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Outpost News Archive 2004
2/18/2004 greetings!!! been a long time coming, but the Last Organic Outpost now has an e-mail list!! My name is Indica (a.k.a. Nancy Loggins) and I recently jumped on board to help with things such as email lists and the paperwork side of running the garden. You can also find me at the Outpost every Saturday from 9 - 3 managing our market garden. The community is invited to come out during this time to
This weekend should be beautiful, so come on out and join us! The other happenings associated with the Outpost are
~~~ salad mix sales are high and we're looking forward to another great weekend !!! ~~~
... and i'm sure there's more that i simply can't recall at the moment. Upcoming events include picking parties on Fridays (the big pick for saturday markets), an open journal show on kpft (date and time to be announced), a Last Organic Outpost presentation at Wabash Antique and Feed Store on March 6, a poetry reading by the one and only Urban Ethereal Poet - Joe Nelson Icet, creator of the Outpost - at Taft Street Coffee House on March 2nd, and...who knows what else?!!!!?!! Now that we have an email list, we'll let you know. What a beautiful thing community is. We invite you to contact us for volunteer opportunities whether you define that as your mere presence on the planet, offerings of man-made green energy (i.e. moo-la, dinero,$$$$) or some manifestation of movement. visit our website at www.lastorganicoutpost.com directions to the garden: take I10 east --- exit waco --- south to clinton --- left on clinton ---- go one "block" and turn right (the turn is actually a large parking lot between 2 red brick buildings - turn into parking lot and you'll see the garden straight ahead) feel free to call joe's cell 713-875-9569 for further info Peace, love, and urban agriculture, Indica
3/24/2004 HEY YA'LL!!!!! Ok, I'm not going to go into too much fancy font and color this time around. My back is about to go on strike so I've got to keep this "sittin' at the computer thing" short. We've got great news, so keep reading! The "wooHOOOOOO!!" is for the official IRS letter we received yesterday establishing us as...whatever the technical jargon is for being tax exempt and able to apply for grants. hmmmmmm...501 (c) or 501 (c) (3) - something like that. It's great news. After picking up the cooler from Central City Co-op this afternoon, I'll be dropping the letter off to Dr. Floyd Atkins who will probably meet with the lawyers again to figure the next step. The point is that this opens the door for the garden to be financed by contributions rather than Joe and others' pockets. Our good buddy Kelly continues to contribute greatly to the garden. I stopped by the other day and she had unloaded bricks from her trunk to make a border around the sorrel. Y ou should just see her in action. With her 1+ year old and 4 year old in tow. She RAWKS!! Nancy dropped off some much needed Ziploc bags for bagging the salad. Things like that may seem minor, but when it takes up until 10 p.m.at night to bag when you actually HAVE bags, having someone take the initiative to go to the store, find a parking spot, walk from their car to the store, find the bags, stand in line, walk back to their car, and drive them over here is a BIG help. THANKS!! Paul continues to run the Houston Farmers Market. And yesterday did another one of those "simple" things - showed me how to turn the water on for the garden. Plus, he put the cooler in the truck for me which my back thanks him greatly for. Joe is working the "coal mines" as he calls them (the chemical plants he services as a refrigeration mechanic) this week until Friday afternoon. And that's where YOUR opportunity to shine and have fun in the garden comes in... FRIDAY PICKING PARTY (100 lbs of salad mix for saturday markets) 3 p.m. at the Garden Directions: so, there are probably other things i have forgotten to mention.... OH YEH!!! Taft Street Coffee House, 2115 Taft in Montrose, is serving Outpost Salad Mix as their House Salad. Support local businessess and local growers by eating lunch at the Coffee House. Hey, while you're there on Wednesdays, you can do your produce shopping at Central City Co-op which is in the in the large room right next to the Coffee House. peace, love, and urban agriculture, indica
10/27/2004
The Halloween Harvest Party featuring Bhangra Music Making News in the Houston Chronicle An Article on the Last Organic Outpost will appear
in this Be sure to pick up a copy! Children's Gardening Classes (all classes will take place at the Last Organic Outpost Gardens) Sat Oct. 30, 6:15-7:15 (before the Bhangra party) Nov 7, Sunday 1-3pm. Our facilities are primitive!! Depending on the response, more classes will be scheduled. Carol hopes to develop a regularly scheduled bi-monthly Saturday class at the Outpost. A portion of the proceeds from each class will benefit the Last Organic Outpost, a 501(c)-3 non-profit organization.
Habitat for Humanity Building Supply Outlet For all of you "weekend warriors"! - Here is an alternate place to shop for your home/misc. projects! Habitat for Humanity Building Supply Outlet Grand Opening was Saturday, October 23rd. www.houstonhabitat.org
11/16/2004 Hi All! Carol Burton is conducting another one of her fantastic
Children's
Children of all ages are welcomed. Parents must stay with children age 4 and younger. Personally, I can't wait to hear the Cherokee Tale about the First Strawberries. I enjoy Carol's lessons as much as the children do! Whether you are four or forty - Carol's Workshops are great! Those of you that would like to send a tax-deductible donation or anything to us by snail mail - here's our address:
Any donations sent can be tagged for a specific purpose (ex: dirt, seeds, lumber,etc) if you would like - to tag your donation, just put a note in the memo line of your check or enclose a note with your donation. A letter acknowledging your tax deductible donation will be mailed back to you for tax filing purposes. Last, but not least - I would like to extend an invitation for all of you to come by and visit the garden over the Thanksgiving holiday. The Last Organic Outpost Garden is also a park. We have picnic tables and benches where you can sit and enjoy the beauty of nature. There is a small playground too for our younger garden visitors. Joe, Philip, and all of the wonderful people who volunteer to help have really made the garden look nice! Bring your family and friends out this Holiday Season and show them the beauty created in our urban setting! Stop by and say "Hi" anytime!
11/23/2004 Hi All- Happy Thanksgiving! Thanksgiving is just around the corner and all of us at the Last Organic Outpost send our thanks to you for your interest and support! We do appreciate you all! Great things are going on at the Last Organic Outpost! Web Site Additions New Poems!
If any of you get a chance, over the holiday weekend, to check in on the garden - it would be greatly appreciated!
12/4/2004 Hello All- Welcome to December! Most of us have gone through the last of the Thanksgiving
leftovers by now, and are gearing up for the hustle and bustle of the
Holiday Season. It even feels kind of like winter for a change!
12/15/2004 Dear All - Thank you so much for the great tips, comments and suggestions sent in. Engineers Without Borders visited the garden for a weekend of cistern building at the Last Organic Outpost. Joe and Indica visited Austin and sent in this report: As synchronicity would have it, Y-O's birthday was being celebrated that night in the soft light of Casa de Luz. In the hours spent with Y-O and his friends, Joe shared his visions manifested through the Last Organic Outpost and visions yet to be born. With a twinkle in each of their eyes, Joe and Y-O seemed to share a spark of the same dream. It is Joe's and my hope that with more connections such as these that the visions that birthed the Outpost will continue to lead us into a brighter tomorrow. Big thanks to Brian Herod of Green Drinks, Nancy Sorenson, Cath Conlin, Celeste and the Great Mystery for bringing all of us together last weekend. It was through a series of connections between these people that resulted in a journey to Austin. A visit to www.tierrapacifica.net provides information for those interested in learning of the vision he shares for this land. Following is an excerpt from another site concerning this project www.spiritu.us. In order to further fulfill our own mandate to make a more habitable world for ourselves and the next generation, the Spiritu Village Project will extend the New Urbanistic vision with the sustainable and ecological vision of natural systems of permaculture and alternative building techniques.Our attempt is to create a more complete and nourishing living environment on as many different levels as possible. This can be achieved by marrying small town design principles to sustainable and common sense land use and building practices
Taste Raw Chocolate Mousse!
Read on for information about a free raw foods lecture, holiday discounts on January classes, and a raw chocolate mousse recipe!
FREE RAW FOODS LECTURE Would you like to taste chocolate mousse? I will have samples at my free talk:
Learn about the effects of heat and cooking on nutrients, the health benefits of a raw food diet, food combining for better digestion, and simple meal planning. Please call Nature Yoga at 773-227-5720 if you’d like to attend
CHOCOLATE MOUSSE PARFAIT This chocolate mousse parfait is one of my very favorite raw-food dessert recipes. The secret ingredient is avocado! But you would never know. Avocados give raw desserts a rich, creamy texture, but without the saturated fats in cream, butter, and eggs.
Cashew Cream:
Chocolate Mousse:
Assorted fruits, such as sliced bananas, sliced strawberries, cherries, blueberries, and/or raspberries
Using a blender, process all Cashew Cream ingredients until velvety smooth. Remove the Cashew Cream to a bowl. Place all ingredients for the Chocolate Mousse in a food processor and process until smooth and creamy. To make the parfaits, layer the chocolate mousse, cashew cream, and assorted fruits in wine glasses or parfait glasses. For great raw food recipes and raw food holiday meal
suggestions go to Other tips included information on making bricks from soil and buying gasoline and petroleum products from companies that do not import from the Middle East. I will have more on these and other tips next week. Have a great week and remember - Grow What You Eat and Eat What You Grow! Lezlea
12/21/2004 Merry Christmas All -
The following is an update on the the Last Organic Outpost Visit With Dan Phillips - An excellent account of the visit written by Outpost friend Ann follows:
Visiting with Dan Phillips: Building homes out
of garbage, Some Outpost gardeners and friends traveled with enthusiasm and high hopes to Huntsville to meet with housing/community visionary and salvage guru Dan Phillips to see his "low-income housing initiative committed to people and their communities" (as he says on his website, http://www.phoenixcommotion.com/). We were all so psyched by what Dan is doing that we're talking about going out for a weekend building workshop with him. In the past eight years, Phillips has built seven houses -- all made using 85 percent recycled materials. And these are the most wonderful houses. He creates floors out of broken tile, railings from the twisted steel-hard boughs of the bois d'arc tree, skylights from pickle & relish plates (so ugly sitting on grandma's shelf, so beautiful with their etched glass ridges lit up with light), house trim from hazelnuts and putty-filled eggshells, stained glass from the thick green and brown bottoms of wine bottles, a roof made from license plates, a floor made from the round tops of champagne corks (easy on your feet). How does Dan know how to use all this stuff? He just figures it out as he goes along. You're not exactly taught on the construction site how to make hazelnut detailing. But it's this kind of inventiveness, this kind of curiosity, this kind of "why not try this" mentality, a "why do it the normal (wasteful) way" spirit that Dan is convinced will be the salvage of the planet. "I do have an agenda, an anger that drives me," he told the Houston Chronicle, who wrote a long story about his work on the cover of the Texas Magazine. "We Americans are so wasteful. This town of 30,000 wastes enough material to build a house once a week, when there are families who would do anything to own their own home." Part of his mission is reducing the waste of materials and the filling of landfills. "Joe, what you don't understand is how much garbage there is," Dan told a rapt Joe. "It's terrifying," Indica chimed in. "One afternoon I'll be yawning," said Dan, "And I get $50,000 worth of materials. I can't use it all. When people steal from me it's irritating, but it still serves my purpose "at least it doesn't end up in the landfill." He showed us his latest treasure--two 18-wheeler trucks-full of stone cornices. Gorgeous and expensive. Why were they being pitched by the high-end architectural supply company? Because they'd gotten water-stained by Tropical Storm Allison. Never mind that they'll end up looking exactly the same way after standing out in the elements for a year. But when you sell them, they have to look pristine. Another big part of Dan's program is building houses that folks on minimum wage can afford. He starts with the low cost of his "garbage" materials, then teaches his prospective homeowners how to work with him or another master craftsman in building their own houses. We met Londa, who was his assistant on his current project (more about that in a moment) “ they're going to start building her house after Christmas. Sponsored by Brigit's Place (the happening women's group aligned but not confined by Christ Church Cathedral), Londa's going to build a house for herself and her three kids that'll only cost a total of $20,000 (including some pay to Dan for his labor), and will be 60 percent paid for when she moved in. Dan did the math for us, and Londa's mortgage, taxes, insurance, and utilities will top off at $300 a month, plus she'll be building equity. Part of the program is building the tiniest house allowed by law “ just 600 square feet for the whole family. But these houses all include ample decks for lots of outdoor living, and plenty of opportunity to add on down the road. Dan also keeps his costs down by using unskilled labor "like Londa used to be. His assistants work cheap, and over the course of a year apprenticing with Dan, they're not unskilled anymore, and they can go out and get well-paying jobs, plus spread the gospel of salvage. Dan's current project is a studio designed to rent out to artists for affordable rent "apparently in scarce supply even in Huntsville. There's a big spacious floor space for a dancer, lots of light pouring in (salvaged sliding glass doors filling the back wall facing the trees and gully, and those relish trays on the front) for an artists, heavy-duty power outlets for a sculptor, even the capacity for a potter's kiln. It's going to be connected by gangplank to a treehouse and another tiny roomette. Dan doesn't want to sell it to anyone “unlike his other houses “because he wants it to stay an artist's space. A big part of Dan's "the means of house production in the hands of the people" agenda comes from his hero, the California architect Christopher Alexander, who is building a worldwide design village, which he describes on his website (http://www.patternlanguage.com/) as "an association of people from all walks of life with architects and builders. We are rebuilding our neighborhoods, slowly rebuilding the earth." His books A Pattern Language and The Production of Houses (about a cluster of low-income people in Mexico building a beautiful inter-related community for themselves, designing and building their own homes) are some of the most stimulating you may find. As Alexander writes on his website, "These tools allow anyone, and any group of people, to create beautiful, functional, meaningful places. You can create a living world." Sounds like the perfect place for some gardeners and village builders to join in. Stay tuned to hear about the wild work weekend with builder-man Dan Phillips, and other possible Outpost-Phoenix collaborations.
"Elves and More" Need Santa Helpers! Last Organic Outpost friend Belinda sends this news: Below is an email from a gentleman named Dave Moore, the founder of "Elves & More," a program that delivers bikes and gifts to underprivileged children in and around Houston. The are building bikes in the Reliant Center over the next 5 days and are in need of volunteers. They've assembled 3,000 but need to do 17,000 more before Christmas!! They are also assembling and wrapping gifts. Here it is...
It's Time! I know you must feel whipsawed by the start/slowdown messages you've received on the Elves & More Christmas Program. It's been even more maddening for us, believe you me. But now the bikes are here, and time is very short. We simply cannot afford to let down the kids. Progress (or lack of it): 17,300 more bikes must be built, and only days remain before Christmas. 10,000 of these are here in Houston, and offloading at Reliant early Thursday morning. The rest are arriving late Friday. 5,000 Treasure Boxes full of 30,000 gifts must be packed and wrapped. Gifts are arriving at Reliant Thursday and Friday. View our webcams and you'll see where we are (or aren't) at any point in time. Come on out to Reliant Center, Halls A & B, Thursday night, Friday night, all day Saturday, and (now), all day Sunday, Monday and Tuesday until all the bikes are built, and all the gifts are in the boxes, wrapped and ready to go. The full schedule is shown below. We need your help now! None of these bikes or gifts will get to the children for Christmas unless you help make it happen. Don't wait on anyone else to do it. They won't. Only you can make it happen. Come early, come often, and stay as long as you can. Bring your family and your friends, your colleagues and your clubs. Please! And, tell everyone you know! Thank you for helping the kids! David Moore TIMETABLE (as of midnight December 15):
* Come assemble during the day if you are skilled
in bike-building LOCATION Reliant Center is located at Kirby Drive at McNee,
just one mile TOOLS If you don't have tools, you can use ours. If you
have your own, We have all the tools needed for Treasure Box packing and wrapping. Load-Up--December 23 Bicycle load-up into delivery trucks will take place
on December Delivery to Kids--December 24 Delivery of bikes and gifts will take place on the
morning of Where We'll Deliver Bikes and Gifts In general, our neighborhood deliveries will occur within an area bounded by Conroe in the north, to Galveston in the South, to Pasadena in the east and to Katy in the west. Draw a big circle around those and you'll get the idea. There are 263,000 children living below the Poverty Line in this area, and we will reach 25,000 of them this year. We must keep the locations of the specific neighborhoods we will visit a closely guarded secret until the day we arrive, on Christmas Eve. We do that in order to avoid having far more kids "waiting" in a neighborhood than we can serve. If secrecy were not maintained, the telephones would start ringing and kids would appear from other neighborhoods in such large numbers they could not be served. Thank you for your support of the kids! David L. Moore
In Closing - I would like to thank you all for your support and for the great suggestions and ideas you have been sending in - Have a Safe and Happy Holiday! Remember - Grow What You Eat and Eat What You Grow!
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