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India: The Talupula Site, Part III

Douglas Barnes’s Articles at Permaculture Reflections, Page 5

July 27, 2009 by Douglas Barnes 1 Comment

At the invitation of the Green Tree Foundation, I visited the town of Talupula in the drought-stricken Anantapur District in Andhra Pradesh. Once a dry tropical region, biotic pressures have changed the region into an arid landscape. Because of this, the Green Tree Foundation had me come in to design and implement water harvesting systems suitable for their area in an effort to assist with their regreening activities.

Site outside Talupula, APHaving selected a site for our project, I mapped the boundaries of the site with a GPS unit, and assessed the site’s features and vegetation. Being ferrosols, the soil structure was generally pretty uniform from the surface down to as much as 8 metres deep. And being gravelly, it was not appropriate for dam construction. This meant we would stick to swales for this site. The cost of digging the swales was well within the total allotted budget for the project, so we next looked into choosing the best machine for the job.

While digging out swales with a bulldozer with a tilting blade can be a convenient way of making them, the soils were so hard that they would have created a near impossible situation for the dozer to handle. Add to that the fact that the nearest dozer would be 6 to 8 hours away, requiring a transport fee, and that they would only come out for more than 100 hours work, bulldozers were not an option anyway. We were left with the choice of a backhoe or a small excavator. The excavator had speed going for it, but availability was a problem (we would have access to it only one day a week). It also required transport to the site (increasing its cost) and was 35% more expensive than the backhoe. The backhoe looked to be the best choice by far.

Designing the water-harvesting system, I did not want the site to be plagued by undersized swales. For one thing, I wanted them to be able to hold a lot of water before excess would go over their spillways. Also, if they did not have gradual enough walls, they would be more prone to erosion. Over time, swales gradually fill in, too. With larger swales, they would be around longer.

Douglas Barnes enjoying a fresh mango

The designer enjoying a fresh mango under a tamarind tree that saved him from heat stroke many times. Photo by Gangi Setty of the Green Tree Foundation.

As I wanted the swales to be around 1 metre from the bottom of the trench to the top of the mound, I designed the trench to be about 4 metres across (a little smaller on two of the swales) and about 4 metres across on the mound. The site was nearly devoid of vegetation, so to be on the safe side, I assumed 55% runoff, meaning a coefficient of runoff of 0.55. To determine the spacing of the swales, I used the formula

Spacing = Holding capacity per m ÷ (Runoff coefficient X Maximum rainfall in one event)

[Please note that this formula is flawed. We have a swale spacing calculator on the site to make your calculations for you.]

The volume of the swales per metre was to be around 1.7 cubic metres. The maximum rain in one large event in the area is 10 cm. From this, I calculated the approximate spacing for the spaces at 30 metres. Using the GPS, I was able to find the level for the second swale, 30m down from the top, then the 3rd level, 30 m down from there.

Map of swales on Talupula siteWe needed to map out the contour sites, so we tracked down some local engineers with a dumpy level. It turns out that the engineers owed a friend of the landowner a favour, so they came out to the site for free and mapped out the contour points for 4 swales on 3 different contours. While I planned on mapping the site myself, their proficiency had them finishing the mapping in half the time it would have taken me. They put us ahead of schedule by one day.

Image of surveying Talupula site

The map of the site showing the swales in red and the level-sill spillways in yellow.

Backhoe excavating swaleThe swales were excavated without too much incident with the total excavation taking about 3 and a half days to move 600 cubic metres of earth. We didn’t have the backhoe do everything. We simply had it dig trenches 3 metres wide and 50 cm deep, placing the excavated earth on the downhill side of the trench. The rest we were leaving to be groomed by hand. At one point, we hit rock that would have taken hours for the backhoe to chip through. In such cases, it is simplest to try to go around either uphill or downhill around the rock. We opted to go uphill. Apart from that one little snag, the rest of the excavation went as quickly as one could expect considering the soil was nearly as hard as concrete.

Labour team outside TalupulaWe hired a team of ten labourers to groom the site. Because the soils were so hard, however, we had the backhoe come back and chip off the uphill edge of the trenches it dug to make the process faster. The first day of grooming was gruelling work for the work team. They had to rely on picks to be able to chip through the earth to smooth out the edges of the swale. Grooming the mound was much easier as the soil there was already broken up. In the end, I had hoped to get the mounds groomed to a more gentle slope while the workers were there, but time ran out before we could get everything as perfect as the ideal I held in mind. Still, the edges are not steep and erosion should not be a problem.

On the night before the final day of work, the heavens opened up and released a torrent on the site. Excited to see the swales in action, the landowner rushed out in the middle of the night to see them fill up with water that would otherwise have washed down the hill in an erosive flood. When I arrived on site the last day, the top swale and one of the lower swales were full of water due to the slower infiltration from their slightly higher clay contents. Already they were a home to some very happy frogs that, with the rains, had come out of hibernation.

Swales filled with waterThe rains transformed the earth from a concrete-like surface to a soft and yielding one. This made the final grooming much, much easier. In order to help make the swales more durable, I had the work team put in compacted, level-sill spillways set at 90 cm from the bottom of the swales. With them in place, water can spill gently over the top in very heavy rains, greatly reducing the chance of erosion damaging the swales. The workers seemed to get a kick out of me inspecting the spillway with a site level and having them fix spots that were a few millimetres out. While it may seem fanatical, if the spillway is not dead-level, flowing water will concentrate in the lower spots. When it is concentrated, it moves faster, and when it moves faster, it has more erosive potential.

Swale spillway

Workers compacting the soil to create a level-sill spillway to allow overflow without eroding the swale.

Since the monsoon season hit just as the project was completed, it started collecting water right away. Within three weeks of the completion of the swales, they had already captured and saved over half a million litres of water. The land owner was initially worried about the amount of land that the swales took up – land that would otherwise have been dedicated to the mango tree crop that is to go in later. But upon seeing the results of the swales in action, he knew they were the right thing to do.

I was very fortunate to have the agroforestry expertise of the Green Tree Foundation to assist in the selection of tree species from the site. The plan was to plant a windbreak crop and living fence consisting of Gliricidia sepium, Caesalpinia crista and Sapindus trifoliate. G. sepium is a fast-growing nitrogen fixer with medicinal properties. C. crista makes a good windbreak and has anti-malarial properties. Sapindus trifoliate, as the name suggests, is rich in saponins, meaning it makes a great soap. Its fruit, which resembles a date, is a valuable crop that fetches a good price on the local market. I have received word from the Green Tree Foundation that these windbreak trees have already been planted on site and are doing well. When the mango crops go in, the Green Tree Foundation will provide nitrogen-fixing support trees to assist in the growth of the mango trees.

Given the swales and the addition of the trees, I suspect that within 3-years time, springs will appear at the bottom of the hill below the site. With the site’s exposure next to the national highway and the growing notoriety of the farmer we worked with, it is hoped that our project will be replicated by others throughout the area. I have been invited back by my friends at the Green Tree Foundation to do more work in the area, and I look forward to the day when funding permits me to go there again and carry out more projects.

Swale designer and work team in Talupua

The work team and the designer celebrate the project’s completion.

Filed Under: Article Tagged With: Arid climate, earthworks

Morus alba

Douglas Barnes’s Articles at Permaculture Reflections, Page 5

July 22, 2009 by Douglas Barnes Leave a Comment

This month, we’ll take a look at the white mulberry, Morus alba. In the Species of the Month series, we’ve looked at some truly amazing plants and fungi. I thought I would make it easy on myself by doing a “simple” tree. Well, I thought wrong. I knew some of the uses of this tree, but as it turns out Morus alba offers many benefits and carries out many different tasks.

First off, this fast-growing tree is useful for controlling erosion. It also provides shade and can act as a windbreak. The leaf litter improves the soil. White mulberry has been adapted to many climates from tropical USDA zone 11 to chilly zone 4. The tree is coppiceable and survives short-rotation coppicing very well – I have seen M. alba thrive on a 2-month coppicing cycle, which is an amazingly short rotation. Mind you, this was in the tropics. Mulberry would not last very long on such a short cycle in temperate climates.

Mulberry can be propagated through coppicing or through seeds. Coppice shoots can be cut and treated with rooting compound or the coppice stool can be covered with soil after the shoots are around 30 cm tall. Left under the soil, the buried part of the shoots will grow roots. The shoot can then be carefully dug out and cut for transplanting. When propagating from seeds, soak the seeds in cold water for 1 week before planting. Mulberries grow best in dry to well-drained soils.

The wood is useful for both construction and woodworking. As a fuel, it will produce from 4370 to 4770 kilocalories of energy per kilogram or around 25.8 million BTUs per cord, making it an excellent fuel tree. In coppice production, it would make a goode fuel tree, provided it were grown in a small-scale operation. The bark from mulberry has its uses. It is used to make high quality paper and can be made into textile.

The leaves can be used for fodder. Ruminants can be fed up to 60% of diet with mulberry fodder. Mulberry also increases milk yields in cows. The leaves are also famously used in sericulture – raising silkworms. For this, mulberry is grown on short rotation; the leaves are chopped and then fed to silkworms.

Mulberry leaves being chopped for silkworms.

Silkworms fed on white mulberry leaves.

Mulberry can also be used as human food. While the young leaves can be eaten, it is the fruit that is sought after. High in vitamin C, iron, calcium and potassium, the berries are very tasty. Unfortunately, the only way to enjoy fresh mulberries is to pick them. Being quite fragile, they do not pack or transport well. Mulberries are used to make jellies, pies, juice and wine.

There are plenty of medicinal uses for mulberry as well. It has antibacterial properties, is used to treat rheumatism, reduces fevers, and helps induce sweating.

The leaves are used to treat insect bites and the cineole content in the leaves makes them useful as an expectorant. The limone in the leaves has antitumor properties. Some research suggests that the leaves could be used to help prevent type II diabetes. The fruit is used to treat upset stomachs and sore throats. And the bark is used to treat stomach aches, neuralgia pain and edema.

If you have the right conditions and the room, a mulberry tree would make an excellent addition to your permaculture garden.

Filed Under: Article Tagged With: trees

Permaculture versus Conventional: Corn

Douglas Barnes’s Articles at Permaculture Reflections, Page 5

July 19, 2009 by Douglas Barnes 1 Comment

Note: While this piece is rather hard on the practices of conventional agricultural science, it is not to be taken as an indictment of science or the scientific method. Indeed, I greatly encourage more science. What motivated me to write this is the alarming positions and attitudes of followers of the unscientific religion of scientism, which I feel is one of the more harmful fundamentalisms in the world today. Also note that this was written at a time pre-CRISPR-Cas9.

Imagine two different people of two different mindsets want to grow corn: one a permaculturist, the other a conventional agricultural scientist. Imagine both have unlimited resources. One sees corn as being a part of an interconnected system that interacts with everything around it. The other sees corn as a combination of inputs. One view looks at corn as an organism that affects and is affected by its environment. The other view looks at corn as a machine.

The Conventional Approach

Plowed fieldThe agricultural scientist knows that corn is a demanding crop, so after plowing the land and applying glyphosate herbicide on upstart weeds, he or she fertilizes the soil with a commercial synthetic fertiliser. After all, plants grow better when they have a good nutrient supply. Unfortunately for the scientist, plowing kills beneficial worms and fungi and damages soil structure, increasing erosion. Plowing also oxidizes some of the carbon in the soil, releasing it to the atmosphere as CO2. Apart from being a significant contributor to green house gas emissions, this also reduces the carbon content. Reducing the carbon content reduces the cation exchange capacity of the soil, which is the ability of the soil to transfer essential minerals to plants. In other words, it makes the soil less fertile.

The glyphosate applied might be a brand that has a surfactant which is highly toxic to amphibians. In any event, glyphosate increases the risk of fusarium, a toxic fungus. Glyphosate is also linked to acute health risks including but not limited to headaches, skin and eye irritation, nausea, numbness, increased blood pressure, and heart palpitations and longer term health risks including lesions in salivary glands, inflamed stomach linings, genetic damage in human blood cells, reduced sperm counts (in testing on rats) and abnormal sperm (in testing on rabbits), and cancer (non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in humans and liver tumors and thyroid cancer in rats). So, let’s hope the scientist is careful and has good health coverage.

Hopefully, the fertiliser is not one that holds the nutrients in a cadmium salt as cadmium will further kill off fungi. On its own, the synthetic fertiliser will shift the soil in a bacteria-dominant direction and reduce fungal content with or without cadmium. The synthetic fertiliser also reduces the carbon content of the soil making it less hospitable to life and less fertile, reducing its capacity to retain water, and degrading soil structure thus increasing erosion.

As the corn starts coming up, weeds start popping up again, so a second run with glyphosate is made. This time, the agricultural scientist experienced some tingling skin and burning sensation in the throat.

The corn came up, but the field was full solely of corn, proving to be a smorgasbord for corn borers. Even spraying could not control them all. Clearly there is a problem.

Being clever, the scientist goes into the genetics lab and isolates the cry 1Ab gene from Bacillus thuringiensis ssp. kurstaki, the nptII gene, an intron (a non-coding section of a gene) from the heat shock protein hsp 70, the CaMV 35S promoter gene from the cauliflower mosaic virus and the NOS terminator sequence from Agrobacterium tumefaciens and sets them on the plasmid vector pV-ZMBK07. Plasmid vector pV-ZMGT10 carries the CP4 EPSPS gene from Agrobacterium tumefaciens and the gox gene from Achromobacter strain LBAA and the nptII gene. These are coated on microscopic BBs and fired into corn cells to transfer the DNA. Simple enough, right?

Wow. Millions of dollars later, the copy of the gene cry 1Ab gene was incomplete. If you don’t know what this means, don’t feel bad. No one does. No one knows exactly how this affects the functioning of the genetically modified corn. There was another problem, unfortunately. The terminator sequence to turn off the promoter gene was absent but made it to market anyway. Promoters can affect the DNA 40,000 base pairs down from them. So what is the CaMV 35S promoter promoting besides the inserted transgenes? What are the health implications, if any, of this? What are the environmental effects? Is the incomplete cry 1Ab gene coding for something slightly unique rather than the predicted insecticidal toxin? If so, is this unique attribute helpful or harmful to human health? Independent research has suggested that there were some deletions or rearrangements in the host corn DNA. What affect, if any, is this having on the corn’s nutritional content, human health and environmental safety? Is glycosylation (an enzymatic process attaching carbohydrates to other molecules in cells) causing unpredicted effects when this GMO is ingested? This has been seen with other GMOs. Has the disruption in gene order (something known to be important) had any harmful side effects? And if the only changes made are those that theory designed and predicted, why does this corn have higher lignin content than conventional corn? What about the recent finding of decreased fertility in rats fed the corn?

And it turns out that the pollen and detritus from the plant are toxic to caddisflies. Further research is not done, however, as industry-lead science is not interested in funding a project that might show that one of its controversial cash cows may be dangerous.

With millions spent, the agricultural scientist has increased greenhouse gas emissions, decreased soil fertility, increased erosion, increased pest losses, decreased yield, killed off local amphibians, decreased biodiversity, consumed more energy than the crop yielded, and compromised human and environmental health in a number of different ways. If that were not enough, 10 calories of energy were consumed to produce one calorie of corn.

The Permaculture Approach

It must first be noted that the permaculturist uses sustainability as a measuring stick. That means the energy created by his or her system to grow corn must capture and store more energy than goes into creating and maintaining that system. In other words, the net energy balance must be positive without fudging the accounting.

The permaculturist knows that corn is a demanding crop and will require healthy soils. As such, he or she has set aside a patch and has allowed it to overgrow with weeds and has chopped and mulched those weeds in place to build up soil fertility. Perhaps the permaculturist has added some kelp meal for trace elements. He or she has seeded the site with mycorrhizal fungi spores and/or transplants (probably Glomus species) to increase plant health. King stropharia mushroom spawn (Stropharia rugoso annulata) is added to the mulch to benefit the corn and provide an extra yield as is done in Eastern Europe.

Climate permitting, the permaculturist might adopt the Central American technique called frijol tapado. This method involves allowing the land to fallow for 2 or 3 years until woody weeds are dominant. Grasses will be competitive with the crop, but the woodier weeds will not be. Beans and corn are scattered directly into the weeds. Then the weeds are chopped and dropped to create mulch for the crop. (This system works well enough to produce 60 to 70% of the beans grown in Costa Rica.)

If this technique is not possible, the site needs to be cleared for planting. But the idea of tearing up the soil is unthinkable as it destroys fungal life in the soil, decreases fertility, and breaks down soil structure, contributing to erosion. Furthermore, the act of plowing creates an ideal niche for a raft of weeds that thrive in disturbed soils. The clearing could be done by hand, but doing the work yourself when it could be done by another and could benefit another is foolish. So, the permaculturist sends in the chickens. Penned in the desired area and kept on the hungry side, they tear through the weeds and contribute phosphorus-rich, natural fertiliser at the same time. Their droppings will also increase the number of worms on site, further benefitting the soil.

The corn is planted, but to help meet nitrogen needs, it is intercropped with clover and beans to fix nitrogen. Beans have also been shown to decrease outbreaks of leafhoppers and fall armyworm when intercropped with corn. Clover and soybeans have been found to decrease losses from the European cornborer. Weeds want to be avoided, so to back up clover as a ground cover, squash is planted. The added benefit to this groundcover is the food it yields. Squash also reduces losses in corn to spider mites and aphids. Bee balm is thrown in as a beneficial attractor, encouraging predatory insects and attracting pollinators. Over-concentrating corn is avoided as this would be too attractive to pests. Dr. Jane Mt. Pleasant of Cornell University has run trials of 3-sisters plots (3 sisters being a corn, bean and squash mix) against conventionally grown monocultural corn plots and found the calories produced in the 3-sisters system were 17% higher per unit area.

Wildflower strips along the perimeter of the patch are intentionally grown. These provide a haven for predatory insects, allowing them to overwinter and providing summer habitat for them. The flowers act as attractors for beneficial parasitoids, which help control pests such as cornborers. These parasitoids seek out caterpillars like the cornborer and lay eggs on them. The eggs hatch and burrow into the caterpillar, eating it from the inside out. The sugars from the flowers increase the adult parasitoids’ fertility, lifespan, and host-searching activities. The permaculturist is confident in this approach because field studies have shown this technique to be effective in controlling pest insects.

The permaculturist also plants silverleaf desmodium (Desmodium uncinatum) and molasses grass (Melinis minutiflora) in patches amongst the corn, which has been shown to repel stem-borers. Sudan grass (Sorghum vulgare) and napier grass (Pennisetum purpureum) are planted on the margins as this has been shown to lure away stem borers. Furthermore, all four of these grasses are useful as animal fodder. In Kenya where this method was developed, stem borers were shown to be cut by 80% over control plots.

As the soil has been built up, it grows healthier food. Recent research by chemist Dr. Donald R. Davis of the University of Texas shows significant declines in nutrition in conventional agricultural produce over the past 90 years. And this falls in line with other studies as well.

So, the soil in the permaculturist’s plot has been fed and the use of plowing and biocides avoided, increasing soil life. In other words, the soil is in a healthier condition than it previously had been. So compared to the agricultural scientist’s approach, the soil is healthier, the food is healthier, biodiversity is greater, the watershed has not been contaminated, pest losses are lower, more calories have been produced, less money has been spent, and human health has benefited from the practice rather than been compromised.

Filed Under: Article Tagged With: Design

Nature’s Mosquito Control: Designing Against Mosquitoes, Malaria and the West Nile Virus

Douglas Barnes’s Articles at Permaculture Reflections, Page 5

July 17, 2009 by Douglas Barnes 1 Comment

This article from our old site was written by Scott Meister

[UPDATE: The recent announcement of a malaria vaccine is a very welcome development. — Douglas Barnes]

One thing that can always dampen a good summer day is an itchy bite from a mosquito. In some places, a bite from a mosquito can transmit diseases and even end your life. Recent outbreaks of mosquitoes in Texas have caused concern about West Nile Virus. However, Malaria is a global concern. Malaria is the leading cause of death and illness in Rwanda (fightingmalaria.org). According to the Roll Back Malaria website, There are at least 300 million acute cases of malaria each year globally, resulting in more than a million deaths. Around 90% of these deaths occur in Africa alone, and mostly in young children.

In fact, the vast Majority of Malaria deaths occur in Africa where it has been estimated to cost more than US $12 billion every year in lost GDP. It’s interesting to note, that Malaria could be controlled for just a small part of that sum.

There are two basic approaches to fixing natural problems such as this. The first (and most costly) is the Industrial approach and the second (more reasonable) is to use a more holistic and natural approach.

The commercial/industrial approach mentioned above, involves using potentially harmful insecticides that kill indiscriminately and destroy the web of life without regard to long-term consequences to health and the ecosystem.

Fortunately, for the lesser fortunate people on earth, there is a cheaper, simpler, sustainable and eco-friendly approach to managing and controlling both mosquito’s, Malaria and West Nile Virus. It can be practiced anywhere…even in your own back yard, regardless of whether malaria or West Nile Virus is an immediate threat to you or not. These approaches cost very little, and once implemented…continue to produce long-term results requiring very little energy or money to maintain.

In a healthy, ecosystem, pests and diseases don’t generally run amok for long. This is because nature’s design uses biodiversity and various tricks such as plants with a certain scent, aroma or color and predators, natural barriers and limits, etc to keep everything in check. There are no mono-cultures in nature, there are no “lawns.”

By mimicking nature’s bio-diverse design in our own landscape, we can come up with a way to protect ourselves from the pesky mosquito and the viruses they carry. Sustainable solutions to natural problems such as malaria follow the following formula. Natural Repellent/Barrier, Predator (and predator attractant/habitat), Natural Herbal Antidote. Let’s examine each.

Natural Mosquito Repellents/Barriers

[Edit: Please note that the repellent property of the scent in the plants is only made available when the plant is crushed. The plant growing on its own does not repel mosquitos. — Douglas Barnes]

Mosquitoes are often repelled by scent. The scent that has proven most effective in repelling mosquitoes comes from Citronella macronata, which is a tree that can be planted as a hedge. This serves two purposes, first by exuding the scent which repels mosquitoes, and by providing a habitat and food for birds that eat mosquitoes. The Citronella plant attracts birds with berries, while also providing both nesting for them and cover from it’s own predators. Mosquito repellent and predator attractant and habitat are provided all in one tree. Two hits for the price of one..and once planted, they continue growing, and can give free cuttings/seed to be spread to other areas to grow. Did I say free? Yes, and I’d say that’s a rather cheap solution.

The citronella compound has also been bred into the “lemon geranium” which exudes the same scent, and is being used to repel mosquitoes at the herb layer. Lemon geraniums can be planted under or around windows, or can flank the sides of doorways to repel mosquitoes while providing beautiful flowers and a pleasant lemon scent to any shelter where humans spend time and sleep.

Catnip is another common herb that contains an oil that is supposedly 10 times better at repelling mosquitoes than using the expensive, resource-consumptive chemical DEET. Catnip can also be used as a (mildly stimulating) tea for human consumption.

The popular culinary herb, Rosemary, also has an oil that is effective in repelling mosquitoes. Because it’s a tropical plant, and thus not very cold-hardy, it should be planted in pots in cold climates and taken inside for winter. However, if you’re in Africa, it can be planted in window boxes, hung in pots around windows, or planted with lemon geraniums around doorways. It could even be planted and kept indoors near windows that have a lot of light as an interior repellent.

Citronella grass is a tropical grass that grows to be 6-feet tall, and happens to be where companies get the citronella oil that they put in candles and lanterns that can be burned to repel mosquitoes. While not very practical for the dreaded suburban lawn due to it’s height, it could be planted as a decorative grass to flank windows and doors to help repel mosquitoes.

Another grass that has potential in fighting mosquitoes and malaria is the Vetiver grass, which is a clumping grass helpful in fighting erosion and soil stabilization. Vetiver grass roots are aromatic and have been used to weave screens that can be used on windows and ventilation areas for homes. Spraying these screens with a mist of water, helps to cool air flowing through them while simultaneously enhancing the aroma, and thus repellent power of the screens.

Mosquito Predators, Attractant and Habitat

If we wish to get malaria under control, we need to focus on controlling the mosquito population. We can do this efficiently and effectively by attracting and providing habitat for the mosquitoes natural predators. Some of the more famous of these predators are Bats, Birds, Dragonfly and a fish so adept to eating mosquitoes that it’s taken on the suiting name Mosquito Fish (Gambusia affins). By providing the proper habitat for these creatures, we can have them manage the mosquito population for us.

To invite the dragonfly in to help, we can plant Bullrush and Cattail, two plants that attract this mosquito devouring insect that can eat thousands of mosquitoes. Bullrush and Cattail should be planted around ponds, and these ponds can be used to control mosquito larvae by stocking them with the Mosquito Fish and guppies. These fish can eat thousands of mosquito larvae, helping to reduce the adult mosquito population. If stocking ponds with these fish, care should be taken to also stock the ponds with water plants, as Gambusia also require plants to eat, and to provide breeding cover. The population of larvae that survives to become adult, can be eaten by dragonflies and birds nearby.

Last, but certainly NOT the least, when it comes to mosquito population management, is our champion mosquio predator, the bat. A healthy bat population can devour millions of mosquitos in an evening. To insure that they help clear our surrounding areas of malaria carrying pests…we can build and install bat-houses in a nearby area. Perhaps, a bat-house could be placed on a high post between the pond and living abodes. An extra added benefit to building and installing bat-houses…is that bats also provide a valuable fertilizer in the form of guano. This guano can be harvested from below bat-houses and be used in the garden.

Filed Under: Article Tagged With: Tropical climate

India: The Talupula Site, Part II

Douglas Barnes’s Articles at Permaculture Reflections, Page 5

July 11, 2009 by Douglas Barnes Leave a Comment

First impressions

This May, I visited the town of Talupula in the drought-stricken Anantapur District in Andhra Pradesh, India at the invitation of the Green Tree Foundation. Although I had seen photographs and general climate data for the region, I was struck but how dry Andhra Pradesh is. The province generally receives 350 to 700 mm of rainfall a year, and though I would like to report more specific rainfall for the District where the project was carried out, repeated requests to the government meteorological office by the Green Tree Foundation over the years have gone ignored.

When I first arrived, I met an engineer from Talupula who is living and working in Hyderabad. I went over what I was planning to do in terms of earthworks, which included swales and possibly a dam. When I mentioned that swales can be built with the aid of a bulldozer with a tilting blade or a grater with a tilting blade, he said that the soils were very hard and would require an excavator.

Lateritic soilUpon arriving in Talupula, I found the lateritic soils to be slightly more yielding than asphalt. The soils are ferralsols, which are an iron-rich lateritic soil that becomes hard after the land is stripped then subjected to repeated wetting and drying – just the conditions that occur in the dry tropics. When wet, they are very workable and may even bog down machinery working on it. When dry, they are are hard as pavement. In these soils, calcium, magnesium, potassium and sodium are weathered out, and there is next to no humus content in the soil. As a result, the cation exchange capacity is low, meaning that plant health suffers. While these soils do tend to lose potassium easily (another argument against the common practice there of burning pasture land as a management strategy), they do hold onto phosphorus well. They also respond well to amendments of lime and gypsum, though this was beyond the scope of our project.

Government irrigation projectThe Indian government is in the process of building a large irrigation channel to divert the flow of the nearest major river to the drier regions of the south. While I am personally skeptical of the ecological viability of this project, visiting the excavation site for the channel did give me the opportunity to examine the typical soil strata of the area. Lateritic soils are deep – sometimes running down to 20 metres in depth. I could see from the channel excavation that the gravelly soil continued down at least 8 metres to the bottom of the channel. All that gravel meant that I would not be designing and constructing an earthen dam as the gravelly conditions require considerable engineering for dam construction. The focus then became on swales and possibly gabions.

Obula Swami

Obula Swami, Talupula, APBefore I left Canada, a site in Talupula on public land on a small mountain outside of town was suggested. It is said that the deity Obula Swami lives at the summit of that hill. Our potential site there was the highest practical site to work on. On firsthand inspection, however, I found that the access to the site was difficult and there was very limited space to work in. There also were a number of rock walls already build on the site to combat erosion. And as it was public land, would it be subject to neglect, or destruction? A further problem was that shepherds regularly burn the land there, so establishing trees would be difficult at best.

We looked at a second site at the foot of the same mountain on private land. There was a good catchment and plenty of room to work on. After contacting the farmer, though, the restrictions he set made working there not worthwhile.

Gangahadr

For a few days, we were stuck without a site to work on. Then we got the approval of an organic farmer outside of town to do whatever we liked on a 7-acre hillside patch of his land. The farmer, Gangahadr, had already greatly benefited from the agroforestry advice of the Green Tree Foundation and was eager to see what we could do. The land was not too steep, and the nick point on the land (the point at which the hillside goes from convex to concave) was high enough that we could get up near the top of the hill and put in a series of swales. Being private, the land would be well cared for and access to it controlled. Gangahadr had a growing reputation in the area for excellent results, and the site was visible from the national highway, giving the project more exposure. As an added bonus, the site was adjacent to and would thus compliment a rock check dam built in 2005 by the Rural Development Trust. The effect of that dam has been to change the land downstream from desert-like conditions to a rich oasis. This was the site. I met with the Ganghadr and got his permission to build swales on his land.

In Part III, we will look at site planning, implementation, and the results so far.

Filed Under: Article Tagged With: Arid climate, earthworks

Neem

Douglas Barnes’s Articles at Permaculture Reflections, Page 5

June 22, 2009 by Douglas Barnes 2 Comments

Azadirachta indica, neem, the village dispensary. This amazing tree has so many uses that it’s hard to imagine a tropical garden being complete without it.

First, the tree has a deep tap root, making it drought hardly. It is not, however, tolerant of seasonal flooding or of frost. It helps rejuvenate damaged soils. In the hot climates it grows in, its shade is very welcome. It also makes a good windbreak. Timber from neem trees is termite resistant – a good feature in the tropics – and its calorie-rich wood makes good fuel. The flowers of neem also make good bee fodder.

Neem leaves are sometimes used in curries and chutneys in India. Extended consumption over long periods has the potential to damage the liver, so consumption should be occasional. Also, neem should NOT be consumed by pregnant women, women trying to conceive, or by small children.

The dried leaves are used as a moth repellent to protect clothes, in grain and dried fruit stores to protect from insects, and as a general insect repellent. Fresh leaves are sometimes eaten to rid the body of parasites. Twigs from the tree are chewed on one end, then used as a tooth brush.

Azadirachtin, the active ingredient in neem, is a very effective pesticide. It repels insects and disrupts their growth and reproduction. A neem solution can be sprayed directly on plants to deal with existing insects and to help repel further insect attack. To make a solution, simply bring a bucket of water to boil, add 2 handfuls of crushed seeds or 6 handfuls of minced leaves, and steep for 1 hour. Add a small amount of soap as a surfactant, strain and spray directly on plants. If only neem oil is available, mix 10 ml of neem oil with 1% azadirachtin content (get certified aflatoxin-free neem oil) with 500 ml of water and a touch of soap and spray the mixture on plants. Neem can also be used on animals to kill fleas, ticks, intestinal parasites, and repel blowflies. For a topical solution for animals, mix 1 ml of neem oil to 30 ml of water and spray it on the animal’s coat.

Looking at the medicinal uses of neem, it is easy to see why it is called the village dispensary. It is an emollient (soothes the skin), a purgative (a laxative), a vermifuge (rids internal and external parasites), a digestive agent, an anti-inflammatory, a sedative, a carminative (prevents gas), an anti-fungal agent, an antiviral, an antiseptic, and a diuretic. The list of ailments it is used to treat includes but is not limited to:

  • Gastritis
  • Fever
  • Poor circulation
  • Bronchitis
  • Candida (yeast infection)
  • Gingivitis
  • Kidney problems
  • Duodenal and peptic ulcers
  • Liver problems
  • Diabetes
  • High blood pressure
  • High cholesterol
  • Hemorrhoids
  • Conjunctivitis (pink eye)
  • Tuberculosis
  • AIDS
  • Asthma
  • Rheumatism
  • Venereal disease
  • Skin ulcers
  • Urinary tract infections
  • Athlete’s foot
  • Ringworm
  • Head lice
  • Scabies

Neem, Azadirachta indica

Neem also has commercial value with popular products made from neem including soap, toothpaste, shampoo, candles, mouthwash, tea, and on and on.

If you are in the dry tropics and are looking for useful trees for your site, be sure to include this amazing tree to you list. With so many uses from neem, you’ll be glad you have it nearby, and your pests will hate you for it.

Filed Under: Article Tagged With: Arid climate, trees

India: The Talupula Site, Part I

Douglas Barnes’s Articles at Permaculture Reflections, Page 5

June 20, 2009 by Douglas Barnes Leave a Comment

During the month of May, I was in the semi-arid region of Andhra Pradesh, India at the invitation of the Green Tree Foundation. The spread of desertification is something that I have written about here in the past, but to see the environmental degradation of a region that had formerly been a dry-tropical region of forest and savannah is always a real jolt. If nothing is done to halt the biotic pressures of deforestation and uncontrolled grazing and to repair the damage that has been done, this region will become a desert in the not too distant future.

Some forest is lost by people cutting trees for fuel wood but, as many species in the tropics coppice vigorously and firewood cutting tends to coppice the trees cut, this is not the major cause of deforestation there. The major causes of deforestation are land clearing for agriculture and land destroyed by grazing animals or by shepherds setting fire to the land as a management strategy. Also, grazing is communal by default. If land can be accessed by shepherds, both private and public land will be grazed.

The quickest means of repairing the land might arguably be by the controlled grazing techniques of Holistic Management®. This method would involve using one of the current degraders of the environment – grazing animals – to regenerate the land. I gave the practicalities of this approach some thought. To do just one District of the province would involve a large scale educational program to teach Holistic Management® to thousands and thousands of shepherds. It would also require each shepherd to have portable electric fencing to contain their herds in a controlled area for a controlled amount of time. Additionally, a sophisticated database, easily accessible by cell phone (the only communication tool at a shepherd’s disposal) would be needed to track grazed land and grazing schedules of different plots of land. The alternative, if Holistic Management® were to be employed, would be to have land owners fence their land into small plots and control animal access themselves. One problem here would be to convince the land owner that there would be benefit to him were he to shoulder the expense of fencing and managing the grazing on the land. The alternative is to only allow grazing on one’s own land. The problem here being that this approach would ruin the livelihoods of thousands of families, throwing them into poverty.

Were a land owner looking to raise animals on his or her own land, Holistic Management® would be the ideal approach to take. But as a large-scale solution to the problems of the region, it strikes me as being not very practical given the current system of de facto communal grazing. It would require massive coordinated effort, billions of rupees in training and billions in material costs to make it a reality. And then, it relies on everyone following the rules. While not impossible, it would be extremely difficult to carry out this approach successfully, I think.

The approach that my associates at the Green Tree Foundation are taking is a tree-based approach. The problems are well defined: poverty from a degraded environment; the environment degraded by biotic pressures – mostly from grazing animals. The solution they are using is to try to replace the forests that once stood and to shift agriculture in the region to an agroforestry-based system.

They are surveying local villages, finding the material needs of the villagers, selecting appropriate tree species based on local conditions and local needs, and supplying trees at low or no cost to the farmers and citizens of the village. To address the problem of grazing animals specifically, they often seek out productive tree species that are non-browsable or use non-browsable species as a living fence to exclude grazing animals from a site. They are planting agave as a firebreak to protect their planted areas from the fires set by shepherds. They are also encouraging the use of fodder trees for animal feed. Penned animals cause no damage to surrounding lands and feed can be cut and carried from fodder trees to the animals.

The main goal of my visit was to establish water harvesting earthworks and to demonstrate to the Green Tree Foundation staff the proper design and implementation of those earthworks. In Part II, we’ll look at site selection for our water-harvesting project there.

Filed Under: Article Tagged With: Arid climate, earthworks

Trametes versicolor

Douglas Barnes’s Articles at Permaculture Reflections, Page 5

March 19, 2009 by Douglas Barnes 2 Comments

Being a mushroom nut, it has taken all the discipline I can muster not to have a fungal species as Species of the Month yet. I can wait no longer. This month’s species is Trametes versicolor, the turkey tail or yun zhi mushroom. This saprophytic, polypore mushroom is a white rot mushroom, meaning that it breaks down lignin (the organic polymer that gives trees their strength). This mushroom is found in boreal, temperate, sub-tropical and tropical regions.

It has multiple uses. In the field of health, it has been shown to combat cancer. The cancer drug Krestin, also known as polysaccharide K or PSK, is derived from T. versicolor. It has anti-tumour properties, inhibiting cancer cell growth. It inhibits leukemia cell growth. Alcoholic extracts of T. versicolor are used to help fight prostate cancer. It stimulates the immune response. It helps the spleen recover from gamma radiation. PSK has antibiotic properties against E. coli, Staphylococcus aureus, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Candida albicans, Cryptococcus neoformans, Listeria monocytogenes, and Streptococcus pneumoniae. In-vitro studies show it inhibiting HIV replication.

It has many uses for bioremediation. It can be grown on woodchips in burlap bags. The bags can then be stacked in runoff channels below animal paddocks to filter E. coli, Listeria, Candida and Aspergillus, protecting watersheds from contamination.

The research of mycologist and permaculturist Paul Stamets suggests T. versicolor might be effective in out-competing pathogenic fungi like Armillaria spp., Sparassis crispa and Hypholoma capnoides.

Heat-killed mycelium of T. versicolor has been used to absorb up to 97% of mercury ions from water, suggesting its value to clean water systems.

It is also very valuable in either breaking down or bioaccumulating some of the worst manmade pollutants in our environment, among them antracenes (used in dyes, wood preservative, naphthalene and other products), chromated copper arsenate (used in pressure-treated lumber), dimethyl methylphosphonates (used in VX, sarin and soman chemical war agents), dioxins, persistent organophosphates (used in pesticides), pentachlorophenols (used in pesticides and preservatives), and TNT.

This fungi grows well on hardwood, including apple and cherry (unlike other fungi), as well as on fir, pine, spruce, larch, cypress and juniper. It can be harvested in the wild (in which case, only pick 25% of a patch of turkey tails), or cultivated on logs raised off the ground or in pots filled with sand. Tree stumps can also be used to cultivate turkey tails. It produces mushrooms annually from spring to late fall, though mushrooms usually appear most in the late summer.

The mushroom itself is very tough and leathery, and you will need a knife to harvest it. It can be boiled and used in soups or drunk as tea. The flavour is a little bitter, but compared with many other polypore mushrooms, the bitterness is mild. In a soup with other flavours, the bitterness will go unnoticed.

Filed Under: Article Tagged With: fungi, soil

Creating The Permaculture Balcony Garden

Douglas Barnes’s Articles at Permaculture Reflections, Page 5

March 10, 2009 by Douglas Barnes 3 Comments

Gardening offers many benefits. Compared with buying fresh produce at a market, properly managed gardens can provide fresh, healthy produce in a fraction of the time and at much lower cost than purchasing food. A single trip to the market can easily take 20 minutes to several hours out of your day and cost over $100 per visit. Gardening by contrast requires an initial investment to set it up and a few minutes a week to maintain and use. And with seed saving, you can continue to save money and enjoy organic produce year after year.

For apartment and condominium dwellers, however, the lack of space stops most from pursuing their own garden. But with careful design and planning, even a small terrace can yield a surprising amount of food.

While conventional gardening can be a lot of work, the permaculture approach will be to mimic a natural ecosystem to make your garden as self-sustaining and robust as possible. The first step to developing such a system is observation.

Site Assessment

To design a good garden space, you will first need to assess the space you have available. The single biggest limiting factor is climate. If you are in a temperate area, you will need to know your local growing season. How long is your frost-free season? This will determine how much time you will have for outdoor growing. If you are in a sub-tropical area, you would probably benefit from growing tropical foods during the hot season and temperate plants during the cool season.

Not every apartment or condo unit faces the sun, so you will need to determine if you have full sun, partial sun or shade at your particular site. If you have partial sun, would you be able to increase the exposure to sunlight with the aid of reflectors strategically placed on the balcony? If you have full shade, you will have to avoid growing plants that require full sun as they will grow poorly in such conditions.

For high rise buildings, wind is a limiting factor. Strong wind stresses plants, stunting growth, and it reduces soil moisture. The difference on a windy terrace growing avocado, for example, versus a sheltered site can be a 100% greater yield for the sheltered site. If there is too much wind, you will need to block it with some sort of barrier such as a trellis. In any event, make a note of the direction and strength of the prevailing winds.

You may be lucky enough to have a fair amount of rainfall on the terrace or, if permitted, be able to tap into a downspout from the roof. If not, you will need to take on more of the watering yourself.

How much floor space do you have on the terrace or by windows? We will see shortly how to maximize the space you do have, but for now, you will need to know the area you have to work with.

Finally, you will have to know what sort of artificial restrictions there are such as local ordinances and/or restrictions from the landlord or the condominium’s management.

Planning and Layout

Keyhole gardenFirst, create a map of the site. It needn’t be anything too fancy, just something you can use for planning purposes. Freehand maps will do fine.

Plan your access routes. Without easy access to everything in your garden, you are more likely to neglect hard to reach areas. You may stuff your site with growing space, but be sure to give yourself 40-cm-wide (16-inch) paths to walk on.

Balcony gardenAfter laying out the paths, you will know what floor space is available to you. Now you need to consider sun exposure and wind direction. You’ll generally be placing taller plants so that they do not obstruct the sunlight of other plants. You may need to break this guideline if you need either the taller plants such as bamboo or a trellis to act as a windbreak to prevent wind damage to other plants. In arid conditions, the additional shade from taller plants or trellises can be beneficial by helping to retain soil moisture.

Hanging plants are a great way to make use of window space for growing, so you need not be limited be floor space.

To make maximum usage of the outdoor growing space available to you, you are going to have to design in 3 dimensions. It will be much easier to access the space if you set up the planters in a terraced fashion with the highest ones in the back and the lowest ones in the front.

Balcony gardenThe installation of trellises will also help us to grow plants up walls and across ceilings. A trellis with a mesh pattern is good for plants that climb using tendrils such as grapes and bitter melon (Momordica charantia). Poles or lengths of string can be used for plants like beans or hops (Humulus lupulus) that twist around objects as they grow. In addition to natural climbers, plants such as squash and kiwis (which have a variety of species suited to climates from sub-tropical to cold temperate) can be tied to trellises to grow where you want them to. An added benefit of climbing plants is that they shade buildings in the summer, helping them to stay cooler.

There are many techniques people have devised to grow in vertical spaces. For example, PVC tubing can be used to create planters that maximise growing space with the minimal usage of floor space. These tubes can even be hung if necessary, though they may need to be anchored at the bottom if winds are strong on your site.

Planters can be ready-made units, or constructed out of bricks, wood, or other available materials. They can be fancy or simple depending on your taste. Just make sure that your planter gives you at least a 30 cm (one foot) of depth for the soil. If you plan on having root crops, you will need a planter that is deep enough for at least 60 cm (2 feet) of soil for plants like daikon, carrots, potatoes, etc.

Preparing the Soil

Proper soil preparation is what distinguishes easy, low-maintenance gardens from gardens requiring lots of effort spend on weeding, watering and tending. If you look at a natural system, you will see that it is able to survive without the constant input that most gardens need to survive. If you mimic this natural system, you will save yourself a lot of work.

In your planter, you can use potting soil if you wish, but starting with sand is cheaper and does the trick. But you are also going to need compost and mulch, preferably woodchips as they are less likely to blow around in the wind. It will also be helpful if you can go to a natural place such as a healthy woodlot with minimal foot traffic and grab a few handfuls of soil to put in your planters. This will serve to “seed” the soil in your planters with beneficial microorganisms.

Mulched containerFirst, put in a base layer of soil – either sand or potting soil – about 15 cm (6 inches) thick or more, depending on how deep the planter is. Place some of the natural soil you collected outside in the planter. Water the soil. The deeper the planter, the more you can put in. Next, add a dusting of compost on top of the soil followed by 10 cm (4 inches) of mulch and water it. Next add about 5 cm (2 inches) of compost and water it. Finally, add on about 5 cm of mulch and water it.

Mulched planterThe mulch serves several purposes: it suppresses the growth of weeds, it helps retain moisture in the soil, it breaks down over time to feed the soil, and it creates a niche for spiders, which will help control any unwanted pests that show up. This mulch is a key element, and without it your garden will be less likely to be successful and will surely take more effort from you to maintain.

MulchIt will be helpful if you sow white clover seeds (Trifolium repens) in the mulch. Just sprinkling it on top will do. As the clover grows, it will create a weed-suppressing groundcover and it will fix atmospheric nitrogen into the soil, helping to fertilise your garden naturally. Groundcover also reduces soil moisture loss due to evaporation.

Planting and Harvesting

Now you are ready to plant seedlings into the planter. To do this, dig aside the mulch in a small area of mulch until you reach the soil layer. Throw in a handful of compost them place the seedling into the hole. The mulch will settle over time, so place the plant so that the seedling sits down in the mulch about 5 cm (2 inches). Make sure that the mulch is not touching the stem of the plant. Water the seedling.

If you sowed white clover into the surface layer of mulch, you will be on your way to maintaining the soil fertility that your plants need. You can also plant nitrogen-fixing vegetables to help your garden. You can plant beans with other plants and the nitrogen they provide will help the other plants grow. You will, however, need to purchase inoculants for the beans at a garden supply store. This inoculant is simply a type of bacteria that joins with the roots of the beans to fix nitrogen from the air into the soil. The exception to plants that are benefited by beans and peas are members of the onion family. Beans and peas do not grow well together with onions, garlic or chives. If you grow these together in the same planter, make sure that you have at least one other kind of plant between the beans and the onions.

When using your garden, you may just need to harvest parts of the plant but any time you harvest the entire top of a plant, leave the roots in the soil where they can decompose and feed the soil. If, on the other hand, you harvest a root crop, bury the top of the plant just under the mulch where it can breakdown. Additionally, vegetable and fruit waste from your kitchen can help to feed the soil when buried under the mulch. This is a more energy efficient means to go about composting, particularly in the limited space available to apartment dwellers.

Avoiding Artificial Inputs

You may be tempted to add synthetic fertiliser, just in the beginning to get things started. Although this may seem like a good idea at first thought, it will lead to less soil life and less fertile soil over time. In a natural, healthy soil, most of the biomass is in the ground. In fact, there is twice the biomass below the ground compared to above the ground. Plant roots account for only a fraction of this biomass. The majority is in the form of soil micro and macro-organisms. These are so important to plant health that plants release up to 40% of the photosynthates they produce through their roots to feed them.

Adding synthetic fertiliser will reduce the amount of soil carbon, which reduces the productivity of your plants. Synthetic fertiliser is sometimes bound in a cadmium salt, which kills off soil fungi. And the addition of artificial fertiliser increases the plants’ uptake of water, bloating them. This causes the root hairs to shut down, starving the soil life. The bloated plants are now more attractive to insect pests and more likely to suffer a parasitic fungal attack. In this way, the end result of adding artificial fertiliser is going to be to kill of most of the beneficial soil life, which would otherwise have done most of the work of fertilising the soil for you. In other words, adding synthetic fertiliser means you are setting yourself up to do more work and spend more money than you would have to do otherwise.

Life in the soil is the key to healthy plants, which are, in turn the key to human health. The bacteria in your soil will be regulating soil gases that plants need for growth and reproduction. They are also mobile storages of nitrogen and other nutrients essential for plants; and at up to 80 kg (176 pounds) per square metre of soil (compared with 500 to 600 grams per m2 in ploughed soils), they are significant stores of these nutrients.

The mycorrhizal fungi in soil physically enters the roots of most plants and provides them with nutrients from the surrounding soil and even allows plants to swap nutrients and send chemical signals among themselves. Saprophytic fungi break down dead plant material making the nutrients from the detritus available for plants to absorb. The samples of wild soil that you ‘”seeded” your planters with will hopefully contain both types of fungi, but you can purchase these fungi, if you wish. (See resources below.)

Compost worms (Eisenia fetida or Lumbricus rubellus) will produce 1 kg of worm castings (the best fertiliser available) per m2 per year. If you can get some of these in your planters, they will self-regulate their numbers and provide you with much healthier soil.

Dealing with Pests and Disease

If you plant a variety of plants and mix them in together, you are unlikely to suffer from a huge loss of plants as you might with just or two species of plants planted together. However, when establishing a new ecosystem (i.e. your garden) the first year is likely to be the most turbulent as the system establishes a relative equilibrium. Pests may show up and, with the lack of predators, their numbers are free to expand. If you are having too much problem with pests, the simplest, safest and cheapest means of control for you is to spray milk on the bugs. It does not matter what sort of insect pest this is, spraying them with milk will get rid of them. Another common problem is powdery mildew (it looks like a white dusting on the leaves of roses, cucurbits and other plants). This can be dealt with naturally using a 0.5% solution of baking soda. Mix one teaspoon of baking soda with one litre of warm water. Add one teaspoon of liquid dish soap and spray this on the leaves of the affected plants, making sure to spray the underside of the leaves as well.

Planting different flowers that flower at different times of the year will create a habitat for predatory insects that will help control the numbers of pests. If you have the space, this can be very beneficial. If you plant flowers that you yourself can use (like chamomile and marigolds, for example), you will not be sacrificing space for predator habitat.

Some plants are good at repelling certain pests. Aphids are a common menace, but you can help chase them away with nasturtiums, garlic, onions, spearmint, basil and oranges.

When you “seeded” your planters with wild, healthy soil, you probably imported some saprophytic fungi with you. These fungi now have a head start and can out-compete potentially harmful parasitic fungi that might show up.

Plant Propagation

Many of the foods that you pick up at your local supermarket can be propagated and grown in your garden:

  • Onions or garlic cloves placed in a 10-cm-deep bowl of potting soil with the top third of the bulb emerging should grow if left in a bright window.
  • Chickpeas (Cicer arietinum) and other dry beans can be started in a 10-cm-deep pot. Cover the seeds with 5 mm of soil, water and put in a sunny place.
  • Potatoes with eyes growing out of them can be placed on soil a 15-cm-deep pot and covered with 3 cm of soil and left in a sunny place.
  • Avocado pits can be placed in a one-litre plastic bag with sphagnum moss that is just a little bit moist. Seal the top of the bag and place it is a warm, dark place for a few weeks. After two weeks, punch some holes in the bag to allow air circulation. When the avacodo has roots that are 8 or 10 cm long, you can transplant it to a pot, leaving the top half of the pit above the soil.
  • Lemon grass (Cymbopogon citratus) that has some grass blades left on it can be placed in a glass with enough water to cover the wide portion of the base of the stalk. Add about a tablespoon of activated charcoal to the water. When the roots are about 6 or 7 cm long, cut the top half of the stalk off and carefully transplant it (the roots will be delicate) to a pot and keep the soil moist.
  • Fresh ginger root can be placed on top of moist soil and kept in a warm place that is bright but not in direct sunlight. It should sprout and grow very rapidly.
    Jujube pits (Ziziphus jujuba)can be placed in a pot with moist peat moss, covered with plastic wrap and placed in the refrigerator for 2 to 3 months to stratify the seeds. Once removed from the refrigerator, the pits should germinate within 3 weeks. When the roots are about 10 cm long, the seedlings can be transplanted.
  • Chinese Yams (Dioscorea batatas) can be placed in a plastic bag with slightly moist sphagnum moss. The closed bag is then placed in a warm, dark place until it has roots that are 5 to 10 cm. Watch out for soft spots on the yam and cut out any that appear. Place the yam in a pot and just cover it with soil.

Keep the soil for these plants moist and make sure they are in a sunny place or they will grow weak and spindly. Once these plants start growing, they can be transplanted into your garden as described above.

For seeds, they generally germinate best in soil that is twice as deep as the seed is high as it rests on the ground; so, a 5 mm high seed would be covered with 1 cm of soil. They can be set in seed trays or any small containers that you may have. Once sown and watered with a mister, cover the tray with plastic wrap. Once the seeds germinate, make sure they get enough light to avoid weak and spindly plants.

Resources

Beneficial Fungi:

Fungi Perfecti LLC
Box 7634
Olympia, WA 98507
www.fungi.com

The Arunyik Mushroom Center
Box 1
Bankok, Thailand 10162

Mycelia
Jean Bethunestraat 9
9040 Gent, Belgium
www.mycelia.be

Appendix

Worm Farms

Another simple and useful way to deal with kitchen waste is with a worm farm. A worm farm is just a watertight container with compost worms (Eisenia fetida or Lumbricus rubellus) in it. Every square foot (30 cm X 30 cm) of worm farm surface area is able process about 200 grams of kitchen vegetable scraps per week. Once established, you can use the worm farm to dispose of not only vegetable waste, but also tea bags, coffee grindings and used filters, the occasional crushed eggshell and shredded newspaper (but not glossy colour paper). A properly run worm farm produces no smell and can be kept indoors without any problems.

The tailings from worm farms are the best plant fertiliser available. When the worms are ready, you can take the compost from the worm farm and sprinkle it onto the soil in your planters to feed the soil. Capturing some worms to put directly into the planters will help with the plant life as well – a dozen per planter would be fine. They regulate their own numbers and will be fine left to help out in the garden. If you have very cold winters, however, the worms might not survive over the winter. If this is the case, their eggs are very likely to survive over the winter and repopulate the planters in springtime

To construct a worm farm, take any watertight container that is 30 cm X 30 cm or bigger and add 10 cm of compost and shredded paper. Water it just enough that the mixture is moist. If it is too wet, you will drown your worms. Add vegetable scraps just under the surface where the worms can get at them. Finely chopping the scraps will help the worms to break them down faster. If you wish, you can put a lid on the container; just make sure to cut air holes in the lid. Covering the holes with screen of cloth will prevent any fruit flies from entering the container.

Actively Aerated Compost Tea

A great natural fertiliser and pest-repellent for plants is compost tea. To make it, put a handful of compost into a ten litre bucket of rain water (or any water that is free of chlorine). Add a tablespoon of sugar, put in an aerator, and leave the mixture to bubble for 24 hours. When finished, the tea can be put in a watering can and used to water the garden. The mixture will be rich in beneficial bacteria, which, when poured over the leaves of the plant, helps to prevent parasitic attack.

Filed Under: Article Tagged With: Urban permaculture

Keith Johnson Interview

Douglas Barnes’s Articles at Permaculture Reflections, Page 5

February 27, 2009 by Douglas Barnes Leave a Comment

In September, 2007, I had the wonderful opportunity to work with Keith Johnson and a team of other designers on a 25-acre property near Hamilton, Ontario. Keith and I, together with one other designer, walked a section of property designated to us to design. It was a tremendous learning experience for me. Working with Keith is extremely easy to do – he finds the humour in any situation, making everything more enjoyable. After our preliminary designing was finished, Keith graciously agreed to the following interview.

Douglas: Who are you and what do you do?

Keith JohnsonKeith: I’m Keith Johnson. I teach permaculture design with Peter Bane. I help him on the Activist mostly as the web guy but occasionally, if I ever get enough energy, I do a little bit of writing maybe a little bit of reviewing. But it’s been a while since I’ve done that now. (Laughs) But I love doing the web-work. And we also design and consult together with our company Patterns for Abundance. And I am the gardener at home. I’ve now got about a half acre garden almost and we’re putting in a forest garden. So we are slowly developing our base in Bloomington where we’ve been for about a year and a half now.

Douglas: You also mentioned some other places earlier as well. California was one.

Keith: Well yeah. Prior to Bloomington, I was 10 years in North Carolina outside of Ashville at Earthhaven Ecovillage where Peter and I lived for six years in a clay straw home we built for ourselves. And prior to that, I was in California teaching permaculture and I had started Sonoma County Permaculture. And I was landscaping for about 10 years all together all through the Bay Area. I had to get away from that. It was too crazy. Although, when I left I cried because I have so many dear friends there. And it was my friends I missed rather than the place itself, although, it’s pretty lovely despite eight months a year of no rain.

Douglas: How did you get your start in permaculture?

Keith: I discovered Permaculture One in about 1978 or 79 when I read about it in the Whole Earth Review which was also known as Co-evolution Quarterly. And also I am pretty hip to gardening and natural things because when I was about five years old I learned via my grandmother, who was doing lots of genealogical research, that I’m related to Johnny Appleseed.

Douglas: Oh wow!

Keith: So, I thought that was cool. And he was always an early inspiration to me.

Douglas: You aren’t dropping seeds out of your pocket as you go around are you?

Keith: I do! Sometimes I drop them into people’s hands but it’s very common for me to have seeds in my pocket. Very, very common. I don’t specialize in Apple’s, by any means. I’ve been a big seed saver for the 34 years I’ve been gardening. I guess I got started gardening really when I was about 25. My first gardening books were Organic Gardening Magazine and Ruth Stout’s book How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back and Gardening Without Work – all about mulch gardening. I am also a big fan of medicinal and edible plants. My dad is one of the last of the hunter gatherers. He grew up in Northern Michigan, where I also grew up for my first nine years. Wild foods were always high on the list of things that got us excited – collecting mushrooms and wild fruit and so on. Any time I go and see my folks my dad always a few places he wants to take me for wild food – get grapes or raspberries or juneberries, or take me fishing on the beaver ponds.

Douglas: It sounds like you didn’t find Permaculture, it found you. It was the thing to come waiting to happen.

Keith: Yeah.

Douglas: Maybe about four years ago on the Australian scene, permaculture “tipped” as Malcolm Gladwell would say. It’s basically a mainstream now. How would you say it’s doing in North America?

Keith: It’s coming on a little slower. But in just the last half a decade, there’s been a big shift. More people are tuning into it. More people are writing about it. I have read at least five different science fiction novels in which the word “permaculture” showed up.

Douglas: Really?

Keith: In one case, it was permaculture in an artificial environment in orbit around the earth. Kim Stanley Robinson recently wrote a trilogy of books about climate change. In one of the books, he used the word permaculture at least a dozen times. So, word is getting out.

Douglas: I hadn’t heard anything about that!

Keith: Read Kim Stanley Robinson, anything he’s written is very, very good.

Douglas: I’d love to but there’s so many things I need to know, and I guess I’ve always been like this, but I always read nonfiction almost exclusively. People always ask me why, and I always say “It’s not real.”

Keith: Well, you watch television don’t you?

Douglas: (Awkward silence.)

Keith: No?

Douglas: (laughing) No. (laughing)

Keith: I’ve never owned a television. My parents have television, people I visit have television. When I meet them in front of one, it’s sort of like an anthropological study, really. (Laughs) Cause I’m just kind of curious because seeing what people are watching is interesting feedback about the culture. And so, that’s always intriguing to me.

Douglas: I’m having flashbacks of Japan now and the culture of there. Anyway, that’s another story.

So, what we’ve been working on this site, Ian Graham’s property – designing it up with a whole bunch of people together – I’ve found it to be extremely productive to bring people together. It’s a great learning experience. There’s so many things I’ve learned, and I hope other people maybe picked up something from me as well. What advice do you have for people who are getting their feet wet with permaculture?

Keith: Read a lot. Start collecting the seed and plant catalogues. Study them. They are an enormous source of data. Get yourself a good library. Shop at the Permaculture Activist catalogue online.

Douglas: Of course. (laughs)

Keith: (Laughs) Permaculture Activist dot net. You’ve gotta put in a plug there.

Douglas: (Laughing) Of course!

Keith: And don’t waste any time is the next thing I’d say. And get help. Don’t try to do this by yourself. Start small, gain some mastery. Take care of zone 1 – that area 50 feet from your kitchen door all around the house. Get some greens and herbs going and start seeing what it takes to take care of oneself and family. Learn to live on things that don’t travel a great distance. Find your entertainment nearby so you don’t have to travel all around. And then when you do travel, it’s all the more valuable. You’ll make much more out of it. And when you do travel, go to people who are doing something intelligent – people who have gained some kind of mastery –and learn from those people. And they are all over the place, you just have to start looking for them. Start connecting yourself up to them and help them connect with others. Basically, we just have to let each other know we are there. This is one of the reasons why for the last 10 years, I have emphasized the Planetary Permaculture Directory where I try to keep track of all the permaculture contacts that I can, so that others can be found.

Douglas: Excellent advice. Thank you very much!

Keith: You are very welcome!

Filed Under: Article Tagged With: interview

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