Your 2020 Free Seed Project Pack Guide
Congratulations on receiving your garden starter kit from the Free Seed Project! You are on your way to a beautiful, organic garden that will provide food for you and your community, while providing benefit to pollinators and beneficial critters and insects in your neighborhood.
This is a guest blog by Suzie Roberts from the Green Riders.
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I was recently contemplating why being apart of the Green Riders Europe tour was so important to me.
In the summer of 2016 I was on my first cycling tour solo. I met a friend named Marc living in Arcata, California. He invited me to volunteer at Food Not Bombs, an anarchist group who feeds anyone who is hungry for free. At the time Marc was living at a community called The Spoon House. Twice a week they hosted the cooking for Food Not Bombs in their kitchen. We hooked up bike trailers to our bikes and went around to grocery stores to collect the food that otherwise would have gone to the landfill. These grocery stores were expecting the food pick ups as they had this arrangement for a long time. The grocery stores loaded us up with rescued food. We brought the food back to the community and cooked a big meal that fed around 70 people in the Arcata Plaza.
Last summer I had a film team from South America come to shoot a documentary about my life for TV in Latin America. They offered to pay me $5,000 to spend a week with me. I explained that I don’t accept any payments from media but that they can donate $5,000 to a nonprofit to do good work with. I chose the Fruit Tree Planting Foundation and together we’d plant 100 fruit trees.
For one year I am growing and foraging 100% of my food. That means no grocery stores, no restaurants and not even taking a nibble of a cookie or sip of beer at a party for an entire year!
You might imagine me in the countryside living off the land or on a farm. On the contrary, I live in the urban environment of Orlando, Florida, in a 100 square foot tiny house that I built with repurposed materials. With no land of my own, I garden the front yards of people in my neighborhood and share the bounty with them. I take trips to nature to harvest salt from the ocean, coconuts to make coconut oil, wild yams bigger than my head and dozens of other wild foods. I also forage for food all over the city, where people walk by every single day, without ever noticing the abundance around them.
I am so excited to share this video with you. I am about 1/3rd of the way through the project and this is the first video I’m releasing in documenting the year. It serves as both an introduction to the project and a day 111 update.
We think that life is better with fresh food grown right in our own yards. We want to help people who are dreaming of this, but don’t have the money or the ability to make this happen. That’s why Rob Greenfield and the Live Like Ally Foundation are excited to launch Gardens for the People!
UPDATE. The Green Riders European Tour was a success. Read the final blog here.
The Green Riders are back at it again. This time, cycling across Europe!
I am so elated to see the good deeds continuing on. I won’t personally be on this tour, but I will be there in spirit and supporting from home. The following is an announcement of the 2019 tour and all the details one would need to get involved, written by the Green Riders team.
-Rob Greenfield
Your 2019 Free Seed Project Pack Guide
Congratulations on receiving your garden starter kit from the Free Seed Project! You are on your way to a beautiful, organic garden that will provide food for you and your community, while providing benefit to pollinators and beneficial critters and insects in your neighborhood.
What’s above me is a couple of pear trees. What’s surrounding me is hundreds of pears going to waste on the sidewalk. So today, I’m going to show you how to clean up your community, feed some people in need, and have yourself a tasty treat all at the same time.
As I write this, it’s is September 2018. This blog is over a year late, but better late than never in this scenario I think. I had said I was going to do a monthly blog about my year of nothing new and I utterly failed at that. I acknowledge that and apologize on not following through on sharing this endeavor. I was just far too busy and overwhelmed in 2017, all by my own choices. I’m just finally catching up now!
To recap, 2017 was my year of buying nothing new (see the original blog for details). Basically, it meant attempting to go the entire year without buying or receiving anything brand new. Anything already used was fine, just no new items.
In my last blog, Nothing New for a Year- Spring Update, I had just finished a speaking tour in Europe. This blog is about my bike tour across the USA.
After returning to the United States from Europe I had just eight days to prepare to bike from New York City to Seattle, Washington, a 3,700-mile trip. I had been so busy for the last seven weeks in Europe that I had done very little preparation for the bike ride as far as my gear goes. The real challenging part about this trip for me, is that it wasn’t just me, it was about 30 of us cycling across the country, and I was the main organizer. I had way more on my hands than just preparing for myself. I was finding lodging and volunteer activities for about 60 stops across the country and planning out our route, among other things! The trip was called Green Riders- Good Deeds on Bikes.
After nearly a year in the making, I am so excited to finally release the story of how my bamboo bike got stolen and the roller coaster ride I went on to try to get it back. Many of you saw the adventure as it unfolded, but you only saw a fraction of the whole story. When I decided to search for the bike I had a feeling it was going to be quite the adventure, so I decided to film it, but I never, ever expected it to turn out like this. I truly hope that you’ll take the time to watch this short film. I believe you’ll be very glad you did.
