• Home
  • Courses
  • Articles
  • Member

Permaculture Reflections

Learn sustainable design

Articles and courses by Douglas Barnes

Killing Soil With Synthetic Nitrogen

Douglas Barnes’s Articles at Permaculture Reflections, Page 7

March 25, 2008 by Douglas Barnes Leave a Comment

Soil is like air. It is a simple thing that gets overlooked and it gets a bum rap: it’s “just dirt.” But “just dirt” is where the nutrients that keep plants healthy come from. And even for people who refuse to eat vegetables, plants are ultimately the source of nutrients in human nutrition. In other words, without healthy soil, there is not healthy food. And without healthy food, there are no healthy people. This often overlooked fact has been a factor in the collapse of many a civilisation and no civilisation that ruined its soil has survived, so we ignore it at our peril.

Permaculturists know that the use of synthetic fertilisers are a great way to damage soil life, but new research shows that the overall effect is actually very dramatic.

Research farmSaeed Khan, Richard Mulvaney, Tim Ellsworth, and Charlie Boast, soil scientists from the University of Illinois, found that in one of the University’s Morrow Plots the growth and yields of corn were 20% lower than in another plot.1 Conventional theory would predict the poorly performing plot would have been the better performing one as it received greater inputs of nitrogenous fertilizers and crop residues.

According to Saeed Khan, “What we learned is that after five decades of massive inputs of residue carbon ranging from 90 to 124 tons per acre, all of the residue carbon had disappeared, and there had been a net decrease in soil organic carbon that averaged 4.9 tons per acre. Regardless of the crop rotation, the decline became much greater with the higher nitrogen rate.”

The effect is not limited to this one case, either. Charlie Boast points out that “In numerous publications spanning more than 100 years and a wide variety of cropping and tillage practices we found consistent evidence of an organic carbon decline for fertilized soils throughout the world and including much of the Corn Belt besides Illinois.”

Adding soluble nitrogenous fertilizers pushes soil away from a fungal-based soil to a bacterial-based soil (mycorrhizal, saprophytic and epiphytic fungi can greatly boast plant health and yield). But it appears that, in the long run, the addition of synthetic nitrogenous fertilizers makes the soil less hospitable to bacteria as well.

Furthermore, the addition of too much phosphorus kills off fungi; and fungi produce glomalin, which makes up 27% of carbon in soils.2 Glomalin is also very stable in soil, lasting from an estimated 7 to 42 years. And as CO2 levels increase, mycorrhizal fungi respond by increasing the amount of glomalin produced (responding in accordance with the predictions of the Gaia hypothesis). We cannot afford to kill off this natural climate regulator simply for the convenience of running our agricultural systems like a factory.

This loss of carbon not only hinders soil life, it also reduces the water storage capacity of soil as well. The loss of life in the soil will damage the soil structure leading to increased erosion. The loss of carbon in the soil also means more nitrate pollution from runoff as the excess fertiliser not taken up by the plant (i.e. most of the fertiliser) washes away with rainfall and irrigation, polluting aquatic systems. And if that were not enough, the carbon is lost to the atmosphere in the form of CO2, increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

Imagine the effects of a holistic approach to soils. It is reasonable to expect that more than 4.9 tons per acre could be sequestered in soils rehabilitated to maximize soil life.3 But taking 4.9 tons as a conservative figure, the U.S.’s 434 million acres of cultivated land could sequester 2.1 billion tons of carbon, were it to be shifted to ecological farming methods.4

Organic soils have higher numbers of Trichoderma and Piriformospora species of mycorrhizal fungi which help protect against the parasitic Fusarium fungi.5 Fusarium produces vomitoxin, which is not destroyed in the cooking process. Its associated risks include cancer and birth defects. Fusarium also contains the chemical warfare agent fusariotoxin. Infected crops are unfit for human food or animal feed. Losses can be significant, as well. In 2002 for example, farmers in Manitoba, Canada suffered $100 million in losses due to fusarium.6 It is worth noting that the addition of glyphosate has been found to stimulate the growth of fusarium,7 so following conventional practices greater risks on human health and introduces the possibility of increased losses for the farmer. [Good luck to conventional farmers. The latest news is that the most popular brand of glyphosate, which also happens to have a surfactant that is deadly to amphibians,8 has now doubled in price from last year.9]

Once upon a time, farmers needed to respect soil life. Since the Second World War, however, agriculture has been incorrectly reduced to an industrial process with the belief that simply supplying the right parts (mixes of crop nutrients) is all there is to manufacturing the agricultural product. What we have actually managed, though, is to damage more land in a shorter period of time than any other period in history. And we are doing it on a scale that is global. We can live without oil (believe it or not). We can live without silicon chips. We can even live without industrial manufacturing. We simply cannot live without healthy soil.

The solution is, luckily, simple. Stop wasting money by giving it to chemical manufacturers for products (biocides, etc.) that reduce yield. Stop relying on chemical manufacturers for fertility. Stop wasting energy by ploughing. Instead, recognise that life is interconnected. Build a healthy soil ecosystem and you will be rewarded with healthy plants. But if you approach nature with the ill-conceived metaphor of the machine, you can expect that “machine” to perform poorly.

1. Study reveals that nitrogen fertilizers deplete soil organic carbon http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-10/uoia-srt102907.php
2. Glomalin: Hiding Place for a Third of the World’s Stored Soil Carbon http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/AR/archive/sep02/soil0902.htm
3. The mass of bacteria per acre of healthy soil is around 70,000 pounds with only 4500 lb to 5400 lb in ploughed soils (80,000 kg per hectare and only 5 to 6,000 kg per hectare of ploughed land). The figure for actinomycetes would conservatively be around 8,000 kg per Ha (about 7140 lb per acre) but could reach as high as 80,000 kg/Ha (about 70,000 lbs per acre). And after adding the mass of the fungi, protozoa, algae, nematodes, earthworms (one to 1.5 million per acre of healthy soil, not including their castings), and arthropods in the soil, the figure of 4.9 tons per acre more for healthy soils is not a radical estimate at all.
4. Based on figures from the 2002 USDA Census of Agriculture.
5. Bulluck, III, L.R., Brosius, M., Evanylo, G. K. and Ristaino, J. B. 2002. Organic and synthetic fertility amendments influence soil microbial, physical and chemical properties on organic and conventional farms. Applied Soil Ecology 19:147-160 cited in Ho, Mae-Wan and Ching, Lim Li. 2004. GMO Free: Exposing the Hazards of Biotechnology to Ensure the Integrity of Our Food Supply. Vital Health Publishing, Ridgefield, CT; Deshmukh, SD; Kogel, KH. 2007. Piriformospora indica protects barley from root rot caused by Fusarium graminearum. JOURNAL OF PLANT DISEASES AND PROTECTION. 114(6):263-268.
6. Suzuki, D. Dressel, H. 2004. Naked Ape to Superspecies: A Global Perspective on Humanity and The Global Eco-Crisis. Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, NSW, Australia; Boswell, Randy. 19 August, 2003. Roundup May Harm Wheat: Researcher’s Say Monsanto’s Popular Weedkiller Might Boost Blight. The Leader-Post. Regina, p. A1
7. Coghlan, Andy. August 14, 2003. Weedkiller May Boost Toxic Fungi. New Scientist; Suzuki, D. Dressel, H. 2004. Naked Ape to Superspecies: A Global Perspective on Humanity and The Global Eco-Crisis. Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, NSW, Australia; Boswell, Randy. 19 August, 2003. Roundup May Harm Wheat: Researcher’s Say Monsanto’s Popular Weedkiller Might Boost Blight. The Leader-Post. Regina, p. A1; Bigwood, Jeremy. August 20, 2003. Scientists Link GM Crop Weed Killer to Powerful Fungus. IPS; Rahe, J. Can. J. Bot. 33 (1987): 354-360., Appl. Soil Ecol. 8 (1998): 25-33 cited in Scientists Expose Myths that Organic Farming Produces Dangerous E-coli and Plant Diseases http://www.organicconsumers.org
8. Roundup®highly lethal to amphibians, finds University of Pittsburgh researcher http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-04/uopm-rhl040105.php
9. Farmers Feeling Roundup Spike http://www.agbios.com/main.php?action=ShowNewsItem&id=9425

Filed Under: Article Tagged With: soil

Increased Drought tolerance and Resistance to Salinity Through Fungi

Douglas Barnes’s Articles at Permaculture Reflections, Page 7

January 13, 2008 by Douglas Barnes Leave a Comment

Here we look at two recent discoveries showing how mycorrhizal inoculation can help plants better survive drought and salinisation.

In one study (Marulanda, A, et al. Drought tolerance and antioxidant activities in lavender plants colonized by native drought-tolerant or drought-sensitive Glomus species. MICROBIAL ECOLOGY), researchers looked at drought-tolerant species of the mycorrhizal fungi Glomus (namely drought-tolerant strains of Glomus intraradices and Glomus mosseae ) and their effects on drought-tolerant Lavandula spica (lavender). Drought tolerant strains of Glomus intraradices showed 35% greater root mass growth in the lavender compared to the regular strains of G. intraradices. And the drought tolerant Glomus mosseae showed 100% greater root mass compared to regular strains of G. mosseae.

Other beneficial effects included an increase in water content in the plant and decreases in antioxidants which would hurt plant health in times of drought. Plants with the drought tolerant strain also had higher levels of nitrogen and potassium compared to the non-drought tolerant Glomus species.

I think one could reasonably expect that the less drought tolerant strains would still be better than an absence of any mycorrhizal fungi. Nevertheless, the drought resistant strains would be a very useful and welcome addition to arid and semi-arid systems.

The following is an excerpt from the study’s abstract:

This study compared the effectiveness of four arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungal isolates (two autochthonous presumably drought-tolerant Glomus sp and two allochthonous presumably drought-sensitive strains) on a drought-adapted plant (Lavandula spica) growing under drought conditions. The autochthonous AM fungal strains produced a higher lavender biomass, specially root biomass, and a more efficient N and K absorption than with the inoculation of similar allochthonous strains under drought conditions. The autochthonous strains of Glomus intraradices and Glomus mosseae increased root growth by 35% and 100%, respectively, when compared to similar allochthonous strains. These effects were concomitant with an increase in water content and a decline in antioxidant compounds: 25% glutathione, 7% ascorbate and 15% H2O2 by G. intraradices, and 108% glutathione, 26% ascorbate and 43% H2O2 by G. mosseae. Glutathione and ascorbate have an important role in plant protection and metabolic function under water deficit; the low cell accumulation of these compounds in plants colonized by autochthonous AM fungal strains is an indication of high drought tolerance.

The second study on the effects of Glomus fasciculatum on the salt tolerance of Acacia nilotica (Giri, B, et al. 2007.Improved tolerance of Acacia nilotica to salt stress by arbuscular mycorrhiza, Glomus fasciculatum may be partly related to elevated K/Na ratios in root and shoot tissues. MICROBIAL ECOLOGY), higher nutrient levels were observed in trees inoculated with the mycorrhizal fungi Glomus fasciculatum where soil was salinated.

The United States Department of Agriculture considers soil over 4 dS/m to be “saline soil.”The study looked at uninoculated trees and inoculated trees at salt levels of 1.2, 4.0, 6.5, and 9.5 dS per metre. In the inoculated plants, higher biomass in root and shoot was observed, showing that fungi assisting in plant growth. Inoculated trees had higher levels of phosphorus, zinc and copper than their uninoculated counterparts. And interestingly, in the lower levels of salt, inoculated trees took up more sodium (1.2 and 4.0 dS/m) than the control trees. At higher levels (6.5 and 9.5 dS/m), the sodium levels decreased whereas the control trees took up more sodium. And as salinity increased, the absorption of potassium in the inoculated trees increased. These results show that Glomus fasciculatum fungi increases the health of Acacia nilotica in saline conditions when compared to uninoculated Acacia nilotica. It is reasonable that this species of Glomus and possibly others could benefit other species of trees in saline conditions as well.

They found that at the higher level of salt (9.5 dS/m), the mycorrhizae had a harder time being established. Designers might offset this somewhat with swales. This would allow fresh rainwater to hold in the soil, reducing the salt content over time. Where salty water tables are a problem, appropriate trees can be used to pump down the water table, thereby removing salt from the upper levels. Whether or not Glomus spp. could help tree species used in this way to pump down salty water tables remains to be seems; but it is very plausible.

A pot experiment was conducted to examine the effect of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungus, Glomus fasciculatum, and salinity on the growth of Acacia nilotica. Plants were grown in soil under different salinity levels (1.2, 4.0, 6.5, and 9.5 dS m(-1)). In saline soil, mycorrhizal colonization was higher at 1.2, 4.0, and 6.5 dS m-1 salinity levels in AM-inoculated plants, which decreased as salinity levels further increased (9.5 dS m-1). Mycorrhizal plants maintained greater root and shoot biomass at all salinity levels compared to nonmycorrhizal plants. AM-inoculated plants had higher P, Zn, and Cu concentrations than uninoculated plants. In mycorrhizal plants, nutrient concentrations decreased with the increasing levels of salinity, but were higher than those of the nonmycorrhizal plants. Mycorrhizal plants had greater Na concentration at low salinity levels (1.2, 4.0 dS m-1), which lowered as salinity levels increased (6.5, 9.5 dS m-1), whereas Na concentration increased in control plants. Mycorrhizal plants accumulated a higher concentration of K at all salinity levels. Unlike Na, the uptake of K increased in shoot tissues of mycorrhizal plants with the increasing levels of salinity. Our results indicate that mycorrhizal fungus alleviates deleterious effects of saline soils on plant growth that could be primarily related to improved P nutrition. The improved K/Na ratios in root and shoot tissues of mycorrhizal plants may help in protecting disruption of K-mediated enzymatic processes under salt stress conditions.

The moral of the story reaffirms what we already know: Healthy soils with mycorrhizal fungi allow for healthier plants, particularly in difficult situations.

Filed Under: Article Tagged With: fungi, soil

Daniel Jaramillo Interview 2005

Douglas Barnes’s Articles at Permaculture Reflections, Page 7

September 14, 2007 by Douglas Barnes Leave a Comment

The following interview was conducted on October 15th, 2005 at the University of Melbourne. Apart from being one of my heroes, Daniel is one of few designers and teachers out there putting permaculture to its full effect: redesigning society. Apologies for making you wait so long to see this.

Douglas Barnes: Could you give us a brief outline of your permaculture history?

ColombiaDaniel Jaramillio: Alright. I learned about permaculture in 1997, while studying agronomy in Costa Rica, from Introduction to Permaculture and I thought it was very interesting. I had been going that way. I had been studying agronomy for 2 years and I realised how there were a lot of nutrient cycles and energy cycles that were just broken by our own stupidity, really, you know? And that could be put together to make something that makes more sense. So I was thinking that way and then I found permaculture and I was really excited because then I didn’t have to figure it out. That would save me a lot of time, yeah? Someone had done it already, so I didn’t have to do it. So, I just started from there.

Then in 2000, I finished school and I was looking for what to do. I was living in the United States then ready to leave. And I found that they were teaching a course at Tagari Farms, Mollison’s farm. But the course was taught by Geoff [Lawton], and I applied for a scholarship. And they gave me a scholarship, so I flew into Australia and I stayed in Tagari Farms for a month and a half. I took the course and spent another month working. We were doing a lot of work with the chinampas.

Then I went back to California, which is where I was living, to meet my girl then. And my daughter was born in February and we moved down to Mexico to Guajaca, to the coast of Guajaca to work in a small village. It’s a little village on the coast with campesinos there. And we started doing a community project. We created a community compost piles, we introduced bamboo there because they used to use a lot of mangrove. But the mangroves were gone because of a hurricane. Anyway, I stayed there for that year then went to Colombia.

In 2002, I sent up a centre again in Mexico, a demonstration and education centre. We designed that and did the earthworks with Geoff. Geoff flew there. And then last year, I taught a course together [with Geoff] in Mexico again. And I registered myself as a teacher with the Institute in December. I taught my first PDC this year in March and here I am.

Douglas: You’ve done a lot of work in community building. Could you tell us more about that?

Daniel: You’ll find a lot of ideas and approaches to permaculture. But I believe that if we are really into preparing the ground and set up for some kind of change, we need to work with the community. We have to stop thinking that very western way of thinking of fencepost to fencepost, yeah? Because it doesn’t work like that. It won’t work like that. I mean, we can’t keep on doing things in so selfish a way. So, I think one of the most important tasks in permaculture and what permaculture is really about is community work.

Obviously in community work, we use appropriate technologies or appropriate techniques that can be based on the permaculture ethics of care of the earth, care of the people and sharing the surplus. So, you kind of build up capacity in people. And it’s very clear how you can definitely make a strong statement to them of what the problems are. I’m in the third world, yeah? So, we definitely don’t have to look far to see the problems that we have there, yeah? How they suffer and how easy it could be to just solve those problems if we start being responsible for our own basic needs. That’s all it is about. But always from a community point of view, not in a selfish way. Then we can help each other because we don’t have to all grow our own potatoes, you know? There are many things that need to be done and many jobs that, if you spend your time growing your corn or your potatoes, you won’t have time to do. You know, each one of us has a role in the community and the bioregion.

So, I’m living in a community that is all doing community work, and that’s all we do, really. I mean, I have some private things, and also, well, the family is mine, but the family reaches out to the community because I feed, like, 40 families with organic vegetables. Some of them are in the rich part of town. But some of them are very poor people and they pay less or they actually pay me with other things. We barter, yeah? But because you cannot just grow organic food for the rich and let the poor eat chemically grow food. So, it’s all about, for me in Colombia, it’s all about healing community. And obviously you know the problems that Colombia has. You know Colombia is a very troubled country. There’s a lot of creativity in the people. It’s just that energy is put into war, so people just see war or drug trafficking, yeah? We can focus that in more creative ways that would heal our society, you know?

Douglas: In your presentation that you gave this week, you mentioned that in Northern Colombia, a village you were working in reached a food emergency state. What happened there?

Daniel: Well bro, in Colombia you have a lot of coca. There’s coca growing all around to make cocaine, yeah? The United States through the Colombian government – this is the new type of dictatorship state – they have this spraying program, yeah? They are spraying Roundup and all sorts of things. Campesinos tell you like a year and a half ago, they started seeing all these little worms appearing in all their crops. And they are sure it came from the airplanes. But, supposedly, it says in the papers in the States that it’s just Roundup. Well, it’s not just Roundup. But still, we don’t know exactly what they are spraying.

But they sprayed this area, which has a lot of coca. It’s a very frontier area of Colombia, yeah? Where there is not much presence by the state. I mean, maybe there is presence of the illegal groups [right-wing paramilitaries] and with some of the groups you can clearly see how they cooperate with the state, yeah? And the only presence of the state is just the army that goes in and out and just wreaks havoc, yeah? But there is no presence of the state for health or social services – what people really need, yeah? So people need to look for a way to live and they were ripped of all their traditional knowledge, you know. And now they are dependent on money. Well, the only thing they can grow to make some money is coca, so they grow coca.

And the thing is that they are spraying this right now with Roundup. They’ve been doing that for many years now around Colombia. But they are now spraying even the national parks because some people have started to live in them in the frontier areas of the national parks planting coca and they [the government] just go and spray them, you know? There is no social program that would accompany that. So, people who are chiefs, are corrupt or are secure, they don’t really need that. They are just, you know, who knows the senator that is being supported by Monsanto which does all the lobbying – the United States senator says we’re going to spray down there. You know how those things are.

So, yeah, they are spraying all around Colombia. It’s United States contractors that they want to spray. It’s not the Colombian government spraying. It’s United States pilots, United States planes. Colombian army helicopters accompany the airplanes that spray. They not only spray the coca, they also spray the forests and the waterways. I mean, bro, there’s so much evidence and so many stories from the campesinos of what they are suffering with these sprays, yeah? Because all their food is gone. All the cash crop is usually gone, too. But the weird thing is they tell you and you see it too, and I’ve seen it with my eyes – I won’t be afraid to tell anybody this – you see big crops of coca high in the mountains not being sprayed. But the small ones low in the valleys, the small ones, the campesino ones are the ones sprayed along with their food.

What happens with these people is the war gets there, they hear these planes, they go to poor areas of the cities, you know? And they become really cheap labour to export [cheap goods] that work without any social benefits or anything. So that’s why I work with community in Colombia, yeah? Because we need to build capacity. And the state programs are not building capacity.

And we are pretty much like the lawn of the United States. They go there and do whatever they want to. If they did good things, they would be very welcome. But they are just ripping our country apart and killing our people.

So this community is in a food emergency. It was sprayed two weeks ago and as we speak they are in a food emergency. They don’t have any food. And the problem is that the paramilitaries, the right-wing paramilitaries, which do cooperate with the state army and police – they are illegal – they deal a lot with drugs and that’s well known all around Colombia in newspapers and magazines and the government knows that. But they also know, and I have seen it with my eyes, I have seen how they cooperate. There’s a roadblock, a police roadblock, but there’s a paramilitary telling them who to stop. So, they do cooperate. They don’t let food go up because the guerrillas live up in the mountains.
So these [villagers] are the people who are in between. I mean, they are confined, you know? And now they come and spray them, so they are in a food emergency. The only food that really reaches those parts is the food that is sent by the World Food Program or these humanitarian aid organisations backed up by the United Nations. But the paramilitaries don’t let any food go up, so it’s really tough, yeah? We were there. You know, we go up because we are being contracted by an international aid organisation, a human rights organisation. So, yeah, we usually have a very high political price, yeah? So, we can just go in and out. And usually all the permission is taken. We ask, we send messages and things.

And now that they have sprayed, their crops are gone, so they don’t have food. And we need people to know this. That’s why I’m not afraid of saying this because we need people to know this everywhere in the world because borders are really obsolete, yeah?

We get to a point where we know that if in Japan they pollute the air, that air is going to reach Colombia some day. Or that water, too. So we have to work together all around the world. Everybody has to know what is happening there as much as we have to know what is happening here. But people just don’t know. And the governments, the empires that are ruining the world and that we are supporting by the way we buy, by the way we consume, by the way we think, by the things we say, by the way we behave. All these things are doing those there, yeah? And we cannot support that anymore.

Filed Under: Article Tagged With: interview

Water Catchment Strategies for Drylands: Swales

Douglas Barnes’s Articles at Permaculture Reflections, Page 7

March 10, 2007 by Douglas Barnes 3 Comments

DesertificationDrylands present a serious problem for agriculture and for human development; and the problem is worsening. Standard agricultural practices have actually created major deserts in the world including the deserts around Mesopotamia. Twenty-five percent of the land on Earth is either desert or threatened with desertification. The problem strikes poor regions (like Africa with 66% of the land affected by desertification), and rich regions alike (as with Texas, where 40% of pastureland is now too arid for use). Almost 70% of the agricultural dryland is degraded by desertification.

Yet, our agricultural practices remain largely unsuitable for most climate conditions exacerbating the problem. Our methods are contributing to salinisation and soil erosion. Tragically, many people live in or depend on the agriculture from these areas. Generally, in most arid regions there is enough rainfall to re-green an area, but the rain that does fall quickly washes away taking precious soil with it.

Trees and waterOne of the strategies that has proven affective in combating and even reversing desertification has been reafforestation. Trees help the land hold water, are more drought tolerant than most plants, and their detritus helps build up soil. Trees serve as windbreaks which help reduce evaporation and soil erosion, and provide shelter for humans and animals. Trees also make up a significant part of the hydrological cycle, providing virtually 100% of the water for inland continental rainfall.

Consider the situation in the two most populous nations in the world: China and India. China is suffering from encroaching deserts and already has 19% of its land suffering from salinisation. India is chiefly arid or semi arid, though this was not always the case. Eight Thousand years ago, Asia had an estimated total of 15.132 million km2 of forests. Today, that figure is down to only 4.275 million km2, of which just 0.844 million is natural forest (i.e. not tree plantations).

To assist in reafforestation, we can make use of the swale. Simply put, a swale is a water-harvesting ditch cut level into the ground on contour. Swales are not diversions ditches. Their job is not to carry water form one place to another. Water will continue to flow over land until it reaches the lowest point it can find. Creating swales is essentially creating low points for water to collect in. The swales catch rainwater running off the land, allowing it to soak into the land. Once in the ground, water is more protected from evaporation – a very serious problem in deserts – which reduces the problem of salinisation.

SwaleSwales are often the most cost effective type of earthworks (depending on the situation), catching the most amount of water for the work put into their construction. Once constructed, swales greatly assist the growing of trees by capturing rainwater that would otherwise run off the land, eroding the soil in the process. Additionally, swales also help to recharge groundwater – a water source that has become greatly taxed since the proliferation of motorised pumps following WWII.

By reducing soil erosion and capturing water that would otherwise have been lost, swales contribute to the creation of healthy soils. The trees grown in conjunction with swales can further aid in soil stabilsation and can contribute vital nutrients for the soil from this detritus. Trees and associated groundcover plants can provide symbiotic hosts for mycorrhizal fungi, which, in turn, can boost plant growth, protect plants from acid rain, salt and pollutants (see also here), and greatly benefit the fertility of the soil.

Construction of Swales for Arid Climates

Arid climates are characterised by large rainfalls occurring in just a few events each year. As such, swale dimensions in these regions will be a little different than they would be in regions with more rainfall. One easy and inexpensive way to find a level contour is to construct an A-frame as shown in the diagram and hang a string with a weighted end down from the top of the A-frame. Find a level surface and mark on the cross piece where the string points to. This mark will show you where level is as the diagram below shows. You can use this A-frame level to map level areas along the ground. Along the level point, place stakes as markers. At the end, you will have marked out a contour line.

A-frame levelMark out contour lines about 20 metres apart from one another. (Twenty metres is a rough guide, as the shape of the land will make the contour lines closer in some places and further apart in others). Dig the swales to be 2 to 3 metres across and about 50 cm deep. The excavated earth is used in construction of the swale’s mound on the downhill side. When digging the trench and when constructing the mound of the swale, do not compact the earth. This will assist in water infiltration. Also take care to make the top of the swale level. In this way, it will be less likely to erode should they overflow with rain. Below is a sample of an actual swale designed by designer Dan Palmer. These measurements can be flexible as long as these swales for drylands are about 2 to 3 metres across.

Swale

And here is an example of swales used in Kafrin, Jordan:

Kafrin, Jordan swales

After the swales are dug, you want to mulch the area and plant groundcover vegetation to cover the bare earth that has been exposed. Since you will be planting trees along the swales in the future, you want the canopy of the trees at maturity to shade the swales. This will help reduce evaporation. Swales can be mulched to assist in water retention, and the swale itself can serve as a footpath. Allow at least one heavy rainfall to fall before planting trees along the swales and do not plant on the swale mound itself. This will help ensure the survival of the newly planted trees.

As I have had a request for information specific to the semi arid regions within Andhra Pradesh, India, where rainfall can be as low as 500 mm per year, I include this list of helpful tree species for that region:

Nitrogen-fixing species

The following species will absorb nitrogen from the atmosphere and, with the aid of symbiotic bacteria, will fix the nitrogen in the soil.

  • Tagasaste (Chamaecytisus palmensis) – Requires over 300mm of rainfall per year. Grows to a height of 7 metres. It makes an excellent protein-rich fodder crop.
  • Salt wattle (Acacia ampliceps) -Requires between 250 – 700 mm of rainfall per year. Grows to 2 to 8 metres in height. Tolerates alkaline and saline conditions. Makes good fuel or timber for posts. Can be used as fodder.
  • Chisholm’s wattle (Acacia chisholmii) – Requires between 190 and 800mm of rainfall per year. Grows 2 to 3 metres in height. It can be used for fodder or fuel.
  • Australian pine (Casuarina equisetifolia) – Requires from 175 to 1500mm of rainfall per year. Grows to 8 to 16 metres in height. Makes a good windbreak and controls erosion. The wood is durable and makes good posts. It is a good fuel tree yielding 4950 kcal per kg and will burn when green. It also makes good charcoal. The bark is tannin rich and can be used for tanning.
  • Rosewood (Tipuana tipu) – Drought tolerant once established. The trunk will grow up to 1.6 m across, and the tree can grow 40 m tall. This tree yields good timber.
  • Pigeon Pea (Cajanus indicus) – This tree is drought tolerant and might be a possiblility. Its protein-rich peas are edible and are sometimes used to make dal. The food can be used for fuel, fencing or thatch. Planted over chicken ranges, these trees can feed chickens.

Climax Trees

  • Neem (Azadirachta indica) – Drought tolerant. Grows 15 to 30 metres in height. The trees has anti-septic properties and it used for everything from oral hygiene to head lice treatment. This is one of the great trees of India.
  • Mexican pinon (Pinus cembroides) – Requires 270 mm to 800 mm of rainfall per year. They yield pine nuts which can be roasted or eaten raw, and can be ground to make flour.
  • Olive (Olea europaea) – Drought tolerant. The olives can be eaten or used to make olive oil.

This list is not exhaustive, and other species are certainly possible. Other species can be selected based on human needs for food, medicine and fuel, or for animal fodder.

When planting the initial system to repair the landscape, 90% of the species should be the support species: the nitrogen fixers. Among them, interplant the long term productive fruit, nut and timber trees. As the system grows, you can trim the support trees (or cut them out entirely for timber or fuel). The trimmed branches should be left laying where they fall so that they provide mulch and nourish the soil. The following diagrams represents ‘chop and drop’ fertilization. For the purposes of demonstration, they show the entire tree being cut, but in reality, the tree would only be trimmed until it was ready for final harvest.

Chop and drop

Support trees

Filed Under: Article Tagged With: earthworks

Retrofitting For Passive Solar

Douglas Barnes’s Articles at Permaculture Reflections, Page 7

January 19, 2007 by Douglas Barnes 2 Comments

The following is a write up of a seminar given at Noah’s Café in Tokyo. The focus of the seminar was suggesting potential retrofits to the café to reduce the heating costs. More will be written on passive solar design in the future, but for the purposes of this article, we will just look at enough to understand how to retrofit existing buildings.

In cold climates, 20% of the economy can be dedicated in one way or another to keeping warm. For areas below the Arctic Circle, this need not be the case. On a sunny winter’s day at 45°N (or south) latitude, there is around 957 Wh/m2 available to us for heating… if we use it. This is almost equivalent to the energy used by running a 1000W hairdryer for one hour falling on every square metre of ground.

There are 3 types of heating available to us: convective heating (heating using hot air), conductive heating (an object coming into contact with a hotter object), and radiant heating (heat radiating off a hot object such as the sun). While conductive heating is the most efficient, it is not practical for heating living spaces. Convective heating is the most common, but is also the least efficient. Radiant heating is the most efficient means of heating that is available to us. Luckily, we can get the sun to help us to use radiant heat.

To capture the sun’s heat, we use a technique called passive solar heating. We allow visible sunlight to enter a building through a window. When the sunlight hits objects in a room, some of that light is transformed into longer wave infrared light or heat. The windows then prevent most of the infrared light from escaping the building. Massive structures (concrete, brick or even water tanks) called thermal mass are used to store the heat generated and slowly re-radiate it into the building.

Although it seems obvious, it should be stated that passive solar systems need to be oriented towards the sun. It is worth mentioning because people have made the mistake of not doing this in the past. It is best that buildings are oriented so that they are within 10° of the polar axis (i.e. due south if you are in the northern hemisphere).

passive solar

Because the change in the sun angle is so great in temperate areas where passive solar heating is needed, the system automatically adjusts solar gain throughout the season. In the summer when heating is not needed, the sun is high in the sky meaning that the eaves of the roof cut solar gain. In winter, the sun is low admitting more light and allowing more solar gain.

passive solar

Existing buildings can often be retrofit to increase solar gain from windows that are actually on the shady side of the build. This is done be placing reflectors outside the windows on the shady side of the building. Designer Derek Wrigley has built these and reports that the 4.3m2 reflector system on his home in Canberra “is the equivalent of having a 1kW electric radiator on in the room for 9.72 hours each sunny day.”

passive solar reflector

With a little work, an electric motor can be attached to a reflector to make it rotate incrementally throughout the day allowing a steady beam of light to enter a given window. This technique could be used to target a specific thermal mass body. [Derek Wrigley has also installed this system in his home.]

Heliostat

A technique sometimes used on new homes is the trombe wall. From the outside, a trombe wall looks like a window built over a wall, but it is a very effective passive solar technique. A thermal mass wall is built then covered with glass to trap the heat it stores.

Trombe wall

A cheap, portable version can be made of water-filled bottles and placed next to a window to make use of that window’s solar gain. As sunlight strikes the wall, heat is stored in the water to be slowly radiated outward.

Trombe wall

Thermal siphons are another retrofitting option; and finished, ready to use units are sold in Australia under the name Sun Lizard. To save money, you can make your own out of easily found materials. To do so, you would construct an insulated box with a black piece of corrugated steel inside and a glass top. Solar powered fans can be used to increase the air flowing through a thermal siphon.

Thermal siphon
Thermal siphon

Windows will lose heat at night, so covering them up can save a lot of energy. The best method would be an internal shutter that completely covers the window. If that is not possible, heavy curtains can be used to help stop heat loss. The drapes need to seal off the window, so attaching the sides of the curtains to the wall with Velcro is a good idea. From there, the top is sealed off with a foam block so that air cannot enter from the top of the curtain rod. The bottom is sealed at the floor with cloth rolls on the inside and outside of the curtain.

Insulation

As an example, we took the building housing Noah’s Café in Nakano Ward in Tokyo. The orientation of the building was not bad (close to due south), but neighbouring buildings blocked a lot of sun reaching the first floor. The second floor and roof, however, have good solar access that could be tapped.

Some possibilities include a bottle wall in the second story window and thermal siphons on both the wall and the roof of the building as shown.

Passive solar retrofit

To keep in the heat generated, curtains could be fitted as described above. Additionally, blown-in cellulose insulation could be used to insulate the walls and attic of the building, which are currently uninsulated.

Filed Under: Article Tagged With: Energy, Home design, Temperate climate

Waste and Worms

Douglas Barnes’s Articles at Permaculture Reflections, Page 7

January 14, 2007 by Douglas Barnes Leave a Comment

by Scott A. Meister

Every household, every cafe, every restaurant, every place where humans are active, produces raw, organic waste.

What happens to this waste, and what does it do when it leaves our front door?

We pay taxes, to have municipal or privately owned trucks drive through our cities and streets every week or more to pick it up and have it sent to either a landfill, or an incinerator.

If the waste goes to a landfill, it starts decomposing, creating greenhouse gasses such as methane gas and Co2, which destroy the ozone layer, and contribute to global wrming. Landfills smell, and often become places that give birth to disease, and pollute groundwater supplies with hazerdous waste.

If the waste goes to an incinerater, mind boggling amounts of fossil fuel energy is wasted, to burn it into smaller pieces of ash, that float up into the atmosphere, perhaps into the jet stream, only to come down somewhere else. This again contributes to global warming, Co2 is again released, and the ash and gasses combine to contribute to diseases and respiratory illnesses such as asthma, lung cancer, hayfever, allergies, and a host of other costly health problems.

In effect, we are wasting our hard earned money and precious fossil fuels on the illusion that we are throwing things away. There is no such thing as “away.” The earth is a closed system that we all share.

We are currently paying money to destroy our environment and make ourselves sick, only to have to spend more money to “clean up” our environment later, and to pay hospitals, doctors and pharmacies in an attempt to make us well.

This is a negative use of our time, money and resources. It’s a never ending negative cycle.

I wish to show you a positive way to use our raw organic waste, to have a positive effect on our environment, our health, and our wallets. We can make our waste work for us instead of against us. We can profit from it, instead of paying to have it hurt us.

To do this,we need a little help from a friend. It is a lifeform that we have often been taught to avoid. Many people have been indoctrinated into fearing it, or thinking it is disgusting. It’s easily found in the soil on every land mass on earth accept antarctica. It’s the earthworm.

Contrary to many people’s opinions, earthworms are not disgusting. They are amazing. Without worms, we humans could not inhabit most of the land we do today. If we were to dissappear tomorrow, the rest of the world, including worms, would continue to exist without a single problem. However, if worms were to dissappear from the earth, our ecosystems would collapse. Worms are, in fact, harmless. “They do not harbor any bacteria or viruses harmful to humans, and are completely free of parasites. They eat harmful organisms and excrete masses of beneficial organisms in their droppings, known as worm casts.” (Murphy) In fact, worms have the ability to neutralize harmful bacteria, such as Ecoli, while simultaneously producing beneficial bacteria and also increasing the levels of nitrogen and potassium in the soil; just a couple of the elements necessary for all plants to grow. http://www.wormdigest.org/content/view/307/2/

Earthworms are actually the managers of the soil world. We depend on a healthy soil world for all of our food. Worms breakdown decaying organic matter and move the soil making air pockets, and water channels so that air and water can reach the other lifeforms below the soil, and make it available to plants too. They break-down organic material such as leaf litter, decomposing fruit and fecal matter from animals making. Doing this makes valuable nutrients available for the roots of plants, and for other forms of life in the soil. Worms are breaking down decaying matter 24 hoursa day, matter that would otherwise be releasing harmful gasses into the atmosphere or being burned to harmful ashes in an incinerator.

When earthworms break down organic matter, they produce two very valuable things: Worm castings (clean worm poop) and worm tea (clean worm pee). By doing so, they stop decaying organic matter from releasing dangerous greenhouse gasses and Co2. In the process, they are, in fact, producing the two most valuable forms of organic fertilizer known to man. Worm castings and worm tea, are mother nature’s fertilizer, and mother nature is the best gardener on earth.

Lori Marsh (Extension Engineer, Biological Systems Engineering Department, Virginia Tech) says, “You can process one-half pound of food scraps per day for each square foot of worm bin surface area. For example, a bin that is 18 inches by 24 inches (18/12 x 24/12) is 3 square feet in surface area and can process about 10.5 pounds of food a week (3 sq ft x 1/2 lb/ft sq/day x 7 days/week = 10.5 lbs).“

We can use these worms to help us convert our organic kitchen and house waste into a valuable form of fertilizer/soil conditioner that we can either use in our garden, sell to others, trade or give away. Worms are also great at reproducing, due to the fact that, being hermaphrodites, every worm has the ability to reproduce. Just two worms, have the ability to become over a million in just about a year. With this is in mind, we could even be good stewards of the earth, and simply give it back a few of them back to natural environments we have around us.

We can benifit from using worms wherever humans live, by building a worm farm.

There are many different types of worm farms: stacks of old tires, wood boxes, styrofoam boxes and my favorite, the recycled sink or bathtub.


Some of these cost lots of money, and others require some woodworking skills to construct. Others require lots of embodied energy to manufacture and ship to your home. Some are only suitable to use in areas where there is lots of space. Here in Tokyo, as in other cities, space is in limited supply. This is why I’m going to teach you how to build your own worm-condo, or in Japanese, a “Shimamimizu-Mansion.”

My version of the worm condo is easy both easy to build (is fashionably blue) and easy to use in an urban environment like Tokyo, where space is a valuable commodity. It can easily be placed on a balcony, or perhaps even under a sink or in a cupboard.

What you need, and how to make it:

First I went to my local home center and bought three plastic containers and two lids. Each container was about 350yen and the lids were 150 yen. Then I bought a small stainless steel mesh bathroom or kitchen drain catch for 350 yen, a sheet of stainless steel mesh for 500 yen, and a couple small thin slats of wood for a total of 200 yen.

The total cost was about 2,500 yen, or roughly $28-$30 U.S. (at rates based on the time of writing). Just to put this into perspective, the pre-manufactured worm condo pictured above costs around $169 U.S. or 26,900 yen (roughly $300 U.S.) to have shipped to Japan (then you also have to think about the other embodied energy costs).

Next, I went home and used a box cutter to first cut out the raised portion of the lids to make room for an air breathing screen that will also allow in moisture without letting in insects or other pests.

On the underside of the lid, I super-glued (super-glue already on hand at home) the mesh screen between the plastic of the lid, and one thin slat of wood which I cut to size.

Next, in the bottom of one of the plastic containers, I cut a hole with a drill to make room for the stainless steel mesh drain catch. This will be our first worm-bed and will allow the worm-juice to drain into a recycled jam-jar that I will place below it in the container below.

In the bottom of the second container, I took a power drill and made a lot of small holes in various sizes. This will be the second story of our worm-condo. These holes will allow the worms to move up into a second story of waste, allowing us to harvest the casting from below, and seperating the worms from their finished castings so they don’t start to die. (**please note: the picture was taken to show what is happening, it is not a safe way to drill holes into a container, please use common sense and rules of safety when handling power tools)

So, there we have it. About 2,500-2,800 yen and an hour of labor later, we are finished.

HOW IT WORKS:

The first container holds our jar and perhaps a small garden scoop to remove castings and stir the worm bedding or cover the waste. The second container (the one with the drain) sits on top with the drain positioned above the jar. (Of course, we will always put the screened lid on top).

The worms will start their work here, and when the container is full, we will place the third container (the one with all the many holes drilled into it) on top.

When the worms are finished with the first container, they will slowly move up through the holes into the next level. When all or most of the worms have moved up to the next level, we can remove the top level, and harvest our worm castings from below. Any worms still left in the castings can be added to your garden, sold as fish-bait, given to friends, or put back into the top container.

When the first container is empty. Place all the contents of the top container back into the first container along with a little of the finished product and start the process all over again.

I should mention, that there is no need to just use these two levels. You could continue adding as many containers with holes drilled in the bottom as you wish. In fact, it may be a good idea to add a couple more levels just to help keep up with the worms being created, and the waste being supplied.

WHAT KIND OF WORMS?

Many people are surprised to find out that there are more than 4,400 named species of earthworm on this planet and they have been broken into three categories. There are Endogeic, Anecic and Epigeic earthworms. Only worms from the Epigeic category should be used in worm-farms. The worms from the Endogeic and Anecic category are burrowers, and most of their lives underground eating soil. Their purpose in nature is to break down soil to make nutrients available to plants, and to physically move the earth, changing its structure to allow air and water down below. Their burrows are sometimes up to 6 feet deep. In short, they improve drainage and texture of the soil

Worms from the Epigeic category are known as top-feeders, and they are the ones that come up to eat decaying organic matter, turning it into nutrients for the soil and moving it below.

The best worms to use for this kind of compost are top feeding epigeic worms, specifically Eisenia Fetida (a.k.a.: red wiggler, brandling and manure worm or in Japanese: Shima-mimizu)

and Lumbricus rubellus Hoffmeister.

How can you tell what worm you have? From the way it’s been explained to me (it’s still hard for me to tell) usually, Eisenia Fetida and Lumbricus rubellus Hoffmeister have more of a reddish color on one side of it’s belly than another, and they usually have clearly defined reddish stripes.

On the other hand, burrowing worms (the ones we don’t really want) are usually a little more grey or yellow in color, and you can usually see that their bellies are full of soil. If you find a worm hole, with a mound around the entrance, it is a worm of the Anecic category. If you find the worms in a pile of decaying leaf-litter, then it is most likely of the Epigeic category.

Eisenia fetida is found on nearly every land mass of this planet, with the exception of Hawaii. You should not have a problem finding them. With some good detective work, you may be able to find somebody near you that has a supply. In the U.S. you can buy them at garden centers, but I have yet to find a garden center in Japan that sells them. I’m sure that a little googling will help you find a source to get your worms.

We need to use these kinds of worms, because they will move upward in the mansion, and not burrow down where they will most likely drown in their worm tea. We can also create their perfect environment in a worm-farm for these types of worms. These worms have an amazing appetite for organic waste, get along well in high-density populations and tolerate a wide range of environmental conditions such as temperature.

One extra, added benifit of using Lumbricus rubellus Hoffmeister is that it has been found to be tolerant of toxic levels of arsenic. Therefore, they can be of use in detoxifiing land poisoned by levels of arsenic that would be lethal to most other lifeforms. They also prefer a wet environment, so are ideal for plastic worm farms that tend to have a higher moisture content.

“[Lumbricus rubellus Hoffmeister is] resistant to very high concentrations of arsenate have colonised abandoned copper/arsenic mine and tungsten mine spoils that contain up to 50,000 ppm As on a soil dry weight basis (Langdon et al., 1999, 2001). This level of arsenic would be fatal for most earthworms (and other animals), therefore the physiological capability of these earthworms to become established on arsenic-contaminated soil must involve a mechanism for detoxifying accumulated arsenic in their tissues. The mode of arsenic detoxification in earthworm tissues is not clear, although biochemical analyses (Langdon et al., 2002) and sub-cellular localisation studies (Morgan et al., 1994) indicate that As3+-thiol (sulphur binding) complexes are probably involved. The cysteine-rich metalloprotein, metallothionein (MT), is a strong candidate thiol donator. It is not known whether arsenic in any of its oxidation states is able to induce MT expression in earthworms, but the presence of MT has been identified in earthworms taken from arsenic-contaminated soils (Stürzenbaum et al., 2001).”
http://srs.dl.ac.uk/Annual_Reports/AnRep02_03/worm.htm


WHAT TO FEED YOUR WORMS:

You can put almost anything in a worm farm. They love fruit and vegetable peels (but I’ve heard they are not big fans of citrus pulp or peels, or spices), crushed egg shells, tea bags, coffee grounds and filters (shredded), shredded newspaper or computer paper, pieces of torn-up cardboard, leaf litter from house plants, vaccuum cleaner bags (emptied and then torn up into digestable pieces, dog or cat hair, waste from dust-pans etc. Things you should perhaps avoid are meats, dairy products, oily foods and grains or fecal matter from pets that have a diet of meat because they may create unwanted smells or attract flies and rodents. It’s obvious but worth stating that we should not add anything that won’t decompose such as glass, plastic tin foil de-worming medicine or pet poo (pets are given de-worming medicine that can be transferred to your wormery, thus killing your worms). Already composted manure should be safe. It’s also a good idea to dust the top of the tray with a handfull of wood ash every now and then to help control oders, and balance the pH of the bedding.

A good rule to follow, is to make sure that your worms get a healthy variety of food, and do not over-feed them. Adding too much waste to a worm-farm, makes it difficult for them to keep up, and smells can occur. A properly managed worm-farm will never smell, is free of bacteria and germs, and provides a healthy amount of completely safe to handle worm castings and worm tea that you can add to your garden.

Worms will self regulate their population so do not worry about an over-abundance of worms. If you feel you have a few too many, share the wealth with a friend. Help them to set up their own worm farm, and get them started with the worms.

MANAGEMENT TIPS:

Although the worms may not survive a winter with temperatures below zero, their eggs will. However, it’s a good idea to move the worm-farm indoors if temperatures will drop too low. However, if your worm farm is small enough and is well managed, it can even be placed under sinks or in a cupboard.

Worms like it to be cool…so it’s best to keep it our worm farm out of the sun. They also hate light, so it would be a good idea to keep an extra cover like a towel, rag or piece of cloth rug underneath the lid with the screen. This will also keep moisture in, and aid in keeping other pests and insects out of the worm’s bedding. Although worms like their abode to be moist, they don’t like it too wet. It should be the consistency of a wrung-out spunge. If it’s too wet, they will drown, and anaerobic conditions can set in causing the worm farm to smell.

When first starting out, make sure you don’t over feed your worms. Keep decomposing kitchen waste to a minimum, and have a larger balance of perhaps moist shredded paper or coffee grounds and perhaps a little soil. If the worms cannot keep up with the amount of food given them, the kitchen waste will start to “gas-off” and it will begin to smell.

If a worm farm becomes too wet, your worms can drown, and anaerobic conditions can set in, again causing the worm farm to smell. Keep an eye on moisture levels. If your worm bedding becomes too dry, your worms will start to die, and the worm farm will start smelling like fish.

Worm farms must be able to get air and moisture, this is why we have the screen on top to allow for air ventilation and moisture management.

It is important to seperate worms from finished compost, or they will begin to die-off, this is why we have a second level for our worms to passively move into on their own. Without this second level, we would have to physically remove the worms on our own…a time consuming task…although with children, it can be a fun learning experience, that will teach them that worms are something to befriend, rather than fear.

After emptying the first layer of worm-castings, be sure to save a little bit to mix in with the decaying matter from the second layer. This will also help to keep the worm-farm from smelling like raw garbage.

When just starting out, you may find that worms want to crawl out of the worm farm. Especially if the balance of food to surface space to worms isn’t right. To remedy this situation, just keep the worms in a well lit area. Because worms hate light, they will not try to crawl out into a lit area. It’s also a good idea to start by covering your worms and kitchen waste with a bit of soil.

Remember, a well managed, well balanced worm-farm will never smell, and will be free of harmful bacteria and diseases. It will take some practice to get it right in the beginning, but just don’t give up if you find your worm farm starts to smell. Do what needs to be done to fix the problem. The very little effort it takes to manage a worm farm is worth it to save the ourselves from greenhouse gasses, and the health hazards (and the expensive hospital bills) associated with landfills and incineration. The bonus is, we get three profitable products in the end, better health and better food from our gardens.

Filed Under: Article Tagged With: soil

Passive Cooling

Douglas Barnes’s Articles at Permaculture Reflections, Page 7

November 22, 2006 by Douglas Barnes 15 Comments

Passive Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration

by Douglas Barnes

In permaculture, we look to a problem as being a solution. Much money is spent battling the cold in places like Canada, Scandinavia, Scotland, Tasmania, Russia, Argentina, and so on. But the cold can also be a valuable resource. Unfortunately, the cold is a largely untapped resource in most places. That said, there are some hopeful developments being made. For example, many office towers in Toronto, Canada are now cooled using a deep water cooling system that draws frigid water from Lake Ontario. While the buildings themselves are not sustainable, this method is less energy intensive than powering large air conditioning units to cool each building.

There are techniques for the rest of us – passive cooling techniques – that we can use to beat the heat.

Food needs to be kept cool for preservation purposes. The zeer pot described below is one cheap solution. But if one has the means, it is possible to design a passive cold cupboard that doesn’t require energy to operate. In almost any region of the Earth, the ground is going to be cooler than the surrounding air in the summer season (areas of geothermal activity are an exception to this and offer heating potential instead of cooling potential). A cold cupboard makes it possible to replace a large part of one’s cooling needs with a system requiring no outside energy inputs.

The cupboard itself would be a fully insulated space within the home with the same magnetic seal on the doors that refrigerators have. Cool air is drawn in to the bottom of the cupboard through a pipe running under the house with the pipe itself 4 to 6 feet (1.2 to approx. 2 metres) underground and with an opening to the surface outside. (See diagram – click to enlarge.) A drain should be installed in the pipe to allow for condensation forming in the pipe. A second pipe at the top of the cupboard vents to the outside of the house. The external portion of this vent should have access to full sun and be painted black. This will cause the air inside it to heat and rise, which in turn causes cool air to be sucked in through the bottom pipe.

To cool the house itself, a similar technique can be employed. In this case, a closed circuit of pipes is laid 4 to 6 feet (1.2 to approx. 2 metres) beneath the ground outside the house. A small fan is then used to force air through the system and blow cold air into the home. One variation on this is the have one end open to the surface and draw the air out through a vent pipe as is done in the cold cupboard described above.

Drain

[UPDATE: For those in temperate climates, the same thermal mass that helps to keep passive solar homes warm in the winter also helps to cool the house in summer. The large thermal mass in a home will remain cooler than the outside temperature on hot days, and serves to regulate indoor temperatures.]

Another variation is the wind chimney, which is sometimes employed in deserts. In the direction of the prevailing cool winds, a scoop-like vent is placed and a pipe is laid under the ground from it to the house. Where it reaches the house, the air passes over a container filled with dampened charcoal. This causes evaporative cooling of the air before it enters the home. Charcoal is used both as a sponge to hold the water and as a means of keeping the water fresh

Another strategy put into effect in tropical and sub-tropical areas is the shade house. A shade house is simple an area on the shaded side of a home with a vine-covered trellis to create a shaded sanctuary. Often these shade houses will contain an outside kitchen to prevent the heat of cooking from entering the home. Subtropical areas would have two kitchens, one inside for the winter, and one outside for the summer. Urban temperate areas suffering from the thermal island effect would also benefit greatly by the shade house strategy.

If you are living in a tropical or sub-tropical region and building a new home, you can increase airflow through the home by substituting the simple “box” design for one with more corners in it (see diagram). This will allow greater airflow through the home.

In tropical regions, it is beneficial to design a traditional tropical home with wall vents and a vaulted roof of permeable material to draw cool air in and push hot air out. (See diagram.)

These strategies are not only sustainable cooling solutions, they also save money by using available cold as a resource.

Zeer Pots

by Scott Meister

If you happen to live in an area that depends on a lot of electricity, and you’re finding electricity to be rather expensive…or would rather wisely eliminate as much of that expense as possible so you could spend your hard earned money on other things, then you need to be looking for ways to reduce or eliminate your electrical use as much as possible. Where can we cut our electric bills?

We’ve all heard of changing our lightbulbs to the new and improved warm fluorescents (no, they no longer turn your skin green). Of course, we can shut off our lights when we’re not in a room, shut off all electrical appliances we aren’t actually using. After all, there’s really no need to have all the lights on in the house, the stereo blazing and the TV on with no sound while we browse the internet. Those kinds of things are easy to see, and cutting back on them does a lot of good. But a large portion of the energy going into a household is actually used for heating and cooling rooms, food and beverages.

Even if you think you’re rich enough to waste your money on electricity, you still need to be concerned about emergency situations when the power companies stop giving you what you need. If you lived through the LA blackouts as I did…then you know what I mean. Believe it or not…there are a number of free and effective ways to nip your electrical cooling bill in the bud while also be prepared for power-outages.

We can consider passive solar cooling and air-conditioning. Please note that we are not talking about the use of photovoltaic solar panels, those are active solar devices. I’m talking about passive solar cooling. A lot of people have trouble imagining that the hot summer sun, can actually cool your house, but it can. The second law of thermodynamics is our best friend, and it works endlessly for free (or at least as long as the sun exists).

Heat rises (in the case of hot air), heat can radiates outward from warm surfaces, and heat will always move toward cooler areas, and if it happens to draw liquid with it, and that liquid evaporates…the inside surface of what just evaporated will be cooler. Solar chimneys, underground cool rooms (the old fashioned cellar), and the zeer pot, are just a few ways that use these aspects to our advantage to help us cut our power needs forever, and for free. After all, isn’t that what we all want? Why should we slave away at work all day and then spend our hard earned money on things that we can get for free?

To the surprise of many, the world’s cheapest refrigerator/cooler costs less than $2 dollars to make, uses minimal resources to produce and runs completely without electricity. It’s called a zeer pot, or the pot-in-pot and was developed by Mohammed Bah Abba, who realized that he could put the second law of thermodynamics and transpiration to work for him.

The zeer pot, is actually two earthenware pots (I’m assuming they are both unglazed), one pot smaller than the other. The smaller pot is put inside the bigger pot, and the space in-between them is filled with sand. The sand is made wet with water (twice a day) and a wet towel is put on top of the two pots to keep warm air from entering the interior. As water in the sand evaporates through the surface of the outer pot, it carries heat, drawing it away from the inner core, thus cooling the inside of the inner pot which can be filled with soft-drinks, water, fresh fruit, vegetables or even meat. A damp cloth placed on top keeps the inside pot away from hot air. In this way, fresh produce can be kept for long periods of time without the need for electricity, or camping coolers made high embodied energy. Tomatoes and peppers will last for up to three weeks, and African spinach, or rocket, which normally would spoil after just a day in the intense African heat, can and will remain edible for up to twelve days. Eggplants will keep for up to 27 days instead of three. It can even be used for storing sorghum and millets for a long time since it protects from humidity, thus preventing fungi from developing. The zeer will keep water (and other liquid beverages) at about 15 degrees Celsius (maybe acceptable for Guinness), and even meat can be kept fresh for long periods.

The new technology is now being used by farmers at the market. Fresh produce is kept inside, with just a couple fresh items displayed on the damp towel resting on top. In this way, most of the produce is kept hidden away from both warm air and insects. In the past, all produce was displayed in the open air, attracting flies resulting in stomach disease such as dysentery. Now food can be kept fresh for longer and kept away from flies…even miles away from electricity or ice. The key however, is a certain degree of aridness, for at a certain amount of humidity, the benefit of evaporative cooling tends to dissappear.

Although many people are excited about promoting this technology in developing countries, I see greater potential for this technology in the developed western cities, suburbs and countryside.

Instead of having humming, heat producing, electrical, bank-sapping refrigerators and freezers, we could have zeer pots stashed away in or near the garden, by the back door, out on the porch or balcony…anywhere. We could have them on the truckbeds of roadside vegetable stands, in cross-country delivery vehicles…at the local farmer’s market. We no longer have to make choices about freshness based on expensive camping coolers, refrigerated trucks, ice machines and electrical outlets. We can provide our own endless supply of refrigeration for less than two dollars.

For further information on zeer pots, please see the following sites:

http://www.rolexawards.com/profiles/laureates/mohammed_bah_abba

http://www.scidev.net/global/feature/refrigeration-the-african-way.html

Filed Under: Article Tagged With: Energy

Seed Balls

Douglas Barnes’s Articles at Permaculture Reflections, Page 7

October 17, 2006 by Douglas Barnes Leave a Comment

Masanobu FukuokaSeed balls are a method of plant propagation widely promoted by Natural Farming innovator Masanobu Fukuoka.

Seed balls are simply seeds mixed with equal proportions of dried compost and clay, formed into small balls, and dried for later sowing.

To make them, simply select the seeds to be used – thick-skinned seeds will need to be scarified, and some seeds need heat or cold to bring them out of dormancy. Legumes will require inoculant if they are to fix nitrogen. Also, for species that can benefit from mycorrhizal relationships, adding the spores of mycorrhizal fungi such as the genus Glomus and/or Rhizopogon, species Gigaspora margarita, and/or Pisolithus tinctorus would be beneficial, though not necessary. [This list is not exhaustive, but these are readily available through Fungi Perfecti.]

  • Mix one part seeds with one part dry compost.
  • Next, add one part dry clay and mix.
  • Then spray in water a little at a time and mix it together until you have just enough water to hold everything together without crumbling.
  • After that, form the mixture into balls 2~3 cm in diameter.
  • Finally, dry the balls for later use.
  • Once dried, the balls are ready to be spread over land that you want to plant. When the rains come, the seeds will germinate.

Using this method along with other Natural Farming techniques, Fukuoka san was able to produce 590kg (1300lbs) of winter grain (barley or wheat) and 22 bushels of rice per quarter acre of land. Moreover, these techniques require the labour of just two people working a few weeks a year to attain the crop. There is no plowing, no weeding, no application of biocides in any form, and no fertilising.

Seed balls may be obscure in North America, but in parts of the world already badly damaged by human activity, their use is easily recognised. The BCIL Alt.Tech Foundation of India uses seed balls to regreen Bangalore. And as most of the planets deserts are the creation of mankind, we can follow their lead to undo the damage we have done.

Imagine tanks used, not for warfare, but to pull land imprinters to give seedballs an advantage. Imaging cluster bombs, not killing, but being used to distribute seed balls over deserts creating green explosions. While some of these ideas may seem unrealistic, they are within the realm of possibility… if we only act.

Filed Under: Article Tagged With: soil

Mulling over mulch

Douglas Barnes’s Articles at Permaculture Reflections, Page 7

May 30, 2006 by Douglas Barnes Leave a Comment

The climate has suddenly decided to stop throwing 9C days at us, which means that the garden is growing into a jungle. The delay with the set up of the garden has been securing mulch. I’ve been after straw but unable to find any nearby. Those days are over. What I had thought inappropriate but what is available is cedar mulch. I had been concerned that it would be mildly toxic to the plants and would create acidic conditions. Research from the University of Missouri allays those fears.

Most people have a vague feeling that, since cedar tends to repel insects and resist rotting, it is toxic to plants. While there is some evidence that cedar heartwood inhibits seed germination, there is not much information available on the effects of the same material on plants that are mulched with it. A few years ago, I got tired of shrugging my shoulders when asked the cedar mulch question and did a little research on the matter.

…

[B]ased on this small test, it would appear that ground cedar wood is not toxic to plants when used as a mulch. Even though straight extract and 1:1 dilution retarded the germination of tomato seeds, there was no apparent permanent damage. Furthermore, it seems unlikely that the concentrations of potential plant growth inhibiting substances in the soil under cedar wood mulch would ever approach those in the 24-hour water extract. Materials leaching gradually into the soil from the mulch would probably be broken down by microorganisms before they could build up to high levels.

…

Most people have the idea that mulches tend to reduce the pH of the underlying soil. While this may be the case for certain types of mulch, most studies have found that mulching has little influence on pH. The theoretical basis for predicting a mulch-induced pH decline is that organic mulches tend to increase the organic matter content of the soil and decomposition of soil organic matter releases organic acids. However, certain mulches have fairly high concentrations of calcium and potassium and when they decompose, these minerals are left behind, increasing soil pH in a manner similar to the minerals in wood ashes.

In an Iowa study comparing the effects of various mulches on soil properties and on growth of maple trees, Jeff Iles and Michael Dosmann reported that the pH of the soil under hardwood bark (6.8), pine bark (6.1) and wood chips (6.4) was higher after 2 years than that in unmulched control plots (5.9). Duryea et al., reported a slight decrease in pH in response to mulching with pine needles, but little or no effect of pine bark, ground yard waste or cypress mulch.

Results of a study in Connecticut examining effects of soil amendment with high volumes of leaves will surprise most people. Abigail Maynard, with the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station at New Haven found that the pH of soil amended with 50 tons per acre of leaves for 3 years increased from 5.4 to 5.7.

While fresh oak sawdust may have a pH as low as 3.5, I found that a 3-inch-deep layer had no measurable effect on soil pH whether used as a mulch or tilled in. This was probably due to the relatively small amount of total acidity in the material relative to the buffering capacity of the soil.

Addendum

With mulch stored in large piles, anaerobic breakdown can occur causing “sour” mulch with a vinegar, sulfur, or silage smell. Such mulch can have a pH of 3.6 to 1.8, which can kill plants.

Filed Under: Article Tagged With: soil

Top 10 Fuel Trees for Zone 5 and Above

Douglas Barnes’s Articles at Permaculture Reflections, Page 7

May 16, 2006 by Douglas Barnes 2 Comments

This article from our old site was written by Scott Meister.

  • Jump to the list

Image of osage orange.With today’s bleak future for fuel, we must start planning wisely. In today’s society, most people now living in urban areas are dependent upon the municipal, industrial and commercial structure to provide for their energy needs. This dependence has removed much of our freedom, for we are at the mercy of those who own or control the fossil fuels that we depend on.

At this point, we have a choice. We can go to war to secure the last few drops of fossil fuel energy, and destroy the world, freedom and life on the planet in the process, or we can start living wisely and self-sufficiently, so we are no longer subject to the whims of government or those who “own” fossil fuel sources. Furthermore, if we sever ourselves from this dependence, we will no longer be feeding the greed of the upper, say, two percent of society that is in “possession” of those natural recourses. It is both wise and intelligent to start reducing the amount of energy we need to live on, while at the same time taking steps to provide that energy for ourselves while using that energy in the most efficient way possible.

The first steps toward this kind of self-sufficient independence and freedom begin at home. First, we must begin with the intelligent design of a low-input house that takes advantage of passive-solar heating and cooling, and combine it with a surrounding landscape that will provide for our nutrition and any energy-input needs.

Those who are unfortunate enough to live in the energy intensive cold-temperate climate are at a specific disadvantage. Before the arrival of Europeans in the midwestern area, people roamed through it seasonally as nomads, wisely realizing that settling in the area would require all of the trees to simply survive the winter.

Some have suggested this is why the midwest is so sparse with trees in the first place, thus, the land is not as rich as other areas. Just as some have laid blame on the Anasazi for the deserts around Mesa Verde. Making clearings for the sake of agriculture to support permanent settlements removed the shelter, shade and water regulation needed for the continued survival of vegetation in the area.

The hot summers further aggravate the situation in the areas furthest from the coasts. This forces us to design for both extremes. It would be much easier to design for a place that is always cold, or always hot, but in the heartland of the U.S. we have been forsaken to have to deal with both.

The main problem, is that we most likely will not be able to keep warm through the winter by simply making use of insulation, orienting the house toward the sun for passive solar heating, and attaching greenhouses (tactics of which non are currently being used. Due to the pioneer paranoia of indians attacking, all settlements have been designed with a wagon wheel back-to-back square or circular design, ignoring sun aspect. If you add the former “abundance” of cheap energy, and aesthetic design customs which are dictated by the drive toward and show of status you end up the modern midwestern suburb).

As of now, many of the houses were not designed to survive a world running short of energy. They are, in -fact, aimed entirely toward the opposite goal, consumption of massive amounts of embodied and fossil fuel energy.

Vaulted ceilings (being pushed by architecture firms today) require massive heating and air-conditioning. Massive decorative grass lawns require insane amounts of time, labor, oil and gas inputs for mowing, fertilization and pest control (not to mention waste disposal). These are the status symbols of suburban life. They are the coveted norm. This is all going to change, whether we like it to or not. As the price of energy rises, as it has no choice but to do, these lifestyles will slowly become obsolete.

Since the winter weather is so harsh, and the summers are so blistering, we must turn toward a more harmonious inclusion of nature in our immediate surroundings and our settlements if we wish to survive without the benefit of cheap fossil energy.

In the future, living trees and shrubs will be the main source for what little fuel inputs we will depend on for our new eco-friendly homes. Trees will be the main source of shade to keep us cool in the sweltering summers. Trees will be the main source of soil building as well as water and soil conservation partners.

We will slowly start to see the disappearance of the aesthetic fireplace, that heats a small area while actually cooling the rest of the house. Franklin-stoves (which do little better than a fireplace) will fall by the wayside. Instead, we will see a wise homeowner installing masonry stoves that build and trap heat from small fires for the slow radiation of it over time thus making better use of whatever fuel we put into it.

To be most thoroughly efficient however, we must use efficient fuel, wisely. We wouldn’t want to burn something that will not last long enough to build up the heat we need, thus requiring large amounts of wood to feed the masonry stove. This would further add CO2 emissions to the atmosphere, while not really contributing to our heating needs. We also don’t want to harvest trees in an unsustainable way by planting lots of pine trees that grow fast, and then simply cut them down and replanting. This would be too energy and time intensive. This growing to kill system just doesn’t make sense when it comes to time use and yield.

It is with this in mind, that I’ve decided to do some research into the best kinds of wood for providing heat. I went in search of the tree that would give off the highest amount of BTU’s per cord. It is this search that lead me to the information below that was provided by a study done by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Extension, Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources. I also consulted a study published by the University of Missouri-Columbia along with various other online resources.

I chose the Top 10 BTU producing trees from these studies in hopes that we would all consider planting bio-diverse hedgerows, food-forests, shade trees, swale tree-lines with nitrogen-fixers that can also act as coppiceable sources of fuel. By including a variety of these trees, in combination with a passive solar home properly shaded in summer, using a masonry stove to maximize the efficiency of our fuel trees in winter, we can wean ourselves from dependence on the system, and on the fossil fuel cartels at work both at home and abroad. By providing our own food and energy security, we thereby will increase our own independence and freedom, thereby truly living the “American” dream.

Without further ado…the Top 10 trees are (drum-roll here)……….

Top 10 Firewood Trees
Rank Tree Million BTU / cord
1 Osage Orange (Maclura pomifera) 32.9
2 White oak (Quercas alba) 29.1
3 Black Locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) 27.9
4 Ironwood (Ostrya virginiana) 27.9
5 Shagbark Hickory (Carya ovata) 27.5
6 Apple (Malus domestica) 27.0
7 Honeylocust (Gleditsia triacanthos) 26.7
8 Bitternut Hickory (Carya cordiformis) 26.7
9 Bur Oak (Quercus macrocarpa) 26.2
10 Mulberry (Trees from the Moraceae family) 25.8


Top 10 Fuel Trees

Three Cheers for Osage Orange!

I’d like to spend some time talking about some of the better fuel woods up on this list, specifically , Osage Orange (Maclura pomifera). Look at that number again…32.9 million BTU’S per cord. That’s the next best thing to coal! Another paper from the University of Missouri-Columbia stated that Osage Orange would produce 30.7 million Btu/cord. This would equal (and here’s the interesting part) 219.3 gallons of Fuel Oil.

Considering that 1 barrel of oil produces 9 gallons of fuel oil, and one barrel of oil is priced currently at $67 US. Then one cord of Osage Orange is worth $1,634.80. Since it generally takes 4 to 10 hours of work to harvest, haul and prepare a firewood cord, in terms of labor, this would translate into between $163.48 /hr and $408.70/hr (depending on your planning and efficiency). NICE WORK IF YOU CAN GET IT! And…if the trees are coppiced in rotations, this would be sustainable! In other financial terms, one cord of Osage Orange is about 4,728 lbs. (dry weight). This would mean you could get about $3.00/lb. Considering the ever rising price of oil…ick! This tree is going to just become more valuable, especially since it’s not very popular right now, and people seem to just want to stick it in the ground dead as fence-post…more on this later.

Since I was a child, I would use the large and gnarly fruit as a makeshift bowling ball…split many a tree into firewood (to build character and muscles, so I’ve been told) and watched many a log light up our franklin stove in the bone-numbing Nebraska winters (F.Y.I. coldest temp that I remember experiencing was about -45 degrees fahrenheit but the yearly average low is -20 to -25 degrees F, or -28.9 to -31.6 degrees C)

Osage Orange (also commonly known as Hedge apple or just Hedge) got it’s name from the the tribe that live in an area around Arkansas, the Red River Valleys of southern Oklahoma and northern Texas. The Osage Indians valued the tree’s wood for it’s strength and elasticity and therefore used it to make bows, clubs and other tools (it’s still being used for this purpose today (well, bows at least, I don’t know how many people are making war clubs today). My father was recently bragging on it’s behalf in terms of its woodworking value. It has a beautiful fine grain and a yellowish-orange tint. It’s gorgeous and as it dries, it becomes extremely hard. Greener Osage Orange is easier to work with. Attempting to put a nail into dried, cured hedged takes a bit of effort. I bent many a nail in dried and cured pieces of Osage Orange while playing around in my uncles workshop. When I was a child of about eight years old (I think), I watched as my father and uncle built a barbed wire fence with Osage Orange as posts. Untreated, thirty years later…those posts are still in the ground, rot-free and untouched by termites.

It’s actually because of the invention of barbed-wire (and a bit of shortsightedness on the side of humans today) that Osage Orange is becoming more scarce, and being used as dead fence-posts and un-coppiced firewood, instead of a living hedge and a sustainable source of fuel. To be frank, we humans have a bad habit of valuing things more when they are dead than alive…a habit we must drop. The capitalist corporate mind looks at forests and sees clearings for subdivisions and measure it in board feet, or they see cabinets and fence posts. Unfortunately, they no longer see the rain makers, shade givers, shelter, temperature and water regulators, air filters and air-combs, soil builders and nitrogen fixers. They see the forests use only after it is dead and gone.

Before 1874 when barbed wire was invented, Osage Orange was better known as the hedge-tree. Pioneers valued it highly as a living hedge, and planted them close together, taking advantage of it’s tolerance to severe pruning, and ability to be coppiced in order to make strong, long lasting, hedges that were “Horse high, bull strong and hog tight.” In other words, tall enough that a horse couldn’t jump it, strong enough that a bull couldn’t push through it and interwoven so tightly that even a hog couldn’t get through. The thorns it produces takes care of discouraging most animals, including the most dangerous one on earth, the human. Due to the gnarly appearance of such hedges, many have evidently come to see it as an “ugly weed tree.” How disappointingly shameful.

If Osage Orange trees are planted out in the open (a situation formerly common on the great-plains) they grow like a shrub. If they are close enough to each other, they will become intertwined to create one of the best living hedges known to man. We might further argue that it’s even better than barbed wire, and much more sustainable to boot considering it’s lighter embodied energy audit.

If Osage Orange trees are grown amongst other woodland competition, or coppiced with proper management, they can grow very tall and straight with the tallest recorded height being 54 feet with a span of 90 feet. On a historical note that tree was grown from fruit sent back by Lewis and Clark from seed which was planted by Patrick Henry’s daughter at Red Hill in Virginia. In fact, Osage Orange was the first tree that Lewis and Clarke sent back from St. Louis.

The fruit of the tree is a large, green, wrinkled ball with a fragrance like an orange peel (hence the name) that will often stay on the tree after it has lost most of its’ leaves in the autumn. Squirrels go NUTS for the multiple seeds buried inside, and will spend quality time at the base of a tree to disassemble a fruit into bits just to get to all of them. Horses and other livestock enjoy the fruit, although it’s not recommended for humans, as it’s “harsh, hard, dry and astringent.” [Permaculture Info Web] However, it does contain an antioxidant which can be used as a food preservative, especially for oils. “The heartwood and the root can yield a nontoxic antibiotic that is useful as a food preservative.” [PIW] The fruit can also be used as an insect repellant because it contains the chemicals (2,3,4,5-tetrahydroxystilbene) . By cutting one into wedges and setting them on a plate, the fruit sap will repel cockroaches, crickets, spiders, fleas, box elder bugs and ants. If you want to skip the hassle of trying to dig into one of these with a knife, just drive over it with your car…you’ll still get the desired result, although it won’t look as pretty.

On a side note, anyone wishing to be “Johnny Hedge apple Seed” might want to plant both male and female trees so that trees will bear fruit, thus giving us more seeds, and trees to replace the thousands who have fallen due to mankind’s’ shortsightedness.

All this information is nice but now let’s get on with the matter at hand.

Fuel…32 million BTU’s per cord. That’s virtually twice the average of most trees, and I will repeat: it’s the closest you’re going to get to coal with wood. Why, in this energy scarce day, would we want to rid ourselves of such a valuable fuel source and waste it on fence posts, shelves and decorative bowls? I guess, because we dangerous humans are idiots.

If we are going to insist on living in an energy intensive cool/cold-temperate climate, and wish to survive the winter without the advantage of cheap oil, natural gas and electricity. We might want to consider the following.

Rip out our aesthetically pleasing, yet highly inefficient fireplaces and franklin stoves. Especially those that are using natural gas. As natural gas has peaked and it’s going to continue to increase in price, along with oil. Fireplaces, and even the slightly more efficient franklin’ stoves do not do much to heat the house, but they do an efficient job of sucking in cold air from the outside, and throwing up a bunch of carbon-dioxide emissions into the air. Just like the suburban lawn, these serve no practical purpose. They are a massive waste of resources for the sake of an aesthetic show of wealth.

If we truly want to keep warm in an efficient manner, I would suggest installing a well-built, and well-placed masonry stove. With one of these, you could stock a really hot fire of Osage Orange, let it burn out, and the heat will radiate from the masonry throughout the rest of the day. Using a bio-diverse, coppiced, high BTU fuel forest will save you a lot of woodcutting and hauling labor because you will need less wood to provide your heating needs. Furthermore, you will have a higher yield of wood over time for your efforts.

Keep in mind, that Osage Orange burns hot, but slow, and therefore starts slow (as most hard wood-high BTU producing woods do). You will need some serious kindling to get that baby goin’. This means planting more trees. The more the merrier! For kindling, I suggest trying Aspen, Basswood, Cottonwood, Yellow Poplar or Eastern Red Cedar. These quick burners.

So, we continue planting a bio-diverse fuel forest. A good number of Osage Orange and a few other species from this list above, along with some of the kindling species mentioned should keep you set. You could even harvest and make bundles of Osage-Orange twigs instead of logs that will get the fire burnin’ hot and bright. Speaking of which, the aesthetic value of burning hedged is almost priceless. It gives off a slight fragrance, and a colorful light show of flames accompanied by a crackle and a small concert of pops of sparks (the sparks are small, and usually burn out before hitting the ground thus don’t usually cause damage, but better safe than sorry, and not use it in an open-faced fireplace or stove, just one more reason to opt for a masonry stove).

So, just to recap, Osage Orange planted and coppiced for fuel is our energy efficient ticket to surviving the winter in a cold-temperate climate. Oh… and I almost forgot one of the most important things. It’s hardy to zone 5, succeeds in poor soils (especially dry ones) therefore being drought resistant, and fairly tolerant of maritime exposure. One slight word of warning too: the milky sap from the tree can cause dermatitis in some people, so be careful when harvesting, you’ll want to wear gloves anyway due to the thorns. Hmmm, there’s another use, security barrier!

How Much Is Enough?

How many trees will you need? This, of course, depends on if you’ve wisely followed the advice above, and have a masonry stove (better yet, having it installed in a passive solar straw-bale or earthbag house built toward sun aspect) with the proper amount of windows on proper sides and with sufficient awning or roof overhang to allow winter sun onto a radiant heat mass while also keeping the summer sun off your outside walls. If you’re simply going to go for a cord, here is the Firewood cutter’s rule of thumb.

Tree Diameter at Breast Height (DBH)
Tree Size (DBH) Number of Trees per Cord
DBH 46-55 5
DBH 21-33 6

Now unless you’re a lumberjack, or semipro wood cutter, you’re probably wondering what the blazes is a DBH. That stands for diameter at breast height, taken by measuring a tree’s diameter at about 4 1/2 feet from the ground. Now, this list only goes up to 6 DBH for one reason. Most trees are coppiceable if they are less than 6 inches in diameter and less than 10 feet tall. Therefore, if we want the tree to survive and continue providing us with firewood in a sustainable manner, we don’t want to let it grow bigger than that. So, we will need, on average, about 34 of the above trees to produce one cord of firewood (if that is the amount you really need). I would suggest more, as we are going to coppice them on rotation. The average by today’s standard home (considering the average home is lacking sufficient insulation, has ceilings too high, and if it has a fireplace or stove, it’s inefficient) needs 4 1/2 to seven full cords of wood per year to heat. I will be bold here and state that this is probably due to the fact that modern structures aren’t built toward energy efficiency, and most people don’t burn wood that kicks out a high BTU. The common, lazy fire builder usually goes for lighter, faster burning woods.

I will further venture to make a brave guess, that a straw-bale or earthbag home properly designed and placed to take advantage of passive solar heat, with a masonry stove burning Osage Orange will only need one or two cords per year maximum. However, I have yet to see anyone that has done this. I might also add, that the above numbers were probably taken from trees that weren’t coppiced, therefore the amount of wood harvested from those trees will have been much, much less, especially over time.

Optional High BTU trees/Words of Warning and Tips:

Many permaculturists will be excited to see that Black Locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) is on the Top 10 BTU list. Although the Permaculture Info Web says it is hardy to zone 3 and fixes nitrogen (the only tree on the list that supposedly does so) we should not get too excited. The report later says that “The leaves are rich in tannin and other substances which inhibit the growth of other plants….(it’s) a very greedy tree, tending to impoverish the soil (Although a legume, I believe it does not fix atmospheric nitrogen).” [PIW]

So there seems to be an open debate as to whether or not this tree is Nitrogen Fixing. Even if it is, it seems to impoverish the soil, and exhibits some antisocial behavior not suitable to a bio-diverse well stacked planting.

White Oak (Quercus alba) has 9 uses including edible seed that can be used as a caffeine-free coffee substitute. It’s is hardy to zone 4, and is Lime tolerant as well as side-shade tolerant. A mulch of leaves repels slugs and grubs although fresh leaves shouldn’t be used, as they can inhibit the growth of other plants.

Black Locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) (see above warning) is a fast growing deciduous tree that withstands drought and tolerates poor soil while being hardy to zone 3. It brags of about 25 uses including edible seed and seed pod, can be used as a drink and has fragrant vanilla-like scented flowers. Beware that the branches are brittle and subject to wind-damage.

Ironwood (Ostrya virginiana) is a slow growing deciduous tree that is hardy to zone 4 and doesn’t demand much light. A decoction of the bark can be used medicinally to bathe sore muscles, and an infusion of the bark can be held in the mouth to relieve toothache pain. Good fuel, but very difficult to split, so if you want your kid to have big strong muscles, and work on their temper, or if they need to blow off some steam… get them to do the splitting (under close supervision).

Shagbark hickory (Carya ovata) is “a slow growing deciduous tree… [but] is the fastest growing hickory in N. America” (PIW) hardy to zone 4. It’s seeds can be eaten raw or cooked and are used in pies, cakes and bread. Medicinally, the fresh small shoots can be steamed to make an inhalant for the treatment of headaches. It also produces an excellent charcoal.

Apple (Malus comestica) needs almost no introduction, and there’s so much information out there already, I won’t go in to any further detail here. However it is hardy to zone 3, withstands frost, and seems to be able to grow well near a wall or in the secondary layer, or in woodland gardens. It’s ability to grow close to walls may offer you the benefit of giving you a fuel and food source in zone I near the house.

Honey Locust (Gleditsia triacanthos) is a deciduous tree hardy to zone 3 that withstands drought and poor soil (including saline soil) making it ideal for soil reclamation projects. The seeds have many edible and medicinal uses.

Bitternut (Carya cordiformis) is the tree for you if you have a boggy swamp area. It’s a slow growing deciduous tree that is hardy to zone 4 and succeeds in low wet to dry woods, stream banks and on the borders of swamps. Produces seeds that are edible, but even squirrels don’t seem to like it much (according to PIW).

Last, but not least, we have the beloved and highly edible Mulberry (Morus species): a deciduous tree that might do well in the second layer in the canopy or in a woodland garden. Often grown for the fruit, it’s often looked over as a fuel source – afterall 25.8 million BTU’s per cord ain’t bad. It certainly isn’t anything close to Osage Orange, but it’s still in the top 10. It’s a good addition to any bio-diverse planting as it also gives you the added benefit of edible fruit.

Although I’ve spent a great deal of time concentrating on Osage Orange, I can’t emphasize enough the need for bio-diverse plantings. Most of these high BTU trees are slow growing, this is one more reason to coppice, and mix up your fuel forest with a variety of trees to help you get through the winter.

I would also like to suggest that we take a good serious look at the way we use our trees. Do we value them alive or dead? Do we wish to get the most out of them? If so, then we must use them wisely, as both a windbreak, hedgerow, shade giver, soil stabilizer as well as a source for fuel and food. We must also carefully look at how we use our lumber. Are we really going to use Osage Orange to make a bunch of decorative pens, jewelry boxes or pen holders? To me, this is somewhat similar to the executive who spends thousands of dollars on a platinum umbrella stand. We could be better use Osage Orange to take advantage of it’s rot resistance in the form of outdoor structures, door frames, planter-boxes and trellises, or perhaps bowls and cups? If we wish to get the most out of whatever resources we have, we have to use them wisely and use their advantages to our advantage.

Finally, trees are not just lumber and firewood. They are a part of this living ecosystem that we depend on for our survival. They aren’t of much use to us dead. There seems to be a prevailing attitude that cutting down (and thus killing) a full grown tree is the best way to serve mankind. The support for this argument is that you get “more” wood from the tree and large, wide pieces of lumber, or more “board-feet.” This thinking is fundamentally flawed. First of all, you get a greater yield over time, if you sustainably harvest from a coppiced or pollarded tree. Secondly, why do we need large pieces of lumber? Isn’t it true that anything that needs to be made big, can be made by joining many smaller pieces of wood together? Let’s save cutting down full-grown trees for those who’s time has come from old age, have succumbed to illness, or are creating a hazard. The indiscriminate hacking down trees for our own selfish purposes is doing more harm than good.

Tips For the Novice Woodsman:

For your own safety, please, please, please learn from someone who knows what they’re doing when felling a tree. Use a good quality saw with good sharp blades (it will save you a lot of effort, wear and tear on the body, and swear words). Carefully consider wind direction, natural lean and balance of the tree, location of large limbs, and the surrounding area where the tree is likely to fall. Make sure the area around the tree is clear of brush, and make an escape safety zone. Be sure to back far away from the stump so the trunk doesn’t kick off and hit you when it falls. Trees don’t always fall the way you want them to (see story below). If a tree becomes lodged in another tree while falling, the safest way to get the tree down is to pull it away from the other tree with a tractor or winch. Never attempt to cut the tree in which the felled tree is lodged, and never try to climb the tree either. Always move away at a 45-degree angle from the direction of the falling tree to the side and rear of the tree as it falls.

Don’t ever try the following:

Once, I was felling a tree on my in-law’s property, about a 30-40 ft evergreen. I didn’t take into consideration the wind direction because I was down in a sheltered area, while the tree top was up above in the mountainous winds around Mt. Fuji. Furthermore, I didn’t make my undercut or back-cut properly and carefully as I was in a hurry (big mistake number one: never hurry) When the tree started to fall, it went the opposite way toward a steel fence surrounding a turf tennis-court. A nightmare of expensive damage flashed through my mind, and I jumped between the tree and the fence (big mistake number two), put my feet back on the fence and put all my weight (all 130 lbs of me) pushing against the tree in hopes I could offset the wind, and get it to fall in the proper direction. I got the tree to stop falling, but couldn’t offset the wind. I was quickly becoming tired, and was thinking about how to get myself out of this situation. Luckily, my wife, and mother-in-law came around to see how things were going, and they were silly enough to endanger themselves to run over and help me, and we got the tree to fall the proper direction. This was insanely stupid. damage of property is always more welcome than causing physical damage to yourself and loved ones. Never hurry, and plan ahead carefully. Hopefully, we’ll all coppice trees less than 10 ft. tall and less than 6 inches in diameter, so we won’t ever be in such a situation…but remember. SAFETY FIRST!

The above information was based on a report entitled “Heating With Wood: Producing, Harvesting and Processing Firewood” Published by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Extension, Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources written by Scott DeWald, District Extension Forester; Scott Josiah, Director, Nebraska Forest Service; Becky Erdkamp, Publications Assistant); a research paper entitled Wood Fuel For Heating by John P. Slusher, School of Natural Resources published by University Extension, University of Missouri-Columbia and various information available on the Permaculture Info Web (http://permaculture.info/index.php) and the experience and observations of Scott A. Meister.

Filed Under: Article Tagged With: Energy

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • …
  • 5
  • 6
  • 7
  • 8
  • Next Page »

Courses

A Brief Introduction to Permaculture

Design Fundamentals I

Design Fundamentals II

Articles by tag

Getting started

Temperate climate

Tropical climate

Arid climate

Urban permaculture

Design

Earthworks

Energy

Fungi

Home design

Interviews

Land repair

Patterns

Soil

Trees

Water

About TOS Contact Resources
  • Facebook
  • Twitter

Copyright © 2005 - 2021 · EcoEdge Design Ltd.