Full yard pics, February 2012

I just posted some winter pictures of the yard from the roof. Not very exciting since most plants are still dormant, but nice to compare to the lush growth of other seasons.

Greens - Phases of Growth & Winter Snapshot

Inflection Point

With lengthening days and unusually abundant winter sunshine, the greens in our yard grow actively again! No longer do I sparingly pick leaves, carefully allocating the non-renewable resource over the weeks of winter gloom. We enter a period of daily growth in the yard evenly balanced with how much we can eat each day. Soon we'll enter the crazy exponential phase of growth where we can't possibly eat it all, and we'll start replacing some of the weedy greens with more deliberate summer staple crops. As we eliminate the greens further out in the yard, we'll turn our attention more and more to the two new dedicated beds of perennial greens I organized over the last couple of months. These beds, of about 100 square feet total, currently lie in the shade of the house, so are growing more slowly than the rest of the yard. In another month they should have enough sunlight to begin vigorous growth, and the shadier conditions will help them through the summer.

Right now, since each leaf is small to tiny and I have to pick a thousand leaves to fill a bowl, harvesting takes me about 5 minutes per ounce.  That will change soon as leaves get larger, overall growth gets denser, and I spend less time wiping off dirt splashed onto leaves from the ground.

Current Greens Harvests

Roughly in descending order of bulk, we're currently harvesting:

Salad Greens

• Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale)
  
• Wintercress (Barbarea verna)
  
• Alexanders (Smyrnium olusatrum)
  
• Woodland chervil (Anthriscus sylvestris)
  
• Purple dead nettle (Lamium purpureum)
  
• Nipplewort (Lapsana communis)
  
• French sorrel (Rumex acetosa)
  
• Scorzonera (Scorzonera hispanica)
  
• Allium tops (garlic chives, elephant garlic, egyptian walking onion, bunching onion, other unknown species)
  
• Fennel (Foeniculum vulgare)
  
• Earth chestnut (Bunium bulbocastanum)
  
• Popweed (Cardamine something or other)
  
• Sheep sorrel (Rumex acetosella)
  
• Spearmint (Mentha spicata)
  
• Lemon balm (Melissa officinale)
  
• Unknown mint
• Salad burnet (Sanguisorba minor)
  
• ground cover bellflower (Campanula poscharskyana)
  
• Zebra mallow (Malva sylvestris mauritiana)
  
• Calendula (Calendula officinalis)
  
• Siberian miner's lettuce (Montia sibirica)
  
• Hen and chicks (Sempervivum tectorum)
  

Stinging Nettle

Cooking Greens

In addition to using most of the same greens as for salads, we're harvesting (again in descending order of bulk):

• Stinging nettle (Urtica dioica)
  
• Tree collard
  
• Clove root leaves (Geum urbanum)
  
• Radish leaves
  
• Chard
  
• Kale
  
• Beet leaves
  

Harvest log update, February 2012

I've updated the harvest log website. I haven't posted about the harvest log since last April. Some unorganized thoughts follow:

• Our average daily calorie harvest hasn't changed much, still right about 670 calories per day. We still have perhaps 10-20 pounds of honey and maybe 3 pounds of fennel seed which we harvested but haven't weighed and entered into the database yet, which will boost the calories.
  
• We've been harvesting fewer ounces of food per day than before, but with similar total calories, meaning we're harvesting more calorie crop - mostly a result of increased honey and egg harvest.
  
• None of the fruit trees we've planted yielded last year, except the medlar in heavy shade with a little over 2 pounds of fruit. We did get twice as many cherries from our front yard seedling cherry as we did the previous year. We were a bit surprised and disappointed that the persimmon tree which gave 8 1/2 pounds in 2010 didn't yield in 2011. Our region had poor fruit harvests in general due to weather causing poor pollination. Hopefully this year the fruit trees will really start to produce, after 5 years in the ground!
  
• Great yield from our goumi, which gave 12 1/2 pounds.
  
• Much better yield from the strawberry patch, which gave 17 pounds in 2011 compared to 6 in 2010. Probably because Tulsey thinned out the plants in winter of 2010/11. The patch is about 80 square feet.
  
• Bad raspberry year (11 pounds compared to 31 in 2010), as most of the plants in our original planting died (probably from root rot or some other disease), plus we didn't water the living patches enough to get a good fall harvest.
  
• Our english walnut and two or three of our four hazels set some nuts, but all were taken by squirrels and jays. Unfortunately, we didn't eat any squirrels from the yard this year to offset that loss. We did get one tiny chestnut!
  
• Our harvest of greens dropped off a lot last year, partly because we were wrapped up in the house project, and partly because we didn't irrigate much in summer and the greens suffered a lot.
  
• Fairly large garlic harvest last year, of 18 pounds. (Shallots were a near total failure.) I'd like to see that tripled next year.
  
• Sunchoke harvest has dropped by 50% due to making fewer fires, greatly affecting the winter calorie harvest. I think I'm going to break down and just use our gas stove and a sleeping bag (to act as a "haybox") to start cooking the sunchokes.
  
• We approximately doubled our fennel seed harvest, to 5 pounds. Very successful calorie crop.
  
• More eggs this past year, as the hens we purchased in May 2010 laid heavily from December 2010 through November 2011 before slowing down. We've had a larger flock than would be at all sustainable for this yard, and have been gradually culling the flock for ongoing meat harvest.
  
• Harvesting a lot more nettles this winter season than last year. Delicious!
  
• Light skirret harvest this year. I think last year I harvested a bunch of plants that had been in the ground 2 or 3 years and got very big, then replanted those crowns. I didn't water the skirret much this past season, and many of them grew in part to full shade. I harvested almost all those plants this winter as 1 year old, relatively scrawny roots. Definitely better to get some sort of multi-year mixture going so you can always harvest older plants.
  
• Light mashua & yacon harvests this year, again because of lack of water. Almost all the mashua plants died down in the summer; I didn't expect any roots from them at all, and was pleasantly surprised at how many we did get considering how sad they were.
  
• Good oca harvest this year! Two patches did poorly (lack of water again); one patch to the north of one of our persimmon trees in polyculture with yellow asphodel & lily did very well.
  
• Nice teaser autumn olive and grape harvests! Neither huge, but larger than the few dozen berries or grapes from last year.
  
• Pretty good potato harvest, though still not as good as I'd have liked - lack of water stunted or killed many plants.
  
• We ate lots of fuki stalk, and sold or gave away several divisions, barely managing to keep the growth of the patch in check. Great vigorous perennial vegetable.
  
• So far our asparagus is a very poorly yielding crop in terms of calories per space it takes up--only 280 calories from maybe 10 plants using maybe 30 square feet? Our solomon's seal gave 2/3 the calories from a similar area but growing in heavy shade on the north wall of our house, under timber bamboo, with lungwort, lovage, and wood sorrel in there as well. And we didn't even harvest as much of the solomon's seal as we could have.
  

Close Encounter

A couple of nights ago, I returned from the library at dusk.  On the way home from the bus stop, I detoured into the vacant lot 3 doors down from our house.  I decided to sit in the grass under one of the black locust trees and watch the sky and the stars and the moon for a bit.  After maybe 10-15 minutes, I heard a rustling in the blackberry patch to my left, and turned my head to see a big ol' raccoon creep out!  Maybe 8-10' away from me!  He or she walked forward a few steps, sniffed, stared in my direction, walked forward a few more steps, getting within 3-4' of me!  Peered some more in my direction.  Turned to my right and walked in an arc, now maybe 6' out. topped and turned to stare at me again, sniff sniff, until due south of me.  Maybe finally smelled me well enough to figure out my presence...moved at a brisk walk to the orange fence 20' away, and seemed to vanish in the blink of an eye!

2 minutes later...whole thing over again!  Rustle rustle, emerging raccoon, maybe even a little bigger than the last.  Step step stop peer sniff step step--this time definitely within 3', maybe 2', even closer than the last!  Reared up on hind legs as high as he or she could get.  Then back onto all fours, then moving to my left and backing out a bit. I thought this raccoon maybe peed, but I'm not sure why I thought that--I didn't really hear pee or see anything clearly (and when I went and sniffed the spot later I didn't smell anything.)  Circled around to my right again, with the same step step stop sniff peer step step, pretty much in the same path as the first raccoon.  Same thing again of stopping due south in front of me, and finally moving quickly to the fence; this time I watched carefully and saw the movement as he or she glided under the fence at a low spot in the dirt.

I waited another 5-10 minutes, but no further activity; I was wondering whether younger adolescent raccoons would all repeat the performance!

Very very cool; I'm so glad I got to experience that!  I must have lucked out with positioning myself such that the bright street light was more or less behind me when they came out of the thicket, and the wind was coming from the south so not blowing my scent at them.  I was actually scared a little bit; big animals with nasty teeth and claws and all that, oh my!  Definitely worth another twilight stake-out sometime soon...

New Paul Wheaton video: Sustainable Food - People Per Acre

I've added this to the "Video and articles about us" perma-link:

Paul Wheaton Sustainable Food - People Per Acre video (12 minutes) with a lot of footage of me and Tulsey describing our property, our initial expectations for self sufficiency for 3-4 people, and our growing realization of the realities of how many calories we can harvest here. Shot in August 2011.

Income from tours & classes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

House heat update & unintended consequences

Fuel Used To Date

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

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

Future Steps

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

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

Unintended Consequences

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

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

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

House Layout, Features, & Future Projects

Design Goals

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

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

Goal Implementation

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

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

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

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

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

Other Features

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

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

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

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

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

Future Projects

If we were staying in this house, we would:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Site Plan

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

Neat seeds from Adaptive Seeds

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

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

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

Seed sources

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

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

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

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

My personal vision statement

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

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

Or in limerick form as:

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

Press & videos including or about me

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

You can watch a presentation I gave in 2011, via youtube below, or visit Self Sufficiency, Five Years In for other download options.

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Paul Wheaton Sustainable Food - People Per Acre video (12 minutes) with a lot of footage of me and Tulsey describing our property, our initial expectations for self sufficiency for 3-4 people, and our growing realization of the realities of how many calories we can harvest here. Shot in August 2011.

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

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Paul Wheaton Dandelions in permaculture video

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Paul Wheaton Mullein video

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Paul Wheaton Comfrey video

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

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

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

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Perennial Vegetables article from Portland Tribune, July 9 2009.

Ecoroof Grant Report: Addendum

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

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

Mulching exposed pond liner

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

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

Expanding sunspace roof drainage channel

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

Self-sufficient tropical diet, rough draft

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

House insulation & initial results

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

Materials

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

Application

Walls

Approximate R-value: 20

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

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

Ceiling

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

Original House

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

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

Sunspace

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

Floor

Approximate R-value: 30.

Original house

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

Sunspace

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

Crawlspace

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

Initial Results

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

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

Fixing the graywater tub

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

The Problem

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

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

The Solution

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

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

Fall 2011 Garlic Plantings

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

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

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

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

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

Garlic & shallot harvests: ecoroof and yard

The Experiment

Test locations

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

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

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

Season conditions

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

Uncontrolled variables

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

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

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

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

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

Expectations

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

Harvests

Method

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

Data

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

Scapes

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

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

Analysis

Garlic

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

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

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

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

Shallots

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

Future Research

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

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

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

Slug Moat: Pond, Rainwater Catchment, & Protected Nursery

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

Background & Objectives

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

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

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

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

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

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

Construction

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Functions

Rainwater catchment

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


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

Aquaculture

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

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

Habitat

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

Future Potential

Ducks

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

Temperature moderation & humidity

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