One Green World orchard tours

Continuing the theme of "type up scattered notes before they get lost forever", here's what I jotted down on the two tours we've taken of One Green World's orchard. The tour spiels and plants visited were pretty much the same fall and this fall, so I'll basically combine the two tours into one set of notes, plus include the pictures we took.

Figs crop twice, once in the summer and again in the fall. Some varieties have their main, heaviest crop in the summer, and others in the fall. In this region, Desert King is a good variety for a heavy 1st crop. Latarulla is a good variety for a heavy 2nd crop. Figs are somewhat deer resistant, due to their latex. The fig on the left is Latarulla, on the right is Peter's Honey, 3-4 years after planting as a 1-2 year old cutting propagation. Of the figs OGW sells, Peter's Honey is the sweetest, but has the longest ripening time so needs a good warm spot outside of Portland in this region. (In Portland we're a warmer microclimate in general already.)

Akebias sold by OGW come in two species, the 3-leafed and the 5-leafed. Both produce seedpods which contain a white pulp around hard, inedible seeds. We were able to eat some pulp; the texture and taste are reminiscent of tapioca pudding. The pods are also edible; in Japan they're cooked as a vegetable. They can be stuffed and eaten like a pepper. It doesn't seem like a huge food crop, but if you want an ornamental vine it definitely has bonus food value. The 3-leaf pod is thicker and harder than the 5-leaf pod. Akebias are semi-evergreen, meaning they'll stay evergreen in a mild climate, but start losing some or all of their leaves if it gets too cold (I believe the temperature given was consistently in the low 20s? Or high teens?) They're low maintenance; at OGW they just whack the vines back as needed and the vines bloom just fine. The akebia picture on the left is the 3-leafed "Deep Purple", and the picture on the right is a 5-leafed variety.

Flowering quince has citrus-like fruit on shrubs. I keep wondering whether the fruit has the same acidic properties and whether it can be used straight-up in recipes.

Aronia is good for adding to apple juice. On their own the juice is only "ok".

Beautyberry has unique purple berries which hang on the branches after the leaves drop. They berries are very bitter, but edible.

Empress tree is a fast grower! Considered a weed tree by many people.

Persimmons - astringent types can be fast-ripened overnight in hot water at the right temperature. Astringent varieties are always sweeter than non-astringent. The persimmon on the left is an American persimmon, which are all large trees with relatively small, astringent fruit. On the right are two different Asian persimmons, one so loaded with fruit its branches are badly in need of extra support! The Saijo persimmon is ideal for drying (and from other conversations I've had with OGW, seems to be the only proven astringent variety for this area.) Fuyu is a dry crisp [did I get that right?] non-astringent variety.

Jujubes are late to leaf out, as late as June. The variety "Coco", when dead ripe, has a coconut flavor. (I tried this variety inside at their sample table and thought it tasted, like all jujubes I've tried, like a cardboard apple--and not even a coconuty cardboard apple. :/ ) They are attractive shrubs, as seen in the picture on the left.

Asian pears are super productive. Thinning out the numerous fruits allows those that remain to become larger.

Autumn Olives are large shrubs of the Elaeagnus genus, meaning they fix nitrogen and produce tasty red berries. We munched on a lot of them from different plants. All were good, but the "Ruby" variety was slightly sweeter and tastier. "Garnet" appears to be a seedling selected by OGW to ensure pollination for "Ruby" when they sell it, since they're unsure of whether Autumn Olives are self fertile.

Seaberries are highly prized in Russia, and used for commercial juice in Europe (especially or only Germany?). They must be sweetened to become palatable, though last year there was someone on the tour who said he ate them raw from his bush. For easy harvesting in Germany(?), they cut off entire branches and freeze them, which then makes it easy to mechanically knock off the berries. With this setup plants have to be on a two year rotation, since the cut branches can't crop the following year.

The Medlar in the background is about 12' tall. Medlars are tip-bearers. The "Nottingham" variety is annoying because the fruit tends to fall off before its ripe. Some varieties, especially those with larger fruit, are prone to the fruit splitting, but apparently this doesn't cause any problems besides aesthetic. There was a vague report of dipping medlars in salt water and hanging upside down to do something...preserve them? Medlars have to "blet", aka "rot", to soften up before eating. This can happen on the tree, or you can pick them and blet them indoors.

Pineapple guavas are slow growers, but grow faster with supplementary water in the summer. This hedge of 4 was planted in the 01990s, froze and died to the ground, and then grew back. One guy mentioned that wind in the winter knocked off lots of his leaves. In a hard freeze, new leaves fall off. I guess that would make pineapple guavas semi-evergreen, and not suitable for winter windbreaks.

Fruit Tastings

Last year and this year, Theressa and I attended fruit tastings at One Green World and at the Home Orchard Society's "All About Fruit Show". From those, I have scribbled notes on various scraps of easily mislaid papers with our reactions to the different varieties and fruits. It seems useful to compile those notes here, both for our benefit and for anyone else who comes along. I suspect other notes will turn up after I post this, which I'll just integrate into this post...so don't be surprised if new varieties magically appear later.

Note that these reactions are by no means definitive--fruit quality can vary widely depending on whether it was harvested at the optimum time, the quality of the soil in which the plant is growing, whatever whims our non-professional taste-testing palates impose, and so on. That said, here's what we've got:

Kiwis

Home Orchard Society All About Fruit Show, fall 02005

• Dumbarton Oaks - yum! slight bitterness
  
• Arguta purpurea (Hardy kiwi?, Red) - very good
  
• 74-49 - As good as Dumbarton Oaks without bitterness
  
• Kuenta 72.001 - very good
  
• Michigan State - so so
  
• Cordifolia - very good
  
• Anna - very good
  
• Hardy Red - different taste, very good. Theressa wonders whether the fact that it's red gives it extra nutritional value?
  

One Green World, fall 02006

• Hardy Red - bitter says Norris, Theressa likes
  
• Rossana, Dumbarton Oaks, 4-96, L-167, Michigan State, Anna - all good
  
• #54 especially good
  
• Fully ripe Annas straight off the vine in the OGW orchard are especially enjoyable
  

Apples

Theressa likes crisp, tart apples. Norris likes a fair amount of sweetness, though sweet-tart is fine.

Home Orchard Society All About Fruit Show, fall 02005

• Ashmead's Kernel - Theressa and Norris like. Maybe a hint tarter than Norris prefers
  
• Black Gilliflower - neat color, good taste
  
• Braeburn - crips, some tart, Theressa likes
  
• Calville Blanc - meets both taste bud needs [not sure in retrospect what this means--maybe Theressa's requirement for tart and crisp. Or maybe it appealed to both N & T]. Kinda like the apple tree at Theressa's house at Rhine.
  
• Earligold - mushy, nothing special
  
• Fiesta - good, crisp
  
• Gala - soft, low on flavor
  
• Honeycrisp - watery
  
• Idared - eah [not impressed]
  
• Liberty - pretty good
  
• Pink Lady - Excellent [we've also enjoyed Pink Lady's from the supermarket]
  
• Red Boskoop - T likes the tart, N would like a tad less
  
• Spartan - crisp, tasty
  
• Sonata - crisp, very sweet, but enough tart for T which N doesn't notice
  
• Spitzenburg - good
• Swiss Gourmet - soft
  
• Zeek's Longkeper - T likes, N thinks "OK", bland
  

One Green World, fall 02006

• Callaway crabapple - N likes OK, T finds sour
  
• Golden Sentinel - N likes OK, T not so impressed
  
• Northpole - not impressed
  
• Scarlet Sentinel - N likes OK, T likes OK
  
• Spartan - OK
  

Asian Pear

Home Orchard Society All About Fruit Show, fall 02005

• Chojuro - good!
  
• Czui - not much flavor, softer, more tartness
  
• Daisui Li - T likes OK, N finds watery and bland
  
• Imamuraaki - a littel tart, almost apple. T likes.
  
• Lao Suan Li - very good!
  
• Large Korean - grows well, good for drying. So-so on the taste test.
  
• Komenashi - dryish, mealy, weird crunchy bits
  
• Kosui - pretty good. T likes.
  
• Niitaka - butterscotchish, crisp, some strange tastes
  
• Raja - OK, funny taste that comes out [I think this means an aftertaste]
  
• Seuri - interesting pineapple? taste, crisp, enough flavor but not lots
  
• Seuri li - a little more flavor than Seuri, quite good. T likes
  
• Shinko - watery, crisp, no flavor
  
• Shin Li - More flavorful, not blown away
  
• Ya Li - even waterier
  

One Green World, fall 02006

• Daisui Li - N likes well
  
• Raja - yum!
  
• Ya Li - N likes OK
  

European Pears

Theressa isn't a big fan of pears in general, though she hasn't had a lot of exposure to different varieties.

Home Orchard Society All About Fruit Show, fall 02005

• Belle de Beugny - little taste
  
• Cascade - T says like Wasser/Warren, general standard pear taste. N likes, but like Wasser better.
  
• Conference - Norris yum (had this at HOS '06)
  
• Elliot - good
  
• Leona - kinda an apple. Crisper, less sweet.
  
• Lezinova - eah
  
• Mellina - OK
  
• Princess - yum
  
• Turnbull - bleh
  
• Wasser (Warren?) - yum!
  

One Green World, fall 02006

• Shipova - yum! says N, unique taste. T likes OK, too much pear taste for her to be excited.

Figs

One Green World, fall 02006

• Lattarulla - very sweet, N and T like
  
• Peter's Honey - sweet, N and T like
  
• Vern's Brown Turkey - not very sweet, neither N nor T impressed
  

Grapes

One Green World, fall 02006

• Blue Muscat - similar to Glenora, stronger flavor.
  
• Canadice - a little tart-sweet, good.
  
• Glenora - good
  
• Heavenly Blue - yech
  
• Marquis - good (instinguishable from Reliance)
  
• Reliance - good (indistinguishable from Marquis)
  

Home Orchard Society All About Fruit Show, fall 02006

• Challenge - OK, not exciting
  
• Marquis - yum!
  
• Mars - OK
  
• Vanessa - OK
  

Pawpaws

Home Orchard Society All About Fruit Show, fall 02005

• Wells - interesting flavor with aftertaste, not so sweet [not convinced that this was fully ripe]
  

One Green World, fall 02006

• Unnamed Pawpaw in official tasting - N likes, T doesn't like--got a bitter taste from it.
• Found fully ripe Pawpaws on the trees in the OGW orchard, which were all delicious to N and T.
  

Miscellaneous

Aronia

Raw - meh. Sweetened juice tastes good.

Chinese Haw

Both N and T yuck, cardboard apple but bitter! (OGW '06)

Chinese Dogwood (Cornus kousa)

• Big Apple - tasty goop inside, 2 seeds. Skins yucky. (HOS '05)
  
• E14 - sweeter goop than Big Apple, but more seeds. Skin not good. (HOS '05)
  
• fresh from OGW orchard trees and local Portland trees - N and T enjoy a lot.
  

Cornelian Cherry

• unnamed variety - OK, big seed, not much flesh (HOS '05)
  
• unknown yellow variety - OK, nothing special (local Portland tree)
  
• unknown red varieties, probably somewhat overripe - range from OK to somewhat too tart for N's taste though T likes OK (OGW orchard '06)
  

Jujube

N and T have found all the Jujubes they've tried, whether at fruit tastings or from OGW orchard trees, to taste like cardboard apples. Not impressed

Persimmons

• Garretson - yum! small clusters (HOS '05)
  
• We've scavenged some fallen persimmons from local Portland trees, and from a OGW orchard tree in '05 and '06, all generally in the fully ripe, mushy stage--all have been really tasty
  
• We had some supermarket nonastringent types last year, and some supermarket astringent types. We both liked both types. Astringent seem to be sweeter, but the ability to eat nonastringent like crispy apples is nice.
  
• Norris has eaten fallen American persimmon fruit at the Home Orchard Society demo orchard--fully ripe mushy, yum! Lots of waste though, since trees are way high and you have to scavenge relatively undamaged fruit from what's fallen to the ground
  

Seaberry

Seaberry juice, sweetened, tastes good. Raw seaberry - yuck.

Wolfberry

Dried wolfberries not terribly exciting but knowing how healthy they are, tasty enough to eat happily. Wolfberry fresh off the plant - good! (OGW '06, new named variety they're carrying)

Book review: West Coast Food Forestry by Rain Tenaqiya

I received and read West Coast Food Forestry: A Permaculture Guide by Rain Tenaqiya a few weeks ago. I think it's a very useful addition for this region to the other resources available. Much of the bioregional analysis I've figured out in the last couple of years, but some of it was new, and it would have been a great headstart for me when I was just getting started. Surprisingly, the CD introduced me to several new trees, shrubs, and vines I hadn't heard of before, despite obsessive perusal of catalogs and other permaculture resources! The section on perennial vegetables was especially useful, summarizing a lot of the species already on my to-try-out list and introducing me to many many more. There were also a few surprises in terms of uses and edibility of some of the plants I already new about.

There are also some handy lists of plants that meet different conditions--"Fertilizer Unnecessary: Tall Trees", "Makes Lots of Organic Matter: Herbs", "Casts Light Shade: Short Trees", etc. And there's a sweet little chart of harvest times for Fruits, Nuts, and Berries to help plan your food forest for staggered harvests.

The book gives virtual tours of many west coast permaculture sites. The descriptions are inspiring, giving some ideas on combinations of plants being tried out elsewhere. Unfortunately, the pictures of the sites have been compressed enough for the ebook that it's difficult to make out what's what...I received permission from Rain to post higher quality images as a Picasa album.

All in all, I found this to be a good read and I've referred back to its various lists and plant bios as I designed our current food forest.

There's another review of the CD at:
HopeDance.

discountpermaculture.com

Last year, I organized a wholesale order of edible plants from One Green World, a local nursery. I'm doing it again this year, and since I also have a habit of ordering multiple copies of interesting permaculture-related books to share at a discount with others, I put together a website to handle the plant order and list the books I have available:

http://discountpermaculture.com

The plant order is open to anyone who can pick up their order from our house in NE Portland in January or February, and the books are available either for pickup or for mail orders. Feel free to share the URL with anyone who may be interested in plants or books at discount prices!

Fall plantings

I've been doing one of my favorite things this past week--planting forest garden plants! It takes a lot of mapping, researching, designing, planning, redesigning, reresearching, and replanning (part of that whole prolonged & thoughtful observation rather than prolonged & thoughtless action thing) before I finally get to the point of actually putting a shovel into the ground. So it's always rewarding to pat down the soil around a newly homed plant.

There are two sites I've been planting--our own yard of course, plus the already partially planted food forest at Theressa's dad's place (Jay's). At Jay's, we planted 18 trees last spring, but very little of the other layers (10 shrubs, and no ground or vine layers.) We simply didn't have time last spring to finishing designing the tree understories, obtain plants, and get them into the ground before the end of the rainy season...and since we only make it over to Jay's about once a week, we figured it was better to grow his plants in pots at our house for the summer instead of putting them into the ground late and not being able to baby them to ensure they thrive. Now that the rainy season has begun (and oh boy but has it begun!), I planted another 13 shrubs and 3 echinaceas as understories, which makes the whole area look much more like an actual multi-storied food forest instead of trees stuck in a sea of wood chips. It's very exciting, and I'm looking forward to small (but tasty and real!) harvests next year of gooseberries, currants, barberries, chilean guavas, and maybe even blueberries, plus perhaps some pears, cherries, plums, apples, and peaches (though I need to decide whether to allow the trees to set fruit next year, or remove their flowers and fruit to let them invest all their energy in growing for another year.)

I did most of the planning for Jay's last winter while still living at the Portland Permaculture Institute, designing understory patches for trees both at his place and at the Institute. I made some last-minute changes, primarily adding a few extra gooseberries and currants, but mostly implemented the designs as-is. It was really nice to be able to just pull out the old designs, find the appropriate plants in pots, do some minor measuring on the ground, and put in the plants.

Here at home, a lot more planning has been necessary over the last couple of months. The mapping was pretty easy--the lot is a simple 50' x 183' rectangle, with the house in the middle dividing the lot into two distinct design areas. There are a few tall trees (30-40') at the south end of the back yard: an evergreen on the neighbor's lot to the east, essentially at our southeast corner, a seedling cherry on our south boundary about 8' in from the east edge, and a black walnut on the neighbor's lot to the southwest. There are also many black locusts and one more seedling cherry along the east boundary of the lot in both the front and back yards. Other than those, the lot is a blank slate.

Since we have tremendously destructive miniature dinosaurs roaming the back yard, pecking at anything which moves or doesn't move, scratching anywhere there may be roots to destroy, and ignoring the paths we carefully lay out to instead trample across any vegetation they can find, we decided the back yard would be primarily trees and shrubs and large perennial herbs. I designed a layout with:

• 4 main trees (2 plums, 1 cherry, one fig), with 15 understory shrubs (gooseberries, currants, serviceberry, chilean guava, blueberry, salal, honeyberry)
  
• a 10-shrub thicket of medium sized shrubs approximately 6' x 6' (blueberries, honeyberry, serviceberries, wolfberry, pea shrub, chilean guava, goumi)
  
• a continuous evergreen hedge along the entire east boundary to act as a windbreak for the cold winter winds. Evergreen huckleberries on 6' spacing under the black locusts (which are nitrogen fixers), and nitrogen fixing Silverberries (Elaeagnus sp.) on 6' spacing in non-locust areas, plus salal halfway between all the 6' spaced larger shrubs
  
• one lone mulberry which is going to hate the spot we're giving it 4' out from the north wall of the neighbor's garage (but which, if it grows up tall, will one day hopefully get enough sun to fruit nicely). No understory for the mulberry, as this area is where we plan to keep the hen house, duck and rabbit housing if we ever raise them, wood for burning, etc
  
• an experiment with semi-espaliered Autumn Olives all along the west fence with various vines trained up them--pruning them flat against the fenceline to be living trellises and more effective chicken barriers than our current 3.5' fence, and giving them 1' of space towards the yard with a 2' path beyond that. This attempt to corral the autumn olives in such a small space may prove to be a maintenance headache and/or a mess, but if it works it'll provide nitrogen-fixing, tasty berries for humans and birds, firewood coppicing, and trellis space.
  
• a row of larger shrubs/small trees (including 2 yellowhorns, 2 Cornelian Cherries, and a medlar) a few feet out from the west boundary, plus another goumi and pea shrub
  
• A row of buried bathtubs about 6' out from the future house boundary, to allow us to experiment with aquatic plants and to provide extra winter sunlight into the house
  

The front yard, not cursed with hunt-and-peck feathered killing machines, will feature a large open area of about 1200 square feet, used for annual vegetables, herbs, nursery plants, and some smaller shrubs. In addition, we'll have:

• 3 Pawpaws and 2 Chinese Dogwoods (Cornus kousa) in the morning-shaded area just off our east boundary of tall locusts and cherry.
  
• 2 asian persimmons and 2 olives in full sun
  
• east boundary evergreen hedge with the same pattern as the backyard, except for one full sun area where we'll plant two Darwinian barberries (Berberis darwinii). The front yard currently has a laurel hedge all along the east boundary, so we hope to rip out sections of the laurel hedge to plant the replacement plants, with ongoing pruning and knocking-out of the rest of the laurel hedge as the new plants grow
  
• 2 large nut trees on the north boundary of the lot, taking advantage of the fact that shading out the street doesn't matter. Probably 1 english walnut and 1 chestnut, if we can convince a neighbor to plant a chestnut for pollination; otherwise 2 chestnuts.
  
• 2 hazels as nut tree understories, plus a few sun-loving shrubs on the south edges of the nut tree canopies.
  
• A material zone 10' wide x 14' deep to act as an unloading zone, receive future wood chip drop-offs, and possibly serve as a parking spot for soil-crushing cars
  
• bike rack, probably set in concrete and with a roof covering, for visitors to secure their bikes
  

There is essentially no area on the east side of the house for planting. There is an area approximately 11' wide on the west side. A black walnut (or english walnut if we wind up planting two chestnuts in the front yard) will be planted approximately even with the south edge of the house, 8' from the house, for future summer shade (and, of course, nuts). North of that, a line of Russian Olives 8' out from the house will be trained to form an archway to the house, serving as a sun-screen for blasting summer sun, support for trellising vines, possible coppiced firewood, nitrogen fixation, and possibly future sheltered nursery space once there's sufficient shade.

We plan to run some hardy kiwi vines up some of the existing black locusts and maybe the seedling cherry trees. Eventually we'll use kiwis and grapes as summer sun-screens for the south side of the house, though first we'll have to tear off and rebuild the south addition. We may also experiment with either non-living trellises over the main 4' path in strategic spots, or living trellis (autumn olive?) trained to form archways over paths, with grapes or kiwis growing on those as well.

I'm following one of Dave Jacke's forest garden patterns for trees in which a 2' path circles the expected mature canopy dripline, with 5 1.5' paths evenly spaced from the perimeter of the tree to its center, like wheel spokes. This creates full access to the tree and understory for maintenance and harvest, while leaving as much of the rootzone area as possible untrampled and uncompacted. The 2' path around the outside of the tree allows extra sunlight to penetrate into the understory, making it more productive, and also allows a margin of error in case trees get larger than expected.

Once we had the design on paper and Theressa gave her first-pass thumbs-up, I measured things out on the ground and "planted" bamboo poles of the approximate mature height of the given tree or shrub. I used metal sign-stakes to mark off the perimeters of the trees and delineate the paths (one main 4' path through each yard, plus 2' paths to access almost every tree and shrub from all sides.) The backyard picture on the top is from the roof looking south, with the shrub thicket at the bottom of the photo, taller trees in the middle of the yard, and the mulberry sticking up over the orange garage at the back. You can sort of make out in the pictures the stakes for the tree perimeters, and the main 4' path on the right side of the picture. The front yard photo on the bottom, looking north from the roof, is less dramatic. The bottom part of the photo with the existing garden beds and extending further into the middle of the yard will be open space, with a few bamboo stakes towards the street indicating the trees and shrubs to be planted there. For the trees to be planted in the driveway once it's ripped out, I used pots as the plant markers, which aren't nearly as much fun as 15' tall bamboo stakes.

I've started planting the back yard with the plants we already have in our nursery. All in all, I'll be able to plant about two dozen trees and shrubs and several vines now, with more to follow once we receive plant orders later this winter. A few plants will have to wait until house renovations are completed, as they're too close to the expected construction zone.

I hope to get the yard designs for both our house and Jay's place scanned and posted, but the last time I tried the scanner it wasn't working. :/ I'll get them up eventually, but don't hold your breath! I welcome questions about the designs, plants, implementation, etc...

Oregon Indigenous Population Densities

I just sent an email to some friends and thought this part was worth posting here too...I'm reading L. S. Cressman's The Sandal and the Cave: The Indians of Oregon, published back in 01962, summarizing what's known (or what was known back then) about the indigenous populations of Oregon. I'm not too far into the book, but I got a partial mind-blow regarding indigenous population densities which seems worth posting here.

Obviously any number for pre-European native population involves a lot of speculation--guesstimates for the population of the Americas as a whole range from 10 million to 200 million. (See Charles Mann's 1491) But even with a huge margin of error, the Oregon numbers are astounding. The numbers in the book are based on 1939 figures from A. L. Kroeber, who seems to have been a respected anthropologist. Listed for each group is the number of people per square mile, then the number of square miles per person (the numbers are inverses of each other.)

Group	people/mi²	mi²/person
Pacific Coast	.65	1.54
Chinook on Columbia River from The Dalles to the sea	3.86	.26
Coos around Coos Bay & south to the Coquille	2.6	.38
Columbia River east of the Dalles	.12	8.33
Klamath (the author says densities were likely higher than these numbers, since much of the claimed land was used only lightly)	.13	7.69
Northern Great Basin	.06	16.67

So the densest population of Oregonians pre fossil-fuels were the Chinook, living in a fully functioning ecological community that wasn't half-asphalt, with abundant salmon runs and game to hunt. And they had one person per quarter of a square mile, or 160 acres. That means I'd have 9 city blocks by 9 city blocks of land supporting me. Damn but are we in overshoot.

Not that this is news...but there's a difference between knowing that we have 600+ million extra people on the continent vs the close-to-home comparison of 9 city blocks square just for me or 9 city blocks square for 600 households.

Similarly, if you assume a population density of 1 person per 3 square miles, the 1 million acres of Mt. Hood National Forest could support a whopping 555 people. Boy, looking at the facts sure puts a damper on hopes for a soft landing.

Granted, we still have to fossil fuels we can burn to support our overshoot for a while yet, and there's been a tremendous mingling of plants and techniques from all over the world which could allow for the most productive horticultural (or permacultural) communities humans have ever managed. But weighed against those bonuses in the carrying capacity equation are the impacts of climate chaos, toxification of the environment, degradation and paving over of soil, loss of even the most rudimentary naturalist skills, and the ongoing mass extinction. All in all, we know that population needs to decrease, and numbers like these give us a good indication of the general order of magnitude we're looking at, at least in the long-run.

Fall cover cropping

I cover cropped half our front yard last Wednesday (1500 square feet) with 1.5 lbs of wheat, 3/8 lb of crimson clover, 3/8 lb of white dutch clover, and 4.5 lbs of fava beans. To determine how much to use, I found different recommendations of how much seed to sow from different catalogs, then applied 1/4 the lowest recommendation of crimson clover, 1/4 of white dutch clover, and the lowest recommendation for wheat and fava beans. I figured that a somewhat higher density of seed would be appropriate than just dividing everything by 4, since the part I sowed is covered in wood chips laid down about 7 months ago and doesn't give the best conditions for establishment, plus the different species will utilize somewhat different niches in the soil and above ground. I used wheat because we have a lot of it already for food but we're weaning ourselves from it, favas because they're a classic cover crop and we hope to eat them in spring, white dutch clover because it's a perennial which will stick around as a ground cover (and even expand its coverage) anywhere we don't replace it with other stuff, and crimson clover because Theressa thinks it's pretty, plus it's cheaper than the white dutch and can fill in space until it dies off next year, by which time the white clover will be ready to fill out.

I followed pretty much the same practice I used when I cover cropped in early summer, presprouting everything in advance. When sowing, I began by trying to carefully apply seeds from the wheat bucket to an area of the yard, then carefully pick seeds from the clover bucket (with both kinds of clover mixed together), then from the fava bean bucket. But I got tired of that very quickly and decided it was a lot easier and a whole lot more fun to just grab handfuls of seeds and fling them across the yard in a vaguely targeted yet largely random manner. I think the yard got fine coverage.

Once the seeds were all flung, I covered half the yard in another 1" of wood chips. I left half the seeds exposed to the air because we were in a cloudy, rainy stretch. However, by Friday the sun had come out enough that I decided it best to cover most of the exposed seeds with 1" of chips. I still left a few areas uncovered to see how the different patches do.

As of today, in the patches not covered in chips, there are some signs of the first green leaves unfolding if you look closely enough at the chips, and lots of seeds sending out their radicles (the first white shoot a germinating seed sends out) trying to find a path through the chips downward to anchor its root. I haven't seen anything breaking through the 1" chip layer yet.

RIP Cleo, 1987-2006

Yesterday we had to put down Theressa's cat Cleo of nineteen and a half years. She's been a miracle kitty, reversing a diagnosis of feline leukemia when she was a year old, and bouncing back from the vet's prognosis of death within a day or two two years ago after a severe E coli infection, mixed with a slightly enlarged heart, one functioning kidney, and thyroid problems. Nonetheless, after some tough times for Theressa two years ago, Cleo decided to stick around and help Theressa through the hard times, being gifted in turn with wonderful pampering fit for a queen. Cleo remained happy and healthy even as she slowed down over the last year, but over just the last week, her body really started to crash. By two days ago she could barely walk, stumbling along in the saddest manner, no longer able to purr normally, too tired to move much at all. :(

Cleo's long-time vet came to our house yesterday afternoon to give her a gentle passing from her body into painless freedom. We buried Cleo today, at one end of one of our vegetable beds, in a sheltered sunny spot in the food forest plan. We'll put something on her grave to mark her rest, whether a bird bath, a special plant, or something else...to be determined.

Rest In Peace, princess.

The Birds and the Bees

Theressa and I have been living at the new house she bought since the end of March, so it's about time I gave an update on how things are going here! Theressa bought .2 acres with a small 800-odd square foot shack plus garage/carport/shed. The lot is 50' x 175', with the house set back 80' or so from the street, leaving a 65' long back yard. There's almost no tree cover right now, except for one pine and one cherry in the back yard on the south boundary, a row of black locusts on the east boundary in the back yard, and a cherry and a few more locusts on the east boundary in the front yard. It's nice to have a near blank-slate for designing in full sun.

Soil

The soil is interesting--incredible drainage, but very little top soil and full of rocks. Apparently this area used to be a river bed. My thought is that there's good nutrients available because of the presence of rocks constantly being weatherized, but that we need heavy additions of organic matter to improve soil structure and hold on to some of the water, and we probably need dynamic accumulator plants to tap into the nutrients that have washed downwards with the rain and bring them back to the surface. So, we've had dozens of loads of wood chips dumped in the driveway and have sheet mulched almost the entire yard to build soil organic matter, add nitrogen via coffee grounds and dumpstered bread (our soil test showed 1 part per million nitrogen, ouch!) and improve soil life (our earthworm population is really really weak). The driveway is currently used to store heaps of wood chips continuing to break down, plus our firewood pile.

I tried an experiment a few months after the first layer of sheet mulch. I presprouted three or four jars worth of beans and many more seeds of various Amaranthus sp. (pigweeds) and Chenopodium sp. (lambs quarters and relatives) and sowed them directly into the wood chip sheet mulch. I sowed the beans on top of the wood chips and then covered with about an inch of fresh wood chips. I then sowed the smaller seeds and raked them into the mix. We used the sprinkler for the next few days to keep things moist as the seeds established. I had no idea whether or not it would work, between the hot June sowing, ravaging chickens in the back yard, and general uncertainty of how well the seeds would take to having no actual soil, just wood chips. It turned out fairly well--many bean plants did come up and several developed into very healthy plants (those in the back yard have now been largely devoured by the chickens). The smaller seeds didn't seem to come up at all--I think they should have been sown with the beans and then had the 1" of chips on top of it all. As it was, I think sowing the smaller seeds at the surface and raking them in was inadequate to protect them from drying out in the sun.

Annual beds

Two or three days after she took possession, we had a load of 6 cubic feet of mixed soil plus 3 cubic feet of potting soil dumped in the double-wide landing-strip driveway (the previous owner had an RV), and within a day or two had four 20' x 4' raised beds laid out and seeds planted. This is our third year of trying to grow annual vegetables, and the first year things have really clicked for us. The beds have kind of petered out now, but for a while we were having large salads every day, and we got lots of beets and carrots and rutabagas from the first round of planting. Very exciting! We've found that the heat of summer on our fully sun-baked garden beds has made it difficult to grow a second round of veggies, especially as we have a lot of projects going on and can't devote all the necessary time to the annuals. Hopefully the fall growing will be a little easier as the heat backs off and rain starts in.

Sharing Garden

Taking a cue from a practice Pam & Joe from the Permaculture Institute had used at their old house, we created a sharing garden right next to the street, with raspberries in a curve enclosing salad plants, strawberries, and four large barrels planted with cherry tomatoes and a nectarine. We encourage passersby to harvest from the area, sharing the wealth and helping people realize where food actually comes from. At first we had a hard time convincing anyone to take any food, but now there seems to be some regular picking of delicacies! Unfortunately, the summer heat has taken its toll on the front area, which is far enough away that it gets even less maintenance including water than do the annual beds next to the house. Permaculture zones in action!

Nursery

We have a nursery going of plants we bought wholesale last year, plants we've started from seed, and other plants we've accumulated here and there. Although we have planted out lots of annuals already (especially squash and sunflowers) and a few perennials (especially jerusalem artichokes), we're waiting to do any "real", permanent planting until this fall. By then we will hopefully have a fairly good feel for wind and water flow, sun patterns, traffic dynamics, interaction with the house, etc. Probably the planting will be in two stages--one in fall with the plants we already have, and a second in late winter or early spring when new plant orders come in. Meanwhile it's a struggle to keep the nursery watered well with so little shade, but we're doing pretty well! There are a lot of seeds we have which I'd hoped to start this year but didn't get to...hopefully we can organize well enough to do a round of seed starting in the fall for overwintering and germination in the spring.

The Birds

We have hens for eggs! We started Helen from a chick last year; she lived at the Permaculture Institute for a few months after we moved out, giving us time to start new chicks and build a hen house. The chickens have the full run of the back yard and are proving to be wonderfully destructive little beasts. It's fun watching them scratch the hell out of plants and wonder exactly what our permanent planting will look like. One of our hens wandered out of the back yard and found a rat trap which gave her a concussion and had us worried about her for several days. :( She seems to be OK now, though after a few name trials we seem to have settled on "Dizzy"--we're guessing she'll never be quite like the rest of the chickens. :/ At this point Helen has been laying regularly and Sexy (our black sexlink) just joined her last week with little teeny tiny cute baby eggs! Here you can see Sexy in action, plundering a sunflower head twice as tall as she! Chickens have wings but can't fly very well, so she's jumping, not flying!

The Bees

We also have bee hives! We bought two "packages" of bees, which are small cages with a queen and 10,000 worker bees buzzing like crazy. We set one hive up on our roof and the second hive up at Theressa's dad's place, where we've been sheet mulching and planting a food forest since last fall. This past June Theressa caught a swarm of bees from a neighbor's tree way high up, and we set that swarm up on our roof as well. The purchased colonies seem to be doing really well; we've actually added "supers" which are boxes in which bees place their "surplus" honey, the stuff we get to harvest! Normally you don't expect a harvest the first year, so it's exciting to potentially be harvesting already. The swarmed colony, perhaps because it was set up later in the year, seems healthy enough but lacks the honey reserves and full strength of the other two colonies. We might steal some honey from our strong colonies to make sure our swarmed batch can make it through the winter and have a strong start next year.

It seems that I may be allergic to bees--I had amusingly chipmunk-like swell-up the first time I got stung in the cheek, and a similar reaction the second time I was stung on my foot. Stings since then haven't been nearly a problematic, so I'm not too worried about it, but for now Theressa is the primary beekeeper, with me acting as a cowardly back-seat driver shouting inane instructions and taking pictures from a safe distance.

The Fungi

We ordered 2000 plugs inoculated with mushroom spawn--1000 each of Shitake and Oyster mushrooms--and spent a tediously long time drilling holes in big chunks of wood we scavenged here and there, hammering in the plugs, and sealing with beeswax. We have them stacked in a big criss-cross pile on the north side of the house where they can be shaded, and we're keeping them watered. Next year the spawn should have colonized the logs well enough to start producing mushrooms!

That about covers the summary of yard projects. We've also been busy canning and preserving gleaned food (blackberries, apples, figs so far), and there's a lot of work to be done on the house itself. I'll write more about house projects later.

Recent readings: anthropik.com and Derrick Jensen

This post is about my thoughts in recent months and what's been influencing them. Two sources have radically changed my perspective this year: the website anthropik.com and anarcho-primitivist author Derrick Jensen.

Anthropik is a tribe forming to exit civilization. They have four members now, and their plan is to make enough money in the current system to pay for workshops and classes for foraging and hunter/gatherer skills and to purchase land adjacent to national/state forest. They'll be well situated to use their land as a socially accepted base for living off of the land in the forest, and to melt into the forest when they're ready and/or when civilization crashes.

It sounds crazy to most of us who've grown up in this culture of civilization, but it's actually an incredibly logical and well thought-out plan built on an equally logical and well thought-out analysis of the nature of civilizations and their collapses. Applying the analysis to our current civilization, the tribe predicts collapse to become obvious by 02012-02015 and in full progression by 02020, whether the proximate cause is resource depletion, global climate chaos, mass extinction, or a combination of these and other factors.

The primary writer on the site is Jason Godesky, who combines a strong background in anthropology with computer skills and technical knowledge. The tenor of the site takes the writings of Daniel Quinn as a starting point of sorts--Quinn's basic points of civilization and agriculture being very recent constructs in human history (having begun a mere 10,000 years ago), with a much longer history of successful tribal living with hunting and gathering as the subsistence method (millions of years). Quinn is where Godesky got started years ago questioning our cultural assumptions...my mom gave me Quinn's Ishmael in high school and I remember liking it but it apparently didn't leave much of an impression then. I got a lot more out of Quinn when I ready The Story of B, My Ishmael, and Beyond Civilization last year. Godesky takes a rigorous, scholarly approach to further explore the subject matter covered by Quinn, pulling together many sources of anthropological research and studies and theories of the collapse of civilizations.

The discussions following up on posts by Anthropik tribe members are amazingly flame- and troll-free, intellectual and serious and a joy to read. It took me probably tens of hours to work through the site including some (but by no means even a majority) of the links to further resources. I've gotten some great pointers to books and subjects to pursue further.

Derrick Jensen has written books on a variety of subjects--the nature of hate, teaching and the education system, technology, communication with nonhumans, the logging industry, and more--but all the books are very much about civilization. He takes an honest, painful look at what our civilization costs the planet and its inhabitants--nonhuman and human, those obviously displaced and oppressed and those getting along relatively well. It's pretty grim, and Jensen is unapologetically anti-civilization, to the point that his latest books, Endgame Volumes I and II, in part discuss how to bring civilization down. Even ignoring the subject matter, his writing is brilliant and a true pleasure to read. I began by checking out one of his books from the library because I'd heard so many good things about him; once I read the first one I put holds on all the rest of his work.

Some of the concepts and radical changes in my thinking due to reading anthropik and Jensen:

• The Paleodiet: Based on the fact that we evolved for millions of years eating a diet of meat, vegetables, fruits, tubers, and berries and few or no grains, the diet eschews the grains which make us sick--our bodies are not adapted to them since they're such a recent introduction via agriculture. I'm experimenting with my diet, having sharply reduced my grain intake, am eating meat (local and organic) again after a few years of vegetarianism, and eating a lot more vegetables (a full meal's worth of salad every day now for several days--harvested from our own garden as a fresh and nutritious bonus!)
  


• Agriculture is inherently doomed: From the first successful experiments with agriculture 10,000 years ago, we were practically doomed to the path we've since followed. Agriculture is the original escalating arms race; any culture which began farming and successfully worked around existing biological limits to its growth was able to absorb its neighboring cultures, unless they adopted agriculture themselves. Similarly, once a culture is practicing agriculture, it must intensify and expand the area it brings under cultivation as much as possible. If it slacks off, a neighboring culture will eventually take advantage of available opportunities and become the dominant. Also, the result of agriculture is desert and ruined lands, bringing another constant need for expansion. Without a major disruption to short-circuit the escalation (such as climate change altering the conditions necessary for successful cultivation), the system will proceed to an inevitable endpoint of consuming everything available before collapsing. This means that any post-crash strategy reliant on agriculture, even if possible in the short term, will also be doomed in the long term to the same pattern of required growth and ultimate collapse.
  
  
• Permaculture may be flawed as well: Permaculture may not be a panacea for a permanent sustainable culture. Permaculture is a form of horticulture, and horticultural systems have only been around about as long as agriculture. Obviously agriculture is more destructive than horticulture, but that's no guarantee that in the long run horticulture won't lead to the same end. Possibly a culture starting with permaculture which decides to abandon some of the basic ethics and instead simply apply permaculture "tricks" to intensify production could overwhelm neighbors carefully safeguarding the fertility of their land, leading to another cycle of short-term exploitation of land with the need to constantly take over new areas. Fortunately, permaculture is capped at a lower level of output potential, so cultures probably wouldn't be able to reach the same levels of intensity as with agriculture and the expansion and collapse influence would be diminished and never again reach anywhere near global proportions. Another drawback to permaculture is that horticultural systems may be dependent on some of the same climatic conditions as agriculture and thus be vulnerable enough to climate change or other disturbances to collapse, leaving only tried and true hunting and gathering as a viable mode of sustenance. So permaculture may well be a good stepping stone as we decline from current industrial civilization to something more sustainable, but it might not be adequate as a final state of collapse.
  
  
• More nuanced understanding of collapse: Anthropik's analysis of the inevitability of collapse and its arguments for why it'll happen sooner rather than later makes a lot of sense and has greatly augmented my understanding of what sort of future we might be seeing as a result of Peak Oil. Much of it is comforting: Anthropik and Jensen have very convincing arguments as to how bad civilization is for us, and Anthropik details the advantages of a hunter/gatherer existence. Further, my current working definition of collapse (the same used by Anthropik I think, and the same used by Joseph Tainter in his book The Collapse of Complex Societies) is simply a reduction in complexity of a society. It doesn't have to mean starvation and rioting in the streets. In fact, the relocalization movement and much of the direction of the Peak Oil community is pushing voluntary collapse: scaling back the US empire, taking power back to localities instead of the feds, producing goods and services locally rather than via globalized trade, voluntary simplicity, and having more people growing their own food and being self-sufficient instead of employed as one of a million categories of specialized cogs in industrial civilization, are all reductions in complexity and thus elements of a society in collapse. Also, historically, civilizations have taken decades to collapse, again meaning that a decline doesn't have to be bloody and terrifying. But it does get scary when the collapse is neither gradual nor voluntary, and my immediate research is into what collapse has looked like in past societies and whether our own is likely to be graceful or ugly. (Anthropik fully believes it'll be worst-case scenario with abrupt decline into violence, starvation, and cannibalism in the cities.)
  
  
• Believing civilization needs to crash: I'm now convinced that civilization is not only inevitably doomed to collapse, but that the sooner it happens, the better. The atrocities, daily atrocities, carried out to continue its growth (which is a requirement; there's no way to have a static civilization), are so horrifying that nothing can justify civilization's continued existence. There's also no way that civilization can voluntarily change itself into something sustainable; that would require multilateral agreements across the board of everyone on the planet not to continue down the current path; if any small group took advantage of everyone else's self-crippling that group would again kick off the whole escalating cycle. Further, the longer civilization drags itself on, the larger our population grows and the more we trash our support bases, thus the harder the crash will be. What I'm not sure of yet is whether I want to play an active role in bringing civilization down or whether my focus will continue to be on preparations at a personal and community level.
  
  
• Questioning my plan to see it through in the city: Reading anthropik has made me much less confident about my prior attitude of sticking it out in Portland as Peak Oil hits, helping as many people as I can through the chaos. (The disappointing experience with the Peak Oil prep community at PPI probably factors in as well, since the integration challenges there make me wonder just how possible it is for people of our culture to come together to address the problems we'll be facing soon.) Anthropik's approach of preparing to become hunter/gatherers holds enormous emotional appeal for me, and almost as much intellectual appeal. Along with my readings of Derrick Jensen's work, I've started wondering what the point is of keeping myself mired in a culture which is so intensely destructive, exploitative, and miserable--will I really be able to change anything or help anyone? Or is it best to get out of the way as civilization crumbles and turns in on itself, working with whomever else wants to get out to forge a new culture? Even if I don't go the full-blown hunter/gatherer route, a multi-acre permaculture homestead in a rural area, adjacent to public forest, is very attractive, giving me more flexibility than I have here. Community, of course, will still be crucial.
  



• Foraging for food: This is a natural extension of the permaculture path I was already travelling, but learning how to forage has taken on a new priority. Being able to identify useful plants for edible and medicinal uses, know how to use them, and actually be using them now is vital if I do ever want to exit civilization, in which case these skills will be even more important than knowing how to grow my own food in an annual vegetable garden or a permaculture food production system. It's also a fascinating realm in and of itself--I bet I could feed myself entirely on food foraged within the city if I just had the knowledge (so long as not too many other people get the same idea, of course), and I'm already enjoying figuring plants out bit by bit.
  

Portland Permaculture Institute, October 02005-March 02006

Theressa and I moved into the Portland Permaculture Institute at the end of October, eager to learn from and live in a community working on sustainability, Peak Oil prep, and sharing knowledge and skills with the larger Portland community. The hope was that after a trial period, Theressa could "buy in", to co-own the property with Pam and Joe and maybe others, depending on the ownership model. I had a wonderful time getting to know the land and appreciating the scale of 1.6 acres...so much larger than a standard 5000 square foot lot, but not as overwhelming as 40 acres! 1.6 feels pretty manageable by the 8 people expected to eventually live in the community. (Whether or not it's enough land to feed all 8 people is another question!)

I spent a lot of time outdoors clearing blackberries and ivy, sheetmulching, and measuring and mapping out areas. Most of my time was spent indoors, helping to finalize the tree placements in the main food forest, designing an extension of the food forest under and around a giant 80' black walnut, and researching plants and designing polyculture patches as understories for the various orchard trees.

Unfortunately, it turns out that Theressa and I aren't a fit for the community, so we'll be moving out this month into a new house Theressa bought, half a mile away. Hopefully we can stay connected as part of the larger network of permaculturists and peak oil people in the neighborhood, still working together to do the research and knowledge dissemination to blunt the coming economic and energetic crashes. I'm very excited to see how this property continues to develop, and hope to watch the trees I've planted develop into fruit-producing, integrated elements in the whole site design!

I learned a lot here about living in community, as this was the first intentional community I've ever joined. I've lived with housemates in the past, but there's a huge difference between co-habitation where you all live your own lives, vs a community actively trying to work towards shared goals. Although the key to success in both situations is probably the same: communication. That's something our culture doesn't train us on very well...hopefully what I've learned will help in whatever future community situations I'm in, as I expect that whatever solutions arise for Peak Oil et al, response as and in community is going to be a necessity.

Mossback Farm internship, August-October 02005

I spent two months from the end of August to the end of October interning for Rich and Val at Mossback Farm, a 40 acre permaculture farm in Yamhill, Oregon, about 40 miles southwest of Portland. Their main product has been pastured chickens for broiling and for eggs, though they've now discontinued both as high feed prices and increasing energy costs make the business uneconomical. It was a wonderful experience, giving me the chance to experience country living, slow down and relax a bit, and learn a lot about permaculture and on-the-ground aspects of animal husbandry.

Besides the chickens, I helped care for their pigs, sheep, and young steers, which mostly involved daily feeding and watering, with once or twice weekly moves of the animals from one patch of pasture to the next, controlled via portable electric fencing. The most memorable moment of my internship was slaughter day for the lambs--not so much for the slaughter and skinning process itself (though that was a new and unique experience for me), but for the half hour we spent chasing escaped sheep across the pasture, sprinting in work boots to try to head them off and herd them back towards their pen, reading their eyes and faking with them as they juked and tried to slip past us...it reminded me of and made me miss playing ultimate frisbee!

I'm really glad I was involved in the fascinating project of ripping the soil along Mossback's three seasonal creek channels, staking out routes leading from the creek channel downstream, but looking like they go "up" the bank because the fall of our stakes was less than the fall of the creek itself. We then had a bulldozer guy come in and drive along the routes with two tines embedded two feet in the ground, creating deep gouges and breaking up the hard clay. The idea is that we've created massive drainage ditches for water to flow through during the heavy winter rains, pulling water out of the creek and onto more of the land than would normally absorb the rain. If all works as planned, Rich and Val will start noticing their seasonal pond and their creeks lasting longer, eventually becoming year-round water sources. I look forward to revisiting the farm in the future to see how things develop!

Rich and Val have a great library, including Permaculture Activist back issues, books by Joel Salatin about small-scale livestock keeping for direct marketing, books by Daniel Quinn, and a wide range of other agriculture and permaculture-oriented literature. I spent most of my spare time reading through their library, and didn't come close to exhausting it! On top of that, Rich is a huge storehouse of permaculture information, and it was wonderful to be able to pick his brain on all kinds of subjects.

I discovered that I could actually enjoy living in the country, something I'd never really contemplated before. The quiet and the space to manage a sizable landscape is wonderful, and I don't mind the isolation since I'm practically a hermit anyway. I could really see myself pursuing the self-sufficiency thing on a plot of land and enjoying the lifestyle, a path Theressa is interested in but which I've been hesitant to pursue. This realization doesn't change my immediate plan of staying in the city to help Portland through the changes coming down the line, but it opens up whole new possibilities if I decide in the future that I don't want to do the city thing...

All in all, the internship was a great experience. I'm really glad that I had the opportunity, and very grateful to Rich and Val for welcoming me onto their farm and sharing so much with me.

Climate change, global and regional

At the Portland Peak Oil meeting last night, we had a presenter from Portland's Office of Sustainable Development walk us through calculating our baseline of energy use and CO2 emissions. In the process, he happened to mention expected changes to our regional (Pacific Northwest) climate, as researched by the University of Washington's Climate Impacts Group:

• Amount of rainfall the same, but coming in short intense storms rather than drawn out
  
• Summer dry spell will extend one month in each direction, for an extra two months total of drought
  
• Spring will continue to come earlier and earlier each year
  
• We'll see more days in the summer with intense heat, such as over 100 degrees Fahrenheit
  
• No snow in winters
  

It struck me that I dropped the ball big-time in designing Theressa's yard (and to some extent Leah's) without fully researching where our climate is likely to be headed. In the future I'll be paying more attention to plants that are drought tolerant and worrying less about cold hardiness, and focusing more on cooling houses in the summer rather than maximizing heat gain in the winter. Water catchment also becomes even more important.

Anyone preparing for the future challenges we're facing should find solid information on local climate change predictions and also try to figure out social implications. (Here we're very concerned about millions of Californians and other Southwesterners crowding into the Pacific Northwest). On the east coast for example, you'll want to pay really close attention to the possibility of the conveyer belt shutting down, staying up to date on the latest scientific predictions of how likely it is, and how much warning you might have if it begins (5 years? 1 year?)

Some troubling recent news on the global climate change front:

1. Scientists have just discovered that an area of permafrost in Siberia the size of France and Germany combined is beginning to melt. Bottled up underneath the frozen peat bog is billions of tons of methane, which is 20x as powerful a greenhouse gas as CO2. This is potentially the tipping point of runaway global climate change, a point of no return, as the melting permafrost releases methane which increases the temperature which accelerates the melting and on into the positive feedback loop. It may already be too late to stop catastrophic climate change, and with this news it looks like if we do have any remaining window of opportunity it's closing faster than ever.
   
2. The Amazon rainforest may be reaching a tipping point of its own, as its destruction has altered local climate patterns enough that the rainforest may start dying off on its own, even without active human destruction. In the bigger picture this is potentially another runaway global climate change trigger point, as the CO2 sequestered by the rainforest dwarfs our annual emissions. If the rainforest begins to self destruct, releasing more CO2 which increases climate problems which accelerate the rainforest's destruction, off we go again on the positive feedback loop. Presumably massive efforts to reforest the area (especially with the help of permaculture concepts) could stave off such a runaway process, but I'm not holding my breath on the western world ceasing its exploitation of the forests, let alone providing the resources needed to turn this situation around.
   

10 days without fossil fuels

I'm fresh off my stint of experimental fossil-fuel-free living, and here's a report-back on what it involved. I'm adding footnotes throughout for certain products or concepts with URLs for more info.

My basic premise was to eliminate active use of fossil fuels, meaning no electricity, petroleum, or natural gas use. As this was an excercise in preparation for rising energy costs and potential disruption of energy supplies, I did not attempt the impossible feat of living without using anything made of fossil fuels or manufactured & transported by fossil fuel energy. Two other exceptions I made up front were:

• Not limiting my food preservation activities (drying food in an electric dehydrator, since we don't have a solar dehydrator (1) constructed yet, and canning produce on a propane burner for which I have no good ideas for
  substitution)


• Not avoiding meetings or places simply because they had lights on (Portland Peak Oil meetings, the library, etc)
  

Transportation

This was easy for me, since I rarely need to go anywhere and already bike when I do venture out. (See exception under "Cheats" section.)

Washing Dishes / Bathing / Laundry

The house in which I live has the fascinating feature of a garden hose fully exposed to sun on the exterior south wall of the house, providing an easy way to kill any plants you dislike. The setup has the added benefit of providing water too hot for immersion of your hand. This became my source of hot water for bathing, laundry, and for washing dishes/canning jars/storage buckets/etc.

I took sponge baths which used about 1.5 gallons of hot water per bath (and I could probably further reduce that usage). In the words of my housemate, I "don't stink too much!" which I guess means the baths were a success.

I did laundry with the Wonder Wash pressure washer (2), a device I've had since last fall. You add hot water, detergent, and clothes, then screw the top down to create an airtight seal and manually rotate the laundry drum for about 2 minutes. The high pressure environment inside forces the water and detergent through the clothes. Water and detergent usage is minimal, and the clothes smell clean to me. It doesn't do well at removing stains; perhaps by applying special stain removal stuff I could take care of that too, but I've never cared about stains in my clothes so I haven't bothered to experiment with that.

Clothes of course were dried on a drying rack, outside.

Lighting

I carried my bike front headlight in my pocket wherever I went, to use during the daytime in dark basements/garages, and to use at night as needed. The light's batteries were charged using a solar battery charger (3).

I tried unsuccessfully to get on a sleeping schedule of 10 PM - 7 AM, to make near maximum use of daylight hours while accomodating Portland Peak Oil meetings and other occasional night activities. I had a very hard time falling asleep each night, mostly due (I think) to environmental factors of an overheated bedroom with no shades on the west facing window and the window facing directly into a noisy neighborhood. Yesterday evening I finally wedged a towel across the window which did wonders for
blocking the evening sun and allowing me to close the window at bedtime to block out the noise. This should make it a lot easier to fall into a sensible sleep schedule minimizing the need to turn on lights.

Other Electricity

This barely warrants mention, but the wireless phone used by our household requires electricity, so with the blessing of Pete (Leah was out of town) I added an older non-electric phone.

I don't watch any TV and only the occasional movie, so it wasn't difficult to do without those. I do frequently listen to recorded music, and at times wished I could turn on the stereo while working on other things...but not so much that I ever got around to finding my portable CD player and solar charging a couple more batteries.

Going without computer use (mostly--see "Cheats" section below) was somewhat difficult, though also hugely relieving in some ways. I lose a *lot* of time to email and reading up on news which is really irrelevant since I already know that I need to spend my time learning as many useful skills as I can and getting as much sustainable infrastructure into place as I can. There were a few projects on which I was working where internet access would have been helpful, and I mostly just made sure I researched what I needed before I began the fossil fuel fast, or postponed the
projects rather than waste time muddling through them without the info I felt I needed. It helps that suddenly it looks like I'll be moving to a new place in a month or so, making the planting of seeds at my current location mostly pointless and eliminating the need for me to research details of every seed I had intended to plant.

Cooking / Food

This was absolutely the hardest aspect of the experiment for me, dependent as I am (and presumably as most of us are) on refrigeration and the ability to cook food at will with an electric or gas stove. Most of my diet is based on dumpster-dived (4) food which generally needs to be refrigerated to remain fresh for more than a couple of days, and I do not have a cool root cellar. I tried to manage temperatures by moving a few foods back and forth between the basement and the house as temperatures fluctuated through the day, but it was still too warm for optimum food storage.

I learned how to sprout seeds for raw consumption, doing a few batches of adzuki beans and one batch of wheat. These made good snacks on their own or additionns to salads, sandwiches, and meals of rice & beans.

I ate a lot of stale dumpster-dived bread (which works much better when rejuvinated with a little toasting) with Earth Balance (butter substitute which holds up reasonably well without refrigeration) and jars of preserves, fruit butters, and jams which I could eat through within 2-3 days. Some sandwiches consisted of Earth Balance, arugula, tomatoes, and whatever sprouts or solar cooked beans were on hand.

I built a parabolic solar reflector oven (5) for cooking. It worked great with the very first experiment, cooking nearly two cups of dried beans. I also had great success cooking rice and beans together. I experimented with other configurations to allow for easier cooking or larger batches and to find the optimum setup. This was a big help in allowing me to eat at least some cooked meals, and I think a much better option (when the sun is shining, at least) than cutting down trees to burn wood.

Since our community garden had no success in growing proper lettuce, I ate two weed salads comprised mostly of volunteer amaranths and dwarf mallow. Dumpster-dived tomatoes and/or sprouts and a good dosage of salad dressing helped make the salads palatable, but obviously not so desirable as to wean me away from dependence on stale bread and into healthier daily salads as I had originally envisioned. :/

Difficulties / Cheats

Three times I went online to deal with email/internet tasks requiring immediate attention, and each time was easily distracted by other emails, checking news, etc. It's a big challenge for me when online to focus on specific tasks and not waste time on other non-critical clicks. There's too much valuable info online for me to seriouly consider cutting myself off completely, but I need to find ways to keep myself focused and efficient so I can do the necessary research but then get back to the most important piece: action on the ground.

I did use a car once, to pick up a special order of beans from the food coop half a mile away. That could have been avoided with multiple trips on Theressa's bike, which is outfitted with a basket, or with a bike trailer, which I have not yet researched. For now I decided to just do the time-efficient thing and drive, knowing that a bike upgrade & bike trailer is high on the list of to-do projects.

I went out to eat several times and participated in two potlucks, all undermining the food portion of the experiment. (For one of the potlucks I brought a dish with beans cooked in the solar funnel, but corn steamed via propane and some ingredients which had been refrigerated.) I ate out so often not because I was actively avoiding figuring out something at home, but rather because of several invitations to go out. No matter the intention, it had a very real impact on my food situation and my diet
would have been even harder without those "cheats."

And of course there's the general issue of dependence on infrastructure based on cheap fossil fuels...the aluminum foil I bought at the store to make the solar funnel, the duct tape and super glue I bought to patch up my clothes drying rack, the black spray paint for the glass jars and pots used with the solar funnel, and the many items I already own but which have finite lifespans and may or may not be easily replaceable in the future. Lots to think about and plan for there...

Summary

This was an excellent experiment for me, and a great incentive to finally implement some of the projects I've had on my list, especially the solar funnel, learning to sprout seeds for consumption, learning to sponge bathe, and experimenting more with the laundry pressure washer (shelved since last fall, when I discovered it wasn't much fun to hand-wring water from clothes in 50 degree weather).

I did not do as well as I'd hoped in finding ways to eat enjoyable raw foods, as so far I'm not crazy about sprouts, and the salads I made weren't great. The solar cooking thing is wonderful, but has limited applicability most of the year in our cloudy Pacific Northwest climate. In general, food production, storage, and preparation, which are the most important pieces of sustainability, promise to be the hardest aspects for me to disentangle from dependency on modern appliances and fossil fuels. The rest of my life has already been largely pared down to the basics, but
it turns out that, no matter what, I still need to eat!

I intend to integrate many of the practices of the last 10 days into my regular life now, and to focus on the challenges (especially around food) and keep working on ways to reduce energy usage and dependency without feeling like I'm sacrificing my standard of living (or losing weight!) Perhaps by this time next year I'll be living fossil-fuel-free routinely in the summer, and ready to embark on the even larger challenge of going without fossil fuels through the winter!

Footnotes
(1) Solar Dehydrator: I'll start with the easiest design I've found, at
http://www.i4at.org/surv/soldehyd.htm

(2) Wonder Wash pressure washer: about $50 with shipping

(3) $15 Solar battery charger

I also recommend some way to check the charge on your rechargeable
batteries...I purchased the $15 Digital Battery Checker from the same
website to get free shipping on the two items, but I'm not too impressed
with it, as it requires a AAA battery to function and seems to have a hard
time sometimes making terminal contacts to display the charge.

(4) For more on the subject, read The Art & Science of Dumpster Diving
by John Hoffman

(5) Parabolic solar reflector: Easiest design I could find is at
http://solarcooking.org/funnel.htm

Peak Oil, March 02005 - my death

This post is the big one; this is where I'm focused now. As the timeline in the title indicates, Peak Oil isn't a campaign with a discrete ending point. Whether we know it or not, almost all humans are now entering the onset of Peak Oil. We'll almost certainly be coping with its effects for the rest of our lives, and for a few generations beyond.

In some ways I was already beginning down the Peak Oil preparation path a few months before March. Without Kucinich as the Democratic nominee for President, it was clear to me that people wanting to prepare for existing and looming environmental crises need to bring it down to small-scale local efforts. I didn't expect even Kucinich to "save us" top-down, but at least Kucinich as President would have set the stage for greater awareness of what's really happening and assisted people in their efforts to save themselves. The PUD campaign was part of that switch in focus, but Theressa and I also began thinking about a fundamental of life: food. Last summer we experimented with a tiny vegetable garden in Theressa's yard, and we got together with neighbors during autumn and winter to prepare a vacant lot for a community garden to be planted this year.

The November election was disappointing almost across the board from national to state level. Only local city results turned out well, which further drove home the importance of saving what we can while we can at a local level. Shortly after, I read neighbor Toby Hemenway's book Gaias's Garden, which applies permaculture principles to home-scale landscaping and gardening. I was fascinated by this introduction to permaculture and the integration possible between humans and their immediate environment, and especially by the potential to drastically reduce my environmental footprint even further while preparing for coming crises. Pretty soon I'd talked Theressa into turning her yard into a forest garden, with the goal of fruit and nut trees and shrubs, edible and herbaceous ground layer plants, vines to utilize vertical space, and root crops, all arranged in an ecological mesh to create a gorgeous and largely self-sustaining landscape with multiple useful outputs for humans and wildlife.

Shortly into the forest garden planning, I happened to read Paul Roberts' The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World. I had come across the concept of Peak Oil during the Kucinich campaign, but this was the first time I really "got it," and boy did it turn my world upside down! I can't recommend too strongly that you devote a chunk of 2-3 hours to googling "peak oil" and reading what you find, perhaps starting with www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net. For those of you who already blew your spare 2-3 hours reading the recent story of my life, here's Peak Oil in a nutshell:

Just as the US extracted the most oil it would ever extract per year in 01970, the entire world is at, past, or very near to the point where it will extract less and less oil each year, instead of more and more. When the US peaked, it set us up for the oil shocks of the 70s, with economic recession and temporary shifts in lifestyles and consumption. We were ultimately bailed out by expanded imports from the rest of the world. Being a global peak this time, there is no "outside" from which to import oil, and there is no combination of "alternative energy" sources which will allow us to continue living the way we do now. Meanwhile, natural gas extraction has just peaked in North America, and the infrastructure is not even in place to allow the costly import of supplies from overseas, which means for the short term we have to make do with what we've got. For both natural gas and for oil, as demand continues to rise and supply continues to fall, prices will continue to skyrocket even neyond the quadrupling we've seen in the past few years.

Almost every human society around the world is to some extent organized on the premise of constantly increasing supplies of cheap energy, ie oil and natural gas. In the US, everything we do or use is based on these fossil fuels. This includes the obvious: transportation, home heating and cooling, and electricity generation. The more subtle dependencies are our consumer goods: clothing, electronics, plastics, pharmaceuticals. Our most basic needs are currently met with infrastructure based on cheap energy: housing, water supply and sewage treatment, and perhaps most critically, food. Across the US, our agricultural land has been paved over and most of what's left has been eroded and abused. As Dale Allen Pfeiffer of From the Wilderness puts it in "Eating Fossil Fuels", "Much of the soil in the Great Plains is little more than a sponge into which we must pour hydrocarbon-based fertilizers in order to produce crops."

The repercussions of Peak Oil are as widespread as our fossil fuel dependencies. The best case scenario is an ongoing national and eventually global recession, leading into an economic depression which never ends. That means the continued decay of our physical and social infrastructures, accelerating loss of jobs and capital, harder work and longer hours for those holding on to paying jobs, widespread bankruptcies and disruptions for millions of families with associated homelessness and poverty, power and control moving even more firmly into the hands of corporations and elites (to the point of a potential return to feudalism), inflation and higher costs for everything including basic commodities such as food, and generally making do with much less economic and material wealth. The ultimate result will have to be more localized economies and societies, producing most of what they consume at a bioregional level. Unfortunately, the skills and economic networks for functional local economies have been mostly destroyed, so there's a lot of relearning and rebuilding necessary. The best case scenario is reason enough to take stock of our lives and evaluate how we're going to weather the changes to come and what preparations we need to start making now.

The worst case scenarios are grimmer, since they involve the potentially rapid breakdown of one, many, or all of the systems on which we now depend. No one has ever built a globalized society as complex as what we have now, so we don't know what happens when the underpinning of cheap energy is gone. What happens if gas shortages, hoarding, price spikes, and worker strikes grind the shipping industry to a halt for as little as two weeks? Do you have enough food in your house and growing in your yard to feed your family once the supermarkets run out of their three day supply? What happens to cities when blackouts lasting days or weeks exhaust backup generator capacity and water can't be pumped to households while sewage treatment plants shut down? What happens as global climate change, spiking costs of chemical inputs and fuels, gasoline shortages, and unpredictable supply chains make industrial agriculture more volatile than ever? What happens when a collapse in yield can't be offset by importing food from thousands of miles away? What happens when millions of people can't get jobs to pay for whatever food there is? What happens when people can't afford to heat their homes through freezing winters, or when sudden natural gas shortages mean even the affluent just plain can't run their furnaces? What happens when blackouts shut down air conditioners in highly populated deserts like Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles? What happens when a global population of 6.4 billion and growing, a more than threefold increase from the days before cheap energy, has neither that cheap energy as a crutch nor the skills to live from the land? These questions hint at where things could end up, and though apocalyptic nightmare is not inevitable, it's important to take all the possibilities seriously and keep an open mind while evaluating where we're headed and the importance of personal preparation for different Peak Oil scenarios.

So there's the gist of what I learned from Roberts' book and further research. Once I fully understood the nature of peak oil extraction, how close we are to that point, and the severe consequences, I had one of those rare perception shifts where the whole world looks permanently different. Since that short, intense burst of reading everything I could find, I've spent my time primarily on personal preparation, with some energy devoted to spreading the word and networking with others via Portland Peak Oil. My vision for now is to develop useful skills for a post-carbon world, centering around ecological food production and permaculture principles. I hope to build a physical "lifeboat" of food, shelter, and water for myself and whomever else joins me. Having learned necessary skills and having secured my own needs, I can make myself available as a resource for others in Portland as they react to Peak Oil, whether in advance or as the negative impacts hit. The safest thing for pure self preservation might be to find some rural land and do the homesteading thing, but I'm more interested in helping as many people as I can through the crisis ahead. I think that if any major US city can pull through Peak Oil in a civilized way, it's Portland...so I'm digging in here.

With that vision, the forest garden for Theressa's yard took top priority this spring and summer, and we designed a layout including 15 fruit trees and dozens more shrubs and vines. I moved in to to Leah's house across the street from Theressa, joining Pete who had just moved from Los Angeles to escape Peak Oil and build a lifeboat somewhere more sustainable. Theressa, Pete and I planted the tree, shrub, and vine layers of Theressa's yard, and Pete and I also began planting Leah's yard. We began holding weekly Peak Oil neighborhood preparation meetings, but unfortunately we didn't hit a critical mass of enough people with enough spare time to get research and implementation of preparation steps really flowing.

One of the primary preparation recommendations from most Peak Oil thinkers is to get out of debt! Any kind of "soft crash" or controlled decline will probably favor corporations and the rich at the expense of middle and lower class folks. Debt is already a major lever of control over people's lives. The freer you are of it, the more options you'll have as the economy collapses. With that in mind, Theressa decided last month to sell the house she hadn't chosen in the first place, the legacy of her recently ended marriage. She's never been really happy where she is, and by selling now at the top of the housing bubble she can wipe her mortgage out and have cash left over. So my planning stage for the herbaceous and ground layers of her forest garden was interrupted; the next residents will have to plant the annual and perennial flowers, herbs, vegetables, ground covers, and so forth! It's a little disappointing to leave the work I've done, mostly because I know there's still so much for me to learn by observing what we've done so far and how it works out, but I'm OK with the change in plans. It makes a lot of sense for Theressa to get out of this trap, and I can keep learning anywhere I go. With luck, the new owners will allow me to come back from time to time and take a look at what's happening.

Theressa isn't entirely sure yet what her long term relocation plans are, but for now she and I are excited about moving in to the Portland Permaculture Institute (PPI) with Pam & Joe (we both knew Pam already from the Kucinich campaign!), Bob, Tony, and Michael. They have a 1.6 acre lot in the middle of Portland, and the community is focused on learning, practicing, and teaching permaculture. There's a general awareness of Peak Oil and Pam and Joe are specifically preparing for it, so it seems like a good place for us to learn more about permaculture, live in and learn from intentional community, and build a lifeboat with more people who share the same preparation vision. We'll be moving in by the end of October, assuming I'm accepted by the community members.

With Theressa's house going up for sale and my impending departure from Leah's yard (with no one committed to caring for further edible and ecological plantings), I decided to jump on a timely opportunity: an internship at Mossback Farm, a permaculture farm 40 miles out of Portland. I'll be spending about two months there learning as much as I can before moving into PPI and devoting myself to preparations there. It promises to be a very exciting experience; I'll write updates from there! The same can be said, really, for Peak Oil...so stay tuned!