Nonprofit Aggregator: Catalogue for Philanthropy: Greater Washington

This post is a reprint of a post that originally appeared at Lambi Fund of Haiti.

This post is a reprint of a post that originally appeared at Lambi Fund of Haiti.

This post is a reprint of a post that originally appeared at Art Enables's Facebook Wall.

Torn from the headlines, Darnell Curtis' "Rusty the Red Panda" almost looks ready to run away!

This post is a reprint of a post that originally appeared at Art Enables's Facebook Wall.

What? We didn't make the Hill's 50 Most Beautiful List again this year? But we had this amazing rainbow dress! ("Background Dancer" by Paul Lewis)

This post is a reprint of a post that originally appeared at Art Enables's Facebook Wall.

Summer is the perfect time for thoughts of vacation. Here is Charmaine Jones' "New York City Tour Bus", ready for big city fun.

This post is a reprint of a post that originally appeared at Art Enables's Facebook Wall.

Summer is the perfect time for thoughts of vacation. Here is Charmaine Jones' "New York City Tour Bus", ready for big city fun.

This post is a reprint of a post that originally appeared at Accokeek Foundation.

by Daniel Michaelson

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, a weed is any plant growing where it is not wanted. This means that a weed to one person may be a prized gem to another. Regardless of what you or I view as a weed, the bottom line is that, as humans, we spend a large portion of our agricultural energy eradicating or otherwise “controlling” weeds. I wonder about the relative value of this activity. Is there an alternative to our obsession with the annual crops that require so much weeding?

As Mark Shepard of New Forest Farm puts it, modern agriculture concerns itself with killing plants that want to live (weeds) to allow plants that need massive inputs to thrive. He employs sheer, total, utter neglect (STUN) on his farm near Viola, Wisconsin. This technique is especially suited to the perennial agriculture he practices and essentially eliminates the need for hand weeding or pesticide use. Instead, he uses pigs, sheep, and cattle to control the understory beneath his chestnut, pecan, apple, and hazelnut plants.

To succeed in annual agriculture, weeds have to be controlled. Organic growers use mulch, tractor cultivation, hand cultivation-weeding, black plastic, cover cropping, tillage, and artificial selection to control weeds. In conventional agriculture, the bag of tricks is larger. In addition to the above mentioned techniques, conventional growers may employ a wide range of chemical controls and genetic engineering to stack the deck against unwanted plants. An example of this is the well-known glyphosatebased
corn and bean agriculture being practiced all over the country. Farmers plant their crop of genetically engineered corn or soybeans and spray glyphosate, sold under the trade name Roundup, at a critical point of growth to eliminate encroaching competitors. With genetically based resistance to the herbicide, the corn and beans endure the treatment while the weeds brown and die. Some herbicides, such as 2,4-D the first invented, only kill dicots (broadleaf plants) such as legumes making them particularly
useful in the production of cereal grass crops such as wheat, maize, and rice.

In both organic and conventional systems weed control is dependent on inputs, which cost money. Why not take our problem and turn it into food? To start, many of the most common weeds and some of those that affect us at the Ecosystem Farm make great human and animal food. For example, pig weed and lamb’s quarters are both highly nutritious and prolific human and animal food. Those weeds that we cannot eat directly such as foxtail, dock, etc. can be used to feed animals in the understory of fruit and nut trees. The calorie and protein rich annual staples the world depends on such as wheat and soybeans can at least be partially replaced by perennials such as acorn, chestnut, hazelnut and more. Annual crops, especially the vitamin-rich fruits and vegetables we produce on the Ecosystem Farm, should still be included in our diet. So, we will choose to use cover cropping and mulch to suppress the weeds when we have to and select and grow only the most competitive annual crops in planting densities that maximize weed suppression. In general, I believe we can all strive to minimize the time spent bent over in the sun killing plants that want to live and supporting plants that want to die.

Happy weeding!

 

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This post is a reprint of a post that originally appeared at Art Enables's Facebook Wall.

Do you have a laptop in good shape that you want to donate to a good cause? Our artist research computer is on its last legs, and a newer one would really help us out! Here is a dramatic recreation of the situation by Nonja Tiller, called "Broken Computer (The Baby Did It)."

This post is a reprint of a post that originally appeared at Accokeek Foundation.

by Meg Nicholas

Each year, despite the season, we come across a number of photographers out wandering our trails, or pausing near the farmhouse and fences for shots of our heritage breed chickens, cows, sheep and pigs. Some of these visitors share their shots with us via email or the Facebook pages for the Accokeek Foundation, the National Colonial Farm, the Ecosystem Farm, and the Center for Agricultural and Environmental Stewardship (CAES). Some we find through searches on Google and Youtube. All of these pictures offer us a chance to see how other people view our site and what we do here. Through these lenses, we get a better idea of what visitors focus on and what impacts them most on any given visit.

Rarely, though, do we have an opportunity to view the lands we steward from a perspective other than a ground or water view. We see the NPS and military helicopters overhead from time to time, and there is no shortage of winged visitors in flight over the farms but, sadly, we don’t have the same opportunity to see this protected area from the skies. Or rather, we haven’t had the opportunity before. Now, thanks to one of our visitors, we have a bird’s eye view of the National Colonial Farm. Robert Macgregor, who runs the blog “airfoiled” and has volunteered his photography skills at some of our events, has taken to the skies with a camera and a quadcopter and generously agreed to share his footage with us.

Seeing the fields, gardens and historic buildings from a vantage point previously reserved for pilots and birds is a unique treat. The footage captured from these flights not only provides us with another view of the farm, it also helps us evaluate the land we steward. From above, we can see which fields need a little help, determine which routes most visitors take when touring the site, and see where repairs might be needed on our 18th century structures. We hope you enjoy this teaser of the aerial footage taken at the National Colonial Farm.

This post is a reprint of a post that originally appeared at Art Enables's Facebook Wall.

What's your dream job? One of Darnell Curtis' dreams is to be invited to San Diego's ComicCon - and he knows just what it will look like when he reaches his goal.