Press: San Francisco Chronicle & Good Magazine

Changing how we live and eat, one fig at a time

Emma Brown, Special to The Chronicle

...Berkeley graduate student Georgia Seamans stumbled on Forage Oakland when she was surfing the Internet, looking for a recipe for nocino, an Italian liqueur made from walnuts. She left a comment: "There's a walnut tree on my block. Hopefully the squirrels will let me share in this year's bounty." Wadud wrote back offering walnuts, and in return Seamans gave her garden herbs. "We've been trading ever since. Our last trade, I gave her some end-of-season tomatoes and I got some hachiya persimmons."

Read the entire article at SFgate.com.

Project 010: Nature Make Your Yard

Words By GOOD magazine

For Project 010 we asked you to propose a GOOD Project. Georgia Seamans sent in this contribution. She would challenge people to create a landscape design that works with nature, rather than against it. She writes: I propose "Nature Make Your Yard" (or balcony or community garden or sidewalk strip). The project can be a physical design (of any scale) or a fine art representation of a nature made place. What is nature making? The intentional design of a landscape to produce ecosystem services like storing carbon; intercepting rainfall and slowing runoff; cleaning the air; cooling the air, infrastructure, and buildings; and, providing habitat for small, highly mobile species (like butterflies, bees, birds, and yes, bats) and native plants. It sounds like a challenge, but a fun one. Using runnels to channel rainwater into a simple, low-tech irrigation system (pictured above) is just one way a landscape designer can capitalize on the surrounding ecosystem. There's more on "nature making" at Georgia's site, localecology.org.

Read the article at Good Magazine.