Hugelkultur Raised Garden bed after 1 year

Raised Garden Beds – Hugelkultur

Imagine a garden with no irrigation or fertilization that uses up old wood and gives you more plant miles for your space than any other form of raised garden bed or otherwise.  I’m so excited about Hugelkultur which is a wonderful way of gardening ecologically.  Paul Wheaton, a permaculture guru [in my opinion] has written in great depth on this specific form of raised garden beds. We are so excited about it we are planning to make a hugelkultur bed in the next week or so.  Here is some basic info and a link to the real deal.  This form of raised garden beds allows you to make magic in your garden

You can grow a typical garden without irrigation or fertilization.  It has been demonstrated to work in deserts as well as backyards. It uses up rotting wood, twigs, branches and even whole trees that would otherwise go to the dump or be burned. It can start small and be added to later and is pretty much nothing more than buried wood. Hugelkultur raised garden beds have the potential to feed many people at no cost and will endure into the future,  For more on this interesting form of eco conscious raised beds, and very comprehensive how to information – check out Paul Wheaton’s blog article here

© 2012, Sunny Soleil. All rights reserved but relaxed Pierre Soleil We like to pass on the word so YOU are welcome to use this document in accordance with the Creative Commons license. That is, you can tweet, facebook, repost, excerpt and even adapt it so long as you don’t pretend it’s yours for commercial purposes

 I am renewed with inspiration and ideas to begin to live in a self-sustaining and regenerative way that will save the earth and promote co-operation and love amongst communities.

Permaculture is one of those words that most people who don’t know might easily associate with gardening.  That’s a bit like associating spirituality with prayer.  It’s an important part but it isn’t the whole.

On the last day as we shared our gifts in a circle outside on Koinonia Community Farm, we were reminded that permaculture is more than just growing food ecologically.  It espouses a way of life, the principles of which relate not just to growing food, but to our very way of living and being.

Golden Learnings – a way forward

With 230 million acres of forest being decimated in the last 3 years, we must change the way we live.  As long as people are addicted to MacDonalds and the like, forest will continue to be slashed down to make way for grain to feed animals for human consumption.

The Sahara desert was once a lush forest.  

The concrete skyscrapers of New York stand on land that was once covered with diverse trees and plant life, home to a plethora of wildlife and harvest-able edibles.  

We humans are gifted with intelligence and cognition.  We have used these gifts to do many good things, but we forgot to put on the brake.  

Human magnificence has created the keyline plough that doesn’t compact but aerates the land and it has also developed agriculture row farming and chemical fertilizers /pesticides that quickly destroy the natural fertility of Earth.

Say no to chemical fertilizers and yes to pig/chicken poo, compost teas and mulching

The same spark of creativity that discovered fossil fuels in the ground and a way of harnessing it for human energy can now be converted and harnessed to discover ways of capturing and storing energy.

Say no to city water, the electricity grid and say yes to elemental power from sun, water, wind and earth [solar, hydro-electric, windmills and geo-thermal sources of energy]

The same genius that learned to build cities is now able to find creative ways of creating natural dwellings that can appeal to all tastes from simple cob huts to huge earthship systems [Actor Dennis Weaver was one of the first people to build an earthship on his land in the 70's].

Say no to cement and urbanite and yes to sand, clay, straw, bamboo and tire-based structures.

The same genius that discovered penicillin and created anti-inflammatory drugs is now beign redirected to developing herbal medicines, alternative wellness programs and miracles like colloidal silver.

Say no to big Pharma and yes to growing your own medicinal herbs and plants, learning to make medicines and practising and using wellness ways as found in yoga, tai-chi, acupuncture and shiatsu.

The mind power that learned how to store and process food from across the world for mass consumption can also be turned to growing food forests that offer an earth-friendly way of feeding humans coupled with old-timey ways of preserving produce that promotes wellness and doesn’t drive us into the arms of diabetes, heart disease and toxic poisoning.

Say no to mass cultivation and imports of foods that enlarge our clod-hopping carbon footprint.  Say yes to home grown, local produce that is still replete with valuable vitamins and minerals because we pick, eat and share it as soon as we harvest it.

The same intelligence that worked out how to clone and genetically engineer can also be put to divining natural patterns and learning to grow in a way that preserves Earth and makes her a richer, longer lasting source of bounty for all life.

Say no to ‘So not Man’ and yes to heirloom seeds, non GMO foods and the right for farmers to save and distribute their own seeds.

We cleverly developed microwave ovens, espresso machines,  gas powered BBQ systems and state of the art kitchen appliances and it is that same cleverness that will help us to develop resource conserving solar and cob ovens as well as woodstoves that can serve dually as a heat source and cooking facility.

Say no to microwaves, electrical kitchen gadgets and discover the joy of woodstove cooker, solar oven baking and open fire BBQ’s using deadwood from the forest.

The intelligent faculty that helped us invent plastic bowls and man-made fibres can also be turned to learning how to make tree bark baskets, weave natural cloth from animal wool, and eating utensils carved from wood [ecologically harvested to encourage not deter reforestation]

Say no to buying more man-made fibres and plastics, re-purpose what exists instead of land-filling it and say yes to natural ecologically harvested materials for clothing, furniture, cooking utensils and building.

It took a genius to develop suburbia and vast city living structures and that same genius is now being harnessed to create transition initiatives, bringing communities together to build shared resources, and begin the ‘energy descent’.

Say no to urban skyscrapers, isolated housing and road dependent urban sprawls and say yes to helping your community begin to pull together and become self-sustaining and regenerative.

Our greatest gift and that which sets us ‘above’ the animals is that of intelligent creativity and innovation.   That is why we are the designated stewards of this land we call Earth.   Animals and plants know how to live symbiotically and harmonically, accepting natural culling from predators and death to ensure renewal but they do not have an overall sense of the whole.  

We do and it is our birthright to ensure that every life form is taken care of and that we restore natural patterns of living that will ensure the eternal existence of this birthright.

A Native American said to me the other day, pointing to the land we were standing on, ‘This is MY land’ ‘You are standing on the land of my ancestors’.   My response was ‘this is neither your land nor mine. 

It is not a question of right but a question of right stewardship and native ancestry does not always mean that someone knows what is right.

The land has been leased to all humans and we all have a duty to tend it with the same outlook that came from the true spirit of Native Americans not the one corrupted by the white man.     We are all potential stewards not owners.   

Owning land privately should not mean that you can treat it any way you care.   Ownership comes with a hidden responsibility to care for it with the whole planet in mind, not just your selfish concerns.  

Selfish Manicured Lawns

Behind the 10 acres and house that we are renting lies hundreds of acres of neatly manicured non-productive land.   The owner has a massive mansion set in the hilltops, a guest house and a shooting lodge. 

The land has been deforested to create a parklike atmosphere.. and a pond is fed from the creek to house fish that are only avaialble to the few.     And they visit it no more than 3 times a year for an odd day or two.

Say no to manicuring and hoarding land for ego purposes and say yes to land-sharing and using the land to create food, ecological living space and a haven for all of gods creatures, plant, animal and human.

Share The Land

Pic by localfoodcleveland.org

If you own more than 20 acres, you probably have far more than you need and are able to farm and nurture holistically without damaging that land.  If this is the case, please consider sharing your land with those who are willing to work for the good of Earth first and create a pleasant, productive, ecological space for humans, animals and plants to thrive and feed each other in reciprocal generosity.

Find out how land trusts can be written to ensure your lifetime stewardship and provide a measure of security for those who are willing to put their life toil into the land.

If you are on Facebook please join our Share The Land group or pass on this blog or link to people you know who have land and are willing to share or those who are willliing to work and need land on which to homestead and build local co-operative community.

© 2010, Sunny Soleil. All rights reserved but relaxed Pierre Soleil We like to pass on the word so YOU are welcome to use this document in accordance with the Creative Commons license. That is, you can tweet, facebook, repost, excerpt and even adapt it so long as you don’t pretend it’s yours for commercial purposes

As you can imagine,  I was not looking forward to having to make a scale map of a 500 plus acre farm as part of my team permaculture project.   

 Handy Body Measurements

As we sat down to a session on map making given by Dylan, another of the dedicated assistant trainers on this amazing 2 week permaculture course,  my automatic psychological ‘numbers escape mechanism’ was activated and my eyes started to close. But not for long.  It’s amazing how learning just meanders in when you’re having fun.

Instead of being confounded by trigonometry and calculations I found myself learning how to measure using my bodies.   I discovered that the space between the top and second knuckle on my pinkie finger measures roughly 1 inch.   My arm span is 5’7 and when I stand up straight and raise my right hand, it measures 7’2″.  Wow, I’m a living ruler.   

One of the ‘design principles’ of permaculture is ‘use appropriate technologies’. This means finding tools and technologies that liberate us from dependency.  It doesn’t mean that we have to throw away our tractor or computer and build a road with a shovel and a pen and paper.  

Modern technological tools can be really useful and whilst we still have the electricity and fuel to power them and they are utilized for the greater purpose we should.  A chainsaw can help us build a log home quickly, and when the fuel runs out, we can learn to use a cross saw just like the participants in Frontier House did.

If we’re creating a food forest garden that will eventually feed hundreds of people, it’s perfectly ethical to do what it takes to set it in motion, using big and techie tools in the beginning and then moving onto more ecological innovative, simpler methods.

And what could be more ecological and simpler than using our bodies as measuring instruments?    If you don’t have your tape measure or one of those digital laser things that need batteries and are liable to break down [as was my experience years ago when the realtor reduced the size of my living room by 6ft because his fancy digital measure was on the blink] relax, because as long as you’ve got all your limbs, and a willing friend, you can still take pretty accurate measurements.

In that spirit, we step outside into the crisp sunny afternoon to watch the intrepid Dylan demonstrate how to measure 100 ft using our paces.  

He marks out a 100ft path and places two flags at either end. Starting at the first flag, we walk to the furthest one and back again at a regular leisurely pace counting up each time we put the same foot on the ground again.   Average out the two and I now know that twenty of my leisurely paces are equal to 100ft.    It’s so simple I want to cry!

A few minutes later, Patricia prances onto the grass waving a round protractor with a string dangling from it with a pen attached to the end of the string.  She shows us how we can measure the angle of rise of a distant object by holding the protractor to our eyeline and tilting it to meet the top of the object we’re measuring.   The string moves round the protractor to reveal the angle.   Doh!

And if you’re going to build a road, you’ve got to know the angle of elevation so that you can calculate how to wind the road round so that the rise is not too steep.    Yes, I did say ‘build a road’.

Little Old Lady Road Building

After Patricia’s presentation on road building yesterday, as someone whose home improvement skills were limited to what I could do with a hammer and a box of nails,  I had a big grin on my face as I thought to myself  ‘ohmygosh, I actually know how to build a road’ 

Patricia remarked to me on the way out of her road building presentation, with a twinkle  in her sparkly green eyes,  ’If a little old lady can build a road, anyone can’. 

Back out on the lawn, Dylan took us through our paces again.  This time we were learning how to measure  the distance across a creek by using nothing more than our hand, eyeline and the foot of a friendly partner.  This is of course vital if we want to know how long a tree we must cut down to make a bridge across the water.   I am beginning to feel more than a little empowered!

This course is peppered with all kinds of fascinating  tricks and tips for doing things simply and innovatively and in particular gardening.

Make-do Gardening Tips

Chuck Marsh’s gardening tips are unmissable.  This man has 35 years experience of permaculture and he must have tried every trick in the book.   

If you are thinking of throwing away that old mattress forget it.   You can turn it into a garden by placing it on top of a piece of old plastic sandwiched between two layers of old carpet and a bit of straw.  Poke a few holes in the top, shove in some seeds, water it and hey presto.. you’ve got a raised garden bed.

And instead of forking out $9.99 for one of those fancy tomato hangers [as we did in our ignorance] you can make one out of a couple of plastic store bags and some old chicken wire with a bit of scrap material scraps wrapped around it to stop light degradation [Bob added in that bit].

Old tires, which generally end up being burned are an amazing re-purposing resource.  Slice off the top, shove in some soil and a bit of manure and you’ve got an urban container planter.   Short of space?  Plant some tall growing field corn and a little later, shove in some beans which with a little bit of encouragement from you will grow quite happily up the stem of the corn. 

Chuck advised urban gardeners to carry a poking stick around with them… and each time they see a bit of earth, poke a hole in the ground and shove in some seeds.   He told us how he got his landlord to plant a couple of apple trees in his garden which fed the homeless with nutritous organic snacks.   The trees were conveniently located along the route from the homeless shelter to the liqor store!!!

If you’ve got some old windows [and there's plentiful discard of old windows as more and more of those who can afford it sling out their old ones in favor of energy saving sealed units] and a bale of straw you’ve got the makings of a greenhouse.  

Stick the bale of straw on its side, stuff in some manure or mulch on top, pour water into the bale until it’s saturated, shove in some seeds and lean a window up against it.   On top you can raise the hardier green leafy stuff while using the space between the angle of the window and the straw bale as a kind of make do hothouse.

If you think you can’t because you don’t have any space, we heard today from one participant about the abundant gardens being raised by New Yorkers in tiny apartments using a 3′ by 4′ window and vertical spacing.  ANYONE can grow food.   There are even portable plastic sprouters that provide high quality, portable nutrition that can be grown in  two or three days in the back of your rucksack.  

If you want to find out more, there are oodles of books appearing on the market on the topic of guerrila gardening, dumpster diving and repurposing

Map Making Triumph

And as for mapping, my design team consisting of a retired lawyer, a refugee worker, a farmer and myself actually managed to draw out our map tonight using google earth and a calculator.  After hours of debate, hair tearing out and sleepless nights we finally did it.   

Next comes the good stuff.. planning out how to make an income yielding resource out of an intentional community farm that will not only feed the members of the community but also provide plenty of excess to share with friends and neighbors and be regenerative and self-sustaining for many years to come.

I can’t wait to get back home and put all this into action.. and already we’re thinking about how our newfound knowledge can really and truly help to put nutritious food in the mouths of the hungry and set up a food forest for the future.  

I’m hooked and I bow down to the wonderful people who’ve made it their life mission to take permaculture from a little known esoteric activity to being the potential answer to saving and healing this planet.   

Incidental Mushroom Foraging

And a special hurrah to Bob’s design team who found a huge clump of Lions Mane wild mushroom in a hole in a tree.    Looks like we’ll be eating exotic wild mushroom soup tomorrow alongside all the other amazing goodies our chefs are cooking up each day.

More Permaculture Info

There’s another of these courses planned in Atlanta this year… and I suspect it’ll sell out quickly. For more information check www.georgiapermaculture.com  and check Patricia Allison’s site for more permaculture events round the country.  http://www.patriciaallison.net/schedule.php.  Chuck Marsh teaches permaculture and also runs a medicinal plant nursery in NC.  http://www.usefulplants.org/

© 2010, Sunny Soleil. All rights reserved but relaxed Pierre Soleil We like to pass on the word so YOU are welcome to use this document in accordance with the Creative Commons license. That is, you can tweet, facebook, repost, excerpt and even adapt it so long as you don’t pretend it’s yours for commercial purposes

Looking at my mind mapped notes I see a symbol that, sadly, I’ve used a few times today.  It’s a gravestone with the letters RIP.   Because, if we don’t stop and rethink, revise and regenerate our way of being on this earth.. ALL THE TREES WILL BE GONE in 2050.

If you have ever walked in a forest, smelt the pine, crunched your feet on the mulch of leaves and twigs, stood in a circle of trees and felt the energy or watched the pines waving in the wind you will probaly recall just how precious that feeling is.  But our personal forest experience is but a tiny jewel in an Indra’s net of magnificence compared to the vital role trees play in all life on earth.

Our notes described trees as ‘interfacers, transformers of energies of wind, water and sunlight.

If our grid electricity were turned off tomorrow, we’d all be up in arms, rioting in the streets, demanding that the service is returned immediately.   Many people would die.   It’s the same with trees, only it’ll take a little longer. Rather like the difference between a quick slice and dice death and a slow lingering one.

There probably isn’t a person in this so-called ‘civilized’ part of the universe who hasn’t heard of the plight of the Amazon Rain Forest.    We humans are not only short sighted we’re unconsciously suicidal.  We cut down trees to grow crops to feed cattle so that we can make ourselves sick on burgers in pursuit of short term satisfaction yet we ignore the plight of the trees.

Trees stabilize global temperatures, store carbon, enhance water and preserve offshore reefs and marine life. They are a vital source of nutrition and medicine. They provide a habitat for animals and other plants. Trees offer shade, protect us from wind, warm us with their wood, provide lumber, glue, nuts, pollination, fix nitrogen in the soil, aerate it and offer spiritual solace.  Trees can even make rain!

Traditional agriculture is Earth’s worst enemy.   We cut down our precious trees, turn the soil up which destroys topsoil to grow rows and rows of wheat or corn.   The pests look at it and see a buffet of food readily available, so we drench the land with pesticide. The topsoil degenerates so we cover her with fertilizer.   If  the likes of  ‘So NOT Man’ have their way we’ll destroy the very hand that feeds us and they’ll be sitting in their decaying mansions with a fistful of dollars.  Ever tried to eat a dollar bill or a gold coin?

Down deep and dirty

My father imported toys for a living, so my bro and I had a lot of toys and yet our favorite game of all was to be out in the garden making fake ‘dinners’ with mud, berries and twigs.    I only recalled this fondly after an afternoon of building a swale.   Swales are kind of dams that divert the flow of water to make it more appropriate for both the land and humans.

Bob took us over to an area between two buildings where, after a heavy rainfall, water flowed in a particular path, making it muddy and difficult to transverse.   As we looked over to one building we could see that the broken gutter was the source of the water flow.   So we set to building a dam to avert the water flow using earth from another project on site.

After we’d shovelled heaps of earth and tramped it down, which reminded me of a version of wine making, we had to make sure it was level.    I love repurposing so I was squawking with delight when I saw what I now know is an A-Frame level.  It was made out of discarded bits of wood, a stone, some string and a couple of strips of tape.    It worked perfectly.

The exercise was a reminder of how important planning for all needs is.  Sarah, who lives in the community and is attending the course, pointed out that the dam was all very well, but what about the people who wanted to get up in the middle of the night and cross the path to get a snack from the kitchen.      So we set to making a step arrangement from some old concrete stuff.    Hmmm.  It just didn’t work.  And then someone came up with the bright idea of creating a path round the dam.

Chuck, our lead trainer, showed us that this was an example of how important it is to plan.  This was what he calls a ‘small mistake’.   Big mistakes in permaculture are ones that we have to live with for years.  Rather like a neighbor who build a big house on a hill and didn’t put in the silt dams.   In a few years the hillside will start to erode and wash down the hill, the pond below, which is full of fish will be full of silt, the fish will die and his house won’t be so steady…  Everything has a consequence for more than just our own individual desires.

Planning and design are the keystones. If we get the plan right, we’ll have trouble free living for years to come and if we don’t.. we’re screwed!

Chuck reminded us that in permaculture ‘the opposite is also true’.    What works in one situation, might not work in another and there are many solutions to our design challenges.

We were wondeirng what we could do to divert the people from crossing the dam instead of using the path and innovative solutions such as putting a brush pile by the side of the path, or planting paw paws or other suitable plants would not only make it pleasant, offer edible pickings but also keep them on the path!

Carbon Footprints

After dinner we adjourned to the library where Bob and Isabel put up the website www.myfootprint.org where you get to figure out your impact on the earth in acres.   Fascinating fact was that when Bob, who lived in Bangladesh for 3 years, calculated that even living like a king there, his footprint was lower than living in the States.   Know what the most heavy-carbon factor is?  OWNING A CAR.

Maybe it’s time we got a horse and cart like the Ingalls in Little House in the Prairie. Rural dwellers are at a disadvantage for travel because we have to travel so far. So maybe it’s also a reminder that LOCAL LIVING is gonna be the only way to go.

Bob and Isabel are my homesteading exemplars.  They live in the middle of a 40 acre forest somewhere in mid Georgia.  They treated us to a slideshow of their homesteading journey.  All I can say is that to me living in a home made of cardboard, surrounded by a jungle of edible and medicinal plants, with chickens and goats in pens made from dumpster diving materials j[as was a lot of their 'cabin']not to mention the ‘swimming hole’ constructed from discarded plastic & living coppiced trees that grow shade in the summer, is my idea of heaven.

Meanwhile, it’s 8am and time for class to begin. It’s pretty cold here and even the delicious breakfast of home harvested sausage, quiche made with a crust of cooked brown rice and ground up seeds, coconut rice porridge, kefir and home grown grapefruit can’t keep out the bite.

This course has been totally inspiring.  I find myself jumping up and down with delight at the potential, at the information that is so vital to spread out into the worldand the idea of building our own repurposed living quarters in the middle of an edible jungle of plants and trees all working together in perfect harmony.

Blogs- check out one of our chef’s blogs

She’s also posting the daily menu on Facebook if you want a gustatory thrill go friend her.  http://www.facebook.com/#!/ms.milkweed?ref=ts

© 2010, Sunny Soleil. All rights reserved but relaxed Pierre Soleil We like to pass on the word so YOU are welcome to use this document in accordance with the Creative Commons license. That is, you can tweet, facebook, repost, excerpt and even adapt it so long as you don’t pretend it’s yours for commercial purposes

Oooh as a revolutionary activist at heart, that got me good and proper.  This morning was filled with profound statements and stories about permaculture, what it is and what it means to us…

Ask most people who aren’t overly familiar with it, they’ll probably tell you it’s about ‘gardening’ and it is. BUT that’s just the surface of this design for life on earth.

Permaculture is a spiritual practice. And I don’t mean that we sit and meditate underneath the canopy trees or worship at the altar of richly mulched soil.   

Permaculture is a design for ethical living and perhaps the only thing that will save this earth from the crap we’ve inflicted on it.   Patricia, one of our lead teachers, suggested we start to call her ‘Earth’ leaving out the ‘the’.  As she pointed out Earth is a living being and deserves to be recognized as such.   

Chuck, our lead teacher with Patricia, and a 35 year-long permaculture activist and passionata, described it as

“An ecological design system for creating regenerative human habitats’.  He said that when he heard politicians using the world ‘sustainability’ he knew it was time to find a new word. Regenerative kind of works for me too.

One by one the teachers stood up and shared their definitions of this thing called permaculture. Each of them were obviously moved deeply by their passion.   I use the word passion a lot.  Passion for the earth, for the sanctity of human life drives these people and I can feel it welling in me as I sit there immersed in it.

Bob told us that yesterday he saw a tree on this land that he could hardly put his arms around. It was a tree that he planted here 20 years ago.    He’d tried living in different communities and somehow found himself back here in Georgia, homesteading 40 acres with his partner Isabel, because, as he put it, his mission was to ‘bring Permaculture to Georgia’.  I’m with you Bob…

Penryn talked of the land she’d inherited in Kentucky and how she’d realized that her mission was to bring this work to Kentucky….

A theme was developing that touched me deeply… we all have a duty to spread the word, at local level, no matter how tough the resistance.  That is what pioneers do… and in their own way, these people are all pioneers.  Again, I feel humbled to be part of this growing movement…

Another description that moved me was the idea of permaculture as a ‘design dance between people and the natural world’ an interaction of flow and motion rhythm, give and take.

Patricia described Permaculture as an ‘umbrella for all her spiritual beliefs’ and that echoed what my husband has been saying for years in reference to his love for the earth first manifest in the woeful cry of a twelve year old writing a poem about his beloved… His warcry is ‘It’s my religion’.   

That about sums it up.  Permaculture is the new religion.  Now I know that some people might consider this ‘sacreligious’ but it makes sense to me.  Eons ago when the principle energy of the world was feminine, Gaia or mother earth was worshipped, adored and taken care of… and then the male energy came in and we entered a long period of earth rape.

I’m not getting at men… it’s just a way of describing the difference between softly treading and harshly marching… And now,I sense that this female energy is emerging again in both men AND women and we are finding a new way to honor Earth.

The big difference now is that we don’t have time to waste dancing naked in the woods and adoring the earth in ceremony, sweet as that may be.  This lady is dying and we gotta get down dirty and give her CPR.  

Which was exactly what we did today in the mulching exercise.  I knew I was in love when I got down on the ground and dug my hands eagerly into the pig manure to spread it on the garden.   There’s something so alive about touching her body… this lady we know as Earth.   She’s so responsive…

We were presented with two young peach trees which had grass growing a little around them.  Various heaps of material were piled up, in the same way professional chefs on TV have those little white bowls of ready chopped ingredients that they just pop into the mix.

First off we learned that turning the earth with tractors or even spades was an absolute no no. It compacts the earth…So all Bob did was stick a pitchfork in here and there to aerate it. 

After that we shovelled on a heap of pig and chicken poop mixed with a bit of straw and other dirt which we spread in a 10ft diameter circle around the little peach tree.  Then we stuck in some blueberries.  And I literally mean, stuck in.  Someone dug a spade into the ground, pulled back the sod and in went the yummy antioxidant cuttings…

After that we covered the entire circle with cardboard [all tape removed] and a discussion ensured about pure cardboard, chinese cardboard, soy printed paper and more… Bottom line is if people are starving a bit of chinese cardboard is better than none!  But we were going for the full on organic thing here so we used pure cardboard.   Every single gap was covered and double covered. This Bermuda Grass is a greedy blighter and will peek it’s head up through even the teeniest gap.

I realized that my rather half hearted effort to ‘mulch’ our bit of growing land was pretty inadequate.. sheets of cardboard and a scattering of yard mowings won’t cut the mustard here.  And our gratitude to the Deputy Sherrif [our neighbor] who cut and turned the land with his huge tractor is somewhat diminished.. but as they say ‘bless them for they know not what they do’ and the generous intention is well appreciated].

The cardboard was watered down and then some..

After that we shoved on heaps of straw, fully covering the cardboard.   Then we planted some irises around the circle of the tree, after Brendan, the lead gardener of the community, had placed some plastic pots around the base of the tree to protect it. 

We used knives, trowlels and whatever was on hand that would cut the cardboard.  Bob showed us how to make a slit in it and just laid the iris with its root on top.. after that, we just shovelled a little bit of soil starter to give it a booster. and tucked it up in a bed of straw.  

Bob reminded us to plant the annual foody stuff where we could reach it. Irises don’t have to be picked but taters and onions do! 

So here we have this little permaculture plot with a peach tree, blueberries and annual such as potatoes and onions.   Seed potatoes grown up North were used.  And we’re doing this in the beginning of February… Tthe temperature outside here in Southern Georgia was up in the late fifties and delightfully warm so God blessed our planting today.

A hole cut in the cardboard, the potato was simply laid on top and covered in straw. Bob assured us that it would be enjoying a period of growth while the cold was still with us and would give around 6 – 10 potatoes per one planted.   

The onions were planted in triangular form… we used green onions… and again a little hole dug, in the cardboard, pop in the onion, shove on some soil starter and spread the straw around it and finally we heaped piles of pecan shells onto the top. Because people come to visit here and like it to look nice, we also placed circles of bricks around the garden.  

A little part of me and all my fellow permaculturists in waiting will be left in this wonderful place.  Perhaps like Bob, we’ll return in twenty years and with tears in our eyes look at the little bit of garden that we were responsible for starting.  

I loved every moment of it, from picking up handfuls of piggy poop to spreading straw..digging holes in cardboard and putting in blueberries.   And as I remarked to one of our group… these things are like weeds down here yet we still pay $3.99 for a pathetic punnet that’s probably travelled a few hundred miles.  Not for long. 

Somehow everyone just mucked in and did their bit… There’s something so satisfying about getting down in the dirt.. and even more exciting for me was that I’d actually done something practical and that for many years down the line,  people will be eating luscious berries from those little shoots that we stuck in ground today.

After that we engaged in the planting of a number of yummy foodstuffs in our stomachs.. including the hog that was slaughtered this week.  Quinoa pilaff, broccoli and cheese, I can’t even remember what we ate only that it was downright divine…Of course Earthy Girl is pretty versed in giving her lovers a great time!!!

The afternoon was taken up with patterns, led by Zev who talked earlier about how nature’s cuisine is different everywhere populated by species that want to be there.   I thought about my husband and his affinity with patterns and wished he could have been there to see it..

I studied something called NLP for many years. NLP is about modelling what works and adopting strategies for success. Permaculture is Nature’s NLP… It takes what works, uses patterning and reapplies it to create edible gardens using strategies tried and tested by nature herself.. But as we learned earlier, this stuff goes way beyond gardening… It truly is a design for living…More of that later.

We in the West are well aware that we won’t be able to live the way we do for much longer.. The Cubans didn’t have a choice. When we embargoed them and Russia collapsed they were left with nothing.   Our bedtime movie was all about how, through dire need, they learned to permaculture the entire country…

But it truly is bedtime now and I’m ready to hit the sack.. and despite the sunshine today it’s pretty cold right now… and tomorrow is another day….

And I leave you with the thought that, as we were told today…

It’s time to put the ‘nature’ back into ‘human nature’.

© 2010, Sunny Soleil. All rights reserved but relaxed Pierre Soleil We like to pass on the word so YOU are welcome to use this document in accordance with the Creative Commons license. That is, you can tweet, facebook, repost, excerpt and even adapt it so long as you don’t pretend it’s yours for commercial purposes

On our way down here we came through Atlanta, another huge monument to concrete, ostentation and the money lords.   And I realized how I no longer have the urge to engage in  retail therapy in a mall.   My retail therapy nowadays consists of a trip to Dollar General to buy cheap plant pots and bathroom tissue.  And even that will probably phase itself out the more we return to earth..

A once in a blue moon visit to Sevenanda  one of the cities oldest co-operative stores in Atlanta’s Little 5 area, is the ultimate excitement.  

Aaaah my life is so simple, so sweet…fetching wood, making cornbread, dressing for comfort not fashion.. so what it was not!   We are living on the edge, we have far less  stuff, no TVand I’m far happier.

The back holler folk are amazing… they know how to live and many of the oldies we’ve encountered express concern that ‘these young folk gonna have a hard time cos they don’t know how to look after themselves without flickin’ a switch’. cern that ‘these   There are so many skills and knowings about the land, how to lives self-sufficiently and how to make do. 

They are literally walking Firefox encyclopedias and we’re reading them hungrily and they love sharing their knowledge.  But, I digress…

Six hours after leaving home via a leisurly wander around Wal-Mart and Target to pick up supplies, noticing the way people wander around picking up things because ‘they’re on offer’ or ‘that looks cute,we needed to stop again.

It was late, the truck was unheated and we pulled into a small town MacDonalds to get a coffee as my husband was in danger of falling asleep at the wheel.   Outside two or three ‘kids’ stood drinking liqor, the bottles hidden in brown paper bags. 

It’s still strange to me coming originally from the UK to see that phenomenon.  People in the UK drink just as much in public, they just dont cover it up in paper bags!  And it’s so sad to think that the only entertainmnent for kids like this on a Saturday night is to hang out in MacDonalds drinking booze.   

As we drove through the strip malls with signs saying ‘strippers – need we say more’ flashing between countryside lit up by fluorescent and neon adverts for motels and insurance companies cajoling you to ‘have a better year in 2010′ [by buying insurance?]I realized how much I love the earth and the rural areas where I am blessed to live. 

Even if we have to return to living in an RV in the forest, it will be far more rewarding and closer to earth-living than cooped up in a town.  I crave the earth, the countryside and the sounds and smell of fresh cut wood, firesmoke and the deep fecund experience of walking in the forest.

As we moved out of the urban sprawls of lower income Southern Georgia reeking of dying attempts to survive in this illusory world of ‘stuff’, we found ourselves in a ‘tree farming forest’ , the smoke of a local pulp mill blowing across the flat countryside.   

Nothing like the wild forests where we live. I love the area because it’s full of hollers and hills.  Round here it’s very flat which is an interesting contrast. 

Arriving last night after dark at Koinonia farm where the permaculture course is being held, was a breath of fresh air.  The prettily painted signs told us we were entering another world and in a way we were. You can smell and feel the peace here. 

Situated in over 500 acres, this Christian peace community is pretty laid back.  I’d called earlier to confirm that it would be OK for my husband to sleep over and break the 10 hr drive..and one of the ladies in the office said ‘there’s plenty of food – we had a great meal last night- so help yourself to leftovers’.

I already knew this would be a good place to hang out for 12 days, this added to the welcome and being here confirmed it.

The accommodation is basic, shared rooms and bathrooms with a kitchen and living area.. a ‘boys’ side and a ‘girls side’ and it’s sufficient – all we really need.   After meeting Isabel Crabtree, one of the teachers and chatting about ‘permaculture activism’ before we found our accommodation, we knew we were with like minded souls.

My husband says ‘this is the war we are fighting and it’s very different from how it was’. We’ll win them over with food and health and a realization that we must grow to survive and beyond that we must grow in a more ecological way’.  That’s why we’ve pulled out all the stops to enable me to do this course..

This morning we got up at cock crow, drank some herb tea and ate an avocad before driving into Americus which is about 5 miles away. Stopping at a Waffle house for coffee and a once in a blue moon wicked [and not even well cooked] breakfast we passed, on the way out a mother, daughter and son, all of whom were testament to how a regular American diet is killing people off slowly. 

Food Forest Gardens – the answer to our dietary hell

That’s why we’re so passionate about inspiring and encouraging people to start growing real food, food forests that provide fruits, berries, herbs, alongside an annual garden.  In a few years when the price of a hamburger has soared, and more people are on meds or dying from a ghastly diet, it might just be the salvation this world needs.

And talking of nuts, Kiononia is famous for its Pecans.  They grow and process lots of pecans.  So, you can imagine my delight when wandering around the grounds today, I found pecans lying on the earth.  Picking up a stone I cracked one then one more then one more open… and smiled… at the experience of tasting delicous food, fresh from the tree, knowing how good it was for me. 

Gradual Dietary Transition Works For Us

Our own dietary transition isn’t as drastic as my venture into raw foodiesm a few years back. Raw food is great, and it’s ultra healthy, but until we start growing our own and the right kind of ingredients together, it will remain exclusive to the ‘rich greenies’ who like I could way back then, can afford the greenstar juicer, the vitamix blender, the nutmilk maker, the dehydrator and all the other ‘high ticket’, grid-dependent  items such as raw chocolate, coconut oil…and agave syrup.  

We are adding more raw, especially sprouts,still picking our winter kale and mustard leaves, eating lots of veggies with every meal and saving energy by cooking everything on the woodstove/heater/cooker. 

We haven’t stopped eating meat, but our intention as soon as possible is to be able to grow our own and treat meat as just that ‘a treat’.  Naturally grazing animals provide a very different meat from their hormone stuffed factory farmed brothers and sisters.   We eat more raw nuts as snacks and juice fruit and veggies but not every day.

Gradual transition is working for us… as we embrace wellness promoting products like MMS and Colloidal Silver.   And we sense that by this time next year, we’ll be ready to plant the first permaculture style food forest garden in our area.

Permaculture Design Course – So Right for Us

This course is a milestone in our purpose… and judging by the enquires and enthusiastic support we’re receiving from people on a more frequent basis, food forest farming is gonna take off. 

And so I sit here in bright sunshine, still a morning chill in the air, writing this looking out on the tranquil grounds and cottages of this part of the complex I know even more surely that this was the right thing to do. 

We begin the course tomorrow, officially, and today most of the students will arrive for the opening circle and potluck dinner.   I found some reduced mushrooms in great condition and am gonna cook up a brown rice, mushroom, onion and jalapeno pilaff to bring along.

Birds are chirping, people walking around and it’s definitely wake-up time on Sunday morning. 

Tomorrow is the first teaching day of the course.. I can’t wait, and yet, even as we use those words so frequently, I know that life is not about waiting for what is to come, but enjoying what is.. the sound of the birds, the rural peace, light chitter chatter from community members greeting each other and mmmm brilliant,warm sunshine and fresh air.. not to mention the pecans!

© 2010, Sunny Soleil. All rights reserved but relaxed Pierre Soleil We like to pass on the word so YOU are welcome to use this document in accordance with the Creative Commons license. That is, you can tweet, facebook, repost, excerpt and even adapt it so long as you don’t pretend it’s yours for commercial purposes

Tomorrow I leave for a twelve day residential permaculture design course, starting this Sunday in Southern Georgia.  

 There’s so much to learn and know and this is just the beginning of a beautiful adventure and the continuing of a dream my husband and I have been evolving over the last year from a lifetime of exploration..

Food forests in every community will Feed The Future

We know how important it is to reskill ourselves to be able to survive comfortably in this changing world.  Permaculture is gonna be big, real big as people get hungry for knowledge on how to grow sustainable food supplies that will ensure the future of their families and the generations that follow.

It wasn’t easy to decide to spend such a large proportion of our funds on this, but if you’ve ever had that ‘this is so right for me’ feeling you’ll know how it is.  I just had to be there.  

My husband and I passionately believe that we need to start growing our own healthy nutritious food now. That doesn’t mean just planting an annual garden. It’s much more than that.  We need to create ecologically balanced food forests, annual gardens, kitchen gardens.  We need to start growing for survival NOW.

We are creating our own food forest garden and knowing how to design something specifically for the location and climate will be invaluable.  And we want to share our growing knowledge with as many people as we can.

Our aim is to encourage people to start growing properly planned, ecologically functional fruit forest gardens, that will be there to feed not just their family but others too.    If you haven’t got a back yard, you can create a community project.   As your energy grows around the project so will the help and support you receive.

A certificated design course coupled with doing our own design are all part of being able to stand up and talk at 101 level in an informed and intelligent way. 

We want to reach everyday folk who are going to need to know how to live self-sufficiently. Food is a major need in our lives. Healthy, nutritious, wellness-promoting food can be yours for ever when you create a food forest garden.

 Shouting it from the Treetops

We aim to give talks to local communities and anyone who’ll listen to us.. we’re so convinced this is a MUST for every community in the world!

The course is run at a community called Koinonia in Americus, South Western GA,  so it’s gonna involve a 5 hour drive to get there form way up here in the North Georgia hollers! 

It’s back to the dorm and communal eating as I spend 12 days breathing, sleeping, drinking and learning permaculture in close company with 30 or so other eager permies-in-waiting…

Omigosh, today I took another look at the contents of the course.. it’s mindblowing and led me down a pathway of dreams..You’ll know what I mean when you read the course contents..

Permaculture Design course content

Even as you read that list, you can probably imagine how useful these skills are going to be.. And they are including things like barter and gift economy.  I really love the idea of ‘gift economy’ and what it means to me.

Image from pointloma.edu

Gift economy

Peopole and communities who plant food forests will have such abundant supplies in a few years that they will easily be able to gift those who have less.. there’s a sense of the voluntary sharing we’ve been encouraging in our selves and others from skills to land.  

And there are all kinds of other connotations and potential for the idea of a ‘gift economy’…gifts generate abundance for receiver and giver and gifts aren’t subject to.. you know what!

A way of life for us

With  the learning I’ll gain and share with my husband added to his Western Montana frontier upbringing, his 3d design skills, acute awareness of patterns a close relationship to the earth and a shared passion for growing food forests everywhere, I sense that we’re embarking on a wonderful new way of living, doing what we adore, wanting only to live simply and self-sustainably on the land, eat nutritious food, be warm and help others to make the transitions…and plant food forests EVERYWHERE.

Watch this space… as I share myexperiences with you on a regular basis

I’ll keep you posted on how it goes for me, what I learned, what I’m loving, what’s challenging and how inspired I am each day…

Meanwhile, I’m listing out all the things I’m gonna be taking with me from my work clothes, rain gear, comfy pillows , laptop, tape recorder and camera and yes.. chocolate. So much to do and already it’s mid afternoon. 

Rain is Good

The rain has been steady for a day and a half which makes us remember why this part of the world is so good for growing.  Apart from an abundance of natural creeks and streams, we have lots of sloping wooded hills and the growing season in the summer is long with sunshiney Aprils to mid October, usually. Spring is just round the corner here! 

Suki our spirt animal on this adventure, doesn’t get to enjoy running through the forest,climbing trees and perching on the woodpile but he’s healing from an awkward encounter with the female up the road which left him with a sprained leg so the rain is good for him too as he ‘rests up’ in front of the stove. 

My husband is out chopping wood on the front porch and while it rains where it needs to outside, we’ve got a heap big iron woodstove that keeps this place and us warm as hot toast while we get to write and design and connect with people..;-)  And playing in the background is Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen..one of the songs from ‘The Watchmen’.

And so tomorrow the adventure begins…and I’ve not even started getting things together yet and it’s almost time to start dinner. 

Permaculture Design Course.   http://www.georgiapermaculture.com info on upcoming courses in Georgia and the South East.

Feed The Future blog – follow my adventures and learn along with me
as I enter the world of permaculture design

© 2010, Sunny Soleil. All rights reserved but relaxed Pierre Soleil We like to pass on the word so YOU are welcome to use this document in accordance with the Creative Commons license. That is, you can tweet, facebook, repost, excerpt and even adapt it so long as you don’t pretend it’s yours for commercial purposes

Part of this was foundated on the concept of permaculture. Dune, the first of a series of books was written in 1965 even before the word ‘permaculture’ was made popular by Bill Mollision and David Holmgren in the 70′s.

One of Dune’s characters, Liet Kynes was a planetologist who was devoted to reviving the desert. He served as both the planetary ecologist of Dune and leader of the Fremen the simple, desert dwellers.

He continued his father, Pardot Kynes’s, vision of gradually terraforming the planet from a harsh desert into a temperate world with precipitation, greenery, and open water.

An entire permaculture plan for the desert planet, Arrakis

In the Appendix to the first Dune, Herbert lays out Pardot Kynes’ entire imaginary, but sound, ecological plan for this transformation. “There’s an internally recognized beauty of motion and balance on any man-healthy planet. You see in this beauty a dynamic stabilizing effect essential to all life. Its aim is simple to maintain and produce co-ordinated patterns of greater and greater diversity’

‘Life and all life is in the service of Life. Necessary nutrients are made available to life by life in greater and greater richness as the diversity of life increases’

‘The entire landscape comes alive filled with relationships within relationships within relationships’

‘The thing the ecologically illiterate don’t realize about an eco-system’ Kynes said, “is that it’s a system. A system! A system maintains a certain fluid stability that can be destroyed by a mis-step in just one niche. A system has order, flowing from point to point. If something dams that flow, order collapses. The untrained might miss that collapse until it was too late.

That’s why the highest functioning of ecology is the understanding of consequences’.

He goes on to talk about the revivification of the desert in a total permaculture way using the Fremen, desert-dwelling simple-living warriors to undertake this grand plan 

“When will we solve it [the water problem]?” the Fremen ask.  Kynes told them ‘in three to five hundred years’.

A lesser folk might have howled in dismay but the Fremen had learned patience from the men with whips…. somehow the disappointment made the prospect of paradise more real.

The concern on Arrakis was not with water, but with moisture. Pets were almost unknown, stock animals rare. Some smugglers employed the domesticated desert ass, but the water price was high even when the beasts were fitted with modified still suites

Kynes thought of installing reduction plants to recover water from the hydrogen and oxygen locked in native rock, but the energy-cost factor was far too high.

There was a native root plant that grew above the 2,500-meter level in the northern temperate zone. A tuber, two metres long yielded half a liter of water.  And there were the terraform desert plants, the tougher of which showed signs of thriving if planted in depressions lined with dew precipitators.

He began the re-examining of the evidence of dry wells were trickles of water had appeared and vanished, never to return… and through a series of relationships with the sandworm and other creatures he set up a system to irrigate the land..

Then they went to work on the climate. The sand surface often reached temperatures of 344 – 355 degrees. A foot below the ground it might be 55 cooler, a foot above 25 cooler. Leaves or black shade could provide another 18 degrees of cooling.

Next the nutrients.  The sand of Arrakis, a product of worm digestion. Dust is produced by constant surface creep. Course grains are found on the downward side of the dunes. The windward side is packed smooth and hard. Old dunes are yellow, young dunes are the color of the parent rock – usually grey. Downwind sides of old dunes provided the first plantation areas.

The Fremen aimed first for a cycle of poverty grass with peat-like hair cilia to intertwine, mat and fix the dunes by depriving the wind of its biggest weapon; movable grains. Adaptive zones were laid out in the deep south..the mutated poverty grasses were planted first along the downwind slipface] of the chosen dunes that stood across the path of the prevailing westerlies.

With the downwind face anchored the windward face grew higher and higher and the garss was moved to keep pace. Giant sifs along dunes with sinuous crests more than 1,500 meters high were produced this way.

When the barrier dunes reached sufficient height, the windward faces were planted with tougher sword grasses. Each structure on a base of about six times as thick as its height was ‘fixed’.

Now they came in with deeper plantings – ephemerals, then scotch broom, low lupine vine, eucalyptus [the type adapted for Caladan's northern reaches], dwarf tamarisk, shore pine, then the true desert growths, candellilla, saguaro and the barrel cactus.

Where it would grow they introduced camel sage, onion grass, gobi-feather grass, wild alfalfa, burrow bush, sand verbens, evening primrose, incense bush, smoke tree, creosote bush.

They turned them to the necessary animal life – burrowing creatures to open the soil and aerate it: kit fox, kangaroo mouse, desert hare, sand terrapin… and the predators to keep them in check, desert hawk, dwarf owl, eagle and desert own, and insects to  fill the niches these couldn’t reach : scorpion, centipede, trapdoor spider, the biting wasp and the wormfly..and the desert bat to keep watch on these..

Now came the crucial test: date palms, cotton, melons coffee, medicinals, more than 200 selected food plant types to test and adapt. Kynes and his people watched and waited.

The Fremen now knew what he meant by an open-end prediction to five hundred years.

Constant Monitoring and Re-Assesment

A report came from the palmaries. At the desert edge of the plantings, sand plankton was being poisoned through interaction with the new forms of life. The reason, protein incompatibility. Poisonous water was forming there which Arrakis life would not touch. A barren zone surrounded the plantings and even shi-hulud would not invade it. Kynes went down to the palmaries..he tested the barren zone and came up with a bonus, a gift from Arrakis.

The addition of sulfur and fixed nitrogen converted the barren zone to a rich plant bed for terraform life. …

Nor could the Fremen be ignored with their windtraps and irregular landholdings organized around water supply – the Fremen with their new ecological literacy and their dream of cycling vast areas of Arrakis through a prairie phase into forest cover.

So it was true as this umma had said in the beginning: the thing would not come in the lifetime of any man now living, nor in the lifetime of their grandchildren eight times removed, but it would come. The work continued: building, planting, digging, training the children….

 You can buy the first Dune book here
Dune, 40th Anniversary Edition (Dune Chronicles, Book 1)

© 2010, Sunny Soleil. All rights reserved but relaxed Pierre Soleil We like to pass on the word so YOU are welcome to use this document in accordance with the Creative Commons license. That is, you can tweet, facebook, repost, excerpt and even adapt it so long as you don’t pretend it’s yours for commercial purposes

Building and Growing with Nature

Earth builders and forest food gardeners who follow the permaculture principle of learning from the natural environment, observing patterns and using that to create  a design for the optimal needs for that environment, have got it right…

Bottom Line – We cannot fight with nature.  We tried that already and we’d be well to remember the Easter Island experience and how they decimated nature to create stone statues to their gods turning their home into an uninhabitable wasteland.

 Nature has much to teach us about harmonic and most productive design. 

The nature-harmonized earth house

We speak often of earth houses in general but there are many types of earth houses. What works in one environment superbly would be a disaster in another.

Naturally Right Building

Every style of natural building such as cob, log, straw bale, earth-ships, bamboo huts, houses on stilts, yurts and more, all evolved as a result of a direct relationship with and understanding of nature and natural design.

The design that works best for you is one that takes into account the natural ingredients of the specific location.  It may not always be the design you are locked into.

Early earth home builders studied the natural climate, land structure, soil type, vegetation and human and wildlife interactions and needs.

The Mandans of the Upper Missouri in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains designed log structures worked perfectly for and  with the natural contours and components of the Plains.

In the desert climes, thick-walled adobe structures painted white and thick walled serve the purpose of sheltering humans from the harsh sun and protecting them from colder extremes of temperature.  Damp is NOT an issue. Water was precious so they focused on water catchment and well systems.

 The log structure that works so well on the Plains won’t necessarily be as functional in hilly wetter climes without adaptation.   It is up to each builder to know how the area works by basing his design on what works in nature.

There is a harmonic building structure and design that is perfect for each unique climate and micro-climate and contour. 

 Evolving and Adapting

Given how bright we humans are and how much technology we have at our fingertips, we will quickly learn to adapt and evolve ways of earth building that take this into account.  Permaculturists are doing it already.

Edible food forest gardens mimicking nature

As students of permaculture and permaculturists know, nature has a perfect design for every part of the land.  The forests are living examples of eco systems.  By taking into account the natural design and what works, food forest gardeners learn the purpose  of patterns and structure and allow this to inform  their design. 

 They never try to impose a design that is contrary or counter-productive to natural workings because they know, in the end, it won’t be the most beneficial for nature or themselves.

They know they need canopy trees and they know they need ground cover. In the tropics mangos and coconut trees form the canopy layer whilst in Northern Georgia apple and pecan trees serve the same purpose.

In the same way when builders use natural designs and structures the structure is fluid enough so that someone building in wetter hilly lands can begin to devise a way to dam and reflow the water so that it doesn’t run back into and under the house. 

 Someone building in the desert of Nevada will design what works in a water-scarce desert. They won’t worry about excessive water flowing under or flooding the house because what little there is has been redirected to a water catchment system.

 The ultimate aim of both is to capture water without damaging the natural contours and flow.

 The Miracle of Nature-based Building

Mike Oehler, r-evolutionary author of  ‘The $50 & Up Underground House Book’, does not design cellars, mole holes or dark gloomy homes.  He designs homes that are functional and suited to the environment.

The home is constructed to reach below the frost line to protect the fragile structure from frost damage. 

It is a place where all the workings like pipes and wiring are underground in an easily accessible space.  This keeps them protected from freezing and other hazards of being exposed.  It also makes repairs and reworking easy as no structures have to be disturbed to get at the pipes and wires.

The merits of ‘underground’ housing are, according to Mike Oehler – author of ‘The $50 and up Underground House Book’ pretty fantastic.

If you are into natural building and could design and create an ‘earth’ home that is synchronized with the natural environment, and have all of these amazing facilities.. why would you choose any other way..????

Benefits of an ‘underground’ house

• No Foundation
• Less building material and labor
• Less Tax
• Warm in Winter, Cool in Summer
• Better view
• Built-in Greenhouse
• Ecologically sound
• Increased yard space
• Fallout Shelter
• Defensible
• Concealable
• Close to Source of Water
• Relatively fireproof
• Pipes never freeze
• Superior flooring
• Can be built by anyone
• Weatherproof
• Less maintenance
• Soundproof

We recommend this book and here’s our Amazon link to it.   

 The $50 and Up Underground House Book: [How to Design and Build Underground]

If you click here, and you do decide to buy, you are helping us as we re-route money energy from the machine towards supporting a more ecological cause!  Feed The Future – A food forest garden in every community is doable and could alleviate world hunger in 10 years.

Mimicing Nature is the Only Way

Builders who study the contours of the land, the rainfall, the flow of water or indeed where water, the position of the sun and all the natural ingredients, will design structures that work perfectly with nature and offer relative to that environment all of the above features. 

In Oehler’s book he points out all the mistakes people are making when they design earth houses and all the things they can do to create a successful, secure, warm, sound structure that utilizes the natural situation to the best advantage of all concerned including their needs.

For example he has come up with an amazing design for housing set against a hill.  He finds a way to avert the flow of water from the hillside, have it run down beside the house without ever reaching the house.  He describes how to create drains that naturally pull the water back into the house.  It’s not just a question of catching water or sloping roves, it’s creating roofs that contribute to the above qualities..

 His designs have been called ‘radical’, ‘revolutionary’ ‘unique’ unconventional’ ‘practical’ ‘masterpieces’.  

 They are based on pure physics and a study of natural design and purpose. 

For instance, It makes sense to have the kitchen garden, greenhouse as an extension of the kitchen and not an external entity. 

The greenhouse captures the suns rays while being protected by the house from winds.  In turn we get  easy accessibility to foodstuffs as they grow.  Nipping in and out of the greenhouse as you cook, you are more in tune with how it is growing and take more care of what’s there.. as it takes care of you by producing more abundant offerings.

 It makes sense in Tony Wrench’s underground house to grow grapes on the eaves of the house. The roof offers the grapes space to climb and protects the house while providing on tap food and with a little processing natural wine!

It makes sense to have a composting toilet that collects human waste and with very little effort other than facilitating natural process, it turns in to rich, natural fertilizer for the garden in less than two years.

It makes sense in some locales to have French drains that through a natural filtering and siphon system reclaim good water and direct it into the home.

 Forest Food Gardens – Natural Wonders

 Food Forest Gardeners observe what works in nature, how water flows and how to guide the water to where it is needed most and is kindest to the land.  

 They have a structure from nature of layers and inter-actions between different species for the greatest good.  They apply that structure to local specifics and as a result the forest becomes healthy, lush, self-sustaining and abundant. 

It makes sense to cover the ground with abundant, local herbs and beneficial plants because they offer not just nutritious food and medicine but also keep off invasions of unfriendly weeds.

It makes sense to plant mutually cooperative species because the system requires so much less maintenance after the early labours of reconnoitre, design and planting and pruning, the system starts to take care of itself and become independently inter-dependant.  The only ‘labor’ that remains is that of walking through the forest collecting the fruits – Tough eh!

It makes sense to let chickens run around in the forest [while protecting tomatoes from them!] and let them peck at fallen fruit and pests … while keeping down the tree pests, the chicken’s manure sows seeds and fertilizes the earth.

It makes sense to contour and dam water flow so that it is distributed in a natural way to where its needed most and away from where it can cause damage by accumulating.

So much of this just makes plain natural sense.   And all it takes is for us to get off our backsides and get into action.   We can’t argue with nature any more, so why not use her system to our advantage.

Here in the USA, the pioneer nature of the people is emerging to meet the needs of our changing times and the opportunities of re-contouring building and growing in a way that works for all perfectly. 

This spirit  genetically evolved and a part of our history, will save this nation.  When other countries, areas, look back to what worked and use what they know now to merge the two and alchemise new workable ideas.. the world will begin to flourish again.

 We simply have to stop being afraid, take that leap and JFDI

Recommended Books:

The $50 and Up Underground House Book: [How to Design and Build Underground]

 An introduction to permaculture (Design course series)

© 2010, Sunny Soleil. All rights reserved but relaxed Pierre Soleil We like to pass on the word so YOU are welcome to use this document in accordance with the Creative Commons license. That is, you can tweet, facebook, repost, excerpt and even adapt it so long as you don’t pretend it’s yours for commercial purposes

A community forest garden is a vital cog in the wheel of transition, that we must inevitably spin into. It is a transition from oil based consumption and materialistic lifestyles and emerge into simple satisfaction, self-sufficiency, self-reliance, local sustainability and smaller group inter-dependence. 

There’s no doubt that big changes are pushing their heads above ground and that we must begin now to prepare.  If we do we WILL ride this wave and emerge refreshed and renewed.. landing on new shores of potential. 

To us, as long time observers of the social shifts, it does seem that we, today, are present to a crumbling of ‘what was’ and an emergence into a new way. 

As information spreads and things seem to happen much much more quickly [people can connect, share ideas, start groups, research through the internet] more people are aware.   Ideas are beginning to synchronize like women who live together experiencing their menstrual cycles synching with each other.  

We are being pushed towards finding creative alternatives for our basic needs which are safety, shelter, food, wellness and connection to other from intimate, family, friends, neighbors into the community and beyond.

And it seems that the place to begin is really at grass roots, one or two people, adding more as the idea spreads, neighbor to neighbor, neighbor to community, community to other communities…and our role exists within our individual community yet as part of the entire whole…ain’t that cool!

 Forest Food Gardens are one part of the great web of emergence.  It is one [jolly good]  way of ensuring abundant, localized community  food and wellness.

Natural Building methods and all the variants thereof offer effective, localized, low cost and resource friendly solutions to providing shelter for all

Shared Land in the form of people offering parts of their land for community shelter/food growing spaces knowing that they will be supported and helped by the community as their generosity melts the divide between have’s and have not’s..

Shared Labor in the form of people working on projects and knowing that they will be fed and sheltered as they help create an abundant world for future generations not just for themselves.

Free energy solutions from those who are fascinated by experimenting with solar/wind, magnetic, water and whatever power.  Like this we can step over the  spirallingly expensive grid electricity and gas-fuelled transportation.

Connection to Other and Community  is the spirit that fuels us to come together and pool our resources, ideas and skills. It is also the spirit that connects one community to another and thus springs the spider network of local communities, trading, bartering, sharing, caring helping….

Living v Working to Live.  In living we bypass the ’middle man’.   Instead of going to work for someone to earn ‘money’ to pay for heat, light, food, entertainment, transport and keeping up with ‘them’, we will expend our energy on living.  

We forsee that there will be a shift towards people using their ‘time’ to dig, plant and tend food forests, collect herbs and concoct tinctures, preserve and prepare food, collect wood, tend the fires, build homes, care for the livestock, school the children…..

This alone would consitute a good enough ‘work’ day. The fruit of your labor is the home, the eggs,the warmth, the nutrition, the healing and the children delighting in playing in ‘secret’ hidey hole under the large fruit bushes. 

We are going to have to learn to make do with less, be more independent and self-sustaining, become more hardy and resiliant and come up with creative ways to utilize what we do have in abundance.

And thankfully, something we humans have in abundance is the ability to transcend through adversity via creativity and soar to heights of magnificence and when we pull together.   The evidence is there.

Past Evidence of the Great Human Spirit

A friend’s mother who grew up in the Great Depression of the 30′s said to us the other day ‘I don’t know what all the fuss is about the ‘great depression’ and how people had to live – that’s the way we’d always lived.    Rural folk know how to survive, how to adapt, make-do and use the natural resources. And they know how to pull together as a community from taking food to bereaved neighbors to sharing the surplus of their gardens with those less well off.   They had no other choice.  It was live off the land or die!  And they had a sense of caring for their community.

Anyone in the UK who knows someone who is in their 80′s will have heard tales of how they managed in the 40′s WW2.   Food shortages, nightly bombings in big cities, people being made homeless in an instant were all part of their everyday reality.  A woman recalls how living rurally they had lots of orchards. During WW2 her father dug up the orchards, by himself with the help of a neighbor’s son and planted vegetables that he gave away to locals so that they would have fresh food to eat.

Riding the Wave of Transition Together

So how do we begin to energize a transition wave in our community.   And before you get all scared about official stuff, there is none.   One of the pleasures of living in the rural South is that people just do things… they aren’t too fussed about what the officials think.    They don’t get all bogged down in ‘what about the codes’ or ‘you can’t do that’.  

Here are some initial guidelines…

1.  We have to find our bliss, the thing we love doing that fit into this new kind of living

2.  We may need to develop new skills or link together with others to pool our skills

3.  We have to work with the greater good in mind, knowing that we will be taken care of as long as we are genuine and doing the right thing

4.  We can’t just sit around talking, we have to start doing NOW.  We’ve talked a lot over the last year about how it is and what’s going on and now we are acting.  We went out into the world and connected and followed the leads and found the like-minded energies and we asked for connections, help, guidance…and it comes in

5. We have to be prepared for a bumpy ride as we shift gears, but we must also allow ourselves to experience the vision of living a more natural, earth-based, community centred life… and all the joys that it brings.   There really is nothing like good honest labor to have that feeling of being in the moment and alive. 

 The increasing research and talk around global warming, carbon footprints, oil running out aka post-peak oil combined with evident economic challenges [to use a mildly inoffensive word] and price-hikes everywhere is making a pretty LOUD statement.They are the result of people waking up and getting that we can’t go on living the way we do.

Across the globe people are preparing for transition. There’s even official transition sites and examples of what people in communities are doing to create a more earth-based less oil dependent life.

Forest Food Gardens are part of a transition initiative that is designed to help communities become less reliant on oil derivatives which includes all manufactured items, electrical goods, grid lighting and heating, truck/plane/rail transported food and more reliant on producing what they need for themselves within the community.

THIS is NOT THAT

Please don’t start to label this and compare it to any political movement.  It is not that way.  This is NOT that other ‘c’ word.  It is about human challenges, emergence, freedom and working together and finding creative solutions.

We don’t just need to create food, we need to find ways to harness free energy, build affordable or even free shelter, utilize our land for the community, share our labor and the fruits of that collective labor.  And NO this is NOT anything like the com****** word.    That was awful.   That system was heirarchical and worse still hypocritical. This is something COMPLETELY DIFFERENT.

This can and will become a global initiative.  The global initiative will not be orchestrated at global level.  It will consist of each individual playing the instrument they play best and all coming together in harmony with others to allow community initiatives to unfold.  We like to think of this transition as a harmonic emergence of humans, a return to earth.  H.E.R.E.

More on the topic of Community Transition

Transition 2 – The just do it’s 12 steps to creating a self-organizing community initiative coming soon

How to set an initiative in motion and avoid energy sapping bureaucracy whilst surprizing and then  inspiring the authorities with what you all achieve.

© 2010, Sunny Soleil. All rights reserved but relaxed Pierre Soleil We like to pass on the word so YOU are welcome to use this document in accordance with the Creative Commons license. That is, you can tweet, facebook, repost, excerpt and even adapt it so long as you don’t pretend it’s yours for commercial purposes