Farmer Scrub's blog

Our house for sale: Permaculture designed urban homestead

2012-02-02T22:37:00.000-08:00

4510 NE GOING ST
One-of-a-Kind Permaculture Designed Urban Homestead

Country Feel In The City

$224,900
All offers considered

2 bedroom / 1 bath cottage (easy potential for 3rd bedroom) on 8750 sq. ft lot
House sits 80 ft off the street providing privacy & 4,000 sq. ft garden in front yard
975 sq. ft Living Space with potential to live comfortably without fossil fuels
345 sq. ft new Sun Room– amazing room with 21 ft wall of windows floor to ceiling!
Shaded, rain-proof porch for year-round outdoor living
Garage with washing machine, Carport, Wood Shed, and Utility shed with electricity
Passive Solar Heating System (no fossil fuel or electricity to operate)
New concrete perimeter foundation & earthquake ties
Well insulated walls, ceiling, & floor joists
Double-pane vinyl windows allow lots of natural light
Natural gas furnace and range
New custom metal roof
Chicken coop with laying hens, beehive for bees
600 sq. ft of under-house storage space, including root cellar area
1,000 sq. ft of edible Ecoroof garden
6,850 sq. ft low maintenance, organic, permaculture designed Food Forest providing a family with year-round fruit, berries, nuts, eggs, and honey.
A wonderful loose-knit co-housing community that shares tools, potlucks, and neighborly help
Super quiet, low car traffic street
3 blocks to bus line #75, 9 blocks to #72
Walk to New Seasons and Alberta Arts District
Property taxes for 2010: $1582

4510 NE Going Street, Portland OR 97218

Contact Tulsey @ 503-288-5331 or norristh@gmail.com

see our Website http://farmerscrub.blogspot.com

Download PDF flyer

Photos

House pictures of our finished house project.
Garden pictures - general pictures of pretty plants
Chickens - Pictures of our feathered helpers
Harvests - A few photos of harvests, mostly roots
Full Yard Views - Roof-top photos showing the changes over the years, from 2006 til present

Income from tours & classes

2012-01-30T10:50:00.000-08:00

A friend and potential tribe-mate sent me a video of an Australian permaculture farm which makes most of its cash income from teaching classes and from tours. My friend wrote:

I know you aren't big on making $ but perhaps once you have a working system in hawaii (or even here) you can have tours which both teach people, inspire people, and maybe make a few dollars per visitor while also inspiring you to keep learning ?

My reply is meant not as criticism of what others do for income, but as an expression of my own approach:

I enjoy giving tours and teaching classes, and have hosted dozens here over the years. I don't like organizing them, and have left much of that up to Tulsey or to other folks who bring their class or a permaculture meetup group or whatever.

I really really dislike the notion of charging for tours. Partly because I dislike engaging in the cash economy in any way, but I have extra resistance to charging for information & knowledge, insubstantial and more or less infinitely reproducable goods. (I recognize that it takes time for someone to reproduce that by writing it down or speaking and presenting it, but I don't think of time as a commodity either.) I feel reasonably happy with my current model of giving information away to anyone who will listen, and having products like plants and books for sale at bargain prices for those who want to spend some money. I *hate* the idea of excluding people based on ability to pay, and I don't feel comfortable with "sliding scale" options because I almost always stay away from such classes myself.

I'm very concerned about the trend for middle class white people to be buying their way into peak oil / climate change preparation by stockpiling goods, buying land, and buying classes & information. Giving away my knowledge is the least I can do to help counter that.

All that said, yeah, if we're hard up for income in Hawaii, I would entertain tours and teaching as part of our income model. But I'd rather not go into the project planning for that.

House heat update & unintended consequences

2012-01-29T18:52:00.000-08:00

Fuel Used To Date

With the whole house almost completely insulated, we've burned about 38 cubic feet of firewood this winter, a bit less than 1/3 cord. (One cord of wood is a pile 4' x 8' x 8', or 128 cubic feet.) We've been keeping the sunspace between about 50-62F, with the north part of the house generally a few degrees cooler during the day, but dropping to the same temps overnight. We've made a fire every 2 or 3 days on average. We made at least 1/3 of those fires for guests or for house showings, not because we needed the heat for ourselves. We're probably on track to use a total of 4/10 a cord of wood. We scavenge all our wood for free, but market rate is around $150/cord, so we'll use about $60 worth of wood for heating.

We still have extra heat input from showers (about 3 per week) and from cooking on our gas stove (8 therms=800,000 btus since Oct. 18, or the equivalent of 1/25 cord of wood.) This winter has seemed unusually sunny, so our passive solar heat gain has been higher than in a normal winter.

Future Steps

I'm fairly pleased with our relatively low energy consumption this winter, but we're still far short of our original goal of heating the house entirely from on-site resources. Some pieces we're still missing:

Insulation for all house windows, especially sunspace windows, for better overnight heat retention
Finish insulating attic
Rocket stove instead of normal wood stove, for much greater efficiency in cooking and heating
Install our 5 solar hot water panels and run the hot water through the radiant floor tubing
Full growth of trees and shrubs for fuel from pruning & coppicing

Unintended Consequences

In past years, we used our daily fires through the winter to cook our jerusalem artichokes (aka sunchokes), converting the inulin to digestible sugars after 6-8 hours of pressure cooking. That worked well when we made fires daily. Now, with fires only every 2nd or 3rd day, it takes almost a week to cook the 3 pounds of sunchokes which our pressure cooker can hold. Last winter I ate twice that much per week. We could partially solve this problem with an additional and/or larger pressure cooker.

Same problem with processing acorns using our preferred hot leaching method. However, since we don't rely on a pressure cooker, we can "scale up" by using multiple pots of large size to leach the acorns, rather than relying on daily fires.

Similarly, without frequent fires, we're having a much harder time drying nuts, herbs, processed acorn meal, seeds, laundry, wet winter clothes, etc. Now I wish we hadn't sold our solar dehydrator last fall; we could have used it on our sunny winter days when we weren't making fires. If we were staying here longer, we'd probably set up the front porch or carport for initial drying of clothes, moving them inside for final drying as needed. Better yet would be a space protected from rain but exposed to the sun, such as my recent idea of an enclosed greenhouse to the south of our sunspace.

House Layout, Features, & Future Projects

2012-01-27T21:47:00.000-08:00

Design Goals

Before embarking on our house project, we designed the final layout of rooms with a few criteria in mind:

Active living space at the south end of the house, to utilize the light & warmth from the sun.
Heat the entire house via passive solar with back-up wood stove.
Bedrooms at the north end of the house where the reduced light and cooler temperatures don't matter as much.
Natural daylighting in all rooms.
Add significant storage area for food, preferably unheated space (canned goods, fresh produce, roots, etc)
Integrate airlocks/mudrooms to reduce heat loss in winter and heat gain in summer, as well as contain dirt & wet clothes.

Goal Implementation

We built the sunspace at the south end of the house as one large room, suitable for a wide variety of active living uses - living room, dining room, party room, play room, study/office, etc. We "planted" our bath tubs to the south of the sunspace for extra heat & light gain in the winter. We planted a black walnut to the SW of the house, and built a grape trellis south of the sunspace for seasonal shade.

We installed an EPA certified wood stove facing the kitchen for radiant heat gain and comfort from the cheery glow. It heats the sunspace quickly. The sunspace sits 2' below the rest of the house, creating a natural convective loop of heat rising from the sunspace into the rest of the house, for fairly rapid heat distribution.

We added east windows looking onto the ecoroofs, to allow morning light into the NE bedroom, the pantry, and the sunspace. We added a wavy glass privacy window between the bathroom and the sunspace, since the bathroom had no natural light. The sunspace allows a lot of light into the kitchen and the SW bedroom (which also has a west window.)

We created a pantry with a 2' path down the middle and shelves lining the walls for efficient storage of lots of goods.

We didn't build the airlocks, but we left room to add them if desired: one in the sunspace around the back door, and one on the current front porch, enclosing the upper portion of the deck.

Other Features

The front porch makes a wonderful hang-out area in the summer, opening to the front garden to the north. Walls block the sun to the east, west, and south, and the ecoroof limits heat gain from above.

We made it easy to add a third bedroom (or office space) by constructing a single partition wall to turn the northwest portion of the house into a large closed off room.

We installed a sliding glass door between the sunspace and the kitchen, and of course the southwest bedroom has a closing door, so it's easy to isolate the sunspace for cozy temperatures in the winter without needing to heat the entire house.

We built nice big stairs from the kitchen to the sunspace, very inviting for people to sit and gather on.

When we lifted the original house and put a perimeter foundation under it, we wound up with three holes in the foundation wall so the I-beams could lower the house onto the wall. We discovered that in the summer, opening those holes creates a natural air conditioner as cool air from the crawl space flows into the sunspace.

Future Projects

If we were staying in this house, we would:

Add insulating curtains to the sunspace window wall. (And figure out insulation for the other windows in the house.)

Replace the wood stove with a rocket stove, for dramatic efficiency improvements in heating and cooking.

Remove the natural gas forced air furnace and associated ductwork in the attic, since we never use it and it wastes a lot of space (usable room space in the southwest bedroom, and insulation space in the attic).

Install the five hot water solar panels we bought, using them to heat domestic water and to run the excess heat through the radiant tubing under the original house.

Build a greenhouse on the south side of the sunspace, enclosing the bath tubs with the grapes growing on top. Move the chickens to sleep in the greenhouse.

Plant more plants on the west wall or west side of the house to create more summer shade while utilizing that growing space (without interfering with its current use as hang-out party space.) Perhaps plant akebia or scarlet runner beans against the house, and/or trees further out trained to high-branching trunks for easy human passage underneath.

Build a cold cupboard to tap into the cool crawlspace air and pull it up through a small pantry area to keep perishable foods a little cooler in the summer.

Site Plan

Here's the house in relation to the property boundaries, showing setbacks for addition of an Accessory Dwelling Unit:

Neat seeds from Adaptive Seeds

2012-01-25T19:31:00.000-08:00

Since we're trying to sell our house and move to Hawaii any month now, I'm not planning new experimental plantings. But that doesn't stop me from dreaming, and I might as well share that here.

I just received the 2012 seed catalog from Adaptive Seeds. They have a few interesting perennials and Pacific Northwest (PNW) adapted calorie crops:

"Western Front" perennial kale - newly available after last year's unavailability. I bought seeds of this in 2010, but didn't get very many plants well established. Chickens ate the best plants and none wound up overwintering successfully. So I can't vouch for their perennial nature, but they seem to have potential.
Withner's White Cornfield Pole Snap Bean - according to Carol Deppe (author of Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties and The Resilient Gardener), this variety is the best for the PNW and for growing in the cornfield (or in partly shady conditions).
Corn varieties recommended by Carol Deppe for the PNW: Abenaki & Mandan Parching Lavender.
Amaranth seed varieties: Copperhead (A. cruentus) and Rodale Red Leaf Grain. I still have hopes of getting seed amaranths growing in the yard as self-seeding "grains."
Japanese buckwheat - supposed to have larger seeds than the usual cover crop varieties. They say they've planted as late as mid-July and still harvested a crop; maybe this could work as a follow-up to garlic or favas?
Elka White Poppy - large seed pods stay sealed instead of scattering their seed. I've always liked the idea of poppies as a staple seed source, with their ability to grow a bit over the winter, but have had no success growing them.
Millwright Perennial Rye - bred by Tim Peters.
Douglas Triticale - from Tim Peters, shows some perennial regrowth when plants are spaced out well. May not work well with our system of dense plant growth everywhere.
Silene inflata - perennial herb with winter-available greens.
Oregon Homestead Sweet Meat squash - selected by Carol Deppe for the PNW.

Seed sources

2011-12-23T14:12:00.000-08:00

Quick post to share how I've searched in the past for temperate climate seeds of the unusual perennial vegetables & food forest plants. I haven't done much with these for more than a year, but in the past I mainly used two plant search engines:

Dave's Garden Plant Scout (returns more live plant sources)

Plant Information Online from the University of Minnesota (returns more seed sources)

A few years ago when I was most actively seeking seeds, I made a list of everything I wanted, and wrote some scripts to automatically search for each plant at the Dave's Garden Plant Scout site, then parse the results and put them into a spreadsheet for me. Then I went through the spreadsheet manually to order most of my desired seeds from about a dozen companies. You can download the resulting spreadsheet to see what seed companies were useful to me in the past.

My personal vision statement

2011-12-10T19:30:00.000-08:00

After a year and a half of not getting around to it, I finally sat down and wrote up my own vision for tribe. Tulsey read it over and agrees with it. We've been meeting with a few other people with various degrees of commitment to joining us for a trial period, and have talked a little about each other's goals and values and priorities and visions, but we haven't formally developed a group vision statement. So for now this remains my (and perhaps Tulsey's) vision statement:

"We live and propagate fun, egalitarian, autonomous, sustainable lives
based on mutual relationships with humans and non-humans. We actively
disconnect and heal from civilization and its technologies, meeting
our needs directly from our landbase while giving back more than we
take. We support our members for life."

Or in limerick form as:

A tight knit new tribe came to Puna
to live out their lives so in tune that
they'd never need cars or
to visit the bars so
they said to civ "Hey there fuck you, yeah!"

Press & videos including or about us

2011-12-06T11:26:00.000-08:00

I plan to maintain this post with a permalink from the blog's sidebar. If I/we appear in future videos, articles, etc, I'll add them to this post and make a temporary one-off post to let people know about the new addition.

Podcast (1 hour 11 minutes) with Paul Wheaton interviewing me. We discussed our transformation of the lot into a food forest, our house sale, chicken paddocks, sunchokes, and our reality check with hopes vs actual yields on our urban homestead. Recorded in October 2011.

Paul Wheaton Jerusalem artichoke video (11 1/2 minutes) including some footage of me and Tulsey starting at 1:30. Shot in July 2010 and October 2011.

Paul Wheaton Slug moat video (4 minutes) showing our slug moat with Tulsey & me describing it a bit. Shot in August 2011.

Paul Wheaton Currant sawfly video (less than 2 minutes) of me describing how I trained our chickens to eat currant sawfly caterpillars. Shot in July 2010.

Perennial Vegetables article from Portland Tribune, July 9 2009.

Ecoroof Grant Report: Addendum

2011-12-03T18:55:00.000-08:00

See Ecoroof Grant Report for the main write-up. This is an addendum to that post.

During a site visit from Portland BES staff to see the ecoroofs, Tom Lipton suggested two changes to our ecoroofs:

Mulching exposed pond liner

On the garage and carport roofs, we had left about half the pond liner exposed. (See original report for details.) That makes the liner vulnerable to degradation by sunlight, making it last only 20 years instead of the 40+ years expected from a liner covered by soil media. Tom has been experimenting with douglas fir needles as a thin mulch on a light-weight ecoroof of his own, and has been having good success, so he suggested that we apply something similar.

In some areas we moved soil media over the exposed liner in a very thin layer. In the rest, we applied a thin layer of pine needles or bamboo twigs with leaves. Both materials should decompose slowly, providing an effective sun blocking mulch, without holding water and thus adding excess weight to the roof. They will likely require periodic reapplication as they decompose, though perhaps some of the hardy sedums will eventually colonize the areas and act as permanent cover over the thin layer of organic matter.

Expanding sunspace roof drainage channel

We have ~290 ft² of metal roof from the rest of the house draining into the sunspace roof. I created two small channels using 4” diameter drainpipes. Tom mentioned potential problems he'd seen in similar situations in winters when we get alternating freezing and thawing weather, creating ice dams around the drain. He suggested enlarging one of the drain areas to minimize that risk. I removed the drainpipe from the western channel and dug out the soil media to leave just a thin layer for pond liner protection.

Self-sufficient tropical diet, rough draft

2011-12-03T18:23:00.000-08:00

My original Self sufficient diet post didn't use an awkward enough title, so I've added "tropical" to this attempt. This also has something to do with moving to Hawaii instead of northern California, I suppose. Silliness aside, I present my latest rough sketch based partly on my temperate climate draft and on my observations since then of how much we actually eat of what; and mostly on the plantings suggested by Scott at Evening Rain Farm for a family on two acres in the lowland tropics. I've guessed at space requirements, loosely based on numbers from Scott, from Jeavons' biointensive book, and from random sources online. Mostly by accident, this version has goat milk replacing 80% of the meat included in the temperate version. (I've grown enamored with the idea of goat walking through the jungle, getting a majority of calories from their milk supplemented by hunting & foraging.)

In the table below, "Cals/day" and "Oz/day" give the number of calories and the number of ounces one person would consume on average each day. "% of diet" gives the daily caloric consumption as a percentage based on 2400 total calories per day. "Qty req" gives the total number of trees, poultry, etc required to feed 10 people 2400 calories each. "Land" gives a rough estimate of how much space would be needed to provide 10 people an annual yield sufficient for 2400 calories/day using this category as a monocrop (not integrated with other foods).

Food type	Cals/day	% of diet	Oz/day	Qty req.	Land	Notes
Goat milk	400	16.5%	9	4 full-time does + babies	Integrated into zones 2&3, and walked through 4&5	2 1/2 cups milk/person/day
Goat meat	35	1.5%	1	4? babies per year yielding 260 lbs hanging weight?	Integrated into zones 2&3, and walked through 4&5	Very unsure of realities of how much goat meat we'll get as a byproduct of keeping does for milk
Eggs	250	10.5%	6	50 hens + 4-8 cocks	Integrated into zones 1&2	3 eggs/person/day. Mostly chickens, some ducks
Poultry meat	40	1.5%	1	Culling 50 hens & cocks per year	Integrated into zones 1&2	Based on hatching 50 new eggs each year to replace the 25 oldest layers and then culling 25 young cockerels. We could hatch out more eggs specifically for meat
Fruit & berries	250	10.5%	~16	11-25 trees	10,000 ft²	Assume 20' to 30' spacing on grid. Assume 1/3 lb/ft²
Avocado	275	11.5%	8	12 trees	11,000 ft²	Assuming 21 lbs/100 ft² and 30' grid spacing
Coconut	300	12.5%	5	~46 trees, tall & dwarf	20,000 ft²	Uncertain of #s. Assuming 30 lbs per plant, on 21' spacing in square grids
Bananas	165	7%	9	50 plants	7,200 ft²	Assume 12' spacing on grid, and 40 lbs/100 ft²
Nuts	300	12.5%	2	15-30 trees	11,000 ft²	Spacing from 20' to 30' affects # of trees
Starchy crops	300	12.5%	16		7,000 ft²	Assume yield of 1/2 lb/ft². Start with taro, sweet potato, cassava, yam, squash; phase out once tree crops of breadfruit, malabar chestnut, etc start bearing
Greens	40	1.5%	4		1,000 ft²	Assume yield of 1 lb/ft², between beds and foraging greens from other parts of the system.
Honey	45	1.5%	.5	2 hives?	10 ft²	Assume 60 lbs/honey/hive/year
Grand total	2400	100%	4.85 lbs		67,200 ft²

So the total land required to feed 10 people is about 1.5 acres for the plant portion of the diet in zones 1 and 2 (and maybe 3). I'm making some big assumptions here about being able to fit the chickens into zones 1 and 2 with no additional space required, and bigger assumptions about keeping goats in zones 2 & 3 with goat walking in zones 4 & 5.

I would expect to fence the chickens and goats out of about 8000 ft² of zone 1 for the greens, berries, and starchy roots.

Book review: The Small-Scale Poultry Flock by Harvey Ussery

2011-12-03T15:24:00.000-08:00

I've known of Harvey Ussery and his pioneering homestead flock techniques for years, since he started posting on the RunningOnEmpty2 peak oil listserve. Now he's written the book I wish I'd had when we started keeping chickens 6 years ago: a thorough guide with breadth and depth to all aspects of integrating poultry into a homestead food system, based on decades of experience working out details of permacultural, whole-systems approaches. Most importantly, he's spent at least the past 6 years experimenting with ways to adjust his methods to prepare for the changes peak oil, climate change, and economic disruptions will force on us all.

His book gives the usual basic information on keeping poultry: selecting species (from the range of waterfowl, geese, guineas, chickens, and some more exotic options); selecting breeds (if he could only keep one chicken breed with no further inputs of chicks and feed from outside he would keep Old English Games; if only one waterfowl he'd keep Muscovies); starting from day-old chicks; housing; watering; providing purchased feed; fencing (the hardest part for him to transition to non-industrial technology - he relies on electric fencing); protecting from predators; and killing & butchering. He includes detailed explanations for why he does things the way he does after years of working out his systems - very appealing to me with my brain that wants to understand why systems work the way they do, so that I can apply the principles to my own situation rather than just copying someone else's model.

The book really stands out from the other poultry guides I've read in its details on permacultural integration of chickens into the rest of the homestead: both for their inputs (feed produced on site) and for their outputs when putting them to work in mutually beneficial ways. His chickens process all his compost (some specifically as compost piles, some as part of their deep litter bedding system), turning it and breaking it down faster while finding much of their own food in the process. He details some excellent twists on the chicken tractor theme. He describes multiple interlocking strategies for providing feed including cover crops eaten by and tilled into new beds by his chickens; sprouting grains; making comfrey & nettle "hay"; and the infamous use of "recomposers" such as vermiculture worms, blow fly maggots and soldier fly larvae. (I've successfully used his bucket-based "maggot farm" in the past to convert roadkill, meat scraps, and wet cat food into delightfully squirmy chicken feed.)

Interestingly, because of his whole-systems approach to keeping his chickens fed a good diet with plenty of rotating grazing pasture and well ventilated, dry shelter, his chapter on chicken health might be considered "useless" in comparison to other books detailing how to treat this or that disease or parasite. He simply hasn't had to deal with more than a handful of problems raising thousands of individuals over almost 30 years, because he just keeps his birds healthy!

I learned the most from the chapters on breeding; I've never had to think about this since we can't keep a rooster in the city anyway. I had vague notions of letting our flock in Hawaii free-range and make babies as they saw fit, culling to select for future breeders. But this book opened my eyes to the fact that allowing free breeding in a small flock quickly results in loss of productivity in new generations from inbreeding depression. So despite my goal of having very minimal hands-on control over our Hawaii flock, I will probably adopt the "spiral mating" method and some active selection over who breeds with whom. I may post a separate discussion of this topic and my thoughts for Hawaii.

My biggest complaint about the book is that it doesn't do me much good now! (But that's not the book's fault.) Had I read it 6 years ago, I'd have had a much more realistic idea of how to integrate chickens into our site, and I'd have made better design and management decisions here. If I were staying at this site, or even moving elsewhere on the mainland (such as to northern California as originally planned) I could apply many of the book's lessons. But we're moving to Hawaii, with minimal predator pressure, mild climate meaning no need for formal shelter, ample acreage producing forage year-round, and a food system dominated by food forest with the chickens running freely everywhere beneath. So most of the techniques based on directing chicken activity through loose confinement won't apply to our situation.

I have only one other minor complaint: I noticed maybe 15-20 occurrences of Ussery repeating himself, giving the same information (even using the same phrasing) in multiple places. Sometimes this seems justified (warnings about something with potential significant danger to the health of the poultry), and in some sense I can understand it as part of the whole-systems approach - the book has to be divided into discrete chapters with specific focus, but much of the information falls under multiple categories and makes sense to present with each of them. But often it comes across as sloppy editing.

All in all, a must read book for anyone in the beginning stages of keeping poultry or not satisfied with their current systems and their resiliency as imported resources become tighter. And even those experienced flocksters with a well-developed, functional system can likely learn a trick or two!

House insulation & initial results

2011-11-16T16:23:00.000-08:00

As part of our house renovation over the last two and a half years, we've added huge amounts of insulation, getting the whole house to an average of about R-30. Here's a rundown of what we did.

Materials

Fiberglass - about R-3.5 per inch. Not the highest R-value, and kind of nasty to work with, but cheap. We got lots for free from craigslist, and lots for nominal cost from the Rebuilding Center, a local salvage/resale place. We used this in spots where we had ample room to stuff insulation and thus could use this cheaper product.
Loose-fill (cellulose and rock wool) - R3 to 3.5 per inch. Our attic had a thin (~2" on average) layer of cellulose, and we got a few more bags for free from craigslist.
Polyisocyanurate rigid foam board - R6.5 per inch. Expensive (even used, at about $10-$15 for a 2" x 4'x8' sheet), but highest possible R-value per inch. We used this where existing framing limited our available space for insulation: original house walls and the floor joists. Most of this had reflective foil faces on both sides.
XPS rigid foam board (pink and blue board) - R5 per inch. Somewhat pricey. We got some used, but bought most of it new. Resistant to water uptake, and with high compressive strength, so we used this under the concrete slab in the new sunspace. Also used it in some walls where we ran out of appropriately thick polyisocyanurate.
Reflective "bubble wrap", similar to the commercial "Reflectix." Petsmart receives their tropical fish in 2' x3' double-layered "envelopes" of this stuff; Tulsey arranged for us to pick up big stacks every 2 or 3 weeks, saving them from the dump. We used these as air and vapor barriers, and the bubble wrap probably adds about R-1, and they may have significant value in reducing radiant heat loss. (The last claim is somewhat controversial.) We did have to buy the shiny tape to seal adjacent strips together.

Application

Walls

Approximate R-value: 20

In the original portion of the house, we gutted two bedrooms with no wall insulation and filled them with 3" of polyisocyanurate (or in a few places, 2" of polyiso and 1" of XPS just because we ran out of polyiso materials to get us to 3".) We had to cut the insulation to size, which was not difficult, but was somewhat tedious. Next we furred out the walls with some old lathe, to make the total cavity depth a full 4".We built the east and west sunspace walls to be 8" wide, with 2 rows of 2x4 studs with 1" offset between the rows with scraps of rigid board to reduce thermal bridging. The south wall mostly has windows, so we built it with 2x6 studs. We filled all the sunspace walls with fiberglass insulation.

With all the walls, once we had the insulation in place, we ran the bubble wrap insulation over the interior face of the studs, then into the wall cavity until it hit the fiberglass or rigid insulation, then along the face of that insulation until the next stud. The goal was to create a 3/4 to 1" air gap between the shiny bubble wrap and the sheetrock attached to the studs. This air gap is critical for the reflective nature of the bubble wrap to reduce radiant heat loss.

Ceiling

Approximate R-value: 40. The bubble wrap acts solely as an air & vapor barrier, not as a reflective barrier.

Original House

We redid the ceiling in about half of the original house, so in those rooms I attached a layer of bubble wrap under the ceiling joists (on the room side). In the rest of the areas I nestled the bubble wrap into the joist cavities from above (similar to the application to the walls), first removing the thin layer of existing loose-fill cellulose. I'm using our loose fill to fill the 2x4 joist cavities, then laying fiberglass bats perpindicular to the joists to a depth of 6-10". (I haven't finished all the attic insulation yet--I'm about halfway done.)

In the funny little pop-out of our NE bedroom, there was no way to access the attic space after sealing it up from below. So I stuffed pink XPS between the joists to create a supportive "platform" on top of which I could put fiberglass and loose fill before applying the usual bubble wrap to the bottoms of the joists.

Sunspace

We built the sunspace ceiling with 2x12 joists, in part to support the ecoroof load. We also built a 2x4 drop ceiling under that, so we were able to place about 13" total of fiberglass insulation. We finished with a layer of the bubble wrap insulation attached to the bottom of the drop ceiling joists before attaching the sheetrock.

Floor

Approximate R-value: 30.

Original house

Under the original house, we had no insulation to begin with. About 60% of this area had 2x6 joists, the rest 2x8. With the help of friends, I installed 3/4" PEX tubing under the living areas, which takes up about 1" and needs another 1" airgap between it and the reflective surface of the polyisocyanurate below. That left 3.5" and 5.5" available in the 2x6 and 2x6 joist cavities; I stuffed these with 4" and 6" of polyiso (with 1/2" hanging below the joist bottoms.) I finished off with bubble wrap stapled to the bottoms of the joists.

Sunspace

Going with the design of our passive solar consultants (Urban Sun), we used 2" of XPS (R-10 total) under the concrete slab, and against the interior face of the stem wall. The low R-value is a little deceptive, since it's OK to use the ground itself for some heat storage in the interior of the slab. Only the outside edges will lose much heat.

Crawlspace

I placed 2" of polyiso against the foundation wall butting into the sunspace, to reduce the heat loss from the sunspace into the crawlspace. Around the rest of the walls, we glued the bubble wrap for a little bit of R-value and hopefully some help from the radiant barrier.

Initial Results

Today marks the first time this year we've felt the need to make a fire to heat the house! We've definitely made it way later into the cold season than ever before. Some notes on our parameters:

We've been comfortable with the house ranging from 55F as a worst-case overnight low up to 61 or 62 or sunny days, generally in the 57-59 range during the day. Yesterday we were stuck at 55 all day long, and overnight dropped to 51, so we finally broke down and made the fire today.
We've been cooking and baking a fair amount on our gas stove, which adds a lot of heat to the house.
We've been taking hot showers every 3 days or so, which adds a lot of heat to the house.
Before today, we had made 6 fires, but hadn't really needed any of them for our own heating comfort. We primarily made them for open houses and house showings as we try to sell our house.

Fixing the graywater tub

2011-10-09T19:26:00.000-07:00

Earlier this year, I described our constructed wetland for graywater treatment, and mentioned problems with much of the water infiltrating through the dirt instead of overflowing into our second tub. Today I attempted to correct the problem.

The Problem

This picture shows the upper edge of the hot tub which I buried in the ground. I "planted" the tub too low, so we added lots of soil around the edge of the tub, and wood chips on top of the constructed wetland. The wood chips broke down into lovely soil, and it all wicked water out of the tub and into the surrounding paths. Small flows of water from sinks, even prolonged activities such as washing dishes, never made it into our second tub of "treated" water, so we never got to use most of our water for irrigation. We only got water overflows when we took a shower.

The white pipe in the photo carries graywater from the house and deposits into the tub.

The Solution

I dug around three sides of the tub, exposing the upper edge, and removed 2-3" of dirt and gravel on the inside surface. I wiped that 2-3" of tub edge clean, then squeezed a bead of PL Roof & Flashing Sealant onto the cleaned edge. I cut some scrap pond liner (left over from our ecoroof projects) into approximate 3 1/2" - 4" tall strips, and pressed it into the sealant bead to effectively raise the waterproof edge of the tub by about 2 1/2" on three sides. I did not raise the fourth side, where the water is supposed to overflow.

After the sealant cures overnight, I'll refill the interior of the new pond liner extension with gravel, and bring dirt back up to the outside edge of the pond liner. This should prevent the worst of the "wicking" and allow water to overflow as originally planned.

Fall 2011 Garlic Plantings

2011-10-04T21:46:00.000-07:00

Today I planted the new batch of garlic. I'm writing up notes as a hard copy of what got planted where, but also figured I'd document it here. See also my post documenting last year's harvests and observations on yields.

When I harvested the elephant garlic from the ecoroof in the summer, I replanted a bunch of the little tiny bulblet offsets, not knowing whether we'd still be here in the fall and how busy we or new owners would be, and how well organized for planting new cloves. I figure I'll keep an eye on those patches as the bulblets sprout, and plant some larger cloves in any thin areas. I'll plant the shallots on the ground somewhere; I still need to figure out their destination.

I planted 11 varieties of true garlic, all on the sunspace and front porch ecoroofs. Since our garlic plants didn't seem to be limited by soil depth last year, I spaced the cloves at 6" this year instead of the 8-12" of last year, hoping they still won't run into soil competition limitations. I planted 50 cloves of each variety (with three exceptions), using one "patch" of 9 sq. ft on the front porch or 12 sq. ft on the sunspace for each variety. I switched last year's three patches of shallots over to garlic this year. I planted a total of ~550 cloves, compared to about 175 on the ecoroofs last year.

I weighed the planting cloves to give a better understanding at harvest time next year of how much input was required for the yield.

Variety	Roof	Patch	# bulbs	Weight (oz)	Notes
Spanish Roja	Sunspace	North side center	50	5.25	Relatively small cloves
Mild French Silverskin	Sunspace	Far NE	~80	8.25	Relatively small cloves
Polish Jenn	Sunspace	South side center	50	17.75
German Porcelain	Sunspace	SE of chimney	50	16.75
Inchelium Red	Porch	1st stepping stone area on south side	50	4.75	Small cloves
Unknown #2 (Porcelain group?)	Porch	SW most garlic patch	50	22
Italian Late	Porch	North side, second most from west (west-most north patch with garlic actually in it)	~35	2	Small cloves
Musik	Porch	North side, third most from west (second west-most north patch with garlic actually in it)	50	7	Relatively small - one more year of growing out should provide larger seed cloves
Nootka	Porch	North side, just east of center (east of Musik)	~38	2	Small cloves
Appalachian Red	Porch	North side, second from the far east	50	7.75
Unknown #1 (Porcelain group?)	Porch	North side, east most patch	50	12

Garlic & shallot harvests: ecoroof and yard

2011-10-03T22:32:00.000-07:00

The Experiment

Test locations

Last fall I planted garlic and shallots in the yard and on the sunspace and front porch and ecoroofs:

Sunspace ecoroof: 5.5" of soil medium. Slight south slope, and heated living space below, full sun. (Photo at left.)
Front porch ecoroof: 8" of soil medium. Slight north slope, open air beneath, full sun.
Yard: Various locations, all in full sun until about April, but some with morning shade or morning and mid-day shade thereafter.

See my Ecoroof Planting Plan for details on the ecoroof locations and polycultures.

Season conditions

Portland had an unusally wet and cool spring and early summer. This likely benefited the ecoroof plantings by providing low heat stress and enough moisture despite the thin soil and exposed conditions. Meanwhile, the yard plantings suffered from leaf rust and root rot (more details below.)

Uncontrolled variables

I planted garlic cloves 8-12" apart from each other, in various polycultures. I used a wider spacing than the usual 4-6" because I thought the thin ecoroof medium might not provide enough water and nutrients, especially with other polyculture plants mixed in. I created and planted the ecoroofs last fall, so they had few weeds and very young polyculture members. Engrossed in our house project, we did no weeding in the yard, so those plants had to cope with competition from many weeds as well as from nearby established plants, including overstory trees.

As noted above under "Test locations", some of the yard garlic varieties experienced varying degrees of shade from about April onwards.

Much of the yard garlic was planted in spots which have grown garlic in previous years (ie, no crop rotation). The yard garlic all got hit with leaf rust (super common around Portland this year), and some got root rot. The ecoroof garlic did not get either disease. I don't know that the leaf rust harmed the garlic all that much, but the root rot made many plants unusable. I discarded these bulbs from the figures, but some of the bulbs counted may have suffered partial damage.

Several of the garlic varieties I planted in the yard came from first year purchased seed bulbs, which means that I planted many small cloves. We had already grown out almost all the ecoroof varieties for at least one year prior, so we were able to select only the largest cloves for planting there.

I planted the ecoroofs first, and the yard a little later. This meant the ecoroofs had a week or two head start. More importantly, I wound up using the largest cloves on the ecoroofs since I popped cloves for planting as I went. The yard plantings got the smaller, left over cloves.

Expectations

I expected soil depth (and thus nutrient and water availability) would determine yields. So I expected garlic in the yard to give the greatest yield, followed by the front porch ecoroof, with the sunspace yielding the least. I didn't expect the condition of seasonal shade in some of the spots in the yard to have too large an effect. I expected the interplanting of garlic with other polyculture crops not to affect the garlic too much, since for most of its growing season the garlic has access to full sun, only suffering from some competition starting in May or June.

Harvests

Method

When I harvested bulbs this summer, I let the entire stalks air dry for about two weeks in the shade of our front porch. Then I trimmed off the stalk and most of the root, and for each variety and location recorded the number of bulbs harvested and the total weight, to give an idea of weight per bulb. This allows comparisons of the yield in different conditions.

Data

Variety	Location	# bulbs	Weight (oz)	Weight/bulb	Notes

German Porcelain	Sunspace	24	22.5	.938
German Porcelain	Porch	18	20.25	1.125
German Porcelain	Yard	6	5	.833	Morning shade
Polish Jenn	Sunspace	18	32.25	1.792
Polish Jenn	Porch	13	16.25	1.25
Polish Jenn	Yard	9	8.25	.917	Morning shade
unknown #1	Porch	6	9.5	1.582
unknown #2	Sunspace	29	55	1.897	Minor morning shade
unknown #2	Front porch	15	24	1.6
Italian Late	Yard	24	9.5	.396	1st year seed cloves, heavy competition
Mild French Silverskin	Front porch	17	9.25	.544	1st year seed cloves
Mild French Silverskin	Yard	17	8.25	.485	1st year seed cloves, heavy competition
Nootka	Yard	12	6.25	.521	1st year seed cloves, heavy shade from hazel
Musik	Yard	11	12	1.091	1st year seed cloves?, only light competition
Appalachian Red	Yard	14	13	.929	1st year seed cloves, only light competition
Inchelium Red	Yard	21	13	.619	1st year seed cloves, fair amount of overstory shade
Spanish Roja	Yard	8	5	.625	1st year seed cloves, fair amount of overstory shade. May not have found all bulbs (numbers here reflect the 8 bulbs I did find.)
Elephant garlic	Sunspace	8	32.25	4.031
Elephant garlic	Porch	16	46	2.875	May have planted smaller cloves
Holland Red shallot	Sunspace	7	19	2.714	1st year seed cloves
Holland Red shallot	Porch	7	12.75	1.821	1 or 2 duds not counted. 1st year seed cloves
Holland Red shallot	Yard	4	3.5	.875	1 planted bulb vanished, not counted. 1st year seed cloves
Dutch Yellow shallot	Porch	11	18	1.636	1 or 2 duds not counted. 1st year seed cloves
Dutch Yellow shallot	Yard				Entire planting of 8 bulbs vanished (perhaps so runty that I just couldn't find them to dig them up? Hopefully they'll resprout this fall.) 1st year seed cloves

Variety	Location	# bulbs	Weight (oz)	Weight/bulb	Notes

Scapes

I harvested scapes from nearly all the garlic plants. I didn't track which varieties yielded what scape weights, or how many plants provided them, but here's the basic harvest info. I estimated the number of scapes based on number of bulbs harvested (from table above); I know I missed some scapes from the yard so I've adjusted that number down slightly. Also, I have a sense that not all of the varieties made scapes, so these numbers may be off by quite a bit in terms of weight per scape.

Location	# scapes	Weight (oz)	Weight/scape
Yard	106	21.25	.2
Ecoroofs	163	72	.442

Analysis

Garlic

Locations yielded inversely to my expectations: the yard yielded the least, the porch roof in the middle, and the sunspace the most. I attribute the low yard yields to the increased competition and disease problems mentioned above, especially since the plantings with the heaviest competition do seem to have yielded the lowest amount (though varietal difference could also affect this comparison.)

A friend just reminded me that garlic doesn't like hard soil, which characterises much of our yard soil. So that could also account for the reduced size of the yard garlic compared to the garlic growing in the very light-weight, loose ecoroof soil.

As I recall, all the sunspace growth (garlic and other plants) got off to an earlier start than on the porch roof. I now suspect that the heat from the sunspace room, despite about 14" of ceiling insulation and a 1" air gap, provides enough extra warmth to the ecoroof above to greatly improve plant growth. Alternatively or in conjunction, the south slope of that roof vs the north slope of the front porch roof may create enough of a microclimate difference to account for the improved yields.

I don't know why the German Porcelain garlic performed better on the Porch than on the Sunspace roof, in contrast to the other porch vs sunspace comparisons. Also interesting to note that the morning-shaded yard planting of this variety yielded only 10% less than the sunspace planting. Similarly, the yard planting of Mild French Silverskin amongst heavy competition came within 10% of the yield of the sunspace planting. Other varieties had much larger variance of yard vs ecoroof plantings.

Shallots

The shallots disappointed me, both on the ecoroofs and in the yard. Garlic wants its water to taper off in early summer, which is what makes it so well adapted to our climate of wet winter and dry summer; I had thought shallots share this preference. But looking over the literature, it seems shallots need water in the summer for best production; I provided them none. I want to keep the ecoroof largely irrigation free, so the shallots don't make sense there; in the future I'll plant them only in the yard, in easily irrigated areas.

Future Research

I feel very happy with garlic yields from the ecoroofs, so I don't see a need to grow any in the yard. We'll reserve the yard for more intensively managed crops, especially those benefiting from irrigation. That said, if we were staying here (instead of moving to Hawaii in a few months) and inclined to try the experiment again with better controls, I would:

Pre-pop cloves and allocate roughly equal sizes to the different planting patches.
Weed out the non polyculture plants.
Crop-rotate the yard patches, especially where they suffered root rot.
Plant yard and ecoroof garlic at the same time.
Plant yard test plots in full sun to match the ecoroof conditions.
Record scape harvests by variety and location to evaluate the full yield.
Use cloves from bulbs grown out for at least a year, to give us the opportunity to plant only the largest cloves of each variety. This would allow better comparison across varieties.

We would still have the variable of different polyculture companions in different patches, but otherwise the extraneous conditions would be much more uniform.

Slug Moat: Pond, Rainwater Catchment, & Protected Nursery

2011-09-26T00:11:00.000-07:00

Watch a video of our contraption thanks to Paul Wheaton of permies.com

Background & Objectives

We had lots of scrap pond liner left over from the ecoroof projects, so I decided to glue them all together to make a big pond, which can hold more water with less surface evaporation than a bunch of small ponds like our current array of 4 50 gallon bath tub ponds.

We've had lots of trouble with slugs attacking young seedlings in our nursery pots, especially legumes and brassicas, so I wanted a way to protect them.

Our front porch ecoroof receives rainwater from an area twice the area of the actual ecoroof, discharges a lot of runoff. I wanted a way to store some of that water.

I wanted a way to conveniently water our nursery pots with rainwater.

We think the property should integrate ducks into the front yard to help with slug control and to provide a diversified egg and meat source, so we wanted some sort of pond area for future ducks.

Put all that together, and you get our slug moat!

Construction

First I had Tulsey dig a giant pit for the pond. The hole wound up about 30" deep, 5' wide, and 18' long. Closest to the house, we made a slope of about 45 degrees entering into the pond, to enable ducks and other animals easy access and escape. We tried to make the bottom more or less uniformly deep, and to keep the banks level.

I placed cardboard in the bottom of the pit to help protect the pond liner.

Next Jonathan and I placed the giant sheet of pond liner into the hole. I had created the giant sheet from all the small scrap sheets by overlapping them and gluing them together with P&L Roof & Flashing sealant from Home Depot. I used a double line of caulk, about 2-3" apart, for extra protection. The manufacturer doesn't guarantee it for underwater applications, but many aquarium & fish enthusiasts have used it successfully as a fish-safe, underwater-proof sealant.

I was concerned about the possibility of a shovel, cattail rhizomes, or duck bills eventually prying the glued pond liner joints apart. We had some 6 mil visqueen plastic lying around, so I put a single solid sheet of that on top of the pond liner. The visqueen will probably wear through and leak sooner or later, but will still function to reduce the danger of something popping open the main pond liner seams.

Next I laid out the footings for the slug moat: concrete blocks leveled on a thin layer of sand & gravel, stacked high enough to keep the posts out of the water.

I covered the bottom of the pond with a 2-3" layer of river rock, accumulated during the excavation of the pit. The rocks provide more protection for the visqueen and the pond liner.

I tucked the pond liner and the visqueen underneath a layer of soil to anchor it all around the edges, using a long 2x4 and a 4' level to get the banks roughly level.

I built a wooden frame by anchoring four 4x4s into the concrete post footings at the top of each pile of blocks. The two posts closest to the house are about 10' tall, to provide support for the drainpipe coming from the ecoroof. With some additional cross-pieces, they could act as a trellis for a vine.

The back two posts are about 3' tall. I connected all the posts with 2x4s. I considered installing diagonal cross-braces for more rigidity, but that would make it harder to access the area underneath.

I attached some pallets to the frame at a height convenient for watering and other nursery access needs. The pallets also add stability to the structure. When our friend Jasmine expressed doubts, I climbed onto the pallets and shook everything around as a test, to my satisfaction at least, if not to hers!

At last, I moved our nursery plants onto the pallets. Since the posts are sitting on concrete blocks in the middle of the pond, slugs should have a difficult time gaining access as long as vegetation is kept clear along the banks. We ran our graywater into the pond for a few weeks, and got a few hundred gallons of roof runoff from our last decent rain before the summer dry season. This kept the pond reasonably full through the summer until rains resumed at the end of September, despite use of the water for nursery and some yard irrigation.

Functions

Rainwater catchment

The pond should hold somewhere around 1000-1200 gallons of water, so can act as a significant source of irrigation water in spring and early summer, again in fall, and possibly in the middle of the summer in years with good rainstorms. The water from the roof falls about 10' into the pond, creating a mini waterfall fun to watch during rains, and aerating the water in the pond.

I added a small cross-piece board from which to hang our watering cans. Now I water the nursery pots by dipping the cans into the pond to fill them. The excess water from the pots falls right back into the pond, re-aerating the water and keeping all nutrients contained in the system. Keeping the cans right next to the pond also makes it fairly convenient to dip in and go spot water plants throughout the yard.

Aquaculture

From our other small ponds, I transplanted some cattails (eventual starch, vegetable, and pollen source), duckweed (accumulates excess nutrients in a form easily removable from the pond as much appreciated duck food) and wapato (nice potato substitute.) They're all thriving.

We bought about a dozen tiny goldfish to eat mosquito larvae and eventually provide duck and/or human food. They doubled in size within a few months, and I recently counted 9 all at once, which could very well mean they've all survived. (Oops: on October 1st I found one floating on his or her side, dead for long enough to smell funny. I couldn't tell what happened.)

Habitat

We've had tons of new life attracted to the pond: mud dauber wasps gathering mud for their homes from the edges; a red dragonfly we've never seen before laying eggs in the duckweed; damselflies; drone flies; and lots of little aquatic critters we haven't identified.

Future Potential

Ducks

Ducks thrash ponds, unless you have a really big pond and not many ducks. Someone could build a fence to section off 1/3 or 1/2 of this pond for ducks, leaving the remainder to grow plants, provide refuge for the goldfish, and filter and clean all the duck manure and the muck they stir up. The pond edges will also need a small fence to keep the ducks from entering the off limits portion directly from the banks. The ducks won't have a huge area, but it'll be enough to swim around, dive down, forage some food, and get laid.

Temperature moderation & humidity

I haven't tried this yet, but I envision some sort of plastic enclosure coming down to the edges of the pond to create a greenhouse with thermal mass and high humidity. This might help nursery plants get off to a quicker start in the spring, and especially help cuttings as they root. Building a second "deck" of nursery pot shelves underneath the existing set would also help with rooting semi-hardwood and softwood cuttings in the summer time, by providing shade but still enough brightness from the sides, along with the humidity boost.

Books for sale: field guides, gardening, and more

2011-07-30T22:12:00.000-07:00

We have lots of books for sale, mostly gardening books, field guides, and foraging books related to the mainland US, which won't do us much good in Hawaii. See my Discount Permaculture "Books for sale" page for a full listing with prices. I'm keeping the list pretty well updated as people buy them.

Reflections on This Life Is In Your Hands by Melissa Coleman

2011-07-28T21:21:00.000-07:00

My strong interest in the realities of homesteading and community living drew me to Melissa Coleman's This Life Is In Your Hands: One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone; her gripping story of her family's disintegration with its familiar childhood perspective kept me reading until I'd finished the same day. If you have any interest in these subjects, I highly recommend this as an engrossing, quick and easy read.

Besides saying that, I don't want to review this book so much as jot down my reactions and reflections. You can read more detailed synopses of the book elsewhere, but in short, Melissa describes her first seven years growing up on a rural Maine homestead with her parents Eliot (well known in organic agriculture circles) and Sue Coleman, next to and on land purchased from their mentors Helen & Scott Nearing. Much of the book revolves around the accidental drowning of Melissa's younger sister in a pond on the property, and the assumption of blame for her death.

My Thoughts & Observations

Homesteading in Maine is difficult. I don't want to work so hard during the short growing season of summer and fall to prepare for a bitterly cold, long winter. Not that I didn't already know that.

Organic agriculture is difficult. I don't want to cut down an acre of mature forest by hand, then cut off the roots of the stumps to pry them out by hand, just to create growing beds I have to dig every year to grow vegetables I have to plant, water, and weed every year. Not that I didn't already know that.

Trying to get a homestead up and running with a newborn baby is difficult. Not that I hadn't already guessed that.

Trying to keep a homestead running with a 3 year old and a newborn baby is even more difficult. Usual comment applies.

Trying to keep a failing marriage from deteriorating further and a homestead running with two children and yet another newborn baby is...go figure...even more difficult yet. Usual comment, plus some head-scratching at the seeming inability of otherwise rational folks to understand the effects of popping out babies. (I can never contemplate global demographics for very long; I quickly scratch my scalp raw.)

Interesting that besides the seasonal reappearance of sparrows each spring, and some wild berries, Melissa doesn't talk about their landbase. Perhaps she just didn't want to add that theme to an already dense book, or perhaps this reflects the disconnection from landbase that seems to regularly accompany agriculture.

Melissa mentions a couple of times early in the book that their family bought in a lot of staple foods like nut butters, oils, and grains; plus occasional luxury items like oranges from Florida. Later on I think she mentions growing potatoes, but otherwise doesn't address staple crops again, so it's not clear whether they ever transitioned to growing their staples. I'm guessing they only grew or foraged their produce, root crops, milk, berries, and fruits; selling extra veggies to pay for imported staples along with other cash expenses like their car. So they never really achieved the sort of homesteading self sufficiency we're seeking.

The Colemans' adherence to a vegetarian diet made life harder than necessary. Besides possible nutritional imbalances causing or exacerbating Sue's depression and Eliot's hyperthyroidism, the diet led to inefficiencies:

The family only needed one male goat for fertilization, so Eliot killed and buried any male kids as soon as they were born, a waste of substantial energy invested by the mother goat.
The Colemans originally kept chickens for their eggs, but after a few years decided the chickens were too many extra mouths to feed during the food-scarce winters, so got rid of the whole flock. This baffled me since our own hens provide our most labor-efficient protein, fat, and calorie harvests. Eventually I figured out that since the family wouldn't eat their chickens, they couldn't utilize the normal temperate climate adaptation of slaughtering most of the flock in fall or winter, keeping just a few hens and a rooster to rebuild the flock the following spring.
They probably missed out on labor efficient opportunities to hunt deer or other meat, which one of their neighbors did to the disgust of the vegetarian Nearings.

Don't design a system that requires you to operate near maximum capacity almost 100% of the time. (Or fall into such a system through lack of design.) Limited slack means any significant disruption has extreme consequences. See the history of China for example, with its population maxed out with all land cultivated as extensively as possible, leading to serious famines somewhere in the country almost every year for two thousand years. For the Colemans, who were running at full speed with just Melissa and the homestead to deal with, the expected arrival of their second daughter drove Eliot to exhaustion building an addition to the house. This apparently started his decline in health. Even worse, it initiated or expanded a chasm with Sue as he couldn't meet her need for connection.

Eliot constantly pushed himself. As an athlete in college he kept seeking the next mountain to climb, and apparently he took on homesteading partly as a "mountain with no top," a challenge he could never fully conquer. As soon as he achieved some success with homesteading, he threw himself into advocacy of organic farming, first publishing newsletters and organizing at a regional level and in later years taking multiple long research trips to Europe. This workaholic approach, so often respected as a model of modern success, trashed his health and his marriage as he used work as refuge from emotions and his growing distance from Sue. Eliot reminded me a little bit of myself in years past when I moved from obsession to obsession (Roger Zelazny website, bootleg taping, Kucinich campaign, etc) to distract myself from the pain of civilization. I've slowed down and opened up in recent years, though at times I've used the house project to avoid dealing with relationship challenges.

In the early years Sue generally shouldered all the necessities of child care plus heavy work loads, but even early in Melissa's life Sue had occasional breakdowns and mild depression from the strain and stress of their endeavor. Her exhaustion grew with a second and then third child, Eliot's decline in stamina with his health problems, and his increasing absences as he pursued teaching and research away from the farm. She grew emotionally distant from Eliot, eventually suspecting him of involvement with the cute young interns present every summer, but unable to discuss it with him. She became less and less capable of engaging with life and her children, spending more time sleeping, fasting for the resulting blood sugar spikes, or just emotionally "checked out" as she went through her day.

Sue and Eliot's marital break-up despite fairly successful homesteading demonstrates the overwhelming importance of communication and relationship in these projects. The "hard skills" of growing food, building shelters, and providing water are fairly easy to learn and implement; us modern civilized folks have a much harder time learning to live together and resolve conflict.

Personal Reflections

I see Tulsey going through some of Sue's struggles. When I met Tulsey working on the Kucinich campaign she seemed strong and fully capable as we ran the Portland office. But as I got to know her better, I learned of her brittleness following a long difficult marriage and divorce, years of overworking herself at the small business she and her husband owned, and her mother's death. In the years since, Tulsey has bounced between breakdowns and confident accomplishments, happily with the balance tipping much more to the latter as she's healed herself from past stresses. The house project of the last two years has rekindled a lot of stress, and though Tulsey is mostly coping with it well, it's taken its toll. Reading Melissa's story emphasizes the importance of keeping our workloads manageable in Hawaii, not trying to do too much at once. Always good advice (one of the principles of permaculture, in fact), and even more important when starting from a depleted state.

I also see my mom in Sue's story and myself in Melissa's. As the oldest of three siblings, and with our parents' relationship following a similar trajectory, Melissa's descriptions of her parents' stresses and her own fears and loneliness (felt in the gut more than intellectually recognized) felt painfully familiar to me, raising several tears and even outright crying two or three times. Looking back now, I can better appreciate the strains my mother must have felt working multiple jobs to care for the three of us, breaking down from time to time with the stress of it all.

Towards the end of the book and her parents' relationship, Melissa describes a memory laden with emotions difficult to articulate but so poignantly recognizable from my own long unvisited, time blurred memories of childhood. Coming home from a school where she doesn't fit in, longing for her parents' attention as their limited spare energy goes to her younger siblings, and living with constant background anxiety about her family's future, Melissa trips and lands hard. Convinced that she broke her arm, she rushes home in search of sympathy. Discovering both parents gone, she begins running back and forth, back and forth, cradling her arm even as the diminishing twinges reveal the insignificance of her injury, wanting to preserve her fresh moment of pain and need until a parent returns. She runs, conscious that it makes no sense, but continuing anyway, unable to understand why she does. That confusion resonated so strongly with me I put the book down and bawled.

Final take-home lessons for me: probably good that we're moving to Hawaii instead of northern California, for a much easier transition to fully self sufficient homesteading. Take it easy as we go. Focus on communication and relationship. Carefully scale in the addition of people who will demand more of the community than they can immediately repay (children), making sure the community can integrate and support them without undue strain. And enjoy ourselves!

Life Changes in Hawaii

2011-07-26T19:04:00.000-07:00

When we move to Hawaii and purchase land, we expect to live a very primitive, self sufficient life, with no use of fossil fuels, and electricity limited to one or two solar panels directly charging something like one laptop, one cell phone, and some batteries for headlamps. We'll stop purchasing food as soon as possible, instead foraging, hunting, and growing everything we eat. To help prepare myself for the new lifestyle we're embracing, I jotted down all the life changes I expect for myself as a result. (Tulsey's theoretical list would be similar to mine, but not identical.) The shortness of my list and achievability of everything on it pleasantly surprised me; my attempts to wean myself from civilization while stuck in the city must have done some good! Here's the list, with some notes, loosely grouped by categories:

'Awapuhi (shampoo ginger) instead of commercial shampoo
Natural or no soap (perhaps use 'Awapuhi for soap as well?)
Limited hot water - generally bathe with cool or sun-warmed water after working up a good sweat
Make all our own clothes eventually - not a high priority for us, but eventually required.
Make our own baskets for storage & transportation - somewhat higher priority than making our own clothes
No toothbrush and toothpaste - use chewing stick and perhaps some sort of natural toothpaste. See also the 'zine on primitive tooth care.
No sugar or grains - I've pretty much weaned myself from grains, but my sugar/sweet addiction rages strong.
Hunt our own meat. We'll use guns initially, but eventually want to transition to handmade implements like bow & arrow.
Different foods to learn to eat.
No freezer. I barely use our fridge, but have relied heavily on our freezer especially for bulk meat purchases.
New plants & climate & growing conditions to learn.
Limited irrigation - we don't want to install a bunch of plastic pipe & breakable parts; we plan to mostly rely on rainfall which will require more careful attention to what & when we plant
Pigs will eat root crops and damage gardens - we've never really dealt with pests larger than slugs.
Mongoose prey on fowl, during daylight hours - we've only had to worry about nocturnal predators here.
Raw salads have the potential to harbor rat lungworm disease, a pretty nasty & currently mysterious illness.
Walking barefoot potentially makes me vulnerable to rat lungworm or other diseases.
Open drinking water potential source of pathogens - supposedly no surface water can be trusted, even potentially infecting you from just standing in it.
High sun exposure - will need to develop a tan, perhaps wear a big shade hat, and adopt patterns of sheltering under trees during the most intense exposure hours.
Mosquitos in abundance at lower elevations - mostly a problem for me for sleeping outdoors.
No TV, recorded music, or movies for mediated entertainment - will have to develop our own skills at storytelling, dancing, composing music, etc.
No regular internet access
Limit computer use
Artificial lighting limited to headlamps with solar powered batteries - explore use of candle nuts (kukui) as light source.
Sleep with sun
Limited bus service, and no car - rely mostly on biking and walking. (We don't drive much now, but I use the bus as my primary transport.)
Metal eventually rare - plan for long term independence of metal tools, machetes, cookware, etc
Learn to cook without metal cookware - in earth ovens, on open fires, in gourds or water tight baskets, etc
Cooking with fire instead of on natural gas stove - requires more advance planning for meals and often more maintenance of fuel as food cooks
Limited medical care
Limited access to civilization's waste streams - we've grown very accustomed to getting almost everything we need for free or cheap. Much harder to do when we're removed from the city, and when the city is much smaller than Portland. Plus energy descent will reduce the waste streams.
More difficult to get to stores for the things we still need to buy in early years - requires more careful planning of trips and advance planning for what we need
Less useful library system - Portland's is about as good as it gets, plus we'll have more difficult physical access to libraries in HI
Limited social interactions - Fewer people around and less likely to run into them than in the city. On the other hand, we can probably form much deeper relationships

Escape Plan From Civilization - Brief Update

2011-07-25T20:53:00.000-07:00

For several years we planned to implement our tribal escape plan by moving to far northern California, somewhere along the Klamath River between Happy Camp and Orleans. We even made an unsuccessful offer on land in Somes Bar in spring 2009. When that didn't work out, we decided to fix up our current house to improve salability while we kept an eye out for other attractive properties.

In August 2010, as we hit the half-way point of our house project, our friend Wade returned to visit Portland after eighteen months on the big island of Hawaii. He convinced us to take a closer look at Hawaii, extolling the ease of growing food (plant a cutting and two years later you have bananas!), the ideal climate, and the abundance of people living alternative lifestyles. I had considered Hawaii years ago, but wrote it off as too island-like: very little room to move as climate change, energy descent, and economic collapse unfold. Wade pointed out the relative ease of growing enough food quickly to feed the current inhabitants, the diversity of microclimates along two nearly 14,000 foot tall mountains, and the remaining abundance of land even after, say, a 50' rise in sea levels.

So Tulsey and I spent five weeks from early November into December on the big island, getting a feel for the current self sufficiency activity; the tropical environment; the foragable foods such as breadfruit, coconuts, mangos, and avocados; the forest reserve system (somewhat equivalent to national forests on the mainland); land for sale; hunting opportunities; and overall potential of the landbase to support its inhabitants. Plus a bit of outright sight seeing on the dry side of the island. Our friend Jasmine, potentially interested in the tribe or at least in living nearby, joined us for the last 10 days.

We have reservations about Hawaii, but overall we liked what we saw enough to move there instead of CA. The decision mostly comes down to ease of living in Hawaii vs lots of landbase to support a very small human population in CA; and even more fundamentally to prioritizing horticulture (permaculture) over hunting & gathering. Both subsistence methods can work in both regions, but horticulture is much easier in HI while in the short term CA more easily support hunting & gathering. Surprisingly, it generally costs a bit less for land in HI than in CA, especially when you consider the potential of tropical vs temperate production.

A few months ago we made a new friend; Jonathan attended a few of our classes and expressed interest when we mentioned our tribe and Hawaii plans. We've spent a lot of time getting to know each other since then, chatting about visions and goals and past experiences while continuing to plug away at the house project with Jonathan's help. He's decided to move to HI With us where we'll continue to build our relationship while exploring and looking for land to purchase. Jonathan has a lot of experience living in community, which should help a lot as we formalize our vision and procedures for people to join our tribe. And we definitely want several more people to join us soon, with a long term target of 10 to 25 folks of all ages.

We're now in the final stages of our house project, perhaps three weeks from having an open house and actively marketing it for sale. We plan on a short trip to the eastern US after the house sells to bid farewell to our families, then off to the big island. Jasmine will probably fly over with us and spend another ten days on the island to make her own decision about whether she wants to move there.

Once in Hawaii we'll exercise patience as we learn more about the microclimates and available land and our own needs, before actually purchasing a parcel. We'll spend the time until then caretaking or WWOOFing. Once we buy property of our own, we'll observe the site for a year before designing and implementing our long term structures, orchards, animal paddocks, etc. So it'll be quite some time before I've learned enough to make many meaningful Hawaii-related posts to this blog. But I have a lot of knowledge I still need to share from my experiences in Portland, so keep checking back for that!

Ecoroof Grant Report

2011-07-24T12:36:00.000-07:00

Here's the report I wrote for the City of Portland's Bureau of Environmental Services, which gave us a $5 per square foot grant to implement our ecoroofs. You can also download a PDF (1 MB) of this report.

Update: addendum to the original report as a blog post or as a small PDF download.

Introduction

Project Summary

We implemented four ecoroofs on our residence at 4510 NE Going St, covering a total of 1000 square feet with ecoroof soil mixes sourced from Philips Soil Products in depths ranging from 3.5" to 8". We implemented and planted two in October 2010, and two in June 2011. We have another 660 square feet of house roof we deemed too difficult to beef up adequately to support an ecoroof. We roofed this area in metal, and it all drains onto the sunspace, front porch, and carport roofs.

About Us

Tulsey Latoski and Norris Thomlinson have experimented at this site since 2006 practicing sustainable, low-work food production via a food forest, perennial vegetable garden, and chickens and bees.

Read more about our projects in general at http://farmerscrub.blogspot.com

Read ecoroof-specific blog posts at http://farmerscrub.blogspot.com/search/label/Ecoroof

View food harvest logs from our ecoroofs at http://discountpermaculture.com/cgi-bin/harvest.py?ecoroof=1

Email us at norristh@gmail.com

Design Goals

Food production - We planned the ecoroofs for production of food crops either naturally adapted to our seasonal rains, or drought tolerant to make it through the summer.
Reasonably low maintenance - We hope for minimum irrigation requirements, no more often than once every week or two. Once the perennial plants have fully established they shouldn't require much weeding.
Human hang-out areas - We included space for humans to spend time eating, reading, or watching the ecoroof or the rest of the neighborhood below.
Bird & insect habitat - Our food producing, perennial plants provide a diversity of flowers for insects through several seasons, and various seeds for birds to eat.
Potential rabbit or chicken fodder - We envision rabbits potentially grazing on the roofs with human supervision. We planted a few plants which can either serve as human food or be cut and dropped to the chickens below.

Four Roofs - Details

Sunspace

392 ft² (13' 3" x 29' 7"): A newly expanded room whose roof we rebuilt from scratch. This roof slopes south with 1/12 pitch, and we constructed it with an ecoroof in mind. The west end receives full sun year round; the east end receives dappled morning shade from black locust trees from late spring through mid fall. It holds 5.5" of intensive B-4 soil mix.

~290 ft² of metal roof drains into this roof, evenly distributed along a ~28' line, depositing into the upper end of the ecoroof.

Since we have the quickest and easiest access from our kitchen to this roof, we planned it as our zone of most frequent harvest, concentrating leaf and flower crops here for frequent picking. The central 2' wide path extending the length of the roof doubles as a sitting area. The south, lower end of the roof overlooks the back yard, where our chickens free range, allowing for possible harvest and dropping of fodder to the chickens below. Rabbits may eventually range here, but they would require a ramp to get to it from their likely dwelling area on the garage roof.

Front Porch

136.5 ft² (7' 3" x 18' 10"): The front porch roof slopes north with about 1/12 pitch. It receives full sun year round. It holds 8" of intensive B-4 soil mix.

To access this roof, we have to walk from the sunspace roof up and over 20' of metal roof, so we planned this roof for less frequently harvested crops such as root crops, seeds, and berries.

~265 ft² of metal roof drains into this roof, with about 2/3 of that evenly distributed along a ~19' line dropping water from above into the upper end of the ecoroof. The other 1/3 coming into the ecoroof meets the soil perpendicular to the slope, allowing very little infiltration; this water mostly runs straight down the side of the soil to a drainage pipe directing it to the gutter.

Garage

245.3 ft² (11' 6" x 21' 4"): The garage roof slopes south with about 1.5/12 pitch. It receives afternoon shade from the house and from late spring through mid fall much of the roof receives dappled to heavy shade the rest of the day from black locust trees. It holds an average of 1.5" of extensive-E soil mix, but we created mounds of soil 3 - 3.5" high in between paths and areas of no soil.

We have a hang-out area for three or four people to gather and sit together in the sun, plus the path lower in the roof in the shade of the locusts allows one person to sit. As with the sunspace, the south end of this roof overlooks the chickens and could be used to grow fodder plants, though the thin soil depth limits the possibilities.

Carport

227.2 ft² (11' 9" x 19' 4"): The carport roof slopes east with about 1/12 pitch. It adjoins the garage roof. It receives afternoon shade from the house. ~85 square feet of metal roof drops its water into the upper edge of this roof, with about 75% dropping into a single spot.

Two paths run the length of the roof, allowing for sitting in the sun or during the afternoon in the shade of the house. It holds an average of 1.5" of extensive-E soil mix, but we created mounds of soil 3 - 3.5" high in between paths and areas of no soil. The thin soil depth and mostly full sun exposure doesn't allow for much more than succulents and Alliums.

Structure & Layers

Structural Engineering

We worked with Ken Safe and Jeff Hartman at Miller Consulting Engineers to determine the necessary structural modifications to support a minimum additional ecoroof weight of 35 pounds per square foot (psf), allowing 5.5" of intensive soil mix:

Sunspace

We had already built the sunspace with 2x12 joists on 16" centers, spanning ~12', sheathed with 7/8" tongue & groove OSB. The north wall of the sunspace is a standard 2x4 stud wall, with a 2x12 ledger attached with lag bolts to carry the joists. The south wall is a window wall, with multiple windows 34" wide with 2x6 studs between them on 3' centers. A 6x8 header spans the windows and rests on 6x6 posts (one 9' and one 12' span between posts).

Miller determined that the 2x6 studs between the windows were too weak to handle the load from the 6x8 header, and the header couldn't make the full 9' and 12' spans on its own. They recommended the retrofit of adding a 2x6 LVL to both the inside and outside face of the header to stiffen it up. They also had us add SDS screws to attach the 2x12 ledger to the house wall, as the existing lag screws weren't strong enough. Because the window wall had too few areas of plywood sheathing to provide adequate shear strength, they had us add plywood to the interior north wall of the room, calculating that the shear load could be transferred via the OSB roof sheathing to that interior wall.

Front porch

Our porch roof had existing 2x6 joists on 16" centers, spanning 67", sheathed with 1/2" plywood. One end of the joists hung from a 2x6 ledger nailed to the house studs; the other end rested on a 4x6 beam supported by 4x4 posts. Miller determined that we needed to use a 4x12 beam instead of the 4x6, and 4x6 posts set in poured concrete pads instead of the 4x4s on pre-cast pier blocks. They also had us add SDS screws to attach the 2x6 ledger to the house wall. These changes permitted 50 psf.

Garage

Our garage roof has 2x6 joists on 24" centers spanning 10' 1", sheathed with 1/2" plywood. One end of each joist hangs from a 2x6 ledger lag bolted to the house; the other end rests on a 2x4 wall. Miller determined we would need one extra joist between each existing set for a final spacing of 12" on center, and we would need to strengthen the 2x4 wall.

Carport

Our carport roof has 2x6 joists on 24" centers spanning 11' 2", sheathed with 1/2" plywood. One end of each joist hangs from a 2x6 ledger lag bolted to the house; the other end rests on a 4x6 beam support by 4x4 posts. Miller determined that we needed to add two joists between each existing set for a final spacing of 8" on center, and do something to strengthen the 4x6 beam, such as adding metal C-beams. The 2x6 ledger against the house should have SDS screws added to attach to the house studs.

Scale-Down of Garage & Carport

We originally planned to implement the garage and carport roofs similar to the sunspace and front porch, with at least 5.5" of intensive soil mix to support food crops. However, these two roofs were built right up to the property line in the past, so to put ecoroofs requiring permits on these structures would have triggered requirements to bring various aspects up to code. We didn't want to deal with that, so we decided instead to implement very light ecoroofs of 30% of the allowed dead load value. Therefore, we did not add any joists or strengthen the beams for these roofs.

Layers

From bottom to top, the ecoroof layers consist of:

Sheathing (1/2" plywood on all roofs except the sunspace with its 7/8" OSB)
Feltex (light-weight substitute for tar paper)
EPDM pond liner (45 mil Firestone Pondgard. We purchased sheets large enough to fit onto each roof without having to join multiple pieces together, so as to avoid potential leak spots.)
Rotting wood (on sunspace and front porch roofs, to act as a physical dam slowing water down as it works down the roof, and to hold and store water and nutrients. Though the wood was already rotting and soft, we placed a thin layer of soil mix under the wood as an extra precaution to protect the pond liner.)
Soil mix (Intensive on sunspace & front porch; extensive on garage & carport)

We figured that the roofs had sufficient slope (1 or 1.5 in 12) to move water via gravity through the soil mix, so we didn't include a separate drainage layer.

We created "raised beds" by using 2x6 and 2x8 boards around the edges of the roofs, running the pond liner up and over before capping the boards with metal rake edge protecting the edge boards and the sheathing, extending down at least 2" into the fascia boards attached under the sheathing. We secured the edge boards with 4"x4" right angle brackets, and placed scrap pond liner pieces or foam padding over the exposed metal to prevent the main pond liner layer from being damaged by the brackets.

Overflow

The front porch roof already had a gutter attached, so we worked with that for our overflow drainage. We lifted the lower "raised bed" edge board an inch off the surface of the decking, then cut slits in the pond liner to allow water to run under the board and into the gutter. We placed filter fabric all along the slit with a layer of river rock to retain soil.

For the other three roofs, we cut holes at the bottom edge of the roof through the decking, large enough to allow a 1.5" diameter PVC or ABS pipe to fit through. We cut the pond liner in an "X" pattern over the drainpipe, folded the flaps down into the pipe, and secured and caulked it with P&L Roof & Flashing Sealant. (For the garage & carport roofs we inserted a plastic ring to help hold the flaps against the inner wall of the pipe.) We used one hole each for the garage and carport roofs, and two holes for the sunspace roof.

Over each drainage hole, we placed a ~10" diameter coffee can with holes drilled or cut out all around the sides of the can. We cut one hole in the bottom of the can to match the hole cut through the pond liner. We wrapped each can with filter fabric then a ring of river rock to minimize loss of soil, and caulked the bottom of each can to the pond liner to secure it and prevent soil from getting under the can. We painted each can with rustoleum.

The excess water from the roofs drains to different places:

Sunspace: waterfalls into three bath tub ponds, which then overflow away from the house
Front porch: waterfalls into a large pond constructed of the scrap pond liner pieces left over from the four ecoroofs
Garage and Carport: trees and shrubs near their respective downspouts

Plants

Sunspace & Front Porch Planting Plan

The deep soil of the sunspace and front porch roofs supports a relatively broad palette of plant species, and hopefully allows for productive cropping. We designed these roof plantings for polycultures of edible plants providing nearly 100% soil coverage throughout the year. Mostly we aimed for each patch to include an evergreen ground cover with evergreen or deciduous plants rising above.

For ground covers, we planted Arctostaphylos uva-ursi, Fragaria chiloensis, Rubus calycinoides, Viola odorata, Campanula portenschlagiana, C. poscharskyana, C. cochlearifolia, Gaultheria shallon, G. procumbens, Vaccinium angustifolium, V. vitis-idaea, Valerianella locusta, and Sedum telephium. For taller plants, we planted many Allium species including garlic and elephant garlic, Astragalus canadensis, Linum perenne, Hemerocallis sp, Agastache foeniculum, Asphodeline lutea, Chenopodium bonus-henricus, Sedum spectabile, Anthriscus cerefolium, Papaver somniferum, Oenothera biennis, several ephemeral bulbs in the Camassia, Triteleia, Brodiaea, and Erythronium species, and a few miscellaneous others. See our Ecoroof Final Planting Plan blog post for full details.

Carport & Garage General Plan

We didn't design the carport & garage roofs in as much detail, since we only had about 3.5" of soil depth to work with. We obtained numerous cuttings of Sedums and other succulents, mostly of unknown species from similarly thin-soiled, dry conditions. We also planted several Allium cernuum plants, one Fragaria chiloensis, a large Origanum vulgare, and a large unknown species of Thymus. In areas of the garage roof which receive heavy summer shade from the black locust trees, we planted Viola odorata and Campanula glomerata, since the protection from the sun may allow a wider diversity of plants to grow in that area despite the thin soil.

Mid-summer report

For an ongoing record of harvests from the ecoroofs, visit http://discountpermaculture.com/cgi-bin/harvest.py?ecoroof=1

Sunspace & Front Porch

Our one plant of Vaccinium moupinense died within a month of being planted. Our seeds of Lepidium peruvianum (old seed), Valerianella locusta, and Papaver somniferum never germinated. Otherwise, the plants on the sunspace and front porch, planted in October 2010, survived the winter and now flourish to a greater or lesser extent. The wet spring and summer this year have sustained growth with no irrigation on our part except for a few recently added plants, and occasional spot watering of some of our more valued experiments (Vaccinium angustifolium, V. vitis-idaea, Gaultheria shallon, G. procumbens, Chenopodium bonus-henricus, Akebia, and Astragalus canadensis).

The Fragaria chiloensis has impressed us with its rapid growth and precocious berry production; this species may make sense as the primary ground cover, since it stays evergreen, grows low, fills in gaps between taller plants very quickly, and tastes delicious! Large swaths of the Arctostaphylos uva-ursi died off following its transplantation from our yard below, but the portions that survived have made a few berries. Unfortunately, the berries of this species don't taste very exciting so it makes an inferior ground cover in our food-focused system. The Rubus calycinoides is establishing fairly slowly, though a few plants have produced flowers. The Vaccinium angustifolium is producing a few berries.

The garlic and elephant garlic seem to have done very well, producing numerous scapes followed by reasonably sized bulbs. We haven't weighed them all yet, but it looks like a very good yield. The other Alliums are establishing fairly well, but with much less vigor so far.

The Chenopodium bonus-henricus has produced a tiny amount of seed; we'll need to wait until next year to assess the production potential of established, mature plants. The Linum perenne made numerous flowers but only a handful across all the plants set seed; we're waiting anxiously to evaluate convenience of seed harvest and their taste. We're disappointed that the Papaver somniferum didn't germinate, as we would have enjoyed that as a seed crop. We have one Oenothera biennis plant flowering profusely, which should result in a reasonable number of seeds for ourselves or for the chickens.

Hemerocallis (daylily) is proving itself very tough, already producing numerous flowers for harvest.

Many other plants have flowered over the last two months, providing an ongoing diversity of blooms and making the roofs pleasant hang-out spaces and valuable for foraging insects.

Carport & Garage

We didn't plant the carport and garage roofs until late June 2011. A month later the cuttings and plants seem to be establishing well.

Implementation

We found it fairly straight forward to implement everything. For each roof, once we had the structural supports in place as designed by our structural engineer, we removed all the old asphalt roofing, tar paper, and roofing nails. We swept up all the dirt and debris to create a clean surface. In places with more than 1/8" gap between plywood we added shims so the pond liner wouldn't get stretched down into the crevice.

Once we had the plywood surface cleaned up, we laid the feltex on the decking in the same manner as tar paper. Then we placed our pond liner, running it under the flashings of the roofs above (sunspace and front porch) or up the wall of the house (garage and carport). We worked it up and over the "raised bed" edge boards, and cut off the excess. We adjusted the liner to minimize any bubbles in the middle of the roof, and folded the extra material at the corners.

The hardest part of placing the liner was dealing with the wood stove chimney projecting through the sunspace roof. We cut an oval hole about 2/3 the size of the chimney flashing, and worked the pond liner down over the chimney, making small cuts as needed to get the pond liner down to the roof. We had to make sure the pond liner stayed 2" away from the actual chimney, so we could only bring it up the flashing to that point. It proved difficult to cut the hole in exactly the right place, so we wound up with a slit in the pond liner extending upslope from the chimney for a few inches. We protected that by adding scrap pieces of pond liner, caulked to the chimney flashing underneath the storm collar and to the main layer of pond liner. To minimize water approaching from upslope, we placed two pieces of plastic to divert water to either side of the chimney. (We also initially placed a ring of drainage pipe and river rock around the chimney, but removed them later when we suspected that rainfall was splashing off those and getting under the storm collar.)

Next we placed the rotting wood for the sunspace & front porch, then soil for all the roofs. And finally, of course, we planted the plants!

Maintenance

Irrigation

Since we planted the sunspace & front porch roofs last October, and have had a wet spring with rains extending into June, as of July 12th we've only watered a few spring-planted additions and (perhaps unnecessarily) some of our more valued experimental plants (see "Plants" section above for details.) Since we completed the carport & garage plantings at the end of June, we expect to water two or three times a week to allow establishment.

The metal roofs condense some water during humid summer nights. We don't know yet whether that will provide any meaningful moisture input, but we hope that the plants at the upper edges of the sunspace and front porch roofs will benefit.

We expect to provide occasional (perhaps once a week) irrigation in future summers to maximize crop production, though certainly we have the option to not irrigate and just accept whatever harvests are possible.

Harvests

Most of the future maintenance should be simply harvesting greens & flowers two or three times a week, plus seasonal harvest of root crops like garlic, camassia, and yellow asphodel.

Further experimentation

We'll adjust the crops planted based on how well they perform. If new plants suggest themselves as good candidates, we'll try adding them.

Weeding

Hopefully most unwanted plants will be excluded by the establishment of a solid canopy of desired plants. After that, we just have to keep those desired plants in balance, which may mean rearranging some polycultures or selectively harvesting greens of certain plants more heavily to set them back.

Fertilization

The sunspace and front porch roofs will require ongoing fertilization to replenish nutrients taking during harvest. We can easily accomplish this by occasional application of urine during harvest trips.

Lessons Learned

Early loss of silt

The runoff water from the sunspace and front porch roofs obviously carried a lot of silt for at least two weeks after the beginning of the fall rains. Perhaps the ideal time to install soil and plant would be mid spring, so that plant roots could grow quickly while the soil was still moist, but without heavy enough rains to carry off so much silt and presumably fertility.

Excess water flows

Due to the extra water coming from our existing metal roofs, we had two problem spots. On two occasions of the heaviest rainfall last winter, the water flowing onto the sunspace roof backed up enough to get past the flashing and into the interior wall of the house. We added two drainpipes, one towards each end of the ecoroof, buried and running under the path directly down the roof. The pipes are wrapped in filter fabric with the upper ends protruding past the upper end of the soil for water to easily enter. This now allows excess water to safely drain away.

On the front porch roof, moderate rains caused a stream of water to overflow the lower edge of the "side channel" where some of the metal house roof meets the edge of the ecoroof perpendicular to the ecoroof slope. We built up a higher "dam" with metal caulked to the existing edge, which now allows excess water to enter a drainpipe running from that spot towards the gutter. The picture on the left shows eroded soil piled up against the original, shallow edge at the far right.

Gutter vs Drainhole

We found integration with the front porch gutter to be more awkward than the drainholes we created for the other roofs. We made a mistake by not caulking the pond liner down to the feltex along the slit we cut for discharge into the gutter, so water initially wicked back upwards under the pond liner and leaked through nail holes in the sheathing until we corrected the problem. The gutter will require more ongoing maintenance to keep it free of leaves than will the drainholes with their small cans.

Surprising absorption of rainfall events

We've been impressed by how much of the rainfall the roofs can hold before discharging anything into the overflow, especially the sunspace & front porch which receive so much extra water from the rest of the house. We haven't made precise measurements and observations, but it seems that if the roofs dry out a bit, they can fully absorb at least a .25" rainfall.

Difficult to buy low-cost plants

We were disappointed to find that we couldn't source low-cost sedums or other ecoroof plants. The wholesalers with good prices apparently only sell to retailers, not directly to end users, even if you can meet the minimum bulk requirements. Luckily, we found friends who allowed us to take cuttings of their sedums.

Costs

With the help of friends, we did all the labor ourselves, so we only had to pay for construction materials, soil mix, plants, structural engineering, and the permit. We located used material as much as possible via the Rebuilding Center, craigslist, etc. Our total cost was about $5400:

$700 - Structural engineering
$94 - Permit
$180 - Concrete (front porch pier pads)
$129 - Dump fees for old roofing
$1023 - Lumber - structural posts & beams, sheathing, edge boards, etc. (We would have bought some of this lumber anyway for the sunspace, but it wouldn't have needed to be so beefy had we not put the ecoroof on it.)
$108 - Nails & fasteners
$157 - Brackets (to attach edge boards)
$403 - Rake edge to protect edge boards & match existing metal roofing theme
$148 - Feltex (light-weight tar paper equivalent)
$849 - Pond liner
$692 - Soil mix
$906 - Plants & seeds
$15 - Drain pipe for water overflow

Perennial polyculture: New Designs

2011-06-21T00:46:00.000-07:00

This is part three of a three part series on perennial polycultures:

Introduction

Following the massive failure of our original polyculture designs (see part one), I spent some time this past winter utilizing my hard-won knowledge of our successful perennials to try again. I didn't design anything for greens, since we have more than enough already established and coexisting quite nicely. I focused instead on root crops, which have proved more difficult to just plant here and there for a few reasons (not all reasons apply to all root crops):

Soil disturbance damages adjacent perennials or roots of woody plants
I lose track of where I planted odd plants after they've gone dormant, so can't harvest the roots
Roots (especially those starting from small tubers or seeds) get outcompeted by other perennials

In this post I'll present the polycultures we're trying this year. I'll also mention a few other ideas I've had but haven't tried to implement. Refer to part two of this series, species profiles, for individual plant characteristics, presented in roughly the same order in which they appear in polycultures in this post.

Polycultures

Implementing

Garlic & Skirret

Garlic & skirret in foreground
volunteer burdock & more skirret in background

This bicrop makes use of different time niches with these two root crops. I planted garlic at about 9" between bulbs, with skirret between with 9" spacing to other skirrets and 4.5" to neighboring garlics. Garlic grows through the winter and has died down in early summer by the time skirret has gotten big enough to begin competing for light. Garlic bulbs should lift out easily without disturbing the skirret, and skirret's drought tolerance allows for non-irrigation of the garlic while the bulbs dry down.

This patch could be replanted in the same place year after year by harvesting all the skirret in September and October, then replanting garlic cloves and skirret crowns. Or move the garlic to a new patch and harvest the skirret as needed through the winter, replanting the skirret crowns into that new patch as they become available.

Skirret, Day Neutral Strawberry, & Oniony Thing

This patch combines the need to thin strawberry plants with the need to thoroughly dig up skirret roots. It works because you can leave skirret in the ground for two years before harvesting, and because we have day neutral strawberries which should be thinned in late fall or over the winter. (June bearing strawberries should be thinned after they bear their crop in mid summer). I planted four rows 15" apart in a 5' bed, with skirret and strawberries alternating in their rows every 8". (16" between strawberries, 16" between skirrets, 8" from a skirret to the closest strawberry.)

I planted some sort of evergreen oniony thing between the rows to have some winter growth of its edible leaves. Originally I planned for the ongoing disturbance of the skirret & strawberries to prevent the oniony thing from getting swamped out. But as of mid June, the oniony thing is dominating the area and I'm aggressively harvesting their leaves to open up space for the strawberry and skirret!

This fall I would harvest skirret from two of the four rows (rows 1 and 3), replanting skirret crown divisions after harvest. This will wipe out most or all of the strawberries in those two rows. Next year the strawberries left in the undisturbed rows 2 and 4 will recolonize rows 1 and 3, while the skirrets in rows 2 and 4 grow for a second year.

Next fall I would harvest the skirret in rows 2 and 4, wiping out those strawberries and replanting the skirret crowns. Then follow the same pattern in the future, harvesting two rows each year, such that each row is harvested every other year. This should keep the strawberries from crowding themselves out, as a natural byproduct of thoroughly digging the soil to harvest the skirret. I would adjust the size of the skirret crown divisions in future years to integrate well with the strawberry growth rate--smaller if the skirret is outcompeting the strawberries, or larger if the skirret is getting swamped.

Skirret, Oca, & Potato

This patch uses time niches to some effect, though it doesn't have any winter evergreens.

Oca and potatoes alternate in rows with 16" from one oca to the next potato, (32" from oca to oca and 32" from potato to potato.) I spaced two rows 30" apart in a 5' bed. I then planted one row of skirret halfway between the oca/potato rows, with skirret on 12" spacing within its row.

Skirret and potatoes grow vigorously early in the season, with oca putting on growth more slowly. We'll harvest potatoes July through September, with skirret still providing shade for the oca in the heat of the summer. With the cooler cloudier weather in September, the oca vegetation should quickly fill out to use up the space left behind by the potatoes. We'll dig all the oca tubers out after the first frost, and harvest skirret as needed through the winter. We can either reimplement the same polyculture in the same bed, or rotate it to other beds to prevent disease problems with the potatoes.

Oca, Asiatic Lily, & Yellow Asphodel

Confusing mess w/unplanned strawberry etc

Utilizes different time and height niches. These are planted in an understory wedge to the north of a young persimmon. At 6' tall the persimmon casts minor shade. Oca is planted on 30" centers with asphodel surrounding it on 10" centers. One lily is planted in the center of each oca "triangle". I don't have enough asphodel propagated yet, but eventually their density could be increased to about 6" between plants.

Asphodel grows from fall through winter til early summer, making its roots available for harvest while the oca is still small. The oca and asphodel provide ground cover for the lily, which grows above them. Harvest all oca after first frost, and harvest lilies as needed through the winter.

Lilies and asphodels can be harvested with fairly minor soil disturbance, so the main conflict might be the effects of oca harvest on the asphodel roots with their new-ish growth going into winter.

We planted this polyculture into an area somewhat invaded by strawberries, and with remnant camassia and weeds including dandelion & popweed. We may have trouble with the strawberries especially, since we don't have a strong ground cover or weed excluding element.

Yellow Asphodel, Good King Henry, & Violet

Utilizes height & time niches. Violet should be an evergreen (we're using Viola odorata) for permanent low ground cover and winter greens, with the yellow asphodel and good king henry (GKH) growing up through it. The GKH begins growing late in the spring, but the other two plants should help suppress early weeds, and the asphodel will then die down in summer for the GKH to fill out further. We should be able to harvest the asphodel roots in the summer with minimal disturbance to the GKH.

I planted GKH about 2' apart, and would eventually like to have asphodel at 6-8" spacing filling all the interior area. We don't have enough asphodel plants yet for full density, so they're more sporadic for now. The violets will fill in wherever they find gaps.

Jerusalem Artichoke, Mashua or Groundnut, & Chinese Artichoke or Creeping Bellflower

Jerusalem artichokes with small
chinese artichoke underneath

This polyculture has a core structure but multiple possible plants to plug into the different niches. It mimics the well known three sisters guild of corn, beans and squash, which Eric Toensmeier has proposed morphing into the perennial guild of jerusalem artichoke, groundnut, and chinese artichoke. This polyculture makes use of above ground space niches, but not of time niches, since these root crops require heavy disturbance for harvest in fall through early spring. With the possible exception of the creeping bellflower, they should all benefit from the regular ground disturbance and loosening of the soil.

We're retaining jerusalem artichoke as the vertical element; we had an existing 100 square foot patch. However, we've never had much success growing ground nuts here, so we only planted 3 or 4 which survived from last year, instead mostly planting mashua on 3' centers as the vining element to climb the jerusalem artichokes. We can easily supply nitrogen via our urine so we don't require the leguminous groundnut for nitrogen fixation.

For the ground cover layer, we're trying about half a dozen fast-spreading chinese artichoke in half the patch, with creeping bellflower 1-2' apart as another vigorous, shade tolerant root crop in the rest of the area.

Our patch gave us about 100 pounds of jerusalem artichokes last year (1 pound per square foot). It makes sense to knock back the jerusalem artichoke production a bit in favor of more root diversity, and hopefully the total yield of roots will increase while we're at it.

Brief Mention

Oca & Tomatillo / Ground Cherry

Ocas & tomatillo at bottom
tree collard and mashua at top not part of guild

Inspired by oca-testbed's oca & tomato bi-crops, I've planted 3 ocas, 2 annual ground cherries, and 2 tomatillos with 10" between each oca and its neighboring ground cherry or tomatillo (20" from one ground cherry or tomatillo to the next).

Squash & yacon

I planted some squash seeds at 6' centers and yacon halfway between at the 3' mark. The yacon should grow tall enough to hold its own by the time the squash reaches it, to share the space niche a bit. It may work somewhat as a time niche, too, as squash often dies back in early to mid fall with powdery mildew, while the yacon can keep growing until frosts kill it.

Not Implementing

Oca & squash

We created an accidental time niche bicrop a few years ago when a squash covered up some oca for most of the summer, but started dying back with powdery mildew in early fall, allowing the oca to explode in growth and fill out the space. We didn't get much of an oca yield--but I wasn't experienced enough at that time to pay close attention to frost and harvesting all the oca promptly. So maybe we got some roots but they rotted? Or maybe the squash didn't allow the oca to grow well enough to produce roots? I'd like to try this again with squash on 6' centers and two or three ocas at the 3' point in between. Or try combining it with the squash & yacon polyculture, with the squash and yacons spaced further apart to allow oca some breathing room between the larger plants. (See oca-testbed's polyculture mound of yacon, oca, and chinese artichoke.)

June bearing strawberry & summer root crop

I've tried to design a polyculture which combines digging some root crop with the need to thin June bearing strawberries in late summer, after they've finished cropping for the year. I've had a much harder time with this than with day neutral strawberries (see my polyculture with skirret above), since very few root crops can be harvested in the summertime after two years of growth to allow the alternating row harvest method. Strawberries fill out quite well by mid spring, creating a lot of competition for anything shorter than they are, limiting the ability to sow seeds or plant small divisions at the beginning of the growing season. Further, the root crop can't be allowed to outcompete the strawberries too badly -- we have some burdock in our patch, and we have to keep harvesting the huge leaves (we do eat the leaf stalks) or the strawberries get totally covered up!

Spring ephemeral bulbs such as Camassia, Triteleia, Brodiaea, or Erythronium might work for the row harvest method, especially if you establish a solid patch first, then add strawberries later. Or instead of harvesting a full row at at time, you could do a distributed harvest of the thickest clumps of bulbs, disturbing patches of strawberries here and there while eating the largest ephemeral bulbs and leaving the small ones behind to regrow quickly the following spring. Or try root crops whose seeds can germinate in the autumn, overwinter as a small plant, and grow quickly in spring: black salsify (Scorzonera hispanica) or dandelions for full row harvest after 1.5 years, or black salsify, dandelions, or parsnips for distributed patch harvest the summer after they've been sown.

Perennial polyculture species profiles

2011-06-06T22:35:00.000-07:00

This is part two of a three or four part series on perennial polycultures:

Introduction

In Perennial polyculture designs, I mentioned inadequate knowledge of plants as one barrier to successful implementation of my designs. We've now gained enough knowledge of a few perennial plants to try again. With this mouthful of a title, I give the relevant design characteristics of perennial vegetables we're trying in polycultures this year. Unless otherwise noted, I consider these plants primarily root crops, though some have secondary uses like edible flowers or leaves. By the way, for more information on many of these unusual root crops, including some polyculture experiments, see:

Oca testbed - nice details on tomato & oca bicrops, plus lots more on oca and some on other roots
Radix Root Crop Research and Ruminations - pioneering work with many roots I haven't tracked down or in some cases even heard of before
Obligatory link to Plants for a Future database.

Species characteristics

Garlic (Allium sativum)

Harvest time: July or August
Harvest process: Lift all bulbs, which doesn't require much soil disturbance. Store in cool dark place.
Planting process: Plant cloves in October or November, which doesn't disturb soil, but cloves shouldn't be disturbed by other digging after being planted.
Generally doesn't require any watering, and in fact shouldn't receive water in July so the bulbs can dry out for long term storage.
Vegetative growth: small amount of leaves over the winter, growing more actively in spring. Die back in July with the summer drought.

Skirret (Sium sisarum)

Harvest time: October through April. Stores in the ground all winter.
Harvest year: can harvest after one year of growth, or leave in the ground for multiple years for more and larger roots, which seem less prone to having a woody core.
Harvest process: Dig large chunk of soil from around plant (up to 2.5' diameter with older plants), pull out crown. Cut off roots, optionally divide and replant crown. Can be difficult to find in late winter after stalks have rotted away.
Drought & shade tolerant
Vegetative growth: Appears mid-season (April), grows fairly quickly to 3-5' tall (depending on age of plant), and dies down in early fall (October). Dense, casting heavy shade.

Garden strawberry (Fragaria x ananassa)

Use: berries
Harvest time: summer through fall
Best with full sun and adequate water through growing season.
Benefits from thinning (following the annual harvest for June bearing varieties, and in the winter for day neutral varieties)
Vegetative growth: semi evergreen to 1' high, spreading quickly from runners

Potato (Solanum tuberosum)

We haven't actually grown potatoes very much, but my understanding so far:

Harvest time: June onwards. Can probably store in the ground through the winter?
Harvest process: Seems to need a fairly thorough excavation of the soil, especially to find all the roots. We had many potatoes return this year from last year's plantings, so this seems to have potential as an overwintering perennial. Disease buildup normally demands crop rotation.
Supposedly fairly drought and shade tolerant.
Vegetative growth: Starts growing in late March or April. Reaches 3' wide? Yields supposed to improve with hilling up soil onto the lower stem.

Oca (Oxalis tuberosa)

Harvest time: after the first light frost(s) kill the foliage, but before hard freezes damage the tubers, which often dwell close to the soil surface.
Harvest process: Dig out all the roots, generally concentrated at the center, though some may form where foliage touches the soil. Store in cool dark place for the winter, replanting some tubers in spring. In mild climates, tubers missed at harvest time may resprout on their own in spring.
Appreciates some shade during heat of the summer, but may not tolerate too heavy competition. We tried it as a ground cover amongst other plants one year, and they swamped it out with very little root yield.
Vegetative growth: Leafs out in April or May, generally low growing to about 1', though can clamber up other plants if it needs to gain access to sunlight. Doesn't put on much growth until September, when cooler cloudier weather kicks in, at which time the foliage explodes to 3-4' wide.

Asiatic lily (Lilum sp)

Harvest time: Late fall through early spring.
Harvest method: Compact bulb, so fairly easy to harvest with minimal soil disturbance. Leave large offsets behind to regrow. Can be difficult to find in late winter after top stalks have rotted away.
Like their feet in shade and top growth in sun, thus well suited to combination with a low ground cover.
Vegetative growth: comes up in early to mid spring, grows to 3-4' tall, and dies down in fall.

Yellow asphodel (Asphodeline lutea)

Harvest time: Can definitely harvest in the summer, and I think we can dig roots year round.
Harvest process: Medium soil disturbance, concentrated around center of each plant. The plants make numerous offsets, and each plant has multiple thin roots. So you can harvest some entire plants and leave/replant others, or cut some of the roots off of each plant and replant them all for slower/less vigorous regrowth. Not sure yet of the best method.
I think it prefers full sun, and probably doesn't need any irrigation.
Vegetative growth: somewhat sparse, to about 1.5' tall on flowerless plants, or 3' tall on single flower spike. Doesn't seem to compete all that well with other plants, so may do best with a low growing ground cover for weed exclusion. From the Mediterranean, so well adapted to our summer drought by dying down in mid summer and coming back with fall rains, staying green through the winter.

Good King Henry (Chenopodium bonus-henricus)

Uses: leaf crop (spinach substitute) and seed crop (used like quinoa, though smaller).
Harvest time: leaves throughout season. Seeds over a period of about three months, July through September.
Harvest process: seeds require periodic picking every week or two as different seed stalks ripen at different times.
Somewhat shade & drought tolerant, though I assume for optimum seed production we should give it full sun and summer water.
Vegetative growth: comes up in late spring, reaching about 1.5' tall and perhaps a bit wider. In our back yard where chickens roam, we have a fairly pure stand of GKH and it does fine. In our front yard, (because chickens aren't eliminating the other plants? or because the GKH hasn't dominated the root zone yet?) the GKH gets crowded out by the early spring growth of nipplewort (Lapsana communis), lemon balm (Melissa officinalis), and wood avens (Geum urbanum) and I've had to weed the bed this year. Like the yellow asphodel, would probably benefit from a low growing weed suppressing ground cover.

Jerusalem artichoke / Sunchoke (Helianthus tuberosus)

Harvest time: October through April
Harvest process: Major soil disturbance. Will always miss some roots so that it will regrow the next year. Can be difficult to find roots in late winter after stalks have rotted.
Drought and shade tolerant
Vegetative growth: appears mid spring, reaches 8+' tall. Dies off in late fall.

Mashua (Tropaeolum tuberosum)

Harvest time: In theory, should harvest after the first light frost(s) kill the foliage, but before hard freezes damage the tubers. Roots seem much hardier than oca and yacon, though, such that they might store OK in the ground through the winter.
Harvest process: Fairly thorough excavation to dig all roots, storing in cool dark place for the winter. We usually miss some of the roots so that it regrows the next year.
Appreciates some shade during heat of the summer
Vegetative growth: Vining to at least 10' tall, climbing other vegetation. Appears in mid spring and grows at a fairly steady rate until frosts.

Groundnut (Apios americana)

We haven't had much success with this plant, but we haven't totally given up on it yet..

Harvest time: dormant season, late fall? through late spring?
Harvest method: Extensive excavation required. Leave some tubers behind to regrow.
Fixes nitrogen
Vegetative growth: vining, scrambling up surrounding vegetation. In our climate, appears around June and disappears in September or October.

Chinese artichoke (Stachys affinis)

We've only grown these for one year, so I base this mostly on the literature:

Harvest time: Dormant season (fall through early spring)
Harvest process: Probably requires major soil disturbance, especially since I don't think dead plants leave woody stalks behind to mark their spots. Will regrow in spring from tubers you missed.
Moderate moisture requirements?
Vegetative growth: appears in early or mid spring, gets about 1' to 1.5' tall, runs quickly (mint family) and forms good ground cover. Not sure exactly when it dies down.

Creeping bellflower (Campanula rapunculoides)

Harvest time: I think we can get usable roots year round.
Harvest process: Fairly major soil disturbance. Need to dig towards the center of the clump to find usable roots. I suspect it will keep regrowing vigorously after each harvest with no need to deliberately leave roots behind.
Very shade tolerant, and competes well with other vegetation.
Vegetative growth: Leaves appear in early spring and make a good source of greens while others are somewhat scarce. Plant reaches about 3' tall and runs vigorously. I think that without irrigation it responds to our summer drought by going somewhat dormant, resuming growth in the fall before dying back for good over the winter.

Perennial polyculture designs: a five year review

2011-06-02T13:23:00.000-07:00

This is part one of a three or four part series on perennial polycultures:

Designs: a five year review
Species profiles
New designs

Background

When we first moved to this site in 2006, I designed, on paper, elaborate perennial polycultures for tree understories. In each guild I included at least one plant to perform the main "food forest" functions: nitrogen fixation, nutrient accumulation (generally deep taprooted plants), beneficial insect feeding (plants in the carrot and sunflower families), aromatic pest confusing (onion family and mint family with their strong odors to throw off pests trying to find their preferred plant), spring ephemeral for early season nutrient cycling, ground cover, and foot tolerant path cover. I also wanted all the plants to have some direct human use, whether as food or medicine. And I tried to minimize inter-plant competition by matching vigorous runners with taller clumpers, plus designing for a combination of taprooted, fibrous, and flat rooted plants. I placed plants under each tree according to their sun requirements, designing for a fairly mature tree canopy casting significant shade (with some thought to the transition period of full sun in the early years.) And I matched guilds to tree root patterns, so that a taprooted tree would mostly have shallow rooted plants under it, and vice versa. Example polyculture design (1 MB PDF) I can't call these designs complete failures. The exercise of working them out helped me think through all the factors involved, and helped me learn the on-paper characteristics of many interesting perennial plants. I'm glad I did it. However, I never successfully implemented a single design, for several reasons.

Reasons for failure

Plant (Un)Availability

Our Process

To create my list of desired species, I diligently went through every entry in the species table at the end of Volume II of Edible Forest Gardens by Dave Jacke and Eric Toensmeier, plus all the species rated 4 or 5 in the Plants for a Future database. I added a few plants from books like Simon Hickmott's Growing Unusual Vegetables, local edible plant nursery catalogs, and odd mentions here and there. I came up with a great list of about 175 potential guild plants. I worked from the list to create my polycultures, then began tracking down the plants to implement the guilds. I hadn't anticipated the difficulty I would have locating the plants, even in the form of seeds which posed their own propagation learning curve. Over the last five years I've ordered hundreds of species of seeds from dozens of seed companies, spending hours researching and combing through plant catalogs. (My two most useful plant source search engines: Dave's Garden Plant Scout and UMN's Plant Information Online.) I managed to track down 90-95% of the species on my original list, though I kept adding more species of interest over the years, so that I still have dozens of species I would trial here if we were staying in this bioregion. Of the species I could find, only about 50% grew successfully. The rest never germinated, succumbed to slugs, got outcompeted by other plants, rotted from winter moisture, died with drought, or disappeared while we weren't watching. With the skills I've gained over the years in seed starting and with willingness to provide some extra babying to the most interesting species, I'd probably re-try another dozen or two of those failed species if we were staying here longer.

Repercussions

The long, drawn out process of tracking down seeds over several years, starting them up, waiting for them to get large enough to plant out, and having many of the attempts fail to produce a viable plant meant we never had all the planned species for a given polyculture at once. So my on-paper designs had to adjust to accomodate what I actually had available, with additions over the years as I successfully grew out new plants to incorporate. I still tried to make additions based on the original factors of guild function, top growth, and root patterns, but inevitably my incremental plantings lacked the full integration of my theoretical designs.

Inadequate Knowledge of Plants

I gathered as much information as I could on plant habits, culture requirements, and uses before designing my initial polycultures. But the books can only give so much detail on the intricacies of a living organism's life cycle, don't always accurately describe a plant's response to our particular climate and site, and certainly can't tell us whether we'll actually like eating the plant, or which part(s) we'll value the most, or what time of year we find the plant most useful.

Examples

Size, life cycle, & harvest methods: Skirret

The literature led me to believe that skirret (Sium sisarum) would grow to 3' tall by 1-2' wide. We've found that, on our site, that accurately describes a first year plant with its flowers, but older plants easily reach 5' tall and 3' wide. In mid-summer, after our typical weeks without rain, the first rainstorm or the first irrigation via our sprinkler weighs the foliage down so much that the whole plant flops right over. So my skirret placed carefully 1.5' from the edges of paths fell into them and created a maintenance problem. Other subtle details of skirret's life cycle and harvest methods affect how it integrates with other plants:

The roots radiate outwards in all directions from the central crown, necessitating a thorough excavation of the soil to find all the roots. So as opposed to something like garlic with a bulb easy to pull out without soil disturbance, skirret does not work well under trees and shrubs, nor next to perennial greens. Instead, it needs to integrate with other root crops or self seeding annuals.
The foliage dies down relatively early in the autumn, before the first frosts, allowing early harvest and potential cover crops or garlic plantings. Many of the roots we grow can't be harvested until November or later, so this timing makes a big difference in polycultures or time niche planning.
Skirret top stalks stay visible for several months into the winter, but by late winter or early spring they've rotted off, making it difficult to find the root locations. So it works best to have predictable locations for the skirret, or situations where it doesn't matter if some plants regrow in the spring where we missed harvesting.

Life cycle & harvest methods: Creeping bellflower

Creeping bellflower (Campanula rapunculoides) volunteered in our yard. I identified it, looked it up, discovered it's considered invasive in gardens as it runs rapidly but that the roots are edible, and devised a plan of allowing it to grow in place, with periodic harvesting of the roots from the edges to keep it in check.

Several times I dug up the edges to find the roots, but never found anything larger than spaghetti, tough and fibrous with nothing that seemed actually edible. I wondered whether this was a famine food, or if I had defective plants, or what. Finally I happened to dig into the center of my neighbor's patch of the plant, and discovered numerous sizable roots up to 3/4" diameter and 1' or longer! So apparently the plant only makes large roots over time, and my plan to harvest young roots from the edges won't work.

Parts used: Scorzonera & Dandelion

We originally planted scorzonera (Scorzonera hispanica) as a root crop. Soon thereafter, we learned that the leaves make an excellent lettuce substitute, so the plant became primarily a perennial green, with self-seeded plants as a bonus root crop. So rather than growing scorzonera in frequently disturbed soil in zone 2, we grow it in an undisturbed zone 1 bed. Conversely, we originally considered dandelion (Taraxacum officinale) just a leaf crop, best used during early spring then weeded out. Last year I discovered the roots make an excellent vegetable in their own right, providing a low maintenance root crop in the summer. So now we let the dandelions stay and harvest them from late spring til fall, when more desirable roots become available.

Inappropriate zone placement

I missed a very basic permaculture principle with many of my original polyculture designs. I didn't pay attention to what sort of yields went under which trees in the yard, and their accessibility from our front door. So I had leaf crops designed under trees in the far corner of the yard, which in practice I would almost never get around to harvesting.

Crop balance

When I first designed our guilds, I had no concept of how many leaf crops we would need vs roots, shoots, berries, seeds, etc. Since the perennial plant world offers many greens but relatively few foods from the other categories, I overdesigned leaf crops by default.

Difficulty implementing self seeding annuals

I sometimes consider myself a terrible gardener, such as when I have to admit that I failed--several years in a row--to grow pigweed (Amaranthus sp) and lambs quarters (Chenopodium album). You know, those weeds that gardeners everywhere else persistently pull out of their beds year after year. I tried several different species of amaranth, and at least two of Chenopodium, and I don't think I ever got any to grow the first year, let alone persist as an annoying weed. My original designs incorporated several other self seeding annuals: breadseed poppy (Papaver somniferum), miner's lettuce (Montia sp), land cress (Barbarea verna), corn salad (Valerianella locusta), and some biennials like evening primrose (Oenothera biennis). Only the evening primrose has really succeeded here; the rest never got started or have failed to robustly self seed. I attribute the failures to our heavily mulched, rarely dug soils. The first two years (especially the first), everything had a thick layer of wood chips. I tried spreading a thin 1" layer of soil in some places to seed plants like the amaranth & chenopodiums, but those tend to germinate in late spring or early summer with more heat, which coincides with the end of our rains and thus drying out of those 1" layers of soil. In subsequent years, we had heavy slug pressure, and rarely had bare patches of soil with full sun to support such pioneering annuals, especially late in the season. I did include root crops amongst those self-seeding annuals in my original design, to facilitate creation of bare soil, but with the exception of evening primrose (whose root I dig over the winter), those combinations of digging & self-seeding never really came together.

Spring Ephemerals Not So Useful

I made a small design mistake by including, in each guild, a spring ephemeral as suggested in Edible Forest Gardens. These ephemerals begin growing in late winter or early spring, taking advantage of full sun conditions before shrubs and trees above them leaf out. They flower early in the season, then die back to the ground as shade increases. On the east coast, with its harsher winters and frequent late winter snowpacks, these ephemerals play a crucial role in "catching" nutrients early, preventing snow melt or rains from leaching them out before the woody plants come into growth. In the pacific northwest, we have mild winters with many warm spells throughout the winter allowing some plant growth. In Portland we never get a real snow pack. Here it makes more sense to incorporate evergreens or fall planted crops such as garlic and fava beans. The ephemerals I've tried have competed poorly with other perennials and the late winter/early spring annual weeds.

If I Knew Then What I Know Now...

If I had the opportunity to do this all again, I would:

Design with the plants available to me, so I could plant them all out at once. (I would reserve some areas as nursery & trial beds for new experiments.)
Plant out low growing or easily removable ground covers everywhere I'm not yet ready to implement permanent designs. Selection criteria:
- Evergreens preferred
- Winter leaf crops
- Berries
- Duck forage
I haven't put much thought into this, but some ideas on species:
- Evergreen violets such as Viola odorata (edible leaves & flowers)
- Evergreen bellflowers such as Campanula poscharskyana and C. portenschlagiana (edible leaves & flowers)
- Bunchberry (Cornus canadensis) as a native berry crop. This did poorly in early years, but might succeed now with more shade from maturing trees.
- Various low growing Rubus species, such as R. nepalensis, R. tricolor, R. x stellarcticus, R. arcticus, R. pentalobus.
- Strawberries, both garden variety and species (Fragaria sp.)
- Perennial ground cherries (Physalis sp.)
Plant fewer greens, and concentrate them closer to the house since I pick them once or twice a day.
Plant more perennial seed crops.
Try to design a soil disturbance regime to suit self seeding annual seeds from Amaranthus sp. and Chenopodium sp.
Incorporate ducks to reduce slug pressure on leguminous seed crops of favas, peas, and runner beans.
Include more evergreens in general rather than spring ephemerals
Group root crops together for complementary soil disturbance. I'll post soon with several root polyculture ideas I'm trialing this year.
Skip the nitrogen-fixing function from my list of guild requirements. One person can fertilize 4000-5000 square feet of forest garden with urine.

Crop summary: Fuki, Petasites japonicus

2011-05-26T10:40:00.000-07:00

Fuki with young rhubarb in foreground

We have an abundance of low maintenance, perennial and self-seeding annual greens through most of the year. I eat salads and cooking greens almost every day as my primary veggies. We have a much more limited selection of other veggies, though--relatively few shoots, stalks, and flower buds. So I really appreciate fuki (Petasites japonicus) as a low maintenance, shade and chicken tolerant, leaf stalk and flower bud crop.

Fuki, also known as butterbur, hails from Japan, where people sometimes cultivate it for its edible flower stalks with flower buds, and 2-4' long leaf stalks. We planted a one gallon pot in 2007 in the back yard chicken free-range area, in the north quadrant of our Hollywood Plum tree circle. Before the existing mature trees on our property line leaf out, the fuki gets almost full sun in early spring, but by late spring receives only a few hours of afternoon sun. We also planted the native coltsfoot, Petasites frigidus, in the east quadrant of the same tree circle. (The coltsfoot has fared poorly, hanging on but not spreading, even with some fencing to partially protect it from the chickens. Another coltsfoot patch in the front yard has done a lot better.) Both plants prefer moist but well-drained soil with partial to full shade. I also placed a non-draining pot with the semi-aquatic plant sweet flag (Acorus calamus) in the west quadrant, with the plan to frequently top off the pot and water the Petasites species through the summer.

In practice, we find it too inconvenient to water consistently through the summer. Although the area lies more or less in zone 1, adjacent to the path we travel twice each day to the hen house, the garden hose moves around the yard, making it more difficult to water the moist zone as often as the plants would like. We probably give them water two to three times a week through the heat of the summer, more than the rest of the yard receives, but less than the daily watering they would prefer.

Our chickens enjoy the large leaves
as shelter from rain and sun

Despite near daily wilting for months in a row, full-time chicken access, and our harvesting modest amounts of leaf stalks in past years, the fuki patch has lived up to its reputation as a rampant spreader! It now covers about 30 square feet, the maximum area I'd like it to occupy. Over the last few weeks we've harvested heavily from the edges to keep it in check, about 2-4 large leaf stalks every 2-4 days, averaging 3.25 ounces per day. The fuki keeps growing new stalks, and last year we harvested stalks til the end of July, so we have plenty more crop ahead of us. If we can't eat enough to keep up, we can propagate some for sale, and use it as a cut mulch, taking advantage of the large leaves for soil protection while knocking back its vigor.

After we planted our one gallon pot, we waited a year before harvesting. The first harvest in 2008 gave us a poor impression of the plant; it tasted very strong, very medicinal. We could only envision using it as a small addition to dishes, though I did find a mixture of fuki/angelica/rhubarb palatable enough in an interestingly flavored sort of way.

Fortunately, for the last three years (2009-present), the fuki has had a much milder flavor, very edible in larger amounts, especially with adequate cooking. In 2009 and 2010 I generally steamed the stalks for about 10 minutes without peeling them, and found them pretty good, but quite fibrous. This year I've taken the time to peel them fairly well before cooking, and I've increased the cooking time to 20-25 minutes, which makes them much more tender and very enjoyable in large amounts. I can eat about 3 stalks, or 9-10 ounces, as the veggie side dish to a meal. Fuki doesn't provide many calories--only 4 per ounce--so it definitely serves as a standard vegetable, providing the micronutrients vitamin C, calcium, potassium, and manganese, but not the macronutrients of fat, protein, and carbs.

We've eaten a few of the flower buds with stalks, which have a similar flavor and expand the season by appearing in February and March, a month before the leaf stalks come up and two months before the leaf stalks grow to full size. We have had some trouble with the chickens breaking off the flower stalks by scratching them, and kicking dirt onto the buds, which tend to trap the debris. We didn't have our rotating chicken paddocks implemented in time for the fuki flower buds, so the chickens may create less of a harvest problem in future years when they only visit the fuki one week out of three or four.

As always, see the Plants for a Future entry for lots more useful information!

Harvest log - one full year

2011-04-14T21:35:00.000-07:00

We've just completed one full year of weighing and recording everything we harvest from the yard. I've uploaded a snapshot of the one year harvest so it's archived even as I update the regular harvest log. We harvested on average each day two pounds of food, providing 675 calories. As far as our goal of self sufficiency is concerned, that means we could choose between feeding less than half of Tulsi (who requires 1500 calories per day) or barely feed one third of me (2000 per day).

I last blogged about the harvest log in September. Since then, we've harvested fall and winter root crops of 105 pounds of jerusalem artichokes, 15 pounds of skirret, 15 pounds of mashua, 2 delicious pounds of lilies, 10 pounds of yacon, and a few other miscellaneous species, for about 170 pounds total.

We harvested 70 pounds of tomatoes since September. We had a first-time harvest of 8 pounds 11 ounces of Jiro persimmons, our largest crop of fruit yet from any of the trees we've planted.

We harvested 2.5 pounds of fennel seed, the equivalent calorie-wise of 25 pounds of greens.

Harvest of greens dropped dramatically with the hard winter freezes, both because we had fewer leaves available, and because I don't enjoy picking them in cold rainy weather with freezing fingers. We picked up again in March with the return of milder weather making happier plants and people.

Egg harvest slowed similarly with the onset of cold weather, as our older hens quit laying. Our new batch of four chicks (purchased in late May I believe) started laying in December, and we've had an average of a little over 3 eggs per day over the last four and a half months, with egg laying accelerating with the spring. (I guess it makes chickens happier, too.)

I've killed four chickens since September, all older hens we received last summer from some folks who were replacing them with a new flock but didn't have the heart to kill them themselves. (These have all been difficult for me, since they've been my first non-mercy killings of healthy and happy animals.)

We harvested 26 pounds of honey (about 3 gallons) a week ago, which gave a huge increase to our calories, taking us from 575 to 675 calories per day on average for the year. As with the other animal products (eggs and meat), this harvest represents a certain amount of imported resources from off-site, since the bees forage from all around the neighborhood to make their concentrated sweetness.

I won't go into great detail analyzing the calorie breakdowns, since I haven't gotten any comments asking for elaboration in the past, and you can take a look at all the data yourself. I'll just note that the vast majority of our harvested calories this year have come from animal products (eggs 25%, honey 15%, meat 6.5%) and roots (jerusalem artichokes 15%, all others combined 13.5%). Greens provided 10%, which speaks to the large quantities we've eaten since they don't actually provide very many calories per pound. Fruits and berries combined provided 9.5%. Seeds, shoots & stalks, flowers & buds, mushrooms, and squash provided relatively few calories.

We don't expect to be here more than a few months longer, so we probably won't get to see how the harvests of fruit and nuts turn out. If successful, they'll add a lot to the calories harvested. We'll keep recording the data as long as we're around, and I expect to resume similar tracking once we move to a new homestead in a year or two, since this has helped me a lot to figure out how much of what we actually eat, what we're lacking, etc.

Rotating Chicken Paddocks - What a Relief!

2011-04-14T02:12:00.000-07:00

Chicken Yard Design Mistakes

#1: Sheet Mulching the Lawn

I've made several mistakes in my design for this property. That topic deserves an entire post of its own; for now I'll focus on perhaps my biggest two mistakes. When we moved in five years ago, we started with a big lawn in the front and back yards, which I promptly sheet-mulched to death, with a "take no prisoners" attitude towards grass. We introduced six chickens into the backyard in the first summer, letting them free range through the whole area. When I created our food forest design in the fall, I laid out the back yard as trees and tall shrubs, with the chickens running amok through the understory of the entire area, cleaning up fallen fruit and keeping pest insects under control. I had vague plans to fill in under the trees and shrubs with herbaceous perennials providing chicken fodder or some human use.

Great in theory, but we didn't really understand just how much destruction the little chicken monsters unleash on the ground layer vegetation! We had expected them to peck at things and eat some of the leaves, but we underestimated how many fresh greens they like to eat, and how quickly they can decimate their favorite foods. And we didn't account at all for the constant scratching, here, there, and everywhere, especially around newly planted starts with their loosened soil.

Since I wiped out the lawn, we've never been able to reestablish a solid ground layer of herbaceous plantings, except within a few protected cage enclosures. We have had some success with a few perennials such as the vigorous running Fuki (Petasites japonicus) pictured at right, but nowhere near full coverage. I now wish I had left the grass and weeds in the backyard as pasture, sheet-mulching in specific spots as needed for the trees and shrubs and patches of other perennial herbaceous plantings.

Compare our back yard chicken area (photo on left) with our front yard perennial vegetable garden (photo on right). You have to look a little closely at the backyard photo to see past all the nice looking tree and shrub growth, but note the absence of ground vegetation. Meanwhile, the front yard has solid dense growth except in the paths:

#2: Single Free Range Area

In retrospect, even if I hadn't made the mistake of eliminating the lawn, the 3000 square foot backyard free range area probably wouldn't support six chickens full time free-ranging. In my defense, I hadn't yet come across Paul Wheaton's excellent article on chicken raising before I designed the back yard. He makes a strong case for rotating chickens for one week at a time through each of four or more paddocks, giving the other paddocks at least three weeks to recover between chicken assaults. Had I designed for this from the start, I probably would have put the chicken coop in the center of the area, with a small run with gates opening into each of the four quadrants of the yard. I would have established 50+ gallons of rainwater catchment next to the coop, to provide automatic drinking water for much of the year. I would have laid out the paddocks and paths to maximize ease of human movement.

Not knowing of the rotating paddock concept, I placed the chicken coop at the far south end of the yard, against the north wall of the neighbors' garage, to utilize the heavily shaded space. The coop has a single door which allows the chickens access to the entire back yard to destroy everything everywhere, every day, at will. I placed our rainwater harvesting bathtubs at the opposite, northern end of the backyard, to serve as watering troughs. I laid out the trees and shrubs in a manner not conducive to division of the yard into quadrants.

Correcting the Problem

Even after I read Paul's article, I remained stuck with the original design, because I could not figure out how to set up four paddocks given the existing design limitations. (We also embarked on our major house renovation about that time, which sucked up most of our time over the last year and a half.) But I finally had a break-through epiphany a couple of weeks ago: if I settled for just three paddocks, I could retrofit them into the yard fairly easily!

New Fencing

Design

So I spent a few days last week adding two permanent fences (I don't want an ongoing maintenance chore maneuvering fencing around trees and shrubs), running north-south down the center of the yard, plus an east-west fence along the bathtubs to keep the path along the house wall free of chickens. Tulsi likes this to keep the area as human hang-out area without chicken poop. I like this so humans can use this primary access route without having to deal with gates, many of which I added elsewhere to facilitate human access into and between the paddocks. (The "I"-shaped notations mark gates.) I divided the area into three roughly equal ~16' x ~60' paddocks (~900 square feet) running from the property line at the south end to the bath tubs at the north end. The east and center paddocks have direct access to the bath tubs for the chickens to use as drinking water. We'll have to maintain a watering dish in the west paddock.

In the future, we could add a fourth paddock by running another north-south fence on the other side of the main path center-right in the design scan. We would open up the path against the house, and fence off the side yard of the house, creating ~700 square feet of paddock. It would interfere with free flow between our house and our neighbors', and reduce the desirability of the side yard as a human hang-out area, so we haven't moved ahead with implementing this, just keeping it in mind as an option.

I made a small "courtyard" around the coop, which gives us flexibility in allowing free range time. I hate to keep the chickens enclosed in such a small run, but we may have to do so to control their impact on the paddocks. Since I could only make three paddocks, instead of the recommended four or more, we may even keep them in the courtyard for a full week at a time to substitute for the fourth paddock. And we may use the courtyard as a "sacrificial zone" in the winter, when the paddocks can tolerate even less chicken activity before plants get damaged.

The courtyard layout ensures permanent access to the dry area under the woodshed (labeled "chicken house" in the somewhat out-of-date design scan - the "chicken coop" written in pencil marks the actual chicken coop). No matter which gate I open to let the chickens into one of the paddocks, they can still use the woodshed cover for shelter from the rain and, most importantly, for their dust baths.

The courtyard has already proven itself useful in one more way. I can lure the chickens into it with bread or other food, then close all the gates and easily catch them to put them into their house before dark falls. This allows us to close them up early if we won't be home at dusk after they go in on their own.

Construction

We had plenty of old fencing of various sorts, so I built everything from materials on hand. I loosely anchored most of the wire fencing with vertical bamboo poles interweaved through the mesh, then jammed into the soil as far as I could get them. I built one straight section of fence from bamboo, with many ~4-5' vertical pieces closely spaced, and a few long horizontal pieces to tie them together.

For the gates, I buried solid posts made of black locust limbs cut from our hedgerow (inherently rot resistant) and in a few spots, scrap pressure treated 4x4s for the below-ground part, sistered to untreated scrap 4x4s for the above-ground portion. I constructed the gates from lath screwed together to sandwich chicken wire. After I figured out the first gate, I put together the rest fairly quickly and easily.

Plants

Goals

I've spent the past few days transplanting excess leafy green plants from the front yard into the back yard. I've tested the chickens with new greens to see whether they'll eat them when I hold the leaves for them. Mostly I want to get a solid carpet of greens so the chickens don't eat more than about 30% of the vegetation during each week they spend in a paddock. I'm also planting some seed crops. And if the chickens don't eat some plants at all, the flower activity will feed and bring insects into the back yard. Uneaten plants may even host caterpillars or other insects for the chickens to eat.

Overstocked chickens push plant imbalances into further disequilibrium. That is, they preferentially eat their favorite plants, ignoring their least favorite plants until they've exhausted their first choices. So over time they'll kill off their best fodder, leaving only the substandard fodder. (Overstocked cattle and other animals create the same problem.) So I'll need to keep a close eye on things and make sure I have enough of the best plants, or protect them as needed.

New Plants

French sorrel (Rumex acetosa) - they love this stuff--I probably need 14 or more plants per paddock, but I only have available 9 per paddock right now.
Sheep sorrel (Rumex acetosella) - we have some of this small running sorrel in the front yard. We rarely harvest it since the larger french sorrel gives us a more convenient harvest, so I'll move some to the back and see whether it stands up to the chickens.
Dandelions - in years past, they didn't seem to eat dandelions very much, but now they love them! I've planted about 30 per paddock so far, mostly in paths, and will probably add more.
Fennel - the chickens love the calorie crop seeds. I'll probably want at least 6 plants per paddock.
Creeping bellflower (Campanula rapunculoides) - they seemed to really like the sample leaves, and this plant spreads rapidly so could stand up well to abuse. If the chickens don't eat it enough to keep it in check, we can harvest the roots for food. I planted about 12 clumps or root cuttings per paddock.
Clustered bellflower (Campanula glomerata) - seemed to really like the leaves. I don't know whether the plants will grow vigorously enough to do well. We have a lot of extra potted starts so I figured I'd try out 2 in each paddock.
Turkish rocket (Bunias orientalis) - they ate the sample I brought them, but probably won't eat a whole lot of this very bitter leaf. They may eat the flowers and flower buds, or the seeds. I planted 3 per paddock.
Sweet rocket (Hesperis matronalis) - Same as for turkish rocket.
Wood avens (Geum urbanum) - Not very excited about the leaves, but they ate some of the sample. I planted about 5 per paddock.

Existing Plants

We had actually fenced the chickens out of a 500 square foot area closest to the house during our house construction, and we kept them fenced out for the last year to give it a chance to revegetate. Now we're letting them back into that area as part of the new paddocks, and they're now eating established:

Kale - number one favored plant, followed closely by french sorrel. Eat it to bare stems.
Purple dead nettle (Lamium purpureum) - eat it to the ground.
Popweed / Bittercress (Lepidium something) - eat it to the ground.
Scorzonera (Scorzonera hispanica) - eat it to the ground.
Spearmint (Mentha spicata) - not their first choice, but they do eat it in smaller quantities along with the rest of the greens, eventually eating it to the ground.
Comfrey (Symphytum officinale) - Bizarrely, they aren't touching this stuff! In years past they ate all the comfrey to the ground, severely weakening or even killing many plants. I don't understand why they don't like it now, but hopefully they'll start eating it later in the season.

Sustainable cities - feasible transition or oxymoron?

2011-04-02T21:53:00.000-07:00

In my presentation on Self Sufficiency, Five Years In, I gave some back-of-the-envelope calculations on the carrying capacity of the city of Portland. If everyone in the city does a better job of feeding themselves and fueling their houses from local resources than we expect to manage on our own site, the city could support about 280,000 people. In this best-case scenario, the current population of 600,000 would have to kick out more than half the people to become sustainable.

Leonard emailed me a question about this, and I wanted to post his question and my reply. This illuminates my philosophy of sustainability and what I think it'll really take to adapt to a post peak oil world in a healthy manner.

Leonard asked: "One bit I wanted to question is your assumption about carrying capacity for Portland: it seems to assume that we would need to produce ALL food within city limits, and couldn't rely on a significant portion of land-extensive staple crops being produced on broadacre polycultural farms in our pretty-well-intact horticultural hinterlands. The future that I've envisioned is one in which intensive vegetable gardening for zone 1-3 crops happens in the city, with zone 3-5 crops coming largely from outside using appropriate (low-embodied energy) means of transport into the city."

My reply follows for the rest of this post:

Good question, and thanks for asking it. In short, my calculations
are based on a long term stable, sustainable system. I recognize that
in the short term, the city will have to transition from here to
there. Your model could make sense as a transition strategy.
However, I think any scenario in which a city depends on the
importation of resources perpetuates unsustainability, and a
relationship of domination and exploitation, both of the landbase, and
of the people working it. That is, it doesn't fulfil the "care for
earth" and "care for people" ethics of permaculture. And the "redistribute the surplus" ethic
continues as the current mostly one-way, coerced flow of resources
into the city.

A lot of my thinking is based on Derrick Jensen's writings. I think
his two volume Endgame is the most important reading for modern
times; it gives a crucial analysis of the relationship between cities,
civilization, and our landbases. Should be required reading for all
permaculturists, activists, and anyone else working with the
"invisible structures." You can read an excerpt here of Jensen's Endgame,
talking about cities.

My first concern is that even with the best intentions, when third
parties get between the consumers in the city and the producers
outside the city, the loss of direct connection can quickly lead to
over-harvesting of resources. The middle men have little reason to
foster sustainable harvest, and focus instead on maximum production.
I think this can only be fully averted via direct relationships
between buyers and sellers, complete with buyers being fully educated
about the impacts of harvests on the landbase, and with visits to the
sites of harvest to ensure sustainable operations. Theoretically
feasible, but unlikely to actually happen. (And of course, for
sustainability, you then have to deal with getting the waste products
of the city, such as humanure, back out to the hinterlands.)

My more serious concern is that if a population is dependent on
importing resources, it will use whatever means necessary to keep that
resource coming, including violence. I wonder, in your scenario, what
the incentive is for people outside of the city to provide staple
crops for the city dwellers? Right now the incentives are shiny
gadgetry (cars, electronic toys, and packaged entertainment, and of
course the energy to operate it all) which are made possible by fossil
fuels; and the need to pay property taxes, which boils down to the
threat of violence. (Someone may own their land in the country, but
if they don't pay property taxes, the sheriff with his gun will come
to evict them. Thus they're forced into the cash economy, which often
involves selling off timber, farming the land, etc.)

The only way I see a society acting in a stable, sustainable
relationship with their landbase is when each participant has an
intimate understanding of their landbase and the effects of their
actions on their community of life. That means everyone participating
directly or at most once removed in producing their sustenance.

It's taken me a long time to write this response; I keep going into extensive details and then deleting them. I'm coming from a comprehensive anti-civilization critique, and since I don't know how much exposure you've had to this sort of thought, I'm not sure how much depth to go into to explain my perspective. (Definitely some overlap between anti-civ and permaculture circles, but also plenty of permies who want cities and civilization to keep humming along, just in a kinder gentler sorta way.) I'm happy to write more if you're curious about anything else I said above. But hopefully that gives you an idea of my thoughts...and an understanding of why we're looking to get out of the city and to a landbase which can directly support the people living on it, including us!

Our bath tubs: case study of stacking functions

2011-04-02T01:52:00.000-07:00

The Tubs

I'll continue on the water theme of my recent posts, with this look at our backyard bathtubs. Whenever I give tours, I spend a few minutes discussing these tubs, which I plugged with rubber patches and silicone caulk to form water-tight ponds. They beautifully demonstrate the permaculture principle of "stacking functions" - each element in your design fulfilling multiple roles.

So, take a look at these tubs (click on the image for a larger version), and if you feel so moved, brainstorm for a few minutes about what uses we're making of them... Bonus points if you've already been on a tour here, and you think of some uses I didn't mention!

Some context for the picture above: our passive solar sunspace is directly to the north of the tubs. The ground slopes slightly from the camera position towards the house. The black locust tree post in the center of the picture supports a grape trellis. (Hard to make out the rest of the trellis components in this picture.) The trellis supports two white PVC pipes above the tubs, close to the roofline. These pipes drain the rainwater from half of our house roof system. (There's an easily visible "T" PVC pipe fitting at the left, and a barely visible 90 degree fitting terminating a PVC pipe above the tub on the right.)

OK, brainstorm away!

Functions

Ready? Here we go!

Rainwater Harvest

The PVC pipes draining the rainwater from the house roof direct the water into these tubs as an 8' waterfall, which oxygenates the water a bit. (On windy days, some of the water does miss the tubs.) The tubs hold about 50 gallons each, the same as a $10 used rainwater barrel. I "planted" the tubs about 18" deep, tilted slightly away from the house, so the overflow falls over the far edge.

Though we can't gravity feed water from the tubs, we do use this rainwater storage in some similar ways:

Manual irrigation (fill a bucket or watering can from the tubs, then go dump it somewhere appropriate)
Wash hands
Wash tools
Wash buckets
First rinse of root crops. Sometimes we do this manually by swishing a root around in a tub, or by filling a bucket of roots with water from the tub and whirling it all around to get the dirt off. Recently I've discovered a second function for our water-oxygenating waterfall: I place an open-meshed tray of roots across a bathtub under the waterfall, and let it clean the roots off. This works very well with a couple of interventions to move the roots around so they all get a share of the pummelling.

The tubs should help a little with catching nutrient runoff from the ecoroof on the sunspace. Probably some of the nutrients just flow out of the tub as the excess water overflows (feeding the comfrey planted at those spots), but I suspect the plants and other life in the tubs get a shot at some of the nutrients, especially during the active growing months when the aquatic biological systems are in full gear, and we have less rainfall and thus less overflow from the tubs.

Drinking Water & Wildlife Habitat

Seems like everyone in the neighborhood (besides the humans) drops by to sip from our tubs! We do have to top off the tubs in the summer with municipal water. Our visitors include:

Bees (thousands of them each day in the summer, from our hives and at least one of our neighbors' hives)
Damselflies (we're hoping they can establish breeding populations, but I don't think it's happened yet)
Wasps (and probably many other insects we just haven't noticed)
Chickens (low maintenance system for keeping our hens watered)
Ducks (from time to time, when our neighbors let them free range)
Cats (several from the neighborhood)
Rats (ditto, though we try to shoot or trap them for some stew meat when they get too comfortable sipping during the daytime!)
Birds (taking baths)
Raccoons
Opossums
...who knows who else comes by in the dark of night?

Aquaculture Yields

Many yields for us and our animal friends:

Wapato - root crop growing in the couple of inches of soil at the bottom of the tubs. Also provides edible leaves and flowers. We prefer to let the leaves grow to pump energy into the root crop. The chickens prefer to eat whatever they can get at right here, right now. No sense of delayed gratification for them. So we have to fence them out from the tub a little bit -- they can get their heads in to drink, but can't extend too far into the middle of the pond.
Fish - I believe the tubs have too little area to support standard aquaculture fish like tilapia (which couldn't overwinter anyway.) Primarily for mosquito control, we have stocked the tubs with Gambusia (mosquito fish) free from Multnomah County Disease & Vector Control, and with 12 cent goldfish from Petsmart. The mosquito fish overwintered at least once, and maybe twice. They did vanish at some point, perhaps during the initial phases of our house project when we moved the tubs all around, draining and refilling them. Our goldfish have mostly survived, including three of them successfully overwintering this year. We did have three go belly-up in a smaller bucket of water two winters ago after a hard freeze. I ate them; they were crunchy and tasted like the oil in which I cooked them. If the future residents at our house don't want to eat tiny little fish, they can certainly toss them to the chickens.
Duckweed - Common aquatic plant, difficult to exclude from our tubs even if we wanted to. Luckily, the neighbors' ducks love it. Our chickens will eat it if they're hungry enough, but seem to prefer other greens. If nothing else, it makes a good mulch, soaking up excess nutrients from the ponds and giving us an easy way to transfer them to our regular garden. (The bees, by the way, prefer duckweed as their landing pads while fetching water.)
Snails - Nothing gourmet here, just tiny 1/8"-1/4" aquatic snails that go 'round and 'round the tubs eating, I presume, algae and decaying vegetation. The snails help keep things in balance. The chickens like eating the snails; I'm guessing they get some calcium from the shells, not to mention that 1/8" worth of protein.

Sunlight Reflection for House

On our rare winter days with bright sunshine, I never tire of following the shimmering patches of light as they travel across the walls and ceiling of our sunspace through the day. I placed our bathtubs a little over 4' from the house. This leaves ample path space and hang-out area, and also allows low-angled winter sunlight to reflect off the water surface and into our house, adding heat and light. In the summer months, the reflection of the higher-angled sun will hit the underside of our grapes on their trellis. Plus, the die-back and re-growth of the wapato, which catches the sunlight instead of allowing it to reflect, coincides nicely with when we do and don't want extra sun in the house.

I don't know how to measure the additional gain from the ponds, but they provide about 30 square feet of reflecting surface. I could believe they add nearly as much gain as one of our 3' x 6' windows in our "window wall."

Climate Control

We didn't plan this function; I'm just thinking of it now. The tubs may create a slightly cooler area around them in the warmer months, thanks to their thermal mass and evaporation. Once the grapes grow in fully on the overhead trellis, we might enjoy spending summer (or at least warm spring and autumn) afternoons on the south side of the house, in the shade of grapes and next to the cool water.

The tubs should also provide a little thermal buffering in the wintertime, perhaps helping to protect root systems of immediately adjacent plants. However, we didn't plant anything to take advantage of this possibility; the path layout and occupation of the vine layer by the grapes makes it difficult to plant any frost-sensitive plants against the tubs. (I've had ideas for planting moringa and/or air potato in the front yard, between the more deeply buried graywater ponds.)

The tubs will probably humidify the nearby air in the summer. This may actually negatively impact the grapes, since I think they benefit from good air circulation and not having too much moisture around them. I haven't yet thought of any useful applications for this function.

Terrace Retaining Wall

We don't really have much of a slope going on, so the tubs play a very minor role as retaining walls. The path on the house side lies perhaps 8" lower than the soil on the other side of the tubs.

Slow-Drip Irrigation

We didn't plan this one, but I think we have tiny leaks in one or two of the tubs. Happily, they occur near the grapes, so probably help maintain a constantly moist soil through the summer.

Betchya Didn't Think of This One

Ice skating rink!

Summary

So there you have it: seven main functions, with multiple sub-functions within some of those. I didn't even think of some of these uses until writing up this post, so I may be missing more! Any other ideas out there?

Portland water activism links

2011-04-01T23:25:00.000-07:00

I mentioned in my "Cost of Portland water" post that the city has plans to implement costly water systems that we don't really need, with expected rate increases of 85% over the next 5 years. I've read a little bit about this, but haven't gotten active and don't know enough to really address the issue. But I wanted to provide links for folks who want to learn more and hopefully get involved in shutting down this siphoning of ratepayer money to big corporations:

Friends of the Reservoirs (fighting the good fight on these sorts of issues for at least 8 years, since I moved to Portland!)

Citizens for Portland's Water (not very up to date.)

Our graywater system

2011-02-27T22:51:00.000-08:00

We now drain all our graywater to the yard: kitchen sink, bathroom sink, bathtub, and washing machine.

Washing Machine

I set up the washing machine a few weeks ago, using Oasis Design's "laundry to landscape" method, which relies on the pump of the washing machine to move the water. This allows us to send the water slightly uphill, into our backyard "shrub thicket" of blueberries and serviceberries, where a gravity-fed system couldn't reach.

PE Pipe Exiting Garage

Our washing machine drain pipe wasn't the right size or type to use a barb to transition directly to the 1" polyethylene (PE) pipe. So, I used large-ish hose clamps (metal ring with a screw that ratchets the clamp smaller and smaller as you tighten the screw) to attach the washing machine drainpipe to a rubber tube we had around, which then attaches to the PE pipe. We placed the washing machine against the south wall of the garage, where I drilled a hole just large enough for the pipe to exit the garage. I included a vertical piece 6' tall to allow proper venting and as an overflow escape if something clogs the pipe. This prevents burning out the washing machine pump.

Pipe Layout

The pipe extends about 10' due south from the garage wall, then takes a 90 degree turn to the west before running another 30'. I drilled 1/4" holes into the bottom of the pipe every 2' or so. We'll use stumps and logs to pin the pipe into place, preventing the chickens from moving it around.

This pipe doesn't work perfectly yet. Despite my efforts to raise up the path next to the garage wall (see the bare dirt in the first picture above), the pipe still dips down before heading gradually upslope to the discharge points. This means most of the water exits through the first couple of holes, and that the last bits of water stagnate in the low spot by the garage wall. I may reconfigure the setup so the pipe still dips to cross the path, but then immediately jumps up and anchors to the black locust trunk visible in the picture above. That would allow a continuous feed downhill to all the discharge points, giving a fairly even irrigation pattern. I can add a joint or cleanout valve or something at the garage wall low point to remove crud that builds up, or drain the hose before hard freezes.

Sinks & bathtub

The rest of the house drains feed a mini constructed wetland in the front yard, which lies slightly below the house, allowing gravity fed flows. If we didn't have to worry about house resale, we could have done what Oasis Design calls "radical plumbing", just piping each drain directly to the outside with one 1" polyethylene pipe for each drain. In that scenario we wouldn't need any vents or p-traps or larger pipe, since we wouldn't have a connection to the sewer system. However, we're including a plumbing valve under the house so that the graywater can be sent either to the wetland or to the sewer, so we needed to use standard 1.5" ABS pipe complete with vents to the roof.

The wetland resides in an old fiberglass jacuzzi I got for free from craigslist years ago, about 6'x4'x3'. I plugged up all the holes in the tub using rubber patches and 100% silicone caulk. In 2007 or 2008, I dug a big hole in the front yard, just across the main path running by the north edge of our house, and buried the hot tub pretty close to level, but making sure it tipped slightly away from the house, so the overflow would drain into the adjoining garden bed. I made the top of the tub level with the path, or perhaps even slightly lower. Over the years we've built the paths up several more inches, so the tub is now uncomfortably low. Back then, I wanted to make sure we could gravity feed from the house drains into the tub, and we did not yet have plans to lift the house. Had I known then we'd wind up raising the house 3', I'd have made the tub higher. Woulda saved me some digging, too!

Original wetland, marble slate overflow, & hole dug for new bath tub

Molded dirt and marble slate for overflow

We put a few inches of dirt into the bottom of the tub, and planted it with cattails, rushes, wapato, and tule. For a couple of years, we just dumped graywater directly into the tub from 5 gallon buckets placed under the kitchen and bathroom sinks. We had no access to the underside of the house, so no way to use the bathtub graywater.

At some point I buried a bath tub (again, free from craigslist) to receive the overflow from the wetland. I leveled the new bath tub to overflow away from the house again, to keep moving any excess water further into the garden bed area. I tried to strategically compact dirt to control the wetland overflow location, and to use a scrap piece of marble slate to catch the water and carry it down to the new tub. Unfortunately, lots of water seeped through the dirt and was lost to the soil in the surrounding paths. The marble slate wasn't quite long enough to properly reach between the tubs, so we lost yet more water. All in all, probably 20% or less of the input water made it into the second tub.

Furthermore, the water in the wetland stagnated somewhat, smelling a bit nasty when we pulled it up from the bottom of the tub. When we poured graywater into the tub, it followed the path of least resistance, mostly across the surface of the tub straight to the overflow area. So we were concerned that the plants weren't having a chance to purify the water much. We decided to follow the method described in Toby Hemenway's Gaia's Garden, and fill the wetland with gravel and baffles. The rocks in conjunction with the oygenating plant roots supposedly help create a combination of aerobic and anaerobic sites for microorganisms to live, eating the other microorganisms and solids coming in with the graywater.

Our friend Nat loaned us a concrete mixer, and helped me make a run with his trailer to buy half a cubic yard of 3/4" gravel. We held a work party and used the mixer to wash off the rocks, to minimize the dirt we'd be introducing into the system. (Dirt will eventually clog up the spaces between the gravel and dramatically slow the water flow through the wetland.) We placed a vertical inlet pipe into the end closest to the house, and another vertical pipe near the overflow area; both pipes have many holes drilled into them to allow water flow. We placed larger river rock (~1.5"-3", a byproduct of my excavations under our house) around those pipes. I based this decision on the literature I read; I think it helps with allowing optimal water flow, or perhaps it helps trap the gunk coming in from the house without clogging up the smaller rocks?

We filled the rest of the tub with the smaller gravel, building up vertical baffles using sturdy scrap plastic (mostly square lids from 4 gallon buckets). The baffles force the water to take a long, circuitous route right, then left, then right, then left through the wetland, giving the plant roots the most time possible to clean the water before it finally overflows at the far right edge of the tub.

Current setup - second tub in background

The drain pipe from the house will enter into the vertical inlet pipe (foreground), dropping the graywater to exit through the drilled holes and begin its journey through the wetland. I still have to finalize the plumbing under the house, so the pipe into the wetland temporarily discharges onto the surface (smear of goop at lower left), rather than into the inlet pipe. I installed the second vertical pipe near the overflow area (not visible, as it extends only 2" above the surface) to allow insertion of a siphoning hose; supposedly it helps the plant roots penetrate deeper down if you drain all the water out now and then. I've only tried once to siphon the water, with partial success; I dropped the water level by maybe 6", but couldn't get more than that to work. Partly I ran into difficulty starting the siphon without getting my mouth all over a graywater-smeared pipe; some sort of mechanical suction device may help with this. Finally, we replanted the old cattails, tule, and rushes, and topped everything with some wood chip mulch.

Ready to install pond liner scraps for new overflow

A few months ago, I fixed the overflow setup, by replacing the marble slate with some scrap pond liner from our ecoroof project. Now most of the overflow makes it down into the second tub.

I assume in the winter, with the wetland plants dormant, we get very little treatment, so I'm careful not to use the water from the second tub for anything where contamination may cause problems. In the summer I feel comfortable using the water to irrigate, rinse roots, wash my hands, etc. However, we haven't done any water quality testing, which would be necessary to establish how well the wetland actually treats the water.

Derrick Jensen free event in Portland

2011-02-27T09:50:00.000-08:00

The most important author of our time will speak at a free event in downtown Portland: Pacific Northwest College of Art, Main Campus, Swigert Commons, 1241 NW Johnson St.

Self Sufficiency, Five Years In

2011-02-25T21:39:00.000-08:00

I gave a presentation last Monday on our progress, successes, failures, and lessons from five years of working towards self sufficiency at our current house. I advertised the event with this blurb:

In March of 2006, Tulsi and Norris purchased a small house on a .2 acre lot, and used permaculture principles to design their food forest, sun garden, and house renovation. They aimed to create a low-maintenance, truly sustainable habitat for 2-4 people plus wildlife, providing from the property all necessary food, heating & cooking fuel, water, and waste treatment. Join us for a reality check on what's worked and what hasn't, what seems theoretically possible for the future, and what all this means to the oxymoronic goal of a sustainable city.

You can view a PDF (12 MB) of our presentation slideshow. I went into a lot more detail during the presentation than what I was able to write out on the presentation slides, but you can still get a good idea of our journey from looking through the slides. I'm hoping to give the presentation at some more venues, and ideally at some point I'll get an audio or video recording so internet folks can see
the whole presentation. But for now, just the PDF.

Cost of Portland water & implications for rainwater harvest

2011-02-12T22:00:00.000-08:00

Water supply vs sewage costs

Range in cost per gallon

This sounds like a very dull question, but here goes anyway: when does your tap water in Portland cost a third of a penny per gallon, when does it cost 1.3 pennies, and when does it cost 3.1 pennies? Short answer: if you're irrigating your garden in the summer, that water probably costs you .37¢ per gallon. During some of the winter, that water probably costs you 1.29¢ to the gallon. But during a certain portion of the winter, your water use will cost you 3.14¢, or possibly 4.06¢ per gallon, due to the way the Portland Water Bureau (PWB) estimates your sewer usage through the year.

Explanation

You can read about this process directly from PWB, but I'll take a shot at summarizing what I find to be somewhat confusing language.

In the following discussion, "one unit" means 100 cubic feet of water, which equals 748 gallons. PWB measures and bills based on these "units."

PWB bills you separate prices for water supply ($2.733 per unit) vs sewer usage ($6.92 per unit), but only measures the water you pull in from their supply; they don't measure how much water you actually put down the sewer. They assume that during the winter and early to mid spring months, you aren't washing your car, watering your lawn, or irrigating your garden, so any water you use from the supply is going down the sewer. So they use your water usage during the billing cycle which falls into that timeframe to establish your "winter average water use." Any water you use above and beyond that amount during the rest of the year is only billed for the cost of the water supply, not for the sewer usage.

For example, if during the key winter months, you use 5 units of water, then during those months you'll be billed for 5 units worth of water supply, and 5 units of sewer usage. If during the summer irrigation period you use 15 units of water, you'll be billed for 15 units of water supply, but still only 5 units of sewer usage. If in late fall and early winter you only use 4 units worth of water, you'll be billed for 4 units for water supply and sewer usage.

Since the sewer charge costs more than twice as much as the water supply cost, this matters a great deal to your bill! Every unit of water you conserve during the crucial "winter average water use" period saves you not only the cost of the water and sewage for that period ($2.733 + $6.92), but most likely saves you $6.92 for the late spring/early summer sewage charge, and another $6.92 for the summer through fall period. In total, you save $23.49 per unit conserved over the course of that year (3.14¢ per gallon). If you wind up using more water during your fall through early winter period than you did during the "winter average water use" period, then you'll save another $6.92, bringing your savings up to $30.41, or 4.06¢ per gallon.

Two notes on this phenomenon

If you move into your residence after (or too late during) the "winter average water use" period, then PWB assumes you're a standard super wasteful household and sets your value to 15 or 18 units (!!!). Considering that we normally use 2 or 3 units in the winter, that really screwed us the first year we moved here as we irrigated a lot during the summer.

If you use 0-2 units during the key period, the city sets your default to 7 (!?!). So if you're super frugal, you'll want to keep an eye on your meter towards the end of the key period, and run a lot of extra water if needed, to get yourself to 3 units.

Winter average water use months

The PWB webpage says "For residential accounts billed quarterly, the city calculates the winter average on water readings taken between February 1 and April 30." Some people may have their billing cycles fall clearly into the middle of this range. ie, if each year your quarterly billing cycle looks something like June 2nd - September 1st, September 2nd - December 1st, December 2nd - March 1st, March 2nd - June 1st, then you'll know that your key period is always going to be roughly the months of December, January, and February.

Our billing cycle falls right around February 1st, sometimes a day or few before, sometimes a day or few after. So it's not clear to us each year whether we need to focus on November, December, and January, or on February, March, and April.

If your billing cycle offers you similar ambiguity, or if you just plain find all this confusing, you can call PWB customer service at 503-823-7770 with your account number and ask them which billing period will determine your winter average water use.

Rainwater harvest

People get very excited about rainwater harvest in the pacific northwest. Rain barrels abound! Water just pours off our roofs all winter long! Unfortunately, our climate does not lend itself well to self sufficiency in rainwater storage, since we get most of our rain during the cold months of plant dormancy, and then get almost no rain during the summer months of heat and active growth. So if you're trying to see your entire yard through the three month drought with stored water, most of your water storage will get filled once, over the winter, then drained once during the summer, giving a very low efficacy, and thus a very long economic payback period on anything beyond about 400 gallons worth of storage per 1000 square feet of roof area. I figure it thus:

Payback Calculations

A good price on a 55 gallon rain barrel is $10 used (let me know if you have information on cheaper sources, since that changes these calculations a lot!). (I've seen similar deals on 250 gallon totes, which go for $50 as a good price.)

Each time you fill and drain your 55 gallon rain barrel during the crucial winter average water use months, you save $1.73 - $2.23 in that year (the range based on whether you save on sewage charge for all four quarterly bills that year, or only three). If you use 2 gallons a day (say, washing off roots, tools, and your hands) over 90 days, you save $5.65 - $7.30. Payback in less than two years! But of course, it's raining more or less all the time, and you're probably not doing much outside that demands water use, so you probably only need to put in one barrel for this payback. For that matter, you can go pretty far with a few five gallon buckets under your downspouts for no cost at all.

Each time you fill and drain your barrel during the rest of the year, you save 20 cents. You need to fill and drain the barrel 50 times before it'll pay for itself. During what I call the "swing months", of April, May, June, and September, you may get decent usage from your rain barrel, as we often go a week or more between rainfalls, and plants can benefit from the water you've stored in your barrel, which then gets refilled in the next rainfall. A barrel may get drained and filled 8-12 times across those months and during the few summer rains, saving you $1.60 - $2.40 in water costs, thus paying for itself in four to six years. Here a rain barrel clearly wins out over dealing with a bunch of five gallon buckets, especially if you integrate the rain barrel into a gravity-fed irrigation system so you're not hauling the water around.

Optimal Storage Capacity

Here are some rough ideas on how much storage capacity will be usefully used during these months. Looking at some historic precipitation data I would target at least enough storage to hold the water from a .5" rainstorm on your roof. A 1000 square foot house footprint would yield 280 gallons of water (1000 ft * .5" / 12 gives you the cubic feet of water, times 7.48 to convert from cubic feet to gallons, times .9 to account for the water lost to evaporation and other loss.) So about five rain barrels per 1000 square feet of roof catchment area. I estimate from looking at the last few years of rainfall, that you'll get spells of .75" or more maybe three or four times a year. So you could have another 140 gallons of storage, say two or three barrels, each of which would save you 60 or 80 cents per year, and pay for themselves in 12 to 16 years. Beyond that and you get only one or perhaps two uses of your barrel per year, so it takes 25 to 50 years to pay for itself.

A single 250 gallon tote would come close to my targeted 280 gallons of storage per 1000 square feet of catchment, assuming that you can direct all that water to the tote. Multiple rain barrels gives you more flexibility in positioning them in different areas, though of course it then requires additional work to visit them all to drain them into garden areas.

Other considerations

Of course, water costs will continue to go up, especially if the city moves ahead with its plan to give tons of money to private contractors with good connections to create treatment plants the system doesn't really need. (Look into this and get active if you plan to remain a PWB customer.) So you could assume water costs will double, and thus bring the payback period way down for the barrels. You do the math.

If you can get rain barrels for less than $10 each, or find another way to store water for less than 18 cents per gallon, then again that improves the payback time on the water storage, in a direct proportional relationship. (Cutting the cost in half cuts your payback time in half.)

If you're planning a multi-barrel system, odds are good that you'll be buying some hardware to connect the barrels together, maybe lumber to support them, and perhaps irrigation pipe above and beyond what you would otherwise purchase. Be sure to include that in your total costs to determine your payback time.

If your garden area to be irrigated by the rainwater is too small to allow you to usefully apply all the water from your storage, then your payback time increases. Be sure to position your barrels to give you the greatest likelihood of actually using them between rainfalls. Place them uphill from your garden beds, and make them convenient to use.

Storage can start to take up a lot of space, fast. We originally wanted to have one or two multi thousand gallon storage tanks, but we realized they would each displace a small tree or large shrub. If you have a two story house and can fit the storage against your shady north side and still get the water to useful areas, losing that space doesn't hurt your food production all that much. Storing water under your house can save a lot on space, but then you need to figure out how to get the water out and up to your growing areas! A hand pump, or a small solar panel with a pump may work, but of course add to the cost and thus to the payback time.

A Final Word

Soil gives you the cheapest water storage. Build organic matter so it'll hold more water!

Plan for root crops

2011-02-01T21:39:00.000-08:00

Here I'll lay out a rough idea of how many of which roots I would grow and eat on this site on an annual basis. I'm only including truly perennial, plant-replant perennials, and self-seeding biennials. We've had very poor success with growing annual root crops (carrots, beets, turnips, rutabagas, etc), most likely due to a combination of slug pressure and our unwillingness to baby the tiny plants (tilling/killing the soil into a fine seedbed, weeding, and watering).

Seasonal availability

I've found from our harvests this year that we have plenty of roots in the fall, winter, and early spring, with jerusalem artichokes, skirret, mashua, and yacon forming the bulk of our harvests. Wapato, oca, and canna lily all have potential for providing substantial harvests, but I only try in this post to estimate the future contribution of oca. For now I'll assign wapato and canna lily to the category of "minor roots", which add some diversity to our diet and to the garden, without any individual species providing a significant harvest.

We need to plan most carefully for root harvests from mid spring through late summer. Annual roots could fill the gap, but I'm not planning for them in our future harvests.

Summer harvestable roots	Minor roots
Potato	Evening primrose
Camas	Solomon's seal
Dandelion (year round)	Lovage
Yellow asphodel (year round?)	Sweet cicely
Campanulas?	Fennel
Cinnamon vine bulbils	Cinnamon vine taproots
Scorzonera (year round)	Sea kale
Grape hyacinth	Lily
Triteleia sp	Earth chestnut
Brodiaea sp	Woodland chervil
Dichelostemma sp	Burdock
Erythronium sp	Dahlia
Annual roots	Daylily
	Scilla
	Orpine
	Parsnip
	Chinese artichoke
	Wapato
	Canna lily

For details on these plants, see my notes on perennial roots part one and part two.

Consumption

Daily average

I figure I could eat about 2 ounces per day of garlic, elephant garlic, shallots, and other perennial oniony bulbs. On top of the garlic, I'm targeting 12-14 ounces per day of other roots. I suspect I'll eat more roots in the winter, and fewer in spring and summer when I have more greens and fewer roots available.

Monthly root consumption

December - March (four months)
Harvesting skirret, jerusalem artichoke, and minor roots from ground as needed. All mashua, yacon, and oca should have been dug after the first hard frost; now eating them from storage.
Root	Pounds (all 4 months)
Skirret	30
Mashua	25
Oca	25
Jerusalem artichoke	10
Yacon	10
Minor roots	5

April
Skirret and stored roots starting to sprout, so eating the last of them. Relying more heavily on jerusalem artichoke
Root	Pounds
Jerusalem artichoke	12
Mashua	5
Oca	5
Skirret	3
Yacon	2
Minor roots	1

May
Not much available
Root	Pounds
Jerusalem artichoke (preserved via fermentation)	10
Dandelion	5
Scorzonera	3
Yellow asphodel	1

June & July
Early potatoes & some other roots now available as summer drought kicks in. Harvest all camas to cook as one big batch.
Root	Pounds (total for two months)
Camas	20
Potato	6
Jerusalem artichoke (preserved via fermentation)	5
Yellow Asphodel	5
Cinnamon vine bulbils	5
Dandelion	4
Scorzonera	3
Grape hyacinth	2

August
Mostly relying on starch-rich potatoes and cinnamon vine bulbils, with miscellaneous inulin roots providing some variety
Root	Pounds
Potato	8
Cinnamon vine bulbils	8
Yellow Asphodel	3
Scorzonera	3
Dandelion	3
Campanula sp	1
Grape hyacinth	1

September
Similar to last month, but cinnamon vine bulbil production may have slowed down??
Root	Pounds
Potato	10
Cinnamon vine bulbils	3
Scorzonera	3
Dandelion	3
Yellow Asphodel	2
Campanula sp	1
Grape hyacinth	1

October
Skirret available again!
Root	Pounds
Skirret	10
Potato	10
Jerusalem artichoke	8
Minor roots	2

November
Assuming we don't get a hard freeze yet, so not harvesting mashua/oca/yacon yet
Root	Pounds
Skirret	16
Jerusalem artichoke	11
Minor roots	3

Annual root totals

Root	Pounds to eat	Pounds to replant
Skirret	59
Jerusalem artichoke	56
Garlic/elephant garlic	45	5
Potato	34	5
Mashua	30
Oca	30	5
Camas	20
Cinnamon Vine bulbils	16
Dandelion	15
Yacon	12
Scorzonera	12
Minor roots	11
Grape hyacinth	4

Land required

I won't try to give square foot requirements for each root, as I would mostly operate on guesswork. Jerusalem artichokes and mashua yield us about 3 pounds per square feet, and I suspect I could grow them together to make even more efficient use of space. Yacon, potatoes, oca, and skirret in the sun should all yield .5 pounds per square foot or more. So all in all I'll assume a conservative average yield of .5 pounds per square foot, giving a requirement of about 700 square feet of growing space.

Note on jerusalem artichokes

To make the inulin of our jerusalem artichokes digestible, I've started cooking them for 2-3 days as we run the woodstove (usually one fire in the morning, and one in the evening), so that they cook for at least 10 hours total. If we didn't have the wood stove running anyway, it wouldn't make nearly as much sense to rely so heavily on this root as a staple. (Though I still need to experiment with fermenting the jerusalem artichokes--many people do this, and I've heard it helps with the inulin.)

Roots as chicken fodder

Prioritize yield and ease. I think mashua and jerusalem artichoke make the most sense, though I have to admit that our chickens have not been very excited about jerusalem artichokes cooked for 1-2 hours til mushy. I haven't yet tried feeding them roots cooked for 10 hours, or tried feeding them mashua.

If chickens will eat cinnamon vine bulbils, and if the chickens don't peck the young shoots to death, these could work very well as a self-foraged summer starch.

Notes on perennial and self-seeding roots, part 2

2011-01-31T22:06:00.000-08:00

In my first notes write-up I missed a few roots we sampled at the open house root tasting. I also want to cover a few more roots we didn't have available at that root tasting. Most of these are minor roots with which we have only a little experience so far, and we don't expect to use them as major staple crops. But they help add diversity to our diet and to our garden, and may yield well with further experimentation or breeding.

I've ordered these roughly by theoretical future performance and usefulness to us in our current location.

Roots

Garlic, Elephant Garlic, and Shallots (INULIN ROOTS)

Edibility: Roots and greens raw or cooked

Growth: Clumpers to about 2-4' tall. Foliage grows from late fall or early winter, then dies down with summer drought.

Harvest: Roots dug in summer. Normally one harvests everything and stores the roots for eating. When we miss plants, they seem to perennialize, but we've only harvested greens from them, and haven't tried to work out an ongoing perennial root harvest.

Culture: Most productive in full sun, but we've had success growing them under trees where they get shade from spring til summer. Adapted to summer drought.

Yield: Not sure of pounds per square feet. Supposedly garlic and elephant garlic roots contain more than 600 calories per pound! Unfortunately, that comes in the form of inulin, and of course one can only eat so much garlic per day.

Potato - Solanum tuberosum

We haven't actually grown a lot of potatoes. I have an ideological bias against the carbohydrate-heavy, high glycemic load potatoes provide, since I'm aiming for a paleodiet. Plus I have my doubts as to the long-term yield of potatoes once certified virus-free slips can't be imported.

Edibility: Root, cooked only.

Growth: Clumping, to about 2' tall and up to 3-4' wide.

Harvest: Available from early summer through fall. Seem to store OK in the ground, though normally people harvest the full crop and store it for winter consumption.

Culture: Seems to do OK in heavy shade, though normally grown in sun. I think it needs some watering, but I haven't paid proper attention.

Some people grow potatoes as true perennials, allowing the plants to continue in place while harvesting some of the roots from time to time.

Yield: Can certainly give very high yields, both in pounds and in calories per square foot. We've had moderate yields of about .5 pounds per square foot, without putting much care into it.

Cinnamon Vine - Dioscorea batatas

Although people can and do harvest the actual roots for eating, it takes a lot of digging to access the deep brittle taproots. I plan to use them in the future for their aerial bulbils, rather than the roots.

Edibility: Root and bulbils cooked. Root comes very close in taste and texture to potatoes.

Growth: Deciduous herbaceous vine. Gets maybe 7-8' tall in a growing season here.

Harvest: Bulbils form in summer, and it seems best to lay a tarp under them to catch them as they fall.

Culture: Provide some sort of vertical support in full sun.

Camas - Camassia quamash, leichtlinii, & cusickii (INULIN ROOT)

Staple root crop for northwest native americans. We're still getting our patches going (fairly slow to propagate and spread themselves). See also my report-back on foraging camas.

Edibility: Root cooked. Unlike many inulin roots, these taste very gummy and unpleasantly starchy unless fully cooked (ie, 9 hours in a pressure cooker) at which point they taste like caramel candy.

Growth: Spring ephemeral bulbs to 1-3' tall depending on species. Slowly spreading patches.

Harvest: Dig during dormant time from summer til late winter. Harvest the largest bulbs and leave behind the smaller ones.

Culture: These do fine in winter wet including standing water. Presumably best with full sun access during main growing season, though may work well under late-leafing trees. Adapted to summer drought.

Canna lily - Canna indica

We killed one plant a few years ago, I believe because we grew it in standing water over the winter. (Thanks to the fellow (Matthew??) who mailed me the starts from the east coast!) One year ago we planted a new division from a patch doing well in this climate.

Edibility: Root cooked. Mild starchy taste.

Growth: Slowly spreading clumper to about 3-4'?

Harvest: Harvest in fall or winter after foliage dies down (with the first frost??)

Culture: Likes moist soil (but apparently not full-on standing water!). We placed our start in our main garden area, which got watered once or twice a week through the dry summer.

Yield: Our division definitely made substantial roots this year, and I see potential for good yields.

Parsnip - Pastinaca sativa

We've been trying to get self-seeding patches going, but we haven't seen very good growth from seeds. Perhaps too much slug pressure? Or too much other plant competition with not enough soil disturbance from us?

Edibility: Root raw or cooked.

Growth: Biennial clumper to 3' tall. Seems capable of going dormant during summer dry season and resuming growth with fall rains.

Harvest: Perhaps any time of year?? Considered sweetest after some autumn frosts.

Culture: Full sun, disturbed soil. Supplemental watering probably helps a lot.

Grape hyacinth - Muscari neglectum

Edibility: Roots cooked. I find them very bitter and tolerable only in small amounts mixed with other food. Tulsi detects only mild bitterness, so can eat more of them.

Growth: Bulb spreading fairly quickly. In growth from fall or mid winter through summer, dying down with the drought.

Harvest: Presumably the dormant season, from summer til fall or winter.

Culture: I assume full sun is best. Adapted to summer drought.

Chinese artichoke - Stachys affinis

Edibility: Root raw or cooked, supposedly crispy and nice nutty flavor.
Growth: Running herbaceous mint to 3' tall.
Harvest: In the fall? You'll always miss some, so the plant will grow back year after year.
Culture: Sunny position with moist soil supposedly ideal.
Yield: Plants for a Future database says about .25 pounds per square foot.

Earth chestnut - Bunium bulbocastanum

Edibility: Root raw or cooked (though cooking doesn't seem to add anything to the taste or texture). The best tasting root I've ever had, even a little tastier than skirret! Leaves raw or cooked, available through the winter. Seed raw or cooked as a cumin substitute.

Growth: Slowly spreading clumper to about 18" tall. Takes a while to get established, but our patch has finally formed a dense carpet after 2-3 years of growth from three original small divisions.

Harvest: We've only harvested once, last December, by digging under a dense clump and flipping it over, then removing the marble-sized roots thus exposed at the top of the flipped-over-clump. After harvesting many or most of the roots, I flipped the clump back over, and it seems to have recovered just fine.

Culture: Could possibly be used as a ground cover, though very slow to establish. We have ours in full sun, and give them some water in the summer along with the rest of the front yard. (Maybe once or twice a week.)

Yield: Probably very small, since the roots are so small. But perhaps an established clump can yield good numbers on an ongoing basis. Probably lots of potential for breeding work!

Miscellaneous spring ephemerals - Triteleia, Brodiaea, Dichelostemma, Erythronium (INULIN ROOT?), etc

I've tried to start many of these from seeds with very low success (I suspect massacres by slugs), so haven't gained much personal experience. But I think they have potential as an understory crop.

Edibility: Roots cooked. Some may have edible leaves cooked.

Growth: Spring ephemeral bulbs, growing from late winter til summer.

Harvest: During dormant season. Harvest largest bulbs, and leave smaller bulbs to continue growing.

Culture: Suitable as understories to late-leafing shrubs and trees. Adapted to summer drought.

Woodland chervil - Anthriscus sylvestris

Sweet cicely - Myrrhis odorata

Edibility: Leaves raw or cooked, usually with sweet anise flavor. Immature seeds raw, tasting like licorice jelly beans. Root raw or cooked, supposedly with the same flavor, though the one older root I've tried didn't taste like much.

Growth: Clumper to about 3' x 3'. May keep a few leaves over the winter, but mostly grows from early spring til hard frost.

Harvest: Probably best during winter? Also possibility of harvesting excess seedlings in summer?

Culture: Full sun to part shade. Probably requires some supplemental water in summer.

Lovage - Levisticum officinale

Edibility: Leaves raw or cooked, a celery substitute. Seed raw or cooked (haven't tried this.) Root cooked; I don't remember it tasting like anything exciting when I tried it once.

Growth: Clumping to 6' tall.

Harvest: Not sure when to harvest the root for best results.

Culture: Full sun to full shade. Tolerates drought just fine.

Orpine - Sedum telephium

Mostly interested in this as a potential ecoroof root crop. We've just begun to grow it, so I don't know much about the root harvest.

Edibility: Leaves raw. Root cooked.

Culture: Supposedly full sun to full shade. Definitely drought tolerant.

Scilla scillioides

Edibility: Leaves cooked (I think they tasted OK the time or two I tried them.) Roots cooked, but I've never really liked them when I've tried them. Not sure why.

Growth: Spring ephemeral bulbs, spreading at a medium rate. Die down with summer drought.

Harvest: Probably best during dormant season, from summer til late winter.

Culture: Full sun probably best during growing season? Adapted to summer drought.

Fennel seed as a calorie crop

2011-01-21T00:20:00.000-08:00

We harvested and have begun eating fennel seed this year, and I think it can play a small but useful part in providing a low-maintenance calorie-dense crop in the perennial food system. We didn't do a great job of measuring how much space our fennel seed sources took up, but we have some estimates. We think we harvested from about 15 plants, and figure they take up a combined total of about 40 square feet. (This gets especially fuzzy when you try to distinguish between space at the base vs space at the top after the stalks have branched out a lot. We interplant a lot of shorter plants with the fennel, so we're estimating more of the base/root exclusion area.) We harvested a total of 35.5 ounces (3600 calories), but we estimate we only harvested about 2/3 of the available seed. So we could have gotten about 5400 calories from 40 square feet, which means 135 calories per square foot...right on par with good yields from greens and roots.

We also harvested an unknown but sizeable bunch of greens from the fennel plants through the season. I also harvested many flowers (perhaps 5% of the total?) for salads, believing mistakenly from my early experiments with eating the fennel seed that the strong flavor meant we wouldn't actually be able to use it in much bulk, so I might as well eat up the flowers.

I can't eat much fennel seed raw; I use it in small amounts as a strong spice or nibble. But I can eat at least a tablespoon (quarter ounce, about 25 calories) in my omelette each day, as long as I put the fennel seed in early so it cooks well. That knocks the strong flavor back a lot. I can sprinkle fennel seed on beef patties before cooking them, or add it in bulk to soups and stews. (Haven't measured exactly how much I've used in these situations, but I'd guess at least half a tablespoon with 1/3 pound of beef.) I've also soaked fennel seed overnight with nuts (hazelnuts, walnuts, sunflower seeds) and eaten them all together with dried fruit the next day. (Again, maybe half a tablespoon at a time with a quarter cup of other nuts.) All in all, I think I can easily average 25 calories a day year round, and if I wanted to push it maybe 50 per day. Not a staple food by any means, but an easy concentrated source of calories. I'm learning the value of that as I find my limits of how many greens or bulky roots I can eat per day. A tablespoon of fennel seed providing the same calories as three cups of greens has a lot of value.

Growing fennel takes no work at all once it gets established. It comes back from a taproot year after year, probably mining some nutrients from deep below, and definitely feeding beneficial insects with its carrot family flowers. You can eat the roots of excess seedlings, though I've had trouble finding a good time to harvest them--young plants have nice enough roots (though very strong tasting, benefiting from cooking) but weigh almost nothing, while older sizable roots have become too tough for me to enjoy. So I'll probably just adopt an approach of over-harvesting to death the greens from unwanted seedlings, leaving more greens on our main plants to maximize seed production.

Our chickens love eating the seed! We had never tried feeding them fennel seeds until this winter, and I wish I'd figured it out sooner. Definitely worth growing a bunch of fennel plants in the chicken yard, then cutting down the heads throughout the fall and winter for the chickens to access.

It took me a while to process the fennel seed. Tulsi had already harvested the seed heads, by cutting them from the stalk and filling a four gallon bucket packed fairly tight. (It maybe took her 15-30 minutes to harvest it all??) I spent about 4 hours total watching movies and stripping the seeds from the seed heads. So I processed about 900 calories per hour. In general, I take much longer to do manual hand-processing work than Tulsi and many other people, so take that figure as an upper end of expected time required. Also, it took me a little time to figure out the most efficient strategy, and even once I did, I had a hard time making myself follow it.

You'll get the quickest results by accepting some losses--strip as much seed as comes off the seed head easily in one or two passes, then move on to the next seed head. The fennel seed you miss will feed the chickens. However, I tend to demand too much perfection in these matters--spending a long time picking the last bit of walnut out from the deep groove, carefully cutting off bad spots from jerusalem artichokes so as to preserve as much good flesh as possible (despite still having 100 pounds out in the yard to work through, more than we'll be able to eat!), and spending 4 times as much time to get the last 4 fennel seeds as I spent getting the first 16 seeds from the seed head. I need to cultivate an attitude of strategic waste; accept that I don't need to extract every last morsel of food from the project at hand, when there's plenty more where that came from, and the chickens have much more combined time on their hands (er, beaks and claws) than I.

I don't know whether fennel seeds contain anti-nutrients, which of course eliminate many seeds (especially grains) from the paleodiet. I would guess fennel seeds rely more on their intense flavor to keep mammals from eating very many of them, so maybe cooking them to mellow the flavor deactivates their main line of defense? And if they do contain anti-nutrients, I would guess that a quarter ounce per day won't constitute enough consumption to really cause problems. But I'd love to see more definitive information on this question.

Harvest log now shows category & food item breakdowns

2011-01-17T11:40:00.000-08:00

Quick note that I just added a new page to the existing Harvest Log. Now you can view the usual harvests by date, plus the new page to show harvests by categories & food items. Makes it a lot easier for me to get a quick handle on how many calories are coming from roots, from greens, from berries, etc.

Notes on perennial and self-seeding roots

2010-12-28T18:16:00.000-08:00

We held an open house root tasting a couple of weekends ago, to let people taste samples of more than fifteen roots. I wrote information sheets for each root, and thought it might help others if I typed up those notes and shared them here.

As always, refer to the Plants for a Future database for full details on plants. The information I give here is based on our experiences in our particular location.

I present the roots in approximate order of importance or desirability for us in our current yard. I'll make another post soon giving a description of our root strategy (how many of which kinds of roots for harvest in which times of year), based on our experimentation with many roots over the last 5 years.

Inulin

About Inulin

I've noted some roots as "INULIN ROOT", which means the root stores much of its starch in the form of inulin. Humans (some? many? all?) can't digest inulin, so we don't get full calories from it. Good for diabetics and people limiting calories. Not so good for subsistence gardens!

Inulin does feed probiotics in our large intestines, creating a good bacterial balance there. But the byproduct of the bacteria feeding on the inulin is gas.

Dealing With Inulin

Ease yourself into eating inulin roots, starting wtith small portions. Some people seem to deal with inulin beter than others, so see how your body adjusts as you eat more.

Ways to transform inulin into more digestible sugars:

Wait to harvest til after hard freezes
Could you freeze roots in a freezer to simulate that?
Wait to harvest til late winter or early spring, when the plant has converted its inulin into more mobile sugars in preparation for new growth.
Cook a long time. Native americans steam-cooked camassia 24-48 hours. John Kallas discovered through experimentation that pressure-cooking camass for 9 hours archieves inulin conversion, consistent with other info I've found online talking about 9 hours at 200 degrees Fahrenheit to make the inulin digestible.

Roots

Skirret - Sium sisarum

Our hands-down favorite root for its taste and ease of growing. See my previous Skirret Crop Summary post for many more details.

Edibility: Roots raw or cooked. Carrot/parsnip taste, and very sweet. Crisp when raw, smooth texture cooked. Only drawback is woody core of many roots.

Growth: Clumping to 3' tall (first year plants) up to 6' tall (older plants). Foliage somewhat open, allowing some light to groundcovers beneath. Roots radiate downward from crown like octopus tentacles.

Harvest: You need not harvest each year; older plants just keep developing more, larger roots (possibly with less of a woody core than first year plants?) Dig any time from early or mid fall (leaves on some plants die down early) til late spring when new growth has sapped the energy from the roots. Requires serious soil disturbance to get entire spread of roots.

Culture: Full sun to full shade, moist soil to super dry. Quite the low-maintenance survivor.

Yield: Still pinning down numbers, but seems to range from .25 pound per square foot per year in shade/crappy conditions, to a bit more than .5 pound in good conditions.

Mashua - Tropaeaolum tuberosum

A perennial, tuberous nasturtium.

Edibility: Leaves and flowers have spiciness of annual nasturtiums, plus flowers taste sweet. Root tastes very hot when raw, like a white icicle radish, but mild when cooked. The writer at Radix hates the taste of mashua, but ours taste fine to us, and no one at our root tastings has ever complained of a disgusting taste.

Growth: Vigorous vine, can reach at least 10' high. Top growth dies in hard frost.

Harvest: Dig all tubers out after hard frost kills top growth. Tubers too close to the soil surface will probably get killed by winter cold, but plant will probably come back the next year from tubers you missed deeper down. (This applies to mild winter climates such as in Portland, OR.) Store dug tubers in a frost protected place and eat as desired.

Culture: Full sun, but might benefit from some shade during heat of summer. Provide vertical support. May work well with jerusalem artichokes in a polyculture--we'll try it this year.

Yield: We got 15 pounds this year from 3 plants, each vine occupying about 1 square foot, though they did sprawl a little onto other plants. Very high yield!

Jerusalem Artichoke - Helianthus tuberosus (INULIN ROOT)

A super productive and low maintenance perennial tuberous sunflower. This root would top our list of most useful if not for the inulin content.

Edibility: Roots raw (crispy and juicy) or cooked. Nice flavor, and can be eaten in bulk. The author at Radix describes eating blanched shoots.

Growth: Stalks to 10' tall (some varieties are shorter), with multiple sunflowers. Patches spread outward somewhat slowly.

Harvest: Dig any time from fall (after top growth has died off) through mid-spring when the tubers hollow out, having sent all their energy up into the new shoots. Harvest on an as-needed basis, since tubers store much better in the ground than in the house. You'll never find all the tubers when you dig, so the patch will come back next year just as strong.

Culture: Full sun to full shade. Drought tolerant. Super easy to grow; you'll have a hard time trying to stop it once you get it started!

Yield: Incredibly productive. One isolated plant yielded about 5 pounds per square foot (but it benefited from no plant competition anywhere around it.) We haven't nailed down the numbers yet, but it seems that our main patch in partial sun and with very little irrigation yields 1-2 pounds per square foot.

Wapato - Sagittaria latifolia

Edibility: Root raw (unpleasant taste) or cooked (nice taste, kind of like a potato.) Our friend eats the leaves and flowers. Samuel Thayer eats young leaves and flower stalks, both cooked.

Growth: Aquatic or swamp plant, growing about 2' above the water.

Harvest: Fall through early spring. Loosen the mud with your feet or a shovel, then gather the tubers as they pop up to the surface of the water!

Culture: Pond or some water-holding container, with a few inches of dirt in the bottom.

Lily - Lilium sp.

Edibility: Root raw (I generally haven't liked the taste of raw bulbs) or lightly cooked (sweet, with fine texture). Some species have edible flowers. Asiatic lily varieties supposedly have more tender and less fibrous roots than oriental varieties.

Growth: Clumpers to 3'-6' tall. Reproduces from bulb offsets or seed. Different species or varieties may spread faster than others in different gardens.

Harvest: Can dig in fall after leaves die back, but the bulb tastes sweeter after a hard frost. Leave smaller offsets behind to keep growing.

Culture: Likes full sun for its top growth, with its bulb shaded. May work well in polycultures with lower growing groundcovers.

Yield: Not sure of ongoing sustainable yield. We've harvested large bulbs from each plant, but we started with medium sized bulbs purchased from flower vendors. The determining factor will be how quickly they reproduce and grow from seed or small offsets.

Yacon - Smallianthus sonchifolia (INULIN ROOT)

Edibility: Root raw or cooked. Has a crispy watery texture with slight sweetness. Leaves and stems cooked; we haven't tried them.

Growth: Large clumper. Ours have grown 6' tall and wide when happy. Usually closer to 3' x 3'. Top growth sensitive to light frosts, dies completely in hard frost.

Harvest: Dig after hard frost kills top growth, but before ground freezes enough to damage roots! Must store in sheltered place; roots will die if left in ground over winter. Save knobbly tubers from root crown for replanting. Eat the larger, lower roots.

Culture: Full sun. Wilts if not kept well watered.

Yield: We got 15" pounds from one of our 6' plants, a bit more than .5 pounds per square foot. Not that large a yield, especially considering the high water content and inulin.

Yellow asphodel - Asphodeline lutea

Edibility: Shoots cooked (we haven't tried them), flowers raw (very sweet). Root cooked, with a mild nutty flavor.

Growth: Main leaves clumping and low, spreading slowly as the roots multiply. Flower stalk takes a few years to appear, then grows 3'-4' tall. Main leaves go dormant for summer drought, growing from autumn til the next summer. Fills a useful time niche!

Harvest: Any time of year, but supposedly roots are best during dormant period. Easy to divide and replant while harvesting roots.

Culture: Full sun, maybe some shade? Drought tolerant.

Yield: Seems low so far, maybe .25 pounds per square foot? Great potential though as a winter grower intercropped with plants like oca or good king heny which take over after the asphodel dies back in summer. Also valuable as one of only a few summer harvestable perennial roots.

Oca - Oxalis tuberosa

Edibility: Leaves and flowers raw or cooked (we don't use them). Root raw (oxalic acid flavor, like sorrel) or cooked.

Growth: Low growing clumper, staying small (about 1' around) until late summer, when it explodes in growth and can get up to 4' diameter with dense foliage. Tops fairly sensitive to frost. Should work well as a groundcover with taller clumpers above it, or by utilizing its time niche with something utilizing space until late summer, then harvested to allow the oca to fill out.

Harvest: Dig all tubers after tops have been killed by frost, but before a hard freeze penetrates to the roots and damages them. Store roots in sheltered place, eating as desired. Replant from stored tubers next spring. (Though possibly tubers deep enough in the ground would survive the winter and regrow on their own in the spring.)

Culture: Seems to like protection from the blasting sun of the summer.

Yield: We've had pathetic yields in some years, but a decent yield of 17 ounces from our single plant this year.

Dandelion - Taraxacum officinale (INULIN ROOT)

Edibility: Leaves, flowers, flower stalks, crown raw or cooked. Root raw (super bitter!) or cooked about 10 minutes leaving only mild bitterness.

Growth: You know how a dandelion grows!

Harvest: Root seems good any time of year, and at any age of root, young or old. Very surprised people don't talk about this as a crop!

Culture: No need to encourage dandelions, really! Just let them grow where they like until they're in your way, then harvest the root.

Yield: Doesn't seem huge, but we're not trying to intensively cultivate it. Just harvesting the excess volunteers as bonus crops.

Scorzonera - Scorzonera hispanica (INULIN ROOT)

Edibility: Leaves, flowers, and flower stalks raw or cooked. Root cooked. Skin of root seems to have an unpleasant flavor, so best peeled?

Growth: Basically a giant dandelion. Leaf pattern different, but flowers very similar. Grows to 4'-6' tall. Prolific seeds, so should be able to self-seed well. Seeds germinate in spring or autumn.

Harvest: Root seems good any time of year.

Culture: Full sun or partial shade. Seems drought tolerant.

Burdock/Gobo - Arctium lappa (INULIN ROOT)

Edibility: Leaves, shoots, flowering stem raw or cooked. Root raw or cooked, but older roots supposedly best cooked.

Growth: Biennial taproot, aking basal rosette of leaves in first year, then tall flower stalk (to 3'-5') in second year. Self seeds well.

Harvest: Dig first year roots after hard freeze kills top growth. Roots can grow up to 3' deep, so expect a lot of digging if you want to get it all.

Culture: Full sun to part shade.

Sea kale - Crambe maritima

Edibility: Leaves and flowers raw or cooked with nice mild flavor and fairly tender texture. Roots cooked, with mildly sweet flavor, pretty nice.

Growth: Clumper to about 3' tall and wide.

Harvest: Probably best to harvest only during dormant season in late fall and winter? You can steal some roots from the edge of the plant and leave the main clump, or dig out the entire clump for root harvest and division/replanting.

Culture: The literature says full sun to partial shade, but our neighbors have a very happy plant in heavy shade.

Yield: Probably not high; treat the roots as a bonus crop when you want to divide a plant or knock back its size a bit.

Camas - Camassia sp. (INULIN ROOT)

Edibility: Roots cooked. When fully cooked to convert all the inulin into sugars, the roots taste very sweet.

Growth: Spring ephemeral bulbs, growing from early or mid spring through early or mid summer. Foliage generally 1-2' tall, with flower stalks a bit higher.

Harvest: Ideally dig during dormant season (summer through early spring). Leave the smaller bulbs behind to keep the patch going.

Culture: Full to partial sun. Can handle waterlogging during the winter and go dormant for the summer drought.

Solomon's seal - Polygonatum commutatum

Edibility: Young shoots cooked (basically a shade tolerant asparagus substitute). Root cooked (some sources describe a bitterness, but our first sample tasted sweet and delicious!)

Growth: Colony spreading at medium speed, growing to 3' tall.

Harvest: We harvested a small sample in the winter, after a hard freeze. Samuel Thayer only likes the roots in early spring.

Culture: Full shade to partial sun.

Yield: I wouldn't expect a large yield, especially if you're harvesting the shoots as a spring vegetable. But the roots tasted delicious enough for me to look forward to harvesting some from time to time as a means of keeping a patch in check.

Dahlia - Dahlia pinnata , Dahlia rosea (INULIN ROOT)

We grew this a few years ago, but the taste of the roots didn't excite us. The plants failed to regrow from the roots I left behind after the harvest, and we didn't care enough to seek out new starts. However, I've thought it'd be worth exploring available varieties to find some that taste better, and an article by William Woys Weaver confirms my hunch.

Edibility: Flower petals raw, root cooked.

Growth: Clumper to about 3' tall. Top growth sensitive to frost; roots may need some protection to overwinter in the ground.

Harvest: Dig roots as needed any time after top growth dies. May require serious soil disturbance?

Culture: Full sun.

Evening primrose - Oenothera biennis

Edibility: Leaves, flowers, seedpods, and seed raw or cooked. We use leaves and flowers heavily in salads. We haven't harvested many seeds, since they're small and fiddly. Root cooked.

Growth: Clumping biennial self-seeded. Makes basal rosette of leaves the first year, then tall stalk to 4'-5' tall with leaves and flowers the second year.

Harvest: Dig root of first year plant in fall or winter.

Culture: Full sun? Drought tolerant. Seed needs disturbed ground to germinate; harvesting the roots does the tirck.

Creeping bellflower - Campanula rapunculoides

Edibility: Leaves and flowers raw or cooked. I find the leaves to taste slightly unpleasant raw, so I mostly cook them. Roots raw or cooked.

Growth: Aggressive runner to about 2'-3' tall. Died down for s last year in summer drought, then again after hard freeze.

Harvest: We have not found substantial roots at the edge of a patch, only in the center. Roots may be available year round?

Culture: Full sun to full shade, though not sure how well it yields in shade. Drought tolerant (dies down.)

Unknown bellflowers - Campanula sp

I received seed supposedly of Adenophora lilifolia and A. pereskiifolia, but as far as I can tell, both turned out to be some Campanula species. They could be the same species, or maybe two separate but similar species!

Edibility: All Campanula species have edible leaves and flowers, raw or cooked, often mildly sweet. Some species have edible roots, raw or cooked.

Growth: Clumpers to about 2' tall, very slowly spreading. Make many seeds, so may self-seed well. Ours died down with the summer drought, then again with winter freeze.

Harvest: Maybe usable as a summer root? Definitely harvestale in winter.

Culture: Full to part sun. Seems drought tolerant by dying down.

Yield: Doesn't seem high for roots, though we've harvested abundant flowers.

Daylily - Hemerocallis sp (INULIN ROOT)

Edibility: Leaves and young shoots cooked (we haven't tried these.) Flowers, flower buds raw or cooked. Root raw or cooked.

Growth: Medium fast runner, about 3' tall.

Harvest: Roots during dormant season (only?). Maybe year round?

Culture: Full sun to par shade. Drought tolerant.

Yield: Low root yield, more of a bonus crop when you divide or reduce a clump.

Giant sea kale - Crambe cordifolia

Edibility: Flowers raw or cooked, leaves raw (though too tough for me to enjoy them raw) or cooked. Roots cooked, but unpleasantly bitter.

Growth: Clumper to 6' tall and wide.

Culture: The literature says full sun to partial shade, but our neighbors have an extremely happy plant on the north wall of their house.

Yield: Probably not high; grow this primarily for the leaves, with the root as a bonus crop.

Crop summaries: Indian breadroot, Psoralea esculenta and Balsamroots, Balsamorhiza sp

2010-12-14T23:07:00.000-08:00

Indian Breadroot, Psoralea esculenta

I've tried off and on to grow indian breadroot since 2006, and have never successfully established any plants. I direct sowed some seeds when we first moved here in 2006, into brand new beds of imported garden soil mix. (I don't remember the seed source.) Some of the seeds did germinate, but the plants eventually vanished. I don't know what happened, as I didn't do a very good job of keeping track of everything that first year.

I've tried at least two years since then to start the plants in pots and transplant them out. I know in two years I successfully started them, most recently this year with fresh seed from Praire Moon. But every plant I've planted out has failed to thrive, and eventually withered up and died. This wouldn't account for the first year's failure in new garden soil mix, but perhaps the current fungal-dominated nature of the yard doesn't provide the right habitat for these prairie plants? (I did receive inoculant for the batch this year, so they should have had their necessary symbiotic bacteria.) Or perhaps the slugs, which seem to avidly eat any leguminous seedlings, keep killing the breadroots before they can establish?

Balsamroots, Balsamorhiza sp
Similarly, I've tried at least two or three years since 2007 to establish balsamroots here, trying three different species: B. saggitata (National Germplasm Repository source), B. deltoidea (Inside Passage), and B. hookeri (National Germplasm Repository.) As with the indian breadroots, every time I've planted out what seemed like successful starts in pots, they failed to thrive in the ground, and eventually withered away. This year I kept all the starts in their own individual pots, thinking maybe they needed to grow large before being set into the ground. I didn't baby the pots a whole lot, but did keep them watered and with decent sun access, just like all my nursery pots. The balsamroots never grew very large, and many or all seem to have died off. Maybe they simply died off for the summer drought season (they're adapted to dry rocky areas with our summer dearth of rain), and will resume growth in the spring. But I'm not holding my breath. Again, I wonder whether the soil of our yard and the potting soil of our pots lack some associates the plants need to thrive?

I have to say, it's a lot easier to write up the outright failures--much less to say about them! I have a lot more of them to cover, some with more interesting nuances of failure. But I'll also try to put some more time into writing up the successful plants.

Crop summary: Gai Lohn, Brassica oleracea alboglabra

2010-12-14T22:53:00.000-08:00

I've tried two or three different years to grow gai lohn, which Eric Toensmeier in Perennial Vegetables describes as a perennial usually grown as an annual, with potential to be grown in a perennial cropping system. I got seeds from Richters in 2008. I might have tried some direct seeding (if so, nothing came of that), but I definitely got two or three decent starts growing in pots. When I planted those out, only one managed to flower, and it did so as a small, stunted pathetic plant. None of them overwintered.

I don't remember whether I tried to grow them in 2009. If so, they failed.

This year, 2010, I started them in pots again, and got two or three decent ones to plant out. They quickly succumbed to slugs or some other pest.

I give up for now, with the hordes of slugs in this yard. Until I integrate ducks, tender seedlings of brassicas and legumes have a very hard time establishing. For now I'll be content with the sea kales (regular and giant, Crambe maritima and cordifolia), tree collards, and hopefully perennial "Western Front" kale, all of which do suffer somewhat from slug attacks but have already established well enough to at least survive and give some yield. (Our Turkish rocket (Bunias orientalis) plants are also doing fine, with the parent plants even making new volunteer seedlings, but I don't find their leaves very useful. We only need to grow three of them, for their broccoli raab-esque flower buds & flowers.)

Ecoroof Final Planting Plan

2010-10-30T20:20:00.000-07:00

Over the last month, we implented the final stages of the ecoroof: putting up pond liner, then soil, then planting the plants! At some point I'll write up more details on the mechanical design of the ecoroof. With this post I just want to share the final planting plan.

The planting plan images give most plants by latin name. For common names, you can refer to my original planting plan post. Or for common names plus details on edible & other uses, you can look them up in the Plants for a Future database.

The Porch roof measures about 7' x 19', and supports about 8" of soil depth. It slopes from the south (top edge) to the north (bottom edge). It has metal roofs from the rest of the house draining into it from the south and the east. We have a relatively hard time accessing this roof, especially in the rainy months due to the slippery metal roof of the rest of the house. So we designed this to not require harvesting during those months. It should yield dry month harvests of garlic, elephant garlic, and shallots; a number of berries; hopefully some seed crop from perennial flax and Good King Henry; and roots of unknown quality from the Sedum telephium (these may require harvesting in late fall after frosts, so would fall into the rainy season.)

I figured we can walk along the edges of the metal roofs to access the planting areas, so we only needed five "stepping stones" of about 2' x 2' to access the interior. (We're not actually using stepping stones, just marked off areas not planted in the regular crops.)

I divided the roof into roughly 3' x 3' planting squares. The "stepping stones" occur mostly in the lower set of squares, so disproportionately remove planting space from those squares.

The Sunspace roof measures about 13' x 29', and supports about 5.5" of soil. It slopes from the north (top edge) to the south (lower edge). A metal roof from the other part of the house runs into the top edge of the ecoroof.

We have a ladder set up outside our back door to give easy access to this roof, so we designed it to provide several leaf crops (Alliums, violets, Campanulas, and more) for harvest a few times a week. We planted many of the same species as on the porch roof, plus a few new ephemerals (tulips, Triteleia, Brodiaea, Erythronium, muscari, and scilla), breadseed poppy as a seed crop, and a few other miscellaneous plants.

I figured again that we can walk along the edge of the metal roof to access the north edge of the upper planting bed. I set a second main path 4' down the roof to give access to the other side of that planting bed, with keyhole paths going down the roof from that main path to give access to the rest of the lower beds.

Most of the planting patches measure about 3' x 4'.

UPDATE 7-23-11: We wound up planting Agastache foeniculum instead of Hyssopus officinalis. We never planted any tulips. Instead of the scilla, we planted Tigridia pavonia.

For both roofs, we hope to get a little extra summer moisture from the condensation that forms on the metal roof and runs down it into the ecoroof areas. It won't be a lot, but it may help support plants at those edges which otherwise wouldn't survive.

For both roofs, we planted the lower edge with camassia, assuming that the soil will be somewhat boggy but that the camassia can deal with it.

For both roofs, Tulsi wanted the edge plantings to look pretty, since people will see them from the ground. The Camassia for the lower edges met her needs there. For the west edges we planted sedums with nice flowers, daylilies, yellow asphodel, and perennial flax.

Extrafloral nectaries

2010-10-05T13:01:00.000-07:00

Just learned something new while watching the videos of Will Hooker's college permaculture class. Many plants have extrafloral nectaries (ie, not flowers) which exude nectar. Scientists theorize the plants do this as a symbiotic relationship with beneficial insects such as ants and predatory wasps, who keep other herbivorous insects in check.

So for permaculture design, which emphasizes scattering beneficial insectary plants through your garden or food forest, this greatly enlarges the number of species you can use to achieve this goal. I suspect that if you have a wide diversity of plants in your system anyway, then you might not even have to deliberately plan any insectaries for nectar. You'd still need to plan out the pollen-providing plants, though. Of course this depends on more information on when exactly the extrafloral nectaries produce; I don't know whether the plants exude their nectar all the time they're in leaf, or just in certain seasons, or only if they're suffering from predation, or what. I'll have to start observing plants to figure this out!

Extrafloral nectary plants by family

Extrafloral nectary plants by genus

Question: Fragaria chiloensis for fruit, and largest bulbed spring ephemerals?

2010-09-30T13:16:00.000-07:00

I'm putting these questions "out there" because I can't find much info through the research I've done. Hopefully someone will stumble upon these and share some good info!

Does anyone know of any selections of Fragaria chiloensis (the native coast strawberry) with better or worse fruit production? Or just have any experience growing them for fruit? These plants should survive on an ecoroof, so I'd like to use them as a groundcover between taller plants.

And, any thoughts on the largest sized corms (bulbs) of the edible spring ephemerals Camassia, Triteleia, Brodiaea, Erythronium, and Dichelostemma? Or have extra corms to share or trade? These should also work well on an ecoroof, plus they fill a useful understory niche in forest gardens, so it seems well worth identifying and breeding for larger bulbs. Here's a little rundown of what I've come across, though I have little personal experience:

-Camassia: Eric Toensmeier in _Perennial Vegetables_ says C. cusickii bulbs get two to three times as large as those of C. quamash.

-Erythronium: Samuel Thayer in _Nature's Garden_ says the western species E. grandiflorum has larger bulbs than most other species. Natives would sometimes harvest hundreds of pounds of them at a time in the spring. By comparison, it takes Thayer about an hour to pick one cup of his native E. americanum.

-Triteleia: T. laxa "Humbolt Star" is supposed to get huge bulbs instead of making many offsets. So it'd be a lot easier to harvest, though you'd have to pay more attention to allowing for good reseeding.

Sustainable and humane rabbit keeping

2010-09-29T20:43:00.000-07:00

Two aspects of common small-scale rabbit operations have kept me from seriously considering keeping them for meat: the prison model (each adult rabbit in his or her own tiny cage, allowed each other's company only to mate) and the importation of alfalfa pellets or hay as feed. I dislike having to buy in feed for our animals, as I'm a cheapskate by nature, and I don't know any easy efficient ways to close the nutrient loop to make the importation of such resources sustainable. We get around that problem with our chickens by only feeding them waste products from civilization--excess bread donated by the bakery down the street, and produce scraps from the local food co-op. But I don't know of any waste streams to tap for protein-rich rabbit food, and I can't even come up with a good model to have the rabbits free-range for some of their own food.

I assume I don't have to go into any detail about why the one-rabbit-per-cage model turns me off. I don't visit commercial animal prisons (AKA "zoos") and I don't intend to start one in our yard.

Many months ago I stumbled across this article (PDF) that changed my perception of the food supply for domesticated rabbits. Basically, researchers fed Soviet Chinchilla rabbits nothing but black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) leaves at a rate of about 14 ounces per rabbit per day for 56 days, and the rabbits not only didn't die, but actually gained an average 10.4 grams per rabbit per day!

Black locusts grow like weeds in our yard. We have an existing hedgerow of them which we plan to coppice for rot-resistant lumber and for firewood. Now when I look up into those trees, instead of leaves I see rabbits all over the branches! The locusts also grow like weeds through the rest of the yard, popping up all over the place and needing the occasional cutting or yanking. Definitely a low-maintenance supply of leaves! Obviously we wouldn't want to feed the rabbits 100% black locust, but it could probably form the backbone of their food supply. We can supplement by growing some alfalfa (we have some growing already for the chickens, but they don't touch the stuff?!), comfrey (I haven't read it yet, but the freely downloadable book Russian Comfrey by Lawrence Hills goes into great detail on its use as animal fodder), the nitrogen-fixing tiny floating aquatic plant azolla,and possibly Paulownia tree leaves (supposed to be good fodder for rabbits, chickens, and other livestock--though again our chickens haven't taken to them in my couple of tries to feed it to them.) And of course miscellaneous excess greens from our garden or trimmings from veggies could go to the rabbits.

This method will take a bit of time per day to cut the fresh material and take it to the rabbits, but as long as enough black locust trees are managed properly in rotation, it should provide fairly efficient ongoing leaf cuts, while also providing firewood a bit at a time.

Inspired by this new information on rabbit feed possibilities, I did some research into alternatives to the prison model, and quickly found a few references to keeping rabbits in colonies. I haven't researched enough to really say much about it, or even to provide links to the best sources, so just search for yourself if curious. Basically you just have to provide a predator-proof fenced area over soil, or a decent sized building with plenty of straw, and the does will create their own burrows and set things up how they like. You can provide nest boxes, which the does may or may not use. Some people successfully allow their buck to live full-time with the does; others find that the buck over-breeds the does, not allowing them any down-time between litters to recover from the last batch. Of course you still have to provide food and water, but you can do so for the whole colony at once instead of having to put food into individual cages or buy expensive automatic systems.

My first thought for our yard was that we could keep a rabbit colony on our garage roof, which has convenient access to overhanging black locusts. We could also provide a ramp to the ecoroof over the sunspace, and occasionally allow the rabbits up onto the roof to graze. Just an idea for now; we'll see if and when I have time to pursue this further! (Our highest priority homestead expansion right now is to add ducks; the slug populations have exploded this year and made it nearly impossible for us to grow any annual veggies. Good thing we hardly bother with them anyway, but still...)

Polyculture summary: stinging nettle & Ribes sp

2010-09-04T22:05:00.000-07:00

Years ago, I read somewhere (maybe in Patrick Whitefield's How to Make a Forest Garden?) that Robert Hart (food forest originator and pioneer in England) allowed the naturally occurring nettles in his garden to grow up through his gooseberries and currants. The nettles provided many functions, including their normal nutrient accumulation, caterpillar host, delicious human spring green vegetable, and host for early harmless aphid species allowing aphid predator populations to build up in preparation for arrival of pest aphids on other plants. But Hart specifically allowed them to grow amongst his Ribes species because gooseberries and currants can take a lot of shade, such that the nettle supposedly didn't interfere with their crop, and the nettles kept birds out of the berries. Once harvest time arrived, Hart would cut the nettles down and use them as rich mulch, and harvest the berries.

I planted Urtica dioica (seeds from Horizon Herbs) nettle amongst our gooseberries and currants as a precaution against bird predation, and as a way to work nettles into the yard in a useful way. So far we haven't had problems with birds eating anything in the yard, except for scrub jays going for our hazelnuts. We get some birds in the yard, eating some seeds (bushtits eating parsnips, goldfinches & nuthatches & downy woodpeckers eating mullein), some cherries, some berries; but so far no major wipe-out-the-crop harvests. We don't mind sharing some!

Unfortunately, our Ribes have not done very well in terms of crop yield. We planted them in fall of 2006, so have had three years for possible harvests. I forget whether anything notable happened in 2008, but they may still have been establishing. Last year (2009), they got hit badly by an outbreak of currant sawfly caterpillars, who feed on the leaves of currants and gooseberries and stripped some of our bushes almost totally bare of leaves. I noticed their frass (poop) early on, but thought it was dirt the chickens had kicked up onto the leaves. Not until a week later did I notice the leaves being devoured and associate the frass with the worms. I immediately started hand-picking worms to introduce them to the chickens; then started shaking the upper branches to send worms to the ground for the chickens to devour; and after a few days trained the chickens to look on the lower leaves for worms. The chickens did regular patrol of the bottoms of the shrubs from then on, and I shook down the upper branches every few days, and we got the sawfly population under control to the point where the bushes all recovered fine, but they didn't bear any fruit last year. Note: I don't attribute these sawfly woes to the nettle; I just figured I should write up this experience while I'm at it.

This year, we had a few sawflies, but not too bad. We had hundreds of gooseberry fruits developing, and all looked promising. Then, while we were out of town for a week, much of the developing fruit vanished! Maybe birds came through and ate them (though I doubt it, since they hadn't ripened yet.) Maybe the bushes just dropped their fruit in the same way many fruit trees do a "June drop" of poorly pollinated or over-abundant fruit. (I heard from someone else in town that their gooseberries did the same thing.) But possibly we had problematic competition between the nettles and the Ribes, for either sunlight (seems unlikely given the shade-tolerance of Ribes), nutrients such as nitrogen (possible, though I do pee on the nettles & Ribes a lot, and the nettles are supposed to be deep-rooted and supplying nutrients to a polyculture), or water (most likely, since we don't water much during our three month drought season.) Even without specific disease or pest problems, our Ribes wound up looking pretty ragged by now, with curled and browned and maybe some yellowed leaves. So between the poor fruit yields and the general sadness of the plants, something isn't working.

Nettles are a pain. Duh. Managing nettles growing through fairly densely branched Ribes shrubs is an awkward pain. Trying to maneuver my hands down into the bottom of a sharp-thorned gooseberry bush to cut down nettles is a pain from two fronts.

Nettles grow fast! They stayed quite manageable for the first two or three years, but this year they've gotten established enough to really take off. They've spread runners into the paths (both the small 1.5' paths between Ribes shrubs in the tree understories, and into our main 2' and 4' paths between trees). It now requires more than an annual chopping of the nettles to keep them out of our way; I have to go in every week or two in the spring to cut them out of the paths. Of course, a lot of that maintenance dovetails well with harvesting them as my favorite spring vegetable. But once they start to flower, you're supposed to stop eating them because their calcium oxalate crystals can damage your kidneys, so at that point I'm just chopping (ouch! it stung me. ouch! damn gooseberry thorn.) the nettles to keep them out of the paths and try to open up some sunlight for the Ribes. And this kind of work, though it occurs in shorts & t-shirt warm weather, really demands pants and long sleeves to minimize masochism--which means I have to dress up special for the job. I haven't dressed up real special since I got old enough for my mom to stop dragging me to church; and I haven't dressed up semi special since I quit my corporate business casual job, and I don't often get around to dressing up special for the nettles either. So the paths get more and more overtaken and the Ribes seem to suffer and we got hardly any berries this year.

When we do get around to chopping back the nettle, we're now ripping out as much of the root as we can get, to slow it down a lot more than just cutting the aboveground growth would. I don't think we'll try to totally eradicate it, but we'll do more to set it back. In my next yard design, I'll definitely still include nettle, but as its own patch where I can just chop it back with a machete from the edges to keep it in check, rather than having to maneuver through and around other vegetation or branches to get at the nettles. I might try planting a shade tolerant low-growing evergreen (violets?) to provide a solid ground cover through the full yard. And for Ribes, I'll try a less robust and non-painful vine--perhaps annual garden peas or annual or perennial beans or Apios sp (groundnut) or Lathyrus tuberosus (earth chestnut - I did plant this originally in 2007 with the Ribes, but they've never taken off--maybe from chicken abuse, or maybe not enough water. Two plants were still alive early this spring, but growing slowly and definitely getting shaded out by the nettles. I wasn't able to find the plants a month ago.)

In conclusion, in the future, unless we have active bird predation problems, I would not plant a combination of nettles and berry shrubs again. Especially not nettles & thorny shrubs!

Harvest log update

2010-09-04T21:16:00.000-07:00

Brief comments on our harvest log (see May 25th post for my original description of the log):

We've gotten good boosts in our calorie harvests since then due to berries (about one eighth of our calories, heavily weighted towards raspberries) and garlic (another one eighth of our calories). We got a decent crop of nearly 8 pounds of cherries from one of our mature seedling (bird-planted) trees, but that only gave us 2000 calories, enough to feed me for one day. (We did harvest the cherry seeds for another 1000 calories.) We've harvested almost 15 pounds of tomatoes, but it turns out they don't have very many calories--less than 100 per pound. We were forced to harvest our small hazelnut crop early, as the scrub jays had begun to spend time in the small trees each morning. I couldn't quite tell whether they actually took any nuts yet, but I think I noticed slightly fewer nuts each morning. I assume our harvest of green hazelnuts doesn't yield as many calories (less fat, less protein?) as properly ripe nuts would. We've gotten close to 3000 calories from potatoes, with a lot more still in the ground, and I expect we'll easily have 50 pounds of jerusalem artichokes and many pounds more of skirret come fall, which will help fill the root crop gap I mentioned in my first harvest log post. One of our two persimmon trees has perhaps 50 fruits developing on it, which should give us a large yield of relatively calorie-dense food.

More than a third of our calories still come from animal products (eggs, three dead chickens, squirrels and rats) which (as discussed in my first harvest log post) are not fed entirely from our yard, so the calorie accounting gets kind of murky with that.

Our harvest of greens has dropped off, caused by at least three factors: I got tired of eating so many of them; the rains of late spring and all of June kept the leaves wet and heavy but now they're dry and light weight; and I've been throwing myself back into the house project and haven't taken the time to pick salads and cooking greens each day. I now estimate I could reasonably eat a year-round average of 8 ounces of greens per day.

We haven't tried to do a formal accounting of our time like we have with the harvests, but we estimate we spend at most an hour a day between the two of us to maintain and harvest the yard, including chicken and bee care. Not bad--if we could scale that up directly, it would mean about three hours a day to supply all the calories for one person. (This doesn't include time to prep things such as cleaning roots.) I've felt disappointed by just how few calories we're getting at this time, and by our yields of certain things, but I feel very happy with the input:output ratio we've achieved.

Crop summary: Woodland chervil, Anthriscus sylvestris

2010-06-03T21:47:00.000-07:00

(Picture shows black locust canopy with annual garden peas on the left, and woodland chervil on the right, taller with lacy leaves)

I got excited about Anthriscus sylvestris, "Woodland chervil" or "Cow parsley" after reading Patrick Whitefield's "perennial alternative to annual chervil" description in How To Make a Forest Garden. I eventually established some plants in the heavily shaded area under our back yard fence-line black locust trees, where an initial few plants have multiplied into a dense thicket of mature plants and young seedlings. This proves woodland chervil's ability to grow and even thrive in dry shade--their position doesn't get much irrigation water from us, and the locust canopy above intercepts a lot of the scant late spring/early summer rainfall along with casting its dappled shade.

Woodland chervil puts out its carrot family flowers very early in spring, making it (with Myrrhis odorata, sweet cicely) a valuable beneficial insect nectary for that crucial time.

Unfortunately, the leaves, whether fresh and young, or older and mature, have a strong mostly unpleasant taste to my palate. I don't taste any of the aniseed flavor the annual chervil has, and notice that Ken Fern describes the leaves as tasting "somewhat less than wonderful." So although I might throw the leaves into a mixed salad in early spring when I don't have much else available, I don't see myself ever using the leaves very heavily.

I did plant a purple-leaved plant someone gave me, which she called woodland chervil. The leaves look much less divided to me than the regular plants, but otherwise I can believe I have the purple "Ravenswing" variety. The purple leaves taste much better to me than the regular plants, such that I think I could use them in bulk in a salad. But I need to verify that I'm working with the Anthriscus sylvestris species before I eat much of it.

I planted the original plants in the backyard chicken area, but just on the other side of a fence; they would not have established without protection. The mature plants might now coexist with the chickens if I removed the fence, but I'm sure their self-seeding would come to an end with all the scratching disturbance. Our chickens occasionally ate some of the regular green leaves early in the season, but they definitely don't devour the plants. So far my efforts to interest them in the green seeds have failed. I'll keep trying, especially with the mature seeds, in the hope that the plant may provide useful calorie-rich chicken fodder via its seeds.

I have nibbled a little myself on the immature seed. I haven't found any mentions of edibility of the seed, so I've only taken a few tastes so far, but I haven't suffered any ill effects. The seeds have some of the same flavor as the leaves, but not as strong and missing some crucial element that makes the leaves taste bad. I can see myself using the seeds in some bulk as a spice or garden snack. As the earliest seeds have matured, they've developed more fiber, so this use may end once they've passed beyond their green stage. Still, I sampled my first seeds almost three weeks ago, and the plants have more green seeds now and flowers getting ready to produce more seeds from scratch, so the season lasts a long time. Plus even fibrous mature seeds may work OK cooked in a dish.

Today I sampled two tiny roots for the first time, which Plants for a Future and other sources specifically list as edible. I really liked them! I took a couple of nibbles raw (though PFAF only lists them edible cooked), and found they had some of the same flavor as the leaves and seeds, but not terribly strong, and not with the extra unpleasant twist the leaves contain. I tasted some sweetness, too. I cooked the remaining root for a few minutes, then sampled again, and thought they'd lost some of their sweetness leaving them with just their strange but not-too-strong flavor. I don't think I would want to eat a big mess of 'em on their own. But I could easily see mixing them in with other roots or in a dish of some kind. We have a lot of young seedlings growing which will need thinning out for their own good, so I look forward to experimenting more with these and seeing how big their roots become and whether the taste changes.

I think I'll try introducing these into the shady, dry NE corner of our front yard, also under black locusts along the fence line. I'll use the better-tasting purple leaved variety if I can verify the species, since I would have much easier access to these plants in my daily greens-picking rounds than to the plants in the back yard. I haven't really figured out a good way to use that front NE area, but now I'm thinking a combination of woodland chervil; the existing edible rooted money plant (Lunaria annua, though the roots I've pulled out have never seemed very big); ground bean/hog peanut (Amphicarpaea bracteata, already planted there and trying to establish a colony); and the native shoot/root/berry crop false solomon's seal (Maianthemum racemosum) may fill in the area well as an understory to the tree canopies.

Harvest log

2010-05-25T11:54:00.001-07:00

Link to Harvest log

Since April 15th, we've weighed and recorded what we've harvested from our yard, to begin to quantify our caloric yield. We realize that we have way more greens than we need, and that the greens don't provide very many calories. We do not weigh or record excess greens that we cut down and use as mulch or feed to the chickens. So the calorie yield would be higher if we measured those as a potential export crop--but our focus is on feeding one or two people a balanced diet from this yard, so we're just tracking what we're actually eating and using.

We need to get more root crops in, but even those wouldn't get our calorie yield up very high--I don't see us eating more than 1 pound of roots per day per person, which would only supply 300 calories or so per person per day. Our berry crops will start yielding soon, which will increase our calorie harvests. I don't expect much from our young fruit trees this year--our Hollywood plum got hit hard by aphids and has dropped all but three of its plums; our Oullins plum in heavy shade only made a handful of flowers and I don't see any fruit, and our Stella fig has died back to the ground (I think I made a mistake cutting off its strong shoots from last year to propagate it). We might get some nuts in the fall, assuming we can get the harvest timing figured out before the squirrels & jays get them.

For this yard to provide a balanced, full-calorie diet, we'll need to focus on calorie-dense foods--seeds, nuts, eggs, and meat. We have four hazels, an english walnut, a black walnut, and a chestnut planted. (Plus one small live and one large dead yellowhorn, neither of which do us much good for a while--I'm pretty sure we need a pair for cross pollination.) I want to experiment with harvesting and using carrot seeds this year--fennel, coriander, Bunium bulbocastanum, maybe others.

We have a small ongoing egg yield, and have harvested two chickens in the last 40 days. These have provided more than half our harvested calories. But, probably half the calories we feed the chickens come from off-site resources from civilization's waste streams--not sustainable long term, and not indicative of what this yard can actually support. Also, we didn't harvest the two hens as part of a plan; one got sick (maybe a broken egg inside her), and a raccoon killed another before our neighbors chased him or her off, saving the hen carcass for us to eat. So our laying flock has dropped from 5 to 3 hens, which puts a big crimp in our ongoing egg calorie harvest. We did just get 4 new baby chicks, so the egg yield should pick up in 5-6 months.

I welcome questions and comments--I can add a lot more about my thoughts on our calorie measurements as I go if people want more. This measuring & calculating exercise has really helped me figure out some of the realities of feeding ourselves from this site.

Crop summary: Skirret, Sium sisarum

2010-05-21T09:54:00.001-07:00

We've grown skirret in our yard since the first year we moved here. I obtained seed from the National Germplasm Repository for research purposes, and direct seeded them March or April 2006. Several plants grew up just fine, and betweeen propagating those vegetatively and volunteers appearing from seed, we've expanded to two or three dozen plants in the yard.

I haven't paid close attention to plant size, so don't take this as gospel. But first year plants reach maybe 18-24" tall and 18" wide. Presumably plants growing from seed attain a smaller size than those with the headstart of vegetative propagation. Our two or three year old plants grow much larger; I measured a two year plant just now and it's grown to 3' tall and 2.5' wide. If I recall correctly, a three year old plant last year in almost full sun reached 5' or 6' tall by the time it flowered in July. In that case, the height proved problematic--the plant put on much of its growth in the dry weeks of June, receiving neither rain nor irrigation. When we started irrigating with sprinklers in early July, the weight of the water bent the tall plant over, making it sprawl into the path. So this year we'll either irrigate sooner so the plants grow accustomed to the practice, or we'll stake up the tallest plants, especially those unsupported by other surrounding vegetation.

Skirret makes the typical carrot family flowers, which provide food for beneficial insects such as predatory wasps. Last year the plants in our yard began blooming July 4th; in 2007 they began July 11th. I didn't keep track of how long the bloom season lasted. It produces copious quantities of seed. I haven't seen any references to people or chickens eating the seeds, but I'd like to experiment with them, since they could provide substantial calories.

Right now we grow skirret to eat the octopus like clump of individual fingerlike roots, each up to 12" long and up to 3/4" thick, all branching out from the crown. We dig up the clump, shake or wash off a lot of the dirt, and cut off the roots from the underside. Then we divide and replant the crown, which has made 6-18 vegetative shoots which can be individually planted out, or just replanted as a group. Skirret also self seeds itself very well; it has begun volunteering itself throughout our yard near parent plants. If you want to propagate the plant more quickly, you could divide after the first year of growth and either eat the roots or replant them with the crown divisions to give the divided plants faster growth the next season. I don't remember whether our first year plants from seed or divisions usually flower the first year or not until the second, so I'm not sure how quickly you'll get seed production.

The pictures above came from first or maybe second year plants I took the pictures several years ago so I don't remember much detail, such as whether I had already removed any of the roots from the clump. Most of the plants I harvest these days have 5x to 10x that many roots attached.

We usually steam the roots for 10 minutes or so which sweetens them up even more than in their raw state, but they make a fine raw snack too. They taste like a carrot/parsnip combination, and leave me feeling well fed and full. Most descriptions of the root mention a woody core at the center of the root, but we find only our thinner, smaller roots have the woody core. We rarely mix skirret into other dishes, but if we do, we just use the fatter roots without any woody core, and save the thinner roots for eating on their own, by stripping the flesh from the woody core with our teeth. Usually we just steam a big mess of fat and thin roots and eat them as a side dish.

Plants grown for one year make smaller and fewer roots with higher likelihood of the woody core. So we usually grow them for two or three years before harvesting. I realized this year that skirret would probably work well grown along with cinnamon vines (Dioscorea batatas) which also works best if you let it grow for 2-3 years before digging and harvesting the roots. Dioscorea batatas shoots emerge very late in spring, which would give skirret a chance to use available sunlight for a few months before receiving light shade from the cinnamon vine growing up the bamboo poles we normally provide.

Our skirret has thrived with minimum care; it seems to handle drought to moderate moisture, and full sun to heavy shade just fine. I haven't paid close enough attention to harvests of roots in different conditions to know whether better growing conditions results in more or better (less woody) roots. Nor have I weighed any of my harvests to calculate productivity per square foot per year. I'll probably do some of that this fall.

Skirret stores in the ground through the winter. We harvest skirret as needed in its dormant season from fall to early spring, up until the new shoots get about 6" inches tall. I just noticed a description at Jonathan Bate's Permaculture Nursery saying "Roots can be detached and eaten fresh. Root harvest will not harm the plant." I read that to mean you could detach roots during the growing season by digging at the clump from the side and eat them on an ongoing basis. But when I tried it a few days ago, it yielded pithy soft roots which had no flavor and lots of fiber. I might try more such experiments later this summer and into the fall to find out when you can start harvesting decent roots.

We tried growing skirret with the chickens, protecting them for the first year in a cage, then digging out half the clump to eat while leaving half the clump in the ground. I thought perhaps the half left in the ground would grow vigorously enough to overcome chicken abuse. But the chickens won. We have chickens free-ranging our entire back yard all the time; this method would probably work better in a rotating paddock chicken setup, where plants would have a solid 3 weeks to grow before the chickens returned. I might try the experiment again with even better established plants.

As a tall clumping plant with plenty of foliage up high, skirret seems to grow fine with shorter plants all around it, such as peppermint or annual weeds. It also holds it own for us amongst other tall perennials such as fennel, lemon balm, and french sorrel.

We sell seeds mail order or in person, and (when available) sell starts for pickup only. See Discount Permaculture for more info.

As always, Plants for a Future has more helpful information on skirret.

Why our tribe members should have a general skill base

2010-04-14T11:37:00.000-07:00

Ran Prieur posted this which really resonated with me, and helps clarify one of the needs Tulsi and I listed in our Needs/Wants list on this blog: "All tribe members reasonably well-versed in all survival skills". Specifically, this statement by Ran encapsulates my thought: "I can see only one way to have a non-repressive society of any size. Every person has to have the ability, whether or not they use it, to connect their work (or the work of their close friends and family) directly to their food (and also shelter)."

Central powers (whether a civilized government or a tribe chief) have far less ability to control you if you know how to procure everything you need. Obviously you still need access to land, but we plan to take care of that part by moving to fairly remote wilderness with lots of land and few people. So as long as we each know how to procure food and water, and make shelter and clothing, we always have the option to move away from unwanted domination.

As a small note, I disagree with Ran's belief that complex human cultures are inevitable, and his belief that it will be impossible to limit cultures to hunter-gatherer tribes and permaculture villages in the future. So I'm not trying to promote his discussion and exploration of ways to have sustainable cities and universities and airplanes and computers. I just agree with his point that "For any system to control you, it must stand between your work and your food."

A related thread I've been thinking about: Sustainability more or less requires direct relationship with the beings you're using for your life. How can you give back more than you take when you take from other landbases you never visit, or from parts of your own landbase you rarely visit and don't really understand? Conceivably you could maintain sustainability by trading surplus you gather sustainably directly with other people who are doing the same. But given the unsustainable relationship almost every civilized human has with their landbase, it will take a lot of trust that your trade partner knows how to give more than they take to their landbase. I think any introduction of a middleman makes sustainability exponentially harder, since suddenly you're not even dealing with someone with a direct dependence on their landbase. The middleman profits from trade and probably does not have a direct connection to the landbase of either originating trade partner.

A section in Alan Weisman's Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World has really stuck with me. I don't remember the full details and don't have the book handy to refresh my memory, so feel free to correct me if I butcher important details. As I recall, the village was paying residents in the surrounding areas to harvest a naturally growing plant which hadn't had economic value in the past. As Gaviotas ramped up their use of the plant, they had to start employing middlemen to find more sources for the plant. At some point they discovered that at least one of the middlemen was procuring the plant from people who were obviously overharvesting it in their area. Although Gaviotas was able to detect and belatedly correct this excess harvest, I have to wonder how many other instances they didn't know about. If you need a middleman because you can't trade directly with the people supplying you materials, how can you expect to monitor all those sources for sustainable harvesting?

OK, enough theory--time to get out into the sunny garden!

The Art of Not Being Governed

2010-02-14T16:10:00.000-08:00

I just finished reading James Scott's book The Art of Not Being Governed, an examination of cultures of resistance to state and civilization, mostly focused on hill and mountain peoples of southeast Asia. I wound up skimming through some parts of the books, where the subject matter didn't interest me enough to plow through the somewhat academic and dry prose, but much of the content gave me some good insights into how we might craft our own lifestyle as a tribe to minimize state encroachment on our freedoms.

Before I go into some of the strategies which might help us, I'll mention an interesting but not directly relevant argument from the book. Civilized lowland valley farmers in southeast Asia have long considered their upland neighbors as primitive ancestral relics who stayed in the hills to continue their nomadic or semi-nomadic, horticultural (as distinct from agricultural) lifestyles while their descendents moved down into the valleys and progressed into civilized life. From my layman perspective on popular anthropological accounts of various hunter-gatherer and horticultural tribes, it seems the authors and the general public make the same assumptions or tell the same origin stories about non-settled tribes in other parts of the world--their cultures have endured for thousands of years in roughly the same form, lasting this long because they worked sustainably with their landbase. Scott makes a compelling argument in his book that, at least in the case of upland southeast Asia, the groups living there have formed and chosen cultures over hundreds or one thousand plus years of intertwined coexistence with civilization. The "friction of terrain" of steep mountains, dense jungles, malarial swamps, etc limited the reach of states, creating "shatter zones" of refuge. Millions of people chose Daniel Quinn's option of "walking away" from civilization, whether refugees of war or famine, escaped slaves, or peasants who decided the benefits of civilization didn't justify the taxes, corvee (forced) labor, dangers of plague, mass famine, war and conscription, and so on.

In good times for the states, and in good and bad times as a result of slavery, many hill people moved into the valleys to replenish the unsustainable population base of civilization. (Apparently, in southeast asian civilizations, and in western civilizations until about 200-300 years ago, civilized people died out faster than they could reproduce--civilizations could only keep themselves going by continuous population raids of mostly slaves from the hinterlands.) Waves of refugees would either integrate into existing hill populations, or push those populations further up into the mountains, creating complex frequently changing populations of no firm ethnic identity or tribal unity; just people adapting to pressures and circumstance. These people did not necessarily lack the knowledge of farming, hierarchical social structure, domestication of animals, literacy and so on. Rather, they chose to incorporate or leave out different elements to support the relationship to civilization that made the most sense to them in their situation. It makes me wonder how many of the "primitive" tribes of other areas of the world in fact have the same complex history of interactions with and partial origins in other collapsed civilizations. (The author specifically mentions the Siriono of Bolivia, whom Allan Holmberg in Nomads of the Longbow described as primitive, timeless hunter gatherers "apparently lacking the ability to make fire or cloth, innumerate, having no domestic animals or developed cosmology...Paleolithic survivors living in a veritable state of nature". New information since his book has definitively shown them to have formerly lived as crop-growing villagers until influenza & smallpox and enemy attacks with the risk of slavery led them to abandon their crops and become fully nomadic around 1920.)

Now on to lessons we can use for shaping our own choices of how to subsist and relate to civilization. Note that I don't much fear a scenario of zombie hordes from the cities pillaging the countryside for potatoes. Instead, I expect the greatest dangers to our freedom to come, as it presently does, from the monopoly of force of civilization. I think about the adaptations below primarily in terms of resisting gunpoint taxes, tribute, forced labor, etc, not in terms of evading individual people or loosely organized bands (though the principles will help with those sorts of relations, too.)

"Escape Crops"

Horticultural (such as permaculturally designed) cultivation of crops can support mobility and freedom from civilization. "Escape crops" meet one or more of these criteria:

Well adapted to terrain difficult to access - high rugged mountains, swamps, deltas, etc
Staggered maturity to avoid easy harvesting of large quantities all at once
Easily hidden
Fast growing
Requiring little care
Little value per unit weight and volume (not worth transporting great distances)
Grow below ground (root crops)

State repelling features

Physically mobile group, widely dispersed, likely to fission into new and smaller units when under external pressure. This probably requires skill in hunting and gathering, nomadic pastoralism, or dispersed horticultural cultivation of escape crops.
Living far from centers of control, or in areas like roadless rugged mountains where "friction of terrain" increases the effective distance.
Highly egalitarian social structure which doesn't allow the state to get a foot in the door by making deals with a single person of power and influence. Elements which support such an egalitarian social structure:
- Radical instability of tribal structure and identity
- Autonomy of local groups
- Capacity to shift to new territory and alternate subsistence strategies quickly
- Ability to divide into small independent units whenever advantageous
- Common property resources such as pasture, hunting grounds, and potential swiddens allows groups to strike out on their own and impede development of large, permanent distinctions in wealth and status characteristic of inheritable private property
- Mixed portfolio of subsistence strategies -- foraging, shifting cultivation, hunting, trade, livestock raising, and sedentary agriculture
- Different social relations, settlement patterns, and cooperation structures arise based on those different methods

After reading this book, I feel even more confident about the value of our plan to cgreate a permaculture homestead adjacent to national forest for hunting and gathering. That gives us secure "owned" property to allow us to experiment with crops and have a stable home base, while providing us the "commons" to allow relatively easy dispersal and fissioning once we have the necessary skills and if and when it becomes necessary or desirable.

Ecoroof Planting Plan

2009-12-01T23:22:00.001-08:00

We just submitted a grant for putting ecoroofs onto our house, carport, and garage. I thought our conceptual approach and plant list may help other people contemplating ecoroofs, or those with thin soils for whatever reason. (Someone on the Portland Permaculture Guild list just asked about plants for a site with a few inches of soil over compacted gravel, so I sent her my plant list a
s a starting point.)

I selected the plants in the plant list below from books on ecoroofs, and from drought-tolerant plants listed in the Plants for a Future database and Martin Crawford's Ground Covers booklet. Many of the drought tolerant plants may survive drought by sending down deep roots, which won't work on the ecoroof, so many of my selections may fail.

Our grant proposal "Planting Plan" follows:

Overview

We consider the ecoroofs "Zone 2", a permaculture concept referring to areas accessed once or twice a week (as opposed to "Zone 1" areas of daily access where you would grow salad greens and so on). We'll grow crops which require relatively infrequent maintenance and harvest. Suitable crops include bulbs and other root crops, medicinals and herbs harvested for drying or other storage techniques, berries, and seeds for eating or animal fodder.

In our yard, we're experimenting with polycultures of perennial vegetables, trying to include nutrient accumulators, nitrogen fixers, beneficial insect attractors, aromatic pest confusers, ground covers, tall clumpers, and vines in patches through the entire garden. Given the limited species pallette for the ecoroof and given that we know even less about species interactions on an ecoroof than on the ground, we'll start with experimentation with simple polycultures of two plants at a time. Generally we'll aim to have a solid mat of low growing ground covers with taller clumping plants growing up through them. We'll try different plants in different combinations, and try different plants in different microclimates of aspect, soil moisture, and shade availability. As we learn what works well together and as plants volunteer themselves in new areas, we'll evolve more complex polycultures of more than two species.

We will design for year-round plant growth on the ecoroofs. In some places we'll use evergreen species, and in others we'll use two rounds of plants, for warm season growth and then for cool season/winter growth. In our regular garden we fill the winter niche with a combination of food crops of garlic and other Alliums, cover crops of fava beans and others, and self-seeding volunteers (such as the salad greens Montia sp, Barbarea verna, popweed [Cardamine unknown], Lapsana communis, and Lamium purpureum).

Seasonal Growth

Winter

On the ecoroof we'll focus the winter crop on garlic, multiplier onions, shallots, and other Alliums which can grow over the winter and produce bulbs for later harvest. We'll also try some chard and kale, and maybe other greens to allow for a once or twice a week visit to the roof to harvest a salad or a bowl of cooking greens at a time. This seems the most efficient way to supplement our normal daily-use winter garden on the ground.

Spring Into Summer

Many "spring ephemeral" bulbs native to the West should work well on the ecoroof. Others have already reported that Camassia grows well on ecoroofs. We'll also experiment with the edible bulb producing genuses Triteleia, Brodiaea, Dichelostemma, Fritillaria, Scilla, and Muscari, many or all of which contain species of similar life cycle to Camassia: leafing out in early spring and dying back with the onset of our summer droughts. These should provide calorie rich bulbs without requiring additional irrigation. We can harvest these as soon as they go dormant, or wait til the fall or winter.

We will also experiment, especially in early years while we wait for the ecoroof to fully fill in, with growing baby carrots and perhaps other "baby" annual roots, taking advantage of the prime spring growing season before the ecoroof gets baked in the summer.

Summer and Fall

The ground covers should persist through summer and fall. In places where our spring ephemeral bulbs have died back, ground covers may be the only plants growing. In other places we'll have taller plants which also persist into fall.

Fall Into Winter

We'll plant our garlic and other Alliums, and sow seeds. Seed sowing will work best in conjunction with harvest of root crops, disturbing the soil and setting back the ground covers enough to open niches for the seeds to utilize.

Implementation Schedule

To save on plant costs, for many plants we'll purchase fewer starts than ultimately needed (especially of the quickly spreading ground covers), and propagate them from divisions, seeds, and bulb offsets once they establish. In the meantime, we'll plant more heavily with annual crops such as garlic, baby carrots, and maybe even some spring greens to use the open space and minimize its colonization by unwanted volunteers. This will also allow us to experiment with a large number of species to see which succeed and which fail; after the first year or two those which succeed will have proven themselves and begun offering propagation material to fill in the areas of plants which failed.

Potential Species Lists

(still a work in progress):

Ground Covers / Low Plants

Rubus nepalensis
R. tricolor
R. hispidus
R. illecebrosus
R. irenaeus
R. pentalobus
Astragalus glycyphyllos (Milk vetch)
Montia perfoliata (Miner's lettuce)
Montia sibirica (Siberian miner's lettuce)
Valerianella locusta (Corn salad)
Cornus canadensis (Bunchberry)
Lotus corniculatus (Prostrate bird's food trefoil, especially "Plena" low-growing variety)
Sempervivum unknown (Hen and chicks)
Thymus sp (T. praecox, T. x citriodorus, T. pulegioides, and others)
Origanum vulgare (Creeping oregano)
Campanula poscharskyana (Trailing bellflower)
C. portenschlagiana (Adria bellflower)
C. carpatica turbinata
Ceanothus sp
Achillea millefolium (Yarrow)
Fragaria chiloensis (Beach strawberry)
Vaccinium angustifolium (Lowbush blueberry)
Vaccinium pensylvanicum (Lowbush blueberry)
Vaccinium vitis-idaea (Lingonberry)
Vinca major
Vinca minor
Stachys affinis (Chinese artichoke)
Arctostaphylos uva-ursi
Berberis wilsoniae
Mahonia repens (Creeping Oregon grape)
Myrteola mummularia
Taxus baccata (English Yew, "Repandens" or other low growing ground cover variety)
Prunus tenela (Dwarf Russian almond)
Ribes alpinum (Alpine currant)

Taller Plants

Astragalus crassicarpus (Ground plum)
A. membranaceous (huang-qi)
Agastache rugosa (Korean mint)
A. foeniculum (Anise hyssop)
maybe other Agastache sp.
Melissa officinalis (Lemon balm)
Hemerocallis sp (Daylilies)
Garlic/shallots/multiplier onions
Allium cernuum (Nodding onion)
A. tuberosum (Garlic chives)
A. schoenoprasum (Chives)
A. moly (Golden garlic)
A. acuminatum (Hooker's onion)
A. senescens (German garlic)
Tulbaghia violacea (Society garlic)
Psoralea esculenta (Indian breadroot)
Sedum spectabile
Sedum telephium
Linum perenne (Perennial flax)
Salvia officinalis (Sage)
Lavandula angustifolia (Lavendar, perhaps "Hidcote Superior" variety)
Rosmarinus officinalis (Rosemary, preferably a dwarf variety)
Berberis buxifolia "Nana"
Amaranthus sp.
Chenopodium sp.
Trigonella foenum-graecum (Fenugreek)

Spring Ephemeral Bulbs

Cammassia sp (quamash, cusickii, leichtlinii)
Triteleia sp
Brodiaea sp.
Dichelostemma sp.
Scilla sp.
Muscari sp.

Hippie Grass Areas

(hang-out space and paths):

Bellis perennis (Daisy)
Achillea millefolium (Yarrow)
Trifolium sp. (clovers)
Lotus corniculatus (Bird's food trefoil, especially "Plena" low-growing variety)
Chaemaemelum nobile (Chamomile)

Our perennial vegetables

2009-11-06T21:12:00.000-08:00

I've typed up a list of the perennial vegetables we're growing in our yard. I've loosely organized them by their primary usage, but we use many of them in multiple ways (for greens and roots, for example.) I haven't organized the list in any other way.

Greens & Edible Flowers

Violets - Viola cornuta, Viola odorata, maybe others
Bellflowers/harebells - Campanula unknown, C. portenschlagiana, C. poscharskyana, C. persicifolia, C. rapunculoides

Mallows
- Zebra Mallow - Malva sylvestris mauritiana
- Malva Alcea fastigiata
- Malva neglecta
Comfrey - Symphytum officinale
Salad Burnett - Sanguisorba minor
Good King Henry - Chenopodium bonus-henricum
Sylvetta Arugula - Diplotaxis muralis
Sea kale - Crambe maritima
Giant sea kale - Crambe cordifolia
Daisy - Bellis perennis
Mitsuba - Cryptotaenia japonica
Perennial Lettuce - Lactuca perennis
Salt Bush - Atriplex canescens and A. halimus
New Zealand Spinach (marginally hardy here) - Tetragonia tetragonioides
Stinging Nettle - Urtica dioica
Peppermint - Mentha x piperita
Lemon Balm - Melissa officinalis
Anise Hyssop - Agastache foeniculum
Lovage - Levisticum officinale
Miner's Lettuce - Claytonia perfoliata
Siberian Miner's Lettuce - Claytonia siberica
Buckshorn Plantain - Plantago coronopus
Sea Plantain - Plantago maritima
Fennel - Foeniculum vulgare
Chicory - Cichorium intybus
Iceplant - Sedum spectabile
Hen and Chickens / Houseleek - Sempervivum tectorum
French Sorrel - Rumex scutatus
Wood Sorrel - Oxalis oregana
Sheep Sorrel - Rumex acetosella
Dandelion - Taraxacum officinale
Cleavers - Galium aparine
Grape (leaves & tendrils) - Vitis vinifera
Wolf Berry - Lycium barbarum

Flowers

Day Lily - Hemerocallis sp.
Columbine - Aquilegea vulgaris
Red and White Clover - Trifolium pratense and T. repens
Turkish Rocket - Bunias orientalis
Black Locust - Robinia pseudoacacia

Shoots and Stalks

Rhubarb - Rheum x cultorum
Solomon Seal - Polygonatum commutatum
Giant Solomon's Seal - Polygonatum commutatum biflorum
American Spikenard - Aralia racemosa
Colts Foot - Petasites palmatus
Fuki - Petasites japonicus
Poke - Phytolacca americana
Angelica - Angelica archangelica
Asparagus - Asparagus officinalis
Bamboo - Phyllostachys sp

Seeds & Seedpods

Swamp Milkweed - Asclepias incarnata
Sweet Cicely - Myrrhis odorata
Scarlet Runner Bean (marginally hardy here) - Phaseolus coccineus
Eastern Bean - Phaseolus polystachios polystachios
Akebia - Akebia quinata and A. trifoliata
Milk Thistle - Silybum marianum

Root Crops

Skirret - Sium sisarum
Scorzonera - Scorzonera hispanica
Yellow Asphodel - Asphodeline lutea
Marshmallow - Althaea officinalis
Licorice, American and European - Glycyrrhiza lepidota and G. glabra
Hog peanut - Amphicarpaea bracteata
Tiger nut - Cyperus esculentus
Earth chestnut - Bunium bulbocastanum
American bistort - Polygonum bistortoides
Wapato - Sagitarria latifolia
Asiatic Lily - Lilium unknown
Camassia - Camassia quamash, C. leichtlinii, C. scilloides
Cat Tail - Typha latifolia
Grape Hyacinth - Muscaria unknown
Scilla unknown
Canna Lily - Canna unknown
Dahlia - Dahlia pinnata or D. rosea
Mashua (perennial nasturtium with edible root) - Tropaeolum tuberosum
Cinnamon Vine - Dioscorea batatas
Yacon - Smallianthus sonchifolia
Oca - Oxalis tuberosa
Jerusalem Artichoke/Sunchoke - Helianthus tuberosus
Sweet Flag - Acorus calamus americanus
Horseradish - Armoracia rusticana
Ladybells - Adenophora lilifolia and A. pereskiifolia

Onions (Allium genus)

Egyptian Walking Onion
Nodding Onion - Allium cernuum
Bunching Onion - Allium fistulosum
Chive - Allium schoenoprasum
Garlic Chive - Allium tuberosum
Garlic - Allium sativum
Multiplier Onions & Shallots - Allium cepa aggregatum
Ramps - Allium tricoccum
Golden Garlic - Allium moly
Drumstick allium - Allium sphaerocephalum
Allium stipitatum

Self seeding annuals and biennials

Evening Primrose - Oenothera biennis
Pop Weed - Cardamine unknown
Kale
Chard
Curly mallow - Malva verticillata
Calendula - Calendula officinalis
Nipple Wort - Lapsana communis
Purple Dead Nettle - Lamium purpureum
Money Plant - Lunaria annua
Parsley - Petroselinum crispum
Pigweed - Amaranthus sp.
Lambs Quarters - Chenopodium sp.

Integrating Chickens Into Your Food System

2009-11-06T19:13:00.000-08:00

Here are some thoughts and pointers I pulled together for my class "Integrating Chickens Into Your Food System".

Foraging Breeds

From books and online sources, these breeds can free range and forage much of their own food:

Austrolorp
Brown leghorn
Buff Orpington
Dominique
Hamburg
Leghorn
New Hampshire Red
Rhode Island Red
Plymouth Rock
Silver-Laced Wyandotte
Sussex
White Wyandotte
Ameraucana
Black Sex Link
Red Sex Link
Sussex

And thanks to Chris for a pointer to a good foraging meat breed, the Le Poulet

Best Chicken Pen Method

We've used a single largish free range area of ~3000 square feet for six hens. They keep the area fairly well denuded of ground covers, though we have successfully established trees and shrubs and a few herbaceous plants. The next time I design for chickens I'll adopt a rotating pasture method. I agree with most of the points made in Paul Wheaton's article, "concerns about the way most people raise chickens".

Chicken Tolerant Plants

Once we established these plants, our chickens did not eat or scratch them to death:

Latin name	Common name	Notes
Mentha x piperita	Peppermint
Sium sisarum	Skirret	Chickens don't eat it; not yet verified whether they'll scratch it to death
Hemerocallis sp	Daylilies
Chenopodium bonus-henricus	Good King Henry
Asparagus officinalis	Asparagus	Chickens do knock it over
Allium sp	Onions, garlic, etc	Chickens don't eat; uprooting depends on its root establishment. It helps that we get lots of coop scrap alliums; the chickens can only kill so many volunteers.
Solanum tuberosum	Potato	Ditto on lots of potatoes from coop scraps.
Malva sp	Mallows
Aachilea millefolium	Yarrow
Helianthus maximilianii	Maximillian sunflower
Angelica archangelica	Angelica	Not sure yet whether these biennials can maintain themselves via self-seeding
Levisticum officinale	Lovage
Armoracia rusticana	Horseradish
Petasites japonicus	Fuki
Urtica dioica	Nettles
Phyllostachys sp	Bamboo
Tropaeolum tuberosum	Mashua
Foeniculum vulgare	Fennel
Houttuynia cordata	Hot tuna

Chicken Fodder Plants

One tip I've read is to watch wild birds for what they like to eat. Plants our chickens like to eat:

Latin name	Common name	Notes
Symphytum officinale	Comfrey	Chickens tend to eat it to the ground mercilessly, but it generally stays alive. We're trying to establish enough plants for them that they won't slaughter them all.
Caragana sp	Pea shrub
Brassica oleracea	Kale	Chickens eat to death
	Berries, fruit trees	Raspberries, gooseberries, serviceberries, mulberry, wolfberry, cotoneaster, and so many more
Rheum x cultorum	Rhubarb	Chickens eat the leaves, but not the stems
Helianthus tuberosum	Jerusalem artichoke	Chickens eat the young shoots, but can't stop them from growing rampantly anyway
Scorzonera hispanica	Scorzonera	Chickens eat to death
Robinia pseudoacacia	Black locust	In theory chickens eat the seeds - ours don't seem to
Prunus sp	Kernels from pits of plum, peach, cherry, apricot, etc	Need to crack them open for the chickens - smashing with bricks or using a grain grinder works fine. Also edible by humans; see my old blog entries for more details
	Acorns / beech nuts / other nuts	Need to crack them open for the chickens, or allow to sprout in the chicken yard
Lemna minor	Duckweed	Chickens not nearly as excited about it as our neighbor's ducks, but they eat some
Oenothera biennis	Evening primrose	Read about this as chicken fodder - probably for the oil-rich seeds. Haven't tried growing it for the chickens yet
Apios americana	Groundnut	Read about this as chicken fodder - I think they'll eat the seeds, while you can harvest the root. Ours hasn't made any seed yet to verify
Trifolium sp	Clovers
Amaranthus retroflexus	Pigweed	Chickens don't eat the leaves, but do eat the seed. Presumably all Amaranthus sp would work
Chenopodium album	Lamb's quarters	Ditto
Elaeagnus umbellata	Autumn Olive	Berries of course, but the chickens also eat the leaves

Needs & Wants for our Land & Tribe

2008-07-29T20:29:00.000-07:00

Theressa and I came up with a list of our needs and wants for our future vision. The Needs list states the things we think we require in our physical set up and in our social tribe. We'd prefer to also have the items in our Wants list, but feel much more flexible about those.

Needs

Wants

Solid water supply

Enough land to, in theory, feed at least everyone we start with / 10 people via horticulture.

No debt

10 years of taxes, hunting/fishing licenses, and other living expenses set aside

Community members into hunting/gathering - enough for a viable group

Not super hot, or some way to escape the heat.

Feel connected to our tribe -- people not spending too much time not in community (20 hour/week max?)

All tribe members committed to disconnecting from civilization

Wide age range - children to elders

All tribe members committed to practicing Nonviolent Communication-type communication, conflict-resolution.

Income-sharing and wealth-sharing.

Safey for our lifestyle, including hunting & gathering.

Available land for hunting & gathering.

Sufficient ability to heat ourselves.

Out of reach of city - 100 miles from large cities? 50 miles from smaller cities?

Tribe committed to improving land (our own & surrounding land).

Fredom of living within constraints of other needs.

Tribe members committed to healing from civilization.

Tribe members to give more to our community than they take.

All tribe members reasonably well-versed in all survival skills

Easiest climate possible for growing food & living

Communal living - shared shelters & infrastructure.

Tribe committed to raising children tribally - Continuum Concept ideas

As little contact with civilization as possible

Adjacent to national (or other public?) forest

As much acreage as possible

Healthy ecosystem for hunting & gathering

Encourage & inspire neighbors / nearby community(s) to disconnect from civilization

Encourage like-minded people to settle nearby

Tribe members to be able to grow/gather food in their preferred ways

Tribe members to be able to live in their preferred ways

Some sort of commitment from and to tribe members - for example, buy-in & guarantee of tribal membership?

Starting tribe with 6+ contributing adult tribal members / 3-5 family groups

Post-apocalyptic weapons

2008-01-19T20:45:00.000-08:00

The other day, Corum asked:

Scrub, i wanted to ask this for a while, are you going to practice with weapons too?
If your tribe is going to be the only ones with food in the area, or even if you are going to have just more comfortable lives than other people... you sure as hell will need to defend your way of life.

I/we haven't put a whole lot of thought into this, and at this point my sole experience with guns involved missing a soda can with my one shot from an air rifle. I may well change my mind about what I write tonight, but I might as well start brainstorming somewhere!

I expect us to have weapons of some kind, if for no other reason than for hunting. Beyond that basic decision, I see two immediate next questions:

What sort of weapons?
What emphasis will we place on defense rather than simply hunting skills?

For question #1, I see two general approaches to hunting given our desire to ultimately depend on primitivist skills: 1) start off using all the heavy equipment, guns, and ammo we want to buy, and incrementally replace them with more and more primitive tools and techniques; or 2) start from scratch with primitive tools & techniques, using civilization-dependent technologies only if and when we need them.

For question #2, two aspects of our envisioned way of life help mitigate against a need to explicitly prepare for defense: our focus on learning skills such as nature awareness, silent stalking, and tracking; and our preparedness to rely entirely on mobile hunting & gathering. Those first skills should give us an advantage in many situations of conflict, assuming evenly matched weapons and numbers. I have no idea though to what extent those skills can compensate for an uneven match of weapons and/or numbers! Unfortunately, to whatever extent we carry out horticultural food procurement (permaculture) in one or even multiple fixed spots, we will present an attractive target to others if the shit seriously hits the fan. We do expect to involve ourselves with the community to whatever extent they welcome our input, to share our thoughts (and especially successful experiences once we have them worked out) with whomever will listen. Hopefully we can make ourselves too valuable a resource in knowledge and community support to leave anyone who knows us wanting to knock us off for a mere partial-year harvest. And if worst comes to worst, we hope to have developed the skills to disappear into the woods to hunt and gather (perhaps from plots we tend to some extent) in a roving lifestyle, where we never have enough accumulated food or other wealth for anyone to bother with us.

So, my practical plans for the next couple of years include:

Buy a slingshot and learn to use it
Practice throwing a rabbit stick
Maybe experiment with other weapons - atlatl, those twirly bola things, nets, others?...
Try to actually kill some squirrels (and eat them, of course)
Make and/or buy a bow, and learn to use it
Buy one or more guns, take a gun safety class, and start learning to shoot. (I might wait on this until we live rurally and can practice shooting without needing to pay at a city shooting range.)
Practice body skills - fox walking, balance, etc
Keep learning about bird language, learning from my sit spot, learning tracking, etc
I don't feel really inspired about this, but maybe I'll start again with some form of martial art

Book review: The Nature Handbook by Ernest Williams Jr

2008-01-10T17:56:00.000-08:00

I picked up this book from the library on a whim, and enjoyed it enough to think I should mention it here: The Nature Handbook: A Guide to Observing the Great Outdoors, by Ernest H. Williams, Jr. The book gives readers insights and shortcuts to understanding various patterns in nature, from bird/animal/insect behavior to plant/tree characteristics to patterns seen across entire landscapes.

The author divides the book into 14 chapters, categorized under three broad headings of Plants, Animals, and Habitats. Each chapter describes about a dozen patterns, and each pattern includes multiple illustrative photos.

I had already picked up some of the plant information from reading other sources, and a smaller amount of the animal and habitat information, but I learned a lot of new stuff across the board. I especially enjoyed learning about:

"puddle clubs" of butterflies, mostly males, who gather at wet muddy spots, or carcasses, or animal excrement, or urinals, to drink up sodium, a mineral they have a hard time acquiring otherwise. In at least one species, the males offer sodium to females along with their sperm, a sweet little nuptial enticement.
"sun and shade leaves", where trees have larger leaves towards the shaded bottom, and smaller leaves at top where sunlight strikes with more intensity. Makes sense, but I'd never noticed that!
"leaf retention" of many oaks and beeches, where the trees hold onto dead deciduous leaves for months into the winter, possibly to keep the nutrients from leaching away all at once over the winter. Trees tend to keep leaves at the bottom more often than the top, possibly because lower leaves will more likely fall close to the trunk where the tree can easily recapture the nutrients. Right after reading this chapter I started noticing the retained leaves on the oaks at the local park.
Wind-pollinated deciduous trees flower before they make leaves which would block the movement of air and thus pollen. Makes sense! I had noticed that all the catkin-trees have their catkins over the winter, instead of flowering with the insect-pollinated trees. Now I know why!

The book doesn't have enough hardcore details that I need to have it in my library as a reference book, but I feel very glad that I found it and read through it once. I highly recommend it to anyone at a beginner or intermediate naturalist level!