"Herb" N Agriculture, Building Bikes!

Ok, I'll admit that I didn't actually build my bike by myself (that would be impressive), but I did learn a lot about basic bike maintenance last night at Sibley Bike Depot in St. Paul. Every Tuesday night from 6-9, they host Women and Trans night, an open shop designed specially for women to fix up and learn about their bikes. Alicia is one of the workers at Sibley, and she runs it every week. Last evening, she showed me how to bend the springs in my brakes so I wouldn't need to buy new ones. Yes!

Women and Trans night is one of a bunch of projects Summer of Solutions is teaming up with Sibley's to work on, alongside community outreach, volunteer coordination, and creating a "bike library" where people can borrow and return bikes as needed. The Twin Cities were recently named the most 'bikeable' cities in America, and Sibley's is working to empower more people to use bikes as a regular form of transportation. Nathan, another Sibley's employee, told Summer of Solutions that he's been completely car free for a year and a half! What I found really cool about the Women's project is that the open shop is not only designed so that ladies can get their bikes fixed up, but also for skills sharing, so that people gain the knowledge they need to ride their bikes more regularly. I attended with fellow solutionary thinker Martha Psowski, who also fixed up her bike. She unfortunately did have to pay for some new brakes, but both of our bikes look great.



There's Martha on the right, putting a rack on her bike.


It reminded me of the movie "Burn After Reading" where Brad Pitt's character sarcastically goes, "You think I ride I Schwinn!"
Yup, Martha's got a Schwinn, and a pretty sexy one at that.


So, changing pace, I spent part of today at my internship in St. Paul, and after being in the office for 3 and a half hours, I was ready to play. I drove over to the SoS house in South Minneapolis and from there some of us walked over to a handful of community gardens just a couple blocks down the street. We spent most of the afternoon in a gardening workshop with Lynn Mayo, one of our community partners. She's set up a group of community gardens open to residents in the Phillips area. When I signed up to do SoS, I was really excited to learn more about urban agriculture, so it was awesome to get my hands dirty and throw earthworms at other volunteers. Lynn showed us one of her gardens that's super diverse (she has everything from strawberries to garlic to medicinal herbs planted there) and talked a little about permacultures and how to avoid soil depletion. We learned how to double dig, a technique that airs out the soil and turns the nutrients over to the top. We also picked a bunch of wild lettuce and garlic to take to the SoS house:


Right to left: there's Brian, a full time participant, Phoebe, a part time intern with the Step Up program, and Willy, a program leader, holding a bucket of wild lettuce to take home. Yum, noms!


In conclusion, here's a random thought: what in the world is this bite on my neck? I think it's a bed bug, but for all I know, it could be some really poisonous spider from the Amazon that found its way to my house in St. Paul. Umm....


I feel like encounters with creepy bugs is some kind of trend among us solutionaries. I still don't have an answer for this one. Those are the updates for now, more solutions later!