Ecoroof Final Planting Plan

Over the last month, we implented the final stages of the ecoroof: putting up pond liner, then soil, then planting the plants!  At some point I'll write up more details on the mechanical design of the ecoroof.  With this post I just want to share the final planting plan.

The planting plan images give most plants by latin name.  For common names, you can refer to my original planting plan post. Or for common names plus details on edible & other uses, you can look them up in the Plants for a Future database.

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The Porch roof measures about 7' x 19', and supports about 8" of soil depth.  It slopes from the south (top edge) to the north (bottom edge).   It has metal roofs from the rest of the house draining into it from the south and the east.  We have a relatively hard time accessing this roof, especially in the rainy months due to the slippery metal roof of the rest of the house.  So we designed this to not require harvesting during those months.  It should yield dry month harvests of garlic, elephant garlic, and shallots; a number of berries; hopefully some seed crop from perennial flax and Good King Henry; and roots of unknown quality from the Sedum telephium (these may require harvesting in late fall after frosts, so would fall into the rainy season.)

I figured we can walk along the edges of the metal roofs to access the planting areas, so we only needed five "stepping stones" of about 2' x 2' to access the interior.  (We're not actually using stepping stones, just marked off areas not planted in the regular crops.)

I divided the roof into roughly 3' x 3' planting squares.  The "stepping stones" occur mostly in the lower set of squares, so disproportionately remove planting space from those squares.

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The Sunspace roof measures about 13' x 29', and supports about 5.5" of soil. It slopes from the north (top edge) to the south (lower edge).  A metal roof from the other part of the house runs into the top edge of the ecoroof.

We have a ladder set up outside our back door to give easy access to this roof, so we designed it to provide several leaf crops (Alliums, violets, Campanulas, and more) for harvest a few times a week.  We planted many of the same species as on the porch roof, plus a few new ephemerals (tulips, Triteleia, Brodiaea, Erythronium, muscari, and scilla), breadseed poppy as a seed crop, and a few other miscellaneous plants.

I figured again that we can walk along the edge of the metal roof to access the north edge of the upper planting bed.  I set a second main path 4' down the roof to give access to the other side of that planting bed, with keyhole paths going down the roof from that main path to give access to the rest of the lower beds.

Most of the planting patches measure about 3' x 4'.

UPDATE 7-23-11: We wound up planting Agastache foeniculum instead of Hyssopus officinalis. We never planted any tulips. Instead of the scilla, we planted Tigridia pavonia.

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For both roofs, we hope to get a little extra summer moisture from the condensation that forms on the metal roof and runs down it into the ecoroof areas.  It won't be a lot, but it may help support plants at those edges which otherwise wouldn't survive.

For both roofs, we planted the lower edge with camassia, assuming that the soil will be somewhat boggy but that the camassia can deal with it.

For both roofs, Tulsi wanted the edge plantings to look pretty, since people will see them from the ground.  The Camassia for the lower edges met her needs there.  For the west edges we planted sedums with nice flowers, daylilies, yellow asphodel, and perennial flax.

Extrafloral nectaries

Just learned something new while watching the videos of Will Hooker's college permaculture class. Many plants have extrafloral nectaries (ie, not flowers) which exude nectar. Scientists theorize the plants do this as a symbiotic relationship with beneficial insects such as ants and predatory wasps, who keep other herbivorous insects in check.

So for permaculture design, which emphasizes scattering beneficial insectary plants through your garden or food forest, this greatly enlarges the number of species you can use to achieve this goal. I suspect that if you have a wide diversity of plants in your system anyway, then you might not even have to deliberately plan any insectaries for nectar. You'd still need to plan out the pollen-providing plants, though. Of course this depends on more information on when exactly the extrafloral nectaries produce; I don't know whether the plants exude their nectar all the time they're in leaf, or just in certain seasons, or only if they're suffering from predation, or what. I'll have to start observing plants to figure this out!

Extrafloral nectary plants by family

Extrafloral nectary plants by genus

Question: Fragaria chiloensis for fruit, and largest bulbed spring ephemerals?

I'm putting these questions "out there" because I can't find much info through the research I've done. Hopefully someone will stumble upon these and share some good info!

Does anyone know of any selections of Fragaria chiloensis (the native coast strawberry) with better or worse fruit production? Or just have any experience growing them for fruit? These plants should survive on an ecoroof, so I'd like to use them as a groundcover between taller plants.

And, any thoughts on the largest sized corms (bulbs) of the edible spring ephemerals Camassia, Triteleia, Brodiaea, Erythronium, and Dichelostemma? Or have extra corms to share or trade? These should also work well on an ecoroof, plus they fill a useful understory niche in forest gardens, so it seems well worth identifying and breeding for larger bulbs. Here's a little rundown of what I've come across, though I have little personal experience:

-Camassia: Eric Toensmeier in _Perennial Vegetables_ says C. cusickii bulbs get two to three times as large as those of C. quamash.

-Erythronium: Samuel Thayer in _Nature's Garden_ says the western species E. grandiflorum has larger bulbs than most other species. Natives would sometimes harvest hundreds of pounds of them at a time in the spring. By comparison, it takes Thayer about an hour to pick one cup of his native E. americanum.

-Triteleia: T. laxa "Humbolt Star" is supposed to get huge bulbs instead of making many offsets. So it'd be a lot easier to harvest, though you'd have to pay more attention to allowing for good reseeding.

Sustainable and humane rabbit keeping

Two aspects of common small-scale rabbit operations have kept me from seriously considering keeping them for meat: the prison model (each adult rabbit in his or her own tiny cage, allowed each other's company only to mate) and the importation of alfalfa pellets or hay as feed. I dislike having to buy in feed for our animals, as I'm a cheapskate by nature, and I don't know any easy efficient ways to close the nutrient loop to make the importation of such resources sustainable. We get around that problem with our chickens by only feeding them waste products from civilization--excess bread donated by the bakery down the street, and produce scraps from the local food co-op. But I don't know of any waste streams to tap for protein-rich rabbit food, and I can't even come up with a good model to have the rabbits free-range for some of their own food.

I assume I don't have to go into any detail about why the one-rabbit-per-cage model turns me off. I don't visit commercial animal prisons (AKA "zoos") and I don't intend to start one in our yard.

Many months ago I stumbled across this article (PDF) that changed my perception of the food supply for domesticated rabbits. Basically, researchers fed Soviet Chinchilla rabbits nothing but black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) leaves at a rate of about 14 ounces per rabbit per day for 56 days, and the rabbits not only didn't die, but actually gained an average 10.4 grams per rabbit per day!

Black locusts grow like weeds in our yard. We have an existing hedgerow of them which we plan to coppice for rot-resistant lumber and for firewood. Now when I look up into those trees, instead of leaves I see rabbits all over the branches! The locusts also grow like weeds through the rest of the yard, popping up all over the place and needing the occasional cutting or yanking. Definitely a low-maintenance supply of leaves! Obviously we wouldn't want to feed the rabbits 100% black locust, but it could probably form the backbone of their food supply. We can supplement by growing some alfalfa (we have some growing already for the chickens, but they don't touch the stuff?!), comfrey (I haven't read it yet, but the freely downloadable book Russian Comfrey by Lawrence Hills goes into great detail on its use as animal fodder), the nitrogen-fixing tiny floating aquatic plant azolla,and possibly Paulownia tree leaves (supposed to be good fodder for rabbits, chickens, and other livestock--though again our chickens haven't taken to them in my couple of tries to feed it to them.) And of course miscellaneous excess greens from our garden or trimmings from veggies could go to the rabbits.

This method will take a bit of time per day to cut the fresh material and take it to the rabbits, but as long as enough black locust trees are managed properly in rotation, it should provide fairly efficient ongoing leaf cuts, while also providing firewood a bit at a time.

Inspired by this new information on rabbit feed possibilities, I did some research into alternatives to the prison model, and quickly found a few references to keeping rabbits in colonies. I haven't researched enough to really say much about it, or even to provide links to the best sources, so just search for yourself if curious. Basically you just have to provide a predator-proof fenced area over soil, or a decent sized building with plenty of straw, and the does will create their own burrows and set things up how they like. You can provide nest boxes, which the does may or may not use. Some people successfully allow their buck to live full-time with the does; others find that the buck over-breeds the does, not allowing them any down-time between litters to recover from the last batch. Of course you still have to provide food and water, but you can do so for the whole colony at once instead of having to put food into individual cages or buy expensive automatic systems.

My first thought for our yard was that we could keep a rabbit colony on our garage roof, which has convenient access to overhanging black locusts. We could also provide a ramp to the ecoroof over the sunspace, and occasionally allow the rabbits up onto the roof to graze. Just an idea for now; we'll see if and when I have time to pursue this further! (Our highest priority homestead expansion right now is to add ducks; the slug populations have exploded this year and made it nearly impossible for us to grow any annual veggies. Good thing we hardly bother with them anyway, but still...)

Polyculture summary: stinging nettle & Ribes sp

Years ago, I read somewhere (maybe in Patrick Whitefield's How to Make a Forest Garden?) that Robert Hart (food forest originator and pioneer in England) allowed the naturally occurring nettles in his garden to grow up through his gooseberries and currants. The nettles provided many functions, including their normal nutrient accumulation, caterpillar host, delicious human spring green vegetable, and host for early harmless aphid species allowing aphid predator populations to build up in preparation for arrival of pest aphids on other plants. But Hart specifically allowed them to grow amongst his Ribes species because gooseberries and currants can take a lot of shade, such that the nettle supposedly didn't interfere with their crop, and the nettles kept birds out of the berries. Once harvest time arrived, Hart would cut the nettles down and use them as rich mulch, and harvest the berries.

I planted Urtica dioica (seeds from Horizon Herbs) nettle amongst our gooseberries and currants as a precaution against bird predation, and as a way to work nettles into the yard in a useful way. So far we haven't had problems with birds eating anything in the yard, except for scrub jays going for our hazelnuts. We get some birds in the yard, eating some seeds (bushtits eating parsnips, goldfinches & nuthatches & downy woodpeckers eating mullein), some cherries, some berries; but so far no major wipe-out-the-crop harvests. We don't mind sharing some!

Unfortunately, our Ribes have not done very well in terms of crop yield. We planted them in fall of 2006, so have had three years for possible harvests. I forget whether anything notable happened in 2008, but they may still have been establishing. Last year (2009), they got hit badly by an outbreak of currant sawfly caterpillars, who feed on the leaves of currants and gooseberries and stripped some of our bushes almost totally bare of leaves. I noticed their frass (poop) early on, but thought it was dirt the chickens had kicked up onto the leaves. Not until a week later did I notice the leaves being devoured and associate the frass with the worms. I immediately started hand-picking worms to introduce them to the chickens; then started shaking the upper branches to send worms to the ground for the chickens to devour; and after a few days trained the chickens to look on the lower leaves for worms. The chickens did regular patrol of the bottoms of the shrubs from then on, and I shook down the upper branches every few days, and we got the sawfly population under control to the point where the bushes all recovered fine, but they didn't bear any fruit last year. Note: I don't attribute these sawfly woes to the nettle; I just figured I should write up this experience while I'm at it.

This year, we had a few sawflies, but not too bad. We had hundreds of gooseberry fruits developing, and all looked promising. Then, while we were out of town for a week, much of the developing fruit vanished! Maybe birds came through and ate them (though I doubt it, since they hadn't ripened yet.) Maybe the bushes just dropped their fruit in the same way many fruit trees do a "June drop" of poorly pollinated or over-abundant fruit. (I heard from someone else in town that their gooseberries did the same thing.) But possibly we had problematic competition between the nettles and the Ribes, for either sunlight (seems unlikely given the shade-tolerance of Ribes), nutrients such as nitrogen (possible, though I do pee on the nettles & Ribes a lot, and the nettles are supposed to be deep-rooted and supplying nutrients to a polyculture), or water (most likely, since we don't water much during our three month drought season.) Even without specific disease or pest problems, our Ribes wound up looking pretty ragged by now, with curled and browned and maybe some yellowed leaves. So between the poor fruit yields and the general sadness of the plants, something isn't working.

Nettles are a pain. Duh. Managing nettles growing through fairly densely branched Ribes shrubs is an awkward pain. Trying to maneuver my hands down into the bottom of a sharp-thorned gooseberry bush to cut down nettles is a pain from two fronts.

Nettles grow fast! They stayed quite manageable for the first two or three years, but this year they've gotten established enough to really take off. They've spread runners into the paths (both the small 1.5' paths between Ribes shrubs in the tree understories, and into our main 2' and 4' paths between trees). It now requires more than an annual chopping of the nettles to keep them out of our way; I have to go in every week or two in the spring to cut them out of the paths. Of course, a lot of that maintenance dovetails well with harvesting them as my favorite spring vegetable. But once they start to flower, you're supposed to stop eating them because their calcium oxalate crystals can damage your kidneys, so at that point I'm just chopping (ouch! it stung me. ouch! damn gooseberry thorn.) the nettles to keep them out of the paths and try to open up some sunlight for the Ribes. And this kind of work, though it occurs in shorts & t-shirt warm weather, really demands pants and long sleeves to minimize masochism--which means I have to dress up special for the job. I haven't dressed up real special since I got old enough for my mom to stop dragging me to church; and I haven't dressed up semi special since I quit my corporate business casual job, and I don't often get around to dressing up special for the nettles either. So the paths get more and more overtaken and the Ribes seem to suffer and we got hardly any berries this year.

When we do get around to chopping back the nettle, we're now ripping out as much of the root as we can get, to slow it down a lot more than just cutting the aboveground growth would. I don't think we'll try to totally eradicate it, but we'll do more to set it back. In my next yard design, I'll definitely still include nettle, but as its own patch where I can just chop it back with a machete from the edges to keep it in check, rather than having to maneuver through and around other vegetation or branches to get at the nettles. I might try planting a shade tolerant low-growing evergreen (violets?) to provide a solid ground cover through the full yard. And for Ribes, I'll try a less robust and non-painful vine--perhaps annual garden peas or annual or perennial beans or Apios sp (groundnut) or Lathyrus tuberosus (earth chestnut - I did plant this originally in 2007 with the Ribes, but they've never taken off--maybe from chicken abuse, or maybe not enough water. Two plants were still alive early this spring, but growing slowly and definitely getting shaded out by the nettles. I wasn't able to find the plants a month ago.)

In conclusion, in the future, unless we have active bird predation problems, I would not plant a combination of nettles and berry shrubs again. Especially not nettles & thorny shrubs!

Harvest log update

Brief comments on our harvest log (see May 25th post for my original description of the log):

We've gotten good boosts in our calorie harvests since then due to berries (about one eighth of our calories, heavily weighted towards raspberries) and garlic (another one eighth of our calories). We got a decent crop of nearly 8 pounds of cherries from one of our mature seedling (bird-planted) trees, but that only gave us 2000 calories, enough to feed me for one day. (We did harvest the cherry seeds for another 1000 calories.) We've harvested almost 15 pounds of tomatoes, but it turns out they don't have very many calories--less than 100 per pound. We were forced to harvest our small hazelnut crop early, as the scrub jays had begun to spend time in the small trees each morning. I couldn't quite tell whether they actually took any nuts yet, but I think I noticed slightly fewer nuts each morning. I assume our harvest of green hazelnuts doesn't yield as many calories (less fat, less protein?) as properly ripe nuts would. We've gotten close to 3000 calories from potatoes, with a lot more still in the ground, and I expect we'll easily have 50 pounds of jerusalem artichokes and many pounds more of skirret come fall, which will help fill the root crop gap I mentioned in my first harvest log post. One of our two persimmon trees has perhaps 50 fruits developing on it, which should give us a large yield of relatively calorie-dense food.

More than a third of our calories still come from animal products (eggs, three dead chickens, squirrels and rats) which (as discussed in my first harvest log post) are not fed entirely from our yard, so the calorie accounting gets kind of murky with that.

Our harvest of greens has dropped off, caused by at least three factors: I got tired of eating so many of them; the rains of late spring and all of June kept the leaves wet and heavy but now they're dry and light weight; and I've been throwing myself back into the house project and haven't taken the time to pick salads and cooking greens each day. I now estimate I could reasonably eat a year-round average of 8 ounces of greens per day.

We haven't tried to do a formal accounting of our time like we have with the harvests, but we estimate we spend at most an hour a day between the two of us to maintain and harvest the yard, including chicken and bee care. Not bad--if we could scale that up directly, it would mean about three hours a day to supply all the calories for one person. (This doesn't include time to prep things such as cleaning roots.) I've felt disappointed by just how few calories we're getting at this time, and by our yields of certain things, but I feel very happy with the input:output ratio we've achieved.

Crop summary: Woodland chervil, Anthriscus sylvestris

(Picture shows black locust canopy with annual garden peas on the left, and woodland chervil on the right, taller with lacy leaves)

I got excited about Anthriscus sylvestris, "Woodland chervil" or "Cow parsley" after reading Patrick Whitefield's "perennial alternative to annual chervil" description in How To Make a Forest Garden. I eventually established some plants in the heavily shaded area under our back yard fence-line black locust trees, where an initial few plants have multiplied into a dense thicket of mature plants and young seedlings. This proves woodland chervil's ability to grow and even thrive in dry shade--their position doesn't get much irrigation water from us, and the locust canopy above intercepts a lot of the scant late spring/early summer rainfall along with casting its dappled shade.

Woodland chervil puts out its carrot family flowers very early in spring, making it (with Myrrhis odorata, sweet cicely) a valuable beneficial insect nectary for that crucial time.

Unfortunately, the leaves, whether fresh and young, or older and mature, have a strong mostly unpleasant taste to my palate. I don't taste any of the aniseed flavor the annual chervil has, and notice that Ken Fern describes the leaves as tasting "somewhat less than wonderful." So although I might throw the leaves into a mixed salad in early spring when I don't have much else available, I don't see myself ever using the leaves very heavily.

I did plant a purple-leaved plant someone gave me, which she called woodland chervil. The leaves look much less divided to me than the regular plants, but otherwise I can believe I have the purple "Ravenswing" variety. The purple leaves taste much better to me than the regular plants, such that I think I could use them in bulk in a salad. But I need to verify that I'm working with the Anthriscus sylvestris species before I eat much of it.

I planted the original plants in the backyard chicken area, but just on the other side of a fence; they would not have established without protection. The mature plants might now coexist with the chickens if I removed the fence, but I'm sure their self-seeding would come to an end with all the scratching disturbance. Our chickens occasionally ate some of the regular green leaves early in the season, but they definitely don't devour the plants. So far my efforts to interest them in the green seeds have failed. I'll keep trying, especially with the mature seeds, in the hope that the plant may provide useful calorie-rich chicken fodder via its seeds.

I have nibbled a little myself on the immature seed. I haven't found any mentions of edibility of the seed, so I've only taken a few tastes so far, but I haven't suffered any ill effects. The seeds have some of the same flavor as the leaves, but not as strong and missing some crucial element that makes the leaves taste bad. I can see myself using the seeds in some bulk as a spice or garden snack. As the earliest seeds have matured, they've developed more fiber, so this use may end once they've passed beyond their green stage. Still, I sampled my first seeds almost three weeks ago, and the plants have more green seeds now and flowers getting ready to produce more seeds from scratch, so the season lasts a long time. Plus even fibrous mature seeds may work OK cooked in a dish.

Today I sampled two tiny roots for the first time, which Plants for a Future and other sources specifically list as edible. I really liked them! I took a couple of nibbles raw (though PFAF only lists them edible cooked), and found they had some of the same flavor as the leaves and seeds, but not terribly strong, and not with the extra unpleasant twist the leaves contain. I tasted some sweetness, too. I cooked the remaining root for a few minutes, then sampled again, and thought they'd lost some of their sweetness leaving them with just their strange but not-too-strong flavor. I don't think I would want to eat a big mess of 'em on their own. But I could easily see mixing them in with other roots or in a dish of some kind. We have a lot of young seedlings growing which will need thinning out for their own good, so I look forward to experimenting more with these and seeing how big their roots become and whether the taste changes.

I think I'll try introducing these into the shady, dry NE corner of our front yard, also under black locusts along the fence line. I'll use the better-tasting purple leaved variety if I can verify the species, since I would have much easier access to these plants in my daily greens-picking rounds than to the plants in the back yard. I haven't really figured out a good way to use that front NE area, but now I'm thinking a combination of woodland chervil; the existing edible rooted money plant (Lunaria annua, though the roots I've pulled out have never seemed very big); ground bean/hog peanut (Amphicarpaea bracteata, already planted there and trying to establish a colony); and the native shoot/root/berry crop false solomon's seal (Maianthemum racemosum) may fill in the area well as an understory to the tree canopies.

Harvest log

Link to Harvest log

Since April 15th, we've weighed and recorded what we've harvested from our yard, to begin to quantify our caloric yield. We realize that we have way more greens than we need, and that the greens don't provide very many calories. We do not weigh or record excess greens that we cut down and use as mulch or feed to the chickens. So the calorie yield would be higher if we measured those as a potential export crop--but our focus is on feeding one or two people a balanced diet from this yard, so we're just tracking what we're actually eating and using.

We need to get more root crops in, but even those wouldn't get our calorie yield up very high--I don't see us eating more than 1 pound of roots per day per person, which would only supply 300 calories or so per person per day. Our berry crops will start yielding soon, which will increase our calorie harvests. I don't expect much from our young fruit trees this year--our Hollywood plum got hit hard by aphids and has dropped all but three of its plums; our Oullins plum in heavy shade only made a handful of flowers and I don't see any fruit, and our Stella fig has died back to the ground (I think I made a mistake cutting off its strong shoots from last year to propagate it). We might get some nuts in the fall, assuming we can get the harvest timing figured out before the squirrels & jays get them.

For this yard to provide a balanced, full-calorie diet, we'll need to focus on calorie-dense foods--seeds, nuts, eggs, and meat. We have four hazels, an english walnut, a black walnut, and a chestnut planted. (Plus one small live and one large dead yellowhorn, neither of which do us much good for a while--I'm pretty sure we need a pair for cross pollination.) I want to experiment with harvesting and using carrot seeds this year--fennel, coriander, Bunium bulbocastanum, maybe others.

We have a small ongoing egg yield, and have harvested two chickens in the last 40 days. These have provided more than half our harvested calories. But, probably half the calories we feed the chickens come from off-site resources from civilization's waste streams--not sustainable long term, and not indicative of what this yard can actually support. Also, we didn't harvest the two hens as part of a plan; one got sick (maybe a broken egg inside her), and a raccoon killed another before our neighbors chased him or her off, saving the hen carcass for us to eat. So our laying flock has dropped from 5 to 3 hens, which puts a big crimp in our ongoing egg calorie harvest. We did just get 4 new baby chicks, so the egg yield should pick up in 5-6 months.

I welcome questions and comments--I can add a lot more about my thoughts on our calorie measurements as I go if people want more. This measuring & calculating exercise has really helped me figure out some of the realities of feeding ourselves from this site.

Crop summary: Skirret, Sium sisarum

We've grown skirret in our yard since the first year we moved here. I obtained seed from the National Germplasm Repository for research purposes, and direct seeded them March or April 2006. Several plants grew up just fine, and betweeen propagating those vegetatively and volunteers appearing from seed, we've expanded to two or three dozen plants in the yard.

I haven't paid close attention to plant size, so don't take this as gospel. But first year plants reach maybe 18-24" tall and 18" wide. Presumably plants growing from seed attain a smaller size than those with the headstart of vegetative propagation. Our two or three year old plants grow much larger; I measured a two year plant just now and it's grown to 3' tall and 2.5' wide. If I recall correctly, a three year old plant last year in almost full sun reached 5' or 6' tall by the time it flowered in July. In that case, the height proved problematic--the plant put on much of its growth in the dry weeks of June, receiving neither rain nor irrigation. When we started irrigating with sprinklers in early July, the weight of the water bent the tall plant over, making it sprawl into the path. So this year we'll either irrigate sooner so the plants grow accustomed to the practice, or we'll stake up the tallest plants, especially those unsupported by other surrounding vegetation.

Skirret makes the typical carrot family flowers, which provide food for beneficial insects such as predatory wasps. Last year the plants in our yard began blooming July 4th; in 2007 they began July 11th. I didn't keep track of how long the bloom season lasted. It produces copious quantities of seed. I haven't seen any references to people or chickens eating the seeds, but I'd like to experiment with them, since they could provide substantial calories.

Right now we grow skirret to eat the octopus like clump of individual fingerlike roots, each up to 12" long and up to 3/4" thick, all branching out from the crown. We dig up the clump, shake or wash off a lot of the dirt, and cut off the roots from the underside. Then we divide and replant the crown, which has made 6-18 vegetative shoots which can be individually planted out, or just replanted as a group. Skirret also self seeds itself very well; it has begun volunteering itself throughout our yard near parent plants. If you want to propagate the plant more quickly, you could divide after the first year of growth and either eat the roots or replant them with the crown divisions to give the divided plants faster growth the next season. I don't remember whether our first year plants from seed or divisions usually flower the first year or not until the second, so I'm not sure how quickly you'll get seed production.

The pictures above came from first or maybe second year plants I took the pictures several years ago so I don't remember much detail, such as whether I had already removed any of the roots from the clump. Most of the plants I harvest these days have 5x to 10x that many roots attached.

We usually steam the roots for 10 minutes or so which sweetens them up even more than in their raw state, but they make a fine raw snack too. They taste like a carrot/parsnip combination, and leave me feeling well fed and full. Most descriptions of the root mention a woody core at the center of the root, but we find only our thinner, smaller roots have the woody core. We rarely mix skirret into other dishes, but if we do, we just use the fatter roots without any woody core, and save the thinner roots for eating on their own, by stripping the flesh from the woody core with our teeth. Usually we just steam a big mess of fat and thin roots and eat them as a side dish.

Plants grown for one year make smaller and fewer roots with higher likelihood of the woody core. So we usually grow them for two or three years before harvesting. I realized this year that skirret would probably work well grown along with cinnamon vines (Dioscorea batatas) which also works best if you let it grow for 2-3 years before digging and harvesting the roots. Dioscorea batatas shoots emerge very late in spring, which would give skirret a chance to use available sunlight for a few months before receiving light shade from the cinnamon vine growing up the bamboo poles we normally provide.

Our skirret has thrived with minimum care; it seems to handle drought to moderate moisture, and full sun to heavy shade just fine. I haven't paid close enough attention to harvests of roots in different conditions to know whether better growing conditions results in more or better (less woody) roots. Nor have I weighed any of my harvests to calculate productivity per square foot per year. I'll probably do some of that this fall.

Skirret stores in the ground through the winter. We harvest skirret as needed in its dormant season from fall to early spring, up until the new shoots get about 6" inches tall. I just noticed a description at Jonathan Bate's Permaculture Nursery saying "Roots can be detached and eaten fresh. Root harvest will not harm the plant." I read that to mean you could detach roots during the growing season by digging at the clump from the side and eat them on an ongoing basis. But when I tried it a few days ago, it yielded pithy soft roots which had no flavor and lots of fiber. I might try more such experiments later this summer and into the fall to find out when you can start harvesting decent roots.

We tried growing skirret with the chickens, protecting them for the first year in a cage, then digging out half the clump to eat while leaving half the clump in the ground. I thought perhaps the half left in the ground would grow vigorously enough to overcome chicken abuse. But the chickens won. We have chickens free-ranging our entire back yard all the time; this method would probably work better in a rotating paddock chicken setup, where plants would have a solid 3 weeks to grow before the chickens returned. I might try the experiment again with even better established plants.

As a tall clumping plant with plenty of foliage up high, skirret seems to grow fine with shorter plants all around it, such as peppermint or annual weeds. It also holds it own for us amongst other tall perennials such as fennel, lemon balm, and french sorrel.

We sell seeds mail order or in person, and (when available) sell starts for pickup only. See Discount Permaculture for more info.

As always, Plants for a Future has more helpful information on skirret.

Why our tribe members should have a general skill base

Ran Prieur posted this which really resonated with me, and helps clarify one of the needs Tulsi and I listed in our Needs/Wants list on this blog: "All tribe members reasonably well-versed in all survival skills". Specifically, this statement by Ran encapsulates my thought: "I can see only one way to have a non-repressive society of any size. Every person has to have the ability, whether or not they use it, to connect their work (or the work of their close friends and family) directly to their food (and also shelter)."

Central powers (whether a civilized government or a tribe chief) have far less ability to control you if you know how to procure everything you need. Obviously you still need access to land, but we plan to take care of that part by moving to fairly remote wilderness with lots of land and few people. So as long as we each know how to procure food and water, and make shelter and clothing, we always have the option to move away from unwanted domination.

As a small note, I disagree with Ran's belief that complex human cultures are inevitable, and his belief that it will be impossible to limit cultures to hunter-gatherer tribes and permaculture villages in the future. So I'm not trying to promote his discussion and exploration of ways to have sustainable cities and universities and airplanes and computers. I just agree with his point that "For any system to control you, it must stand between your work and your food."

A related thread I've been thinking about: Sustainability more or less requires direct relationship with the beings you're using for your life. How can you give back more than you take when you take from other landbases you never visit, or from parts of your own landbase you rarely visit and don't really understand? Conceivably you could maintain sustainability by trading surplus you gather sustainably directly with other people who are doing the same. But given the unsustainable relationship almost every civilized human has with their landbase, it will take a lot of trust that your trade partner knows how to give more than they take to their landbase. I think any introduction of a middleman makes sustainability exponentially harder, since suddenly you're not even dealing with someone with a direct dependence on their landbase. The middleman profits from trade and probably does not have a direct connection to the landbase of either originating trade partner.

A section in Alan Weisman's Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World has really stuck with me. I don't remember the full details and don't have the book handy to refresh my memory, so feel free to correct me if I butcher important details. As I recall, the village was paying residents in the surrounding areas to harvest a naturally growing plant which hadn't had economic value in the past. As Gaviotas ramped up their use of the plant, they had to start employing middlemen to find more sources for the plant. At some point they discovered that at least one of the middlemen was procuring the plant from people who were obviously overharvesting it in their area. Although Gaviotas was able to detect and belatedly correct this excess harvest, I have to wonder how many other instances they didn't know about. If you need a middleman because you can't trade directly with the people supplying you materials, how can you expect to monitor all those sources for sustainable harvesting?

OK, enough theory--time to get out into the sunny garden!

The Art of Not Being Governed

I just finished reading James Scott's book The Art of Not Being Governed, an examination of cultures of resistance to state and civilization, mostly focused on hill and mountain peoples of southeast Asia. I wound up skimming through some parts of the books, where the subject matter didn't interest me enough to plow through the somewhat academic and dry prose, but much of the content gave me some good insights into how we might craft our own lifestyle as a tribe to minimize state encroachment on our freedoms.

Before I go into some of the strategies which might help us, I'll mention an interesting but not directly relevant argument from the book. Civilized lowland valley farmers in southeast Asia have long considered their upland neighbors as primitive ancestral relics who stayed in the hills to continue their nomadic or semi-nomadic, horticultural (as distinct from agricultural) lifestyles while their descendents moved down into the valleys and progressed into civilized life. From my layman perspective on popular anthropological accounts of various hunter-gatherer and horticultural tribes, it seems the authors and the general public make the same assumptions or tell the same origin stories about non-settled tribes in other parts of the world--their cultures have endured for thousands of years in roughly the same form, lasting this long because they worked sustainably with their landbase. Scott makes a compelling argument in his book that, at least in the case of upland southeast Asia, the groups living there have formed and chosen cultures over hundreds or one thousand plus years of intertwined coexistence with civilization. The "friction of terrain" of steep mountains, dense jungles, malarial swamps, etc limited the reach of states, creating "shatter zones" of refuge. Millions of people chose Daniel Quinn's option of "walking away" from civilization, whether refugees of war or famine, escaped slaves, or peasants who decided the benefits of civilization didn't justify the taxes, corvee (forced) labor, dangers of plague, mass famine, war and conscription, and so on.

In good times for the states, and in good and bad times as a result of slavery, many hill people moved into the valleys to replenish the unsustainable population base of civilization. (Apparently, in southeast asian civilizations, and in western civilizations until about 200-300 years ago, civilized people died out faster than they could reproduce--civilizations could only keep themselves going by continuous population raids of mostly slaves from the hinterlands.) Waves of refugees would either integrate into existing hill populations, or push those populations further up into the mountains, creating complex frequently changing populations of no firm ethnic identity or tribal unity; just people adapting to pressures and circumstance. These people did not necessarily lack the knowledge of farming, hierarchical social structure, domestication of animals, literacy and so on. Rather, they chose to incorporate or leave out different elements to support the relationship to civilization that made the most sense to them in their situation. It makes me wonder how many of the "primitive" tribes of other areas of the world in fact have the same complex history of interactions with and partial origins in other collapsed civilizations. (The author specifically mentions the Siriono of Bolivia, whom Allan Holmberg in Nomads of the Longbow described as primitive, timeless hunter gatherers "apparently lacking the ability to make fire or cloth, innumerate, having no domestic animals or developed cosmology...Paleolithic survivors living in a veritable state of nature". New information since his book has definitively shown them to have formerly lived as crop-growing villagers until influenza & smallpox and enemy attacks with the risk of slavery led them to abandon their crops and become fully nomadic around 1920.)

Now on to lessons we can use for shaping our own choices of how to subsist and relate to civilization. Note that I don't much fear a scenario of zombie hordes from the cities pillaging the countryside for potatoes. Instead, I expect the greatest dangers to our freedom to come, as it presently does, from the monopoly of force of civilization. I think about the adaptations below primarily in terms of resisting gunpoint taxes, tribute, forced labor, etc, not in terms of evading individual people or loosely organized bands (though the principles will help with those sorts of relations, too.)

"Escape Crops"

Horticultural (such as permaculturally designed) cultivation of crops can support mobility and freedom from civilization. "Escape crops" meet one or more of these criteria:

• Well adapted to terrain difficult to access - high rugged mountains, swamps, deltas, etc
  
• Staggered maturity to avoid easy harvesting of large quantities all at once
  
• Easily hidden
  
• Fast growing
  
• Requiring little care
  
• Little value per unit weight and volume (not worth transporting great distances)
  
• Grow below ground (root crops)
  

State repelling features

• Physically mobile group, widely dispersed, likely to fission into new and smaller units when under external pressure. This probably requires skill in hunting and gathering, nomadic pastoralism, or dispersed horticultural cultivation of escape crops.
  
• Living far from centers of control, or in areas like roadless rugged mountains where "friction of terrain" increases the effective distance.
  
• Highly egalitarian social structure which doesn't allow the state to get a foot in the door by making deals with a single person of power and influence. Elements which support such an egalitarian social structure:
  
  
  
  • Radical instability of tribal structure and identity
    
  • Autonomy of local groups
    
  • Capacity to shift to new territory and alternate subsistence strategies quickly
    
  • Ability to divide into small independent units whenever advantageous
    
  • Common property resources such as pasture, hunting grounds, and potential swiddens allows groups to strike out on their own and impede development of large, permanent distinctions in wealth and status characteristic of inheritable private property
    
  • Mixed portfolio of subsistence strategies -- foraging, shifting cultivation, hunting, trade, livestock raising, and sedentary agriculture
    
  • Different social relations, settlement patterns, and cooperation structures arise based on those different methods
    
  
  

After reading this book, I feel even more confident about the value of our plan to cgreate a permaculture homestead adjacent to national forest for hunting and gathering. That gives us secure "owned" property to allow us to experiment with crops and have a stable home base, while providing us the "commons" to allow relatively easy dispersal and fissioning once we have the necessary skills and if and when it becomes necessary or desirable.

Ecoroof Planting Plan

We just submitted a grant for putting ecoroofs onto our house, carport, and garage. I thought our conceptual approach and plant list may help other people contemplating ecoroofs, or those with thin soils for whatever reason. (Someone on the Portland Permaculture Guild list just asked about plants for a site with a few inches of soil over compacted gravel, so I sent her my plant list a
s a starting point.)

I selected the plants in the plant list below from books on ecoroofs, and from drought-tolerant plants listed in the Plants for a Future database and Martin Crawford's Ground Covers booklet. Many of the drought tolerant plants may survive drought by sending down deep roots, which won't work on the ecoroof, so many of my selections may fail.

Our grant proposal "Planting Plan" follows:

Overview

We consider the ecoroofs "Zone 2", a permaculture concept referring to areas accessed once or twice a week (as opposed to "Zone 1" areas of daily access where you would grow salad greens and so on). We'll grow crops which require relatively infrequent maintenance and harvest. Suitable crops include bulbs and other root crops, medicinals and herbs harvested for drying or other storage techniques, berries, and seeds for eating or animal fodder.

In our yard, we're experimenting with polycultures of perennial vegetables, trying to include nutrient accumulators, nitrogen fixers, beneficial insect attractors, aromatic pest confusers, ground covers, tall clumpers, and vines in patches through the entire garden. Given the limited species pallette for the ecoroof and given that we know even less about species interactions on an ecoroof than on the ground, we'll start with experimentation with simple polycultures of two plants at a time. Generally we'll aim to have a solid mat of low growing ground covers with taller clumping plants growing up through them. We'll try different plants in different combinations, and try different plants in different microclimates of aspect, soil moisture, and shade availability. As we learn what works well together and as plants volunteer themselves in new areas, we'll evolve more complex polycultures of more than two species.

We will design for year-round plant growth on the ecoroofs. In some places we'll use evergreen species, and in others we'll use two rounds of plants, for warm season growth and then for cool season/winter growth. In our regular garden we fill the winter niche with a combination of food crops of garlic and other Alliums, cover crops of fava beans and others, and self-seeding volunteers (such as the salad greens Montia sp, Barbarea verna, popweed [Cardamine unknown], Lapsana communis, and Lamium purpureum).

Seasonal Growth

Winter

On the ecoroof we'll focus the winter crop on garlic, multiplier onions, shallots, and other Alliums which can grow over the winter and produce bulbs for later harvest. We'll also try some chard and kale, and maybe other greens to allow for a once or twice a week visit to the roof to harvest a salad or a bowl of cooking greens at a time. This seems the most efficient way to supplement our normal daily-use winter garden on the ground.

Spring Into Summer

Many "spring ephemeral" bulbs native to the West should work well on the ecoroof. Others have already reported that Camassia grows well on ecoroofs. We'll also experiment with the edible bulb producing genuses Triteleia, Brodiaea, Dichelostemma, Fritillaria, Scilla, and Muscari, many or all of which contain species of similar life cycle to Camassia: leafing out in early spring and dying back with the onset of our summer droughts. These should provide calorie rich bulbs without requiring additional irrigation. We can harvest these as soon as they go dormant, or wait til the fall or winter.

We will also experiment, especially in early years while we wait for the ecoroof to fully fill in, with growing baby carrots and perhaps other "baby" annual roots, taking advantage of the prime spring growing season before the ecoroof gets baked in the summer.

Summer and Fall

The ground covers should persist through summer and fall. In places where our spring ephemeral bulbs have died back, ground covers may be the only plants growing. In other places we'll have taller plants which also persist into fall.

Fall Into Winter

We'll plant our garlic and other Alliums, and sow seeds. Seed sowing will work best in conjunction with harvest of root crops, disturbing the soil and setting back the ground covers enough to open niches for the seeds to utilize.

Implementation Schedule

To save on plant costs, for many plants we'll purchase fewer starts than ultimately needed (especially of the quickly spreading ground covers), and propagate them from divisions, seeds, and bulb offsets once they establish. In the meantime, we'll plant more heavily with annual crops such as garlic, baby carrots, and maybe even some spring greens to use the open space and minimize its colonization by unwanted volunteers. This will also allow us to experiment with a large number of species to see which succeed and which fail; after the first year or two those which succeed will have proven themselves and begun offering propagation material to fill in the areas of plants which failed.

Potential Species Lists

(still a work in progress):

Ground Covers / Low Plants

• Rubus nepalensis
  
• R. tricolor
  
• R. hispidus
  
• R. illecebrosus
  
• R. irenaeus
  
• R. pentalobus
  
• Astragalus glycyphyllos (Milk vetch)
  
• Montia perfoliata (Miner's lettuce)
  
• Montia sibirica (Siberian miner's lettuce)
  
• Valerianella locusta (Corn salad)
  
• Cornus canadensis (Bunchberry)
  
• Lotus corniculatus (Prostrate bird's food trefoil, especially "Plena" low-growing variety)
  
• Sempervivum unknown (Hen and chicks)
  
• Thymus sp (T. praecox, T. x citriodorus, T. pulegioides, and others)
  
• Origanum vulgare (Creeping oregano)
  
• Campanula poscharskyana (Trailing bellflower)
  
• C. portenschlagiana (Adria bellflower)
  
• C. carpatica turbinata
  
• Ceanothus sp
  
• Achillea millefolium (Yarrow)
  
• Fragaria chiloensis (Beach strawberry)
  
• Vaccinium angustifolium (Lowbush blueberry)
  
• Vaccinium pensylvanicum (Lowbush blueberry)
  
• Vaccinium vitis-idaea (Lingonberry)
  
• Vinca major
  
• Vinca minor
  
• Stachys affinis (Chinese artichoke)
  
• Arctostaphylos uva-ursi
  
• Berberis wilsoniae
  
• Mahonia repens (Creeping Oregon grape)
  
• Myrteola mummularia
  
• Taxus baccata (English Yew, "Repandens" or other low growing ground cover variety)
  
• Prunus tenela (Dwarf Russian almond)
  
• Ribes alpinum (Alpine currant)
  

Taller Plants

• Astragalus crassicarpus (Ground plum)
  
• A. membranaceous (huang-qi)
  
• Agastache rugosa (Korean mint)
  
• A. foeniculum (Anise hyssop)
  
• maybe other Agastache sp.
  
• Melissa officinalis (Lemon balm)
  
• Hemerocallis sp (Daylilies)
  
• Garlic/shallots/multiplier onions
  
• Allium cernuum (Nodding onion)
  
• A. tuberosum (Garlic chives)
  
• A. schoenoprasum (Chives)
  
• A. moly (Golden garlic)
  
• A. acuminatum (Hooker's onion)
  
• A. senescens (German garlic)
  
• Tulbaghia violacea (Society garlic)
  
• Psoralea esculenta (Indian breadroot)
  
• Sedum spectabile
  
• Sedum telephium
  
• Linum perenne (Perennial flax)
  
• Salvia officinalis (Sage)
  
• Lavandula angustifolia (Lavendar, perhaps "Hidcote Superior" variety)
  
• Rosmarinus officinalis (Rosemary, preferably a dwarf variety)
  
• Berberis buxifolia "Nana"
  
• Amaranthus sp.
  
• Chenopodium sp.
  
• Trigonella foenum-graecum (Fenugreek)
  

Spring Ephemeral Bulbs

• Cammassia sp (quamash, cusickii, leichtlinii)
  
• Triteleia sp
  
• Brodiaea sp.
  
• Dichelostemma sp.
  
• Scilla sp.
  
• Muscari sp.
  

Hippie Grass Areas

(hang-out space and paths):

• Bellis perennis (Daisy)
  
• Achillea millefolium (Yarrow)
  
• Trifolium sp. (clovers)
  
• Lotus corniculatus (Bird's food trefoil, especially "Plena" low-growing variety)
  
• Chaemaemelum nobile (Chamomile)
  

Our perennial vegetables

I've typed up a list of the perennial vegetables we're growing in our yard. I've loosely organized them by their primary usage, but we use many of them in multiple ways (for greens and roots, for example.) I haven't organized the list in any other way.

Greens & Edible Flowers

• Violets - Viola cornuta, Viola odorata, maybe others
  
• Bellflowers/harebells - Campanula unknown, C. portenschlagiana, C. poscharskyana, C. persicifolia, C. rapunculoides


• Mallows
  
  • Zebra Mallow - Malva sylvestris mauritiana
    
  • Malva Alcea fastigiata
    
  • Malva neglecta
    
  
  
• Comfrey - Symphytum officinale
  
• Salad Burnett - Sanguisorba minor
  
• Good King Henry - Chenopodium bonus-henricum
  
• Sylvetta Arugula - Diplotaxis muralis
  
• Sea kale - Crambe maritima
  
• Giant sea kale - Crambe cordifolia
  
• Daisy - Bellis perennis
  
• Mitsuba - Cryptotaenia japonica
  
• Perennial Lettuce - Lactuca perennis
  
• Salt Bush - Atriplex canescens and A. halimus
  
• New Zealand Spinach (marginally hardy here) - Tetragonia tetragonioides
  
• Stinging Nettle - Urtica dioica
  
• Peppermint - Mentha x piperita
  
• Lemon Balm - Melissa officinalis
  
• Anise Hyssop - Agastache foeniculum
  
• Lovage - Levisticum officinale
  
• Miner's Lettuce - Claytonia perfoliata
  
• Siberian Miner's Lettuce - Claytonia siberica
  
• Buckshorn Plantain - Plantago coronopus
  
• Sea Plantain - Plantago maritima
  
• Fennel - Foeniculum vulgare
  
• Chicory - Cichorium intybus
  
• Iceplant - Sedum spectabile
  
• Hen and Chickens / Houseleek - Sempervivum tectorum
  
• French Sorrel - Rumex scutatus
  
• Wood Sorrel - Oxalis oregana
  
• Sheep Sorrel - Rumex acetosella
  
• Dandelion - Taraxacum officinale
  
• Cleavers - Galium aparine
  
• Grape (leaves & tendrils) - Vitis vinifera
  
• Wolf Berry - Lycium barbarum
  

Flowers

• Day Lily - Hemerocallis sp.
  
• Columbine - Aquilegea vulgaris
  
• Red and White Clover - Trifolium pratense and T. repens
  
• Turkish Rocket - Bunias orientalis
  
• Black Locust - Robinia pseudoacacia
  
  

Shoots and Stalks

• Rhubarb - Rheum x cultorum
  
• Solomon Seal - Polygonatum commutatum
  
• Giant Solomon's Seal - Polygonatum commutatum biflorum
  
• American Spikenard - Aralia racemosa
  
• Colts Foot - Petasites palmatus
  
• Fuki - Petasites japonicus
  
• Poke - Phytolacca americana
  
• Angelica - Angelica archangelica
  
• Asparagus - Asparagus officinalis
  
• Bamboo - Phyllostachys sp
  

Seeds & Seedpods

• Swamp Milkweed - Asclepias incarnata
  
• Sweet Cicely - Myrrhis odorata
  
• Scarlet Runner Bean (marginally hardy here) - Phaseolus coccineus
  
• Eastern Bean - Phaseolus polystachios polystachios
  
• Akebia - Akebia quinata and A. trifoliata
  
• Milk Thistle - Silybum marianum
  

Root Crops

• Skirret - Sium sisarum
  
• Scorzonera - Scorzonera hispanica
  
• Yellow Asphodel - Asphodeline lutea
  
• Marshmallow - Althaea officinalis
  
• Licorice, American and European - Glycyrrhiza lepidota and G. glabra
  
• Hog peanut - Amphicarpaea bracteata
  
• Tiger nut - Cyperus esculentus
  
• Earth chestnut - Bunium bulbocastanum
  
• American bistort - Polygonum bistortoides
  
• Wapato - Sagitarria latifolia
  
• Asiatic Lily - Lilium unknown
  
• Camassia - Camassia quamash, C. leichtlinii, C. scilloides
  
• Cat Tail - Typha latifolia
  
• Grape Hyacinth - Muscaria unknown
  
• Scilla unknown
  
• Canna Lily - Canna unknown
  
• Dahlia - Dahlia pinnata or D. rosea
  
• Mashua (perennial nasturtium with edible root) - Tropaeolum tuberosum
  
• Cinnamon Vine - Dioscorea batatas
  
• Yacon - Smallianthus sonchifolia
  
• Oca - Oxalis tuberosa
  
• Jerusalem Artichoke/Sunchoke - Helianthus tuberosus
  
• Sweet Flag - Acorus calamus americanus
  
• Horseradish - Armoracia rusticana
  
• Ladybells - Adenophora lilifolia and A. pereskiifolia
  

Onions (Allium genus)

• Egyptian Walking Onion
  
• Nodding Onion - Allium cernuum
  
• Bunching Onion - Allium fistulosum
  
• Chive - Allium schoenoprasum
  
• Garlic Chive - Allium tuberosum
  
• Garlic - Allium sativum
  
• Multiplier Onions & Shallots - Allium cepa aggregatum
  
• Ramps - Allium tricoccum
  
• Golden Garlic - Allium moly
  
• Drumstick allium - Allium sphaerocephalum
  
• Allium stipitatum
  

Self seeding annuals and biennials

• Evening Primrose - Oenothera biennis
  
• Pop Weed - Cardamine unknown
  
• Kale
  
• Chard
  
• Curly mallow - Malva verticillata
  
• Calendula - Calendula officinalis
  
• Nipple Wort - Lapsana communis
  
• Purple Dead Nettle - Lamium purpureum
  
• Money Plant - Lunaria annua
  
• Parsley - Petroselinum crispum
  
• Pigweed - Amaranthus sp.
  
• Lambs Quarters - Chenopodium sp.
  

Integrating Chickens Into Your Food System

Here are some thoughts and pointers I pulled together for my class "Integrating Chickens Into Your Food System".

Foraging Breeds

From books and online sources, these breeds can free range and forage much of their own food:

• Austrolorp
  
• Brown leghorn
  
• Buff Orpington
  
• Dominique
  
• Hamburg
  
• Leghorn
  
• New Hampshire Red
  
• Rhode Island Red
  
• Plymouth Rock
  
• Silver-Laced Wyandotte
  
• Sussex
  
• White Wyandotte
  
• Ameraucana
  
• Black Sex Link
  
• Red Sex Link
  
• Sussex
  

And thanks to Chris for a pointer to a good foraging meat breed, the Le Poulet

Best Chicken Pen Method

We've used a single largish free range area of ~3000 square feet for six hens. They keep the area fairly well denuded of ground covers, though we have successfully established trees and shrubs and a few herbaceous plants. The next time I design for chickens I'll adopt a rotating pasture method. I agree with most of the points made in Paul Wheaton's article, "concerns about the way most people raise chickens".

Chicken Tolerant Plants

Once we established these plants, our chickens did not eat or scratch them to death:

Latin name	Common name	Notes
Mentha x piperita	Peppermint
Sium sisarum	Skirret	Chickens don't eat it; not yet verified whether they'll scratch it to death
Hemerocallis sp	Daylilies
Chenopodium bonus-henricus	Good King Henry
Asparagus officinalis	Asparagus	Chickens do knock it over
Allium sp	Onions, garlic, etc	Chickens don't eat; uprooting depends on its root establishment. It helps that we get lots of coop scrap alliums; the chickens can only kill so many volunteers.
Solanum tuberosum	Potato	Ditto on lots of potatoes from coop scraps.
Malva sp	Mallows
Aachilea millefolium	Yarrow
Helianthus maximilianii	Maximillian sunflower
Angelica archangelica	Angelica	Not sure yet whether these biennials can maintain themselves via self-seeding
Levisticum officinale	Lovage
Armoracia rusticana	Horseradish
Petasites japonicus	Fuki
Urtica dioica	Nettles
Phyllostachys sp	Bamboo
Tropaeolum tuberosum	Mashua
Foeniculum vulgare	Fennel
Houttuynia cordata	Hot tuna

Chicken Fodder Plants

One tip I've read is to watch wild birds for what they like to eat. Plants our chickens like to eat:

Latin name	Common name	Notes
Symphytum officinale	Comfrey	Chickens tend to eat it to the ground mercilessly, but it generally stays alive. We're trying to establish enough plants for them that they won't slaughter them all.
Caragana sp	Pea shrub
Brassica oleracea	Kale	Chickens eat to death
	Berries, fruit trees	Raspberries, gooseberries, serviceberries, mulberry, wolfberry, cotoneaster, and so many more
Rheum x cultorum	Rhubarb	Chickens eat the leaves, but not the stems
Helianthus tuberosum	Jerusalem artichoke	Chickens eat the young shoots, but can't stop them from growing rampantly anyway
Scorzonera hispanica	Scorzonera	Chickens eat to death
Robinia pseudoacacia	Black locust	In theory chickens eat the seeds - ours don't seem to
Prunus sp	Kernels from pits of plum, peach, cherry, apricot, etc	Need to crack them open for the chickens - smashing with bricks or using a grain grinder works fine. Also edible by humans; see my old blog entries for more details
	Acorns / beech nuts / other nuts	Need to crack them open for the chickens, or allow to sprout in the chicken yard
Lemna minor	Duckweed	Chickens not nearly as excited about it as our neighbor's ducks, but they eat some
Oenothera biennis	Evening primrose	Read about this as chicken fodder - probably for the oil-rich seeds. Haven't tried growing it for the chickens yet
Apios americana	Groundnut	Read about this as chicken fodder - I think they'll eat the seeds, while you can harvest the root. Ours hasn't made any seed yet to verify
Trifolium sp	Clovers
Amaranthus retroflexus	Pigweed	Chickens don't eat the leaves, but do eat the seed. Presumably all Amaranthus sp would work
Chenopodium album	Lamb's quarters	Ditto
Elaeagnus umbellata	Autumn Olive	Berries of course, but the chickens also eat the leaves

Needs & Wants for our Land & Tribe

Theressa and I came up with a list of our needs and wants for our future vision. The Needs list states the things we think we require in our physical set up and in our social tribe. We'd prefer to also have the items in our Wants list, but feel much more flexible about those.

Needs

Wants

Solid water supply Enough land to, in theory, feed at least everyone we start with / 10 people via horticulture. No debt 10 years of taxes, hunting/fishing licenses, and other living expenses set aside Community members into hunting/gathering - enough for a viable group Not super hot, or some way to escape the heat. Feel connected to our tribe -- people not spending too much time not in community (20 hour/week max?) All tribe members committed to disconnecting from civilization Wide age range - children to elders All tribe members committed to practicing Nonviolent Communication-type communication, conflict-resolution. Income-sharing and wealth-sharing. Safey for our lifestyle, including hunting & gathering. Available land for hunting & gathering. Sufficient ability to heat ourselves. Out of reach of city - 100 miles from large cities? 50 miles from smaller cities? Tribe committed to improving land (our own & surrounding land). Fredom of living within constraints of other needs. Tribe members committed to healing from civilization. Tribe members to give more to our community than they take. All tribe members reasonably well-versed in all survival skills

Easiest climate possible for growing food & living Communal living - shared shelters & infrastructure. Tribe committed to raising children tribally - Continuum Concept ideas As little contact with civilization as possible Adjacent to national (or other public?) forest As much acreage as possible Healthy ecosystem for hunting & gathering Encourage & inspire neighbors / nearby community(s) to disconnect from civilization Encourage like-minded people to settle nearby Tribe members to be able to grow/gather food in their preferred ways Tribe members to be able to live in their preferred ways Some sort of commitment from and to tribe members - for example, buy-in & guarantee of tribal membership? Starting tribe with 6+ contributing adult tribal members / 3-5 family groups

Post-apocalyptic weapons

The other day, Corum asked:

Scrub, i wanted to ask this for a while, are you going to practice with weapons too?
If your tribe is going to be the only ones with food in the area, or even if you are going to have just more comfortable lives than other people... you sure as hell will need to defend your way of life.

I/we haven't put a whole lot of thought into this, and at this point my sole experience with guns involved missing a soda can with my one shot from an air rifle. I may well change my mind about what I write tonight, but I might as well start brainstorming somewhere!

I expect us to have weapons of some kind, if for no other reason than for hunting. Beyond that basic decision, I see two immediate next questions:

1. What sort of weapons?
   
2. What emphasis will we place on defense rather than simply hunting skills?
   

For question #1, I see two general approaches to hunting given our desire to ultimately depend on primitivist skills: 1) start off using all the heavy equipment, guns, and ammo we want to buy, and incrementally replace them with more and more primitive tools and techniques; or 2) start from scratch with primitive tools & techniques, using civilization-dependent technologies only if and when we need them.

For question #2, two aspects of our envisioned way of life help mitigate against a need to explicitly prepare for defense: our focus on learning skills such as nature awareness, silent stalking, and tracking; and our preparedness to rely entirely on mobile hunting & gathering. Those first skills should give us an advantage in many situations of conflict, assuming evenly matched weapons and numbers. I have no idea though to what extent those skills can compensate for an uneven match of weapons and/or numbers! Unfortunately, to whatever extent we carry out horticultural food procurement (permaculture) in one or even multiple fixed spots, we will present an attractive target to others if the shit seriously hits the fan. We do expect to involve ourselves with the community to whatever extent they welcome our input, to share our thoughts (and especially successful experiences once we have them worked out) with whomever will listen. Hopefully we can make ourselves too valuable a resource in knowledge and community support to leave anyone who knows us wanting to knock us off for a mere partial-year harvest. And if worst comes to worst, we hope to have developed the skills to disappear into the woods to hunt and gather (perhaps from plots we tend to some extent) in a roving lifestyle, where we never have enough accumulated food or other wealth for anyone to bother with us.

So, my practical plans for the next couple of years include:

• Buy a slingshot and learn to use it
  
• Practice throwing a rabbit stick
  
• Maybe experiment with other weapons - atlatl, those twirly bola things, nets, others?...
  
• Try to actually kill some squirrels (and eat them, of course)
  
• Make and/or buy a bow, and learn to use it
  
• Buy one or more guns, take a gun safety class, and start learning to shoot. (I might wait on this until we live rurally and can practice shooting without needing to pay at a city shooting range.)
  
• Practice body skills - fox walking, balance, etc
  
• Keep learning about bird language, learning from my sit spot, learning tracking, etc
  
• I don't feel really inspired about this, but maybe I'll start again with some form of martial art
  

Book review: The Nature Handbook by Ernest Williams Jr

I picked up this book from the library on a whim, and enjoyed it enough to think I should mention it here: The Nature Handbook: A Guide to Observing the Great Outdoors, by Ernest H. Williams, Jr. The book gives readers insights and shortcuts to understanding various patterns in nature, from bird/animal/insect behavior to plant/tree characteristics to patterns seen across entire landscapes.

The author divides the book into 14 chapters, categorized under three broad headings of Plants, Animals, and Habitats. Each chapter describes about a dozen patterns, and each pattern includes multiple illustrative photos.

I had already picked up some of the plant information from reading other sources, and a smaller amount of the animal and habitat information, but I learned a lot of new stuff across the board. I especially enjoyed learning about:

• "puddle clubs" of butterflies, mostly males, who gather at wet muddy spots, or carcasses, or animal excrement, or urinals, to drink up sodium, a mineral they have a hard time acquiring otherwise. In at least one species, the males offer sodium to females along with their sperm, a sweet little nuptial enticement.
  
• "sun and shade leaves", where trees have larger leaves towards the shaded bottom, and smaller leaves at top where sunlight strikes with more intensity. Makes sense, but I'd never noticed that!
  
• "leaf retention" of many oaks and beeches, where the trees hold onto dead deciduous leaves for months into the winter, possibly to keep the nutrients from leaching away all at once over the winter. Trees tend to keep leaves at the bottom more often than the top, possibly because lower leaves will more likely fall close to the trunk where the tree can easily recapture the nutrients. Right after reading this chapter I started noticing the retained leaves on the oaks at the local park.
  
• Wind-pollinated deciduous trees flower before they make leaves which would block the movement of air and thus pollen. Makes sense! I had noticed that all the catkin-trees have their catkins over the winter, instead of flowering with the insect-pollinated trees. Now I know why!
  

The book doesn't have enough hardcore details that I need to have it in my library as a reference book, but I feel very glad that I found it and read through it once. I highly recommend it to anyone at a beginner or intermediate naturalist level!

Post-Apocalyptic Vision

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

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

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

New Year's Resolution

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

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

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

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

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

National Plant Germplasm System

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

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