Bioneer Talk this weekend: Suburban Permaculture

This Saturday I am honored to be a part of a 3 person panel at Madison’s Bringing Bioneers to Wisconsin conference that will be focused on “Beyond Backyard Bioneering”.  My fellow panelists and I will be attempting to give some ideas to the attendees wishing to move beyond gardening, composting, and driving a hybrid.   I will have the suburban side, and the urban sustainablitlity will be covered by James Godsil of Sweet Water Organics, a new Urban Agriculture enterprise in Milwaukee that is attempting to take Will Allen’s aquaponic principles and scale them up to a commercial size using an abandonded warehouse.  Awesome!  Covering more rural solutions will be Chamomile Nusz of Artha Sustainable Living Center – an incredible diverse and interesting farm that houses gardens, a B&B, and is a training facility for the MREA for renewable energy technologies.  Heady company indeed!

 

Our tabula rasa also came completely devoid of soil life.

I was asked to talk about the transformation that we are working on here in our little piece of HOA paradise.  We are heading into our 6th year here and I must say it has been rather fun to go back through the posts from the early years, reliving my first reading of Gaia’s Garden and my growing understanding on how to build soils and start permaculture, but most of all it is healthy to remind oneself on just how far we’ve come in so little time.  The picture at left was taken the week we moved in – almost exactly 5 years ago.  The “soil” was in a wretched state – no topsoil, and so little microbial life that barely even weeds could grow.  It is amazing looking back to think that within 3 yeas I was harvesting 500#’s of food from this desolation.  And it is that story that I will be telling and teaching on Saturday.

 

 

When we moved in, the guilt of literally being Urban Sprawl weighed very heavily on me, and over that first winter I read David Holmgren’s Permaculture: Principles and Pathways.  In the introduction Holmgren said something that grew into a stark commitment for me: that the suburban landscape that we on the environmental left so often lament, is actually one of our greatest resources.  In no other time have so many people owned land – fertile, irrigated, arable land.  In true Permaculture style, Holmgren was challenging us to take the “problem” of Suburbia and turn it into the Solution.   Thus my quest to push our property’s productivity.

The project has had some simple guidelines.  First, it was to be “normal” – no rows of corn in the front yard.  In fact, due to our being in an HOA, the front yard was mostly off limits and even out back the edible landscape needed to conform somewhat to normal suburban aesthetics.  Secondly, as we had small children and rather large dogs we decided to leave more than a bit of lawn.  In fact over half the backyard was given over to the playground and grass for frolicking.  That left about 4500 sq ft for our little experiment.

24" corn.... guess we'd better start composting!

We started with 2 raised beds, about 80 sq ft each and discovered very quickly just how depelted our soils really were.  Even with 4″ of store bought soil amendments, our corn was a whopping 24″ tall the first season back in 2005.  This was when I really started to dig into fertility management and started to read books like Gaia’s Garden which taught me about the soil food web.  Up went our compost bin, but with no trees or landscaping, there wasn’t much to put in it so we talked to our local coffee shop and have been composting 100#s of their slop a week for the past 4.5 years– that’s about 12 tons of organic matter that dodged the dump and is now living a new life under our gardens.  With adding not only that organic matter, but more importantly the microbial life from the compost the stage was set for me to begin putting my growing knowledge of temperate permaculture into practice.  We planted a small 500 sq ft garden of prairie plants, and 80′ of fence line went into red clover.  I went to the local nurseries and paid attention to what flowering plants the pollinators were swarming, and then bought them by the dozen.  In went nitrogen fixing shrubs and mulch making plants like Russian Comfrey.

"Pop" goes the garden. In just 2 years we can now grow 7' corn without supplemental fertilizing.

By the end of our third year the garden was beginning to “pop”.  The soil was becoming richer and we could now actually find a worm or two when transplanting.   Our harvests were finally coming in – the raspberries and strawberries were producing and we were now up to 4 vegetable beds.  We had built 2 rain gardens and were considering putting in larger, more permanent plantings like a small permaculture orchard.  In 2007 our total harvest from those 4 beds with the 2 additional beds of small fruit netted us an impressive 500#’s of harvest – from about 500 sq ft– and even began to sell produce to the coffee shop that we got the slop from forming a nice resource circle.

The next year, 2008, we decided to try our hands at Market Gardening, growing potatoes, tomatoes, lettuce, spinach, and peppers at a permaculture designed farm 10 miles north of our home.   This was fantastically successful at not only allowing us to grow 1500#s of potatoes, but also at completely burning me out.  I found it very hard to divert my attention between the two projects and our home gardens suffered.  Still, the addition of 5 fruit tree guilds to the 2 in front and 3 more vegetable beds at home meant that our harvest was still increasing – this time to about 750#.

Current readers will be fairly abreast of our current situation.  In 2009 we continued to expand our Market Garden – this year harvesting about 2500#’s of potatoes and another several hundred pounds of tomatoes despite the blight.   The home gardens were mostly on hold with no significant plantings other than a massive expansion in our compost crops (60 comfrey plants) and the addition of several black locust trees.

 

From desolation to this in 4 years. The power of partnering with Nature!

After 5 years we now have 7 annual vegetable beds with more than a foot of rich topsoil, 7 fruit tree guilds deeply mulched with vibrant soil food webs, and with the exception of quack grass weeding, very little maintenance needs.  This year we took our first harvests from the orchard – with both our peach trees producing, and two of our pears as well.  All told we now have 11 kinds of fruit from the exotic hardy kiwis and paw-paw to the typical strawberries and raspberries.  We have harvests from mid March’s spinach through to the last green sorrel of fall, and the potatoes and garlic last until late February.  By the time the last pint of jam is eaten we are within weeks of the first strawberries – late May in warm years.   Our children are growing up to know that its the rare plant they can’t eat in the backyard, and those they can’t they understand play a vital role in our mini ecosystem – fixing nitrogen, attracting “good” bugs, or providing food for the worms.

 

We are likely within only a year or two of obtaining our goal of growing 2000#’s of food in a suburban backyard with very few, if any, sacrifices from a “normal” yard.   We live in a small town of about 1200 and have about 500 homes in/near our borders.   In about 5 years, or less, we could be producing 1,000,000#’s of food within our borders – from protein crops like sunflower seeds and hazelnuts to calorie crops like potatoes and corn in addition to the nutritional vegetables and herbs.  If every 3 blocks were producing 50 tons of food we would be a long way towards re-localizing our society and a lot closer to transitioning to a less energy dependent tomorrow.  The problems of our age are daunting when viewed from afar, but as Bill Mollison is fond of saying:

all the world’s problems can be solved in a garden.

We can do this.

Be the Change.

Season Extension: Compost and Thermal Mass

Rye cover and our beloved 25x11 portable Hoop House

I love the Hoop House at our Market Garden.  I love that I can harvest spinach in March.  I love that I can plant my tomatoes in late April and still be picking into October.  I love that it was 85 degrees in there today and 70’s in January are a reality in my little microcosm.  But as I mature, it is the more ephemeral things that matter… how it provides an ‘anchoring’ structure in our little .2 acre plot; something more substantial to draw the eye and provide contrast to row after row after of vegetables; the smell and feel of warm soil in January.   The picture above shows how the rye/feild pea cover crop is coming in.  Got a late start (as usual – “real” jobs get in the way ya know?), but it is doing alright.  The tilled strip in the middle was the last 200#’s of potatoes to come out of this plot, and has a .5″ high stubble of winter wheat coming in.

In years past I have planted spinach and mache in the hoop house, but always put it in so late that I never get a harvest until March and this year is no exception.  I typically get good growth and about 3 weeks prior to harvest (it takes forever with the short days in the winter) we get nailed with the Deep Freezes in early January when it gets down to -10 or so.  This kills everything flat.  The roots regrow in Febuary for a good harvest, but I would like to see what I can do to take the edge off that one or two weeks.

Left: 1st week of compost Right: 250 Gallon "Pond"

I also have another winter problem.   I have arrangements with some local restaurants to compost their organic waste.  This nets us 100#’s or so a week… every week.  From November through April that means I have several cubic yards of slobsicles in my compost bins.  Building up my capacity to handle 4 months of gorp was the primary driver of our new Bin Of Dreams.  That bin is located on the north side of our garage and without direct sun, it takes a LONG time for 1500#’s of gorp to thaw out.  Will Allen at Growing Power composts year round in his hoop houses… perhaps I could as well.  So this year I am trying to kill both these birds with one stone.    The windrow is designed to be 4′ wide and has a 24″ tall fence to contain it somewhat and give me a 3-4′ height without a 8′ base width.  Eventually this will be 20′ long.  I have dreams of following the thermophyllic composting bacteria down the windrow (no turning) with composting worms.   Can I extend both my composting and greens season with the simple movement of 1500#s of gorp into the hoop house?  Time will tell.

Its not a ghetto Koi Pond.... Its thermal mass!

In the past 2 winters I have had buckets and trash cans full of water in an attempt to add some thermal mass to the hoop house.  As I have said, it gets to be 80+ in there with 50-60 degree temp differences to outside air on good days.  But with only a single layer of plastic it sheds btu’s like a sieve.  The thermal mass in previous years has not been enough, it simply freezes solid eventually and effectually adds a cooling effect to the hoop house.  Rat Farts.  This year I have added a large fiberglass crate that hold several hundred gallons of water.  As you can see in the picture, to help this out, I have surrounded it with a foot thick layer of leaves for insulation on 3 sides, and will plant the spinach directly to the south.  In a further attempt to extend the season I amy dig out some row cover I found laying around and cover the spinach/compost/crate to keep the warm air around the plants.  Finally the entire Hoop House will get a 4′ wide “foundation” mulch to keep the frost from creeping in as long as possible while the north wall will get as many leaves piled against it as I can find.  Will this be enough to combat the utter lack of R value in the Hoop House?  Time will tell.  What is likely is that a double walled Hoop House with a bubble insulation system will be the way to go, combined with these techniques, if I want to go 4 season.

On a side note, I am trying to function stack the thermal mass.  I have added about 5 gallons of leaves and some finished compost to it to make the well water a bit more nutrient rich.  Then I walked down to the river and scooped up 5 gallons of river water and made sure to get a bunch of sludge from the bottom.  This water is full of critters and microorganisms.  I dumped this into the crate to “inoculate” the water and in a week or two I will add a handful of feeder goldfish.  Now it is very likely in my first stab at aquaculture I am dooming these goldfish to a cold death as fish cubes, but if they somehow don’t freeze solid the 250 gallons of microbe rich ecosystem should keep them alive.  And if the temps allow them to stay alive I will have also proven that I can sustain temps high enough to overwinter lake perch. Fish Fry anyone?

-Rob

Intro: Living Soils for a Livable Planet

There are a myriad of Fad Diets out there; we’ve all seen them: the South Beach, Atkins, Probiotic, etc.  Then there are lifestyle diets like veganism and raw food.   Years ago, I switched to a vegetarian diet for ecological reasons to lower my footprint.  As I read and listened more about food, this grew into a strict organic food based diet, then to organic local, and now I’ve backed off a bit and  am “virtually” vegetarian as I learned more of the importance of animals to the function of a farm ecosystem .   Food issues are of paramount importance to me – as a parent and a global citizen– driving much of the work for this blog, in my gardens, and my outreach.  Whether you are trying to lose weight, make a statement or live your ethics,  what we put into our mouths to sustain us has a huge impact not the least of which is on our health, but our food choices also greatly impacts our economy, our scenery,  the climate, and our planet.  Food matters… alot.

Over the course of the next few months I will expand on the topic of food grown in Living Soils as part of a Fall/Winter series of articles / essays concerning this topic.  It is far bigger than even a 2000 word post, and I am looking forward to the 1000+ pages of books I have inbound to help me expand my knowledge on the topic.  Plus its been awhile since I have written a larger article and I am rather looking forward to it.  In the mean time here are some High Points, mostly opinions, though later posts will be better referenced.

The data on the ills of our current, conventional farming system are legion, and well documented.  Conventional farming practices promote erosion, are poisoning our groundwater, most of our food is trucked in from at least 1500 miles away, the farmers can’t earn living wages, and small town America is all but extinct outside of bedroom communities.  The case for a different kind of Green Revolution is strong.   Conventional Farming is crude, reductionist and is founded on failed assumptions.  It is time to recommit to growing our food in Living Soils.

Masanobu Fukuoka

As part of the back to Earth movement in the 60’s a growing number of farmers began to grow “organically” – the way that our grandparents had done prior to WWII.  The inspiration for this blog, Masanoubu Fukuoka, was part of this movement to create a more sane, sustainable and productive agriculture that worked in partnership with Nature.  One of the firm tenants that has developed in Organic Farming is the need to foster a living soil.  Feed the soil, so that it may feed your plants and they, in turn, will feed you.  In a single gram of living soil there may be as many as 100 million to 3 billion bacteria, but in denuded soils destroyed  by chemical dependant industrial farming there can be as few as 100.   The incredible interconnected biodiversity of our soil’s food webs is only beginning to be “discovered” by science.  But we do know some things.

First off, organic food is better for you.  I know we’ve all gotten used to the see saw reports on this topic, but the majority of  reports done in unbiased, or at least less biased, manner are showing what our “Common Sense” test has know all along.  Food grown in living soils are more nutritious for you.  From the USDA’s own reports, the nutritional content of our [conventionally grown] food is 25% less than it was 50 years ago because the soil is dead and it takes far more than Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium to grow Real Food.  At the least it takes 18 micro nutrients including zinc and copper to create a balanced soil for plants – and those nutrients need to be in proper proportions to each other to prevent imbalances.   Balancing 3 points can be challenging, balancing 18, plus tilth, moisture, density, and air porosity is a herculean task far beyond the scope of our technology.  It takes the help of those millions of bacteria, fungi, protozoa, earthworms and other soil organisms with the wisdom of millions of years of evolution behind them, to get it right for us.  When the soil web is healthy and stable -living- it is an amazingly self regulating system that balances itself over time to best foster healthy plant growth.  Nature is beautiful.

Not only are the plants more nutritious,  but the heirloom varieties that can be only be grown in a holistic, organic, and local system are far superior to the supermarket varieties.  Anyone who has tasted one of my heirloom Carola potatoes after eating Idaho Russets from the Kwik Trip understands exactly what I mean.  Several years ago, I invited my Mother over to sample our first strawberry harvest at our home.  Upon putting the small, Sparkle berry into her mouth she almost swooned, exclaiming “I haven’t tasted this since I was a girl!”.  Strawberries are supposed to all but melt in your mouth – they are not intended to have a rigid core – that was bred in to allow them to be transported by truck, rather than by basket from the garden to the kitchen table.  Our forefathers and mothers saved the seeds of the varieties with the best taste, and I fervently believe that our sense of taste is evolutionarily designed to sense nutrition – our bodies know that organic food is better for us.

Conventional Soil (left) v. Organic Soil Black = Organic Matter

But living soils matter far more than just helping to offset the massive Health Care crisis of our time (we are the first society to be  overfed to the point of chronic obesity, while simultaneously being malnourished).  Our conventional farming practices are a significant cause of Climate Change.   In a lecture some friends of mine heard in Sweden comparing the carbon cutting benifits to be had from transportation, housing, and food sectors – the Food Sector won by a margin of over 400%.  Granted Europe’s Transportation and Housing sectors have come a long way compared to ours, but a recent article claims that switching to local foods and cutting back on red meat (to sane levels v. American levels) could reduce your carbon emissions more than swapping out 20 primary light bulbs (who has 20 primary bulbs?!) and cutting back your driving by 10%.  But back to the soil.  To feed the soil ecosystem you must supply one primary thing – organic matter. And the primary component of organic matter is carbon.  The reality is that switching to a Soil Based agriculture system will have HUGE ramifications on our ability to sequester carbon as a planet.  Much of the Ag land in America today is depeleted – down to 2-3% organic matter – less in many cases.  Healthy, living soils have at least 5 – 8%.  And here is the amazing stat: for each 1% you add back into the soil, you sequester as much carbon as exists in the entire atmosphere above that acre. And we need to sequester 3-5% back into every acre to rebuild the soil webs to rebuild our soils so we can rebuild our selves and our planet.  That is an amazing amount of carbon – 21 tons per acre, per percent, in fact.  In other words, a 200 acre farm that rebuilt its living soils and raised its organic matter 4% would sequester 16,800 tons of carbon.  Damn!

Living Soils are giving soils, providing far more bounty for less inputs because Nature is doing much of the work of the fertilizer supplier.  When my grandparents farmed they raised a family of 10 on 175 acres – and that was a large prosperous dairy farm for its day.  Now it would be a hobby farm in this era of industrial, corporate agriculture.  With the need for literally over $1,000,000 in rolling equipment, not to mention the silos, dairy barns, etc to support the 2000 acre “farms” of today the bank interest alone is staggering – forcing most farmers to work additional jobs.  Conventional farming has also killed our rural communities – 2000 acres 70 years ago would have supported 10-15 large families well, where now one farmer struggles with bankruptcy every other year because most of the income from the land goes to Cargill  for supplies and to the bank in loan interest.

Saner scale farms based on living soils, working in partnership with Nature, can rebuild our countryside, help to save our climate, and will provide a huge step towards stemming the tide of “lifestyle” disease and cancers as we put the nutrition back into our bodies.

We need Living Soils for a Livable Planet.

-Rob

Potato Tower Results – An End to the Hype?

Thanks everyone for waiting all season for the results!  I finally got to harvest the towers about 2 weeks ago – the last of the vines had been killed on 10/10 when we had a very severe freeze of 23 degrees.  Considering we put the towers in the last week of April – this was a VERY long season for a 100 day potato like Carola.  I know that everyone is dying for the results so I will not keep you waiting any longer.  While I learned alot, the harvest was no where near 100 lbs per tower – I got about 3 lbs for the 1 lbs planted in the main tower

Total Harvest for Tower #1 - about 3#'s

Now, way back in April I planted 4 different varieties into this tower, and the first month saw great growth as I expected from planting in such a rich compost medium.  However in comments on the Month 2 updates I reported that disaster had struck  almost exactly 60 days after the planting- heavy rains had waterlogged the tower, killing 3 of the 4 plants completely and severely wounding the 4th – which turned out to be a Carola.  That little plant had continued to grow, and I was amazed the fact that it flowered a remarkable 5 times over the course of the summer.  At each hilling the flowers would die back, the plant would send up new shoots, and then those would flower, only to have them die back again after the next hilling.  Here is what I discovered when I pulled the rungs of the tower off in early October:

Spud set 18" above seed height (bottom level) - proof of the tower theory?

I even found a few more small potatoes above these. These potatoes were 18″ above seed potato depth – far higher in the soil than one would ever expect from conventionally grown potatoes whose potatoes are clustered within 6″ of the seed.  In fact the potatoes in the harvest basket above ALL came from this plant as it was the only one to survive the steep learning curve as I had to climb as I experimented with this new growing technique. Given that a Carola potato seed is about 3 oz. the 48 oz harvested equates to a respectable 16:1 yield.  Of note though is that spud size was small with only 3 of the potatoes being typical Carola size which is completely opposite what one would expect from the lavish attention these towers received: watering, weeding, compost growing medium, fish emulsion and compost tea foliar sprays – I babied this plant!

My strong suspicion, voiced as the towers grew, is that all the aggressive hilling perpetually knocks back the leaf growth and the plants never develop a lush canopy of sugar producing leaves to build the starch needed for a good harvest.  Perhaps this is an issue that can be worked around with better technique, but its a strong concern.

The other two towers were almost complete failures – the Purple Viking tower was knocked back with blight before tuber set, and  the Kennebec tower had its tubers rotting in the ground due to excessive moisture from my layered straw and a ground squirrel had eaten the rest.  Here is a very important picture from that tower which adds incontrovertible evidence to the theory that some cultivars will not root out from the buried stems at all:

Buried "Stem" had ZERO roots developed after 3 months beneath the soil

The bucket is placed solely to provide enough contrast to see the root-free “stem”.  This is completely the opposite of what the Carola’s did – that plant had roots filling the entire tower and spuds at levels from 2″ above seed depth to 18″ above.  Given that there are 300+ potato cultivars worldwide there is certainly room to further the research on this technique should people wish to continue the task.

Want to grow your own experimental tower next year?

My Recommendations:

• Plant one cultivar per tower – varied growth rates between varieties makes hilling difficult
• Ensure VERY good drainage – I lost 80% of the plants due to waterlogging.  Spacing the rungs 3/8″ to allow for swelling is a good start, placing the tower on a light soil (or a mat of 4-6″ of straw) is also a must.  Pop a rung off near the bottom to check moisture before watering – these towers hold water VERY well.
• Kennebec apparently will not root from the buried stems – hilling Kennebec is critical in field plantings though as they green up within hours of sunlight exposure
• Tower height need not be more than 24″, though this may depend on cultivar choice – fingerlings get TALL.
• Give canopy sq ft allot of thought – if you want 10#’s of potatoes you need to have enough leaf cover making all that sugar
• Add straw in a mix, not as a layer.  My layers of straw blocked moisture and were saturated.  Straw is still valuable – worm casings present in the vermicompost I added hatched and I found dozens of very happy red wigglers in the tower nibbling on the straw bits and adding plenty of fresh castings to the Carola plant.

Do Potato Towers work?  Maybe…  that is the best I can say now.

My concerns:

• Technique is apparently paramount with the tower systems with alot of pitfalls for the gardener – it is far from idiot proof — and with all the variables Climate Change is throwing at us we need a less finicky system.
• Cultivar selection seems critical, and there is almost no research out there as to which kinds work.  Carolas and Purple Viking seem to be a good choice – Kennebecs are not.
• Expense – $25 a tower for what seems to be only 10-20#’s of potatoes –if you can bring them to harvest– is a stretch
• The Hype – promising 100#’s from 4 sq ft is a joke.  It still may be possible -and I hope it is– but it is not easy, it is not guaranteed, and it needs alot more research and realism before anyone goes filling the internet with wild claims.

One of the main Pillars of Intent of this blog is to provide real, proven, and pragmatic solutions for growing healthy food in small spaces such as a suburban backyard.  Do Potato Towers fit that bill?  No.  They are definitely in the experimental camp still.  I intend to plant the tower again next year with what I have learned to see if I can eck out a full tower of harvest – even 20#’s from 4 sq ft would be a huge accomplishment.

Here are some PROVEN techniques that will allow you to grow ALOT of calorie dense, nutritous heirloom potatoes in small spaces:

Buckets

Kate over at Living the Frugal Life tried some of her own experiments this year and I was very impressed with her results.  Using the ubiquitous 5 gallon bucket Kate was able to eck out between 8 and 14:1 yeilds which is as good or better than most organic field grown potatoes.  Buckets allow you all the benefits of container gardening – they work on balconies, the corners of porches or allow you to grow in areas with tainted soils.  Harvest is a breeze (dump the buckets!) and I love Kate’s idea of stacking the buckets in a pyramid.  10-12#’s from 4 sq ft should be possible with 6 buckets in a 2 teir pryamid.  Simple, easy, effective. Try it!

Kate's Potato Buckets (lifted from her blog)

Sheet Mulch Spuds

Have a bit more space?  I tried another experiment this year on a sheet mulched old strawberry patch.  My harvest blew me away: 30#’s from barely 1.5#’s of seeds in 8 plants of Purple Vikings – yes that 20:1!!  Blight knocked the plants back early, so tuber size was low – 50#’s would have been possible had they gone to full weight!  The bed was about 40 sq ft, so yeilds were not as high as the bucket per sq ft, but spacing could be tightened.  This method IS idiot proof – no additional fertilizer, the mulch is a natural Potato Bug repellent and all that straw keeps the moisture up really improving tuber size.

These 8 plants = 30#'s of Spuds!

With winter around the bend it is a great time to try a sheet mulch bed for next year’s plantings.   Thanks for everyone’s contributions, thoughts, and comments in this expirement this year!!

Most of all, thanks for Being the Change!

-Rob

Eco Evangelism

Look... Potato Soup!!

Lots of events coming up!

Tomorrow and next Wednesday my wife and I are off to staff some Slow Food events hosted by one of our Chef customers .  We will have the oppurtunity to educate the attendees on some of our favorite cultivars (we’ll have Kennebec, Purple Viking, Elba, Carola, and Desiree) as well as show how they can be combined with other easy to grow vegetables Garlic (Music), Onions (Red Baron) and Leeks (Blue Solaize) to create incredible hearty, healthy and sustainable food… with the dishes prepared by a gourmet chef!

Then, in less than a month, I will be participating in the Madison Bioneer Conference (From Here to There) as a panel speaker on Saturday afternoon 11/14 if anyone is in the area.  The event is promoting Real World solutions to food, energy, transportation, and community building to help us bridge to a Better Tomorrow.  A very strong focus will be on success stories already up and running in the area.  I am incredibly flattered that our little Suburban Experiment and small Market Garden were chosen to be part of such a cast of Heros (Will Allen is a Keynote speaker).  Very, very excited about this.

Bringing Bioneers 2009 Flyer

There are certainly enough headlines and anecdotal evidence out there to feed our inner Doomsday Voice.  It will be fantastic to be focused on evangelising on how far we’ve come in so little time (we  personally started less than 4 years ago) and using that message to inspire hundreds more to pick up the torch and start their own One Straw Revolutions.

Fukuoka lives on in our actions and we are forever in his debt.  More importantly we each have our own piece to add to the unfolding story that is our society’s answer to the challenges of our age.

Be the Change!

-Rob

Autumn Brings Change

So this week saw the culmination of some significant changes in the World of Rob.  Effective yesterday I have seen a shift change at work.  One of the primary reasons that I can do all the things that I chronicle on this blog is that I have had a 3 day weekend -every weekend for the past 4 years.  I have worked 5am until 5pm Tues-Fri for that entire time.  As I work in a 24hour, 7 day operation for my pay, there has always been the possibilty of a shift change – and each passing year has increased the likelihood. of that happening.

Effective yesterday my new schedule will consist of 3 monster 13 hour days, Saturday thru Monday, with the next 4 days off. While this means that as long as the kids are in school we do not get a full day off with them, I also get 4 days to be a better partner at home and find more ways to grow food, make fuel, and build soils on small acreages.  FOUR DAYS!  And then the summers – 4 days off together as a family.  It is still sinking in and the pros and cons have yet to settle in.  Will the 9 months with no full weekends eat away at us, or will the Summers and free time during the week out weigh it.  Either way it works out to 7-8 less hours in the office a week and that is a Good Thing.  The kiddos are still young enough (6 and 7) that Dad taking them to school is still cool, and I just might finally buy a Mundo Bike to ride them there in style.

Left Brain says that with an extra day I just might be able to stay on top of all my current commitments.  Right Brain says I should call that farmer who offered me 6 acres to “do basically anything I wanted with”…

To everything turn, turn, turn.

-Rob

Straw / Sheet Mulch Potato Update: SPUDTACULAR!

So its been a crazy month – I’ve missed you all!  We’ve harvested over 1000#’s of potatoes -and sold them- hitting farmers markets for the first time.  There is at least another post of stories there, but for now suffice it to say we love that we have become “the Potato People” in at least two towns and that feels great.

With the farm gardens under control again, I spent a beautiful half hour this weekend working through the Straw Mulch Potatoes that I had put in as a test of deep mulched potatoes (no updates on the towers yet – 2 of the three are still growing and the third blighted so bad I only got 3 spuds for 4 seeds planted).  The Straw Mulch bed had 10 plants, and had been sheet mulched with 3″ of horse manure a year ago, and then got another foot of straw thrown on top as the potato plants grew.  No additional fertilizer, no sprays, and not much irrigation was provided (an inconsequential 10 gallons total from washing out compost buckets).  My hypothesis was that the rich, untilled soil from the sheet mulching combined with the more constant soil moisture provided by the deep straw mulch would help tuber size and plant vigor.  On top of that I was very curious to see if there was any credibility to the claims of increased tuber set from the deep mulch, and how the harvest labor would compare.

First off, I am very pleased with the yield and am convinced (as much as one can be after one test) that super rich soil and deep mulching equates to better yeilds.  Here is my proof:

30#'s of spuds from 10 plants!!!

With an average yield of 3#’s per plant I would be getting 270#’s per row at the farm – a 50% improvement over my current technique – and I was already getting a solid 8.5:1 harvest ratio!   I planted this bed with 4 medium sized Purple Vikings – just under 2#’s.  Yes you got that right – a 15:1 ratio which is near record yields for even conventional farmers.

To put that another way if I can scale this technique up and apply it to my current spacing (3′ rows, 14″ spacing)  I could get 43,500#’s per acre which equates to 18,600,000 million calories.   With the blight coming in growth was stunted and overall tuber size was down compared to what I expect from Purple Viking.  One plant had over 15 potatoes on it – but only a few over 3 oz and most had 8 or more.  If those had sized up to the typical 8oz+ …no I’m not gonna run that math, I’m getting faint from the possibilities!  Sheet mulching an acre will take 400 yards of horse manure – this system isn’t for the faint of heart- but my “base” soil is deader than a doornail so a larger trial at the farm on rich soil will be on the docket for next year.

As others have found, and I have begun to suspect, there was no addition tuber set that I could attribute to the deep mulch – the spuds were located low on the vine as usual, but the soil was evenly moist and full of worms.   Harvest was a breeze, though not as easy as the bucket method – just pull the straw back,  ruffle the moist, rich soil with your fingers, and pluck our spud, after spud, after spud, after spud.  ZERO lost spuds to pitchfork foibles to boot.  As a strip crop between young swaled permaculture tree crops this could be a VERY productive system to pay the bills as the chestnut / orchard comes on line.  Plus from my experience you get a significant net INCREASE in organic matter and it is very close to no till.

Can organic farming feed the world?  Show me a conventional farmer hitting 18,000,000 calories per acre .

FU Monsanto.  You’re Round Up Ready?  Big deal…  this system is Peak Oil Ready.

Be the Change!

-Rob

PS: Here is a detailed and technical study of straw mulch for potato growing in Germany.  Graphs – oooo shiny!

Compost Trick: 140+ for a week!

Right.  This is likely old hat for many of ya’ll, but after reading some soil books from the seventies (yes, I know I am that dorky) I ran across an anecdote about a biodynamic farmer talking about building his compost heaps and then covering them with straw to act as a blanket.  The epiphany almost knocked me out of my reading chair!  Mulch my pile?  Of course!  It would keep in the water, block the sun to let the bacteria go all the way to the surface, and even keep the yellow jackets off and act as an insulator late in the season!

So I went out, turned my pile (about 30% composted), watered it well, and topped it off with a 4″ layer of wheat straw.  I stuck the thermometer in, and the next morning I was chugging along at 154 degrees.  The next day? 155.  Next? 152, then 150, now 8 days later I am still over 144 with no added water or turning!!  ALL THESE YEARS of watching my compost heat up to 140 degrees after it was turned and watered, only to have it fall off in a week to 100 degrees until I turned it and watered it again I had thought the turning was the important part, but it looks like the moisture was even more so.

Mulch your piles!  Tops and sides too if they are wire.

So Simple!  So Perfect!

-Rob

Resource Management: Conserve First

The Pimp My Garden push is starting exceedingly slowly – my Real Job got Real Busy and the Great Potato Harvest is taking most of the free time as we harvest and sell 300#’s a week.  Some cool things have happened though, like I was asked to speak on a 30 minute radio show about permaculture a few weeks ago.  In preparation for that I re-read Holmgren’s: Permaculture Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability – god is that a great book!  And, as usual, its got me thinking.

Early in the book he is talking through some of the comments that his Design students have made about the choices at his homestead.  In particular, there is no renewable energy component at the property – at least for electricity production.  Anyone that has priced Solar or Wind Power installations knows that to match your current grid power you are looking at $25-50,000 up front, at minimum, for a typical home.  That is a lot of coins.   We are all struggling to allocate our increasingly limited resources as prudently as possible and I loved Holmgren’s approach of choosing NOT to install the electrical generation.  His thinking is this – that $50k would be *much* better spent in other ways.  For much less money he installed a gravity driven rain water catchment system to completely satisfy his household, irrigation, and fire control needs (50,000 gallons), installed wood stoves to supply all his heat and cooking needs (as well as tree groves to supply the wood in coppice management), root cellars to reduce his freezing needs, and also installed day lighting to cut his bulb needs. All told, the changes saved a huge amount of money, and cut their total farm use of electricity to 3 kwh a month.

At that level, should the Oil Run Out he could either build a small steam generator or gasifier to meet his small energy needs, or just as likely he wouldn’t miss the 3 kwh or energy if it was gone as it is only powering luxury items like a refrigerator and computer.  A recent article in the BBC is claiming that the UK may have rolling blackouts in 6 years and that they need to build more energy plants a the cost of hundreds of millions of pounds.  No where in the article do they talk about the critical “nega-watts” of Natural Capitalism fame – the power “created” every time you reduce your consumption as a household, business, or country.  Conservation is carbon neutral, critical to our future and is cheaper to boot.

To take my home off grid with Solar would cost over $50k -and we already use less than 70% of the average household in our area.  For a third that amount I could install a root cellar, hyper effecient appliances, and a masonry wood stove that would drop my energy use another 50-75%.  Switching my desktop to a laptop, ditching the AC and using a whole house fan, and other changes like replacing the carpet with wood floors to ditch the vacuum would be easy and not overly expensive if done as items wear out.  Quilts are cheaper than cordwood anyday.

I guess my point is that we are hard wired as a society to BUILD solutions – add power plants, erect wind turbines, etc.  When more often than not the solution to our problems is in rethinking the root cause of our problem in the first place.  In this case, we don’t need more, we need less.  Likely that is the case more often than not.  In permaculture speak – the problems that we currently face are due to the poor solutions that we currently have in place.  To pepper in the ubiquitous Einstein quote – we need to change our thinking from the mindset that created the problems in the first place if we are to find a workable solution.

Be the change.

-Rob

Pimp my Garden

Now that is a show I might actually watch!  Instead, I will work on the pilot episode right here in South Central Wisconsin.  Steady readers will know of my successes and my struggles as I try to eke out produce from the denuded, dead soil that are so common here in HOA land.  Our first garden in 2005 was pathetic – corn 3′ tall in soil completely devoid of anything resembling fertility or life.  Within two years we were harvesting over 500#’s from that soil as we worked in organic matter: composting anything that didn’t move fast enough to escape the manure fork.   I read voraciously of Coleman, Permaculture, and Jeavons on how to maximise productivity and most importantly build soil.  That success whet my appetite for more – so in 2008 we branched up to a market garden at a permaculture farm north of here.  We grew 1500#s of potatoes and another 500#’s of spinach, squash tomatoes, flour corn and peppers and became “professional” growers turning a tidy little profit and paying for capital investments in my Grillo and other tools.  But man is ever one to push his limits – and all the time away from the home gardens came to haunt me in a massive insurgence of Quack Grass completely overrunning my now fertile garden beds by the end of 2008.  But I gave it little heed – I had grown 200,000 calories!  I was a FARMER at last.

Over the winter I planned ever grander schemes at the Market Gardens – almost doubling the potential harvest.  Gently voiced concerns from my wife, and many others, about time at home and sheer physical limitations began to add strength to that little, all too easily squelched, voice in my head whispering hubris! and tales of Icarus. And then, for better or worse, I separated my shoulder joint in June playing soccer and was forced to take the month of July to reflect on what I had done.   At home the quack was winning on all fronts, my kids were asking -daily- if I would be home the next day, and the lambsquarter at the Market Garden were taller than me.  My wings were melting in the sun.

Thanks to more than a little help from my friends, we got the Market Gardens back into shape.  My wife, unable to let the home gardens descend any further into The Abyss, reasserted herself as the Real Gardener in the family taking the home gardens and making them shine.   Her plants are out producing mine by significant margins.  We won some rear guard actions against the quack and secured 20 bales of straw and 20#’s of clover seed to hold our ground and Dig In.  Now, the potato harvest is coming in strong, we’ve put up record amounts of pickles, jam, and sauce, and Late Blight has taken care of the overabundance of tomatoes I planted.  We will not do any fall crops this year- opting rather to trade potatoes for storage crops of squash and turnips.

Back to the home garden.  It is stable, but is in need of an overhaul.  It is currently very productive – with great soil tilth and growing organic matter content.  But it takes far too much work due to the fact that all 7 60 sq ft beds are surrounded by field stone to protect them from the rushing waters that come down the swale (half our backyard) in heavy rains.  Those 7 beds add up to over 400′ of edge that I have to weed whip weekly and 400′ that the quack can get in under.  Also, the beds are separated by paths that are 3-4′ wide – meaning I have almost as much path space as growing space.  Because the quack comes in every spring / fall I literally have to tear down the field stone border of each bed (1000#’s of stone), turn it all, and sift out the rhizomes.  It sucks.  It also takes a month of weekends – time I don’t have.

So in the next month we’re going to Pimp My Garden.  Ever wondered what garden you would make if you “knew then what you know now?” Here is my answer:

The field stone is getting yanked – all 4 tons of it- and piled up somewhere – maybe to be a root cellar or stone oven someday.  The fertile soil will get pulled out, piled and covered with straw to protect the ecosystem some.   Then the subsoil, along with all the paths will get “grillo’d” to a depth of 1′ using the rotary plow to chop up the quack rhizomes.  After that bakes  in the sun for a week, it will get grillo’d again with a tiller, and I will dig a trench 1′ thick along the entire perimeter.  The new garden will be a giant “box”: 32′x40′ built of 15 reclaimed douglas fir timbers 3″x12″x16′ long each weighing over 50#’s, terraced 4 times to match the slope of my yard.  To the bottom of these, and extending down into the trench I plan giving the quack grass The Finger and laying a rhizome barrier.  Perhaps 12″ roofing flashing, but maybe just 6 mil plastic.  Eff you Quack.

Then the tilled up sub soil will get sprinkled with blood meal and onto this I will pile as much manure as I can get – I have sources lined up from a veritable Ark of livestock: Horse, Cow, Llama, Worm, and Chicken -networking is a fine thing!.  Its a good thing too, as I will need 50 cu yards of it to fill the bed!!  The manure will then be inoculated with 50 gallons of forest / prairie soil for microbes and 20 gallons of red wigglers from Growing Power, 200#’s of Green Sand for mineral balancing and better veggie nutrition.  This will then covered with pallet sheets of cardboard  2 layers thick (1/2″) and the soil piled back in with a VERY careful eye paid to any quack rhizomes.   Then the whole works gets planted to rye/vetch/field pea mix under a light straw mulch.

Finally, a 5′ “moat” will be tilled around the gardens and replanted to white dutch clover as a living quack barrier.  If I have any energy or time left before November -very doubtful- I would like to plant several hundred flowering natives and perennials around this barrier as well for beauty and beneficials, but that will likely be in the spring or later.

When done, the garden space will have almost tripled to 1000′ of growing space (1:20th of my lot) due to extending the beds by 12′ in length and removing much of the path space.  My edge will have dropped from 400′ to 160′ and the quack will be dealt a Deathblow.  In addition, I will have soil of unbelievable richness and fertility and 10 3′ “beds” of 100 sq ft to play with.  Perhaps I will be able to be no-till by 2011 after I pull the last vestiges of quack out in 2010…  But most importantly it will allow us to shift everything but the potato crop back to our home gardens – keeping me at home and allowing me to share my learnings with our children to teach them these vital skills – or just to be home to see their latest Lego ship or crayon drawing.

This will be a shit ton of work, but I will be in Hog Heaven as there is nothing I like better than building soil: schlepping manure, inoculating,  sheet mulching and running my Grillo.  Plan is one month of weekends, maybe 3 weekends if the weather holds. Also, the kids can help and it will all be in my own backyard rather than 10 miles away. This will be a Garden of Legend.

I will grow 2000#’s of food in my own yard …with the help of my mini Permaculture Orchard and edible landscaping.  Thanks for coming along for the ride.

Be the Change.

-Rob