I’m getting ready to head off tomorrow to the NE Permie Convergence in Holyoke, MA. Got a call today from a man in Springwater looking for a ride share, so I’ll have some company and meet someone new. Also got an e-mail from Brian saying he was going to head down from his internship in Ashfield, MA. I posted a link in the Permaculture section to the NE Permaculture Wiki which looks to have a fair bit of useful information and established community. I talked on the phone to one of my cohorts from the Hancock PDC this spring, and I’m jonesing for some Permie get-together.

My plan is to live-blog or pseudo-live-blog the event. I’m bringing my iPod and mic, so I may try to get a podcast going. I’m also bringing the camera, though video is out for this time. I want to start lo-tech. I also want to be present to what’s going on there, unseparated by a camera, so I may do most of the work at night in the motel.

Meanwhile, I wanted to give an update on what’s going on here at home. Monday night a friend gave me some sorrel, bronze fennel, lupine and a baby horse chestnut, and I picked up some asparagus by the side of the road and got that all transplanted. In my walks I’m seeing a lot of sumac which I’ve pretty much considered a weed, but which appears to be a fast-growing nurse plant for berries, grapes, roses, nightshades, strawberries. So I’ve transplanted a couple to an area between the spruce and red maple that faces the main street, to start to build some privacy and nurse a shrub area- honeysuckle, dicentra, cherry, blueberry I’m thinking- that will also attract birds. We found a small infestation of Japanese Beetles on the northwest side of the house in the dicentra there. Apparently, knocking them into soapy water seems the best way to get rid of small batches. They don’t appear to have any natural predators, although some web sites state that grackles, starlings and chickens will eat them. I don’t really want to get into nematodes and bT.

The hierloom tomatoes I got a couple of weeks ago have been pretty thoroughly trashed by the deer. They must be tasty because they’ve left the romas alone. I got rhubarb chard and some of the onions in the other day, and I’m going to put the tomatillos in where the munged tomatoes were. Everything seems to be growing rather slowly, which I’m trying to figure out. The lettuces are looking good, we’ve been eating a lot of salad, and I’m getting some peas now that the weather has turned cooler and wetter. The Liberty apple closest to the walnut does not look too good, but the Cortlund is doing nicely. I need to put some intervening leguminous tree and a mulberry between the walnut and the liberty to mitigate the juglone effect.

I started a water feature over the weekend to start moving water from the downspout near the herb bed over to the high point of the property where the pond will eventually go. I want a little rock-faced stream bed that will look nice whether there’s water flowing or not. I’m looking for some roofing slates to build up this water feature to flow the water from the downspout to the streambed. This all sounds romantic, but right now it’s some wet concrete slab and dug up dirt. I will post pictures when I get it working. As the Permies say: “happy little accidents and sad little failures.”

This afternoon I helped these young people:

build this herb spiral:

in less than an hour.

They totally made my day and made me feel like I’d done something worthwhile and fun for the day. I was able to forget about the idiocy of work for a bit. I was able to explain about the different micro-climates we were making, from dry at the top to moist at the bottom, hot and light on the southwest and top sides and darker and cooler on the north and east edges, how the bricks and soil form a more stable structure- they totally got it and hopefully now they can do their own spirals and teach others.

After some hemming and hawing, I’ve decided to attend the Northeast Permaculture Convergence in Holyoke, MA over the July 4th weekend. I’ll bring my laptop so I’ll try to blog from the motel in the evenings.

Coincidentally, I just checked out Eric Toensmeier’s Perennial Vegetables from the local library. It turns out the NEPC is being held at Tierra de Oportunidad farm in Holyoke, which is Eric’s home site. So I’m going to make a point of meeting him and hopefully buy the book and Edible Forest Gardening, vols. I and II, which appear to be “must haves” for the serious permaculturalist.

I also need to make sure I bring my camera. One thing I’ve noticed is that there is a dearth of good photographs of permaculture gardens. People close to me want to know what the finished product is going to look like, and I’ve had a hard time finding good pictures of existing sites.

R. claimed to have gone last year and said it was great. I didn’t truly believe him until I was looking at the pics from 2007 and found him lurking in the background:

If you see this man at NEPC 2008, ask him to show you his wallet!

I fall asleep to the serenade of the chorus of neighborhood toads. I awake to the pleasant song of the wood thrush and the red-bellied woodpecker call. There is deer scat in my yard. This little wooded oasis of ours is in the median between the city and a shopping plaza chain store wasteland, yet you’d never know.

Its inarguably beautiful. The problem with all this is that the area isn’t conducive to food production, at least in the conventional sense. We have trees, probably approaching 100 feet, surrounding our yard and that of our neighbors, not to even mention the half acre mature woodlot adjacent to us. This means lots of shade. It means birds and deer and other things that like to eat. Not to mention the clay soil. It means I have to get somewhat creative.

But such is the dilemma in our modern age. Hunting and gathering will not sustain nearly seven billion people and counting. And the majority of this population resides in urban settings. Learning to work with what you’ve got today is not only a cliche, it’s a survival strategy.

So, we have decided to have two main “gardens”, as well as some other strategic placement of random edible plants. One garden is a 2000 square foot fenced in area that most would recognize as a typical vegetable garden. But as we develop it, hopefully one can see where we attempt to apply ecological or otherwise organic methods of gardening to this seemingly conventional garden.

The second area will be an experiment in the permaculture principle of the edible forest. We are extending the woodlot next to us into our yard. Already we have planted three nut trees, a mulberry tree and several varieties of brambles that will compose part of the shrub layer. This is just the beginning however. In this area we will attempt to recreate a successional forest ecosystem, that which is natural to this area.

In the coming months, we have some sheet mulching and fencing to take care of, and more importantly, taking some time to get more intimate with our new yard.

But before that, the next project is the chicken coop and run. In fact, the basic prefab coop which we mail ordered and are planning to soup up a bit just arrived on our front porch earlier today.

Have you ever heard of a chicken moat? Stay tuned…

In the meantime, check out our Picassa Web Album . There’s not much yet, but it will soon be filled with more pictures of chickens than one could hope for.

I found a link to a couple of audio interviews out of Boulder, CO on Crops to Cuisine, that introduces a couple of Permaculture practitioners and their stories. I’ve included links down in the Permaculture category on the right-hand navigation bar. One of the things that jumps out from this, again, is how difficult it is to define Permaculture in a sound bite. I think it belies the question being asked. It’s like asking, “so what is economics exactly?” or “what’s the definition of literature?” As I’ve said before, even David Holmgren has a difficult time with this question.

Nevertheless, this question gets asked a lot. And I also think it is worth having a handy answer, not something comprehensive, but something that has a hook to it, something to keep the inquisitor interested so their eyes don’t glaze over. And then follow it up with something like “if you’d like to know more I have tons of information, give talks, do workshops and teach a design course.” So I’m going to work on this as a homework project over the next week or so.

In other news, I keep thinking about small things I can do each day. Today I was considering closing down my art studio and saving a chunk of change each month that I might put toward buying a house in town for a permaculture center. But then I went over there and it occurs to me that it would make a fine teaching facility, at least in the short term. The food might be a bit of a challenge but I’m now confident I could figure that out.

This weekend was the last installment of the Permaculture Design Course in Hancock. Five of the original ten graduated and I’ve become very fond of these people. We gave presentations of our design projects on Saturday, held the “talent show” after dinner and ended up Sunday talking about invisible structures like legal, money systems, cultural and social processes. Saturday we’d had a visit from a local organic farmer who, after 20 years of struggle, is now facing the Hobson’s choice of selling out to natural gas drilling interests (like Haliburton ferinstance) or continuing to work endlessly treading water in a system where the full weight of the economy falls on the family farmer. This tied in, in a very real, visceral way, with the discussion of these invisible structures.

What I come away with is the concept of Withdrawal. First, I’m feeling the end of this transition, and it was in many ways life-changing for me. After other such initiations there is the need always for an integration period. It leaves me feeling like I’m coming back to a culture that is in no way plugged into the things we were talking about all winter and spring. I feel depressed. Like I’m withdrawing.

There’s the obvious addiction connotation here, as is often tossed about with terms like “addiction to foreign oil.” Like, as if, it’s no big thing to overcome an addiction! Anyway, that’s a little how I feel- on a very small scale- and I anticipate there is more pain ahead as I start to really look at how I’m living. One of my next steps is to “take inventory” but then maybe there’s a real 12-Step progression to this recovery and I should start with powerlessness. The organic farmer is right there: despair.

Looking at the Haliburtons and Blackwaters and World Banks running around screwing everyone, it’s hard not to despair. But there’s another kernel of hope in the word Withdrawal. As in withdrawing from participation in, cooperation with, cooptation by, apologizing for, rationalizing for, and investing in this s***storm we’ve created. Backing away slowly. And with each tiny, seemingly inconsequential action taken (like pulling the paper coffee cup out of the garbage and taking it home to use as a transplant pot for a cauliflower) I will say, “I’m making a withdrawal.” Each withdrawal goes into another account that accumulates over time. One day, one action, one withdrawal at a time. They add up.

Good bread makes me happy, especially good rosemary bread, especially if I baked it myself. This is super-tasty with brie, BTW. This is loaf number 10, about, and I feel like I’m finally getting it (hat tip to Russ!). The [corrected] recipe for basic bread is here. The whole house smelled good after baking this, not burnt like after the first few hockey puck loaves.

I’m digging the ability to start stuff from seed. One of the things I’ve learned from Andrew is to transplant seedlings to a richer mix before going directly into the garden. So I broke down and bought some -gulp- MiracleGro potting mix! I’m mixing this one third to one third of this really chunky cheap potting mix, and one third ProMix. I feel like these are my babies. There are roma tomato, lemon and middle east cukes, fennel, broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, rhubarb and golden chard, sunflowers and purple bell peppers.

This morning I finished sheet mulching the central hex garden. The path, as you can see, forms a spiral with keyholes radiating out from it. This is very efficient in terms of garden to path ratio, and I also like the design aspect. I can reach any spot (basically) from a path so I never have to walk on the beds themselves. Eventually the paths will be laid in gray stone like that you can see in the foreground.

The apples I planted last summer are producing. This one is called Liberty. I didn’t expect fruit for a couple of years, so this is a very nice surprise. Apples, pears and tomatoes are some of the things that most improve, in my estimation, when I don’t get them at a store.

I haven’t had much luck with iris over the years, but this year seems to have been a good year all over for them. I can’t claim to have done anything to improve these, other than to leave them alone. Next spring I think it will be time to separate them into several clumps. These could go around the base of the pears or apples, or around the drip line, to help keep the grass down.

Finally, we bought a trellis arbor to anchor the back of the garden and provide a gateway to the more open side-back yard. The swale on either side is now planted to forsythia and perennial sunflowers, which I come to find out are nearly invasive in that they re-seed like crazy. I was back behind the Pittsford Village maintenance buildings last Friday and they’re all over back there. Ultimately I want to grow the hardy kiwi on this trellis, and maybe hibiscus. That’s variegated dogwood in the foreground.

My largest bed is almost completely sheet mulched now. This bed is a big hexagonal plot in the very middle of my back yard, maybe 25′ x 25′ roughly centered on one of the pear trees. The kitchen window looks directly out at this which means I am looking at it all the time (we have no automatic dish washer, so I spend a fair amount of time at the sink staring out…) In the initial weekend I got maybe half of this bed sheet mulched, but then ran out of the lovely 3-year old black, rotted horse manure. Since then, I’ve sourced another supply: the Rochester Mounted Police stables, about 50 yards from where I work. Each day they’ve been kind enough to put out a big yard bag full of fresh horse manure. The bag goes into the trunk of my Honda Civic and when I get home I spend 5 or 10 minutes carting it out to the back, pouring it onto the grass, raking it, covering it with cardboard and a layer of straw. That’s it- the worms and other microorganisms do the rest.

I’ve read that it is possible to plant directly into the sheet mulch by digging a little pocket in the hay, poking a hole in the cardboard weed barrier and filling the pocket with some soil, then planting into this soil pocket. So I’ve started doing that. So far I’ve got strawberries and melons and brocolli in and they seem to be doing fine. I’ve had to water once, and they seem to be holding moisture pretty well. I’ll continue to post about the results from this method.

I’m very curious to see what the different results will be for the area using the composted manure versus the “hot” manure. I’m planting into the former areas first, but I may try some experiments with the newer, fresh manure areas soon, just to see what happens. I’ve been told that fresh manure is too high in nitrogen and will “burn” plants if you put it directly on the soil. So I’d expect if the roots of pocketed plants got down to below the cardboard, that would be the end. It’s worth the experiment. By next year, I’d expect this to be well broken down and not a problem and high in nitrogen content.

I just finished my design project for the Permaculture Design Certificate program. It was awesome having Andrew Jones at the last session and his suggestions on using the Scale of Permanence as a guide for design was very, very helpful.

The scale goes like this, from biggest effect and most difficult to change down:

• Climate
• Landform
• Water
• Legal
• Access and Circulation
• Wildlife and Vegetation
• Microclimate
• Structures
• Zones of Use
• Soil
• Aesthetics

In permaculture, we start at the top of the list and work down. Changes at the top have the largest effect, but are most difficult and should be designed carefully. Stuff at the bottom is much easier to change. In our culture we generally do this backwards, starting with aesthetics and then trying to make everything else fit with that. Many times, permaculture seems to be the exact opposite approach to how things are done in the larger, unsustainable society. I’m thinking we should start calling the current paradigmTempculture in order to reframe it. Sometimes I think the hegemony of the current way as too ingrained to change, but viewed from a higher level it appears to be surrounded by history on both ends. At least it does now in the moment I am writing it.

There is a lot of gray area in the ordering of the Scale, for example buildings can be used to create microclimate. Generally speaking, though, each level defined and determined a number of issues at the lower levels. For example, legal considerations around access points to the property and how the site was zoned determined a huge amount of the design. By the time I got around to siting buildings, they almost situated themselves. This process makes design much simpler and more coherent in that it progressively eliminates choices at lower levels.

I found this applied to my own site after I laid out and dug the swales (landform, water) and paths (access and circulation), planting areas started to define themselves.

Here are some more details on swales. As I was working on them, I was struck by the sophistication of even the simplest of permaculture techniques.

Here’s a better diagram of how they work and how mine are constructed:

I had previously marked the paths out using a very simple contour-locating device I built ($5) from 2 x 2, a hinge, a cross piece of scrap wood, some fishing line and a weight. This forms a big “A” shape. Calibrate it by setting it up on a level surface and marking where the fishing wire and weight hangs crossing the cross piece. To use it, pick a starting point and then swing it around til the other leg hits the grass and the weight lines up, showing the legs to be level. Mark the new point with a stone and move on to the next point.
To actually dig the swales, first, I rented a rototiller ($39 for a half day) and loosened up the soil on the swale paths. Then I simply went along and dug with a shovel, flippiing the sod over onto the downslope side. After digging, I went along each swale and forked down and loosened a bit, just to put some depth for water to soak in.

Next I filled the swales with whatever drainage and organic matter I had handy. In this case, I had a bunch of gravel scraped onto my lawn from the next door neighbors winter plowing, so I put that in the base. Then I put in dead leaves which I had in profusion as I don’t rake them in the fall. Finally I put some ground bark mulch. This all went inside the swale.

I then scattered clover seed on both the ridge and the upslope side of the swale. The upslope side, being level, makes a nice path. Since the main path on the site runs downslope, across the swales, the swale paths are secondary cross paths. From these I run some keyhole garden paths upslope into the main garden beds defined by the swales and main path.

Finally, both the ridge and upslope side get a layer of straw mulch to keep them moist and deter weed and grass growth, while allowing the clover to sprout.

The fact that all of this works as an integrated whole where each part plays multiple roles was kind of impressive in a quiet sort of way. The clover helps seed the ridge, and will grow a good root system to keep it locked in place. It also adds nitrogen to the soil. The gravel and leaves were readily available and relatively easy to move. I would have had to scrape up the gravel anyway, so no big deal just putting it in the base of the swale. I mentioned that I use the upslope side for paths. I also noticed that laying the swales in broke up the garden space in a very interesting and useful way. The slope is now visible in the landscape, and it’s really obvious where the moisture is and isn’t in the ground, and where it flows. Little pockets and odd accute angles suggest places for anchor plants and shrubs. The garden starts to design itself.