Where to begin

If you want to learn more about permaculture the best place to start is with the founder himself, Bill Mollison.

There is a free online resource from Networkearth.org that has Bill's lectures from 1994 in Texas.

There's no better place to start learning about permaculture for zero money!

Link to the new site.

Forest Garden

Now that it's finally spring, here is a short tour of some of the trees in the young forest garden.

Swale tour

Swales

February

Apr

The swale berms have really greened up. In February we topped them off with some compost and seeded them. It was a mixture of mustard, clover, cilantro, nasturtium, lupine, calendula, dill, chamomile, and
bergamot.

You can get a good idea of the amount of slope they yard has by looking at the fence line in the background. I've only seen this swales full on a few occasions. Water used to race down to the corner of the lot and pond up there. It would stand for a day or two sometimes. It doesn't do that anymore.

Feb

The hugel beds have also begun to green up. After I applied the compost I seeded them, mostly with mustard seeds but also some other things as well. The mix contained white clover, two varieties of mustard, millet, parsnip, echinacea, chamomile, dill and cilantro.

Apr

The real important thing is to get the compost stabilized with roots so that the rain won't wash it away. The mustard seed has done a good job so far. The other things, not so much. They may sprout later on as it warms up. Squirrels took some of the seed, but I'm not sure how much. Without the straw on top birds would have gotten it all.

Spring

I've read lots of books about designing a food forest and its all well and good when it's a diagram, but it doesn't work the way it's written down.

You can plant rye and vetch and clover everywhere in the yard but whether or not it grows where you plant it is a different story. Nature does what it's going to do. We don't control it.

Nature does everything on her own schedule. I've waited so long for seeds to germinate I forgot that I ever planted them in the first place. Nature knew to wait, I didn't.

No food forest is man-made. Nature does all the work plus another million things we can't even imagine. We're only designers and although we be feeble designers at that, it doesn't matter, not when we have the powerful ally of nature.

"If you do something right, it will do a lot more right itself." - Bill Mollison

I read a long time ago that frogs spend the winter on the bottom of ponds. I never thought there was any truth to that but that's exactly where I see them at all the time since I cleaned the pond. There are four or five that hang out there that the dog chases around, even diving in for them sometimes.

Comfrey has erupted from out of nowhere already. It's like it's not there one day and fully grown the next. Plants grow a lot at night.

Nectarine

The peach trees had LOTS of blossoms on them and fruit is starting to set. The asian pear tree bloomed, plum, cherry, apricot, nectarine but I don't know if they have set any fruit or not. Last year all of the cherries shriveled up and died. The birds got all of the peaches. We got one apricot out of two that grew.

There are tons of blueberry blooms. We had a decent amount last year and they grow throughout the year.

Asian pear

There were three grapevines that we put in last year that have made it through the winter. One made it to the top of the fence vertically but didn't get anywhere horizontally before winter. Hopefully, I can get it trained along the top of the fence this year and maybe get some fruit.

I also overwintered four more grapevines in the house that just got planted on the other side of the fence. They are muscadines.

We've had good luck with raspberries so we put in about ten more varieties. We've not had good luck with blackberries however. There are some wild ones in the zone 5 area but they haven't ever produced.

We've had elderberry for several years and it's grown well but never bloomed yet. Most of our gooseberries died from the heat I think. This year I sourced some closer to home that might do much better.

Berm seeding

On the left is how it looked earlier in the week. A little snow fell. I guess everyone stayed at home.

before

It was nice weather today, so I took the opportunity to seed my swale berms, even though I'm rolling the dice a little.

There is rain in the forecast and I need to get the berms mulched over to prevent the compost from washing away.
A big bag of white clover just arrived this week so I made a mixture for the berm from the seeds I have on hand.



The mix contained white clover, two varieties of mustard, millet, parsnip, echinacea, chamomile, dill and cilantro.

after

After I seeded the berm I covered it with wheat straw which holds moisture very well. It is suppose to rain tonight and warm up a lot next week, into the sixties. I'm taking a risk seeding the berm now and having everything germinate and then lose it later with another bout of cold weather. However I've noticed that when I've sowed seeds at the wrong time they've just sat there and eventually germinated when the conditions were right.

The berms are mostly clay. I've tried planting them before but nothing has gotten very much traction, especially when they dry out. Hopefully the top dressing of mulch will get the process going this year.

I also put in around 30 or so comfrey cuttings that I received this week from Coe's comfrey. So I've probably got around a dozen put into the berm.

Compost

The county composts some of the solid wastes and you can go get as much as you want for free. I went and got a truck load recently to add to the hugel beds and the swale berms. The pile in the picture is about twelve feet tall. It seems like it's decent compost. I've used it before. I just cannot afford to buy a ton of compost so it's a nice option.

It took me about half an hour to load the truck. I could have put more in but my arms wore out so I stopped. It took much longer to roll one wheelbarrow load at a time from the driveway into the backyard. That's the hard part.

Swale

On the right is the compost spread out onto the swale berms on the downhill side. These are ditches on contour that catch rainwater. The water then slowly soaks into the ground. Note the pitch of the terrain by the green fence in the background. It's fairly steep. I will plant in a wide selection seeds here as soon as it warms up.

Probable plants will include, mustard, parsnip, daikon, comfrey, calendula, dill, yarrow, bee balm, fennel, chamomile, parsley, chicory, echinacea, garlic.

Hugelkultur mound

I also spread some compost onto the top hugelbed. I will seed it with a similar mix as the swale berms.

This element is above ground as opposed to the swale. The septic tank drainfield is in this vicinity so we are containing the plantings above ground or only ground covers. I am avoiding putting trees into this area.

Sheet mulching

The county mulches Christmas trees every year and puts them out in various locations and you can go and shovel up as much as you like.
The place near me is right next to this pastoral looking horse farm, which is actually in a very urbanized area across from a mall.

Little Creek Farm is it's name.

Pitch fork is best
for mulch

Almost three years ago we sheet mulched and piled compost over the nuisance ivy and monkey grass. After a while we put strawberries in that spot. They did well, but this past summer the English ivy (Hedera helix) and especially the monkey grass (liriope muscari) got the upper hand again.

We had to go over the strawberries too, which is sad but there was no way around it. The grass had taken over the patch.

Sheet mulching

This time we are not going to try and combat that niche with another ground cover. We are putting raised beds on the flat next to the house. It's the only area receiving good sun year round. And the white wall amplifies the light. It's facing east. We would very much like to be able to grow a bit of annuals and every other place in the yard gets shade.

First you lay down the cardboard and soak it with water. I always flip it over after one side is wet because it never seeps all the way through. After that pile on the wood chips. Six to eight inches at least. If you can time it with a rain event that is better. You don't want the cardboard to dry out on you. It doesn't really start breaking down until its saturated.

Some people recommend newspaper but the Sunday paper costs $2 and that won't cover anything much. Thick cardboard boxes are the best, think refrigerator box. Or two or three layers of thin cardboard like beer containers etc. Lawn bags also work well and you can get them free from around your neighborhood already filled with organic matter. Here is a pretty good video of the process.

It's amazing how fast the cardboard will disappear. Actually it is consumed by various organisms. Mostly by fungus here though.

Halloween gets cold

Wild Child w/Demon Dog

On Halloween night we left a party and on the way home it was snowing!

Tonight it is suppose to be 28 degrees.

Cold records are falling all over the south.

Winter is coming..

Bushy Tail is nearly grown already. He hasn't eaten enough food to be as big as he is. Other energies are feeding him, things we can't see. This is what Rudolph Steiner talks about and Mollison. We receive these energies too, but our ability to take them in starts to wane as we grow older. As Thoreau put it, "Though the frost is nearly out of the ground, the winter has not broken up in me. Perhaps we grow older and older till we no longer sympathize with the revolution of the seasons, and our winters never break up."

"Cosmic and solar energies impinge on the earth, and life intercepts these flows to make them available for life forms..."- Bill Mollison

I think if the sun goes out it won't take 8 minutes for us to know it. I think we will all wind down almost immediately. That electric spark that powers us probably has to do with the sun. The world would be dead right away, except for the machines, which would run until they were out of gas.

A woodpecker flew into the kitchen window today and died. With as many lives as we've received we've buried just as many. This is the way it goes, I suppose.

Pond Life

Besides our tree frog Lincoln, I've added ten goldfish to the pond yesterday. As of today they are all still alive though they stay pretty deep most of the time, out of sight.

Goldfish cost twenty-nine cents a piece at Pet Smart. So I spent $3 on fish. Not too steep of an investment I suppose.

More aquatic plants are coming in the near future.

I haven't actually seen Link since I moved him out to the pond, hopefully he's still around somewhere.

The pv powered aeration pump kicks on about 10 a.m. and stops around 4 p.m. It runs fairly strongly most of the time. It will taper off some when a cloud passes over. On an overcast day it just trickles a little. Still, I think with the aquatic plants on the daily water flow the water has ample oxygen for the fish. The water has actually cleared up quite a bit lately. I'm not sure if it's the flow of the water or the addition of the plants or a combination of both.

However, it is a natural habitat. I am not filtering the water with elaborate pumps and filters like koi pond enthusiasts do. Any detritus that falls into the water will decompose and create a fertile compost that I can later use elsewhere.

Last year we took a koi pond tour in Atlanta and saw some amazing ponds. Unfortunately, all of the ponds we saw take great amounts of inputs of energy, food, time, and mostly money. They are for all intents and purposes, swimming pools for fish. Still, they were all gracious people and the ponds do give serene and meditative elements for the owners.

 This pond was truly amazing!

He basically had a dock off of his back doorstep. Tens of thousands of gallons of water, all filtered. There isn't one speck of algae in these ponds.

I believe this pond owner was a koi breeder and does therefore earn some income from his fish. This was by far and away the most extensive pond/eathworks location on the tour. From the front of the house you would never have guessed the backyard was like a tropical rain forest.

This was one of the larger ponds we saw, not as ornate as the one above but the fish were huge. There were two more ponds above this one which was probably over eight feet deep.

Lots of ponds featured gorgeous water features. This was the sole owner I heard mention using any outputs from the fish.

He said he used the fish manure to fertilize the banana trees.

This is the elaborate filtration and pumping system for the pond. An incredible amount of time effort and money!

This tranquil looking pond was adjacent to a swimming pool.

Function Stacking

In permaculture every element should have multiple functions.

"Each element in the system should be chosen and placed so that it performs as many functions as possible. A pond can be used for irrigation, watering livestock, aquatic crop, and fire control. It is also a habitat for waterfowl, a fish farm, and a light reflector." - Mollison


In our system we have an arbor. Besides it's intrinsic function of providing a shaded sitting area, it also provides structure for the climbing kiwi vines. In keeping with the second part of Mollison's statement, the arbors placement was chosen carefully.

It's orientation is aligned exactly north to south. The arbor is located in close proximity to the pond so the pleasant sound of flowing water can be appreciated.

Utilizing the southern aspect of the arbor, it makes a great structure for mounting the solar panel that powers the dc pond aeration pump. So now the pond will not need any additional energy inputs from industrial power generation.

So the arbor performs many functions for us:

- sitting area
- kiwi vine trellis
- solar panel structural support
- birds & squirrels often utilize it
- aligned with cardinal directions
- shade
- meditative area

Shitake Mushrooms!

Last May I innoculated a log from a Maple tree that I chopped down in the back yard.

I used shitake plug spawn that came in the form of short dowel rods.

I drilled holes in the log and drove the dowels in with a hammer. I was supposed to put melted wax over each of the dowel holes but I didn't do that step.

I wasn't sure that they were ever going to produce any mushrooms but today we got our first shitakes to my amazement! People throw around the term "set it and forget it" a lot, but this was truly that. I had totally forgotten about the inoculated log.

So about ten months have elapsed since the log was inoculated. We only got three good sized ones today, but there are some more that will probably be ready in just a couple of days.

This was pretty exciting considering it was totally unexpected. Shitakes are damn good sauteed in butter!

Hugel beds and predators

No these aren't three graves they are hugelkultur beds sometimes known as woody beds. The concept was made famous by Sepp Holtzer in Austria.

Paul Wheaton of permies.com is a big proponent of hugelkultur. The essence of hugelkultur is this: Wood is stacked up into a pile. Traditionally the pile should be about six feet in height. The piled up wood can be logs, sticks, branches etc. The pile is then mulched over. This is then planted into with whatever you like. There is a ton of video and material on the internet about hugelkultur.

These beds are about knee high and around eight feet long. I arranged them where they are and like they are for a couple of reasons. First, they are in an area that receives an okay amount of sun. Going to the left of the photo it gets shadier. Secondly, this part of the yard contains the septic tank drain field and digging down to plant anything isn't something I want to do. So I needed to go up instead of down. They are situated pretty much on contour. The elevation being higher on the right of the photo sloping downward toward the upper left of the picture. The one on the far left is the lowest in the landscape.

Since this area is fairly shady during the summer months I've chosen to go with shade tolerant plants. There is elderberry, currant, gooseberry and a juneberry as well.

The premise of the system is that the woody material when stacked up and mulched forms a zone of moist decaying material that needs little to no water even during the hottest periods. The principle simulates a forest floor, where a tree falls and debris is blown and washed up against it. This becomes an area of high fertility. "A forest grows on a fallen forest" or so the saying goes.

These beds are roughly a year old. The leaf litter that just fell, mainly poplar and maple leaves and some pine straw, is really the first abundant matter that we've been able to mulch over them with. The fertility should really escalate come spring. Fungi has gotten a good toe-hold on the logs and the system seems to be beginning to really "turn on" so to speak.

Quite a lot of interesting things happened after we piled this wood up. When we bought this property it had been sitting unoccupied for about a year at least, I think. The yard became the default territory of chipmunks. They were here en mass.

They took up residence in the wood piles nearly as soon as we had them constructed. Something else showed up as well. This copperhead pit viper on the left was nearly under my bare foot one day this past summer. This is probably near the limit of how large they grow. He was at least two feet long. I've never seen one longer than a foot before.

I figure that if a snake has lived long enough to get this big then it's been around here for a while, I just never saw it before. They're there just the same. I've seen probably four more little copperheads since then. I just leave them alone. Between them and my cats the chipmunk population has decreased substantially.

They are actually really beautiful and perform a useful function. They decimate rodents. So if you've got them, you've probably got rodents. They are working for you. He stands out well against the green in the picture, however he is virtually the exact same color as the clay soil that the yard consists of.

Besides copperheads, I've also seen garter snakes in the yard. I don't know what they eat. Maybe insects. Another predator that preys on the chipmunks is the hawk. Around here they are Red Tail hawks and I've seen them take quite a number of chipmunks right out of the backyard. I've also seen them take squirrels.

It's odd to me that people are so fearful of snakes. I doubt 999 people out of one thousand know anyone who's ever been bitten by a poisonous snake and yet people tend to kill any snake they come across. I can't remember having ever killed one personally. I rather like them.

Permaculture Design Certificate

Official Permaculture Design Certificate from Geoff Lawton!

This was my design submittal. It is our house and property.