Temperate staple crops: plants (and critters) for a future

In my review of Carol Deppe's annual-based The Resilient Gardener, I expressed disappointment that no one has created a comparable blueprint with perennials. Now that I've moved to Hawaii with its abundance of well-documented perennial crops, I've dramatically eased my own task of synthesizing perennials, animals, and wildlife into production of a low labor, landbase supportive paleodiet. But I still want to see similar systems develop in temperate areas. I can offer some hints and glimmers of hope based on my experiments in Portland, for others to develop further. My previous post, Low-Maintenance Temperate Staple Crops, established a broad framework. This post gives more specific suggestions, heavily biased towards a Pacific Northwest climate with its winter rains and summer drought.

Livestock

Small parcels

• Most importantly, experiment with ways to integrate small animals such as ducks, chickens, rabbits, and guinea pigs into perennial gardens in such a way that the animals benefit the system, require minimal care, and produce high quality eggs & meat.
• Keep bees for honey for moderate consumption. They'll gather incredible numbers of calories for the space required.
• If you have a pond, try growing fish, even if just goldfish for slow-growing, very occasional eating by yourself or poultry.

Larger parcels

• Keep grazers such as geese, sheep, buffalo, and cattle where the land wants to grow grass.
• Keep browsers such as goats where the land wants to grow trees. Manage them carefully to ensure they don't make the land grow dead trees and sad scrub.

Tree crops

• Plant nuts. Chestnuts, acorns, english walnuts, black walnuts, filberts, and ginkgos have all proven themselves as reliable abundant croppers in the PNW.
• Plant fruits & berries. Figure out how much you can realistically eat, and how much is healthy for you.
• Grow olives if you can, for low-PUFA, oil rich food. Our olives failed to grow, but others in the Portland area have had success. We may not have given our plants good enough drainage.
• Use the seed kernels from Prunus and other fruit species as bonus seeds for your own or livestock consumption.

Herbaceous seed crops

• Good King Henry (Chenopodium bonus-henricus): needs breeding work for increased seed production (larger and/or more seed.) We found it a very low maintenance and tough crop, though we didn't perfect a ground cover situation to eliminate the need for spring weeding. Seed yields never got very high for the land involved - perhaps partly from competition following our neglect in weeding, and partly from inadequate irrigation in the summer.
• Scarlet runner beans (Phaseolus coccineus): try growing them as perennials. We never succeeded in growing them well even for the first year (slug pressure?), and the few healthy plants didn't overwinter. Someone in my neighborhood grew them as perennials on the west side of his house for summer shade, so maybe giving them a similar warm microclimate and/or heavily mulching would help. Breeding for hardiness may help. Supposedly you can dig up the roots and store them in a root cellar, then replant in spring.
• Experiment with recently developed perennial grains for humans (assuming you can digest them OK) and/or animals.
• Integrate minimal maintenance legumes like overwintered favas and early spring peas (we had minimal success with these - ducks to keep down our slugs may have helped). As with the grains, humans can eat these in moderation if they don't have bad reactions, and/or they can feed livestock.
• Perennial flax (Linum perenne). We grew this on our ecoroof and got a few seeds the first year. We didn't stay long enough to know whether it produces well once fully established. If not, maybe it could benefit from breeding work. Like its annual relative, perennial flax oil is rich in omega-3, highly beneficial for us and for livestock.
• Find other perennial seed crops for minor or major production. For example, we found fennel extremely easy to grow and harvest for ourselves and for the chickens, but we could only eat a small amount of seed each day because of its strong flavor. Perhaps a variety of minor seed crops could add up to useful caloric inputs.
• Breed other perennial legumes for larger or more useful seeds for humans, or just plant them as livestock fodder - Lupinus perennis, Vicia cracca, Vicia americana, black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia), pea shrubs (Caragana sp.), and ...?

Root crops

See my notes on perennial and self-seeding roots for more information on specific species: part 1 and part 2.

• Jerusalem artichokes AKA sunchokes (Helianthus tuberosus): Fantastic drought tolerant, persistent, low-to-no-labor abundant yielder. Due to high inulin content, these only work well as a staple crop if you can either:
  • Digest them OK with minimal cooking (many people ferment them).
  • Cook them long enough on a wood stove running in the winter anyway.`
• Skirret (Sium sisarum): breed for increased root production. We found yields quite reasonable at 1/2 pound/year in good conditions, and 1/4 pound/year in shade or poor soil. We experienced enough variation in yields between different plants to warrant selecting for larger and more roots. Skirret also deserves experimentation with different lengths of multi-year growth before harvest to maximize its potential as a perennial; we generally found the roots larger and less woody if we let the plant grow for two or three years, but never quantified this precisely.
• Grow mashua (Tropaeolum tuberosum), oca (Oxalis tuberosa), and yacon (Polymnia sonchifolia) as perennials, deep mulching as needed to overwinter them.
• Where conditions allow, try aquatic crops like cattail, water chestnut, and wapato.
• Develop and refine perennial polycultures such as my experiments with skirret/oca/potato and yellow asphodel/oca/lily.
• Cinnamon vine (Dioscorea batatas): great potential as a no-dig staple carb from its aerial bulbils. Set up on a permanent trellis such that you can lay a tarp or sheet under the vines to easily collect lots of bulbils at once.
• Creeping bellflower (Campanula rapunculoides): summer available root with mild flavor from an aggressive ground cover. May work well under jerusalem artichoke.
• Yellow asphodel (Asphodeline lutea): summer-available root adapted to summer drought and intercropping well with many other plants. Try to breed it for larger roots (perhaps at the expense of its flowering, which though beautiful and providing tasty nibbles presumably diverts a lot of energy from the roots.)
• Scorzonera (Scorzonera hispanica): experiment with how long to leave in the ground without having to dig too deep for the taproot. I tended to dig the top foot or so of the root, but snapped it off and lost it below that point. Experiment with replanting a portion of the tops instead of needing to resow from seed. I have successfully transplanted individuals with 6-12" of root, but suspect you could plant even less, and therefore get to eat more.
• Asiatic lily (Lilium sp): I assume Asian growers bred these over thousands of years to select for larger bulbs from these gourmet crops. Seek out varieties with maximum food yield instead of showiest flower.
• Camas (Camassia sp.): Another inulin rich root, requiring experimentation in a solar cooker to evaluate as a summer staple root. Otherwise it may not be justifiable due to the large amount of fuel required to make it digestible.
• Garlic (Allium sativum): pseudo-staple (since you can only eat so much of it per day.) Super easy to grow and supposedly high in calories per pound, though I wonder whether the high inulin content means we don't actually digest all the calories.

Low-Maintenance Temperate Staple Crops

During my last two years in Portland, I began focusing on calorie crops, those which can actually provide substantial daily energy. I wanted to create a perennial polyculture analog to the annual-based system described in Carol Deppe's The Resilient Gardener. My criteria for a crop included being regenerative for the earth, healthy for humans to eat, low maintenance, able to be consumed in fairly large quantities, and providing decent yields. I didn't get far enough in my research and experiments to say anything conclusive, but I can share a few findings. For the purposes of my harvest logs and for my Self Sufficient Diet drafts (temperate and tropical), I organized foods into categories, presented here from most to least valuable for these purposes.

Animal Products

Ideally, we can convince chickens, bees, and other livestock to spend their copious free time eating food of low value to humans, then eat them and their eggs, meat, milk, and honey. In a well designed system, our critters self-harvest, according to their preferences: small seeds, bugs, grass & other leaves, and pollen & nectar. This maximizes our efficiency, and provides us with some of the healthiest human food possible.

Calories per pound: Eggs - 650, Meat - 525, Milk - 300, Honey - 1400

Black walnut

Nuts

Nut trees can provide easy, reliable oil-rich seeds year after year. The fact that it takes a decade to start getting big yields just means we need to plant them *now*. And of course we can underplant developing nut trees with faster growing crops to use the space in the early years. Besides the usual nuts, oaks for acorns should get some attention. Oikos Tree Crops has some interesting naturally dwarfish seedlings which could fit much more easily into urban & suburban yards.

Possible nuts include walnut (black & english), butternut, filbert, chestnut, ginkgo, acorn, almond, pistachio, pecan, hickory, and pine. Many of these can be foraged easily.

Note that paleodiet circles warn against excess consumption of polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA); most oil-rich nuts have high levels of PUFAs. I'm still trying to sort through this issue for myself.

Calories per pound: About 900 for chestnuts, 1800 for ginkgo, and 2700-3300 for the more oily nuts.

Good King Henry seed heads

Small Seeds

Though most of these work best as self-harvested livestock fodder, some may yield abundantly enough and process easily enough to be worth harvesting ourselves. Possible species include good king henry, fennel, Amaranthus sp, Chenepodium sp, perennial grains, dock, perennial flax, sunflower seeds, squash seeds, and various legumes including peas, favas, runner beans, and Carol Deppe's breeds adapted to the Willamette Valley. Not all will be palatable in large enough quantities to truly serve as staple crops: for example, fennel. But we should definitely explore those that do meet all three criteria of good yields, efficient harvest & process, and non-overwhelming flavor.

Calories per pound: around 1600

Mulberries & Serviceberries

Fruits & Berries

Everyone loves nature's candy, and the existing permaculture literature does a great job giving species options and describing how to grow them -- perhaps to an excessive extent, to the detriment of other important calorie crops. I found that I could eat about one pound of fruit per day, and half a pound of berries. Though I could probably push myself to eat more, Sébastien Noël of Paleodiet Lifestyle suggests limiting fructose intake to 50g/day, meaning no more than about 1 1/2 pounds of fruit and berries per day assuming no other sugars (including honey.)

Calories per pound: About 300 for fruits, 200 for berries

Mashua

Roots

Perennial, low maintenance root crops provide a moderately dense calorie crop. I found that I could eat about one pound per day, so they only provided a supplement to daily total calorie intake. Greatly increasing this intake may result in too many carbs for a healthy diet.

Root crops, of course, have the inherent ecological and labor drawback of requiring digging, but appropriate polycultures can mitigate some of the disadvantages.

My notes on perennial roots: part 1 and part 2

Calories per pound: around 300

Winter Squash

Though annuals, these don't require much soil disturbance considering how much space they take up at maturity, and can self-seed themselves (though we may have undesirable results from uncontrolled crossing.) While summer squash have the calorie density and uses of other vegetables, winter squash occupies a gray zone between calorie crop and vegetable. I can eat a lot of it in one sitting, but it has fewer calories than roots or fruits (but more than most other vegetables). It has more nutrients than many staple crops. It yields abundantly when happy, and stores well into the winter without processing. Unfortunately, its season of availability coincides with the primary availability of the super easy perennial roots, somewhat diminishing its staple crop value. Still, it adds diversity to the winter meal options, and can definitely provide a substantial number of calories.

Calories per pound: around 200

Goumi

Bonus Seed Kernels

We can eat the seeds from many fruits, giving us a small calorie-dense bonus. Species include all Prunus species (cherry, plum, peach, etc), Elaeagnus sp (goumi, autumn olive, silverberry), Cephalotaxus sp, and grapes. With the exception of almonds, a Prunus, no one grows any of these specifically for the seed kernels, but they're worth utilizing if we have them anyway! I used to eat some myself, and fed some to our chickens.

Calories per pound: guessing 1500-2500

Greens & Other Vegetables

Though not calorie crops, these add important nutrients to the diet. I found it very easy to meet our needs of 4 oz/day/person from perennial greens, shoots, stalks, and flowers.

Calories per pound: about 100

Lost in the Food Forest: rampant growth in Portland

I sent this email years ago to the Portland Permaculture Guild, offering some tips and discoveries from our experiments with dense interplantings in zones 1 and 2:

In zone 1 we have a pretty easy time keeping growth balanced as part of the once or twice daily gathering of greens for salad and omelets, plus occasional dedicated large-scale whack-backs.

Prune/whack ruthlessly where needed. Leave in place as mulch wherever you can.

Designate your paths, at least 2' for main access routes, at least 1.5' for keyhole paths. The plants will invade the paths no matter what, so don't be afraid to make the paths "too big"; you can decrease the frequency and/or severity of your whack-backs if you find you don't mind the plants taking up some of the path. If you make the paths too small you'll guarantee an unpleasant walk through the garden and/or increased maintenance.

Place plants far enough from the paths that they don't interfere.  It can be difficult to determine spacing for perennial veggies based on book data alone; we find that tall plants may fall over into the path after summer rains since they haven't grown up accustomed to the weight of water. I used to want to plant a 3' wide plant (based on book data) exactly 1.5' back from the path to maximize the plant packing. But I now think you need to give a large buffer - maybe 2.5' from the path, and fill in the gap between the large plant and the path with a low-growing plant. You can easily trample the low-grower if it exceeds its allotted space. This makes for easier harvesting anyway--you can reach the large plant in the middle of the bed, and the small plant(s) at the edges.

It's OK to plant the plants more closely together inside the bed--they'll work things out if they crowd or fall onto each other. So I would place two plants with expected 3' maximum width 3' apart from each other. Dedicated trample-tolerant very low-growing ground covers help delineate the path, keep bed plants from spreading into the path, and can fix nitrogen, accumulate nutrients, etc. We're having good success with:

• prostrate bird's food trefoil (Lotus corniculatus plena)
• "Treneague" variety chamomile (Chamaemelum nobile)
• what I think is dutch white clover (Trifolium repens)
• Pacific silverweed (Potentilla anserina)

Those cute little squash volunteers that look so harmless in late spring will take over 6' or more in every direction if you let them grow. Don't, unless you're really OK with it. Similarly, be realistic that squashes you deliberately plant will want lots of space.

Give climbing plants something to climb, or be aware that they will sprawl across the ground. Tomatoes, squashes, beans/peas/groundnuts/hog peanuts, and mashua will all sprawl if they don't find vertical supports. Some of them will sprawl anyway, and require deliberate guidance to minimize horizontal spread.

Crisis: Personal & Planetary

I just experienced the worst, and weirdest, illness of my life. I went from fully healthy to not breathing in a week and a half. It began with some headaches, double vision, acute hearing sensitivity, and fatigue, which prompted me (with Jasmine's insistent and wise encouragement) to check in to the emergency room in Hilo. As my condition deteriorated, they decided to fly me to a Honolulu hospital on the island of Oahu, where they found encaphalitis (brain swelling) and brain lesions. The next day, I stopped breathing so they intubated me, sticking a tube down my throat to keep the air flowing.

The doctors sent out more than 70 tests, but everything came back negative, so the cause of all this remains a mystery. They hit me with antibiotics, antivirals, and steroids to carry out a broad-spectrum attack against the mystery, and something seems to have worked. My brain swelling and lesions have decreased, and after a little over a week in the hospital followed by a week of rehab I can walk and do most tasks well enough to feel confident about my release today back to the jungle.

As I understand it, times of personal crisis are supposed to prompt deep self-reflection and reevaluation of life. Interestingly, my experience leaves me thinking I'm more or less right where I want to be, doing what I want to do. As I wondered whether I would die or be left permanently incapacitated in some manner, my biggest concerns revolved around the effect on my resistance work. My own human life doesn't matter much in the big picture, but the earth sure as hell needs every one of us fighting for her with as much commitment and energy as we can bring. I've positioned myself in a wonderfully low-maintenance and healthy lifestyle, requiring less than 20 hours a week to meet my basic needs in an environment I enjoy. This leaves me a lot of free time to devote to activism, mostly tech work for Deep Green Resistance, and possibly some local campaigns as well.

Time is short, so I'd better make the most of whatever time I have.   Will you join me?

From Subsistence to Resistance

I cried today. Not once, not twice. Maybe I cried eight times. I'm not even sure how to separate one cry from the next, when my heart carries sadness and anger in waves from peak to ebb, ebb to peak.

The exact number doesn't matter.

I'm not used to crying. As a male, socialized into masculinity, I learned to suppress grief and most other strong emotions at an early age. I remember the last time I cried in front of my mother, at perhaps 12 or 13 years old. I don't remember why I cried, but I do remember (and this is why I remember) my guilt and shame around breaking down in such a way, mixed into my sadness and into the comfort I received from her. I haven't cried much since then.

I can give an easy proximate cause for today's release: two heart-wrenching movies. But I need to explore some background for it to really make sense.

 

Portland

Many of you already know about my years living in Portland, where, after an initial period of frustrating and ineffective involvement in national and local politics, my then-partner and I embarked on a path of "disconnecting from civilization." We aimed to develop the practical skills necessary to eventually move to land, create a "tribe" of close-knit community members, and establish self-sufficient subsistence via homesteading and hunting & gathering. I learned how to integrate some of my "waste" products of humanure, greywater, and kitchen scraps into my food system. I learned enough basic construction to build simple shelters. I planted food forests and a perennial vegetable garden to learn how to feed myself efficiently while creating wildlife habitat and sequestering carbon. I learned about those other cohabitants of our landbase, and even learned to listen to them in my attempts to understand the non-civilized world. I played with "rewilding" crafts skills. I talked with three successive groups of potential tribe-mates, and learned some of the difficulties of communication, of connection, of finding shared purpose, of resolving conflict.

At the same time, I engaged with the larger community, trying to share what I was learning and inspire others to disconnect, in part or whole, from the destructive systems of industrial civilization. I offered free tours and presentations and classes, blogged more (or less!) frequently to document my experiments and findings, and provided edible and useful plants and seeds at low cost. I was something of a "food activist", specializing in advocacy of perennial polycultures.

And at the same time, I knew it wasn't enough: neither my own personal withdrawal, nor sharing my skills and encouraging others to move towards true sustainability. I couldn't escape the reality and the challenge presented most eloquently by Derrick Jensen: the culture of civilization is insane and intent on destroying everything on this planet, and it will not voluntarily stop. Withdrawal and teaching are both legitimate responses to the threats of social, economic, and environmental instability, but are inadequate without forming a serious resistance movement to halt civilization.

Although I knew at some point I would need to take part in some form of resistance, I tucked that goal away. I rationalized that I needed to focus on getting myself and a tribe into a stable position on land of our own before I could put energy into addressing the big picture, long-term struggle.

 

Hawaii

After years of preparing to jump from city to rural living, I finally moved to Hawaii last August. But not only had our third hope at pulling together a like-minded community dissolved, but I had broken up with my partner of all those years. I did have a new girlfriend, an acquaintance and then friend of several years, but we were new to each other as romantic partners.

We moved here with the idea of buying land in 6-12 months, developing a homestead, and building a community, which I assumed would keep me busy for several years. I had vague visions of sharing my knowledge and skills as in Portland, but not until I'd learned enough about this new tropical environment to have something worth sharing. I imagined us creating low-tech, truly sustainable lifestyles (or rather, recreating - Hawaiians had all this figured out before western invasion 200 years ago.) We would demonstrate to people the satisfaction, enjoyability, and practicality of living car-free, growing your own food in perennial polycultures, and paring down to perhaps one computer, one cell phone, and a solar panel without toxic batteries


But something funny happened about five months in. I felt increasingly dissatisfied with my priority of pursuing radical simplicity as quickly as possible. We'd achieved food self sufficiency (more or less) within a month of arriving, learned most of the basics we'd need to design a functional homestead, gone car-free, lived on a fairly small solar electricity budget, done 90% of our cooking over fire for a few weeks, done laundry by hand, taken cold showers, lived without refrigeration, and all in all gotten within spitting distance of sustainability. It turns out to take a lot of time and sometimes gets downright boring!

For a couple of years I've had the lesson of Scott Middlekauf's "A Word of Caution for the Permaculture Enthusiast" in the back of my mind: that after years of developing his homestead he realized that his goal in life is not to develop a homestead; rather, he'd been developing his homestead to support him in whatever he really wants to do with his life. Arriving as close as we did to self sufficiency, as quickly and relatively easily as we did, forced me to confront my own weighting of values: "lifestyle purity" vs using "good enough" as a support base to carry out my actual life goals. I now felt confident enough that we can adopt the necessary lifestyle changes down the line when we have to adapt to changing world circumstances. In the meantime, the use of compromising technologies and conveniences in the present would allow me to move ahead with my higher priority goals.

I started reading the latest projections of climate change, which terrified me; everything is spinning out of control faster than almost anyone expected. I got up to date on the actions those in power are taking to deal with the crisis, which all boil down to finding new ways to profit. I reread Deep Green Resistance by Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Aric McBay, and was struck again by their well thought out and feasible plan - the only realistic response I've seen to stopping the destruction. They recognize that begging those in power to change their ways has never succeeded, and that far from being transformed by people "being the change they wish to see", the dominant culture has brutally crushed every sustainable culture it's encountered - we're talking about cultures extant for thousands of years and waaay groovier than even the most spiritual hippie permaculture commune you can imagine.

They lay out a strategy of simultaneously dismantling industrial civilization (primarily through underground activists sabotaging and disrupting critical industrial infrastructure), while networking aboveground activists to rebuild local alternative systems to take over as the global systems collapse (which will occur, sooner or later, whether or not an underground accelerates that collapse.)  I began checking the Deep Green Resistance News Service page almost daily, reading all the linked stories and absorbing the ongoing expansion of global domination and the courageous pockets of resistance fighting back here and there.

Finally, in April, I joined Deep Green Resistance to actively engage in this struggle as a member of the aboveground, and am feeling simultaneously excited, proud, in love, scared, and uncertain. Excited and proud because I'm directing my energy to something so important. In love because even though I barely know them, I feel so much love for my fellow members in DGR, and for its allies, putting their time and energy and passion and money into this shared struggle for Beautiful Justice and thousands of new, sustainable cultures emerging from thousands of landbases (or just being left alone where they already exist). Scared because of the consequences if we fail. (Time Is Short.) And uncertain because I'm new to resistance and don't know how best to apply myself.

In part to address that uncertainty, I've been educating myself - about radical feminism, about racism, about indigenous struggle, about historical and contemporary resistance. Which brings me back to my crying.

So much of what I'm reading and hearing and watching is heartbreaking. I remember crying many years ago as I read Dee Brown's classic Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, one of the only such memories until I go all the way back to that childhood moment with my mother. I cried several times in more recent years reading Derrick Jensen's books. I cried three months ago when I read about the Russian prisoner of war "Sasha" who helped lead a successful mass escape from the German death camp at Sobibor, only to be thrown later into a gulag by Stalin. I cried two months ago watching Escape From Sobibor, the dramatization of that breakout. I cried three weeks ago listening to a Feminist Current podcast of Jackie Lynn's account of abusive grooming for eventual prostitution. I cried two weeks ago reading Patrizia Romito's A Deafening Silence and its analytic yet human exposure of the denial around male violence against women. I cried yesterday hearing about the extinctions of Hawaii birds that have occurred within my short lifetime, and the likely forced death march of several more before my own life is through.

Po'ouli, extinct as of 2004

 

Today

And of course, I cried today. I watched two movies: Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance, and If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front. I didn't expect either one to affect me as it did. Perhaps I primed myself to be ripped apart by Kanehsatake by reading Vine Deloria Jr's Custer Died for Your Sins and watching American Holocaust over the past week. More likely it would have happened anyway. The film, comprised almost entirely of on-the-ground footage in the thick of the action, shows the 1990 resistance of the Mohawk people of the Kanehsatake village to a planned seizure of their traditional land, disturbance of their cemetary, and the destruction of ancient pines to build new luxury housing and expand a golf course.

With amazing clarity and starkness, the film depicts the brute application of force against an already oppressed people; outright disregard for human rights; the repression of journalistic freedom; and soldiers and commanders and mayors "only following orders" and displacing responsibility for their roles in the violent violations. But it also depicts the strong spirit of the Mohawks and their allies, a resistance culture formed from longtime bonds of family and tribe, an integration of women and warriors and chiefs and children and spiritual leaders, unbridled expressions of anger and grief and love, a sense of humor, and an ironclad will to stand up to and fight back against injustice that I've never experienced in my white middle class life.

If a Tree Falls felt less intense. It's a more distanced documentary of interviews and vignettes centered around former Earth Liberation Front member Daniel McGowan as he awaits trial in 2007 for his role in multiple arsons of the property of environmentally destructive corporations (the original ecoterrorists.) I'd heard bits and pieces about his case, and those of the other defendants in the Operation Backfire roundup, but this filled in a lot of important detail, and made it all very human and real. The film drew me in and had me anxiously awaiting, with Daniel, the results of his trial. I'd already idealogically supported him and other ELFers, but I gained specific respect for this man who not only put his life on the front line, desperately trying to stop the ongoing horrors of industrial civilization after the approved political routes had failed, but stuck to his commitment not to turn state evidence against his comrades (even as most of them turned on each other and on him.) I broke down a couple more times watching his vilification and harsh sentencing.

I don't know what's happening to me, exactly. I've never reacted much to traditional tear-jerker emotion-manipulating films (usually about when I notice that I'm feeling something, I also notice the new musical score deliberately orchestrated to make me feel that something.) But the films I saw today are real. I guess I've opened myself up more and more to reality, to looking directly at the ongoing atrocities committed by the dominant culture. It's not as bad as one might expect; the grief hasn't led to despair, the anger hasn't led to some all-consuming directionless and distracting rage. To effectively resist, I need to operate from a realistic assessment of the situation - how others have resisted and succeeded or failed and why, how those in power have struck back against resistance and how they have succeeded or failed and why. I can handle the grief and anger; they're releasing and healing and authentic.

To misquote Steve Forbert: it feels good to feel again. I plan to continue.

Nuts about acorns...

(and walnuts, and chestnuts, and ...)

Every autumn in Portland brings a great opportunity to stock up on the easiest staple foods around: nuts! Depending on the type, in an hour of gathering you can collect days or even weeks worth of calories, all free for the taking from parks, roadsides, and yards where owners find them a nuisance. Of course, you'll spend a lot more time actually extracting the nuts, but the cold dreary days of winter suit that task quite well. Roughly in order of ripening, Theressa and I used to forage:

The Nuts

Hazelnuts (aka filberts) - We never had much success with these, as squirrels and scrub jays always started harvesting early, before full ripening in late August or early September. Friends of ours have had success, so perhaps we didn't look often enough, or get the timing right, or find trees with enough nuts to have some left over after our nonhuman neighbors took their share.

English walnuts - Also very popular with squirrels and jays, but usually produced in enough abundance for us to enjoy some of the harvest as well. Easy to gather, easy to shell out, and generally liked by everyone, these formed the bulk of our nut harvests each year.
Walnuts started dropping in mid to late September and lasted into early or mid October.

Chestnuts - Delicious, sweet, reliably produced carb-rich nuts. Spiny burs protect these nuts from the squirrels until they fall, so by checking trees every day or two you can collect a lot from the ground before squirrels run off with them. (Other humans, especially asian folks who've traditionally eaten chestnuts as a staple, actively seek out the nuts, often getting to trees shortly after sunrise to check on the previous night's fallen goods.) Hurling sticks or short chunks of 2x4s into the trees encourages new nuts to drop right in front of you, allowing a much larger harvest. Look for trees at Laurelhurst Park (mostly along 39th, but also some in the interior), Fernhill Park (two massive trees), and within neighborhoods. I found a nice spot, unharvested by anyone else, off the ramp connecting NE 42nd Ave to Columbia Blvd. Be sure to understand the difference between horse chestnuts and edible chestnuts before trying to eat them.
Chestnuts have a similar start time as english walnuts, but last into late October.

Acorns - By far the easiest staple for us to collect in bulk. Their tannins discourage squirrels and other humans who prefer to hoard the easier nuts first, but once you get a routine for leaching the tannins the acorns become very usable, and probably no more time intensive for the caloric yield than most of the other nuts. Acorns make excellent poultry food, though you'll have to crush the shells a bit for the birds to access the meat.
Acorns start falling about the same time as chestnuts, but last into November or even later. The rains of October and November usually ended our harvesting due to mold attacks long before we actually ran out of nuts to harvest.

Black walnuts - After acorns, the easiest nuts for us to collect in bulk. The hand-staining hulls and thick shells slow down squirrels and other humans. I generally harvested them after the hulls started rotting, making it relatively easy to extract the shell; we then air dried them for a while before storage. I cracked them out by holding each nut on a large rock (or driveway, sidewalk, etc) with my left hand and smashing it with a hammer. I cut the shells further open as needed with wire cutters to extract all the meat. Compared to most other nuts we got much lower yields of calories per hour of extraction, but the quicker and more reliable gathering offsets that a bit, I love the unique flavor, and the caloric yield still pays off quite well.
We harvested black walnuts from early October well into November.

Ginkgos - Tasty nuts surrounded by dog-poopy flesh, borne on female trees. (Many people in cities plant males to avoid dealing with the fruit, so don't expect every ginkgo to yield nuts.) Much smaller nuts than the others, so less efficient to harvest and process in quantity, but can still yield a good supply, and they fall after we've finished harvesting the others. We noticed some Asian people foraging these, but not as avidly as with chestnuts, and we didn't see any other animals gathering them. Some people suffer rashes as allergic reactions, so use caution the first few times you experiment. (One friend got an itchy anus presumably from the nuts on the way out, another a rash on her hands from handling the fruit or the shells.) You need to cook the nuts (before or after shelling); don't worry about removing the pellicle skin.
These start falling in November and last perhaps into December.

Foraging References

Samuel Thayer wrote the best two foraging books I've found for temperate climates: The Forager's Harvest and Nature's Garden. He covers a limited number of plants, but in great detail based on direct personal experience. In Nature's Garden he tells you more or less everything you can know (from a book) about hazelnuts, black walnuts, and acorns; The Forager's Harvest describes butternuts.

Euell Gibbons has shorter sections on acorns, walnuts, butternuts, and hickory nuts in Stalking the Wild Asparagus. "Wildman" Steve Brill discusses hazelnuts, black walnuts, butternuts, chestnuts, hickories, and oaks in Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and not so wild) Places.

Credits

Thanks to Jasmine for inspiring this post's title with her email address!

Book review: The Resilient Gardener by Carol Deppe

I rate Carol Deppe's The Resilient Gardener the most important gardening book of the last few years, and simultaneously the most frustrating gardening book I've ever read. Deppe, also the author of Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties, draws on more than three decades of experience in the Willamette Valley of Oregon to present a treasure trove of tips and tricks for Pacific Northwest (PNW) vegetable gardening. After touching on many common vegetables and devoting some space to orchards, berries, and nuts, she thoroughly covers five staples for calories, protein, and omega-3s: potatoes, eggs, squash, beans, and corn. Her distilled expertise alone makes the book a must-read for regional gardeners and highly valuable for growers in any temperate climate, and her thorough coverage of sustaining staple crops truly sets her book apart.

The Important

Yet Deppe goes far beyond the in-depth but limited scope of how to grow vegetables and these particular staples,. She provides a rough roadmap for each gardener to think through his or her unique circumstances of physical ability, available time, dietary restrictions and needs, land access, soil type, sun & water availability, local microclimate, regional climate, and regional history to design a practical plan for growing some or all of a nutritious, delicious, and balanced diet.

Complicating her task further, she doesn't work from a baseline of stable gardening conditions, but assumes any of a host of disruptions can and will strike at some point in every gardener's life: personal emergencies such as injuries or needing to care for loved ones; climate change causing more erratic and extreme weather events of heat, cold, floods, and drought; temporary or long-term electrical outages; fossil fuel shortages; transportation shutdowns; and other possible disasters. She presents many ideas for minimizing risk of crop loss in various situations, such as organizing plantings for mantainance of the most important crops with a minimum of time and water; experimenting now with learning what you can get away with in withholding water, fertilizer, and attention; and staggering plantings of multiple varieties of multiple crops over multiple sowings.

Deppe has experienced many health issues in her life, including celiac disease, lactose intolerance, difficulty digesting raw vegetables, weight problems, food cravings, sugar jags, salt sensitivity, a bad back, general aging, and restless leg syndrome. Over the years she's observed her body and its reactions to different foods and exercise, allowing her to tease apart what works for her and what doesn't. The detailed description of her process and findings helps guide your own questions about what foods work well for you and which cause subtle or obvious problems. Interestingly, Deppe's observations have pushed her in some ways towards a paleodiet: she doesn't eat gluten grains such as wheat, eats pastured animal foods rich in omega-3s, rarely eats dairy except for pastured butter, minimizes caffeine & sugar, and avoids juices & processed foods. (But she seriously diverges from the paleodiet by relying on legumes & corn loaded with anti-nutrients, and taking in the vast majority of her calories as carbs including heavy reliance on potatoes.)

Deppe has worked out an extremely effective approach to growing not just greens and nutritious vegetables for herself, but also a significant portion of her calories and protein in a scalable manner. She's experimented enough with different techniques and levels of water and fertilizer input that she could, given access to enough land, cope quite well with whatever disruptions come down the line. She's saving enough of her own seed to continue gardening if commercial seed sources shut down. And she clearly relishes the results in every meal; her multitude of uses for each staple crop and her recipes convey a deep delight in the flavors and textures of her produce.

The Frustrating

I love that Deppe has laid out such a solid plan for growing a complete diet in the PNW (and with some thought, experimentation, and adaptation, anywhere in temperate areas.) I hate that four of her five staple crops grow as labor intensive, soil and habitat disturbing annuals. And I feel uneasy with three of her five staples conflicting with the paleodiet.

But I have nothing better to offer! It took me six years of experimenting with perennial vegetables and crops in Portland to:

1. Realize that we could easily grow greens & nutritious veggies but
2. ...we couldn't possibly eat enough of them to get a substantial number of calories.
3. Identify some potential perennial herbaceous staples and
4. ...start to grow them out and eat them in greater quantity and
5. ...realize that we should select and breed for better yields and
6. ...experiment with polycultures for more efficient use of space and minimized harm from digging the root crops.
7. Realize that we had a solid base of winter root crops, but very few summer perennial roots or other staples.
8. Just begin to see yields from the nut and fruit trees.

I haven't come across perennial enthusiasts presenting anything nearly as comprehensive as Deppe's system, at least not for intensively cultivated small to medium scale systems in modern private land ownership patterns. I doubt that her level of expertise exists for a system based on diverse perennial plant crops anywhere in the temperate world. (Though I'd love to hear examples of how I'm wrong!) Hence my deep frustration: I yearn to meld the sustainability and low labor of perennial polycultures, the nutritional health of the paleodiet, and Deppe's level of experience growing resilient abundant staples into a truly permacultural blueprint for supporting ourselves and the rest of our landbase. But I don't know how.

The Future

Now that I've moved to Hawaii, I've dramatically simplified my own task of synthesizing perennials and animals and wildlife into production of a low labor, landbase healing paleodiet. But I still want to see similar systems develop in temperate areas. I have some hints and glimmers of hope based on my experimentations in Portland, which I'll post later.

In the meantime, visit www.caroldeppe.com to download free excerpts of the book. Drop her an email to be notified when she has seeds for sale; most of what she sells you can't buy anywhere else!

Hawaii - Week Six

Food

The food bounty started to overwhelm us this week! We didn't even take any food when we helped farmer Clive on Thursday, because we just plain have too much. We got three ulu from a broken branch from a tree on our host Dale's land, and two racks of bananas. I made a lot of meals of cooked mashed banana with ginger and lime: delicious!

Abiu - vanilla pudding from a tree

A neighbor brought over some excess abiu from her tree, and we discovered that they have way more flavor than those from the tree on this land. Had I based my judgement of the species solely on the sweet but bland tree I may not have bothered planting it; we definitely need to try fruit from multiple trees (especially selected cultivars, not just seedlings) before evaluating a given species. We should also expect to graft most of our fruit trees to superior varieties instead of growing from seed.

We ate a bunch of peanut butter cups and butterfingers because Dale bought them then decided he shouldn't eat them. Another good example of how poorly I self regulate when tempting items become available!

Health

I've had a few health issues in the last month, with infection of a light scrape on my foot, my first cold sore (oral herpes) outbreak in years followed by swelling of (I assume) lymph nodes in my left armpit, then a cold/flu thing starting last Wednesday. I had a lot of coughing and phlegm going on for a few days, especially at night causing restless sleep, and spent a lot of time resting in bed reading and researching. By Sunday I thought I'd gotten past the worst of it, and did some very light work. Monday I came down with a fever and didn't leave our shack all day except to pee. Jasmine took excellent care of me, bringing me tea and food, but I'm still quite sick. On the mainland I used to get a cold or bug about once a year, sometimes but not usually this severely. I feel very surprised to have caught this, given our isolation and very infrequent trips into town and my general good health, but perhaps I'm vulnerable to different strains of bugs here?

Pothos vine

Meanwhile, last Wednesday I did some clearing and mulching work on the land, including cutting off some "taro vine" (also known as "pothos") where it dangled down from huge mango trees. It turns out that the sap from fresh vines can cause a severe skin reaction on some people, including myself; I formed multiple blisters and pustules on my stomach, arms, and feet where I'd handled the vines or had juice splash on me. I also scratched myself very lightly with my machete on the back of an ankle, and the scratch turned into a gnarly blistering infected mess; I'm guessing I injected some of the pothos juice directly into the wound from the machete blade. Many of the other blisters on my body became infected too, perhaps from the multitude of flies and fruit flies who descended to slurp away. Jasmine helped me disinfect and bandage all the problematic spots, getting them well on the way to healing now. Though I've walked around with many open light wounds my whole life without any problems, I clearly need to take more care in this environment to seal up cuts and scrapes (especially on my feet).

Learning

We watched Geoff Lawton's Establishing a Food Forest video. I watched this years ago but hadn't intended to move to the tropics, so didn't retain many of the details about tropical plants. I like Lawton's basic strategy of drastically overplanting a space with legumes and pioneers, then cutting them back as mulch when rainfall exceeds evapotranspiration. Gradually, over the course of a few years, the cropping species take over most of the space from the pioneer species. Unfortunately, he didn't give any specific guidelines for spacing the main trees, which experts like Dave Jacke and Martin Crawford consider crucial to forest gardening. If your canopy closes in too much, you dramatically limit what you can grow in the lower layers, so you need to plan that part very carefully from the start.

I spent some more time working up my concept of goat integration into a multistory orchard/food forest, drawing up two pretty colored sketches and pondering the necessary spacings between trees and palms to achieve that desired goal of a diverse understory. Looking through Mollison's Permaculture: A Designer's Manual, his sketches for the humid tropics show overstory palms spaced far enough away from the next layer of cropping trees to allow them a good sized window of open sky above, with only the next layers down of cacao, coffee, & herbaceous plants in really heavy shade. I need to spend a lot more time observing mature tree sizes and their interactions at different spacings, looking at photos of traditional tropical home gardens, and picking the brains of long-timers who already know this stuff.

I read a lot more of Traditional Trees of Pacific Islands; one of the things I love about being sick is spending so much down time reading!

Networking

We helped for a few hours in the kitchen garden of a nearby retreat center/education center/farm/community, giving us the opportunity to see some of their systems, listen in on conversations about different landscaping challenges, and to meet a couple more folks who seem quite knowledgeable about plants. I liked their organization around resources like the on-farm truck and a shared bicycle, washing dishes, and for rotating chores among community members. Jasmine and I disliked the formal, country club feel of the place with lots of manicured lawn and tightly controlled plantings; presumably a style needed to attract people with enough money to spend on retreats and classes to keep the whole operation going. We definitely want a different model for our own community.

Hawaii - Week five

Food

Pig

A mini-tragedy occurred this week; we discovered that our neighbor's refrigerator into which we'd packed the rough cuts of the second pig never got very cold, and about 25% of the meat spoiled. We had felt very tired after processing two pigs two days apart, and took a break for a day after getting the meat from the second pig into the fridge; otherwise the meat would have stayed fine. Since the meat had started to turn, we rushed through the job of cutting it off the bones (not creating the nice portion-sized cuts of meat as with the first pig) and packed it into the car for our host to drive 30 miles to store in the freezer of another friend.

I started rendering the fat, which took me two solid days and resulted in a somewhat off-tasting half a gallon of lard and a big bowl of cracklings which only I am willing to eat. (Part of the bad flavor comes, I think, from burning the fat while trying to render it; our hasty job cutting fat off the meat and bones left many meat bits with the fat, which I suspect burn more easily than lard alone.)

Meanwhile, the neighbor's freezer got plenty cold with its bags of meat from the first pig - so cold that they all froze together and we became unable to access them! So we wound up eating a lot of stew early and mid week from the two pigs, but then ran out of meat.

We had hundreds of flies descend upon us as we tried to process the spoiling meat, and even more over the next two days as I rendered the fat and cleaned out the garbage bags and scraps of clothes we'd used to store the meat in the fridge. It definitely takes a lot of personal energy to process a pig (especially when you're still learning) and if you don't stay on top of it, it can get problematic fast! All in all, I much prefer the idea of building networks of friends and neighbors who all share in a feasts when someone makes a kill: gut the pig, singe the hair off, throw it in an imu (earth oven) to cook, and then have everyone over to eat it all up. No worries about things going bad, no need for everyone to have their own fridges and freezers, a lot more building of community, and a lot more fun.

Other

We went on an ulu (breadfruit) mission, checking four clusters of nearby trees with no success, then biking 16 miles each way to Kalapana where we found about 8 fruits weighing a total of 10+ pounds under a large tree. Unfortunately, although the fruits felt very soft and ripe, they still had green flesh near the skin, which apparently doesn't taste as good as when the flesh has turned white or yellow. We don't totally understand why these fruits didn't turn sweet and delicious; perhaps they fell prematurely from the tree? We also harvested one fruit directly from the tree; we judged it ripe because it had latex on it, but it actually has a long way to go to ripen. Probably a ripe fruit above it dripped latex onto it.

I ate a fruit of ambarella (Spondias cytherea) which tasted better than I remembered from two years ago; I always get messy when I eat these juicy fruits, but I do enjoy them! We harvested and fried a few flowers of hau, a mallow family Hibiscus whose cooked flowers and buds one of my books describes as a delicacy. We thought that description an overstatement as we find them similar to mallow flowers - fine for cooking mixed into omelettes or with other greens, but bland.

We ate a buffet lunch (including many sugary desserts for me) as part of a "day in Hilo" for Jasmine's birthday.

Learning & Exploring

I really enjoyed our 32 mile round-trip bike ride; it gave me a chance to see a large swath of road at a slower pace than in a car, and to get a human-scale feel for the stretch. I've never ridden so far in a day, and Jasmine hasn't done so in a long time. We're using very uncomfortable bikes borrowed from our host, and found that our butts, crotches, wrists, shoulders, and necks got tired and sore long before our leg muscles had any problems. So we expect we'll handle similar distances fairly easily in the future after building up more strength and purchasing better bikes.

We finally made it to the ocean, more than a month after getting here, even though we only have to travel 15 minutes to get there! I've never felt drawn to the ocean much; although I enjoy the view and the sounds and sight of the crashing waves, I don't enjoy getting wet and salty. Still, I'd like to learn more about the crabs and fish and starfish and corals and other critters in their totally different world, and I want to learn to fish, so we'll make more trips.

We helped farmer Clive weed and harvest "slips", new propagative shoots, from his pineapple bed. I really enjoyed the easter egg hunt of peering into all the spiky plants to see the clusters of fresh leaves indicating clumps we could break off from the mother plant; then we got to hurl the slips into piles at the front of the bed. Someone should invent a sport based on the skill of tossing pineapple slips into precise locations.

I couldn't sleep one night, so spent a few hours lying in bed working out a good (I think) solution to the problem of how to integrate goats into zone 2/3 orchards. I'll write up another post at some point detailing my musings.

I've continued to read Traditional Trees of Pacific Islands now and then, and to work on our plant lists; I finished entering a bunch of palms and started working on native & polynesian canoe plants.

Evil Civilized Technology

We finally got set up with an iphone (gift from Jasmine's aunt, thanks!) with a $45/month Straight Talk plan giving unlimited calls & text, and theoretically (but not really) unlimited data. I jail-broke the phone and got us set up with tethering options (both through the iphone, and through my Notion Ink Adam tablet), so now we have the use of internet in our little corner of the jungle.

I prefer being forced to go into town and stay really focused to get everything done in a few hours on the internet at the library, but Jasmine really likes our new convenience, which allows her to connect with friends and family online without having to be well organized about using limited library time in town. I don't do well limiting myself when something is available; I work best by making it inconvenient or impossible for me to access the thing in the first place. I've already found myself staying up til midnight on the internet once!

We finally exhausted the kitchen propane tank after more than a month of use, including a looong time rendering fat and cooking pig stews. It impressed me with how long it held out. We still plan to build a rocket stove to get off the propane.

We watched The Fellowship of the Ring over two days in the evening while shelling out jackfruit seeds. Part of me wants to make myself more productive and on-task by watching a permaculture video or something if we're going to watch anything at all. But part of me really enjoys having a good story fed to me in such an easy format.

Wildlife

I rested in the grass for a while one day, and think a grasshopper mistook me for a blade of grass and chewed open a flap of skin on my left pinky! Jasmine saw a cool 3" long stick insect in the kitchen one evening.

Hawaii - Week four

Food

Our host shot two pigs this week, the first he's ever killed, and the first Jasmine and I have ever butchered! For the first boar, it took the three of us about 6 hours to set up a butchering station, hoist him up, gut him, skin him, make initial rough cuts, and pack the meat into a cooler and a bucket with ice. The next day the three of us spent about 4 more hours rendering the fat (see picture below left), cutting the meat off the bones into meal-sized chunks, and packing it into a neighbor's freezer. We made stew the first night from the backbone, and fried some meat cuts the next day. Jasmine and I had felt some concern that we might not like wild pig; some people describe it as gamey or tough or otherwise inferior to domestic meat. But after tasting it, I deem it the best meat I've ever eaten!

Our host and I worked on the second pig mostly by ourselves, with Jasmine providing some support. It took the two of us 5 hours to process a larger pig, including the head (which we'd discarded from the first pig), and we did a much better job of retaining the fat with the meat instead of losing it by leaving it attached to the hide.

For the past few weeks, we've obtained all our necessary foods by foraging and work trade at the farm down the street, except for the crucial staples of cooking oil and meat. I feel really excited that we've closed that last gap and achieved semi self sufficiency in food within one month of arriving; the bounty of this land amazes me! (Reality checks: 1) much of the bounty comes from the work of folks in the past planting the perennial trees from which we forage now. 2) We're living at a very low elevation with relatively abundant sun and rainfall, perhaps an ideal microclimate for food trees. 3) We have not yet learned to use a gun, let alone something we can make ourselves such as bow & arrow; we're relying on our host right now to kill the pigs. 4) I don't know how many pigs live in the area and how often we could continue to shoot them without depleting their numbers or scaring them away.)

We had our first taste since moving here of that other Hawaiian classic - ulu, or breadfruit, a staple carb that grows on trees in convenient 1+ pound balls. Ours hadn't reached peak ripeness, so hadn't developed the sweetness of a fully ripe, soft breadfruit, but Jasmine and I both enjoyed it a lot as a blander starch. We also tried two more fruits from different trees of the related jackfruit. Though jackfruit requires a fair amount of work to process, the flavor and multiple yields of fruit and starchy seed has begun to convince me that we should grow one or two. Other new tastings: naranjilla (they remind us of kiwis, with a nice tart taste and similar texture), tree tomato (a lot like a tomato but with a thick, fruit fly proof skin), abiu (sweet & custardy but not much flavor), and yet another breadfruit & jackfruit relative: chempedak (delicious).

Our experience so far confirms my expectation that we can easily procure all the food we need for our tribe by growing perennial plants and hunting pigs. We hardly even need chickens and goats for their food products, though they have so many other uses in the systems (especially for weed and pest control, nutrient cycling, and goat walking) that it doesn't make sense to build permaculture systems without them. Once we develop our own food systems, we may quickly find ourselves with excess to share with the larger community!

After days of talking about it, Jasmine and I finally split a tub of Alden's Cookies & Cream ice cream (on sale at the local natural food store) and ate it for dinner. After eschewing sugar and grains and processed foods for weeks in favor of amazing fresh fruits and greens and taro and local beef, we both decided the ice cream wasn't all that great. I can't say that's the last time I'll succumb to processed sugar in a package, but the experience definitely decreased the temptation.

Learning

I've still been reading the Traditional Trees of Pacific Islands book, and read Sarah Vowell's Unfamiliar Fishes, an easy to read and seemingly balanced history exploring the impact of missionaries on Hawaii, the overthrow of the monarchy, and how it all tied in to the expansion of US imperialism. Jasmine and I both worked some more on our lists of plant species.

We attended an event at La'akea, a local permaculture community, where we learned new information about two fairly recent, rapidly spreading problems for humans in Hawaii: little fire ants, and rat lungworm disease (a potentially dehibilitating and/or lethal nematode when it accidentally winds up in human brains instead of its usual rat and slug/snail hosts.)

Networking

We met a few new people at the La'akea event, and Jasmine chatted a little bit with a pig hunter visiting at Clive's farm. The hunter loves talking about pigs, and we love learning about pigs, so I'm hoping to get a chance to talk with him too!

Hawaii - Week three

We foraged some new food this week, saw some new wildlife, checked out a bunch of library books with our new library cards, and started doing work trade with our land host "Dale" who returned to town. We spent a lot of time working on our spreadsheet of plants, to help us learn and organize0 potential species we might want to grow: fruits, nuts, roots, vegetables, and so on.

Food

We started eating plantains from farmer Clive, cooking one green (starchy and bland like a potato) but mostly eating them yellow and ripe (delicious dessert, especially cooked). I ate a mango from a grafted tree at Clive's; the fruit had an orange rather than yellow or green skin, and very low stringiness to the flesh. We foraged with Dale in a couple of places he knows well, finding pili nuts (Canarium ovatum; we haven't eaten them yet), a large patch of water spinach (Ipomoea aquatica) growing adjacent to a pond, edible hibiscus, mountain apples (crisp and refreshingly juicy, but only mild sweetness and flavor), avocados, guavas, papayas, one starfruit, yellow lilikoi, and chayote (Sechium edule, a squash-like fruit.)

Dale brought home a huge cassava root from another site, which Jasmine and I both enjoyed a lot; it has a nice flavor and texture and we can readily envision growing this as a staple. (I'd especially like to experiment with it as a cyanide-laced, pig-proof crop to plant out in forest areas.) He also gathered some different greens from another site, including sissoo spinach, vietnamese coriander, basil, katuk, and curry tree leaf. We ate all the greens mixed together so didn't really taste the individual species, but it all turned out nicely. We helped Dale harvest coconuts from two trees; he climbed up using special equipment, cut off fronds as needed to access the racks of coconuts, and tied each rack to a rope run up and over a remaining frond, with me and Jasmine on the ground holding the rope and slowly allowing each rack to drop down to the ground. We got dozens of drinking coconuts, with nice sweet water and "spoon meat" - jelly-like coconut meat.

We ate ice cream beans (probably Inga edulis) from two different trees;. The first tree didn't impress me (apparently we harvested a little too late, mostly shaking over-ripe beans from the tree), but we found low-hanging, perfectly ripe beans on the second tree, which tasted very sweet with a nice flavor, and plenty of yield per pod and plenty of pods on the tree. I definitely want to plant a couple of these nitrogen fixing treats on our future land. We harvested a small amount of sugar cane (very nice to chew on; the woody fibers should help clean my teeth while I enjoy the sugary goodness) and naranjillas (haven't tasted them yet.)

Learning

I got a big stack of exciting books from the library, all on tropical plants. I finished reading Introduction to Permaculture, read a short book on growing fruits, nuts, herbs, and spices in Hawaii, and started reading Traditional Trees of Pacific Islands: Their Culture, Environment, and Uses, a lovely book edited by Craig Elevitch with detailed chapters on 80+ multipurpose trees.

We helped Dale maintain a young orchard area by clearing weeds, sheet mulching, and planting comfrey and perennial peanut starts. We also worked with him to clear an area on the land for a temporary structure for us. It amazes me how quickly a chainsaw can totally alter an area by taking down small and big trees fast. I learned a bit about clearing brush and weeds with hand tools - machete, sickle, and scythe. I can see that much of the work involved in tropical systems is keeping unwanted growth at bay; the permaculture principle of immediately planting any cleared areas with desired species applies doubly here, where everything grows so much more quickly than in temperate areas! I want to use chickens and goats very intelligently in our future clearing and weeding work; with good animal integration we can save a lot of human labor.

Wildlife

We saw Java sparrows, Red-crested cardinals, and a yellow bird Jasmine thinks may have been Yellow-fronted canary. We finally saw the Island Blind Snake, the only snake in Hawaii; an earthworm-sized, shiny metallic snake that lives in soil and thrashes around in a slithering sort of way when disturbed.

Hawaii - Week two

We had another good week, with similar times spent on actvities as during the previous week, except with less figuring out electronics & internet, and more actual use of our computers to research things and make plant lists. We received the "crate of stuff" we shipped from the mainland, and unpacked and organized it. We went on a couple of mini exploration expeditions, but all in all didn't get out much.

Food

Orange lilikoi

Besides most of the same foods as the first week, we ate taro root, many ripe papayas, jackfruit fruit and seed, a brownish lilikoi, some delicious orange lilikoi (much better than the yellow ones from last week), and turmeric. Much of the new stuff came from taro farmer Clive, who has work parties twice a week and sends us home with lots of food at the end!
We find taro super starchy and bland, with a lot of potential to soak up flavors of other foods and fill us up fast. Jasmine made a delicious curry with the taro, green papaya, coconut, and honohono. We find jackfruit seed similarly bland and starchy, with a mealy texture and the ability to absorb other flavors. Jackfruit seed takes some fiddling to peel a tough waxy layer off the nuts, but takes less work to grow than taro, and probably we'll figure out some tricks to make the seed extraction go more quickly and smoothly.

Practice climbing vine

I tried climbing a strong vine to get up a coconut tree, and found it very enjoyable and practical. I need to build more arm strength though! I made it 2/3 up and got a little confused as to how to get past a weird loop in the vine; then felt a little too tired to go all the way up. Later, back in the forest where we're staying, I found two vines wrapped around each other providing a wonderful practice climbing rope!

Learning

Clive's taro field

We've learned a lot from just two sessions with farmer Clive, mostly about planting taro. He plants 18" apart in rows 4' apart and keeps everything well mulched, never exposing the soil. He manages all the unplanted portions of his 20 acre lot in cane grass (Pennisetum purpureum), a common weedy vigorous biomass producer. He basically mows and chips the grass, applies weed mat to kill the roots and keep it from resprouting, then peels back the mat to plant taro into the stubble, mulching as needed with more chipped grass from the edges of his cleared area. He's built about 2-3" of soil over bare rock in the last 15 years, while producing a lot of crop to sell at local markets in the last 4 years. I don't think we'll mimic exactly what he's doing, since we want to produce for ourselves in more polycultural, low maintenance ways, but we can definitely learn useful lessons from what he's figured out over the years.

Clive's ginger patch

I haven't made it to any ultimate frisbee games yet, but have found an enjoyable semi-similar pursuit: catching papayas as someone else knocks them off the tree with a special mini-plunger-on-a-tall-stick. It challenges my reflexes and eyesight, as the fruit gets pushed off at some angle or other from its perch on the tree trunk, and falls down through leaves and between or bouncing off branches, hopefully into my soft hands instead of the hard ground.
I'm still reading Mollison's Introduction to Permaculture, which has already given me some useful new ideas and plant pointers; I've never before read permaculture books with the tropics in mind, so now I get more meaning from many concepts I only skimmed before. I read a draft report on sustainable farming in Hawaii, but didn't find it very useful. Much of the book covered marketing and selling products, and the parts about actually growing food didn't go into enough detail (especially about Hawaii specific concepts) to add much to what I already know.

Wildlife

We enjoyed the fascinating sight of an 'Io (Hawaiian hawk) eating prey (most likely a bird) on a branch, ripping off feathers to discard in between tearing off chunks of flesh. We saw a few cool new insects, including a funny little bug who seems to live inside a flat brown dead-leaf-looking mobile home, from which the bug pokes his or her head from at least two openings (one in each end) while dragging the whole structure to and fro. We'd never seen anything like it before.

Hawaii - Week One

Our kitchen

First full week! Jasmine and I learned a lot, foraged a lot, relaxed a bit, explored a bit, and spent a lot of time figuring out how to charge electronics and get online.

Food

We harvested and gathered lots of food: coconuts, avocados, bananas, mangos, strawberry guavas, limes, surinam cherry, lilikoi (passionfruit), koster's curse, green papaya (cooked like a squash), honohono, chaya, ginger flowers, and edible hibiscus. I feel very impressed by how easily we've found major staple foods, though most of the coconuts and all the surinam cherries, bananas, limes, and greens have come from the land on which we're staying, not from roadsides or other semi-wild public places. (If needed we could probably find enough coconuts out and about, and honohono grows as a weed all over the place; but I have yet to see any harvestable bananas or other greens I recognize in public places.) We've gotten nearly four eggs a day from the four chickens on the land.

Sprouting coconut with sweet fatty "King's meat"

On average, between the two of us, we seem to naturally eat on a daily basis something like: 1.5 small sprouting coconuts, 3/4 of a coconut for water, 3 bananas, 2 medium to large avocados, 8 mangos, 2-3 ounces of other fruits, 3.5 eggs, 8-12 ounces of greens, four tablespoons of butter, and a small handful of other nuts.

We brought from the mainland two pounds of butter, half a pound of cheese, some dried meat, nuts, and dried fruit , and still have 3/4 pound of butter and most of the nuts and dried fruit left. We're using the butter quickly and haven't figured out locally sourced cooking oils yet , but definitely haven't needed the nuts and dried fruit! We've experimented a little with extracting coconut oil, but still need to learn more to make it work.

We tried eating hala keys, but found them barely edible - consistent with reports of Hawaiians using them only as famine food. We'll try to get varieties grown on other Pacific islands with flesh larger, less fibrous, and free of oxalate crystals.

We've seen pigs several times, once as close as 40' away. With a gun and a little bit of skill, it should be very easy to shoot one and get a lot of meat. Since we haven't acquired that tool or those skills yet, we're starting to buy some island raised grass fed ground beef at the local natural food store, for less money than similar meat cost us back in Portland.

Learning

Passion vine butterfly

Besides food plants, we've learned a lot of the common trees such as gunpowder tree, octopus tree, melochia, autograph tree, noni, and bingabing. We've seen/identified a few birds, like the Hawaiian hawk, Japanese white-eye, Northern cardinal, Myna, house sparrow, and spotted & zebra doves (and probably mourning dove). We identified the Passion Vine Butterfly. We've seen plenty of the common gold dust day geckos, and a couple of smaller gecko looking reptiles.

I read through a book on organic gardening in Hawaii and added to my species list, and started reading Bill Mollison's classic Introduction to Permaculture.

Lifestyle adjustments

View from our hut -
ti, banana, mango, jackfruit, coconut, & albizia

We're going to bed shortly after dark and waking up at dawn, with much less computer use than usual. I'm experimenting with a eucalyptus toothstick instead of toothbrush. We've hardly gotten online at all, which I haven't really missed but Jasmine has.

Ironically, on our initial push of going primitive, we've probably spent as much time trying to get online and trying to charge electronics as we have foraging food. I've learned a lot about solar systems, DC power, adapters and tips - some of it the hard way - and hopefully have gotten past the worst of the learning curve! This probably merits its own write-up, as I'm sure sharing some of the mistakes I've made and learning I've done could save some other people some trouble.

Networking

We haven't talked much with people yet, but did chat a little with two locals involved in growing food and running a weekly market. We will probably talk with them more about the possibility of using some land in something akin to a community garden. We don't yet know where we'll settle long-term, but the location seems reasonably central to our most likely options. So if we start planting things now, we can harvest them in the future as food crops, and/or for propagation material for our actual land. And if our purchased land doesn't suit itself to teaching and showing permaculture food systems to others (because of our community wanting to keep its privacy, or too isolated for the public to access easily) then perhaps the community garden area could serve as a demonstration site.

We've talked on the phone with two other folks in the area, one of whom gave us permission to harvest his excess avocados but whom we haven't met. The other fellow has biweekly work parties where we can probably learn a lot about lowland tropical farming (and maybe take home some food or starts?) so we look forward to joining him in that later this week.