2010 will be an out door installation that will simulate a post peak oil world where electricity is only intermittent and almost everything used to keep daily life humming along has been... made out of preexisting products and materials. A combination of very old technologies with what can be patched together out of the rubble of what has been made before, fallen apart and left behind.It's exploring the idea that Plan A which we are currently living is very much taken for granted, but it's not as stable and secure as we all want to believe. We need to think about having a Plan B should this current infrastructure fail us.

My involvement in this project is around food security and learning to feed ourselves with out relying on massive amounts of resources to grow and ship food all over the world. We have built a beautiful outdoor kitchen (once again I find myself cooking outdoors!) that is fully functional, with Rocket stoves, a solar oven, an Ice box, displays of preserved foods and containers of growing lettuce and tomatoes!

Rich's composting toilet outhouse that we used on the farm last summer has been beautified and is also on display!

On opening day of Artprize, we had a procession with the Wonderwagon from the SE side of town all the way over to the Plan B venue on the shore of the Grand River. The kids rode in the wagon all the way and we were accompanied by drumming and chanting and banjo playing!


Artprize is a new event for Grand Rapids, and I can't believe the excitement and traffic thru downtown it has generated. If you are nearby, or can make a trip to GR it would be well worth it. There is so much to see and do! We'd be happy to provide some hospitality while your here!

There is daily family entertainment at the Plan B stage and live music every evening. Visit the Plan B facebook page or the blog to learn more about the schedule of events. If you are registered to vote, please consider voting for us! We are currently in the top 100, out of nearly 1700 entries!

Art Show

I have been invited to show some of my recent photographs in an art show at Destination 1111 next weekend. I will be hanging some of my hipstamatic prints. If your in town, come out and see!

Here is a link to the woman's blog who is putting the show together. She has a nice write up on each of the artists.


Artist Statement:
I am a wife and momma to three beautiful little girls. I have worked as a photographer for over 10 years and I am also a professional Doula and Midwifery apprentice, which is a whole lot to juggle and I am always working at maintaining some kind of balance. Our family is living back in the city after an adventure living on a farm together last summer, learning to live more sustainably and interconnected to our local food supply. This year we are growing food in our neighborhood community garden and have been visiting local farms to pick fruit and most of my recent artistic work is based around these activities. I am learning and practicing old techniques of food preservation. Because as a mom, my hands are always full, I have taken to often photographing my life with my iphone as it is always in my pocket. I made these photographs with a vintage camera application that mimics photographs from toy cameras from an earlier era. I apprietiate the irony of using such a modern technological tool to create images that explore old ideas and practices that my generation has become so disconnected from.

Learning about Food Preservation

We are on a journey of finding a new way of eating, a way that is healthier not only for us, but for the local economy, our neighbors, and the planet. I just finished this book, it has provided me with a whole new sense of importance about this journey and a whole new set of tools for how to live in a more sustainable, healthy way. It was a really great read and I will be checking out her other books next.



and here's a poem I came across tonight that I thought was a sweet summary of what's so wonderful about preserving food:

When I go to see my grandma I gain a lot of weight

With her dear hands she gives me plate after plate.

She cans the pickles, sweet & dill

She cans the songs of the whippoorwill

And the morning dew and the evening moon

‘N’ I really got to go see her pretty soon

‘Cause these canned goods I buy at the store

Ain’t got the summer in them anymore.

-Greg Brown, Canned Goods

Picking Cherries!

We picked Cherries at Wells Orchards last week. 49 pounds!

It was a beautiful day in the orchard with friends! The kids had fun and were very helpful! This is Lily with her detective hat on!

Daisy ate A LOT of cherries!


Rosie in her bonnet.

We packed a picnic and had lunch under the cherry trees!

Emilie and Rich picked most of those 49 pounds I think!

We spent the rest of the weekend washing and sorting cherries. I was worried that 49 pounds was too much, but we made short work of it! Emilie spent most of the week making cherry sauces and jams and canning. I froze 2 large freezers bags, made cherry sauce and dehydrated some. I also shared quite a few pounds with friends.



We have also been eating lots or rhubarb while it's been in season too. Kinda sad to see it go. I've got a few jars of sauce in the pantry for this winter.


We're looking forward to Blueberries and raspberries!
What's your favorite fresh local food?

Your Invited

In case you didn't know, I am now a trained professional doula. I am working with families as both a photographer and a labor assistant. My passion is to equip and educate families to make the best choices for themselves to have an empowering and beautiful birth experience.

Here are a couple of upcoming local events. Please pass the info on to anyone you know who might be interested!

Seed Starting party!

It's Spring!! (I know, I heard it's still going to snow, I don't care!)

Click on the pic to see the event on Facebook.

Come celebrate with us! Saturday, we are going to start some seeds for the Midtown Community Garden, but you are welcome to come out and get your hands dirty with us! We are going to do some indoor seed starting and some winter sowing. Bring some milk jugs or other plastic containers and seeds if you've got them, we've got dirt and some seeds to share. You don't have to be a Midtown neighborhood resident or commit to working in the garden. If your excited about spring and gardening, even if you've never done it before, come on over and let's get our hands dirty together! If you want to help us start the plants for the garden that's great, or if you want to take some starts home, that's fine too. We'll be working inside, so don't worry about the weather report!

We went out to the farm last night for the first time and saw all the brand new baby sheep! I love spring! There are something like 17 baby lambs so far this spring, 7 lambs born yesterday alone!

This is Percy! Her momma isn't doing a very good job at nursing her so we fed her a bottle. She is soooo sweet! Her name is short for persistent, because in spite of her mom's (sheep are not very smart) head butts she doesn't give up trying to nurse.

Remember Pìo?She's big now!!

HAPPY SPRING!

The Midtown Community Garden

Rich and I are getting more involved with our new neighborhood and have decided to take on organizing the Midtown Community Garden along with Amy this season! If you live in the Midtown Neighborhood, we have a great neighborhood association, and there's lots going on!

We've created a Facebook group for the garden. Become a fan to find out about upcoming events and see us grow!

The first order of business is cleaning up the site. March 27th is the day! Time and Directions to follow. Come on out, pitch in and see what's going on.

Other upcoming neighborhood events:

April 24: Fulton Street Farmers Market Clean Up

May 15: Perennial Plant Exchange at the Midtown Green

Happy Spring!

Mommas! Your invited to the April Materni-Tea

If you are pregnant and interested in learning more about birth and parenting options and resources, this would be a wonderful event to attend! The Sage Birth Co-op hosts one each month.

A fun fall family day!

Rich is on vacation all this week, so we are spending lots of time together trying to fit in those last outdoor activities before winter. We had a wonderful day Sunday at Historic Bowens Mill. If you're looking for anything fall and fun to do, I highly recommend it!


Lily loved the one room school house. We are reading the Little House books to the girls right now and they were so excited to see firsthand what Mary and Laura Ingalls school was probably like, bonnets and lunch pails and all!


Rosie is especially interested in animals right now and was so happy to pet them all! Daisy is also very excited whenever she see's animals. You should have heard her squealing!


I have been trying so hard for the last few weeks to get a good shot of all three of my girls together, but they are making things very difficult! They are so cute though!

Click here to see the rest of the photos from our day!

Obama in Grand Rapids

After dropping Rosie off at preschool this morning, Daisy and I jumped on the number 6 bus to Calder plaza to catch a glimpse of presidential candidate Barack Obama. Amy and her girls and Kathy and her boys and I met up with Brian and his boys down there and we had quite a party with the other 16,000 people who came out. Even though I am still committed to not voting (No, I am really not voting. I suppose you want an explanation. So the simplest way I can put it is to say that I do not beleive in the political system of this empire and I do not want to align myself with it in any way. I am choosing to place my hope in the Slaughtered Lamb. But that's something for a whole nother blog post, not the parenthesis...) I am glad I went because I recognize that it is history in the making and I am always up for a seeing a big crowd gather in my city.

Here we are right after we got off the bus:

Yes, we did come to hear Obama, I don't know what all these people were doing. It was at this intersection that we realized that we needed to go left!

Rich took some of his clients down and somehow ended up being seated by the secret service right behind Barack! Check out the video if you don't believe me! You can see his head right in the bottom left corner! He even got to shake his hand!

Rich also did open mike night at the comedy club tonight at the Bob. People think he is so funny. I'd probably think he was funnier, but he told a joke about me and he talks about poop...

What a day!

Really Free Market!

I am very excited to tell you that someone else is going to be having a 'free sale' this month. It was a good thing that we did not try to have our freedom celebration because we ended up spending the whole last part of that week cleaning up our yard after the big storm. There is no way that we could have pulled it off this year. But when started the whole thing, we were really hoping that other people would try it out too! So if you are able, please participate in this event, especially if you have stuff you had set aside for the Freedom Celebration. We are planning on going, hopefully we'll see you there!

FREE Fun event this Thursday night

This is put on by an organization that I volunteer with. We are working to provide education and create change in urban Grand Rapids around environmental justice issues such as lead, radon, carbon monoxide, and food availability.

This is a FREE event and there will be fun stuff for the kids to do and even FREE food! Check it out! I wish I could go, but I will be at PAPA Fest! We are leaving Thursday morning and we won't be back till Sunday.