Hoophouse on the Slug Moat

In fall of 2011 I built our slug moat to protect nursery pots from slugs while providing rainwater catchment and other typical aquatic benefits. A few months later, to prepare for spring and make the most of the contraption, I added a hoophouse over the nursery table to provide a warmer, protected microclimate for the plants, without interfering with the use of the pond as an irrigation source.

Duck Integration

I wanted ducks to use the pond, but knew that with unrestricted access they would trash such a tiny area, destroying all plants and fish and filling the pond with poop and stirred up muck. To exclude ducks from enough of the pond to allow sheltering of fish and growth of poop-filtering cattails, I put a fence across the middle of the pond and around the excluded perimeter. Ducks could still be allowed into the protected area periodically, under close supervision.

I constructed a little ramp to make it easier for the ducks to get in and of the water.

Skirting

Using thin plastic which had wrapped our lumber deliveries, I constructed a skirting sandwiched onto the table sides and posts with lathe and hanging to the water below. I hoped this would create a lower seal preventing air from coming up into the nursery table.

Hoophouse

Next, I built a ventable upper enclosure for the plants from clear vapor barrier plastic left over from the house project. I created the end "wall" closest to the house by rolling a piece of lathe into a short piece of plastic, clamping it closed with three strong binder clips. I secured the lower half of this plastic to the vertical posts with more lathe, and tacked a couple of nails into the posts to allow the wall to be "hung" up for closure, or unhooked from the nails to half-open that end of the hoop house.

Since I didn't have posts to work with at the far end of the table, I used a single large piece of plastic for the rest of the hoop house, supported by plastic hoops screwed to the sides of the table, and draping down as the far wall. I used more binder clips to seal the junction between the large piece of plastic and the end wall, unclipping as necessary to move the sheets for ventilation.

I secured the sides by creating a small gap between the existing pallets on top and new wood I attached to the table sides just below. Tucking the plastic into the gap and wedging in some lathe created a strong seal, while allowing easy access or ventilation of the sides by pulling out the lathe.

Successes

On the whole, it worked. It definitely created a warmer microclimate and allowed faster early spring growth of the plants. Using all scrap materials, it had a distinctly amateur look to it, but was fairly easy to use for ventilating and accessing plants. I'm especially pleased with the side attachments of wedged lathe, which worked surprisingly well.

Problems

Despite lathe sandwiching it to the posts as low as possible, the lowest part of the skirting, pushed outwards by the concrete pier blocks, tended to blow around, failing to make a reliable seal. Often the skirting got stuck on the perimeter fence, potentially negating the slug-proofing function of the slug moat. The plastic scrap I used was just barely long enough to reach the water surface; with more material to work with I could have wrapped the bottom with some weights to ensure a straight drop to the pond.

The cross fence within the pond was of very flimsy construction and even flimsier attachment. A fence could have been secured to two of the table legs and anchored against their concrete piers stacked in the water below, but the placement of the table within the pond didn't make sense for that. It would have created either too tiny a pond for the ducks to use, or too small an area for plants to grow without duck disturbance.

The perimeter fencing, secured very loosely with metal stakes salvaged from political yard signs, also failed to inspire confidence. Neither the perimeter nor the internal fence were tested long-term against inquisitive ducks, and I suspect both would have required some adjustment and fiddling.

The binder clips came loose easily from slippery plastic, both where I wrapped lathe into the plastic to create the end wall and especially where I tried to clip the two upper sheets together. Again, I was using pieces just barely long enough to meet, so any significant wind put a lot of force on the joints. Slightly longer pieces with more overlap and slack would have helped. Ultimately the system needed a better connector - perhaps snap-on grommets.

Perennial Greens Planting Plan

Zone 1, extending into zone 2. From bottom center, working counter-clockwise:
Giant sea kale, sweet cicely in seed, turkish rocket, zebra mallow in flower, perennial kale in seed, lemon balm, french sorrel in seed, borage in flower, elephant garlic in flower, sylvetta arugula in flower, and nipplewort.
Also skirret & chinese dogwood in background, with crocosmia in foreground.

Two mistakes I made in my perennial vegetable experimentations in Portland:

1. I overplanted perennial greens, more than we could possibly eat.
2. I planted the greens over a large area, forcing more traversal of the yard than necessary. Though walking the yard to pick greens helps keep an eye on everything, it's inefficient to go further than necessary on a nearly daily basis.

Before we sold the house, I was consolidating a core set of perennial greens into approximately 100 square feet of beds closest to the house. This brought the front yard garden into better alignment with design by zones, with a tight zone 1 producing the majority of the daily pickings for two adults (leaves & flowers, salads & cooked), and freeing up zone 2 for root crops and less frequently harvested vegetables. I still envisioned picking from zone 2, from deliberate plantings and from edible weeds, a few times a week for variety and to augment zone 1 production.

This design took advantage of the fact that, for much of the year, the house shades most of the front yard area closest to it (especially after we raised the house 3'.) Most of the perennial greens should do well in partial to full shade, whereas the root crops and annuals generally need more sun. Most herbs also want full sun, and we found we didn't need to pick them with each batch of greens, so the larger ones made more sense for us in zone 2.

Writing this up two years later, I don't remember the exact number of which plants I moved into zone 1, but I believe I've come close below. It's a good starting point; you'll need to experiment anyway with what works well in your site and what you like to eat. Regardless of the exact species composition, the end result of densely planted perennials should be a yield of greens requiring little to no work besides harvest - more or less no need to dig soil, replant, or weed. (And year-round, at least in Portland and similarly mild winter climates.)

Large Plants

Usually planted 2-3' apart. You can perhaps get away with closer spacing in a heavily harvested zone 1, but I'd be inclined to still give them full spacing.

Qty	Latin name	Common name
1	Agastache foeniculum	Anise hyssop
1	Brassica oleracea acephala	Tree collards
3	Brassica oleracea acephala	'Western Front' perennial kale
1	Crambe cordifolia	Giant sea kale
2	Crambe maritima	Sea kale
1	Foeniculum vulgare	Fennel
2	Malva sylvestris mauritiana	Zebra mallow
1	Malva moschata	Musk mallow
2	Melissa officinalis	Lemon balm
1	Myrrhis odorata	Sweet cicely
2	Rumex scutatus or R. acetosa	French Sorrel
6 sf	Scorzonera hispanica	Scorzonera

Groundcovers

These can be planted under and around the large plants, to exclude weeds and provide bonus greens & flowers.

Latin name	Common name
Barbarea verna	Wintercress
Campanula portenschlagiana	Bellflower
Campanula poscharskyana	Trailing bellflower
Claytonia montia	Miner's lettuce
Claytonia siberica	Siberian miner's lettuce
Diplotaxis tenuifolia	Sylvetta arugala
Origanum spp	Oregano species
Oxalis oregona	Redwood sorrel
Rumex acetosella	Sheeps sorrel
Sanguisorba minor	Salad burnet
Stellaria media	Chickweed
Taraxacum officianale	Dandelion
Thymus spp	Thyme species
Viola spp	Violets

Bed Edges

We used a lot of Allium greens, finding them much easier to grow than bulbing onions. These work well along the edges of beds, helping delineate the pathways.

Latin name	Common name
Allium ampeloprasum	Elephant garlic / Leek
A. cepa 'proliferum'	Egyptian walking onion
Allium cernuum	Nodding onion
Allium fistulosum	Bunching onion
Allium sativum	Garlic
Allium schoenoprasum	Chives
Allium tuberosum	Garlic chives

Zone 2 Greens

If you have more room available, I would experiment with these. For species already listed above, numbers given are in addition to the quantity in zone 1. These are just for greens and flowers; not considering root and seed harvests of things like yellow asphodel and good king henry.

Qty	Latin name	Common name
1	Agastache foeniculum	Anise hyssop
5	Anthriscus sylvestris	Woodland chervile
2	Aquilegia vulgaris	Columbine
4	Asphodeline lutea	Yellow asphodel
2-3	Bunias orientalis	Turkish rocket
4	Campanula rapunculoides, C. persicifolia, and other tall species	Bellflowers
10	Chenopodium bonus-henricus	Good King Henry
2	Crambe maritima	Sea kale
1-2	Foeniculum vulgare	Fennel
1	Levisticum officinale	Lovage
1	Lycium barbarum	Wolfberry
6sf	Mentha spicata	Spearmint
1-2	Myrrhis odorata	Sweet cicely
3-4	Oenothera biennis	Evening primrose
3	Rumex scutatus or R. acetosia	French sorrel
2	Smyrnium olusatrum	Alexanders
1	Symphytum officinalis	Comfrey
10sf	Urtica dioica	Stinging nettles

Zone 2 Stems & Shoots

Other vegetables nice to grow for something other than greens and flowers.

Latin name	Common name
Arctium lappa or A. minor	Burdock
Asparagus officinalis	Asparagus
Maianthemum racemosum	False solomon's seal
Petasites frigidus	Sweet Coltsfoot
Petasites japonicus	Fuki
Polygonatum biflorum and P. commutatum	Solomon's seal
Rheum x cultorum	Rhubarb

Zone 2 Weeds

Volunteers that often need to be kept in check. We generally ate these rather than weeding per se.

Latin name	Common name
Borago officinalis	Borage
Calendula officinalis	Calendula
Cardamine unknown	Popweed
Geum urbanum	Clove root
Lamium purpuruem	Purple dead nettle
Lapsana communis	Nipplewort
Phytolacca americana	Pokeweed
Solanum nigrum	Black nightshade
Taraxacum officinale	Dandelion

Bluehost subdomain for WordPress Multisite domain mapping

This is a geek-post, unrelated to permaculture or resistance. I couldn't find this information when trying to set it up, so wanted to document it here.

There are some guides (try here and here and here and here) to configuring the WordPress MU Domain Mapping plugin, but they don't address Bluehost specifically, and several of them refer to using cPanel to Park Domains, creating wildcard subdomains, registering a domain specifically to handle multisites, moving your domain website into a subfolder to use the root folder for the multisites, and so on. I think I found a simpler way.

Bottom line: it is possible, on Bluehost, to use a subdomain of your domain to host a WordPress Multisite Network, and you can set it all up in any subdirectory so it doesn't interfere with your regular domain. The multisites can be mapped to any domains or subdomains you own. You don't need to register a separate domain or change your existing file structure.

I won't try to recreate a guide for the steps to install WordPress multisites, the Domain Mapper plugin, or how to configure them for general use. I'll just lay out the important points related to configuring as described above. I'll use "mydomain.com" as the domain you already have.

Basically we're going to point all domains and subdomains to a single multisites subdirectory containing the WordPress multisite install, and then tell the Domain Mapping plugin how to sort everything out:

1. In cPanel->Domain manager->Subdomains, create a subdomain such as multisites.mydomain.com and set the Document Root to something like /public_html/multisites
2. Install WordPress Multisites on the new subdomain, using the subdirectory method for separating sites, not the subdomain method. So it'll create http://multisites.mydomain.com/site1 http://multisites.mydomain.com/site2 http://multisites.mydomain.com/site3 etc
3. Install the domain mapper plugin
4. For any domain you want to use with the Multisites Network, in cPanel->Domain List, set the domain as an Addon using the /public_html/multisites directory. For example, you may have myseconddomain.com as an Addon, using /public_html/multisites as its directory. cPanel seems to require that you also create an alias subdomain from your primary domain pointing to this addon. It shouldn't matter what you call it. You could use seconddomain.mydomain.com
5. For any subdomain you want to use with the Multisites Network, in cPanel->Domain Manager->Subdomains, create the Subdomain using the /public_html/multisites directory as the Home folder (aka Document Root.) If a subdomain already exists and you want to change the Document Root, Remove and recreate it.
6. In your Multisite install, from My Sites->Network Admin->Sites, "Add New" site for each domain or subdomain. It doesn't really matter what directory name you specify for the Site Address.
7. In the Domain Mapping plugin, accessed either from Network Admin->Settings->Domains or from a Subsite->Dashboard->Tools->Domain mapping, add each domain and/or subdomain you want to use with the site. Set the desired one as "Primary". You should wind up with something like: http://myseconddomain.com (Primary), http://seconddomain.mydomain.com, and http://multisites.mydomain.com/site1

Now when you access the site from http://seconddomain.mydomain.com or http://multisites.mydomain.com/site1, it should redirect the browser URL to http://myseconddomain.com (whatever you set as Primary).

I did run into a problem with a domain I was transferring from another registrar, that I already had set up in the Domain Mapping plugin, but wasn't being picked up properly. I think I had to remove and re-add the domain name within the Domain Mapping area to get it to work.

This will leave you with a WordPress site at http://multisites.mydomain.com which I don't think you can map anywhere else. You can either use the site for something serious, use it as a placeholder to link to your various sites, or update the sample post to say "Ignore this site." and set it so that search engines don't index it.

Feel free to ask questions in the comments, but I can't guarantee that I'll respond. Tech support on this is not a priority for me. Sorry!

Book Review: Assata Shakur: an Autobiography

I greatly enjoyed this book and Assata Shakur's writing, and have great respect for what Shakur has gone through and the lessons she's learned and shared. I posted a review at the DGR Hawaii site, comparing her life as a poor black woman to my own as a middle class white male, and drawing parallels between her political analysis and that of Deep Green Resistance. Read my review of Assata: An Autobiography.

Video review: Sophie Scholl - The Final Days

I've started a blog for Deep Green Resistance Hawaii, and will probably post most resistance-oriented stuff there, and continue to use this blog for permaculture related and personal posts. But I'll also post here when I think I've made posts of interest over at DGR Hawaii.

I just posted a short review of Sophie Scholl - The Final Days. I watched it last night, and found it educational for those interested in building a culture of resistance, and think it will appeal to a more general audience as well. The acting is excellent, and it's well done overall. Check out my review and the movie if you have any interest in historical documentaries and/or Nazi Germany.

Self Sufficiency, Five Years In on youtube

After many failed attempts with other software, I used Windows Movie Maker to create a video version, now on youtube, of my Self Sufficiency, Five Years In slideshow. I've updated my main post with various links to the presentation.

Sun and shade, temperate vs tropical

May has arrived in Hawai'i, and for the next two months, the sun will shine on us from the north. Huh? From the north? Doesn't that only happen in locales south of the equator, like in Australia?

(The rest of this post assumes a northern hemisphere location, expecting the sun to shine from the south.)

I knew the sun travels at a higher angle in the tropics, and I knew that in temperate climate summers the sun rises and sets in the north. But until shortly before moving here, I had no idea that for part of the summer, our sun never even crosses over to the south. This is the case everywhere within the tropics; on the margins, the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, the sun is directly overhead at noon on June 21st. Closer and closer to the equator, the sun spends more and more time in the north, with part or much of the summer never even seeing the sun shine from the south. This makes for a bizarre solar chart!

Combined with greater tropical sun intensity and temperatures, this necessitates different strategies for shading structures. Standard temperate tricks for winter sun/summer shade don't directly apply; properly sized and angled eaves, deciduous vines on a south arbor, and a deciduous tree to the southwest don't help when the midday sun is directly overhead or shining from the north. I'm no expert at this for Hawai'i, let alone qualified to generalize to the rest of the tropics, but here are my observations and thoughts so far. Some of this also applies to plant interactions and light into understories.

• It's not nearly as important to maximize sunlight in the winter. Though it helps combat the mildew and mustiness we encounter in this super-rainy part of Hawaii, we don't need the sun for warmth. It's OK to compromise a bit on winter sun access.
• We don't need to design for morning sun. Unlike temperate climates, where it can still be chilly on spring, fall, and even summer mornings, we don't need a quick boost of morning sun to warm us up.
• We don't have a large choice of trees that drop their leaves in the winter, and I have even less knowledge of exactly when they drop and regrow leaves, or whether they stick to a consistent schedule driven by the sun (rather than, for example, rainfall.)
• We don't have many deciduous vines. The best I've found so far are the yams (Dioscorea spp.), of which the winged yam (D. alata) and air potato (D. bulbifera) seem most useful. They die down to the ground in November or December, and resprout in March or April, growing quickly to potentially cover a large area by early to mid summer. These may work well growing directly on top of the roof, or on a framework trellised over the roof.
• Rather than a tree to the southwest, we want trees to both the east and west, or the northeast, north, and northwest. Ideally we'd have full tree canopy directly over the structure and maybe a bit to the south. This would provide full winter sun with maximum summer shade. An ideal tree, in order of priority:
  • Has a broad, spreading canopy of known width so we can plant it reasonably far from the structure and not have to prune too much
  • Produces some useful yield of fruit or leaves suitable for zone 1, perhaps harvestable from the roof
  • Doesn't drop limbs or large fruit on the roof (or loud hard nuts on a metal roof)
  • Grows to a useful size quickly, then slows down
  • Doesn't drop much leaf litter, especially if the roof is used for rainwater catchment
  • Lives a long time
  • Does not fix nitrogen, since we'll already provide ample urine to the area

I need to do more research on possible tree candidates, and probably some experimentation to figure out which will grow well on our particular site once we settle somewhere. I'll share those thoughts once I've developed them further!

Integral Permaculture presentation on "Food Freedom"

Integral Permaculture, a radical permaculture group, put together "Food Freedom: an Integral Perspective", a talk for International PermaCulture Day. They cover:

• The food freedom of other species
• The food that most liberates our environment
• Food that liberates the human mind and body
• How not to be enslaved to addictions
• How to free our meals & economies from the Multinationals

Watch the recording of Part 1, and the upcoming Part 2 on Sunday May 11th, at Integral Permaculture Food Freedom.

Hymenoptera - from oasis to desert

A lot of the permaculture literature praises parasitic and predatory wasps in the garden, where they keep insect populations balanced. If a certain "pest" insect becomes too abundant in your wasp-friendly garden, the chances are good that predators will find that abundance, feast away, and bring the prey numbers back down to an unproblematic level. Bees, Wasps, and Ants by Eric Grissell goes further into the amazing lives of all the Hymenoptera, paying special attention to parasitic and predatory wasps. The book gives lots of gory details, and even the non-gory bits are generally more than one strictly needs to know, but it's fasinating if you're into that sort of thing. It's re-inspired me to take a closer look at flowers and who's around.

In my Portland garden, I saw increasing numbers of individuals, and entire new species of bees and wasps every year. Permaculture sources recommend scattering beneficial insectary plants throughout your garden, especially plants in the carrot (Apiaciae), sunflower (Asteraceae), and mint (Lamiaceae) families. Our success in attracting so many insects to our old garden probably lies in our planting 50+ species of perennial flowering plants, ensuring a yard full of blooms from early spring to late fall. (Also, we didn't "clean up" the garden over the winter, instead allowing dead stalks and ground litter to provide overwintering shelter.) Our reliance on perennial vegetables effortly provided food to our insect friends, an important benefit alongside the near elimination of our need to tend the garden and of soil disturbance. I'm concerned that as people maximize food production within cities, they'll convert ornamental plantings to annual vegetables and starve out the insects. Besides the loss of "pest" control provided by wasps, cities could lose honey production as bees lose their foraging grounds. And of course, these insects have every right to live and exist for their own sakes, regardless of any benefit to us. For this and many other reasons, I strongly advocate perennial vegetables, shrubs, and trees as the backbone of any food system.

Sadly, Hawaii has been something of a shock. Apart from a diversity of ants (no species of which occurred in Hawai'i before European arrival), the Hymenoptera we've seen to date are Sonoran Carpenter Bees (lots), honey bees (rare), a stinging paper wasp (a few times - generally accompanied by shrieks), yellow jackets (once, at the Volcanoes National Park), and maybe I saw a small green bee on a flower once. This paucity in biodiversity, unfortunately typical of my experience here thus far, could result from the GMO Papaya Fields of Death in the neighborhood, the general oddness and artificial simplicity of this island ecosystem heavily reshaped by humans, and/or the lack of flowers around here. I'm hoping the latter, as we could rectify this with plantings.

We don't have many flowers here period, and of those present, most are deep, suited to birds, large bees, and large wasps, but not so much to smaller bees and wasps, especially the parasitoids. Grisell reiterates the importance of the sunflower, carrot, and mint family flowers, then writes:

"Bees and wasps come in a huge array of different shapes and sizes. Some have long tongues, others have short ones. Thus, the more shapes of flowers found in a garden, the more and different kinds of hymenopterans will be attracted. Even within a single group such as bumble bees, there are long-tongued species that can reach directly into the nectar spur of a tubular flower such as a columbine, whereas short-tongued species will simply bite a hole at the base of the tube to reach the nectar. Most bees apparently prefer bilaterally symmetrical flowers, by which they orient themselves and then enter the flower's throat. Shallow, dish-shaped flowers, such as apple or blackberry, which are radially symmetrical, are called open-access flowers because many different sorts of insects, including Hymenoptera, have access to the nectar."

Grissell explains the role of color and scent in attracting pollinators, then concludes:

"Creating a garden that enhances the likelihood of attracting adult bees, predatory wasps, and parasitic wasps merely requires that it be a garden of diversity. To achieve diversity, a garden must have many different kinds of plants including native and cultivated species; flowers of different sizes, petal count, shapes, colors, and seasonality; and integration of plants into a network that attracts so much biological diversity that attacks on its structure are absorbed with scarcely a notice by the gardener."

We've noticed, on this land and on other farms and homesteads, a near complete disregard for tree and orchard understories, where most of this diversity can take place. We hope to find many suitable understory plants and arrange them into functional polycultures, but for now we mostly have just theoretical ideas.

We did notice a pretty little insect on the pretty little flowers of Ageratum conyzoides, in abundance around here as a weed. I thought at first that it may be a small bee, but after a good look we suspect a fly of some sort. (UPDATE: thanks to BugGuide.net, I've identified this as a male syrphid fly, Toxomerus genus, probably T. marginatus) Still, I appreciate the prompting of Bees, Wasps, and Ants to look at our smaller neighbors, of whatever orders!

Self Sufficiency, Five Years In - audio slideshow

In spring 2011, I gave a presentation three times on the progress, successes, failures, and lessons from five years of working towards self sufficiency with my ex-partner at our house in Portland. I advertised the event with this blurb:

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

I've finally synced up an audio recording I made of my presentation with the slide images, to make a sort-of movie. You can view the Self Sufficiency, Five Years In slideshow online (may require reasonably fast internet connection) or download a 36MB zip file for offline viewing. (Extract to anywhere on your hard drive, then open the included index.html file in your web browser.)

I've also created a video, which requires more bandwidth: Self Sufficiency, Five Years In on YouTube. (You can download the 166MB WMV movie file or watch it below)

Or you can download a 6 MB PDF of the slideshow without audio.

West Coast Food Forestry - full resolution pictures

I posted a review a few years ago of the ebook West Coast Food Forestry by Rain Tenaqiya. I asked Rain about getting higher quality copies of the photos used in the book, since the book pictures were too small to make out great detail. I've finally posted a photo album of those West Coast Food Forestry pictures, with the pictures captioned as in the book, and in the same order. Enjoy!

Carol Deppe / Fertile Valley Seeds 2014 Seed List

Carol Deppe, author of The Resilient Gardener (my book review here) has a short window each spring when she sells seeds of vegetables and staple crops adapted to the Willamette Valley. See this year's offerings here, and keep in mind that she often sells out quickly!

Climate Chaos & Resistance to Ecocide: Talks By Guy McPherson & Deep Green Resistance

For my readers in the Portland area: Deep Green Resistance Lower Columbia is hosting a joint presentation with Guy McPherson. Lots of important information being presented; I hope you can make it!

"Deep Green Resistance Lower Columbia is proud to host Dr. Guy McPherson, professor emeritus of the University of Arizona. On the 21st of February he will be giving a joint presentation with members of Deep Green Resistance on climate chaos and resistance to ecocide. If you're interested in understanding the sobering facts of climate change and the political resistance necessary to avert catastrophe, please join us!"

Friday February 21
7 PM
Vancouver Public Library, Vancouver, WA
Facebook event page

(Similar events also happening in Eugene courtesy of DGR Eugene, and in Bellingham courtesy of DGR Salish Sea)

Demand Crash! — A response to Holmgren's "Crash on Demand"

The situation in many third world countries could actually improve because of the global economic collapse. First world countries would no longer enforce crushing debt repayment and structural adjustment programs, nor would CIA goons be able to prop up “friendly” dictatorships. The decline of export-based economies would have serious consequences, yes, but it would also allow land now used for cash crops to return to subsistence farms.
–from the Deep Green Resistance Decisive Ecological Warfare strategy

Introduction

David Holmgren, co-originator of permaculture, has a long history of thoughtful and thought-provoking publications, including design books from the original Permaculture One to his 2002 Permaculture: Principles & Pathways Beyond Sustainability. He's written numerous essays over 35 years, ranging from the specifics of agricultural vs forestry biomass for fuel, to the future of energy decline.

I've long admired and respected Holmgren's thinking, so I looked forward to reading his new "Crash on Demand" (PDF), an update of his 2007 "Future Scenarios" projections for global developments. I felt especially intrigued that he's arrived at conclusions similar to my own, regarding not just the inevitability, but the desirability of a crash of the financial system as soon as possible. But the article disappointed me; I think Holmgren is soft-selling his realizations to make them palatable to a hoped-for mass movement. Interestingly, even this soft-sell is being rejected by the permaculture blogging community.

Holmgren argues:

"For many decades I have felt that a collapse of the global economic system might save humanity and many of our fellow species great suffering by happening sooner rather than later because the stakes keep rising and scale of the impacts are always worse by being postponed." (p 9)

"It seems obvious to me that it is easier to convince a minority that they will be better off disengaging from the system than any efforts to build mass movements demanding impossible outcomes or convincing elites to turn off the system that is currently keeping them in power." (p 14)

"Mass movements to get governments to institute change have been losing efficacy for decades, while a mass movement calling for less seems like a hopeless case. Similarly boycotts of particular goverments, companies and products simply change the consumption problems into new forms." (p 22)

Holmgren proposes a possible solution:

"Given the current fragilities of global finance, I believe a radical change in the behaviour of a relatively small proportion of the global middle class could precipitate such a crash. For example a 50% reduction of consumption and 50% conversion of assets into building household and local community resilience by say 10% of the population in affluent countries would show up as 5% reduction in demand in a system built on perpetual growth and a 5% reduction in savings capital available for banks to lend." (p 13)

Where I agree

Holmgren couches his proposal almost rhetorically, apologetically, as if proactively halting the ecocidal system is crazy talk. He need not be so shy about advocating for collapsing the system! It follows very logically if you agree that:

1. Industrial civilization is degrading our landbases every day it continues, far faster than we're healing them
2. Industrial civilization will collapse sooner or later regardless of what we do
3. Industrial civilization will not divert its resources into healing our landbases before it collapses

The facts back up Holmgren's assessment of our dire situation, including imminent climate catastrophe if we continue with anything like business as usual. Industrial civilization is driving 200 species extinct each day and threatening humans with extinction or at best a very miserable future on a burning planet. It is deforesting, desertifying, polluting, and acidifying forests, croplands, landbases, and oceans orders of magnitude faster than nature and all the hard-working permacultarists can heal the damage. The industrial economy consists of turning living ecosystems into dead commodities, and it won't stop voluntarily. It's headed for an endgame of total planetary destruction before itself collapsing.

So I fully agree with crashing the system as soon as possible, and I fully agree with getting as many people as possible to withdraw their dependence on and allegience to the systems and structures of industrial civilization. We desperately need people preparing for crash and building resiliency, in human and in broader ecological communities.

Where I disagree

We also need a viable strategy to stop the dominant culture in its tracks. We are, and will remain, a tiny minority fighting a system of massive power. Individual lifestyle changes do not affect the larger political systems. People "dropping out" is not enough, is not a solution, is not an effective, leveraged way to crash the system.

I worry about Holmgren's speculative numbers. I assume the elite, who control a hugely disproportionate percentage of income and wealth, will be even harder to convince of voluntary simplicity than the average citizen. The poor generally don't have the option to cut spending by 50%, and have few or no assets to divest from global corporate investments. My rough calculations (based on data here) suggest that in the US, 15% of earners between the 40th and 80th percentile (more or less the middle class) must adopt this economic boycott to slow consumption by 5%, and nearly 50% of the middle class must divest their savings to reduce nationwide investment in the global financial system by 5%.

Even hoping for just 15% of the US middle class, 18 million people would have to embrace substantial short-term sacrifice. (While decreasing consumption 50% and building gardens and other resiliency infrastructure, people must still work the same hours at their jobs. Otherwise they'll simply be replaced by those who want to live the consumptive dream.) This lofty goal seems inconsistent with Holmgren's recognition of the infeasibility of a mass movement.

History throws up more red flags. Again and again, when growth economies have encountered sustainable cultures, people from the growth economies have forced the others off their land, requiring them to integrate into the cash economy. The dominant culture will not gently relinquish access to resources or to consumer markets. It will retaliate with weapons honed over centuries, from taxes and outlawing sustainability to displacement and blatant conquest. On a less dramatic scale, banks can, if divestments sufficiently diminish the cash they've been hoarding for years, adjust fractional reserve rates to compensate. (Though precipitating a fast "run" on the banks could work very nicely to crash the financial system and wipe out faith in fiat money.)

Permaculture activists and thousands of other individuals and groups have for years urged people to consume less. Many good people have adopted voluntary simplicity, dropped out of the global economy, and built regenerative local systems. While this has immense value for the adopting individuals, and often ripples out to benefit the wider community, it hasn't put a dent in the destruction by the larger financial system. New people are born or assimilated into the culture of consumption faster than people are dropping out.

Holmgren advocates more of the same permaculture activism, with little explanation of why it would now convince people in numbers thousands of times greater than in the past. He hopes the ever-more-obvious signs of imminent collapse will prompt a more rapid shift, but given our fleeting window of opportunity to act, we can't bank on that hope.

Another Approach

Deep Green Resistance is a design book of what makes a good resistance movement, a permaculture analysis of influencing power and political systems.¹ It arrives at the same conclusion as does Holmgren: we need to prepare for crash by building local resiliency, but the sooner industrial civilization comes down, the better. Its crash will leave the majority of humans better off short-term, as their landbases will no longer be plundered by the rich for resources. Crashing the sytem now will benefit all humans long-term, giving future generations better odds of enjoying liveable landbases on a liveable planet. And crashing the system now will obviously benefit the vast majority of non-humans, currently being poisoned, displaced, and exterminated.

If we truly hold as our goals halting ecocide and slashing greenhouse gas emissions as dramatically as Holmgren suggests, we must devise a realistic plan, based on a realistic assessment of our numbers and strengths, the vulnerabilities of industrial civilization, and how much longer the planet can absorb its blows. Recognizing our tiny numbers and relative weakness compared to the global system, and limited time before our planet is beaten into full ecosystem collapse, we must apply the permaculture principle of making the least change to achieve maximum effect.

The Deep Green Resistance book, as part of its strategy of Decisive Ecological Warfare, examines more than a dozen historic and contemporary militant resistance movements. It concludes that "a small group of intelligent, dedicated, and daring people can be extremely effective, even if they only number one in 1,000, or one in 10,000, or even one in 100,000. But they are effective in large part through an ability to mobilize larger forces, whether those forces are social movements [...] or industrial bottlenecks."

Holmgren notes that it's easier to convince a minority to disengage from the system than to spark a majority mass movement for true sustainability, but his plan relies on 10% of the population making dramatic change. DGR's analysis suggests it's easier yet to convince a tiny minority to take strategic direct action. The rest of the sympathetic population, whether 10% or just 1% of the general public, can provide material support and loyalty with much less immediate sacrifice than in Holmgren's proposal.

The Movement to Emancipate the Niger Delta (MEND), with small numbers of people and meager resources, has used militant tactics against oil companies to routinely reduce oil output in Nigeria by 10-30%.

In April 2013, saboteurs in San Jose CA shot out transformers in an electrical substation, causing damage that took weeks to repair. The New York Times explains some of the difficulties involved in replacing transformers, especially if many were to fail in a short period of time.

We have more promising strategies available than hoping we can persuade 10% of the population to adopt voluntary simplicity, and hoping that will crash the financial system.

Conclusion

While I wholeheartedly agree with Holmgren's analysis of our global predictament, and the desirability of crashing the system, his proposal for doing so seems ineffective. Certainly, we should work to disengage ourselves and neighbors from the global system, but we must combine building alternative structures with actively resisting and strategically sabotaging the dominant system.

Many people will disagree with the necessity of crashing the system, because they don't think conditions are that bad, because they hold vague hopes that God or technology or permaculture will save us, because they fear that fighting back will increase the anger of our abusers, or because they value their own comfort more than the life of the planet. That's fine; we can agree to disagree, though I encourage those people to further explore these ideas with their minds and with their hearts.

Many people do see the destructiveness of this culture, the inevitability of its crash, and the desirability of it crashing sooner than later; but won't want to participate directly in bringing it down for any of many perfectly legimitate reasons. That's fine, too. There's lots of work to do, and a role for everyone. You can work on restoration of your landbase or crash preparation for your community while providing material and ideological support to those on the front lines. We can join together as "terra-ists", with our hands not just in the soil as Holmgren defines the term, but also working with wrenches upon the wheels, the levers, and all the apparatus of industrial civilization.

Suggested Resources

• Endgame by Derrick Jensen, two volume analysis of the problems of civilization and the solution. Several excerpts available at the website.
• Deep Green Resistance - a book, an organization, and a strategy to save the planet
• Liberal vs Radical video presentation by Lierre Keith, explaining the different approaches of these two different frameworks for perceiving the world.
• For my readers in Portland, check out the DGR Lower Columbia chapter, and consider helping with their riparian habitat restoration on the Washougal River this Sunday, January 26th.

[1] Thanks to Stella Strega of Integral Permaculture for this observation

*** This article was reposted at Deep Green Resistance Great Basin and the Deep Green Resistance News Service

Photo album: Going Garden, June 2013

I created an album of photos taken by Jasmine van den Heuvel in June 2013, of my old forest garden in Portland. The new owners have changed a few things around in their first year and a quarter:

• Replaced half to two-thirds of the zone 1 perennial beds with annual beds
• Removed the double row of failing raspberries near the house and mostly left it open (at least for now?) as a big path
• Ironically, after we removed the herb spiral which didn't work very well and dug a catchment pond, the new owners filled in the pond and made a little herb spiral in its place
• Replaced the dead olive in zone 2 and its perennial understory with annuals
• Replaced a large swath of the former driveway, including a sickly or dead pawpaw circle, with a strawberry mound
• Planted some new trees: figs on west side of house, pawpaw in back yard
• Removed the backyard chicken paddock fences
• Replaced the wood shed in the backyard with a second chicken coop (or run?) next to our original coop

View the album

Notes on some small seed crops

A few years ago, I sent an email to the Portland Permaculture Guild list with these notes on various small seed crops:

Of the small seeds, fennel seed comes the closest to meeting my overall food forest goals, as a perennial insect nurturing weedy multi-use plant, with seeds providing good calorie yield per square foot. However, it misses my goal of being edible in large quantities; I'm eating about 50 calories per day of it, and don't think I would want to increase that beyond 100-200 at most. Read a more detailed write-up.

Good King Henry works well as a perennial, decently yielding low-maintenance seed crop. But it bears seeds even smaller than quinoa, which require processing to get off the chaff. My limited experiment suggested the labor time:calorie yield is good, making it worthwhile to process them if you're serious about growing your own calories, but it does take a while. GKH seed requires the same sort of soaking as does quinoa, but I don't find that at all time consuming or difficult. I find the cooked seeds hearty and delicious, and everyone else who's sampled them has liked them as well.

Sunflower seeds have a lot of potential, though we've had trouble direct seeding due to slug pressure, and we've consistently failed to harvest and/or process the seed heads in the autumn to actually eat them.

Favas and early peas also have a lot of potential for us in winter-rain Mediterranean climates, though again we've had trouble with slug pressure. Our slug problem also means we've yet to successfully grow, let alone overwinter, scarlet runner beans, but I'd love to get that going as a perennial large-seeded legume.

We tried Lupinus perennis, the perennial lupine from the east coast which native americans supposedly ate. I found that the seedpods ripened unevenly and if I waited too long to harvest, the pods ejected the seeds in the garden while if I harvested too soon, the pods never really opened up to easily release the seeds at all. As a result, I had trouble effeciently separating the small seeds from the pods. And then I had trouble with the soaking process; apparently lupines need thorough leaching to get rid of the bitter toxic alkoloids. If I recall correctly, I followed a method where I scalded the seeds first, then let them soak in cold water for a few days. Many of the seeds swelled up properly, and tasted fine, but enough of the seeds did *not* swell up that they acted as nasty little rock-hard, bitter landmines amongst the deactivated beans. I gave up on these as a human seed crop and transplanted them into the chicken yard.

We've been growing evening primrose (Oenothera biennis) as a root, leaf, flower, and seed crop, but I find the seeds pretty much unusable. They're easy enough to harvest, but they're so tiny that I can't run them through our grain grinder or just sprinkle them on food and expect to crush them up in the course of eating. I have to deliberately eat a pinchful at a time and chew them up really well. Sadly, the seeds have no flavor at all; it's like eating tiny crunchy nothingness. I don't enjoy eating tiny crunchy nothingness, so I've given up on these as a seed crop.

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

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

Livestock

Small parcels

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

Larger parcels

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

Tree crops

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

Herbaceous seed crops

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

Root crops

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

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

Low-Maintenance Temperate Staple Crops

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

Animal Products

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

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

Black walnut

Nuts

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

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

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

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

Good King Henry seed heads

Small Seeds

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

Calories per pound: around 1600

Mulberries & Serviceberries

Fruits & Berries

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

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

Mashua

Roots

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

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

My notes on perennial roots: part 1 and part 2

Calories per pound: around 300

Winter Squash

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

Calories per pound: around 200

Goumi

Bonus Seed Kernels

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

Calories per pound: guessing 1500-2500

Greens & Other Vegetables

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

Calories per pound: about 100

Lost in the Food Forest: rampant growth in Portland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crisis: Personal & Planetary

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

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

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

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