This afternoon, I crept outside in the rain, into the mud that surrounds the yard of my townhouse. I surreptitiously pulled a package of seeds from my pocket and began to plant them just beyond my fence. A line of buckwheat: it will be my first experiment in growing anything akin to a grain.

Like many of those who live in the city, we have a small home with an even tinier backyard. Our garden plot takes up a hefty chunk of that yard, with a little space left over to walk on. However, we do have a substantial path that runs behind our house. This spring I plan to plant blueberry bushes there. Who’s to say that they didn’t grow there by accident?

This sort of surreptitious gardening has a name: guerrilla gardening. It’s all the rage right now, beautifying vacant lots with handfuls of forage, digging beets and potatoes by moonlight. While guerrilla gardening is all the rage, I’m not suggesting that you grow veggies on your neighbor’s land without asking. There is another route, one that I may go for some time soon. That’s yard sharing.

There are many variations on the sharing of urban and suburban space and produce.  Consider Vancouver’s Fruit Tree Project, soon to be replicated in my neighborhood. People who can’t manage their fruit trees sign up to have their fruit picked by volunteers. The volunteers take part of the produce, the owner of the tree takes part, and the rest is donated to charity. Everyone leaves full and happy.

There’s also shared commercial agriculture. In this model, organizations like Seattle’s City Farmer install a garden in your yard and harvest the produce, selling some at local markets and giving some to the homeowner. The land owner gets a peek into urban agriculture, an urban farmer grows a business, and people get to eat local food from the suburbs.

There is also yard sharing, an informally-arranged activity that occurs between neighbors who want to garden or share their land. Web sites like Sharing Backyards promote the sharing of little-used urban lots. Many landowners have vast expanses of grass that they may want to use for agriculture, but they simply don’t have the time to grow food in their yards. Others have a desire to garden, but they don’t have the land. Yard sharing is like a matchmaking program for gardeners. Those who garden on others’ land do need to respect the boundaries of the landowner, but they may also harvest lasting friendships as well as food.

I grew up yard sharing. In the abandoned orchard across the street, we would pick apples from the trees that used to sustain a local family. I would play in the gardens of the families around our neighborhood, most of whom had lovely yards that grew bountiful produce. I wish the same for the children of today. Yard sharing is a path to food security, but it’s also a way to grow community.

There’s a debate amongst those of us suburban dwellers who have rural fantasies. We dream of chickens, of eggs, or sheep and spinning our own wool and knitting it into fantastic sweaters. We dream of mornings on the farm, pulling out pristine, dew-covered carrots from the ground and turning the earth. Surely, the reality is different from this. Just as the suburbs are not Leave it to Beaver and urban life is not all Sex and the City, I imagine that rural life is not the pastoral fantasy painted above. Yet it has a definite attraction for we urban and suburban gardeners, we displaced back-to-the-landers.

What’s the controversy, then? Well, there is a debate about rural versus urban and suburban living. Simply put, are humans better off joining together in urban areas, where they can build a complex infrastructure to support themselves? Sewage treatment, transit, and other goodies come with scale, and large numbers of people live in urban areas, not rural ones.

Or is it better to fly solo, or with the help of a few neighbors? Rural living can mean fewer building codes, which can lead to things like cob and straw bale building, passive and active solar design, wind power, and composting toilets. Great stuff, but let’s face it, rural living isn’t there yet. Although many possess a modicum of self-sufficiency, many others still depend on the power grid and less-than-adequate sewage treatment and need to drive long distances to get to stores.

There are some people who love the city and would stay there no matter what. They are deeply fond of their urban gardens and of the challenge of growing food on rooftops and balconies. They thrive on the diversity of thrift stores in the city and the growing connections with rural areas through farmers’ markets. They also love the capacity that city-dwellers have to share: for every person in a city of a million who is interested in learning how to spin or how to make cheese, there are many, many others. The ability to learn from others and to create joint educational opportunities is amazing, due to the scale of the city.

Then there’s the down side of urban life. Urban people don’t have to be cut off from nature, but it can be more challenging to find access to land to grow food in the city as it is presently designed. It’s often harder to get to walking trails surrounded by forest, too. While it’s not impossible to be a city kid who loves nature, it’s often more difficult to connect, especially when it’s so easy to move from home to car to office or school, and then back home again.

The city is a big animal, and it’s hard to shift the habits and thinking of urban dwellers. Yet this is exactly where we need to change, because it’s where the people are and it’s where people are making the greatest impact. Better transportation systems, more reuse and less consumption, and more food self-sufficiency are all critical issues for the urban environment and for ecosystems as a whole.

If those who are environmentally-inclined move to rural areas to pursue their straw bale dreams, does this mean that the city loses its advocates for change? Perhaps, to a degree. But maybe the two feed into each other. These former city-dwellers can reconnect the city to its rural neighbors, providing opportunities for current city-dwellers to develop new skills, eat fresh and local food, and learn about building practices that may not be allowed within city limits. Can urban and rural areas act as complementary inspiration to each other, driving each to more environmentally-friendly and trans-formative practices? I hope that it is so.

Come on, now. You don’t want to talk about it? Why not? It’s not polite? Well then. I have a four-year-old. I can talk toilet with the best of them.

I just finished writing a short “how to” book about cloth diapering. Our daughter was in cloth diapers for most of her babyhood, when she wasn’t learning how to use the potty. You see, we also practiced elimination communication or infant potty training, which means that we watched for her bathroom cues and took her to the toilet from babyhood. This involved a fair number of accidents, but eventually everyone got the hang of it.

Even babies understand when they need to go, and they’re not disgusted by it either. But as we grow older, we learn that some things are private, and what happens below the belt tends to fall into that category. We don’t want to talk about it. We certainly don’t want to interact with anything down there if we don’t have to. We’ll buy manure to place on our vegetable gardens, but when it comes to the bodily excretions of ourselves and our families, we say no way, no how.

It may be due to my background in gardening and environmental education as well as my status as a mom, but poop and blood don’t scare me. Sure, I don’t want to interact with them all day, but they aren’t going to hurt me. I’ll even talk about them. See?

Excretions and secretions are just plain disgusting to many people. Cloth diapers? No way, I’m not putting baby poo in the laundry. Cloth menstrual products and cups fall into this category as well. I’ve been using both for almost fifteen years, yet I still can’t chat with my mother about this. Not that the topic comes up much. The recent trend towards family cloth, or reusable toilet cloth bears mentioning too. Bring it up at the next party you go to and watch most people back slowly into the corner.

In these times of transition, we need to start questioning some of the barriers that we have. This includes questioning our use of disposable products that are created with new materials, use energy in their creation, require energy to dispose of, and create waste when disposed. Many disposable diapers, menstrual products, and toilet paper products are made out of trees that are bleached heavily with chlorine. We use them once, then they are burned or buried. In North America, the average woman will create 300 pounds of waste just from menstrual products alone.

Do we really, truly need to throw something out just because it contains bodily waste? Or can we stride forward with a brave face, put what needs to go into the toilet into the appropriate receptacle, and wash it?

I am a firm believer that promoting, discussing, and gradually using cloth and other reusable products will gradually make them socially acceptable. Maybe not cocktail-party fodder, to be sure, but an acceptable part of everyday society. We’ll stand up and be proud in our Diva cups and cloth pantyliners, toting cloth-bottomed baby, and say to the world that we’re not afraid of getting a little down and dirty. It’s all right, we can handle it.

Mercola.com, the popular personal health website, has a list of seven dangerous foods that you should avoid to lead a healthier lifestyle. Of course, these foods are not the only ones that you should avoid in the supermarket, but they are some of the more dangerous and toxic and some might otherwise seem safe to consume. It is sad that so many foods that line the shelves are so contaminated, but some are much moreso than others, so it’s helpful to know what to absolutely avoid.

Included in this list are canned tomatoes, non-organic potatoes, corn-fed beef, farmed salmon, conventional apples, microwaved popcorn, and milk produced with artificial hormones. Most surprising to me was the inclusion of canned tomatoes:

“The resin linings of tin cans contain bisphenol-A, a synthetic estrogen that has been linked to ailments ranging from reproductive problems to heart disease, diabetes, and obesity. Acidity—a prominent characteristic of tomatoes—causes BPA to leach into your food.”

Dr. Mercola comments on the dangers of BPA:

The current US federal guidelines put the daily upper limit of “safe” exposure at 50 micrograms of BPA per kilogram of body weight. You should know, however, that even low-level exposure to BPA can be hazardous to your health, and Consumer Reports testing found that eating popular canned foods may expose you to excessive amounts of BPA:

  * Del Monte Fresh Cut Green Beans had BPA levels ranging from 35.9 ppb to as much as 191 ppb
  * Progresso Vegetable Soup had BPA levels ranging from 67 to 134 ppb
  * Campbell’s Condensed Chicken Noodle Soup had BPA levels ranging from 54.5 to 102 ppb

Scary stuff. Read the list here and inform yourself about what to avoid the next time you go shopping for food!