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

Forest gardener working mulch into the soil

We live in the rural back hollers of the N. Georgia mountains.  The elders here, those in their late 60′s and above, all remember how to be poor and successful.  Their success wasn’t about accumulating stuff or status or money, it was about surviving on the land.  This is a skill that has almost died out. Many of the elders we speak to lament that their kids only know how to flick on a switch and if they lost that they’d be lost.

Stop Trying to get ‘Rich’ and Learn to be Richly Poor’

Programmed with this idea of acquiring more status, stuff and money and escaping poverty, that generation wanted their kids to not have to get up at 3am and milk cows before they walked 10 miles to school.  They were bombarded with the idea that ‘more is better’.   They ‘did the right thing’ and proudly sent their kids to college, working all hours at jobs that took them across the country, sometimes away from home for months.   And now they see that their kids are not equipped to survive the coming tough times.

I found a blog this morning entitled ‘We knew how to be poor’ and as I read, I realized that knowing how to be poor will soon become a very sought after skill.     The writer is musing on the knowings of the elders and how they survived poverty.

In the 60′s an enterprising English teacher in the South Eastern Appalachians, sent his class off to interview the old timers for articles about ‘the old ways of doing things’ in a newspaper that would form their class project.  The project turned into a series of books called Foxfire. They are named after a local Appalachian plant that glows and, like the knowing of the elders, has gone from prolific to near extinction.

If you haven’t read the Foxfire books yet, you might want to get hold of a copy – They are full of old timey knowing.  Marilyn was one of the people interviewed in the blog [link below].

At age 79, Marilyn had a remarkable life story. Besides the six children (five in five years, if you can fathom that), she spoke of living low to the ground in a way that I cannot really imagine. Her family grew, raised, and put up darn near all their food, and had a small dairying operation that served as their cash crop. (Until, that is, the logic of BIG economies of BIG scale discarded their efforts.)

Deliberately Choosing to Live on Less

My husband and I came here to live on the land.  I wanted to go into the woods and write, but I found that this was not my purpose, just a by product of it.  Since coming here we have exhausted all but a teeny bit of our funds but in return we have learned some valuable life skills and we are part of a community. In other words we are richly poor!

I know how to live poor. When I first came here I had no idea how to start a fire, and my growing was limited to planting an avocado in a pot for fun.

NOW – I know how to garden.  I have mentors to help me and books and experience of what works and what doesn’t.  I know how to preserve food and on a grander scale, I know how to plant food forests that will provide perennial abundant food for all, including meat and requires virtually no tending after the first year, other than to harvest.

I have learned how to make shelters out of cob and earthbags – the rudiments of natural building.   I have learned to cook on a woodstove and how wood works to provide heat.  I have learned about hunting and preserving meat and even how to cook squirrels and dumplings.  I have  tried to do many tasks by hand before using my machines, so that I understand and know how it works and I am acquiring more knowledge every day as I LIVE instead of working for a living.

Forest, my husband,  does honest labor jobs helping people build things, clearing brush, guarding land in hunting season, birthing cows and decorating.  He brings in just enough to keep us in rent and utilities [which we conserve].  He cuts and puts up wood and I help him. We heat by wood alone and it keeps us plenty warm.

Our now revised 'chicken motel' built entirely from scrap

We know how to scavenge, refuse and recycle.  We aren’t too proud to take other people’s garbage.  We built our chicken lodging out of stuff gleaned from old barns, neighbors discard, stuff lying around and an old mattress we acquired.  When you’re rich you think ‘chicken house – Home Depot or send off for an online kit or have one built’.  When you’re poor you ask ‘what can I find to build this chicken house without paying a dime [where possible].  Poverty leads us to be creative, ingenious and work harder!

Paying Into the Bank of Kindness

We deliberately put ourselves in a position where we were free to explore, connect, engage and learn.  We became part of a local community by endlessly showing them that we were for real because we were!

My husband got up early one snowy, freezing cold morning, just before Christmas last year and announced he was going to help our farmer neighbor.  ’It’s cold and he has cows to birth and feed and he’s all alone and sick and he needs my help’.  He went every day for several months knowing that the farmer couldn’t pay for an extra worker.  He even got up at 4am to go down there and massage a newly born crippled calves feet.  The calf lived and thrived.  He called this ‘paying into the bank of kindness. And in return we received so many kindnesses from this farmer, from food to connections that our ‘investment’ has been rewarded.

It does not mean that you do this deliberately to see what you can get.  You cannot approach the bank of kindness way from that space.  It means that you take the leap and offer your gift because IT’S THE RIGHT THING TO DO and you trust that you will get only what you need to fulfil your purpose.   We do not need that much as we’ve learned.

What Do We Really Need?

What do you really need to be truly happy?

Maslow had it sorted when he came out with his hierarchy of needs.  After all, what do we really need versus what we’ve been programmed to think we need?  We need food, shelter, air, clean water, sleep at the basic level. We need safety and security [and today those are truly semantically hypnotically loaded words]. We need love and companionship. We need self-esteem – and we need self-actualization.  That last one’s at the top of Maslow’s list.

When we are being who we truly are destined to be in the greater scheme of things, using our gifts for the good of the whole, we are actualized.

We”ve been hypnotized into believing we need a lot of things [that, strangely?!, make lots of money for very few of us] and we’ve been told the right way to get them.   We have to work for a living so that we can come home exhausted, but with a pocket full of green paper so that we can buy instant food [no time or energy to grow, prepare and cook our food] get a dishwasher [no time or energy to wash dishes] buy a car [work too far from home to walk], go to a gym [our work is so sedentary that we need to create exercise time] watch tv [because we're so stressed we need to cut off from reality] and so it goes.

Living v Working for a Living

What these old folk were about was living.  They may have done some work, but the majority of their labor and that of their forefathers was taken up with building shelter, putting up wood to keep warm, preparing the land to grow food, sowing seeds, tending and harvesting, putting up food for winter, tending livestock which provide meat, milk and manure.

And the Winner is… the poor person who’s adapted

If you are working for a living, doing a job that you hate, then it’s time to ask yourself  ’What has to happen for me to simplify and learn how to live on very little?’.  A few years back, parents were worrying how to get their kids into college so that they could get a degree and get a good job. If I were a parent nowadays, I’d be doing everything I can to ensure my kid knows how to survive and live by his or her own labor.

If the 99% would just stop maintaining the rungs of the 1%’s stairway to fake heaven in the hope that they too can climb that ladder and turn their energy to working out how to live a sustainable, self sufficient life, they would create a new ladder to HEAVEN on EARTH.

Return to Earth, Recreate Eden.  Withdraw your lifeblood from the system and inject your energy into a simple life for you and your family and your community.  And while you’re at it, pray.  Pray that you get exactly what you need to do God’s work and accept that there is a difference between asking for what you need and asking for what you think you need [oh we need a big fancy truck or whatever].

Related Blogs

http://satori.hubpages.com/hub/Common-Ideas-to-Put-to-Bed-With-a-Shovel–Pt-2

http://www.culinate.com/mix/dinner_guest/life_and_food_lessons

© 2011 – 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

Transcribed from a talk delivered by Guy Dauncey

First Unitarian Church of Victoria

April 20, 2008

What’s going on ?

Well good morning everyone, and thank you for inviting me to come and join you here. When I was cycling up Interurban Road to get here today and snow was melting into the creek, which was rushing along by the edge of Interurban, and the fawn lilies were sort of bursting out everywhere… You know we live in such a miraculously beautiful part of the world here.

I must admit if you’re a cyclist, you also notice the incredible garbage along the roadside – the toss-away McDonald’s stuff that’s been thrown out. If you’re a motorist you don’t see that, but if you’re walking or cycling you really see the disgusting garbage that we leave.

So there’s a duality to my theme here, which is the incredible need for us to be grateful, and appreciate the wondrousness of this planet we live on, and to pull a piece out of the prophet Job and say “what a shit-awful mess we’re making of things!”

What a shit awful mess we’re making

Whenever you go before the divine, you’re supposed to bring your heart clear and empty, and one way to do that is to show gratefulness ‘cause it gets the ego out of the way. Another way is to honour sins. I mean there’s a good old-fashioned tradition in the Catholic Church of honouring sins, because if you come and you’re holding onto that and you’re not honouring what you’ve done that’s bad and harmful and wrong, your heart can’t be open to receive grace, to transmit prayer, to be clear in any kind of giving. It’s a precondition of that contact with the divine to have that openness.

Some of the things we do are willfully obvious and blind. Others of them happen at a distance. And the analogy I found myself working with recently for us humans on Planet Earth is very similar to that of a child. When a baby is born, for the first year and a half or year of its life it lives in this world of yes. Its parents give it everything. It gets unconditional attention, love, the breast, the sleep, the food; it’ll do whatever it wants, and we say yes to it all the time.

On Planet Earth, for the last ten thousand years here, ever since we stopped being hunter-gatherers and started being settled agriculturalists, we have taken everything from the Earth. We’ve taken the topsoil, we’ve taken the forests, we dump our waste wherever we want it just as a one year old does and we expect Nature to clean up just as Mother cleans up. That’s the world you expect as a one year old.

And you live in a world of abundance, and that’s how it should be for a one year old! That’s what you need, ‘cause you’re ignorant of the ways of the world. You don’t understand how it all works. You look up at the adult world and it’s a mysterious thing, just as we look up at the stars and it’s a mysterious thing.

Me, Me, Me and Screw You

Then there comes that period when you’re beginning to become a bit more important, as a two year old. And you think “oh, I’m getting good ideas now, and I’ll take that and I’ll take this and I’ll take that” and your parents say “no, no! Put that down!” and “Put that back! No, no, don’t go there! Don’t, watch that!” and all that. That issue comes in and the child is entering the world of no, no, stop, stop; you all know that.

Now if the child is allowed to go on living in a world of yes after it’s crossed the barrier of no, and its temper tantrums are indulged, you’ve got a miserable eighteen years of parenthood coming up! And that child has got a miserable life coming up, because it grows up thinking it can always live in a world of yes. Everyone owes it everything it wants, whether it’s the forest, the water, the land, the fish; it’s entitled to take it.

The grim truth is that of the world’s major large fish – the tuna, the cod, the sharks (which have been around in our oceans for probably some six to eight hundred million years) – in the last fifty years, we’ve eliminated ninety percent of them. And by the year 2015, in about seven years time, a lot of them are going to be extinct. Because our fishing fleets are using modern, fancy equipment, we’ve taken the world of the endless yes to the depths of the ocean.

Land, Forests, Water, Air, Food – we’d grab it all if we could

An analogy I heard is that, if you have the Plains of the Serengeti in Africa, and you took two big tractor-trailer type vehicles and put them a kilometer apart and put a net between them, and you drove across the Plains of the Serengeti and put everything into a great big pile – all the lions, all the antelope, all the trees, the bushes, the shrubs, a big pile – and picked out the ones you wanted and left the rest to rot, that is what we’re doing on the floor of the ocean with our trawling practices.

So that we can fill our shops with fish, and our cat food and our dog food with fish, and stuff like that. That’s what trawlers are doing on the bottom of the ocean, ‘cause we have no legislation at all that guides what happens outside territorial waters.

It’s the same with the forests. (This is the Job in me coming out now.) You know, we’ve taken most of the old-growth forest on Vancouver Island – gone.

We’re treating the atmosphere like it’s just this invisible thing up there. The reality is that our carbon-dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels – and we take fossil fuels for granted, even our candles here, unless they’re beeswax…

That flame you’re looking at is ancient sunlight that’s two hundred million years old. Because the oils used to make the candles are the fossilized remains of forests that grew two hundred million ago, that stored sunlight from the sun, locked it up as carbon and became coal and oil and became candles. You’re looking at the sun that shone two hundred million years ago, in the release of that little flame.

Using in a second what took millions of years to form

And whenever we drive a car, that’s the energy we’re using. Every single year, we use a million year’s worth of ancient sunlight! All the heat over a million years is being put back into space.

And the blunt reality of that is that the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere, which is absolutely essential for us to have warmth and existence… Mars has no atmosphere, no carbon dioxide; it’s minus one hundred and eighty-three degrees Celsius at night, on Mars, and plus ninety-three Celsius in the daytime. So like, you don’t want to live on Mars in a hurry.

But on Planet Earth we have this wonderful atmosphere, thanks to carbon dioxide and water vapour and methane gasses which create the right temperature.

But you put more carbon dioxide in there – ‘cause you’ve taken the energy over two hundred million years gathered in fossil fuels, and releasing them in two hundred years – you get a rise of CO2 levels from 285 parts per million, which is pre-industrial, to 385 today, to 450 by the year 2030.

The last time the Planet Earth went through the 450 parts per million barrier, (which is when it was cooling down fifty million years ago), at 450 parts per million, Antarctica became ice. So when we go the other way, past 450, Antarctica becomes water again. And there’s enough water locked up in Antarctica for an eighty-meter sea level rise.

Richmond is at sea level. Bangladesh is at sea level. Shanghai is at sea level. I’m talking eighty-meter sea level rise. And that’s within thirty years, that we’ll pass that threshold. It’ll take several hundred years for the melting to take place, of Greenland and Antarctica and stuff like that, but if we don’t change our behaviour that quickly, that’s what is coming for the future of this world.

And the scientists say they can’t get over that threshold point. James Hanson, NASA’s top climate scientist, said the threshold we need to aim for is not 450 parts per million, it’s 300 to 350, which is lower than we are at the moment. So we’ve got to cut back on all our fossil fuel use right now, and find ways to farm differently and forest differently to absorb the carbon back into the soils and the forests. We have a very, very practical, immediate agenda to cease using all fossil fuels by the year 2030.

And it’s possible and doable – I’m not going into all the details ‘cause I have other things I want to share now.

Get together to find group solutions

But one of the very practical things you can do as a church (‘cause your biggest carbon footprint as a group here, without doubt, is your traveling to get here) is to do a benchmark, and say “here’s how many car trips we have in April 2008; let’s reduce that by 20 percent by April 2009, by 40 percent by 2010, by car-sharing.”

By setting up a site on your website, anyone who’s willing to offer a ride or needs a ride can use a Google Map – a little Google Map symbol for everyone who’s willing to offer a ride or can share a ride – you can look at the map and see who lives nearby, click on the button and it tells you the phone number… to sort of collectively reduce that footprint.

And then by doing so, show how every other church in North America can do the same. When we do something innovative, it becomes a torch for everyone else and becomes a beacon for everyone else.

There’s a major conference of the churches in British Columbia happening a week on Monday, “The Fate of the Earth”, in Vancouver, which Campbell’s going to be speaking at, and all the Sikhs and the Christians and the Buddhists and the Muslims and the Jews are all gathering together to look at global climate change. Saying “what do we do, as spiritual congregations?”

Religions Unite

Now moving to the larger theme here, before I put that Job piece aside, ‘cause I can go on… Job can get quite a grip and there’s a lot that Job wants to say. But, if we look at the history of our religions, it’s interesting: almost all of our major religions have a story, which says that the Earth is a terrible place of pain and suffering and woe, and that if we just pray enough, or buy enough indulgences, or confess enough sins or meditate enough, we can escape Earth, and get enlightened and go to Heaven.

It’s a standard story! Even the Hindu faith, when you scratch it hard enough, that’s what it’s saying. The four ages of God, the four ages of Earth: the Golden Age, which degrades to the Silver Age, which degrades to the Bronze Age, which degrades to the Age of Metals, and there’s a great conflagration, a massive terrible disaster and everything gets destroyed and the world is made new again.

These religions were made, you know, two thousand years ago before anyone had any concept of “progress”, of “science”, of “development”, the fact that you can overcome patriarchy, overcome slavery, overcome child labour, overcome misery, overcome all that stuff. And since the Renaissance, we have had a new vision that actually, we can achieve miraculous stuff on this planet. And every generation since the Renaissance has hoped that their children will live on a better Earth. Our parents put up with terrible grinding work so that their children would have better lives.

For the first time now, we’re the first generation where the children are actually going to have a worse life, ecologically and materially speaking, than we are, ‘cause there’ll be less of everything – unless we go through this crisis and change things. Because every crisis is also a crisis of opportunity.

The key piece in here for me is actually our modern understanding of what evolution is all about. Because our science (which is our story to these days), our scientists are really telling us that evolution is a random bunch of genes trying to reproduce and going nowhere, doing nothing. It’s formally and officially random and meaningless. That is the formal, official science of evolution.

The wonder of human potential

My evolutionary theory includes the work or Teilhard de Chardin and Sri Aurobindo, and it’s that the whole of our consciousness is evolving toward a greater divinity. There’s a deeper unfolding, which I call the process of “syntropy”. All of life seeks wholeness. It’s a very profound thought.

Now have you ever found a human who says “I wish I had hemorrhoids!” Or “I wish I had a lousy marriage!” You will never find a human with negative ideals. Why is that? Why are we all programmed with a positive vision, with a hopeful vision? Why is that?

There’s something profound, biologically, because… science is not just about the material world. And very soon this great merging is going to happen, of science and spirituality. When science understands that, yes, consciousness is for real, that consciousness touches the world of the greater wholeness where prayer is operational, where meditation works, where healing is clearly something that works, and that we’ve got to understand that and link these things together.

Abundance is possible for ALL

Then we can start looking at our future. Then we can start thinking – well, if on Planet Earth, we accept the nature of our two-year-old tantrum process, and accept the need for limits, the world of no, and accept that we need to manage the fish carefully… And by the way, we discover that whenever we create a marine reserve which is totally off-limits to fishing, the fish recover very quickly, and you can fish sustainably on the perimeters of the marine reserve for our needs. Not necessarily for our greed, but for our needs.

And when you farm organically, there’s enough food on the whole planet. When you stop eating meat, there’s eight times more food, because every kilogram of beef requires eight kilograms of grain to feed it. There’s no need for any food crisis in the world if we simply stop eating meat. And if you’re worried about the healthiness of that – I’m sixty years old; I’ve been vegetarian for forty years; I ran ten kilometers around Elk Lake this morning and then cycled up here and back.

I’m healthy; I’m strong on a totally vegetarian diet. And I don’t get sick, at all. (Helps being self-employed because no one pays you to get sick, but that’s another story!)

Work with Nature not against her

There’s an abundance available to us, if we cooperate with Nature. An abundance on the material level, and on the spiritual level. It’s like when the two-year-old discovers the joy of cooperation with its parents, you discover “what a wonderful childhood I can have!” What wonderful things we can do together, when we cooperate together.

There’s always fighting, and saying “mine, mine,” grab, grab, from the world of scarcity – when you think there’s not enough, you’ve got to grab it all.

When you look at the world of alternative energy, you say “how do we operate a whole planet with no use of fossil fuels?” I’ve done all the numbers, I’ve examined the whole thing; there’s a thousand times more energy than we need, when you take solar voltaics, solar thermal in the world’s deserts, wind energy, super-efficiency, deep-rocks geothermal energy, tidal energy, hydro power; all done within ecologically appropriate means.

There’s way more energy than we need. Including totally enough to run our vehicles on electricity, as well as to use far more busses and transit and cycling and ride-sharing and stuff like that.

The numbers add up just fine, and there are companies showing that it works out. I mean, Catalyst Paper, the one that runs the pulp mills, has reduced its CO2 emissions by 71 percent since 1990.

There’s a small town of Gussing, in Eastern Austria, where the whole town has reduced its carbon footprint by 93 percent in just fifteen years.

Apply Our Mind by asking HOW DO WE DO IT?

It’s just a matter of applying our mind with a positive approach to say “ok, how do we do it”? How do we systematically stop using carbon fuels, farm organically, forest sustainably, fish sustainably, and live within the limits of our Earth? And then turn our brains around so that instead of seeing the environmental message all the time (which is like “humans are a disaster, we’re a cancer on the Earth, we’ve got to stop doing this, we’ve got to stop doing that”, you know, it’s all negative, negative, negative), see it as a cooperative vision of where we’re going.

Once we get over this two-year-old tantrum crisis and learn to cooperate with Nature, to do green chemistry instead of toxic chemistry, eliminating cancer, and asthma, and Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s (all of which come from our relationship to our lousy food and our toxic chemicals getting into our bodies) – all that can be gone! We can get back to healthy living for a good, hundred-year lifespan. We can live within the abundance of Nature.

And then, start asking the fundamental, deeper questions. Like, “ok, now that we’ve got over that crisis, what are we going to go for our next ten million years on Earth”? We’ve been walking around on two legs for seven million years quite successfully; why shouldn’t we have another seven million years? Planet Earth doesn’t go supernova for five billion years!

There’ll be historians around a million years from now, looking at this little crisis we went through with the age of fossil fuels, when we suddenly got the knowledge of science and technology and fossil fuels all at the same time, and what did we do with it? Did we use it to just indulge ourselves on flying to Hawaii, and getting a bigger truck, and a bigger house, bigger television and everything?

Or did we use it to do a transition; as a takeoff process to enable us to become a world entirely in harmony with Nature; as a baseline for a happy childhood? So we’re just about to enter our childhood on Planet Earth. As to what adulthood might mean, that’s so far beyond us, it’s like asking “what might God be?” Why should we begin to know that?

Humans are Phenomenal

But here’s another thought. The fact that every single one of us is alive today, with fingers and eyes and ears, is 100 percent proof that if you go back through your ancestors, right back through the human chain to the primate chain, to every single form of existence there’s been – every single one of your ancestors has had successful nookie and produced a new generation. Without failure! Not a single one of our ancestors failed or else we wouldn’t be here.

We have a genetic heritage that runs back, unbroken, to the very first bacterial cell division. Unbroken! It’s a phenomenal thing to carry in our beings.

The fact that each brain has one trillion – a thousand billion – brain cells in it is because Nature took that long to evolve such an incredible thing. And my belief is that every single step of the road, every cell was conscious. Even the atoms were conscious.

I’ll wind up with a much bigger thought here now, because we’re about to have a whole rediscovery of the integration of consciousness and spirituality into the nature of science, coming out of the interaction with healing and the way we know that healing works on our bodies.

Using our Consciousnes to Change the World

One of the interesting things here is around quantum theory, where it says there are positrons and electrons. Electrons have their causal origin in the past, but positrons have their causal origin in the future.  No one’s got close to finding them yet, but we know they should exist. And the reason we haven’t found them yet is that all consciousness, everything that has consciousness, everything we do has its causal origin in the future, through intention.

Every one of us set an intention to come here, and we acted on it and here we are. Everything we do is set on intention set in the future. And that may be the very nature of consciousness and spirituality in the atom itself, that it’s always moving. That’s how time is created, is we have future intentionality.

When we have negative intentionality we will get pain and suffering and grief.

You have negative thoughts about yourself or about the planet, that’s what you manifest. If you think you can’t win a soccer game, you’ll lose it. To be a beautiful choir, you’ve got to visualize that clear ringing note, those harmonies, and know you can do it.

As a planet, we absolutely have to visualize that clear, ringing, harmonious future, ‘cause in the process of science and evolving consciousness, that’s how it happens. When we can visualize it clearly, we can move toward it and make it happen. If we visualize fear and disaster and things going wrong, we get immobilized!

The people who are systematically denying climate change, the oil companies, are as harmful as the environmental communities who are stuck in negativity and defeat; who say that “the corporations are to blame, the government’s to blame, we can’t do anything”, and feeling hopeless and defeated.

Can you imagine Churchill feeling that way in 1939? I’ve been reading Churchill’s memoirs of the World War II and the analogies are really close. Because in 1939 Hitler had occupied the whole of Europe because no one had done anything about the Rhineland or the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, or about anything else, and let him do that stuff. The home army in Britain didn’t even have a rifle to hold!

The only thing the British had going for them – Hitler wasn’t even invading Britain – the only thing Britain had going for it was an absolute determination that they were not going to put up with that bully thug Hitler. They were not going to let him do that to the world. And there’s a point in Churchill’s memoirs when he first became Prime Minister, after Chamberlain handed over, he said to his Cabinet, “look, we’ve got nothing here apart from our own determination to go the whole distance and get total victory”. And he said in his notes “if I’d said anything different, they’d have tossed me right out the window”, ‘cause his whole Cabinet was so fully behind him.

We’re not quite at that stage yet; we’re in 1935 equivalent when it comes to these global ecological crises. Most people are still in denial, still thinking it’s not going to happen, we don’t need to change. And it’s really, really serious.

And yet out of that seriousness comes a whole new vision. Out of World War II came labour rights, came the welfare state – ‘cause after World War II they tossed Churchill out and brought in the first Labour Prime Minister, Atley, who brought in the welfare state.

So out of this upheaval comes a new vision of who we can be and what we are. And it’s really important not just to leave it to the ecologists who have just a narrow scientific basis and don’t include the spiritual dimension. ‘Cause it’s that understanding of how spirituality works that we get the power of our deepest vision from, and the power of our ability to manifest the beauty in our human interaction with the world that Nature has in its own interaction with the world.

So please ask your transportation committee to get organizing on ride sharing. Tell other people what you’re doing. And hang on to that deep belief that we’re going somewhere amazing on this planet. It’s not just an ecological disaster; this is the bumpy road we’re coming to. And we’re heading toward an amazing, amazing transformation”

Acknowledgements – Check out Guy Dauncey’s blog  Earth Future. This guy has some cool ideas

© 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

The indoor composting toilet

Here is a video from a composting toilet manufacturer.  It makes a great case for changing to a composting toilet.  You can buy the expensive one OR you can make your own using an RV porta-potty or wood, buckets, sawdust and more buckets.

Ingredients for a basic composting toilet

• A wooden flat top box with a hole cut in the top  [screw on a regular toilet seat for extra comfort]
• A bucket that fits under the wooden top.
• Sawdust – put 3 inches of sawdust in the bottom and then add an adequate amount of sawdust to cover the contents of the bucket each time you use it
• When bucket is full, remove, take into the garden, throw in a bit of soil, seal and leave or put it in a composting pit [dig a trench in the pit and then cover each 'dumping' with leaves or hay. In a year you'll have wonderful mulchy organism filled organic compost.
• Or you can dig a large hole in the ground and empty the bucket into it, covering it with soil or hay or old leaves and use that as a  rich growing patch for veggies after at least a year

The Forest Gardener Composting Toilet

Forest disappeared into the yard for an afternoon and the result was this

Everything, except the padded seat [$6 from the dreaded Wal-Mart] was found in a dumpster or stuff we had laying around. The wooden box and step up was made from wood we’d retrieved from the moldy cellar we cleaned out. One side ‘wall’ was a fold out door from an old RV and the other a piece of old trellis.  The fancy toilet roll holder was found in a dumpster.  Even the ‘reading material’ was a free give away.

As you can see from the picture above, the bucket is contained in one of those $4 lidded plastic storage boxes.  When you want to go, you slide out the brown box and take off the lid then slide it back in again.

At the back of the platform on which the bucet and container sits are wood blocks that keep the container in the right position.

The RV sliding ‘door’ wall is secured with wire attached to hooks screwed into the ceiling of the car port.

On the wooden platform where the seat is mounted, we have room for reading material and a small spray bottle of colloidal silver mixed with a drop or two of oil or oregano. This makes a great hand cleanser as opposed to chemical hand sanitizer.

One friend suggested having a plastic bottle of sweet and nasty soda and a small glass bowl. Empty a drop or two of the soda into the bowl and it will keep the flies occupied and away from the poop!!

The entire toilet can be broken down and stored in the RV should we have to take to the woods !

Toilet in the Woods

Friends of ours building a log home have gotten the camping lifestyle down to a fine art, including potty stuff.   Digging a toilet in the woods is respectful, natural and feeds the earth with our waste.

Their outdoor earth-based toilet’pit’,   is almost invisible such that it blends into the natural setting. Clue – look for the twig toilet paper stand crossing one of the tree shadows.  Our friends set up this gorgeous homely camping site to live in while they work on constructing the log/earth house.

Kitchen Composting

By the kitchen prep area we keep a 5 gallon bucket for the compost and a cardboard box full of sawdust and wood chippings from our wood cutting [we use a woodstove in winter for heating AND cooking].  Just like the pooper, I line the bin with the chippings and each time I throw something in, I sprinkle a handful or two of chippings onto it.  This stops the smells and also begins to compost the material before you throw it onto the main compost pile.

Composting – 4 ways to do it

If you are going to grow food in a garden, it makes sense to compost.    This concise article by Ernest Wilmington outlines four methods of composting.

There are four methods of composting. Hot, Cold, Sheet and Trench

Hot composting is the fastest. However, it is also the most labor intensive.

When hot composting all of your ingredients have to be ready to go at once. You start your heap by placing sticks or twigs on the ground. This is for air circulation. Next you pile about four inches of brown dry material. Then four inches of fresh green material.

You want you pile to be about 3 ft sq. and 3 ft. high. This can be done using some kind of a wire cage. While you are piling this material, you are wetting it as you go. When you pile is 3 ft. high, you need to cover it with heavy plastic or a blanket (or old piece of rug, etc).

After three days, check the temperature. When the pile reaches a least 140 degrees, its time to turn the pile. From now on you must turn the pile every other day until its finished, which is in about four weeks. This is the method that is used by commercial compost makers. Of course, they don’t turn by hand.

Cold composting. This is quite easy, but takes the longest. The plastic bins that are sold for making compost, uses this method. You simply toss all of you compostable material into the bin. After 6 months, lift the little door at the bottom and you have compost, all the while, you are still throwing stuff in the top.

Cardboard composting is used to create new garden bed or plot. Like hot composting, all of your ingredents must be ready at once.

Choose a site where you want to create a new bed. Cover the area with a couple of inches of newpaper or non-waxy cardboard.

Then pile on alternate layers of brown [leaves, coffee grounds, twigs, torn up cardboard and paper and green manure [fresh garden mowings, green leaves]  in layers of 2 – 4 inches each.

When you get to at least 18 inches, cover the pile with heavy duty black landscaping plastic cloth.

In six weeks, remove the plastic and you are ready to plant. Nothing else needs to be done.

Trench compost is simply burying your food waste and other compostable material in your garden. The earthworms will work on it and it will be gone in about a month. This is the easiest and best to get rid of household garbage that might otherwise smell in a regular pile.  Some composting gurus suggest that you can compost anything including meat and bones [which is what we do] and others say ‘no meat or dairy’.

Here’s another video on composting which has a good tip on starting the pile with crossed over branches to allow air pockets in the bottom.

Compost Tea

I got this recipe on my permaculture design course.   It’s really easy and makes a great addition to the garden.

Ingredients: 1 x 5 gallon bucket with lid.  A mesh bag.  Comfrey or Garden weeds, Yogurt liquid.

Recipe: Fill the  bucket water [put it out in a heavy rainfall and let it collect the water from nature].  Stuff the mesh bag with weeds or preferably, comfrey [it grows wild or you can cultivate it most anywhere].  Put a rubber band round the bag to close it off and put it into the water.  Pour in  the liquid from a large container of natural yogurt.  Seal the lid

Leave this for a couple of weeks and you have 3 – gallons of rich compost tea.  Water your plants with it once or twice a week.

It’s natural, way cheaper than ready-made plant food and it’s loving and kind to the planet.

Heirloom Seeds

And once you get your compost pile built, you’ll want to plant some really great organic heirloom seeds.   We love this company because they sell a vacuum sealed variety of seeds for every situation be it the single urban liver, a family of 4 or a larger homestead or farm. They also sell specialist packs such as medicinal herbs, tomatoes and tobacco!

© 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

 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

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