Native Farming Solutions

✌🏽😎

✌🏽😎

You ever crave atole and champurrado? Toasted tamale flour with cacao, cinnamon, sugar, seasalt, chia, water, and almond milk. This morning I used the champurrado as a coffee creamer. Ah-maize-ing ✌🏽😁

Happy holy days! The rain today was nice. A little chilly but it still felt good to be outside prepping for this bed for early spring veggies. This bed was started a few years back as a winter compost pile. We broadforked the ground, made a bed using sumac stalks, added branches, leaves, and food waste. Then, we covered it with cardboard and plastic for the winter. Today, I restarted a huggelstyle mound on half of the bed using old tipi poles, leaves, bokashi waste, and a bunch of liquified garden debris. That half of the bed will be covered and rest for a bit. The half that we can plant in was turned with a shovel and I added 4 gallons of Char, ash, and sand from the sweatlodge fire pit, plus 2 gallons of sand, zeolite, and char (pool filter media). A couple gallons of crushed eggshells would be the bees knees! We can’t wait to plant again! ✌🏽😁

The day has arrived for another class! Come and stop in today!

Many people are often shocked to realize Oklahoma is a bottom 10 state for education, community, and to be a female…but, did you know that programs for American Indian youth are at the very bottom of all those lists?

Here in Oklahoma native youth face severe bullying. We were surprised to sit in ceremonies all over the state and hear so many families praying about the same issues with bullying and su***de attempts amongst the native youth.

Back in 2019, Sovereign Community School was opened and it was the 1st school in OKC that was created by American Indians for American Indian youth. Unfortunately, The school wasn’t able to stay open and closed after graduating its first class.

SCS was an amazing experience because it took a lot of community action to maintain a safe place for our native youth to learn about their culture.

Kiara Pekka was one of the few students who attended all four years and graduated from SCS. Kiara was a member of a team that entered a small business competition and they won a trip to Vegas to present their business plan. Their winning concept was an “indigenous tea shop”.

We’re so very proud to have Kiara on our team and look forward to working with her to help create more spaces for learning and opportunity for our native youth here in Oklahoma.

Like this status if you look forward to seeing more native owned businesses in OKC!

Oklahoma is a bottom 10 state in many areas. When presenting to visitors from out of state l like to tell em: “congratulations, you found the bottom of the barrel!” 😂 Oklahoma is one of the worst states in America to be a woman and to be an American Indian. Oklahoma has the some of highest female incarceration rates and teen pregnancies in the country. This is why the work we’re doing is so important. If you’ve travelled to any neighboring state to observe urban gardening or community action programs you might notice that Oklahoma is very far behind everyone else around us. Let’s work together and change these stats for OUR local communities. We need more safe spaces for grassroots community engagement projects. Urban farming is a great way to support and encourage the youth to reconnect with realty. Ekosi ✌🏽😎

Being Native you usually get to hear traditional stories being told by community elders during the winter months. But that hasn’t happened for a little while around here. Well, I’m not an elder and this isn’t a traditional story but it is an Indian story about the Ultimate Aunty…Buffalo Calf Road Woman. Reading about her life and the way she fought for her tribe is truly empowering. This is from the era of US history where things were the most hostile between the Indigenous and the colonizers. The westward expansion is a sad time but you do get to see some really amazing characters pop up in these stories. This era produced what we call: “true freedom fighters”….Enjoy ✌🏽😎

Kasey has helped supported NFS from the initial planning sessions and is one of our founding members.

She shares a bday with another founding member Adam Ed and we want to wish them both a belated happy bday.

This past year has been phenomenal with kaseys’ support. Her organizational, networking, and creative design skills have been a big help in shaping our process to be more professional.

With her help we created a local network of food waste diversion and what made it so effective was her detailed spreadsheets that allowed us to measure many components of community composting activity.

In less then 6 months We diverted over 50k pounds of waste and converted it into black gold! Later, we learned that what we did was technically illegal due to local policy about transporting food waste.

This only prompted Kasey to dive deeper into the realm of local waste reduction and sustainability.

She now holds multiple seats within the local sustainability community and each group she joins becomes more efficient and effective with her presence.

Happy bday Kasey and thank you for all your support and encouragement!

Do you garden in Oklahoma but struggle with tough soil, bugs, and lack of knowledge about what to add to your soil? While it’s chilly outside, We would like you to come by for lunch and some hands-on demonstrations that will improve your gardening h skills. We will go over tips for seed sprouting, microgreens, making inoculants, liquid composting, “mama bird composting”, Bokashi composting, and vermicomposting. We will also also teach you how to pull these components together to create garden solutions for plant growth, bug repellents, and soil regeneration. We look forward to hosting the local gardening/composting community for classes once again and we hope you can all make it over for the next class!

Join us for our next class coming up in February! We will be partnering with and for our next class. We will post more info in the next few days. Stay tuned!

Happy Holy Day earthlings! Thank you to everyone who attended our 2 classes this month. This project was made possible with a lot of help from other organizations. Thank you for creating space for the community to gather, thank you for seeing value in our program and asking us to collaborate with ya’ll, thank you for you support and encouragement, thank for donating organic fresh veggies for our Indian taco dinner, thank you for the leadership workshops, and thank you to the NFS team for sharing your skills and talents with us. For the 2nd class we had a visitor from Russia. Many don’t know, but, was a school teacher in Russia and can teach composting in both Russian and English 😁 This was a great experience and we look forward to more classes in the future with you all again. Oh, and happy bday to our teammate as well!

Happy Nilchitsoh! This is the beginning of December and it is also the true bday for our co-founder ! Torii has been an advocate for cultural preservation as long as anyone can remember. In high school she was popular because she helped a lot of her friends graduate high school. Torii has always had a passion for helping students who struggle in academia. Thru the pandemic she helped deliver meals to students who were only getting meals when they went to school. I wasn’t suprised when I seen news stories about the elders I her hometown who organized to distribute food throughout their community during the pandemic as well. Torii has an unwavering passion for supporting indigenous youth in academia. We at NFS are very fortunate to have her on our team. Years past we celebrated the full moon rising at this time of year, this year it’s a lil different but still just as wonderful. Happy birthday Tori aka “Nerdybird”. 🥳🥳🥳😘

Link in bio to register for the upcoming classes in OKC next week! This is a family friendly event. We will have refreshments and there will be other youth including our own to keep the youngsters occupied while we engage in a wi tee story telling session. Please like and share this post! ✌🏽😉

Happy Nilch’its’osi! Hope everyone is doing well and staying warm. This month has gone by so fast. Macy month we’re going to be busy as well. Dec 13th and the 20th we will be hosting 2 classes. These classes will be hosted online as well as in-person. The registration link is in the bio….🖖🏾😎

I enjoy talking about creative ways to use fruit scraps and every now n then I hear someone mention that they put banana peels in water to make fertilizer and it smelled bad so they only did it once. I always like to tell em that adding a little kombucha to the mixture helps prevent the bad odor. This mixture has cloves added for antibacterial benefits. After letting this mixture rest for a few weeks, the liquid can be drained for further processing to create: “Suntea solutions” and the mash can be used to boost composting projects. This is called “mama bird composting”. The Suntea solutions can be used as garden fertilizer and as a compost catalyst. This is a part of the NFS creative waste diversion project….✌🏽😎

The next class from will be this Wednesday at 1pm cst. We will go over small scale options for winter gardening projects. Seed sprouting through the winter will have you primed and ready for spring time planting! Miniature self-wicking planters work great for regrowing food scraps like pineapples and kitchen herbs! These are solutions for those who have limited space for gardening. The link for the class registration is in the bio!

Address correction! Same time though….✌🏽😁

Join us tomorrow for native heritage month celebrations! We will be there from 2-5. There will be seed sprout kit giveaways and tepache demonstrations. ✌🏽😎

We will be hosting a taco sale at Western Heights High School Oct.9th! Proceeds will go towards NFS and Western Heights Indian Ed program! We have been impressed with the students efforts in getting the garden program started! 💪🏽🙌🏽

Please like and repost if you have volunteered at Skyline garden with us this past year…✌🏽😁

Come see us at the FARMERS MARKET at .okc tomorrow from 5-9pm!

We'll have some fruits & veg from our summer gardens available for purchase, as well as soil amendments!

All proceeds go toward continuing NFS work for food sovereignty 💪🏽💪🏽

Come through!

Food resource centers throughout the metro often give out very healthy raw ingredients. I’m not sure what people do with this stuff. I wanted to experiment with shelled walnuts and brought a bag home. This is my experiment that turned out better then expected. Milk made from seeds, grains, and legumes provide some of the absolute best source of healthy fats and oils. This batch of walnuts was prepared as follows: 3 cups of shelled walnuts, 4 cups of water, 1 tablespoon of seasalt, and 1 tablespoon of “cal”. Stir while heating until the water begins to steam. Turn off heat and stir for another few minutes. Drain and rinse walnuts and then put 3 cups of walnuts. 3 tablespoons of chia seeds, 1 tsp of Ceylon cinnamon and a few dashes of sea salt. Heat mix and stir until it steams and then turn off the heat and continue to stir a few more minutes. Then strain the milk using cheese cloth and add 1/4c of brown sugar and 1 tbls of cocoa while it Is still hot. We had some shawnee pumpkins from a their recent harvest dance that were shared with us. I combined the steamed pumpkin with the walnut milk, a lil more water, and some maple syrup. This will make for an amazing breakfast smoothie….✌🏽😎