Banco Vivo: Fresh vegetables straight from the garden
By Rick Wendling January 30, 2009 San Miguel de Allende

Are you old enough (or lucky enough) to remember stopping at a roadside stand on a hot July afternoon to buy a grocery sack of home-grown tomatoes? Those tomatoes probably came from a garden within walking distance of the stand.

How else could the seven-year-old kid you bought them from get them there? Those tomatoes were also probably grown using methods and materials that have more recently been branded as “organic.” 

Those days are all but gone in the US, but here in San Miguel you can still get fresh vegetables straight from the garden. Banco Vivo is a co-op farm near Atotonilco that is similar to a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture), but with a twist. The folks at Banco Vivo work with you to design a garden plot just for you. You choose what to plant from their supply of organic seeds. Banco Vivo plants, tends and harvests your garden for you. You can pick up your harvest at the farm or at their location in town. 

Banco Vivo is a co-op of four people and they are looking for two or three more dedicated, energetic members who can help them advance their vision of a self-sustaining organic farm. The co-op set a one-year time frame to meet its goal. Banco Vivo has embraced sustainable, organic growing methods.

It is improving its garden beds with compost produced on-site, starting with manure from horses and sheep that live on the ranch. All seeds used in the garden are certified organic. No commercial pesticides or fertilizers are used in the gardens.

In addition to improving your diet, the people at Banco Vivo want to improve your mind. They are organizing workshops on composting, organic gardening and bio-dynamics (balancing the interrelationship of soil, plants and animals to achieve a self-nourishing system). Future plans include a tienda in San Miguel that will sell healthy tapas and produce from the farm.

Banco Vivo holds an open house at their farm every Sunday. Call or email for driving directions and to ensure someone will be there to meet you at their gate. Contact Pascal Monzies at 115-2555 or email jpmonzies@hotmail.com.  Banco Vivo’s website is http://bancovivo.com/;  for a map to the farm, see http://tiny.cc/bancovivomap.

Rick Wendling lives off the grid in the campo near San Miguel and is the mapmaker for Green Map San Miguel at http://greenmap.SMAmap.com/.
 

Correction

The information “Sustainable San Miguel” page 31, Atención San Miguel, Jan 23 was a paid advertisement written and authorized by the Director Francisco Peyret of the municipal department of Economic Development and International Relations. 







Celestial Lights 
By Phyllis Pitluga

How our solar system formed and evolved

Rho Ophiuchi Starbirth Region: 407 light years from Earth, this cloud of gas and dust is a stellar nursery. Newborn stars shine in a hot pink and blue light. The yellow ovals of light are where disks of swirling gases are collecting to form new stars and, perhaps, planets.

Once upon a time, 4.6 billion years ago, a swirling cloud of gas and dust began to pull together. Most of it squeezed together in the center, making it ever hotter. At the very center, the temperature became so hot that thermonuclear reactions began, turning the core into a hydrogen bomb kept under control by the pressure of the overlying gases. This was the newborn Sun, our star. 

The surrounding stuff flattened out into a swirling disk around this hot center. Tiny particles of dust began sticking together, building boulders and then mountains, all whirling around in the same direction. The mountains collided and collected into baby planets, which smashed into each other and formed the large planets we have today. The heat of these collisions caused heavy metals such as iron and magnesium to sink to the centers of these young worlds. Lighter material floated upward, creating the crusts. The light gases formed atmospheres. As they orbited, the planets carried forth the counter-clockwise swirl of the original cloud of gas and dust that was their nursery.

The early solar system was a shooting gallery of projectiles. Scars—impact craters—pockmarked solid surfaces. During this violent time, Venus and Uranus were flipped so that Venus rotated backward and Uranus rolled around its orbit on its side. Most of the other planets were tipped somewhat as they glided around the Sun. A baby planet collided with the young Earth, spewing off the lighter crust into a ring around Earth that coalesced within a year to become the moon, made of only lightweight material orbiting in the plane of our solar system, not around the tipped equator of Earth like most moons of the other planets. 

When the Sun blazed forth, it swept away the atmospheres of the planets closest to it. The inner planets became barren rocky worlds. Later, the atmospheres of Venus, Earth and Mars were belched forth in volcanic eruptions. The outer planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, held on to their huge atmospheres of hydrogen and helium gases. 

How can we run the movie backwards to even know? We can because we see other places around us where star systems are now forming. We have the laws of nature telling us about the gravity, pressures and temperatures, chemistry and states of matter (solid, liquid, gas or plasma), the spinning force and magnetic fields. Also, we have meteorites and comets, which are the earliest relics still unchanged in our solar system. Using all of these, we can paint an evolving picture of our own history.

Sky Calendar, February 2009 

By following the moon as the biggest and brightest “pointer” in the sky, during the month you can identify different planets and bright stars. On following nights you can relocate them but without the moon—it moves about 25 times its own diameter from one night to the next. The moon is much closer than the planets of our solar system. The stars are much farther away. So, when the moon appears close to a planet or star, they are truly separated by millions, billions or trillions of miles. 

Feb. 2, Mon: First quarter moon.

Feb. 3, Tue: Slender waxing crescent moon is passing above the Pleiades star cluster. Notice that you can see reflected Earthlight shining on the nighttime part of the moon, creating what is called “earthshine.”

Feb. 9, Mon: Full moon and penumbral eclipse, a dusky shading on the northern half before the moon sets in the west about 7:10am.

Feb. 11, Wed: The moon passes below Saturn.

Feb. 12–25: A cone of hazy light shines in the west after evening twilight for the next two weeks from meteoric and cometary dust in the plane of the solar system. This dust scatters sunlight forward and is especially visible now when the plane of the solar system is reaching from the horizon to overhead here in San Miguel. 

Feb. 16, Mon: Last quarter moon. 

Feb. 19, Thu: Venus is at its brightest tonight after sunset.

Feb. 22, Sun: The moon passes above Mercury, Jupiter and Mars in the morning sky.

Feb. 24, Tue: New moon.

Feb. 27, Fri: Slender crescent moon passes below Venus in the evening sky.