Urban Jungle

I've been getting back to my roots lately. This past week I visited a really cool urban gardening organization called Sembradores Urbanos who has a demonstration garden in the Roma neighborhood. There are 3 ladies in charge, and I met 2 of them, and they look like they are urban gardeners. One of them, Caro, looks an awful lot like various people I know, and it ends up that her mom is from the US and she was "raised as an American but in Mexico City." You can tell. They have great raised beds and all sorts of potted edibles and herbs, and shelves for their store built out of cob. They hold workshops and meetings there and hopefully I'll start as a volunteer soon. Here are some pics of their really cool work.

Back at home in my apartment, various fun plants are taking off. There's arugula on the roof, along with chives, strawberries, jasmine, and hibiscus flowers. I also have lemon verbena and basil plants. And, most excitingly, I got a wormbin and worms today! Through the greenpages (like yellowpages) I found a guy that builds wormbins and sells worms. I was going to make the bin myself, but I figured I'd support the cause and make life easy for myself. It ends up that the bin is not much more advanced than I could have had made it, but the man was so sweet and excited for my worm interested that I feel okay about the high price. Check them out!

I went out to the region I'll be doing my household surveys (Toluca region) and near the university that I work with (Colegio Mexiquense/Urban Observatory) we saw a sign on a house for homemade tortillas. We went in and found some ladies with a huge comal cooking up lovely large tortillas. We asked and they told us the corn came from right around where we were standing. I couldn't help but buy a kilo of steaming tortillas (for 75 cents) which I have been eating consistently ever since. There ain't nothin' like a real, homemade, corn tortilla. Hopefully I will be a regular customer. The picture of the stack does not do it justice.