Rotating Chicken Paddocks - What a Relief!

Chicken Yard Design Mistakes

#1: Sheet Mulching the Lawn

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

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

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



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

#2: Single Free Range Area

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

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

Correcting the Problem

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

New Fencing

Design

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

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

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

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

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

Construction

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

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

Plants

Goals

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

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

New Plants

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

Existing Plants

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

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

Sustainable cities - feasible transition or oxymoron?

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

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

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

My reply follows for the rest of this post:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our bath tubs: case study of stacking functions

The Tubs

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

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

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

OK, brainstorm away!

---

Functions

Ready? Here we go!

Rainwater Harvest

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

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

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

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

Drinking Water & Wildlife Habitat

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

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

Aquaculture Yields

Many yields for us and our animal friends:

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

Sunlight Reflection for House

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

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

Climate Control

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

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

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

Terrace Retaining Wall

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

Slow-Drip Irrigation

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

Betchya Didn't Think of This One

Ice skating rink!

Summary

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

Portland water activism links

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

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

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

Our graywater system

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

Washing Machine

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

PE Pipe Exiting Garage

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

Pipe Layout

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

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

Sinks & bathtub

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

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

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

Molded dirt and marble slate for overflow

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

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

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

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

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

Current setup - second tub in background

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

Ready to install pond liner scraps for new overflow

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

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

Derrick Jensen free event in Portland

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

Self Sufficiency, Five Years In

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

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

You can view a PDF (6 MB) of our presentation slideshow. I went into a lot more detail during the presentation than what I was able to write out on the presentation slides, but you can still get a good idea of our journey from looking through the slides.

UPDATE April 2014: I have now created a slideshow with audio synced to the images. View Self Sufficiency, Five Years In online (may require reasonably fast internet connection) or download 36MB zip for offline viewing. (Extract to anywhere on your hard drive, then open the included index.html file in your web browser.)

Cost of Portland water & implications for rainwater harvest

Water supply vs sewage costs

Range in cost per gallon

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

Explanation

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

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

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

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

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

Two notes on this phenomenon

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

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

Winter average water use months

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

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

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

Rainwater harvest

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

Payback Calculations

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

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

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

Optimal Storage Capacity

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

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

Other considerations

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

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

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

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

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

A Final Word

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

Plan for root crops

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

Seasonal availability

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

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

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

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

Consumption

Daily average

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

Monthly root consumption

December - March (four months)
Harvesting skirret, jerusalem artichoke, and minor roots from ground as needed. All mashua, yacon, and oca should have been dug after the first hard frost; now eating them from storage.
Root	Pounds (all 4 months)
Skirret	30
Mashua	25
Oca	25
Jerusalem artichoke	10
Yacon	10
Minor roots	5
April
Skirret and stored roots starting to sprout, so eating the last of them. Relying more heavily on jerusalem artichoke
Root	Pounds
Jerusalem artichoke	12
Mashua	5
Oca	5
Skirret	3
Yacon	2
Minor roots	1
May
Not much available
Root	Pounds
Jerusalem artichoke (preserved via fermentation)	10
Dandelion	5
Scorzonera	3
Yellow asphodel	1
June & July
Early potatoes & some other roots now available as summer drought kicks in. Harvest all camas to cook as one big batch.
Root	Pounds (total for two months)
Camas	20
Potato	6
Jerusalem artichoke (preserved via fermentation)	5
Yellow Asphodel	5
Cinnamon vine bulbils	5
Dandelion	4
Scorzonera	3
Grape hyacinth	2
August
Mostly relying on starch-rich potatoes and cinnamon vine bulbils, with miscellaneous inulin roots providing some variety
Root	Pounds
Potato	8
Cinnamon vine bulbils	8
Yellow Asphodel	3
Scorzonera	3
Dandelion	3
Campanula sp	1
Grape hyacinth	1
September
Similar to last month, but cinnamon vine bulbil production may have slowed down??
Root	Pounds
Potato	10
Cinnamon vine bulbils	3
Scorzonera	3
Dandelion	3
Yellow Asphodel	2
Campanula sp	1
Grape hyacinth	1
October
Skirret available again!
Root	Pounds
Skirret	10
Potato	10
Jerusalem artichoke	8
Minor roots	2
November
Assuming we don't get a hard freeze yet, so not harvesting mashua/oca/yacon yet
Root	Pounds
Skirret	16
Jerusalem artichoke	11
Minor roots	3

Annual root totals

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

Land required

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

Note on jerusalem artichokes

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

Roots as chicken fodder

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

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

Notes on perennial and self-seeding roots, part 2

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

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

Roots

Garlic, Elephant Garlic, and Shallots (INULIN ROOTS)

Edibility: Roots and greens raw or cooked

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

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

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

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

Potato - Solanum tuberosum

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

Edibility: Root, cooked only.

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

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

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

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

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

Cinnamon Vine - Dioscorea batatas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Canna lily - Canna indica

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

Edibility: Root cooked. Mild starchy taste.

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

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

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

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

Parsnip - Pastinaca sativa

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

Edibility: Root raw or cooked.

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

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

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

Grape hyacinth - Muscari neglectum

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

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

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

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

Chinese artichoke - Stachys affinis

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

Earth chestnut - Bunium bulbocastanum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Woodland chervil - Anthriscus sylvestris

See also my crop summary

Edibility: Root cooked (and raw??). Leaves raw or cooked. Maybe seeds raw or cooked?

Growth: Clumping biennial (or perennial?) to 4' tall. Ours stayed in leaf through this past winter. They normally set seed in late spring and maybe die off after that?

Harvest: Dig roots maybe year round??

Culture: Doing fine in full shade with almost no supplemental water.

Sweet cicely - Myrrhis odorata

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

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

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

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

Lovage - Levisticum officinale

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

Growth: Clumping to 6' tall.

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

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

Orpine - Sedum telephium

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

Edibility: Leaves raw. Root cooked.

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

Scilla scillioides

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

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

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

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

Fennel seed as a calorie crop

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harvest log now shows category & food item breakdowns

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

Notes on perennial and self-seeding roots

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

See also part 2

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

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

Inulin

About Inulin

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

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

Dealing With Inulin

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

Ways to transform inulin into more digestible sugars:

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

Roots

Skirret - Sium sisarum

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mashua - Tropaeaolum tuberosum

A perennial, tuberous nasturtium.

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

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

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

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

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

Jerusalem Artichoke - Helianthus tuberosus (INULIN ROOT)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wapato - Sagittaria latifolia

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

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

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

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

Lily - Lilium sp.

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

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

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

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

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

Yacon - Smallianthus sonchifolia (INULIN ROOT)

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

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

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

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

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

Yellow asphodel - Asphodeline lutea

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

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

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

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

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

Oca - Oxalis tuberosa

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

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

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

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

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

Dandelion - Taraxacum officinale (INULIN ROOT)

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

Growth: You know how a dandelion grows!

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

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

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

Scorzonera - Scorzonera hispanica (INULIN ROOT)

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

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

Harvest: Root seems good any time of year.

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

Burdock/Gobo - Arctium lappa (INULIN ROOT)

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

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

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

Culture: Full sun to part shade.

Sea kale - Crambe maritima

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

Growth: Clumper to about 3' tall and wide.

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

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

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

Camas - Camassia sp. (INULIN ROOT)

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

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

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

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

Solomon's seal - Polygonatum commutatum

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

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

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

Culture: Full shade to partial sun.

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

Dahlia - Dahlia pinnata , Dahlia rosea (INULIN ROOT)

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

Edibility: Flower petals raw, root cooked.

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

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

Culture: Full sun.

Evening primrose - Oenothera biennis

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

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

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

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

Creeping bellflower - Campanula rapunculoides

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

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

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

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

Unknown bellflowers - Campanula sp

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daylily - Hemerocallis sp (INULIN ROOT)

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

Growth: Medium fast runner, about 3' tall.

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

Culture: Full sun to par shade. Drought tolerant.

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

Giant sea kale - Crambe cordifolia

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

Growth: Clumper to 6' tall and wide.

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

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

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

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

Indian Breadroot, Psoralea esculenta

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

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

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

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

Crop summary: Gai Lohn, Brassica oleracea alboglabra

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

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

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

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