Permaculture and Chicken Scratch---Stacked Poly-Alley-Guilds

So it turns out that the 10 pounds of tomatoes I told you about last time was really 29 pounds of tomatoes.  It seems I suck at estimation.  Since then, I have been pulling in anywhere from 10-20 pounds every other day and it's been busy.  I've spent many hours in the kitchen canning and freezing said tomatoes, along with pounds of whatever else the garden is providing.  I bought more jars, and  I have used almost all of them already.  It seems that the 3000 square foot mark for garden space is pretty close to where I want to be.  I have yet to run the numbers, but at a glance, with the extra square feet added by the front garden, this year's yields should come in much higher than last year's.  It's looking good so far, which is lovely, since this was not the best garden year, weather-wise.

Albert is also looking good.

But will I stop there?  Nah.  With the rising cost of everything, the stagnation of salaries, and the possibility of big time economic problems (to put it politely) on the horizon, 3000 square feet is not enough, and it's time to expand again.  I have a family to feed, you know.  :)  Now as you know, we have a nice little chunk of land, but not much of it is actually cleared.  I'm loath to clear any more, truthfully, because it's just so damn nice, plus, in practicality, a lot of it is wet, and is better suited to grazing animals, like the goats or some pigs. Plus free firewood, how can you go wrong??  The area that is cleared is pretty much the best area for growing food on this piece, so I have to make the most of it.

To do that, I looked to a few more principles of permaculture--those of alley cropping, polycultures and guilds.  Polycultures are nothing more than an area where several different crop types are grown in one space.  They are the direct opposite of what is practiced in large scale in this country--monoculture-- or as I like to call it "Corn, corn, as far as the eye can see, and not a bit of it edible".  Any person who has grown a garden of any size has practiced polyculture, unless all they did was say, grow tomatoes or beans and that was it.  But does anyone really do that?  No, so polycultures are not a foreign idea to anyone, I would think.  The benefits are many, including the fact that if the year is a bad one for say, eggplant (which this one was in my garden), and all you planted was eggplant, then you'd starve (you'd probably starve anyway, since eggplant has very little nutritional value, but you get my drift).  But if you planted many other things besides eggplant, then when the eggplant fails, it sucks, but you still have other things to eat.  Ta da!  It's a good system. 

So ok, I already practice polyculture, and I know you all do too.  So let's look at some other ideas, such as alley cropping and guilds.  Both of these principles center around fruit trees, generally, and I happen to have some fruit trees.  Kismet!

This is a shot of the orchard area, earlier this year.  As you can see, and is the fact of almost all orchards, it's a bunch of fruit trees in a sea of grass.  Basically, and especially when the trees are young like mine are, it's a huge waste of space, when space is at a premium.  Now I did attempt to use a couple of plots in here this year, but they failed miserably because I didn't keep up with the weeding.  My bad.  All in all, I didn't use the space effectively.  However, what you can see in this picture is alley cropping--using the space between the trees to grow another crop.  Brilliant!  Had it worked, it would have been a very good use of otherwise unused space. 

So establishing that the principle of alley cropping is sound, and knowing that I need more space, I sought to create an area in this space that would allow me to use the land much more effectively.  Honestly, I was stuck.  The grass is so pervasive, and the soil here is pretty bad, so it was really vexing to think of how to do what I wanted to do without fighting a continuous battle.  Luckily, my parents used to have a vegetable garden, full of raised beds.  And they were no longer using it and were going to take it down.  And because I love stuff people are getting rid of, I bartered that I would take it all apart, if I could have it.  They agreed.  After several hours of hard work, I took apart the boxes they had, loaded them into my car (and my dad's truck), and brought them home to reassemble.  And now the orchard, which looked like the above, now looks like this:

 

Complete with fatty, fatty broilers

 

 

I have no idea how much space I have added.  I actually have to measure today, so I can start planning for next year's garden, so I'll let you know.  But it is a use of the space that would not have been used, and better yet, it's all in neat boxes, which I like because I am so compulsive about that sort of thing.

The large, currently tarped areas are being solarized.  They will be where I plant the hugely vining things, like the pumpkins and winter squash and melons.  When in the garden, these plants eat the planet and severely limit my space to grow things in doing so.  Out in these long runs, they can do as they please and not effect the other plants around them.  The boxes?  Well, I haven't really decided what to plant where yet, but they will be the annuals we all know and love.  Honestly, I will probably use a good number of them for potatoes and garlic and things that need to grow down.   The hard clayey soil here is not really friendly to things that like to grow down around here.  I'll let you know what I decide!

The last principle that could be practiced here is the concept of guilds.  Guilds are a group of different plants, growing together, that benefit one another as well as us.  The above pics are not of a true guild, though I have in mind some ways to make it so.  Potatoes will probably not benefit the fruit trees in any way, whereas if I planted some flowering somethings to attract pollinators, that would benefit the fruit trees, and the fruit trees would, in turn, benefit them.  This area, as I need to intensely cultivate it for our food, is not for that.  Instead I have set up a "test guild" area here:

 

I planted two additional fruit trees, a peach and an apple.  I placed a tiered bed (from my parents' house) in the center.  I will grow strawberries in here.  Around that bed, and around the fruit trees, I will be planting lower fruiting bushes, herbs, and ground covers that will boost the productivity of all (hopefully).  On the flip side, this area is one of runoff from the gutters.  Though we do catch a good amount of the rain water, we never catch it all, and it goes off into this area here.  I have been working this year to stop this, or at least slow it down, but it's been tough going.  The plants here will be able to catch the water, benefit from it, and hopefully make the area less soggy for us.  And in setting up this area, I am stacking functions, another permaculture principle (go me!).  If it works, this will be a win-win situation.  I hope it works.

Truly all these principles can work together to make areas run as a unified whole.  Though I really do like things in their "proper" places, I am really interested to see how a cacophony of plants do together.  Will they work together?  Will it be productive (most important)?  Or will it become an untamed jungle that I can't stand looking at, much less working in (my biggest fear)?  Only time will tell, my friends.  I think we'll all see together!

Permaculture and Chicken Scratch--Holons

Hello friends!  It's a rainy day today, so I find myself with a little bit of time to luckily write this next post.  First, though, I just want to mention that this is my 400th post.  Apparently I have a lot to say.  But seriously, I want to thank each and every one of you who come around here to visit me and to tell you how much it means.  I started this blog for myself, to remind myself of what happened here and when.  I didn't think I would meet such nice people along the way.  So thank you all from the bottom of my heart!  It's been a pleasure to know you all, it really has.

Now back to our regularly scheduled post.

Back in the first post I wrote about permaculture, I mentioned a concept called holons.  I love this idea, I really do.  It's probably because I like to segment things into their "proper" boxes, you could say, and then, after they're all neat and tidy, figure out what to do with them.  Thinking of the animals and gardens and such as separate entities in a way helps me to look at them and see how to use them better.  Especially because not a one of the things that goes on here is truly separate.  Everything at Chicken Scratch is part of the whole.  But looking at them in this light helps me to see a pattern and then tweak it if need be.

A couple of you commented the last time on how you would have one of the "sections" of your homestead relate to the other, ie: by composting with your chickens.  Yes, a lot of things like that go on here as well.  But to think it through was a bit overwhelming.  I couldn't really envision how the systems related, so I couldn't see where the "holes" were.  So I sat down and drew a diagram.

Click on this diagram---if you dare!  :)

Ok, Visio drew the diagram, but you get my drift.  Basically, I sat down and put the different holons on the diagram in relation to where they are in the yard and then drew a bunch of arrows.  First thing I noticed?  We have a LOT of different systems going on here.  Second thing I noticed?  That it looked a lot like a web, and most holons had arrows that were reciprocal, meaning that if there was an input to that system, there was also a useable output.  But it was difficult to see which holons needed the most of my input, and which needed the least.  So I tried again.

And that helped a bit, though the arrows get a bit confusing.  What I was trying to represent was all the ways that each holon here relates to the others.  The system is complicated, no matter how you slice it.  The one common factor? If I don't run it, it doesn't get run.  And that most holons contributed to at least one other holon in the system.  The other thing was that I could then clearly see which holons needed me the most, and which needed me the least. The second diagram really shows it.  The first arc of orangey things are the holons I visit most often (it's in an arc just because it didn't all fit on the page).  The second line are the things I visit less, and the third, least of all.  I did not include the woods, even though it would count and should have a place--probably with the bees.  We'll have to just pretend it's there.

This was how this broke down:

1. Dairy goats
1. Input from me; feed, hay, water, shelter, care, scritching (very important).
2. Output from them; milk for us (myself and family), manure for vegetable gardens and perennial gardens. Potentially also manure for berries and fruit trees, but I haven't used it that way yet.
2. Waterfowl
1. Input; shelter, feed, water
2. Output; eggs for us, manure for gardens and potentially orchard/berries.  Unnoted output: protection for free-ranging hens and ducks.
3. Layers
1. Input; shelter, feed, water
2. Output; eggs for us, manure for gardens and potentially orchard/berries.
4. Fiber Rabbits
1. Input; shelter, feed, water
2. Output; manure for the chickens (I know, but they like it), manure for the gardens, waste feed for the chickens, and fiber for us.
5. Large Vegetable Garden/Small Vegetable Garden
1. Input: animal manures from layers, waterfowl, goats, backyard rabbits, fiber rabbits, broilers, and broodies, seed, water, compost, time, protection
2. Output: food for us (hard to argue with that one), compost materials, waste food for animals
6. Backyard Rabbits
1. Input; shelter, feed, water
2. Output; manures for gardens
7. Perennial Garden
1. Input; time weeding, plants, seeds, composts, manures
2. Output; flowers to attract pollinators
8. Orchard/Berries
1. Input: composts, manures, time weeding
2. Output: food for us, compost materials
9. Broody House
1. Input; shelter, feed, water
2. Output; reliable source for egg hatching naturally ( I don't know about you, but my layers are idiots and forget which nest they were sitting on almost constantly. Silkies always remember), eggs for us
10. Broilers
1. Input; shelter, food, water
2. Output; food for us, manure for gardens
11. Bees:
1. Input; shelter, food (if necessary)
2. Output; honey for us, pollination for gardens

***Note that I did not count time as an input unless it was more time than everything else needed.  Time is an input everything needs.  It got silly writing it over and over.

Whew!  Once I had put that down, I saw the slackers:  the backyard rabbits, the broody house, and the perennial garden.  I don't like slackers.  So I had to think about whether all the inputs that those holons receive was really worth the outputs they produce.  I first concluded that the broodies are earning their keep.  As the price of shipping chicks goes up and up and up, it's becoming too expensive to do. Therefore I need a reliable method of hatching my own fertile eggs (well, not mine specifically, but you know what I mean), since my layers cannot be counted on.  I do own an incubator.  Or two.  But that would require an additional input of electricity, whose price goes up and up and up.  The broodies will need to be fed whether or not I use the incubator, causing the whole process of hatching eggs to cost more.  Therefore, the broodies are cheaper in the long run.  So yes, though at first blush they seem to be slackers, they are not.

The backyard rabbits are another issue.  Feed costs money, they take time.  They produce manure, but since bringing in the fiber rabbits, who do the same thing and yet also produce saleable or useable fiber, they're sort of redundant.  So at this point it's a question of do I keep them and keep on keeping on because it's only 3 rabbits?  Or do I sell them and gain a bit more time in my day and less feed used?  I have not been able to answer that one yet, because it's not so simple as black and white.  But I do recognize that it's something I need to address at some time, probably soon.  If the price of feed continues to rise, that will probably decide for me.

The last slacker?  The perennial garden.  Basically it does nothing but look pretty.  Is that enough?  Yes, actually, I think it is for now.  The garden does not demand feeding or new plantings, if I do that, it's up to me--it needs weeding and mulching to keep it looking nice.  In return, it's beautiful to look at and attracts bugs, bees and birds that then hang around and pollinate things when they visit, and not just the plants in the perennial garden.  This is an example of another sort of intangible output, much like the broody house (or the bees, whose pollination efforts benefit me both directly as honey and indirectly as fruit set).   However, I can "up" the productivity of this garden by snuggling in edibles or herbs.  This is something I will be doing in the next year, that I can tell.

It took a long time to get through that, but one of the first principles of permaculture is observation.  It means for you to see the land and the systems at place within it.  There are many natural systems on this property I still need to look at, but the like it or not, I put all these systems here, and I needed to see how they were working (or not working) first.  Now I know.  My advice you to, my friends, in this time of economic stupidity and climatic crisis that we are in, is to sit on down with a piece of paper and a pencil and draw yourself a diagram like I did. See how your processes lie.  See who contributes what to whom and how.  Find the weak points.  Decide what to do with them. As money gets tighter, it's harder to throw around at things that just don't work.  That's something I am learning.  We start at the beginning by looking and deciding.  Then we'll take action.  Before you know it, we'll be rockin'!

Agree with me?  Am I off my rocker?  Talk to me.  Let me know what you think.  If it takes me a while to comment, I apologize--summer is busy.  I will get back to you, though.  That I promise!

Permaculture and Chicken Scratch

It all starts with "I've been reading...".  Those words are always trouble.  I read, and get all these ideas, and try them.  Not necessarily a bad thing, overall.  But it always means more work.

This time, though, it's meant a lot of thinking.  I recently read Gaia's Garden by Toby Hemenway and came away with lots of ideas.  Actually, I should say that I re-read it.  Years ago, I read it and dismissed it out of hand.  At the time, I was a suburban gardener, and though I had a small plot of vegetables, we had a lot of lawn, and a whole buncha flower beds.  Now..there is nothing wrong with flowers--I love flowers.  But you can't eat them.  And at the time, I thought of the flower beds and the vegetable beds as two very separate things.  And so they remained.  But now of course, things are very different for me, and I work the land as a whole.  Yes, I have flower beds and vegetable beds and they are separate, but I am trying to understand how they relate.  This is why, I think, when I picked this book up for a second time, I started to see the picture I didn't see before.

In a nutshell, Gaia's Garden is about permaculture.  Permaculture is an idea, I believe, that started in Australia, when a man named Sepp Holzer and a number of other very smart down-underers looked around at their wasteful society that farmed completely idiotically, said "This is stupid", and decided not to participate.  Instead what they decided to do was to go the opposite way, stop wasting everything, and start to create landscapes that worked with the earth, instead of against it.  Seems as though Australia has the same problem we do.  We (as a culture) throw out everything, and farm in a way that's not only non-sustainable, but is horribly damaging as well.  Essentially what permaculture is about, to my understanding, is to work the land the way nature would do it, but in a way that is beneficial to you; i.e. you get food from it.  It's a holistic viewpoint that nurtures the growth of plants instead of forcing the growth of plants.  And it does the nurturing by putting back in the earth just as much as it takes out.  It takes things that would seem to not be related and relates them and has them work together.  It's a very interesting idea. 

For me, I combine this with another idea, the idea of holons.  As you know, housing has always been a problem here at Chicken Scratch, because with the exception of the house for us, there was nothing here.  Na-da.  We fixed this problem by building and building, and now we've got a whole bunch of little houses for everyone.  Twelve, actually.  Twelve buildings, some little, some big-ish on this land, and it looks like a little village.

I'm not complaining.  I love the little village that we put here, and I think it's wonderful.  We built as the animals arrived and we had the money, and that's what worked for us.  It also gives me the unique problem of making all those little buildings and their very separate occupants work together.  When I had heard the idea of holons, I immediately knew that it applied to us.  Basically, all the buildings (and their occupants) on this land are separate, and yet still part of a whole.  So there's a duck holon, a goat holon, a chicken holon, and so on.  They are all different, with different needs and producing different things, but are part of the whole which is our homestead (and the homestead itself would be a holon, and that of the community, but I'm not going that far).  In truth, the different buildings that we have actually made it easier to see this, as I intentionally have to go between the areas from one animal to another.  So really the idea was beating me over the head the whole time, I just didn't see it!

What permaculture strives for is to make all the systems' inputs and outputs work together so that everything that is produced is used somewhere else.  This goes not only for the products of your work, but also for the waste products of your work.  Perfect example:  your chickens.  Your input to your chickens is the feed you give them.  The output the chickens produce are three things:  One is eggs.  We keep chickens so we can eat eggs.  Another is meat.  We keep chickens so we can eat meat.  But the chickens, in their work producing the eggs and meat, also produce waste.  They poop.  If we're stupid, we take the waste and throw it in a black bag and let the garbage man haul it away.  We've then broken the system.  If we're smart, we take the waste and throw it in the compost pile or on a fallow bed and let it go back to the earth it came from, thereby putting back the nutrients the chickens took from the earth to nourish themselves.  Permaculture.  See?  Can we go further with this idea?  Oh yeah.  And I will.  But not today.

Today I want to leave you with the few points that have been have really required my brain to churn.  Call me a slow learner if you will, but these things went against everything I had learned about gardening before.  No, I have no idea where I learned these things, but now I need to unlearn them, and it's not the easiest thing.  So the points I have been mulling lately are these:

• The earth likes to be kept busy, and therefore bare earth will never stay bare for long.  Basically, this tells me that my ritual of "putting the garden to bed" every fall was wrong, wrong, wrong.  Earth is like the kid that won't go to sleep.  It likes to have something to do.  Cover cropping, anyone?  Or how about growing on through the winter?  Anyone like that idea?  I know I do.

• Related to the above point, rows of vegetables with nothing but earth in between is not the best way to grow things.  Why?  Because Mother Nature isn't going to leave that earth bare.  Nature abhors a vacuum, and she'll fill it in with something.  Most likely it'll be weeds that you don't want, and then out comes the Round Up.  Don't use Round Up folks, it's bad,  horrible news.  Keep your earth covered.  Mulch, mulch, mulch.  (I will draw aside here and say I knew about the mulch, and I mulch everything I can get my hands on.  And I don't grow in rows.  But I do love looking at other people's rows--I think they are the prettiest, tidiest things and I love to look at them so, so much.  I have row envy.  There I've said it.  Think what you will of me.)Beds, which are what I use, are only slightly better.  The ground is covered better, and there are better yields in a smaller amount of space, which suits me well, since most of my property is wooded.  But in both of these methods the plants are all segregated--beans here, corn here, squash here, and so on.  It would be better yet to do companion planting, or even better (according to permaculture principles) to plant in guilds.  Guilds are like companion plantings on steroids, when all the plants are all willy-nilly and different and helping each other out to grow better.  I have a LOT of trouble with this principle.  I like things kept separate in the garden--it's so much neater.  Permaculturists call this use of many guilds a "food forest".  It sounds lovely, but I don't know if I'll ever get there.  Too much willy-nilly-ness for me.

• Nutrients UNDER the roots of a plant are better than nutrients ABOVE the roots of the plant.  This one I learned this season, and I'm still trying to wrap my head around it.  The garden in the front is a "lasagna" garden, basically a bunch of crap like dry leaves and grass and rabbit and chicken poo formed up into some sort of bed shapes on top of my front lawn with some topsoil on top (because I was going to use the beds immediately--if I was not, I could have waited a season for the stuff to break down, or if I was really brave, just planted in the stuff right then and there-however, I think we've already established that I'm not that brave.) and that garden is kicking the ass of the garden in back, which is a tilled garden with enriched soil.  Never mind that the back garden is three years old and has been enriched for all three years consistently.  The front garden is miles ahead of the back one.  MILES. 
• Now you'd think this idea would be a duh, right?  After all, roots grow down, not up, so nutrients under them would be more quickly accessible to the roots as they grew down, instead of waiting for the nutrients to filter down from above.  Yeah, you would think that.  But I am so programmed to planting in "dirt", you know, the brown crumbly stuff?  Yeah, that.  I was so set to be planting in "dirt", that planting in leaves and rabbit poo and straw felt completely freaky and I expected it to fail spectacularly.  It has not.  More the fool I. 
• As a side note, I recently watched the film Back to Eden, and though I had some trouble with all of the narrator's views (he is very religious, and I am not, but there is room on this earth for all of us), he grows in what is basically wood chips-successfully.  No "dirt" to be found.  If you are interested, I would say check it out.  It proves the point above quite well. 

I have a way to go yet.  There is still a lot to think over, and the concept is big and chewy and my brain has to work on it.  So I guess it'll come along slowly for me.  But how about you?  Have you any ideas about permaculture?  Do you implement any of the principles?  Is there anything you want to talk about?  Let me know and we'll talk about it.  Maybe we can all figure it out together, no?  I think the world would be a better place if we did, so let's give it a shot.

'Till next time, I'll be ponderin',