Global Climate Day yields a local harvest

Visitors to Petaluma’s City Hall will get an up-close-and-personal view of the city’s newest community garden.

Flanking the path to the entrance are four of the six new community garden beds, distributed by lottery to applicants among the 230 volunteers who showed up last Saturday to turn about an acre of City Hall grounds into a drip-irrigated permaculture garden.

The Saturday event was one of more than 5,000 International Day of Climate Action events around the world publicizing the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gases below 350 parts per million to forestall a global warming disaster.

Thanks to many hours of organizing by Daily Acts, Petaluma Bounty, Rebuilding Together Petaluma and Dave Iribarne, Petaluma’s conservation coordinator, the event functioned with clocklike precision.

After short introductory speeches by leaders, swarms of volunteers in green or orange T-shirts disbursed in teams to 11 sites around the grounds, conferred with team leaders and quickly got to work. Volunteers included City Council members and board members of civic organizations.

Volunteer Ashley Sparkes, one of a group of Redwood Credit Union employees, said she came because “Redwood Credit Union is based on community outreach, and that’s a big part of our mission statement, so it felt like it was the right thing to do.”

New to permaculture, Sparkes is learning sheet- mulching techniques and other aspects of transforming a lawnscape into a permaculture garden.

Sheet mulching — the easy, ecologically sound way to replace a lawn by covering it with cardboard and mulch — is the order of the day. With 230 volunteers, the action is fast. A patch of lawn is covered with cardboard within minutes.

Walk by 15 minutes later, and the cardboard has disappeared under a layer of mulch. Volunteers are busy setting plants in holes made through the mulch and cardboard.

Hurrying by with a much-crumpled landscape design blueprint was Louise Leff of Louise Leff Landscape Architecture, she, along with Suzanne Biaggi of Sculptural Landscapes, created the design that would convert the acre or so lawn into a water-wise permaculture paradise.

The two donated their services on Saturday, and put hours of work into the landscape design at a bargain price for the city.

Plantings included vegetables and fruit trees, as well as habitat and native plants that require little water.

At noon, volunteers broke for lunch — donated by High Tech Burrito, Tres Hombres, Velasco’s, Petaluma Bounty, Whole Foods, Anderson’s Farm Stand and Petaluma Coffee Company — and for photos.

By the end of the day, most of the work was completed, including the six community garden beds — created from materials donated by Heritage Salvage.

Against the west wall of the building, rainwater collection tanks furnished by sponsor Wyatt Irrigation were set on a newly created gravel base.

The event was an opportunity to meet and work with luminaries in the local permaculture communities, such as Trathen Heckman of Daily Acts; Grayson James of Petaluma Bounty; Iribarne; and Jane Hamilton of Rebuilding Together Petaluma.

Daily Acts was involved in the ecological-design phase and getting team leaders for the different sections. They brought in Erik Ohlsen of Permaculture Artisans and landscapers Leff and Biaggi.

Iribarne oversaw the project, hired the contractors for the heavy work and purchased supplies.

Petaluma Bounty provided volunteers, ran some of the sections and, last but not least, supplied the salad for the volunteers’ lunch. It will manage the community garden beds on the site.

Rebuilding Together Petaluma took the lead in organizing volunteers and sponsors.

“The partnering to bring multiple organizations together is a really exciting collaboration when you look at all the problems we face with too much storm water, too much green waste, too much wastewater, too much energy used and not enough jobs and not enough drinking water in places,” said Heckman. “So, you start integrating those problems into solutions where you save a lot of water, energy, money and time, while empowering people and building skills.”

The idea was first floated in 2006, but with the tight economy, it was put aside. “Then this day of climate change came and Rebuilding Together came and rescued us,” said Iribarne.

Thanks to the volunteer effort, the city’s share of the bill will come in under $50,000. The project will save 3.5 million gallons of water a year and $25,000 in savings. So the project will pay for itself in two years.

“One of the beauties of this project is the marriage of a really beautiful design esthetic with permaculture principles,” said James. “And the fact that people are actually growing food at City Hall really brings the whole notion of community food security to people’s awareness.”

(Contact Bonnie Allen at argus@arguscourier.com)