Ahhh, Tag Clouds.

Well, I just completed my longest post yet. It was kind of a celebration: a lot of new features, such as tag clouds and categories and other fun stuff.  You can find it, and the continuing blog, at http://www.andtheplotthickens.net/ .  See you there!

Wrestling with Blogger's inadequecies... back soon.  (And may have a good answer!)

Fun Fact: Tomato segments were originally regular, like oranges.  Cherry tomatoes and some smaller slicers still are.  The big, monster tomatoes have many, many irregularly-shaped seed compartments.  That mutation is probably part of what got us big ol huge maters. 

Bed building: Quick, Cheap, Easy?

Sounds like everyday decisions at my last job, because you only get two of the three.  Anyway.   Here are a few of the different kinds of garden bed building I know of; will be doing research on this and will likely find more methods shortly.  :) Most of them involve putting together things that, when they compost, create excellent soil for growing gardens in.  Please note that this is talking about raised or bermed beds -- building boxes is for another post.

Ruth Stout's method: Very basically, you whangle some nice yard maintenance companies (baked goods are helpful) to dump a load of leaves on your property.  Then you push it together until it's a bed.  Wet it down and wait a couple of months, or through winter, until it's crumbly deliciousness and plant in it.  This is basically what nature does anyway when all the leaves fall.  Mulchy goodness.  Since most of Ruth Stout's books are out of print (link to ridiculously expensive used book below), here is an excellent story on "The Mother of No-Till Gardening" at Mother Earth News. 

Lasagna method: Kind of the same as Ruth's, only you layer things carefully.  The microherd needs a few different things to get to work.  It has to be warm enough for them to party down, they need water because it's not BYOB, and they need both types of munchies: carbon and nitrogen.  The Lasagna method aims to provide a good buffet along with everything else, and takes a stab at creating good texture and nutrient content as one goes along.  Here's Patricia Lanza's definitive book.

Delivered method: Pay oodles of cash to have finished compost/soil/what-have-you delivered right to your front lawn.  Fill in your beds with the delivery, add amendments and you're ready to go.

Hugelkulture ("mound method") method: Find a downed tree that's been rotting for a while.  Haul it into your bed.  Cover with native soil and Bob's your Uncle.  As the already-crumbly tree breaks down all the stored nutrients will be slowly added to your beds. 

Sheet bed building: Stare contemplatively at lawn while amassing material.  Measure out your planned bed space, mark and soak.  Pile on newspapers or cardboard.  Soak.  Pile on garden clippings.  Soak.  Pile on hay, last year's leaves, coconut coir or other dry fluffy material.  Soak.  Pile on whatever soil you have to hand.  Soak. Cover with a mulch such as bark, cocoa hulls, or whatever heavy comes to hand.  Leave this bit dry. If there's enough soil, you can cut through the mulch to plant in that last layer.  Otherwise, wait a couple of weeks for the soaked pile to break down a bit and then plant. 

I'll be trialing these methods.  A new Venn diagram will follow with the much more useful "Yield, inputs needed, Renovation needs"

Fun Fact: Renovating crap soil is pretty easy with any of the methods above.  As long as you have the ingrediants for a microherd party-down, you can make beautiful fluffy soil under wherever you put your beds. 

Rant: don't think, just spray!

I love watching CBS Sunday Morning.  It's a great chronicle of some of the things worth pondering.  It's a thought-starter.  Apparently most of the people who watch it are idiot gardeners.  There's a lot of ads for herbicide this and Glyphosate that and pest control another.  OH PLEASE.  If all you plant in your yard is tasty lunch for pests, then all you'll get is hungry bugs.

It doesn't matter how you define it -- Nature, the Biomass Principle, whatever -- life wants to make more life.  If there's life there in the center, it will find a way to expand left and right, front and back, and up and down.  Reproduction, evolution, adaptation... it fills space by whatever means necessary.  Shoot, if you put a bare freakin' rock in the middle of the ocean... life will happen to fly, float, or be swept right out to that spot and BOOM you got an ecosystem.

If a gardener prepares a nice bare stretch of land, SOMETHING will grow on it.  Probably overnight.  Wishful thinking will not keep it from happening. Death-cides might, for a while.  Or you could cover it over... or plant on it!  Maybe with stuff that doesn't attract hungry pests.

This morning we saw ads for:

• Home pesticides (instead, try diatomaceous earth in the back of cabinets when you move in or just clean up your food storage problems in the first place)
• Garden pesticides (hand-picking and water spritzing fix infestations, or you could showhorn in those things that attract pest-eaters.  Tomato hornworms are lunch to birds, so put in a birdbath for them to drink from so you get a daily bird-patrol.)
• Herbicides (boiling water for weeds in the cracks of pavement; or just lay down flagstone instead and put in tough plants inbetween so there is no space for weeds at all)
• Lawn care (rip up your lawn and put in gardens, or clovers, or natural meadows -- monocultures such as lawns attract diversity such as weeds and pests, and lawns do not support wildlife unless your mower is... a little squirrely)
• Fertilizers (compost.)

If we put in life for something besides only our own pleasure, we'd be able to enjoy the whole garden more.

Okay, I'm done ranting now.  *whooh*.  Thanks for listening.



Fun Fact: The fields of Europe were historically seperated by hedgerows.  Hedgerows are long corridors of wild, untended habitat for pests and their predators.  When a field became infested, the pest-eaters in the hedgerows were ready to respond.  Nom nom nom, no sprays needed.

Bees

I want bees, and I want to do some research, and want another graphic.  Hold on, I'll be right back.

(....)

Okay, I found the coolest resource.  It has an excellent graph, and good information one how to help bees want to come to the California garden.

• Native bees are mostly ground-dwellers.  Don't mulch everything all the time so they can burrow.
• Native bees like native flowers best and are MUCH less likely to sting than honeybees.
• Big clumps of each flower, so the bees don't have to fly all over, are excellent.
• Many standard culinary herbs are big hits with bees (sage, thyme, mint, verbena, rosemary) so the herb garden may be a good place to stock up on the flowers.
• Purple and blue are bees' favorite colors, followed by yellow and orange.
• In addition to flowers, bees need a source of water if one is not nearby. A small pond, puddle, birdbath, or even dripping faucet fulfills this need.

More more more: Here is a really really big list of bee-feeding plants, and here's where you can ID your bee.




Fun Facts, lifted directly from the Urban Bee Legends page: California actually has about 1,600 species of bees, both native and very few non-native, living throughout the state. This is actually a very large percentage of bees as the United States has only about 4,000 species of bees. Worldwide there is estimated to be about 20,000 species of bees. California is home to a large diversity of flowering plants (~6,000 plant types), most of which are associated and have evolved with native bees. Our statewide survey of California’s urban areas has identified almost 250 species of bees living in seven cities, and we expect to add more species as we survey more cities. Typically, people are most familiar with honey bees, bumble bees, and carpenter bees, but there are many other types that can be easily observed in gardens and other floral rich places. Some of the most common bees we observe in urban areas include many types of sweat bees, the ultra-green sweat bee, digger bees, long-horned bees, leafcutting bees, yellow-faced bees, and wool carder bees.

Permaculture Zones

This will be a short post because I spent forever on the graphic.  Ever see a front yard with a nicely landscaped little spot around a bench as far from the door as possible?  That never gets used?  *sigh*  Better to put the stuff you use a lot (or that needs a lot of your attention) closer to where you are a lot, and put the stuff you hardly ever visit way the heck out in the boonies.  Zones do this by radiating out from everyday living space.

Fun Fact: make it even easier on yourself by zoning your Annual Crop gardens.  Put your 'everyday' crops, like beans and strawberries, closer to the front door and the 'dude are they ever going to get ripe' crops such as winter squash and cabbage farther out.

Annual Cropping meets Permaculture

Most people haven't heard of Permaculture, so they expect it's new. In truth, it's ancient.

Most native peoples practiced permaculture. When the Europeans came to new land, unless they saw monocultures of waving grain they didn't 'see' gardens. Permaculture gardens look just like forests, and for good reason: permaculture is mostly made up of plants that grow for at least three years. So when these techniques -- heavily based on forestry and observations of natural rhythms -- are properly applied, the European's eyes could not recognize them as gardens. They just thought that the natural forest was unusually productive.

There are indications of Permaculture cropping (limestone alters soil PH, good for certain types of food crops and we can see that from orbit as reflected in leaf canopy color) in most of the lost cities of prehistoric mezoamerica. There are many indications of continual management by indigenous peoples -- don't even get me started on Terra Preta -- from all over the world in all kinds of environments.

So Annual Cropping comes to the colonies (pick a continent) with the Europeans and stomps out native ideas of permaculture. At this time, the fields were sown by hand by walking across them, sometimes behind a type of animal drawing a plow.

Then in the 20th century Annual Cropping got mechanized. Not only were there bare furrows where one walked, the field would be half-bare because the mechanical contraptions need space for their wheels.

That's Annual Cropping -- modern Agribusiness. It's even practiced on forests and fruit/nut trees.  You know when you drive down a road and look into an orchard and the rows of trees open up to your line of sight?  Yeah, even permanent orchards are subject to row farming.

 Permaculture was re-discovered by a busy Austrian in the 1960's.  Then beleaguered farmers and gardeners of Australia needed a way to keep their topsoil in place, moist, and fertile so picked up the idea and ran with it.  It is becoming more refined through judicious applications of science and collaboration. I had only been exposed to gardening in rows through Annual Cropping, so Permaculture was a revolution to the way I thought about growing food.  It will definetly be in the upcoming trials!


Fun Fact for this post: Condensing 100 sq ft of row-planted Annual Crops down into beds reduces weeding, fertilizing and land use by 60%.

Birthday ponderings

Occasionally I'll wonder, in a very macro way, why I'm so intent on growing our own vegetables.   Yes, they are healthy, and they are healthiest when harvest is closest to eating.  And growing them near your kitchen means less or no costs in petrochemicals and other things.

But I've found validation!  Did you know that, out of everything sold in the supermarket, if you look at cost per calories... vegetable calories are the most expensive.  That's pretty ridiculous for health-conscious people.  Here's the link -- I spent a good amount of time pouring over the graphical charts.



Fun Fact for this post: it's my birthday!  And I just got serenaded.  Yeay my life.

Info on the property

Well, we just heard from the bank.  The property we made an offer on is a short sale, meaning the owners (sellers) are selling it for less than they paid for it; not uncommon in this economy.  The sellers liked our offer and passed it on to the bank -- the bank didn't like it and not only rejected the offer but just foreclosed on the home.  Since they're trying to foreclose illegally, they're being sued by the sellers, especially since a foreclosure looks much worse on a credit report than a simple short sale. 

If the litigation goes through, the property will be tied up for quite a while.

If the litigation falls through, the property will go back on the market with the bank listed as owners, and it will be aggressively marketed by yet another agent.  And... the property will be tied up for quite a while.

We've been looking for a good place for 3 years now, and saw the current apple of our eye in January.  That's 4 months.  I SUCK at being patient so... um... I guess this is good practice.  Anyway, until we can get this (or any, I'm a little down just now) property, there will be more of these 'informational' type posts.  Soon I'll be able to get to the down and dirty part of trialing and growing... we all hope.  Cross your fingers for us.


Fun Fact for this post: some nut trees can take 50 or 70 years to produce their first crop.  Good role models for patience, eh?

"Organic"

'Organic farming' is a phrase originally coined by Lord Northbourne and made popular by J.A. Rodale in the middle of the 20th century.  It meant looking at farming as if the entire farm and everything on it was one living animal that should be managed holistically. 

Then 'organic' got codified.  It now describes a type of agriculture which limits/restricts synthetic chemical use.   I rant about it a little in my opening post.  'Organic' has great connotations to the average consumer, and for good reason.  This chart, showing which multinational food producers make which 'organic' brands, is a good example of why allowing the government to restrict the definition of what qualifies as organic makes me think that SOLE is 'organic' 's successor.



Fun Fact: Seeds of Change is owned by M&M Mars and boy oh boy are those seed packets expensive.

about permaculture

Now that we have the history, basis, and general idea of what annual cropping and Permaculture look like, we can talk about usage. Time to get dirt under the fingernails!

Annual cropping is what most people think about when they think raising their own food. Somehow an 'orchard' is something seperate, something different than all that. They want to segregate. However, plants are quiet, industrious Extroverts. They like being together. So when people seperate out one type of plant -- like monocropping or specimin exhibitions:

The plants don't do nearly as well as they would in a diverse environment. One of the reasons for this is space. If you look at a forest, you'll see that as much cubage as possible, up to the canopy, is taken up with living things. Everything fits together like a 3-D jigsaw puzzle. But most modern gardens are laid out like this:

It doesn't have to be laid out that way. You can be efficient AND lazy all at once. Permaculture helps us understand making use of multiple uses for one thing, as nature has been doing for a while now.  For instance: asparagus is a tall, feathery-leaved plant that will be happy in one spot for twenty or more years.  And it's obvious that you can plant around it because there's lots of space around it for most of the year when it's dormant. So interplant: the asparagus can get really tall and strawberries can cover the ground.

Now you've saved the trouble of weeding, watering, fertilizing, mulching, and worrying over two plots. Actually, the strawberries will shade out the weeds, so you're doing what a forest does: multiple uses, rising up into the air, with no room wasted.

This kind of philosophy works with all kinds of plants. Too hot for lettuce? Grow your beans on an incline (fence, sticks, whatever) to make dappled shade that the lettuce will love. Too cold for squash? Grow them on top of your compost pile -- the heat from the little beasties is perfect. Too wet for your garden? Stick in celery and asparagus, they love mucky ground, and will help dry up that corner of the garden.

Okay, this is what blew my mind when I first learned it. This type of permaculture-inspired philosophy works for all TYPES of agruiculture, too. Put flowers in the veggie garden so you'll get more pollinators, and so predators will hang out waiting to knock out an infestation of pests. Put a cuke vine up the side of the chicken pen, it will love the nitrogen and the chickens love cuke leaves. Annual planting throughout the year works just fine into winter, even in Maine, so when the beans come out, stick in cabbages:small plants will shade out the weeds just as you rip up the beans and the rotation of the crops confuses pests. Stick a permaculture kiwi vine overhead and plant annual herbs around the base. Let roses do their thing with their weird backward-facing thorns: they climb up fruit trees to deter raccoons. Multiple uses for any one thing means that the puzzle pieces can be fit together in multiple ways, and that means you can plan for as many uses as you can dream.

These theories, which lead to wide rows/beds, interplanting, multiple uses, and space stacking mean less work and more results.  Pardon me while I get a cool drink and footrest *eyebrow wiggle*. 

Fun Fact for this post: Some plants are 'meh' to each other. Some catfight while many grow better in close proximity.  Taking advantage of Companion Planting can increase yields, deter pests, increase nutritional value, and even make you sleep deeper at night.

Okay, not that last part. I was trying too hard, sorry. But the rest of it is true.

Ice Age 2

Okay, so Ice Age = cold. When the ice sheet retreated, the beginnings of today's agriculture started in the river valleys where Earthworms still lived: Tigris, Euphrates, Nile. It spread out into Europe, which used the quick turn-around of yearly cropping to grow enough food in the summer to live through the winter. This enabled farther and farther expansion into the colder latitudes. Yeay for yearly cropping.

What about agriculture in areas that don't get winter cold?

These places don't need to crop yearly. They can plant something delicate and it will last for years. This process retains soil and fertility better than yearly cropping if properly managed. It also requires less human work hours, because it uses natural cycles instead of fighting against them. This is permaculture gardening.

Here is what it can look like.

You've eaten plants that are permaculture candidates. Asparagus, rhubarb, artichokes, olive oil, fruits, nuts, and a bunch of others. Permaculture is less about how to work the soil than it is how to pay attention to what's going on around you, so that you can use existing processes to do the work for you.

Here's an example. There's a bunch of caterpillars, freshly hatched, chowing down on the Parsnip flowers. What to do, what to do? Well, there's a little nest of paper wasps I saw up on the eaves, and I do nothing. I watch. The very next day, there are many fewer caterpillars. There are none on the third day. They're all carved up and used by the paper wasps to make more paper wasps, which increases the pest-controlling ability of my garden with no effort on my part. Observation, education, judicious (in)action. Yeay!

Fun fact for this post: An acre of permaculture food forest can feed 10 people...

• A balanced diet
• Sustainably
• Forever
• Increasing the cloudcover (-global warming)
• Increasing the rainfall (-droughts)
• No petrochemicals needed

An acre of wheat produces enough calories to feed 4.8 people, and none of the above points are true of that acre. The fact is, permaculture ROCKS.

Ice ages & Earthworms

16,000 years ago. Whooh, that's a lot of ice. Looks cold.

In fact, it was so freakin' cold that the ground froze solid in many places, killing off the little things that lived in it. In Eurasia, the only places that did not experience that die-off were the deep river valleys: the Tigris, Euphrates, and Indus. Therefore, they still had worms. Lumbricus terrestris. Essential to agriculture. Worms are essentially self-propelled compost-makers. Little moving containers for great changes.  They break down plant and animal castoff faster than anything else, essential for the quick turnover one needs for annual plantings -- and it has to be broken down each year, because the cold, cold winter means everything hibernates and the soil must be ready for the next season's crop's demands. You can accurately gauge a garden's health by the number of worms in a shovel of soil.

So what about the rest of the world? Areas without worms?

The Americas did not have native soil-dwelling composters.  There were (and are) a lot of interesting types of worms, but nothing that were as insanely efficient at turning last year's garden into next year's garden.  That's part of the reason why the first European settlements did so poorly. The little earthworm cocoons (carried on boots, seeds, roots, etc) take time to establish. So things were a little hungry the first couple of years because the European’s standard annual-planting agriculture just didn’t have the foundation it needed.




Fun fact for this post: there are hundreds of different kinds of earthworms… perhaps thousands… and this has a really fun skit about their reproduction: Green Porno -- last tab on the right, GP #1  (It's a little tiny bit adult, but generally talks about the reproduction of bugs and other fascinating things.)

Chai

And now for something completely different: how I make chai. Whack together (clockwise from the top)fennel, nutmeg, alspice, star anise, cardamom, pepper, cloves, cinnamon and ginger... which didn't make it into the picture *shrug*.  The rest of it is all there.  I love nutmeg's pattern inside a clove, and star anise is just beautiful.

Make with the grinding.

Toss the entire mess over a flame with some butter to bloom the spices for at least 5 minutes, whacking it back and forth occasionally.  Try not to singe eyebrows when inhaling lovely fragrance. 

When you can't wait anymore, glug in some water.

Simmer it for as long as you can stand it -- 10 or 15 minutes at least.  If you want to make it caffeinated, tip in some leaves about 3 - 5 minutes before you think it's done.

Strain out the big bits and let the little ones settle to the bottom of the container.

Get around the marvelous stuff as quickly as possible.  I add cream and sweetner prior to snarfing.

Ya know, it took an entire mug to get me through this post?  I should go have another!

Fruit through the year

Hm.  Do you think I'll be too busy preserving in the Summer, what with Bananas, Grapes, Nectarines, Tangerines, berries, Peaches, Blueberries, Apricots and early Apples?

Yeah, me too.

Fun Fact: When you gotta put up fruit, be it jams, jellies, or preserves... it's always the hottest day of the week.  Never fails.  And now we know why.

Trees - siting

Here is the list of fruit trees, and where they'll be planted.

Back or side yard

1. Apple (Sweet, early & mid)
2. Apple (crosspollinator)
3. Apple (Sweet, mid & late)
4. Apple (crosspollinator)
5. Apple (Baking)
6. Apricot
7. Avocado
8. Avocado (crosspollinator)
9. Banana
10. Blackberries
11. Fig
12. Nectarine
13. Peach
14. Peach (crosspollinator)
15. Pear
16. Pear (crosspollinator)
17. Sweetie

Over the patio on latticework

1. Grape
2. Kiwi
3. Kiwi (crosspollinator)

Off the patio for cooking

1. Lemon
2. Blueberry
3. Blueberry (crosspollinator)

In the garden

1. Strawberries (with the asparagus)

One of the great things I like about Permaculture is the idea of solving many problems with one solution.  Heck, I hardly ever do anything for just one reason. Anyway, an example is:  we want to keep the vultures from swooping onto the patio.  So putting a cover over the patio would work, but even better would be to lattice these fruit vines overhead: shade when it's hot, protection, fruit, good use of space, and a warm sunny spot for tropical vines.  Also, how cool would it be to just reach up and snap off some grapes and kiwifruit?

The lemons and blueberries are good to group because they are different heights and would fit together well in a kind of four-cornered pyramid just off the patio.  And they're pretty and smell good.

Asparagus is tall and feathery and strawberries are low and solid.  So the strawberries will keep the weeds from being too obnoxious, shade the soil as a living mulch, and share a bed with the asparagus for a good use of space.

The back and side yards are planted with the big trees because there's quite a slope.  The trees' roots will help keep the soil in place and since we don't have to traipse into the orchard to gather fruit from any one tree but one month a year, a less-usable slope is a better place to put less-needy crops.  Those that need a lot of water will go at the bottom of the slope, and those that need warmer climates can be on the slope with some stones behind them -- both retaining wall and heat sink to help the trees.  Higher maintenance trees will go closer to the house.

Fun Fact for this post: most fruit trees are delicate lovely things, and most are grafted onto good hardy rootstock.  Sometimes other kinds of grafts are done as well, such as 'fruit salad' trees, which have many different varieties on one trunk.  This is how you get an apple and its cross-pollinator on the same trunk; peach, apricot, nectarine & plum trees all in one; cherry varieties on one trunk; or even pear & asian pears on one tree.

Trees: how many?

So let's talk trees.  Good idea to plant trees first, because the best time to plant new trees is always 5 or 20 years ago.  Fruit trees are lovely things, so many of those puppies do I need to plant? Oh, MATH. My favorite.  *eyeroll*  And lists! Lists are actually fun. Okay, partial redemption. Let's do this.


Around 30% of our fruit/veg consumption is fruit. So that's 400 lbs. Some fruit requires multiple trees to produce fruit, so let's list these puppies:

 

Type of plant / conservative avg annual yield per tree or 50 sq ft

1. Apple (Sweet, early & mid) / 50 lbs
2. Apple (crosspollinator) / 50 lbs
3. Apple (Sweet, mid & late) / 50 lbs
4. Apple (crosspollinator) / 50 lbs
5. Apple (Baking) / 50 lbs
6. Apricot /60 lbs
7. Avocado / 40 lbs
8. Avocado (crosspollinator) / 40 lbs
9. Banana / 20 lbs
10. Blackberries / 10 lbs
11. Blueberry / 20 lbs
12. Blueberry (crosspollinator) / 20 lbs
13. Fig / 20 lbs
14. Grape /30 lbs
15. Kiwi / 10 lbs
16. Kiwi (crosspollinator) / 10 lbs
17. Lemon /50 lbs
18. Nectarine / 50 lbs
19. Peach / 40 lbs
20. Peach (crosspollinator) /40 lbs
21. Pear / 40 lbs
22. Pear (crosspollinator) / 40 lbs
23. Strawberries / 15 lbs
24. Sweetie /60 lbs 

I'll forego the more esoteric fruit for now, cuz being overwhelmed is something I'm looking to avoid. For once.

 

ANYWAY. Right now that adds up to 865 lbs of fruit per season, which is a bit much, but that could be okay because either we'll be submerged in goodies which can be used to bribe the neighbors into tolerating us, or crop failures will lead to *ahem* learning opportunites.

 

Thank goodness the math bit is done. Now for the fun part! PLANNING. The different types of fruit will need different microclimates, care, and watering needs, so I'll need to think about siting... next time. All this math-type stuff has worn me out.

 

 

Fun Fact for this post: different trees have different depth of roots. So some trees bring up different kinds of nutrients, different amounts of water, and different erosion remediation capabilities.

Doom and Gloom VS da Shroom

Have you ever noticed that everything environmental is doom and gloom?  Every evening news has details of some new evil mankind is visiting upon the innocent fluffy earth creatures.  You can't watch the last half of a wildlife show without a big voiceover declaiming how much evil mankind is doing to (insert species here) and (species) will soon be dead, dead, dead.  There are even instances where journalists go on record with "I can't understand why the entire Western World is not up in arms about (my cause)!  It's awful!  It's terrible!  Why the apathy?"  Well, folks, it's because normal people are served up a daily diet of horrible pitiful things and you can't care 100% about them all... or even a few. 

Let's bring up good things, shall we?  Please?

Mushrooms are fantastic things.  Did you know they can fix oil spills?  Paul Stamets of Fungi Perfecti completely fixed a big ol' diesel spill that was in front of the Washington State Department of Transportation in 1998 (more info in his book Mycelium Running, p. 91).  There were four piles in total - one was innoculated with mushroom mycelium, one was treated with bacteria, another was treated with chemicals, and the other was a control pile.  Here's the dead toxic pile:

The Mycelium (mushroom roots) were very happy with these environments and sprouted big ol mushrooms.

Even after cleaning up the oil, the mycelium (mushroom roots) are so good at changing the chemical components that their mushrooms are perfectly edible and safe.  In 6 weeks, the soil went from 20,000ppm of hydrocarbons to less than 200ppm and the mycelium kick-started an ecosystem. 

And it gets cooler: when oil is spilled on the high seas, like the Cosco-Busan spill in SF Bay, Phil McCrory found that human hair's unparalleled ability to hold oil can be harnessed to remove the oil and take it to a place it can be composted.  Here are some great pictures from a study which used hairmats and used motor oil.  Bleackh, that stuff is nasty.  Here is the process, from Matter Of Trust:

Part I: "You shampoo your hair because it gets greasy. Hair is very efficient at collecting oil out of the air, off surfaces like your skin and out of the water, even petroleum oil. Hair is adsorbent (as in "clings to" unlike absorbent which is to "soak up.") There are over 320,000 hair salons in the US and each collects about 1 pound of hair a day. Right now, most of that goes into the waste stream, but it should all be made into hair mats." Phil McCrory, inventor and barber.

Part II: Fungus (mushrooms):

"The roots of mushrooms, called mycelium (http://www.fungi.com/info/sems/index.html), produce enzymes that unlock wood fibers, which are composed of strings of carbon-hydrogen molecules in the form of cellulose and lignin. Similarly oil and most petroleum products are held together by similar molecular bonds. This studies if mushroom mycelium breaks these bonds, and then re-constructs the oil into carbohydrates, fungal sugars, that make up the mushroom's physical structures." Paul Stamets, Fungi.com

Once the mushrooms have had their oily feast, the whole thing is composted. Different methods are being trialed to find the most effective. The last step is vermicomposting everything -- worms are amazing remediators and can break down anything.  No wonder Darwin devoted the last book of his works to them. The excess human hair swept off barbershop floors and toxic petroleum are transformed by oil-munching oyster mushrooms and hardworking worms to become lovely sweet compost.

How cool is that.


Fun Fact for this post: The oldest mushrooms found in amber at 90 to 95 million years old.

Weekend Vistas

This is the front yard, looking northish.  Once the trees come down and are used for other good things, this is where the chook run and beds will be. You can see that the big half-circle in front of the porch is domed, and that the slope on the far side runs downward.  That's why the beds are angled: to catch as much runoff as possible.  Remember, we get no rain for 8 months of the year out here, so water is precious.

Fun Fact for this post: it's easier to replace an annoying weed with one you like (and therefore won't consider a weed).  Instead of nettle, parsley begins to take over, and around here the persistant weed Oxalis will hopefully be replaced with the tuber Oca... same family, much tastier.

Math: On second thought....

Well, all that math was correct, but perhaps the premises were wrong.

From that post: the average person in the US consumes about 322 lbs of vegetables & soft fruit annually, and 200 sq feet can yield over 300 lb of veg & soft fruit over a 4 to 6-month growing season at intermediate Grow Biointensive yields.


Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, we have year-round growing.  Winter vegetables produce much less yield per square foot than summer veg, so it's not exactly a doubling of the numbers.  Instead of 300 lb /4 - 6 months, let's call it 500 lb / 12 months.  And this math says:

1050 lbs/year for the three of us, minus fruit tree yield = about 900 lbs/year for the 3 of us.
So if 200 sq feet yields 500 lbs/year, then I'll need to aim for 400 sq feet for a thousand pounds a year, giving 100 lbs extra as herbs, pest damage and insurance. If the beds are laid out in 100 sq ft each, that means 4 beds.

Four beds.  Not six.  See, I was wondering about that.  Robert Kourik, in his EXCELLENT work Designing and Maintaining your Edible Landscape Naturally "It takes an exceptional person, or special circumstances, to make a success of a landscape that is bigger than 1.200 sq ft and almost 100% edible."  He says that a couple almost never uses more than 300 sq ft, and frequently scales back to 150.  Later he puts in bits about starting small, with 100 sq ft, and that a family of four might eventually like 600 sq feet.  Hm.  Sounds kinda contradictory, but the reasons are explained in context. 

So I guess my best plan is to prep for 6 beds, be prepared to stop at 4 or so if necessary, and just put potatoes wherever there is extra room.  And garlic.  And asparagus.  Ooo!  Blueberries!  Not sure what you'd make with blueberries, asparagus, garlic and potatoes, but there's gotta be something because those are my favorite veg (for today).


Fun Fact for this post: winter veggies have good defenses against freezing: they create sugars. So a good hard frost will make your winter veggies much sweeter.  This is why ugly artichokes with black bits and skin hangin' off are so much more tasty than their pretty but bland and bitter brethren.

Garden building steps

Well, this is the master plan. Pardon me while I stare at it for hours.

Fun Fact for this post: an underground apron of concrete is the only thing we've found which keeps digging gophers and raccoons permanently out of the maters. 

Fish!

Hey, look!  Fish.

I love the fish under the Japanese tea-house in SF Golden Gate Park.  Couldn't resist adding the fish widget.


Fun Fact: Koi are traditionally sold by the inch.

Math: bed space needed

I honestly did not think that word problems would ever come back into my life. Dude.

From the last post: the average person in the US consumes about 322 lbs of vegetables & soft fruit annually, and 200 sq feet can yield over 300 lb of veg & soft fruit over a 4 to 6-month growing season at intermediate Grow Biointensive yields.

So if my family is 3 people who love vegetables and fruit, we can call it 350 lbs per person per year. Which is 1050 lbs/year. Let's call 1/5 - 1/4 of it fruit from trees and ignore that bit, because trees come later... so about 800 lbs/year. So if 200 sq feet grows 300 lbs/year, then I'll need to aim for 600 sq feet, giving 100 sq ft extra as herbs, pest damage and insurance. If the beds are laid out in 100 sq ft each, that means 6 beds.

Whooh.



Wanna see our front yard? With six beds? (Dude, 6 beds.)

I think I'll start with just one, thankyouverymuch. Starting small in gardening is the key to success. Or at least less pulled muscles.

Fun Fact for this post: Eggs from chickens which forage have deep orange yolks and generally better nutritional value than chickens from feed. And did you know that chickens are omnivorous? I once saw one eat a mouse! The little dangly tail out of the chicken's beak was delightfully ghastly. Riveting!

Bed Types

One of the main reasons to make skinny raised beds is to keep size-9 gardening clogs out of the soil. Stepping on fluffy soil you've slaved over is kinda painful.

Really good-for-plants soil is half dirt and half pore space between the soil particles. Little bugs, from worms to little single-celled beasties, tunnel through the soil in the course of their day, enriching the soil and doing about a million little jobs. This "Microherd" is essential to soil's ability to nurture healthy plants (we'll get into the 'how' later). Pore space is both the result of and essential to this microherd's wellbeing.

There are a bunch of different types of beds. Flat beds are easiest to put together, but they stay cold longer, are prone to flooding and can be easily stepped on -- crushing pore space and microherd. Overall, flat beds are a great reduction in warmth and therefore planting time. Here in the Bay Area, that might not be such a horrible thing because we don't get snow... but then again tomatoes and melons are lovely and need lots of heat.

Okay, okay, and I really like showing off tomatoes in May. *smug smile*


Raised Beds with curved sides work well, though they do erode and shed water like any slope. The curved sides can be formed with pipe, hands, or whatever you like.


Bermed Beds, from French Biointensive (French market gardens) have the sides planted so there is less erosion and water runoff. The sides are usually planted with lettuces and other small things.


Raised edged beds are more... well... neat. They are also more expensive. I once visited a set of raised beds that was beautifully edged with white-barked tree limbs, arranged around a diamond-shaped herb bed, with the paths laid out in orange-pink Arizona sandstone. The whole setup was breathtaking. Also, those tree branches were perfect place for snails to breed. So don't think that raised beds solve all problems.

But I likes 'em.



Fun Fact for this post: the average person in the US consumes about 322 lbs of veg & soft fruit annually, and 200 sq feet can yield over 300 lb of veg & soft fruit over a 4 to 6-month growing season at intermediate Grow Biointensive yields.

Agriculture Philosophies

While we're waiting for the glacial bank to get back to us, I thought I'd put down how I see the different approaches to growing food.

Originally, 'organic' meant more than just 'no scary pesticides'. It was allowed to be regulated by the US government and the boundaries were, in my opinion, constricted and calcified. It's illegal for me to criticize food production in many states, which is ridiculous, but if this is organic then there's a problem.

I like SOLE better. Sustainable, Organic, Local, Ethical:

• Continually replenishes what is used
• incorporates organic methods
• is not shuttled so far that each calorie costs more in petroleum than the actual food value
• treats all aspects and beings in the process ethically

Here's a quick graph categorizing different approaches and growing models.

Beds or wide rows are rarely more than 4 feet wide, because that's how far into a bed you can reach from either side. Against fences or walls they are sometimes 2 feet wide, and of course they can be narrower depending on available space, asthetics, and whim.

Rows are the legacy of machinery running across fields; they need clear paths for the tires. (Don't ask me why backyards are planted in rows, I have no idea how that translated.)

Organic was a good idea in Rodale's time, and its wholesale introduction into the neighborhood store is excellent. SOLE is the soul (sorry) of the original philosophy.

My experiments won't be touching monoculture or row gardening, but the rest of the bubbles have a fair chance of being included. I'll be doing my best to be all SOLE about it, and while I think that raised beds are my best chance, there are a lot of different options... ah, the experiments begin to lay themselves out.

Fun Fact: It helps to make beds 4 feet wide by 25 feet long, or thereabouts, because amendment amounts are usually given for 100 square feet.

Howdy!

I'm a native crazy Californian, and can prove the 'crazy' part by wanting to garden in a place that has absolutely no rain for 8 months of the year. I'm also a fan of the scientific method.

The recent interest in food and growing it is very cheering, but every method claims to be 'the best'. So which is? Let's find out. I want to test some of the 'new' inventions, methods and processes that have cropped up over the last few years. My family and I will be moving onto a piece of land in the East Bay and I get to dirty up my fingernails -- yeay!

Here is a list of some of the things I'll be testing:

• Bed construction: flat, bermed, raised
• Planting methods: french intensive, biointensive, square foot
• Winter: cover cropping, heavy mulch, winter crops
• Mulch: deep, light, plastic
• Bed building: lasagna, hugelkulture, delivered compost, sheet composting
• Integration: chickens on beds, beds away from chickens, beds downstream of chickens
• Permaculture methods
• Mushroom integration
• Effectiveness of amendments such as Terra Preta

Feel free to let me know along the way if there's another method you'd like to see trialed. In the meantime, please cross your fingers because the bank has not yet accepted our offer and we've been on pins and needles for weeks.

Fun Fact for this post: Almost every bee you will ever see are female. There are very few male bees, and they only come out for mating flights and then die. Workers, soldiers and of course the Queens are all ladies. No wonder they know how to dance!