The Story of Stuff

Not sure if you have checked out the Story of Stuff videos yet, but I am thrilled with them. Accessible, compelling without being militant, and very well done. Here's a teaser.


What I am finding in my eco evangelism is that many people understand the need for recycling, energy efficiency, and habitat preservation. But they often do so in a piecemeal form, and lack the knowledge of how it all ties together to be able to Root Cause some solutions. The Natural Step and Permaculture are great ways to provide solutions, but many people are no where near ready for that level of detail yet.

I am more of a "do-er" than a marketer. I prefer to work on the solutions and let others work on marketing. And that is why I love videos like this, books like Omnivore's Dilemma, and movies like an Inconvenient Truth. They are laying a foundational awareness so that a critical mass of the population can be ready for change before it is too late.

-Rob

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Aquaponics

I took a tour this week that blew my mind and I have been dying for a few spare moments to tell you about it.  A few friends of mine from the fledgling Sustainability NPO we recently founded, Sustain Jefferson , spent a few incredible hours touring Growing Power this past Monday.    Growing Power is an Urban Ag facility that claims to grow enough food for 2000 people on 2 acres.  With a claim like that I was drawn like a moth to flame.  Their website offered some clues to their system-vermiculture, aquaculture, and several greenhouses.  The site filled in the details and inspired me in a way that no other has since I was originally introduced to Permaculture and Bill Mollison.

What excited me most about Permaculture was the sheer common sense of it all.  Taking wastes and turning them into resources to allow you to reap the benefits of both in one integrated system continues to fascinate me  Aquaponics, especially in the uber simple system that Will Allen of Growing Power sets up, fits the bill perfectly.

Aquaponics takes the aqua from aquaculture and ponics from

 hydroponics and melds them with a healthy dose of applied Permaculture.  Aquaculture is the farming of fish in indoors in recirculating water tanks.  The single largest waste from this system is that housing thousands of fish in a closed system fouls the water right quick.  Hydroponics is a system of growing plants in a nutrient water medium, which of course begs the question of where the nutrients come from.

Aquaculture attempts to solve these problems, and routes the waste water from the aquaculture tanks through a hydroponic system to provide the nutrients for the plants, which help to clean the water and significantly reduces the filtration needed.  Even at this level I love the idea.  Growing Power puts this system into overdrive.

What Will Allen and some others are doing is experimenting with what is considered by most to already be an experimental way of raising fish and plants.  First off Will has completely done away with the filtration system.  He has also done away with any commercial feed, preferring instead to grow his own.  See the underlying foundation of Growing Power is worms.

Readers of this blog know that I am a firm believer in Vermiculture as a means to reduce, even recycle, waste and turn out some freaky good fertilizer.  Growing Power does this on an almost industrial scale-using hundreds of bins (pictured) like mine to process literally 1o's of thousands of pounds of  waste into worm castings.  

The other great thing that worms do is, um, breed.  In fact in perfect conditions composting worms will double in population every 6 weeks.  Growing Power uses the immense amount of castings to provide the growing medium for their greenhouse operations and then uses the surplus worms as a significant portion of the feed for his thousands of Tilapia in the aquaculture tanks.

Back to the filtration method.  Growing Power uses plants, specifically water cress, to filter the water.   As with most of the systems at the site, it is simple and uses mostly reused items that are common in an urban environment.  In this case reclaimed sump pumps water from the bottom of the 5' deep tanks to 30' long flats of cress.  The flats are very slightly sloped, and as the water slowly makes it way through the pea gravel bed that serves to anchor the cress roots it is cleaned of virtually all of the excess waste.  Will Allen was not real long as specifics when asked about ratios of cress to Tilapia, he is an instinctive innovator... he just knows it works.   Several PhD types have also toured the facility and are adamant that the system should not work.  Yet, Will adds with one of his huge grins-he has been doing it for 3 years and has only lost one fish.  Time to rewrite the textbooks!

So what gives?  Will Allen (the giant in the blue sweatshirt) is convinced that the few handfuls of worm

castings he adds to the cress flats are the difference.  The castings are chock full of rich living bacteria and fungus cultures, and it is these that Will believes supercharges the cress flats with filtering capability.   After seeing the vibrance and life of his greenhouses, the obvious health of his fish, and the numerous innovation that seemingly turn up at every corner-I believe him.  Heck, that is how wetlands are supposed to work, right?

Anyone who knows me can see where this is going.  Will's newest aquaculture houses are built in simple plastic hoop houses in an attempt to cut costs.  He does a lot of mentoring in the 3rd (and 4th) worlds and is trying to get the system down to its bones.  The last house he took us through was built for $5000 plus labor, and it houses 7000 tilapia and 2500 Lake Perch in addition to 300 sq ft of water cress and several hundred pots of greens and vegetables that were basking in the warm humid air.   The next biggest problem to overcome is how to make it Peak Proof by removing the dependence on the second hand natural gas pool heater he is using.  It will certainly add significantly to the start-up costs, but a combined solar water heating and wind turbine dumping into a heating element after charging a few batteries for lighting seems like a great primary heating system with a propane backup.  This could also be modified to run on methane from a digester.   The owner of the farm I am using to grow my market garden has plans for one already drawn up...  

Looks like I have a winter research project!

It was truly inspiring to see people in the heart of an the poorer parts of Milwaukee making a difference, growing sustainable and nutritious food, and spreading the word about simple commonsense systems that work.  

-Beo

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Sheet Mulch : Building Soil Nature's Way

I had the oppurtunity this weekend to take a significant amount of lawn, 1000+ sq ft, at a client's house and begin to turn it into a perrenial bed. Round-Up is not an option in my world, so I pitched Sheet Mulch and it sold. Here is a photo how to for a simple, effective 3 ingredient Sheet Mulch with materials that are locally and readily availible here on the rural fringe of Suburbia: wood chips, cardboard pallet sheets, and horse manure.

Step #1 Prep the Ground

This plot had not been mown in months, so it took several passes with my electric mulching mower to knock down the turf grasses with the great result being a 1/2" thick layer of mulched grass. The owner called them weeds, I called it a Green Manure crop!

Step #2 High Nitrogen "Starter"

In this instance there was a horse farm literally a block away from the home, but the edges of suburbia are speckled with horse farms. Some neighborly conversation can get you access to a trailer load of manure prebasted with straw/sawdust for near perfect carbon:nitrogen ratio. It sounds nasty, and it can smell alittle ripe, but use a long fork and you will be fine. I spread it about 2" thick, but feel free to go as much as 4". More than that and you might go anerobic. 2" deep for 1000 sq ft will took about 5-6 yards or 3 loads with my trailer. That's alot of forking, but you can't beat the net returns!

Step #3 Weed Barrier

I like to use pallet sheets. Most warehouses, and some retailers-especially those carry alot of pet food or other bagged product, will have these in abundance. Again, do some calling and make nice to see what you can turn up. Newspaper 4-7 sheets thick works great too, but pallet sheets are ink free, and don't blow around as much in the wind, plus each sheet covers 16 sq ft so you cover ground quick. I overlapped mine at least 6" on all sides so it took the better part of 100 pallet sheets. The manure is thick with oat and hay seeds, this layer will keep them and the turf grasses out of the bed.

Step #4 Weed Free Mulch

Every muncipality out here has a free mulch pile for its residents. This municipality even had a backhoe on hand to fill my trailer with 2-3 yards of chips in about 5 minutes! I made 5 trips in 2 hours. Check out that windrow!! And, yes, my shoulders will be unuseable tomorrow... The garden will get a 6-7" layer of this that will settle to 5-6". Spoiled hay, straw, etc would also work, but spoiled hay is alot harder to find if you aren't Ruth Stout, and straw typically costs money. Wood Chips take longer to break down, but they don't blow around much and are a perfect medium for innoculating with edible mushrooms!

Putting it Together

When sheet mulching I find it to be much easier to not let any one step get to far infront of the others. Get too much manure down and it starts to dry out, get too far ahead of the woodchipping with the pallet sheets and they start to blow away. Sheet mulching is a very satisfying to do, as the ground is covered very quickly and the sense of accomplishment is huge.

Tools of the Trade

I did this job solo in 10 hours start to finish, with the exception of having 60 of the pallet sheets on hand prior to starting. Here is a short list of some tools that saved me massive amounts of time, all of which are pictured above

1. Utility Trailer. Mine is 5x8', cost under $700 and turns my Forester into a "pickup truck" extraodinaire, able to move 3 yards of light mulch with ease, or 2 yards of manure. Plus a trailer's sides are 3' shorter than a pickups so schlepping manure into it is much, much easier. Besides, when I don't need a work horse I take the trailer off and the Forester goes back to getting 32 mpg vs a pickups 14! I love my trailer!!


2. Wheelbarrow. I purchased a mulch barrow for this job. $95 at TSC and it holds 10 cu feet. Even overflowing with manure I could lift it with ease-the balance is more Vermont Cart than traditional wheelbarrow with alot of the weight past the wheel's fulcrum helping you lift the wieght. I have named it Archimedes, but often call it Hubris... A barrow this big is bound to get me in trouble...
   
3. Coal Shovel and Compost Fork. The Coal Shovel can move over a cu ft of mulch/manure at a scoop-mulch is light so it pays to move as much per scoop as possible. I picked it up at Menards for $16 as quality/design seemed simple. The Compost Fork is from Earth Tools and imported from Germany. It has a balance and feel that far exceeds anything you will ever find in a hardware store, and is worth every one of its $40.


4. Helpers! Many hands make light work; I had my uber energetic 5 yr old with me. True, the amount of work done by Sprout was minimal, but the diversion of someone to talk to was priceless, and mad props to him for keeping us both entertained for a full day as "Mr. Stone" keeping the cardboard from blowing away, or squealing anew everytime I dumped him out of the wheelbarrow on the return trip to the mulch windrow. Regardless of their age, someone to keep the weed barrier from blowing away is always a good thing!
   

The end result of a single days hard work will be taking 1000 sq ft of very sandy loam and covering it with an 8" layer of organic matter. Through fall and into spring the soil's ecosystem will kick into high gear with the manure's nitrogen and eat away at the cardboard. The chips will also begin to decay-I see about a 25% decomposition annually in my paths at home. The net result by June should be a 2-3" layer of ecologically alive compost covered by 4" of wood chips-ready to plant!

Sheet mulching can be a great way to relatively easily turn lawn into garden-as long as you have several months before you want to plant. Those months are worth it if you can spare them: in addition to killing the sod, you keep the topsoil of your lawn, with all its ecology, intact, and add 2-4" of topsoil in the process.

-Beo

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Happy Autumn!!!

Today is one of my favorite days of the year. The Autumnal Equinox is particularly special, even holy, to us. I am not an overly spiritual person, but September/October are fabulous times-the harvest is still in full swing-my sunchokes are cresting 8'-and while there is a nip in the air during my 5am commute I can still pick tomatoes and peppers. It is a beautiful, magical time.


Today was also the final installment of a 6 month long intermittent training program I was participating in at work. Together with another 40 execs from our region, we got together 3-4 times to discuss career development, give/receive feedback and network. This is real Fortune 500 stuff that I tend to isolate from my blog, but during the sessions I (being me) had worked enough permaculture stuff into some of the discussions that 2 of the members of my group were up from IL asked for an "eco-tour" of my property after we wrapped up.


We took the short version (under an hour) of the tour, and as I explained my permaculture guilds, rain barrels/gardens, bio-cisterns, and native plantings we grazed along the way. They were amazed that at almost every stop I was able to bend over and pluck a leaf off a plant, pop a tuber out of the ground, a berry from a bramble, or fruit from a vine. They commented on the simple elegance of the rubble rock walls and the frugality of the municipal wood chip mulches-and were then fascinated at the functionality of the rocks storing heat to serve as season extenders, and the mulch as a substrate for edible mushrooms and provide food for a complete soil ecosystem.


When I answered their question that I had harvested over 500# of produce this year and hoped for 2000# within 3 years they were stunned. They know I work the same jobs they do-they knew that they could do it too if they wanted to.


And that is what my HOA Permaculture is all about. Imagine if I hit my goal of 2000#. Imagine if my entire subdivision of 50 homes did the same (100,000#). Then take that out to my little village of 1200 with its 500 homes and you get darn near 1,000,000 pounds of food. All from homes that still have lawns and play systems and decks. From the street it would look like we all just have well landscaped homes. But a walk through that landscape and you realize that virtually everything is either edible, or supporting a plant that is.


David Holmgren has posited that we turn the problem of Suburbia into the potential solution for the feared food crunch of the coming century through Permaculture. In no other time have so many people owned land-cleared, arable, and irrigated land. The fact that we only farm Kentucky Bluegrass instead of apples and raspberries on our small holdings is only a matter of priorities and the luxury granted to us by cheap energy. The energy needed to completely revamp the infrastructure of our society may no longer exist-I believe we need to make lemons with our lemonade as we transition to a greener future. That Super Walmart looks alot less necesary if each hamlet is growing 1,000,000 pounds of real food...

Be the Change!

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Great Permaculture Plant Resource

As I said in my last post I am spending alot of time on the web researching for next years more significant foray into organic market gardening. Currently I am focusing on 2 main aspects-biological pest control and building long term fertility cycles through cover cropping, rotations, and a more scientific approach to composting. A favored launch point this week has been the Permaculture Activist Magazine's website, specifically today their Plant Lists.

One nursery really caught my eye and thus far has been a font of knowledge and optimism: Fedco Seeds out of Maine. I could describe them, but I will let them do it for themselves:

Welcome to Fedco Seeds, your source for cold-hardy selections especially adapted
to our demanding Northeast climate. Each year we observe hundreds of varieties,
selecting only the best for inclusion in our catalogs. Through our product lines
and cultural hints, we encourage sustainable growing methods. We offer a large
selection of certified organic cultivars and regional heirloom varieties. We buy
products from all over the world.

They have several distinct branches-seeds, fruits/nuts, tubers, and growers supply. The catalog for their trees reads like a primer on orcharding and is over 62 pages long (available online). Their tuber line is dubbed Moose Tubers and besides offering 47 varieties of organic potatoes, they have (be still my heart!) 3 varieties of Sunchokes! Each variety gets several paragraphs of text as well as an extremely helpful chart listing all the potato varieties together showing harvest time, tuber shape/size, average yield, and lots more. Pricing is very reasonable-I can get 100# of Purple Viking shipped for about $180. Considering that should be enough to grow 1000#+ of potatoes $.18 per harvested pound seems pretty reasonable.

In their Grower's Supply section I came across two books, Compost, Vermicompost and Compost Tea: Feeding the Soil on the Organic Farm & Manage Insects on Your Farm: A Guide to Ecological Strategies both are rocketing to the top of my reading list. Here is an entire book devoted to my dabblings in interplanting flowering plants for beneficial insect attraction-and one that is focused on soil management on a commercial scale. Priceless!

And, yes, I realize I am a dork.

We begin cutting the beds in a few weeks, and the adventure will begin with 800 sq ft of garlic.

By January I should have a firm starting plan on crop rotations, insect management, and soil strategies that I can present to the land owner, and then modify after consulting with my customers and the restaurant (where I am currently typing this with my daughter reading beside me) I will be selling to to dial in cultivars and sq footage.

This is a dream come true.

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Adventures in Community

So I am still riding high from this Saturday past when the deal was made-I have land to use next year! But even on the way home my gears were turning. Where in the sam hell would I be putting 600#'s of potatoes next July? As luck would have it a friend I had made this past year was in the middle of restoring an old farm house in town and had uncovered and rehabbed the original root cellar. I shot him a quick email and asked him to stop by if he got a chance.

He is up for swapping 40# of potatoes or so for use of the cellar, so it looks like whatever we are unable to sell we will be able to store well into winter, while also helping to keep another family well supplied with locally grown calories.

So the Beo Farm Community grows: 1 family to own the land, their brother to run the tractor, another to plant and tend the fields, and still another to store the surplus. 3-4 families sharing resources to create thousands of pounds of local food were there would be none without community.

All this grew from the simplest of things-the courage to ask a neighbor if they would be interested in sharing a resource. What other bounties are unrealized every day?

Talk to someone about your dreams,

Ask for help, Give some help.

Be the Change.

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Mother of all Rain Barrels

We had a mother of a drought in July of this year. We went almost 6 weeks without rain-which meant daily irrigation of our gardens-even the established perennials needed a weekly hit. We have 5 oak rain barrels on property which will hold about 300 gallons but that was soon drained and we were taking from the local city water to irrigate our permaculture plot which rankled me as it went straight against my "zero input" plan.

Now thanks to the beauty of Craigslist I may have a solution:

I am guessing the dog doesn't come with, but 2000 gallons with the drain aready installed for $200 seems like a steal. I have no idea how I would support the base (we are talking 16,000 lbs of water!) and I would need to surround it with something lest the neighbors mutiny but I am pretty stoked. If I can work out the logistics of tranporting it here this just might happen.

Wonder if I could get Koi in there...

-Beo

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An Organic Perspective

One of the most common, and utterly ridiculous, criticisms of "organic" methods of agriculture is that they can't keep up in quality and volume with conventional chemical methods. I am prone to picking fights, and this one gets me spitting mad. It takes forms as benign as my family condescendingly nodding their heads as I describe my deep mulching to make my own fertilizer (while all the while musing about all the money I am throwing away when my perennials die), to the much more damaging argument that a switch to organic methods would doom the world to starvation-we can't "feed the world" without Big Ag. That is a load of hooey, and my .1 acre project is hell bent on proving that. So here are some "Where's Beo" shots of my gardens to lend some perspective, literally, on organic methods.

Right, so that is my ugly mug about 2/3 of the way up my Golden Bantam Sweet Corn. I am 5' 7". All of these shots will look weedy, but that is due to the polyculture plantings-in this same bed is also basil, beans, and melons.

One of my 7 Tomatoe Teepees (4 plants each). This one is some of the freakishly vigorous yellow pear plants from Seed Savers. The plants have easily climbed over 6' tall in less than 2 months! The teepees are so sturdy that I didn't lose a single plant in a particularly vicious storm front last week with 50mph winds and 3-4" of rain. This bed also contains 1.5 dozen pepper plants and has an understory (waaaay under these days!) of white dutch clover for weed suppression, insect attraction, and nitrogen. The teepees also offer fantastic habitat for our black and yellow garden spiders which are superb general predators taking the edge off any pest invasion.

This is a shot of one of our native beds. Not a prairie as it was planned primarily for aesthetics but all plants are native to Wisconsin. The cupplant I am behind are only 3 years old and are well over 8' tall with leaves the size of dinner plates. This bed has seen no fertilizer other than deep mulching-and the droppings from the numerous voles, sparrows, finches, and chickadees that frequent it!

The key to any gardening regime is meeting the plants needs-the heavy feeding corn, melons, and tomatoes got a very healthy dose of horse manure (1-2"). In addition the tomato bed was cover cropped with a rye/vetch last fall, and the corn bed was the bottom of the massive sod based compost pile of last year's prairie restoration. The beds also had prep with green sand for trace nutrients, and periodic applications of either composted chicken manure or fish emulsion. With the exception of the fish emulsion and green sand, all of the inputs to these beds are readily accessible on any well balanced (livestock+diverse plantings) small farm-the way 90% of farming was done in Wisconsin 90 years ago when my grandfather was supporting a family of 10 doing it. I will put my yields up against anyones-and this is on only 3 year old gardens on top of a soil made up of a sand/gravel/clay mix from a quarry used as backfill in our subdivision.

"Beyond" Organic Farming works amazingly well-my 8' corn has impressed the heckfire out of me. I got 40#'s of potatoes off of 100 sq ft-that works out to about 9 tonnes per acre which compares very favorably with conventional yeilds... and that is with a lower yeilding Purple Viking strain v. the typical Russets.

Be the change!

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HOA Permaculture

The trees came in last week! Of course they came 22 hours before I was set to leave on a 1300 mile trip to marry off my best friend, so time was of the essence. I was able to get them in the ground with a modicum of marsh hay mulch before we left for Missouri, and was distracted most of the trip praying for rain while we were gone (unanswered, though the wedding was almost canceled due to tornadoes!). Upon our return I spent the next day sourcing materials to finish the beds on my back-hauls from delivering Rain Barrels to clients. The picture above shows the prep work as I left them last Thursday: on the right is the Speckle Pear with a Paw Paw on the other side of the bed and a pair of Hardy Kiwis on the fence. Edible Landscaping was unable to meet my order on the Paw Paw and only had 1 gallon trees on hand-hence the 18" tall "tree". What is impossible to see in this shot is the 3 French Sorrel, 2 Russian Comfrey, 2 perennial Clovers, 2 New Jersey Tea's, and 2 Hazelnut Shrubs that are also part of this polyculture. The grass surrounding this planting will be sheet mulched this month in preparation for more plantings next year.

At left is another of the tree guilds, this time anchored on an Asian Hosoui Pear Tree. This guild butts up against a 300 sq ft native planting that will provide a significant degree of diversity in both soil and insect life. This picture was taken after I had added a 3" layer of 9 month old leave compost from our village yard. The pile was steaming when I forked it into my trailer so the soil ecology will get a nice jumpstart of microorganisms! This bed includes New Jersey Tea, Comfrey, Nodding Pink Onions, and Garlic Chives in the understory, with another dozen or so prairie plants within 10 feet. In the background can be seen some of my compost bins and the tandem rain barrel set I am moving from the front yard to make room for a new, larger system I installed last week.

The bed at right has the second Paw Paw mini tree and the usual suspects in the understory. This demonstrates about how the beds look "finished" with another 4" of wood chips from the village yard on top of the 3" of compost. In the front yard I have the 2 peach trees in similar guilds, though one gets a mulch more elaborate understory complete with multiple nitrogen fixers and a bastion of beneficial attractants from still more native plantings and our large rain garden. I am lavishing plants on these guilds in my respect for the impending pest pressure that the peach trees will undoubtedly experience.

A few more thoughts on my prep. I took the unusual permaculture step of ripping the sod off. This is typically a no-no as you deplete the soil of its organic layer and much of its ecology. However, my sod is rife with quack grass and I had no interest in giving it a leg up in my forest gardens. Their rhizomes laughed at the 1' overlaps of 4' pallet sheets under our play system with shoots coming up in a nice 4' checkerboard. I have a strong dislike of that plant that borders of hatred, but I cannot deny its evolutionary chutzpa. So the rhizomes were removed leaving only the subsoil back-fill.

Without a year to add a topsoil layer through sheet mulch, I purchased 8 yards of a topsoil mix (Peat/Sand/Topsoil) that I layered on about 18" thick and then lightly tamped (ok I walked on it) and into this I planted the trees. I did break up the subsoil compaction considerably with a mattock (it scoffed at my digging fork and fancy imported spades) before planting. My intent was to mirror a forest soil strata as much as possible, so starting with my subsoil back-fill and placing topsoil on top of that, I then applied the 3" layer of mostly decomposed leaf litter from last years leaves. This simulates the micro-organism rich layer immediately beneath the surface in a true forest-the layer that feeds 90% of the plants in the forest. On top of this, the wood chip layer mimics the carbon rich mulch found in any forest-consisting of fresh leaf litter, twigs, and fallen branches. This is the layer that will provide the fuel for future generations of my soil ecosystem, while also protecting the soil from compaction and the suns rays. All trees were also inoculated with mycorrhizal fungus spores prior to planting to give the beds a more balanced soil system.

Next steps will be ensuring that the trees survive the ordeal of being shipped half way across the country and transplanted, and then to sheet mulching the rest of the lawn in this section to prepare the way for next years plantings. Only other additions planned for this year are some gooseberries and perhaps some strawberries as ground-cover and fungus inoculant to encourage decomposition of the mulch layers.

Will it work? Can I grow a suburban orchard "beyond" organic-with virtually no future inputs besides mulch? The next 3-5 years will tell!

-Beo

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Dead Zone

So last year I began experimenting with sheet mulching and had very high hopes. Now, 6 months later I am reporting back. Unfortunately it is with mixed results. The partial success is that the sod is, in fact, dead. The partial failure lies in the fact that the mulch material is not decomposed-or at best only partially. That was last week and I found it frustrating, but it got sidetracked as I began Orchard Prep in full force.

But tonight I spent the final hours before sundown after work preparing about 100 sq feet of soil that I had pulled the sod off this weekend. For some reason that fact that I hadn't seen a single worm finally sunk in. Let me say that again-in turning 100 sq ft of lawn-organic lawn-to a depth of about 8" I did not turn over a single worm. My conclusion, based solely on anecdotal evidence without soil tests, is that my soils are as dead as I had once feared. This is why the sheet mulch is just sitting there-one needs decomposers to decompose coffee grounds and cardboard. This lawn has been there for almost 3 years now, but our subdivison, like most, had its soil stripped off and sold, and then post construction had hundreds of yards of backfill trucked back in-in our case it was quarry waste: a stable and cheap mix of sand, clay, and stones. That backfill came from a subsoil or lower level in the soil strata-a strata dead to the soil ecosystem.

Into that layer-with a thin veneer of topsoil (2-3") crushed to oblivion by my spreading it with a skid steer- I am trying to create my Eden. I recently wrote about inoculating the soil with benifical fungus, but this goes deeper. I need to literally rebuild the entire soil ecosystem. Luckily I am not treading on virgin soil as it were-my trusty texts on Edible Forest Gardening speak of technique to do just that. The long and short of it is that I will be taking some 5 gallon buckets to nearby woods-as old growth as I can find-and scoop out some soil to mix into my orchard plantings. This is a broad base inoculation that will hopefully start to cover the gamut of bacteria, fungus, nematodes, and critters that I need to balance (or in this case create) my soil ecosystem. There is an abandoned farm about a mile from here with standing timber-I plan on making a foray next week to make some very significant progress on righting the wrongs of my site.

Be the Change!

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HOA Permaculture

If you haven't picked up on the recurring theme of the past several months, I am planning a small scale forest garden something bigger than a permaculture fruit tree guild but certainly less elaborate than the ones Robert Hart created almost 30 years ago that have received some coverage of late. I guess I am thinking of linking about 6-8 tree guilds into a mini ecosystem. Perhaps Orchard Gardening is a better term, but I won't belabor the point.

I have a few goals in this experiment:

Tidiness Alright I may be accused of snobbishness here, but I am trying to "bioneer" a system that is replicable in suburban homes across the US, and if it looks like the weed fest that Mr. Hart grew no one is going to be on boarding anytime soon. I know his Forest Garden was brilliant in many ways: self sustaining, productive, and groundbreaking, but I am looking for something that will pass the HOA police. To that end it needs to be structured, functional, and well tidy. That means I will need to add more inputs in weeding and mulch rather than letting succession do the work for me, and I want it to ramp up fast so it will entail alot more prep work instead of waiting for nutrient accumulators and legumes to enrich the soil for me. I figure my garden club attending Mother will be a decent measurable here-if she approves I have passed.

Natives Right, so this may have already nixed my goal of readily identifiable species, but I want to make these guilds decidedly Upper Midwest in Character by including natives to fill niches when possible. This goal is rough to begin with-apples are imported, peaches shouldn't grow in WI, etc but I want to give it a go. So at least in the understory I will be incorporating natives as I go. For every niche if I can find a native to do the job I will be giving it a try. This will only be a partial win as productivity suffers without hybrids and "domesticated" plants but I will be giving it a shot.

Enjoyable, not just Edible This goes back to Mia's euphemism that "just because you can eat something, doesn't mean you should..." So I will be sticking with "normal" edibles as much as possible. Peaches, pears, apples (okay and Paw-Paw but its native) will be the anchor trees in the guilds. Strawberries will be a ground cover of choice, raspberries, kiwis, chives, sorrel, and other familiar plants will be in attendance. I want to be able to serve produce from these guilds without explanation to guests-and then spend the explanation time on the beauty of a (mostly)self sustaining garden instead of driving home that, yes, indeed, that dish is edible.

Some wins to date:

New Jersey Tea I first noticed this plant in the Prairie Nursery's catalog as one of the few native shrubs, and then started seeing it virtually every where I turned in my winter reading: Noah's Ecology, Edible Forest Gardens, Gaia's Garden. Mostly it is mentioned for one of two reasons. 1) The cute anecdote that the colonists used the leaves of NJT as a Tea substitute post Boston Tea Party... planting this shrub is Patriotic! 2) Hummingbirds apparently can't pass it by-they capture some of the pollinators to feed their young. Cool. So it was going into the guilds already for its nativeness, tea-ness, and beneficial attracting-ness, but then came the coup de grâce... this bugger is a nitrogen fixer!

This plant just rocketed to my Top 5 along with Russian Comfrey, Goumi, Sunchokes, and Black Locust Trees. I bought 9.

Nodding Pink Onion I have a few of these in my perennial beds, and I knew they were a native allium, but it took Edible Forest Garden's freaky useful appendices to dial home that this native was a great onion substitute (can you call it a substitute if it is still an onion?) They might not bulb up like a Walla Walla, but they are perennial, can be divided annually, attract beneficials and emit enough chemical odors that they can mask more susceptible plants from pest pressure. I'm in for a half a flat.

Misc Natives some others that will be included: New England Aster for a late season benifical attractant, Bergamot (beneficals and more good tea), Leadplant (N-Fixer), Alpine Strawberries (edible ground cover), Indigo (N-Fixer), and about a dozen other native perennials will be about 8' away in a 500 sq ft prairie transplant bed as a beneficial insect haven to try to keep the Curculios off my apples.

Other plants that will be in attendance in force will be Russian Comfrey and Chives (both great nutrient accumulators). French Sorrel (great snacking green), some Dill, Miner's Lettuce, hardy kiwi, edible mushrooms breaking down the mulch, some clumping native grasses like Prairie Dropseed, and I plan on tucking in traditional annual veggies like peppers, tomatoes, etc to harness some of the wicked good soil.

I know I have given this alot of press lately, but I have eaten my nails down to nubs waiting for Edible landscaping to get me my trees and kiwi (3 week delay!!) and I have to burn the energy off somewhere: Mia is about ready to burn the Edible Forest books if I mention edible fungus or nitrogen fixers more than once an hour.

This week's task will be finding a source for 5 yards of compost (I actually ran out and used all the City's...oops this will probably come on a truck), tearing up the sod, finishing the irrigation swales, and sourcing 3 yards of wood chips. Like I said-I am going uber input to get it up and running!

-Beo

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Sunny Fuel and Chickens

This morning Mia and I were searching for some alternative starch sources for an acquaintance with an allergy to potatoes, and I jumped to Wikipedia to verify that Sunchokes were Asteraceae (yes) and there have been some updates to the entry. One of them was espousing the virtues of Sunchokes as an ethanol crop. The entry claimed that one acre of Sunchokes can be converted to 1200 gallons of 99.5% Ethanol. That claim seemed ridiculous so I let it go and went on to other things.

Right so I can't just let this go, but you all knew that already. Ethanol from my favorite perennial food crop? So I went back to track it and it turns out the reference on Wikipedia came from one of my all time favorite sites: Journey to Forever, again confirming my growing suspicion that it does, in fact, contain the answers to literally everything.

The JTF reference has about 30+ pages of text on ethanol production of which I read about 2, but it is basically just making strong beer-ok that is an over simplification but it ain't hard. So if I can seriously make 1000 gallons of fuel on an acre (v. 200 for corn) the 20 acre farmstead just became alot cooler. That is enough fuel to drive about 23,000 miles if we could convert our Subaru to E-100 (28 mpg * 85% efficiency) or just buy an E-85 car and cut our own ethanol with regular gas. The process looks easier than making bio-deisel, but that is only at first blush.

Regardless this sounds alot better than corn (6x the production/acre) while not having the no till advantages of switchgrass. I hope that it gets some real time in the debate at least.

Surround the whole thing with another of the coolest things I have read about this week: the chicken moat or even a hog moat, to keep the acre of sunchokes from taking over the entire site. As much as I love pushing the limits of the HOA...I need land for all these ideas!

I came across the Chicken Moat idea in David Jacke's Edible Forest Gardens. For those of you getting frustrated by my continual references to it, bear with me- there are still 625 pages to go...

So I had heard of Chicken Tractors, and like their utility and simplicity. I also really enjoyed the chicken coops in Mollison's Intro to Permaculture where the coop is adjacent to several gardens that are each separated by a fence-and each section also has a door to the coop. The chickens can then be released to "till" in a section of garden, remove most insect pests, and fertilize the heck out of the garden. The Chicken Moat combines the two ideas to some extent while adding alot of utility to the traditional garden fence. The picture above is very ambitious. The runs would house dozens and dozens of chickens.

A smaller version, say 30' on a side, would effectively run the perimeter of my 7 beds. The gardens that Jacke demonstrates with are absolutely dripping with function stacking. On the outside the chicken fence is buried 18" to stop burrowing varmints, and the planted thick with Comfrey and other mulch crops. These are planted fairly tight to the fence allowing them to be grazed, but not killed, by the chickens while also giving them some protection from sun and wind. The run is about 6' tall and fenced the entire height with chicken wire, and then there is a larger opening arbor on top with serves as protection from hawks and climbing predators, but also holds grapes, hardy kiwis, and a variety of other edible vines. The model shown had openings on the garden side for the gardener to chuck weeds in through. If you put down a sawdust/chip mulch in the runs you would have all the compost you could ever need. Loves it.

I can see something like this, but much stronger and with hogs, running the perimeter of the Sunchoke Acreage. Any errant tuber would be gladly eaten by the hogs rooting through the soil. Maybe I need hogs to stop my quack grass problems!

-Beo

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Garden Detail

So I wanted to break down my gardens in a little more detail. When I describe everything I am growing in my yard a common first question is "do you have any lawn left?" I do-alot. While the lawn as an expanse is dwindling annually, it will always be there for the dogs and our children. Plus I like bocce ball and while playing in a forest garden would be challenging, the buzzkill from squashing a sorrel plant would ruin it for me right quick. So here is a short rundown of gardens in the ground followed by a short blurb on plans for June:

Right now I have 3 main areas: Small Fruit, Veggies, and Sunchokes with some intermixing.

Small Fruit

This started in yr 1 of our home (even before the lawn) with 125 strawberry plants from Nourse farms. Not organic or sustainable, but dirt cheap. I split the 125 into roughly equal parts early season (earliglow) and midseason (sparkle) for their dependability and resistance. Each type is in a bed to themselves. The first year I debudded them all (while shedding tears) and got a healthy harvest in yr 2. Peak during the overlap week was about 1-2 Quarts a day. This was enough to put a little by-but only because my daughter eats small fruit voraciously. These beds take up about 80 sq ft each and I leave them to their own devices only trimming runners when they escape the beds which anchor two ends of a mixed prairie/perennial bed that also houses 2 comfrey plants (for compost) and my sole Apple Tree. Nearby are our 2 Currant bushes. These are just coming into production and are used for pectin for making jams.

Veggies
We currently have 5 vegetable beds each approx 5x20'.
#1 contains: 24 potato plants on a staggered 2' spacing, along with a grape trellis and 5 raspberry plants on the north side. Tucked in some gaps are also 3 lettuce plants and some mache I had left over.
#2 contains my heavy feeders: 24 tomato plants on 2' spacings to be trellised to 7' bamboo teepees for height. In the other 2' of this bed on the North side are about 16 peppers. This bed is also underplanted with about 1/4 ounce of white dutch clover seed for a living mulch ala Fukuoaka.
#3 is the spring bed and has a 20' double row of peas on trellis (using jute twine so I can compost the whole lot) on the south side and then 3' deep bocks of lettuce (8'), beets (4') carrots (2') and radishes(2') with about 3' set aside last year for this season's garlic (about 20 bulbs). This bed will be continuously replanted as harvest continues to stay in production (with coldframes) until Thanksgiving.
#4 is about 7' wide as 3' of it houses 12 more raspberry brambles. The other 4' contains 4 more tomatoes (1 teepee), 2 zucchini, and 16' of cucumbers in one row. This is a very new bed that is only partially composted sheet mulch-results will not be great.
#5 is my "3 Sisters" variation. Basically it has 4 melons on 4' spacings with 30 or so corn plants on very wide spacings interplanted. Pole beans will go in soon. On the south face are 6 basil plants for easy picking and wicked pesto.

I have a 6th bed I am turning under right now for the remainder of my peppers and lettuce that buts up against the sea of Quack grass that the DOT maintains on the other side of the fence. Keeping out that any rhizomes is futile so I have enlisted some allies. Enter the Sunchokes.

Sunchokes
Quack grass is my nemesis here at Someday Gardens. I have pulled out rhizomes over 6' long and they laugh at my stone rubble raised beds. I have spent about 20 hours this year meticulously turning over my beds and sifting them to get as many of the rhizomes as possible and then weeding with a vengeance to rid my beds of them. But the Quack Sea on the other side of my fence has limitless rhizomal resources that belittle my efforts. So I am choosing to fight an aggressive pioneer with an aggressive native: sunchokes. Now part of me feels like Roosevelt in 1941, but hopefully I can do better at living with the Sunchokes than we were with Stalin. Bordering my beds to the west and north and separated by mown paths are 3' wide strips of Sunchokes about 30 feet in length. The Sunchokes offer both insidious tubers and a mild allelopathic effect that seems to keep the quack grass at bay. The upside is that this living rhizome barrier also supplies me with about 40 gallons of tasty tubers a year and beautiful sunflowers in August. Now if they just don't take over Europe and SE Asia in the next 30 years...

That is about it for edible gardens right now. In some perennial beds I have 4 Goumi Shrubs that will produce if the rabbits ever stop eating them to the crown each winter, and I just put in 3 blueberry shrubs as well. It isn't much, but with a more normal spring, at least half the beds get 2 crops, and they all do if you count the winter cover crops. I also have an Herb Spiral with Chives, and most culinary herbs. Out of this I will be eating from May through the winter (Sunchokes keep like potatoes) and producing enough to sell to a sandwich shop to pay for next year's seed and supplies.

June/July Plans

En route from Edible Landscaping: 1 Housi Pear Tree, 1 Seckle Pear tree, 2 Paw Paw (pushing the zones here) a hardy Kiwi, and 2 Red Haven Peaches. Nourse will contribute 2 gooseberry shrubs, and I have 3 hazelnuts from the Arbor Day Foundation in the fridge. All the above will be incorporated into a "guilded" orchard that I have been planning for about 8 months on and off. In the guilds will also be more strawberries, sorrel, more chives, some edible native onions, mulch plants, and much, much more. The absolute beauty of the guilding is that in the same space as a loosely planted orchard I will have everything in this paragraph and more driving the production of this 30x50' area to huge heights. In the same 8x8 area I will have a fruit tree, 1-2 fruiting shrubs, an edible groundcover, edible vines, and at least a half dozen edible and medicinal herbs while edible mushrooms decompose the wood chip mulch. All in a system that creates its own mulch, fertilizer, nitrogen, and attracts its own pest predators. Buya! There is much, much more to this frankenstein (including an engineered soil/swale irrigation system fed by my blueberry bog and raingardens)-look for an well documented install over the next month!

I have a .5 acre lot, but I am only using about .1 to do all of this leaving the rest for a typical landscaped front yard, a playsystem for the kids, and enough lawn for 160lbs of greyhounds to frolic in. Most lots, even true Urban lots have that much. On the flip side this approach can also easily expand up to 1-2 acres by losing the raised beds for 5x100' beds, adding zeros to the quantities of the fruit trees and enlisting a gaggle of ducks for slug patrol without getting so big that 1-2 people can't maintain it part time. Hello permaculture market garden!

This is starting to feel like hubris, but fingers are crossed!
-Beo

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HOA meets CSA

So as the realization that the farm is at least 3, and probably 5+ years out sinks in I have refused to let that get me into a funk. Those 3 to 5 years are an opportunity for me to learn, experiment, and grow in an environment that is both safe and challenging: the Suburban Backyard.

Earlier this year on a post at Groovy Green I threw a glove down by saying that I would like to grow upwards of a half ton of produce from my 1/2 acre lot in Zone 5b Suburbia. I am taking that resolution seriously and am investing heavily in both research and plants to make it a reality. But it is bigger than a number-in fact I trace it back to one of my mentors: David Holmgren. Holmgren, in his book Permaculture, made a comment that is haunting me. It can be paraphrased as referring to Suburbia as the Salvation of the 21st Century. WHAT?!! His point is that in almost no other time have so many people owned a plot of land for themselves. Right now those 1/2 acre plots are massive ecological deserts soaking up resources, but what if a few pioneers turned the paradigm on its head and showed what could be done on a sub acre lot in a subdivision. Authors like Sara Stien in Noah's Garden, and the entire Urban Gardening (or City Farm) movement are trying to do just that. Making food and sustaining yourself on a 5 acre plot is fantastic and still the dream, but what about the other millions that will need food in the near future. We are a net exporter of food only because of oil-that will change in our life time.

I guess in the time that I have in the Land of the Home Owner's Association I want to see what I can do to add to the Victory Garden tradition of urban gardening. When I start spouting off at work about my gardens-people ask if I have any lawn at all. In fact we still have over 1/3 of an acre of lawn on a 1/2 acre lot. My food gardens are only about 1/8th of an acre as far as space I have set aside in the Master Plan, but in reality it is only about 1200 sq feet right now-with only 2 fruiting shrubs and some brambles augmenting the veggies and strawberries. But in that we eat from our garden from May through November and once the Filberts are online will grow protein, starch, as well as fruits and veggies. We stretch our harvest by "putting food by" in sauces and storage.

We also stretch our labor around by shifting as much of the load to perennials or "come again" crops like Sunchokes as we can. Using those sunchokes as an example. They produce as much, or more, pounds of food per sq ft as a potato and take as the same amount of work to put in and harvest. But once established, from now until eternity (you can't eradicator them!) all you have to do is harvest. No fertilizer, no watering, and no planting. Every Fall I turn the bed harvesting tubers as I go by the 5 gallon bucket load, and then I lay the stalks down as mulch and store the tubers in the buckets with wet sand in the basement (50 degrees). This saves me about 2 days in the spring of work, and about $30 in fertilizer and seed potatoes vs the annual crop. In return I get over 50lbs of tubers for free!

I want to see what else I can do with perennials. I am trying to debunk the theory of the need to rototill your strawberry patch every 3 years and replanting. How does that makes since? I have 2 berry beds: an early and a mid season. Last year on the midseason bed after the harvest I took my digging spade and turned under about 12" every 3' or so in the bed and let it replenish itself with runners. Into that I sprinkled some left over pellitized chicken manure, but compost would have worked as well. That was the entirety of my bed maintenance other than weeding. This year the strawberries are so thick I can't tell where I tilled, and that bed is out producing my early bed 2:1 and they were dead even last year. This is the third year so time will tell, but I will continue my tilling strategy as it appears to be a huge success. It lets the bed reinvigorate itself and I can get by on 1/3 the space with no capital outlays.

I still have 2/3 of my "production" area to plant and even still I am planning on selling produce this year-I will have attained the permaculture criteria of a "surplus". Sure I am still bringing in inputs in mulch and coffee grounds for compost, but they are all by products of my neighborhood. True sustainability in a Suburb is about community-we don't live in the four walls of our plat of survey-we share in the resource web of our community.

I have about 10lbs of produce in so far in the first 10 days of the season, and I have alot of tubers and fruits to go. Agribusiness can get about 14,000lbs of corn off of an acre (200 bushels of corn/acre @ 70lbs/bushel), I would need to hit 1400lbs to beat that in my .1 acre production zone. That is huge... can I do it?

Time will tell, and I will need the fruit trees maxed out to do it, but this time next year I might have a CSA in my HOA and its a purely academic point because my strawberries beat the hell out of GMO feed corn in the taste department and I am carbon nuetral or better.

Be the Change!
-Beo

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Tree Hugging Dirt Worshiper

So the newest breed of livestock farmers are starting to refer to themselves as Grass Farmers, and many Organic Farmers are proud to claim a bio-intensive form of agriculture-farming with nature rather than fighting it. And now one of my favorite bumper stickers (the title of this post) is taking on a new meaning now that I have finished Volume 1 of David Jacke's Edible Forest Gardens.

I know I have stated that in something like my last 3 posts, but forging through 350 pages of what is essentially an Ecology Textbook takes some doing. Don't get me wrong-the book was incredibly enjoyable and I learned an immense amount about, well, Edible Forest Gardens. It did get rough at times, as I was looking for a "how to" for temperate permaculture, which Vol 1 is not (though it looks like Vol 2 [en route] is). Vol 1 is rather a statement of the vision and theory behind forest gardening (creating self-sustaining perennial agriculture) while giving the reader (student?) a more than cursory understanding of the principles of the science of Ecology. The book is valuable if for no other reason than their incredibly thorough appendix titled their Top 100 Useful Plants. Wow.

As I stated in my last post, the biggest take away for me was in the 100 pages or so that deal with ecology. That is a good thing, because after 100 pages on ecology you need a tid bit or two! I will try to paraphrase my aha! here. Many of us aspiring orchardists have heard that a grassy understory can be detrimental to apple trees. I have heard numerous reasons why, but the main reasons center around resource squabbling between the shallow rooted apple tree and the shallow rooted turf grasses. That kind-of made sense, but it never felt truly right to me-too simplistic. Jacke clues his readers in on a relatively new frontier of soil ecology- the ratios of bacteria to fungus in the soil horizons as another possible reason.

Without getting too technical, grass or freshly disturbed areas typically have a very high bacteria to fungus ratio-there is typically little carbon material in the soils for the fungus to feed on and bacteria are more flexible on the relatively higher nitrogen levels in the organic matter in either disturbed sites or under sod. However, trees, and even shrubs and many perennials, have evolved to live in a mutually beneficial existence with various fungus and one (mycorrhizal) in particular is turning out to be one of the absolute powerhouses of the forest. Basically the fungus lives on or near the roots of the trees and in an exchange similar to rhibosomal bacteria in legumes, gives nutrients and water to the tree for sugar intensive root secretions. Sounds neat and all but why should we care? Here is the tidbit that blew my mind: take a table spoon or two of really good old growth soil. In that dollop of soil there may be as many as 40 miles worth of mycelial "hairs" and, in the soil, nutrient uptake is all about surface area. Dang!

But here is the kicker: the fungus is sensitive-every know "-cide" has shown to be damaging to it including the more innocuous ones like Round-Up. So if you live in a new subdivision like me and have dead subsoil, or are living in virtually any other developed soil on Earth you almost certainly have a soil dead to fungus. This is essentially forcing our trees and gardens to try to soldier on alone uphill with one leg chained to a 50lb chunk of lead. Not only are we missing an essential component of the decomposer web in our soils, we have also hamstrung our gardens by taking away one of their staunchest allies.

So I will be running an experiment in my lawn and some of my gardens this year. I have ordered mycorrhizal fungus inoculants for both my veggies and my lawn from Fungi.com and will keep you posted on the results.

Speaking of Fungi.com, they offer an immense line of fungus products allowing you to grow your own edible mushrooms. Some, like the Shitake, need a log to be inoculated and then placed in contact with the soil, but several others would like nothing more to live in (and aggressively decompose) the wood chip mulch in your perennial beds. In return they will give you a harvest every year for the next several years or more. Loathe turning your compost bin and have some time on your hands? Inoculate the pile (or a round bale of straw!) with their The Garden Giant™ (Stropharia rugoso-annulata) and sit back as you harvest some utterly immense mushrooms while the fungus turns the carbon into compost. Fukuoka would be pleased!!

I plan on inoculating the mulch layers of my sheet compost with the Stropharia and perhaps some others as soon as the beds go in next week if for no other reason than to see a 3' mushroom!

-Beo

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Yellowstone and Back

Wow. 10 days and 3500 miles with 2 toddlers and 7 adults in an epic memory fest week of driving, wildlife and some of the most scenic country our nation has to offer. It was fantastic to see Yellowstone again after almost 6 years-the pines have had almost 20 years to recover from the fire and their success was a fantastic backdrop in succession and disturbance recovery to my reading for the trip (Edible Forest Gardening, by David Jacke). The pines seemed small for 20 years old, until my research turned up that Lodgepole Pines take at least 100 years to reach "commercial" diameter. Why in god's name do we log in the Rockies again? The trees that were spared are beautiful-majestic and exuding history and wisdom with every needle.

We didn't hike much and didn't camp at all, this was a car trip, but the payoff in wildlife was amazing. We saw so many pronghorn that I am embarrassed to say they became almost ho-hum-literally 500-1000 in 4 days. Bison in abundance-including 100 calves. We even saw a "parade" of 60 bison ambling down the road as we headed out the west entrance. That was an amazing 30 minutes as we stopped to watch them march past within arms reach. We saw at least 20 moose and a myriad of elk, mule and whitetail deer and even several big horn sheep. Though it was a cub, I did see my first grizzly and we either saw the biggest coyote ever or a small wolf (60-70lbs). Regardless, we did hear a wolf howl the morning after the canine sighting during our stay in Flagg Ranch Wyoming which was as hauntingly beautiful as I had dreamed it would be. Some of the mistakes made by the Dept of Interior in their Forest Management were erased in the moment. Pictures will be available on Mia's Blog shortly I am sure (she took over 3000... editing will take awhile!)

But now we have returned, the lawn was literally over a foot tall and I quick harvested 2 lbs of radishes before dark before they split. My hastily transplanted peppers, lettuce, tomatoes, mache, and melons all survived. The prairie is 2-3' tall and the potato plants are a foot above their holes and the strawberry crop looks to be incredible. With 48 transplants awaiting on the porch from Seed Savers to cover my losses from the windstorm that killed 2 flats and also to bulk up for my restaurant sales, 3 weeks of weeding to catch up on, and a shoebox of seeds to get in 2 weeks late I have a busy day ahead of me!

Finished vol 1 of Edible Forest Gardening and will be placing my tree orders for the "canopy" layer of my guilds this week. Paw-Paw, Alder, Locust, Pear, Persimmon, Plums will all be in attendance with an understory of shrubs and edible forbs and herbs with a thick groundcover of edibles to round things off. Vines will be trained along the fences (Fox Grapes and Hardy Kiwi)- there is an immense amount of work in the next 2 weeks, but Someday Gardens has cashflow and this is what it was designed to do-fund my horticultural experiments.

Finally, I will begin inoculating my wood chip mulches with edible mushroom spawn. I know very little about this right now but resources like ATTRA and Fungi.com are allowing me to fill the gap very quickly. My biggest initial take away from Edible Forest Gardening was the wealth of knowledge of the soil ecosystem and its critical importance to garden success. Basically if you ain't got fungus you ain't got a healthy garden. A healthy soil will be fine, but a farm field that has been brought to its knees by chemical sprays, or my subsoil backfill subdivision will need some intervention to catch up.
Time to inoculate!

-Beo

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Druids are cool.

Why are Druids cool? They value study, reflection, and wisdom while also being champions of balance.

Check out an example of this lucidity here on the Archdruid Report in a recent write up of our current energy insanity and compare it to our current debates at the Federal level.

-Beo

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Permaculture Guilds: A Primer

Permaculture is a world created by merging the words "permanent" and "agriculture" or more correctly "culture". Looking around, it is very hard to find a more permanent (i.e. sustainable) form of agriculture than, well, Nature; no one has to fertilize a Forest! And that realization is the crux of Permaculture in a nutshell: mimicking Nature's vast experience in sustainability to make our own crude agriculture more sustainable in turn. In other words we are using Gaia as a mentor, rather than a nemesis. I have not actually attended a Permaculture Design Course, so I am not an official teacher, but I have read most of the major texts and they have literally changed my outlook on everything from our household's waste stream to my perennial beds and choice of pets.

Guilding is perhaps the coolest detail level aspect of Permaculture theory. In Nature plants are grouped in small, reoccurring but loosely defined communities that are often referred to as guilds.

A full guild will have seven layers-each specifically designed to use one aspect of both the sun and root strata. On top will be the Large Trees, followed by the low trees, shrubs, herbs, vines, groundcovers, and finally "root" plants. But Gaia is subtle, and the coordination goes far deeper than resource use. Each participant in the guild brings a wealth of diversity to the table. The tall tree may house small animals that distribute seeds for them, and the shrub layer may provide feed for birds that use the low trees for nesting habitat and feed on insects that prey on the large trees. Plants in the herb layer may fix nitrogen for all to use, and the "root" plants may seek out pockets of nutrients in the soil that are made available to others in the guild as their foliage decomposes. Some plants will attract pollinators, others predatory insects. Some will act as mulch plants by creating excess biomass that regenerates the soil, while their neighbors may act as fortress plants protecting the entire guild from the encroachment of outside species. The inter-connectivity is how nature works-nice tidy systems that sufficiently supply the community with all of its needs given water and sunlight and a proper climate.

Permaculture takes this knowledge of resource management and biodiversity and attempts to modify nature into agriculture, which is really nothing more than an ecosystem modified by humans for their own ends. Unfortunately we have chosen to do this in a way that favors the monoculture. True Iowa GMA corn can net 240+ bushels of corn/acre, and is the most productive way known to eck corn from that acre (consequences be damned!), but Gaia can produce far more biomass on her own from that same acre without any inputs at all. The trick is to find a way to merge Gaia's productivity and self sufficiency with plants that produce usable products from humans. "Guilding" a garden is that attempt.

For suburban use, the guilded Food Forest often forgoes the Tall Tree layer. One apex tree of this size would overly dominate a typical lot, but if you are planting a large deciduous tree to shade your home consider a useful tree such as a Standard Pear (fruit), Sugar Maple (syrup), Chestnut (protein!), or Black Locust (nitrogen fixer!). The Low Tree layer is where I focus most of my guilds. All semi dwarf rootstock fruit trees fit nicely and are uber productive on a suburban scale. Things to consider are whether you need a pollinator tree and also the ability of that variety to survive organically in your local-pears, paw-paw, and cherries are all good choices for the midwest with apples and plums good fits with careful pest management.

The fun really starts in the shrub, herb and root layers because of the amazing variety available. Each guild will need to provide for the needs of the group in as many ways as possible. Each needs 5 things: Nitrogen, Nutrients, Mulch, Pollination, Protection-both from competition and pests. When choosing your plants, in addition to a usable product for your family, each should provide a surplus of at least one service to the guild. Comfrey is a personal favorite of mine. The leaves are edible and medicinal, the roots are nutrient hounds, and they produce so much biomass that they can literally be hacked down to the ground 5 times a year. Nitrogen fixers are legion-including many edible varieties of annual beans and peas. Clovers are great n-fixers that also attract benifical insects and act as a mulch. My favorite shrub is the Goumi as it fixes nitrogen, has edible fruit and gives a good thicket habitat for insectary birds. Brambles and hazelnut shrubs are also great choices. Fortress plants can be as common as daylilies (also with edible tubers and buds!) or daffodils, as tasty as garlic, or if you really need to beat something back use an aggressive alleopath like our native Jerusalem Artichoke-but be ready to keep it under control! Luckily the best way to do this is by eating the delicious tubers!

A well designed guild will need little additional water due to less evaporation from the dense plantings and thick mulch, little to no fertilizer as it produces its own, and little to no pest control as the plants will attract their own predators. Sound to good to be true? Take a stroll through an established prairie or savanna and then ask the forester about his fertilizer or water bill...

My guild plans tend to rely on the fruit tree to supply most of the food, with the herb and shrub layers mostly supporting the tree's needs while also granting some side benefits like edible fruits, landscape beauty, and wildlife habitat. Look for many updates, including plant lists, on my guilds as the season progresses!

If this post whet your appetite, the most accessible book on temperate permaculture is Toby Hemenway's Gaia's Garden and I highly recommend it!

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Sheet Mulch: Spring Edition

Not sure if you noticed yet, but we have a propensity to add perennial beds at a pace that is almost concerning. Last year that meant I spent alot of time, effort, and profanity cutting and hauling sod. The kicker with removing all that sod is not only the effort expended, but also the fact that it includes about 50% of my topsoil. That I paid for. True I am composting the sod, but it seemed wasteful-and in terms of time and energy it certainly was.

So if you have followed some of my earlier posts about this years plans, we intend to get into orcharding. Not huge, but 4-8 trees. Alot of this is in pursuit of my goal of growing 1 ton of food on our suburban lot in Zone 5, another goal is to finally plant some real permaculture guilds from the ground up. The picture at left is my first real foray down those paths.

The first picture is my laying out of about 15 cardboard slip sheets that I got from our local organic feed store (yes, we have an organic feed store-have I mentioned I love WI?). The slips protect bags of grain from damage and typically are recycled, but they are also the perfect size for sheet mulching. Any local business that deals in palletized freight should have plenty for you-just make sure they weren't shipping pallets of Diazinon...

I also collect about 20 gallons of organic waste from a local coffee shop each week. That raw material has been building up all winter in a compost bin-to the tune of almost 2 cu yards. I opened up that bin and trucked it to the front yard to spread it about 8" thick across the cardboard-I know it was damp because 2/3 of the pile was still frozen!

Once that was rough leveled with a rake, I top dressed it with a 3-4" layer of chips from our local village yard as seen in the final picture. By mid May when I want to get my trees and guilds in, the raw organic material will be 75% composted and teeming with microbial life with all its goodness. So instead of removing 50% of the topsoil I built it 6" deeper!

Here is the best part-doing this the traditional way would have taken at least a weekend of toil. Instead this took less than 2 hours-and that includes going to get the chips from the village lot. The benefits of letting Gaia do the work for you are legion: better soil, less effort, and more time to devote to other tasks. Plus the chance to lay out fetid masses of "garbage" in your front lawn and then take pictures of it while my neighbor's watched was priceless!

Want to sheet mulch yourself? It is crazy easy:

• Sprinkle a high nitrogen fertilizer over the area to be converted to garden to jump start the process. Raw manure is great, I used pelletized chicken manure due to lack of livestock. Seeds in this layer are fine. Sprinkle lightly with water if needed to get it moist.
• Lay out your weed barrier, ensuring at least 6" overlap at the seems so the sod doesn't try to creep through. I prefer cardboard as it doesn't blow away as easily and is readily availible, but 3+ layers of newspaper work well too. Even jeans or natural carpet would work! Keep this layer damp.
• Cover this with compost materials at least 4" thick, but 8" is better. Remember that this will be you soil material and it will break down to 50% of its original volume. Anything that would go into your pile is fine, but avoid noxious invasive weed material like Quack Grass rhizomes. Ensure entire layer is moist.
• Top dress with at least 4" of weed free mulch. Wood chips, marsh or spoiled hay, straw, etc are all fine. This is the layer that keeps the weeds seeds below from ever germinating and can be as aesthetic as you need.

That's it! You can sheet mulch around existing plants by cutting holes in the weed barrier, or pull the mulch back when you want to add plants. remember to give air space between the mulch and the stems to avoid vole and fungal damage.

Congrats! You have just created a haven for microbial life, built literally tons of life sustaining humus and you proved to the world that you don't need a rototiller to make a garden!

Be the Change!

Stumble It!

Plant Propagation Update

So a month ago we were in a sobering warm spell that had me restless. The incredibly warm temperatures were adding alot of energy to my need to get our gardens more self sufficient. I know (hope?) that Global Warming will have a lesser effect here (though we are already warming in a Big Way-the Arbor Day Foundation just moved Zone 5 100 miles north in WI from just 15 years ago) than in coastal regions or the western Mid-West (which should become much drier), but I still felt the need to do something. With the weather warm, I chose to go out and take root cuttings from one of my 3 Comfrey plants.

I took those cuttings and packed 2-3 into good seed starting mix and some nice decorative pots that we had left over from some indoor plants I had killed last year (my green thumb turns brown indoors). I kept them moist, but time marched on. And on. And then three weeks went by. I moved one to the front window hoping that perhaps the sun would help warm the soil over the 65 degrees we keep the house at during the day. Then a month had passed with no growth. I consoled myself that the roots were probably sinking feeder roots, or that perhaps taking cuttings on Dec 30th wasn't exactly a recipe for success.

Then about 4 days ago a miracle happened. Comfrey leaves poked through the mix on the window pot, and yesterday the other 4 pots had shoots emerging as well. Success! I now have at least 6 new plants, and am expecting another 4 within the week. Enough to provide Grow Your Own Mulch for the 4 fruit tree guilds planned for this spring.

If these work out I will provide them via my Someday Gardens site hopefully by June since not even Forest Farm and their 500 page catalogue offers them. Readers that are interested just shoot an email under Someday Gardens "contact us" link and I will hook you up cheap-barter or plant exchanges encouraged!

Stumble It!