Arthur Smid

Tender Loving Empire: 170 artists, a roster of musicians, and a screenprinting studio

Feb 102009

Group hug

Here in Portland there is a Tender Loving Empire. Now, this is for real. Meet Brianne and Jared Mees. A Portland couple who created Tender Loving Empire. It’s the sunshine embrace of creative power. It is all things. Are you an artist with something you absolutely must share with the world, right now? Are you a musician who wants to put your CD in a store? Are you looking for new music? Are you looking for affordable art? The perfect gift? The Tender Loving Empire just opened it’s heart to you.

Okay, but really folks. Brianne runs the retail shop. It’s a consignment store. Everything – and I mean down to the fimo robot – is handmade. Jared focuses on the record label, and he handles the screenprinting orders. The Tender Loving Empire store is in ActiviSpace on the corner of NW Lovejoy and 18th Street.

I stop by on a Monday evening at closing time. Jared is in the screenprinting studio working on a big order of orange bandannas for Oregon State University. He stacks them in a rack to dry and washes out the screen. He has band practice. His friends hang out waiting for him to finish. Brianne shows me the store. It’s full of artwork. It’s a little shop, but really, every imaginable handicraft is there. It’s all there in the Tender Loving Empire. Continue reading »

Walk Along the Urban Grocery Aisle: Portland’s Edible Fruits, Nuts, and Plants

Jan 272009

Have you wondered about an apple tree and thought, can I pick one and eat it? If you’re lucky to live in Portland, you can find that out; you can ask your neighbor; and there’s some motivated people who have already met the neighbors and created Urban Edibles, a wiki with all the fruits, nuts, and edible plants in Portland. There’s a lot of available food in the city: apples, pears, plums, figs, walnuts, hazelnuts, blackberries, and abandoned garden beds.

Michael Bunsen is the founder and web designer of Urban Edibles. He had the idea for a couple years and as his web designing skills developed, he asked his friends to get involved. “When I moved to Portland,” Carly Boyer tells me, “I happened to live with Julie Noble who was getting involved in the project. I had just come from a year-long apprenticeship in herbalism in Eugene. So it was just a natural fit, and my good friend Bobby got involved.” Bobby Smith does work with Portland Parks and Recreation: park rangering, environmental restoration, and education for youth interested in native plants.

The first and most important native plant is Oregon Grape, our state flower, planted alongside government buildings, corporate landscaping, and apartment complexes. “It looks similar to Holly, except it’s not quite as shinny and jagged. This plant is an amazing anti-bacterial, anti-biotic, alterative,” Boyer states. “An alterative stimulates the bodies own immune response. If you catch a cold, your body would respond – but the alterative quickens the process.” Continue reading »

The City Gardens: Growing food in Portland

Jan 122009

It’s common the world over to plant food near your house, and Portland’s a quick study. There’s a growing community of people who realize they would just as soon like to eat vegetables grown next door as they would buy some picked and shipped to the supermarket. Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is one way to get vegetables from a local farm to the table. City Garden Farms is a Portland CSA grown on small plots throughout the city. “I’m a lifelong gardener, a passionate gardener,” Dan Bravin tells me. “I always had a dream to make a small business off what I grow.” Bravin and his business partner, Martin Barrett started City Garden Farms last year after Barrett read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and said to Bravin: “I have a big backyard, can I make money growing vegetables?”

Most CSAs in Portland have a waiting list, some lists are a hundred customers long. “One reason,” Bravin considers: “once people sign up, they tend to stay on. There’s a buzz about local food and ‘getting back to basics’ during the recession, so there’s more demand than supply. Every year, you sell a share of your farm – as much produce as you grow – so they’re buying a piece of the farmer’s output. That’s your share of the farm.” City Garden Farms grow high quality vegetables and promote urban agriculture.

Bravin and Barrett started the business last year with 12 backyard sites around the city, and this year they’ve optimized it at around nine, though the number is not finalized yet. “We get requests to farm in people’s backyards all the time,” Bravin says. They farm any unused land in general that is at least 1000 square feet, has eight hours a day of sunlight, and is not in complete disrepair (if concerned about a site, they do heavy metal testing). They use all organic methods to fertilize the soil: fish meal, soy bean meal, kelp meal,alfalfa pellets, and manure from local farms – so long as the farmers don’t give hormones to the animals. In exchange for the input of agricultural wealth and a share of the CSA, the owners of various yards provide space, water, and welcome City Garden Farms to come in about once a week to maintain the garden. Continue reading »

Blog it Yourself is available to share under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported license. Website artwork courtesy of Nikki McClure Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha