Why our tribe members should have a general skill base

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

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

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

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

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

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

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:

1. What sort of weapons?
   
2. 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

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!

Post-Apocalyptic Vision

With one exception, I can pretty easily see how future tribe and I can meet all our physical needs and substitute hand-made items for civilization-dependent, or adapt to going without. But I haven't really known what to do about my dependency on glasses! I have five ideas:

1. Figure on going without glasses. This would suck, since I have very poor eyesight and without my glasses I can't make out any details of anything more than a foot away from my face.
   
2. Make my own glasses from remaining fragments of glass. I haven't read of anyone experimenting with this; I worry that if it doesn't work out well impaired vision will permanently handicap me. Perhaps not as badly as with option #1, but any impairment in vision will significantly impact my ability to hunt and gather, and even to grow food.
   
3. Practice natural vision healing techniques, such as those pioneered by Dr. William Bates. Ran Prieur has done a lot of work on this with significant results, but his progress has taken quite a while and he still has a long way to go before he could discard his glasses altogether. I have heard and read some encouraging testimonials as to the effectiveness of healing your eyes, but I have also seen at least two accounts of case studies showing no improvement in vision tests from months of eye excercises, even when the subject felt his or eye eyesight had improved. All in all, I feel reluctant to depend on healing my eyes back to normal vision with no backup plan.
   
4. Eye surgery such as Lasik or PRK. I really like the idea of walking in with my current crappy vision and walking out with normal vision. The pricetag (maybe $1000-$3000 range for both eyes?) definitely crimps my excitement. Most of all, my uncertainty as to the long term effects of eye surgery scare me off from wanting to try it. Doctors have only been performing these surgeries for 20 years, so no one knows what happens 30, 40, 50 years down the line. I fear some unexpected side effect that leaves my vision in worse shape than if I'd never had them cut open my eyes, or chronic dry-eye or something even more painful.
   
5. Stockpile glasses! Ran Prieur mentioned Zenni Optical, an online store which sells complete glasses (frames & prescription lenses with UV protection and anti-scratch coating) starting at $8, plus a $5 flat shipping cost.
   

I expect to follow a strategy combining #3 and #5. I will experiment with eye excercises to see whether I can improve my vision, and I'll probably order a bunch of glasses. For $165 I could get 20 pairs of glasses with a wide range of prescription strengths from weaker to stronger than my current need. I can stash glasses in multiple places so that if a disaster breaks, burns, or buries one stash I'll still have others available. Ideally I'll find a frame that meets my normal frame needs (basically lenses as big as possible so I don't lose much of my peripheral vision but still attractive for Theressa to look at), plus has interchangeable left and right lenses. I'll order that frame for all the pairs, and have even more options for mixing and matching lenses to customize my glasses for years to come! Basically I'll have (say) 20 frames and 40 lenses to use, mix up, cannibalize for parts, and so on.

New Year's Resolution

I didn't make an official New Year's Resolution, but the changes I started in my life a few weeks ago could count! I don't know whether writing this up will have any value for anyone besides me, but I don't have the energy to tackle anything else tonight so this will have to do.

Diet: Getting back towards the Paleodiet, especially cutting out wheat and sugar. I know I have had a sugar addiction for the past 10+ years, and I feel pretty suspicious that eating wheat messes up my body, so I've detoxed from wheat & sugar. I felt miserable for the first week, then OK for the second week, then a little more energetic for the third week. Two nights ago I ate a lot of corn and felt somewhat miserable yesterday, so now I wonder whether I should just take the plunge and commit to a fully grain-free diet. Or maybe I just ate too many carbs at once and that adequately explains feeling crappy yesterday, or maybe...

Schedule: I want to kick the internet addiction as well, and direct my time and energy into more useful pursuits. About a week ago I decided to reimplement the idea of a schedule I stick to as best I can each day. (I tried that earlier this year but didn't stay with the idea for long.) Basic schedule:

• Wake up
  
• Eat
  
• Go to my sit spot, figuring about half an hour travel time and one hour sitting/exploring time.
  
• Come home and work on projects until:
  
• Eat
  
• Work on more projects until:
  
• Eat
  
• Finish eating by 6:30 to do the following in roughly this order:
  
• Write something for the blog, 1/2 hour
  
• General internet email & waste-of-timing, 1 hour
  
• Research naturalist stuff (read Arthur Bent's life histories of birds I see, look up pictures of different birds or mammals to try to identify unknows or answer questions that came up at the sit spot), etc, 1 hour
  
• Process food (crack nuts, extract acorns, peel wapato, etc), 1/2 hour
  
• Get in bed by 9:30, maybe read a little longer especially if I don't feel tired yet.
  

It hasn't worked out quite so cleanly so far, but I have actually made it to my sit spot every day (before I only went every other day or maybe two days out of three), I have gone to bed earlier and awoken earlier, and I think it has helped me cut down a little on computer time. And I have posted more to the blog the past few days!

National Plant Germplasm System

For those unaware of its existence, I wanted to point out a resource I have found very valuable: the National Plant Germplasm System, at http://www.ars-grin.gov/npgs/index.html

NPGS preserves genetic diversity of plants, and makes germplasm (ie, seeds and cuttings) available to scientists, organizations, and individuals conducting research. I have requested various rare seeds and cuttings over the last two years to integrate various plants into our food forest and find out what works well together. I plan to request many more species this year, some of which I've only been able to find at NPGS!

Our Humanure Setup

Paul requested a write-up of our experience doing the humanure thing, so here I write! We've been shitting in buckets for two and a half years now, except for the 6 months we lived at the Portland Permaculture Institute. We're following the system laid out in The Humanure Handbook by Joseph Jenkins, which covers pretty much everything you need to know about the topic. Basically, we poop in a bucket, cover our business with sawdust, and when the bucket fills up we dump the bucket in the compost pile and cover the new addition well. We mostly pee in a second bucket and spread that through the yard.

I don't have the skills to build a nifty throne for our shit bucket, and my one attempt at adapting a wooden regular toilet seat lid to a bucket promptly resulted in the lid falling off and breaking (luckily with no messier damage than that). So we still use a plastic toilet seat contraption designed for camping which snaps onto the top of a 5 gallon bucket. (We bought two back in 2005 from the local survivalist shop for $10 each, give or take.)

We used one bucket for poop and pee for a while, but eventually decided to add a bucket just for pee. This allows us to return nutrients to our garden more quickly, reduces the frequency with which I have to dump the poop bucket into the compost pile, and reduces the amount of sawdust we need to use. Enough moisture seems to make it into the compost pile between what urine does go in and the water from cleaning out the poop bucket when I dump it, that the compost pile still seems to get plenty hot and doesn't require extra water in the summer. I empty the pee bucket every 2-3 days (generally when it start to smell, which besides the obvious cue of unpleasantness also tells us we're losing nitrogen to the air). I empty the poop bucket maybe every three weeks or so.

So our bathroom currently has a poop bucket, a sawdust bucket (center), and a pee bucket (left). The standard ceramic toilet makes a fine stand for toilet paper, phone book pages for those who don't want to wipe their ass with trees killed just for that purpose, and candles and incense because Theressa likes that sort of stuff.

Way back when we tore out the driveway in a big work party, I wrote up instructions for how to use our bathroom, just in case it confused anyone. Occasionally when we have normal core folks over we clear the normal toilet off so they can easily choose their preference, but I think only about three people have used the ceramic toilet in the last year.

I haven't measured the temperature of the compost pile. When I shovel out a little hole in the center of the compost pile for the new additions, I put my hand over the divot and always feel some heat, which satisfies me that things are working. We plan to follow the schedule of one year to actively build the pile, then start a second pile and build that for a year while the first pile sits. So everything in each pile will sit for at least one year, and up to as long as two years, which should adequately kill off any potential pathogens.

I don't know what else to say, so I'll leave it at that unless I get any questions!

Liquid gold calculations revisited

David William House replied to my Nitrogen Fixers Vs Liquid Gold post with some alternate numbers for nitrogen content and daily human production of urine and feces:

"One adult on an ordinary diet will produce from 100 to 250 grams of feces per day. On a vegetable diet, an adult will produce from 300 to 400 grams per day. (Respectively, 0.22 to 0.55, and 0.66 to 0.88 pounds per day.) Feces are usually neutral to slightly alkaline in pH, 24% to 27% TS [total solids] (dry weight), with a C/N [carbon-nitrogen ratio] of 6 to 10, nitrogen 4% to 6% of TS, VS [volatile solids] is 85% of TS. Normal values for urine are 1 to 1.6 liters volume per day, average pH 6.0, 4% to 6% TS, with a C/N of 0.8, nitrogen 15% to 18% of TS, VS is 72% of TS. (That's 1.06 to 1.69 quarts volume produced daily). Every liter of urine weighs about 1,020 grams. Every quart of urine weighs about 2.9 pounds." [The Complete Biogas Handbook, p 69.]

Substance	%N	%C	%H20	Comments
feces	4-6		73-75	reported variations
feces	5.0	40.0	74.0	median
mixed	10.9	26.0	92.0	median
urine	15-18		95-96	reported variations
urine	16.5	13.0	95.0	median

Using the median values for the range of urine data means 1.3 liters urine/day (very close to the 1.26 liters I used in my other calculations), with 5% of the urine as "total solids", and 16.5% of that as nitrogen. 1 liter of urine weighs 1,020 grams, so we have 1,020 * 1.26 * .05 * .165 = 10.6029 grams nitrogen/day from urine. (Lower than the 14.112 grams nitrogen/day I used in my other calculations.)

Using the median values for the range of feces data means 175 grams feces per day for adults on "ordinary diets", and 350 grams feces per day for adults on vegetarian diets, with 25.5% as "total solids", and 5% of that as nitrogen. So for "ordinary diet" we have 175 * .255 * .05 = 2.23125 grams nitrogen/day. For vegetarian diets, double the figure for 4.4625 grams nitrogen/day.

So by these numbers, adults on "ordinary diets" produce a grand total of about 12.8 grams nitrogen/day. Vegetarian adults produce a grand total of about 15 grams nitrogen/day. Using the same assumptions I used the other day, the former could provide enough nitrogen for 3730-4660 square feet of forest garden (for canopy demands of 8 grams/square meter to 10 grams/square meter). Vegetarians could provide enough nitrogen for 4370-5460 square feet.

Obviously we don't have the precision of numbers with any of this to make truly exact calculations, but having numbers from two different sources give us results in the same ballpark gives me more confidence in the general idea: one adult can provide the nitrogen for around 4000-5000 square feet of forest garden.

Seeking seeds!

I've spent the past week organizing my seed orders for this coming year. Before I place the orders, I thought I'd see whether anyone out there has reliable seeds (or even better yet for folks around Portland Oregon, plant divisions!) I could trade for. Most of the seeds I order will probably come in packets with more seeds than what I need, so I could trade those, or trade some of the plants we have around the yard, or the extra plants listed at my Discount Permaculture website. If you have extras of any of the following and want to trade, please email me at scrub@corrupt.net

Abelmoschus manihot	Edible hibiscus
Acorus calamus	Calamus
Acorus calamus americanus	Calamus
Adenophora liliifolia	Ladybells
Adenophora liliifolia	Ladybells
Adenophora pereskiifolia	Ladybells
Adenophora pereskiifolia uryuensis	Ladybells
Allium canadense	American wild garlic
Allium carinatum	Keeled garlic
Allium fistulosum	Scallion / welsh onion
Allium pendulinum
Allium perutile	Everlasting onions
Allium sativum ‘ophioscorodon’	Rocambole
Allium senescens	Ballhead onion / German garlic
Allium suaveolens
Allium ursinum	Ramsons / Wild Garlic
Amphicarpaea bracteata	Hog peanut
Anredera BASSELLOIDES	Madeira vine???
Anredera cordifolia	Madeira vine
Anthriscus sylvestris	Cow parsley
Apios americana	Groundnut
Apios fortunei	Fortune's groundnut
Apios priceana	Price's groundnut
Aralia cordata	Udo
Aralia racemosa	American spikenard
Asclepias speciosa	Milkweeds
Asclepias syriaca	Common milkweed
Asclepias tuberosa	Pleurrisy root / butterfly weed
Asphodeline lutea	Yellow asphodel
Astragalus pictus-filifolius	Painted milkvetch
Atriplex canescens	Saltbush
Atriplex halimus	Saltbush
Atriplex sp	Fat hen
Balsamorhiza deltoidea	Deltoid Balsamroot
Balsamorhiza sagittata	Balsamroot sunflower / Oregon sunflower
Beta vulgaris maritima	Sea beet
Brassica oleracea alboglabra	Gai Lon / Chinese Broccoli
Brassica oleracea alboglabra	Gai Lon / Chinese Broccoli
Brassica oleracea ramosa	Branching bush / perpetual kale
Brassica oleracea var. acephala	Western Front Perennial kale
Brassica oleracea var. acephala	Tree collards / Walking stick kale
Brassica oleracea var. botrytis	Nine Star Perennial Broccoli
Brodiaea coronaria coronaria	California hyacinth
Brodiaea sp.
Bunium bulbocastanum	Earth chestnut
Callirhoe involucrata	Purple poppy-mallow
Campanula portenschlagiana	Dalmation bellflower
Campanula rapunculus	Rampion
Campanula sp.	Bluebells
Campanula versicolor
Canna edulis	Achira / Canna
Canna indica	Canna lily
Capsella bursa-pastoris	Shepherd’s purse
Cardamine hirsuta	Hairy bittercress
Ceanothus prostratus	Mahala mat
Cephalotaxus fortunei
Cephalotaxus harringtonia drupacea
Cephalotaxus sinensis
Ceratophyllum demersum	Coontail
Chaerophyllum bulbosum	Bulbous-rooted chervil
Chenopodium hybridum	Maple-leaved goosefoot
Chrysoplenium americanum	Golden saxifrage
Chrysoplenium oppositifolium	Golden saxifrage
Claytonia cordifolia
Claytonia lanceolata
Claytonia megarhiza
Claytonia megarhiza nivalis
Claytonia rosea
Claytonia virginica
Cnidoscolus chayamansa	Chaya
Coccinia grandis	'Sterile Perennial' cucumber
Colocasia sp	Taros
Conopodium majus	Pignut
Cryptotaenia japonica	Mitsuba
Cymopterus montanus	Mountain spring parsley
Desmanthus illinoensis	Prairie mimosa
Desmodium dunnii
Desmodium oldhami
Desmodium oxyphyllum
Dichelostemma capitatum	Bluedicks
Dichelostemma congestum	Bluedicks
Dichelostemma multiflorum	Bluedicks
Dichelostemma pulchellum	Bluedicks
Dichelostemma volubile	Bluedicks
Dioscorea bulbifera	Air potato
Dioscorea japonica	Jinenjo yam
Erythronium californicum
Erythronium grandiflorum	Glacier lily
Erythronium montanum	Avalanche lily
Erythronium oregonum
Fagopyrum dibotrys	Perennial buckwheat
Fritillaria affinis	Chocolate lily
Fritillaria camschatcensis	Kamchatka lily
Fritillaria pudica	Yellow fritillary
Gaultheria hispidula	Creeping snowberry
Gaultheria procumbens	Wintergreen
Glycyrrhiza glabra	Licorice
Glycyrrhiza lepidota	American licorice
Heracleum sphondylium	Hogweed / Cow parsnip
Hibiscus acetosella	Cranberry hibiscus
Ipomoea aquatica	Water spinach
Ipomoea batatas	Sweet potato 'Beauregard'
Ipomoea batatas	Sweet potato 'Beauregard'
Ipomoea leptophylla	Bush morning glory
Ipomoea pandurata	Wild potato vine
Lactuca perennis	Perennial lettuce
Laportea canadensis	Wood nettle
Lathyrus linifolius montanus	Bitter vetch
Lepidium peruvianum	Maca
Lilium columbianum	Columbia tiger lily
Lilium sp.	Lilies
Lilium superbum
Linum perenne	Perennial flax
Linum perenne lewisii	Perennial flax
Linum usitassimum ‘Omega’	Omega flax
Linum usitassimum ‘Omega’	Omega flax
Lomatium cous	Biscuitroot
Lomatium dissecta multifidum	Fernleaf biscuitroot
Lomatium macrocarpum	Bigseed biscuitroot
Lomatium nudicaule	Pestle parsnip
Lomatium utriculatum	Common lomatium
Lupinus perennis	Sundial lupine
Malva moschata	Musk Mallow
Medeola virginiana	Indian cucumber root
Megacarpaea gigantea
Megacarpaea megalocarpa
Microseris lactiniata (M. procera)	Yam daisy
Mitchella repens	Partridgeberry
Moringa oleifera	Moringa
Moringa stenopetala	Moringa
Nelumbo lutea	American Water lotus
Nelumbo nucifera	Sacred Water lotus
Neptunia oleracea	Water mimosa
Oenanthe javanica	Water celery
Oenanthe sarmentosa	Water dropwort
Orogenia linearifolia	Indian potato
Osmorhiza chilensis
Osmorhiza claytonii	Woolly Sweet-cicely
Osmorhiza longistylis	Anise root
Osmorhiza occidentalis	Western sweet-cicely
Oxalis acetosella	Wood sorrel
Oxalis deppei	Iron cross plant
Oxalis violacea	Wood sorrel
Oxyria digyna	Mountain sorrel
Peltaria alliacea	Garlic cress
Peltaria turkmenia
Perideridia gairdneri	Yampah
Perideridia oregana	Squaw potato
Perideridia sp	Yampahs
Petasites frigidus	Coltsfoot
Petasites japonicus	Fuki
Phaseolus coccineus	Scarlet runner beans
Phaseolus lunatus	7 Year Lima Bean
Phaseolus polyanthus	Cache bean / Botil
Phaseolus polystachios	Wild bean
Physalis heterophylla	Perennial groundcherry
Pimpinella saxifraga	Burnet saxifrage
Plantago coronopus	Buck’s-horn plantain
Plantago maritima	Sea plantain
Plectranthus esculentus	Livingstone potato
Plectranthus rotundifolius	Sudan potato
Podophyllum hexandrum	Himalayan Mayapple
Podophyllum peltatum	Mayapple
Polygonum Bistorta	Bistorta
Potentilla anserina	Silverweed
Potentilla pacifica	Pacific silverweed
Psophocarpus tetragonobolus	Winged bean
Reichardia picroides	French scorzonera
Rumex acetosella	Sheep sorrel
Rumex alpinus	Monk’s Rhubarb / Alpine dock
Rumex patientia	Herb patience
Rumex scutatus	Buckler-leaved sorrel
Schizandra chinensis
Schizandra sp.
Sium sisarum	Skirret with non-woody core
Sium suave	Water parsnip
Smallianthus sonchifolia	Yacon
Smilacena racemosa	False Spikenard
Smilacena stellata	Star-flowered lily of the valley
Smyrnium olusatrum	Alexanders
Stachys affinis	Chinese artichoke
Stachys floridanum
Stachys hyssopifolia
Stachys palustris	Marsh woundwort
Stellaria jamesiana
Streptopus amplexifolius	Wild cucumber
Streptopus lanceolatus curvipes
Streptopus roseus	Rosybells
Stuckenia pectinatus	Sago pondweed
Tilia americana	Linden / basswood
Tilia cordata	Linden / basswood
Toona sinensis	Fragrant spring tree
Toona sinensis 'Flamingo'	Fragrant spring tree, maybe variety chosen for food?
Trapa natans	Water chestnut
Triteleia grandiflora	Wild hyacinth
Triteleia laxa	Grassnut
Triteleia peduncularis	Longray tripletlily
Tropaeolum tuberosum	Mashua 'Ken Aslet'
Ullucus tuberosus	Ulluco
Valerianella locusta	Corn salad / Lamb’s lettuce
Xanthosoma atrovirens	Tanniers
Xanthosoma maffafa aurea	Tanniers
Xanthosoma robustum	Tanniers
Xanthosoma sagittifolium	Tanniers

Why we love the N-fixers anyway

So in most urban lot forest gardens, you probably don't need nitrogen-fixing plants for their nitrogren input if you're recycling your urine. I'll throw out some reasons to keep them around anyway:

• Long-term stability. If something happens to change your urine-recycling contributions to the forest garden, nitrogen fixers will still keep the nitrogen flowing if you've designed them well. Crack-down by the neighborhood association on renegade pee-ers-in-the-night, exodus of your housemates on whom you depended for their piss, or selling your property to mainstream squeamish folks could all leave your forest garden without the nitrogen inputs it needs for optimal performance.
  
• Ongoing slow release of non-messy fertilizer. For patches where you're growing salad greens you want to harvest frequently, n-fixers provide a much cleaner nitrogen source than splashing your piss around.
  
• Frees up your nitrogen for application elsewhere. Knowing that you have ample nitrogen available at home, you can gleefully fertilize wild patches of vegetation, injecting helpful nutrients to partially compensate for the abuses they suffer from civilization. I find it a lot easier to go pee in the woods and grow a Goumi at home than to plant and tend a goumi in the woods and pee at home.
  
• Other uses. Many nitrogen fixers have other uses which warrant their inclusion in your food forest regardless of their nitrogen contributions. Off the top of my head, I can think of nitrogen-fixers which also provide or act as ground covers, fast growing cover crops, tea, human food, wildlife food, chicken forage, bee nectaries, foot-tolerant steppables, and dynamic accumulation of phosphorous and other nutrients.
  
• Learning about particular plants through direct experience now. When we move to a rural area and start growing quarter acre food forests per person, we won't be able to fertilize the whole area from which our food comes. I feel glad that we're currently growing Elaeagnus, pea shrubs, black locusts, and various herbaceous nitrogen fixers which I expect to use in our larger systems in the future. If you ever design or give input for project for squeamish neighbors or friends, or for public demonstration gardens where the public "ick" factor precludes urinal input, then having experience with n-fixers will allow you to do a better job of integrating them into a system which actually needs them.
  

Further thoughts on liquid gold

A few thoughts on factors which would reduce the amount of coverage one person's urine could theoretically fertilize as number-crunched in last night's post:

• Not peeing at home 100% of the time, pretty much unavoidable unless you live the life of a recluse
  
• Composting urine in a humanure pile. As I understand it, some nutrients unavoidably leach out of compost piles. I don't know how much you lose how fast, but presumably the more urine you put into the pile, the more rain that falls on it, and the longer the pile sits before being used, the more nitrogen you lose.
  
• Loss of nitrogen to the air as ammonia. We primarily pee in a bucket (though of course some goes into the humanure bucket with our poop). If I wait too long to dump the bucket outside, an ammonia smell develops indicating nitrogen loss to the air. Again, I don't know how much how fast you lose nitrogen.
  
• Inability of plants to use the nitrogen supplied. I mentioned yesterday my assumption that plants can't fully use the nitrogen supplied in winter during the dormant or at least slower-growing season. I made up a number of 25% efficiency for 4 months out of the year. I assume the same situation can occur even in the active growing months, where too much nitrogen in one spot at one time will lead to leaching of excess nitrogen. Careful application of water-diluted pee over large areas should avoid or minimize this problem. Still, I wonder how much nitrogen plant roots can grab how quickly and just how much square footage you need to cover with say a gallon of urine to make sure your plants can use it all...especially in our quick-draining soil at our house, or in soils with low organic matter content to help bind nutrients. I guess with a mature forest garden the deeper tree and shrub roots and rich soil should catch almost all the nitrogen applied, but younger immature plant communities with mostly shallow roots might require more careful application.
  
• Even if you carefully apply your pee to a large enough area each time you fertilize, you still have to make sure you rotate your applications evenly throughout your whole food forest. If you never apply pee to your patch of perennial greens which you harvest every day for salad and don't want to contaminate, then you can't really count that square footage as part of your coverage. Maybe you could apply extra pee to other areas nearby and have the overstory tree(s) capture the extra nitrogen and eventually return it to the perennial green patch via leaf litter. Or maybe your extra nitrogen applications elsewhere will leach away and get lost. Or maybe you apply the soil from your completed humanure compost piles in those spots.
  

I don't feel too worried about quantifying the loss of nitrogen efficiency from the factors above. I think that with some care to avoid obviously wasteful application of your wastes (haha), the square footage coverage shouldn't decrease by very much, so we can still use the numbers from yesterday as ballpark figures. For our purposes, I'll assume for now that the extra nitrogen from our poop via the humanure pile offsets the losses from inefficiencies in our urine application, and use the numbers from yesterday as the total recycled nitrogen.

One more complicating factor: Obviously not every pee contains exactly 5.6 grams of nitrogen, and I don't know what level of water dilution Crawford used for that figure. Piss clear as a stream? Dark yellow? Presumably somewhere in between, but where exactly? And I assume the nitrogen content varies based on how much food you're eating, since urine disposes of the excess nutrients. So if you live an active lifestyle and eat a subsistence diet, you'll have less nitrogen in your urine than if you overeat and sit around all day. (The book Dirt by David Montgomery mentioned historic Chinese farmers in a certain area who had healthy land which yielded more food than in other areas; those farmers regularly gorged themselves on the excess food to recycle the nutrients back into the land via their wastes.) But I don't know how to quantify any of that so I'll just run with Crawford's 5.6 grams figure.

Nitrogen-fixers vs liquid gold

Every book and article on forest garden design stresses the importance of including nitogren-fixing plants in your plantings. Very few give any pointers as to how much nitrogen-fixing capacity you need. And even fewer talk about, let alone quantify, the nitrogen recycled by returning your own urine to your garden.

I've designed four food forests in the last two and a half years, and included nitrogen-fixing shrubs and understory plants in all the designs on principle. I knew in the back of my mind that pissing in the garden must help a lot with nitrogen, but only this past week have I sat down and penciled out the numbers based mostly on data from Martin Crawford in Agroforestry News, Volume 3 Number 3. He categorizes overstory canopy plants (trees and shrubs) by their nitrogen demand:

• Very demanding: require 10 grams nitrogen per square meter of canopy per year. Chestnuts, Citrus sp, Plums, Walnuts, & blackberries
  
• Demanding: require 6 grams nitrogen per square meter of canopy per year. Apples, Apricots, Bamboos, Filberts, Hazelnuts, Medlars, Mulberries, Peaches, Pears, Persimmons, Quinces, Blackcurrants, Gooseberries.
  
• Slightly demanding: require 2 grams nitrogen per square meter of canopy per year. Cherries, serviceberries, Cornus sp, Elderberries, Yellowhorn, Raspberries, and many others
  
• Undemanding: need no extra nitrogen. Figs, Spice bush, Pines for nuts, red currants, hazels for poles, and many others.
  
• Ground covers: 1 gram nitrogen per square meter of canopy per year. Doesn't specify whether ground covers actively harvested for leaves or fruit would need extra nitrogen or whether the figure already takes that into account.
  

Crawford also mentions that one pee, which he defines as half a liter, contains about 5.6 grams of nitrogen.

So I crunched the numbers to figure out how much forest garden I can fertilize each year with my very own piss! I used the following assumptions/number bases/conversions (I don't do British math):

• An average person pees about 1/3 gallon urine per day
  
• 1/3 gallon = 1.26 liters
  
• 1/3 gallon contains 14.112 grams nitrogen
  
• 1 square meter = 10.764 square feet
  
• 28 grams = one ounce. 16 ounces = 1 pound. 1 pound = 448 grams
  
• Our forest garden canopy at our house here demands an average of about 8-10 grams/square meter for canopy areas. (In the heaviest demanding spots we have walnut or chestnut overstory with hazelnut understory, with ground cover beneath the hazel, for a total of 17 grams per square meters. Most areas have a demanding overstory with ground cover, for 7 grams per square meters. Many areas have even lower demand than that.)
  
• I assume that nitrogen returned to the garden in the winter does not fertilize as effectively as during the more active growing season, and that some of that nitrogren leaches away or otherwise goes to waste. So I assume that 8 months of the year, 100% of the nitrogen gets used, but during the other 4 months of the year only 25% of the nitrogen gets used. So effectively you have 9 months worth of useful nitrogen.
  
• According to this random website, vegetables typically remove 30-100 lbs nitrogen er acre, which is 13,440 - 44,800 grams Nitrogren / 43,560 square feet = 1249 - 4162 grams nitrogen / 4047 square meters = .3 - 1 gram nitrogren/square meter. So even assuming the heaviest demand, and more intensive gardening than standard far-spaced monocultures, 2 grams / square meter seems a reasonable high end guess for annual bed / open area nitrogen demand
  

Crunching the numbers for an average nitrogen demand of 8 grams per square meter gives the following:

1 day of nitrogen (14.112 grams) feeds 1.764 square meters of canopy.
9 months (270 days) of nitrogen feeds 476.28 square meters of canopy.
476.28 square meters of canopy = 5127 square feet.

If you assume the forest garden uses an average of 10 grams nitrogen per square meter, you knock off 20% of the coverage you got with 8 grams, so you get: 4101 square feet.

If you were only fertilizing open area using 2 grams nitrogen per square meter, you'd multiply by 4 to get 20,508 square feet, almost half an acre!

So between Theressa and me, we should be able to fertilize 8200 - 10,250 square feet of forest garden, without even taking into account our large open sun vegetable area. And that doesn't even take into account the nitrogen I bring into the yard each week in coffee grounds, and dumpstered bread and bins of produce scraps for the chickens. Nor does it include the nitrogen in our poop in the humanure pile. Not only do we not really need nitrogen-fixers, we may have an excess of nitrogen in the yard! Anyone know if an excess could occur in this situation, and whether we might harm the water table with nitrogen leachings?

In general, it seems urban lots don't need nitrogen-fixers for the nitrogen if the house inhabitants recycle most of their urine. Interesting!

I'll post later with a few redemptive reasons to keep including nitrogen-fixers in your designs. And I'll probably post a summary of Martin Crawford's recommendations for how much nitrogen-fixing plant canopy to plant for a given design.

---

Note: I wrote a few follow-up posts related to this one:

• Further Thoughts on Liquid Gold
  
• Why We Love the N-Fixers Anyway
  
• Liquid Gold Calculations Revisited
  

Portland Q&A with Derrick Jensen

As I posted way back when, Derrick Jensen writes really really well about really really important stuff. I neglected to mention that he also speaks really really well about those really really important stuffs. And lucky for us around here, he will speak at a Q & A session in Portland on December 19!

So, if you don't have the time to read 1000 pages (Endgame) bashing hope, bashing civilization, bashing pacifism; and inspiring passion for reconnecting with and restoring your landbase, you can still get in on some Derrick Jensen wisdom! I highly recommend coming out for the event, whether or not you've read his books. See you there!

Derrick Jensen Comes To Portland!

“Civilization is not and can never be sustainable.”

This is the first of fourteen premises in author Derrick Jensen’s revolutionary book Endgame. For the last decade Jensen has written articles and books concerning the problems of civilization and what we must do about them. In Endgame Jensen challenges the values and tactics of some of histories most influential pacifists, the sustainability™ movement and the painful games we play with those in power while trying to save what is left of our environment. The last time Jensen came to Portland, the Q and A went late into the night and ended with many questions unanswered. This time around Jensen is throwing out the reading and going straight to the Q and A!

Mythmedia Presents: Q and A with Derrick Jensen
Wednesday December 19th, 7pm @ Disjecta (230 E. Burnside)
Advance Tickets $15, Door $18 (tickets @ www.mythmedia.org)

His most recent work, As The World Burns: 50 Simple Things You Can Do To Stay In Denial, is a hilarious graphic novel that he co-wrote with Stephanie McMillan, author of the popular online comic Minimum Security. This new book will be available for purchase at the event.

MYTHMEDIA was founded in 2002 by a group of high school dropouts who all agree on one thing: that civilization is going out of style fast! Our mission is to facilitate provocative and innovative ideas for a sustainable future using cutting edge media. www.mythmedia.org

DERRICK JENSEN, activist, small farmer, teacher, and philosopher, is the author of A Language Older Than Words and The Culture of Make Believe (a finalist for the 2003 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize) among other titles. Jensen’s writing has been described as “breaking and mending the reader’s heart” (Publishers Weekly). He writes for The New York Times Magazine, Audubon, and The Sun Magazine, among many others. His works have received praise from authors such as Howard Zinn, Ward Churchill, Terry Tempest Williams, and Winona LaDuke among others. Jensen’s speaking engagements in recent years have packed university auditoriums, conferences, and bookstores across the nation.

For more information on Derrick Jensen go to:

www.derrickjensen.org

www.endgamethebook.org