#1 AKG podcast in 2011 - Falling Leaves

rainbarrels insulated with leaf bags, solar oven in the background busy preheating dinner.

4'x4' leaf mould piles sheltering fruit trees, storing moisture, blocking view and noise from the road, and producing soil amendment.

watering the winter salad greens in the greenhouse.

Transcript from our latest contribution to the Alternative Kitchen Garden Podcast
Hello again from sunny Hickory North Carolina. We are most pleased to back with Emma on the akg podcast. After a very hot summer and a very cold, snowy autumn, we here at the sustainable living project are settling in for a cozy winter. We had a lovely Christmas, even with a malfunctioning gas heating system.  The wood stove has been delivered but we are still in the process of installing it.


We spent a lot of time at my sister's anyway, making merry, eating her food and breathing her warm air. It started to snow on Christmas day and it stuck around for over a week which gave us about 8 inches of excuse for leaving the car in the driveway. Efforts to reduce my driving have been somewhat successful.  My primary use has been to collect leaves. In fact the primary theme of my efforts in the last four months has been leaf management. There are lots of oaks, maples, gums and other deciduous trees in this town. The city gives away free recyclable plastic bags to be filled with leaves and set on the curb for pickup; if that is too much work, as it seems to be for most, citizens simply blow them with a loud, nasty fossil fueled gadget into the street where another, much larger and nastier fossil fueled gadget on a truck comes along and hoovers them up for composting.


We figure it's brown gold. Our topsoil is practically nonexistent over red clay, so why on earth would we want to get rid of all those lovely nutrients? After all, the trees have been working all year to convert what minerals and nutrients they can mine from the earth into leaves, only to drop them to nourish next year's growth. Most everybody else, aside from us and our next door neighbor, are intent on treating these nutrient rich materials as trash. Consequently, we have been competing with our neighbor to collect as much as we can, and we now have about half as much lawn as we did when we moved here.


I try to wait until just before a rain or snow to spread the leaves. This helps to mat them down and keeps them in place when its windy. We've mulched around the fruit trees, including the four new apple trees, around the raised beds to insulate them from the cold, around the bamboo and the herb bed, and under the drip line of the big maples and the dogwood. I've also created five leaf mold piles with some fencing circles built out of scavenged fencing wire. This will yield fine, loamy soil amendment in the summer, and as they are on the verge near the road they are blocking both the sound and the view of the road. That's the Permaculture reminder for this episode: stacking functions. Here's another example:


Any excess leaves we save in the bags for later use, but they are not idly stored. We've  got them stacked around and on top of our rain barrels to keep them from freezing. When the morning sun shines we uncover the black tops to soak up some solar gain, covering them again when they go into shade.

Speaking of solar gain I've built a cold frame greenhouse on our south facing porch with a number of old windows left from when we fitted double glazing. The greenhouse is about waist high with a hinging lid which I can hoist up and tie off to access the seedlings, cut and come again greens, and herbs we are growing within.


Mmmm, fresh greens in the winter, yummy!

The AKG Sustainable Living Project podcast episode #4 transcript- Rain Water Harvesting

Hello,
Here is the transcript for our latest episode for The Alternative Kitchen Garden podcast;

"Hello this is Jacqui and Robb from the sustainable living project. First we’d like to thank Emma for allowing us to contribute to her wonderful podcast and for sending us her book as winners in her birthday plant competition. We are thoroughly enjoying the book, “The Alternative Kitchen Garden- an A to Z”, and highly recommend it to all our readers and listeners. And now on to our contribution for this month.

In our last post we mentioned our plan to create a rainwater harvesting and management system on our site. Why would we do this? The public water system is a surprisingly inexpensive way to get your water when the supply is plentiful and local. One of my instructors on my masters course was adamant that investing money into rainwater harvesting was pointless from an economic perspective as it would never pay itself back, and perhaps in the mountains of west central Wales she is right, I’ve never seen a rainier place.  But this fails to address several issues with public water systems; they use large amounts of fossil fuel generated electricity to pump, purify and process water. They leak vast quantities of this energy rich water. The water they deliver has had a chemical cocktail of treatments added to it to make it “safe” for human consumption, more on that in a moment. In the US, the drinking water in many locations contains rocket fuel from the defense industry, pesticides from industrial agriculture, e coli from concentrated livestock feeding operations, heavy metals from sloppy mining practice, and in may cases is too acid to be safe for long term exposure. And of course there are the obvious inefficiencies of mixing sewage with treated drinking water and then having to clean the whole mess up again. In addition, depletion of ancient aquifers is a looming problem, threatening our future food and energy supplies.

As to chlorine, it is a chemical designed to be antithetical to life. It is used in water for one thing, whether in swimming pools or drinking water, to kill micro-organisms. Perhaps it is the best choice for large municipal water systems but there are many indications that consuming chlorine and its by products, notably trihalomethane, is not good for your immune system.  The basis of healthy soil and thus healthy plants is a thriving, diverse ecosystem of micro-organisms. Thus, chlorine is designed to eradicate the very foundations of healthy soil. Rainwater is better for your plants as it is naturally soft and contains no chlorine. Rainwater can be purified for human consumption without chlorine.

So we have decided to harvest rainwater. Rainfall in Hickory averages around 4 inches per month. However, prior to the current El Nino cycle there were extended drought conditions. Water levels in the reservoirs in the SE fell to historically low levels causing jurisdiction and ownership disputes, threatened hydropower production, and brought on water usage restrictions.

Our property collection area, including the structures, is approximately 14,520 square feet. Assuming normal rainfall patterns return, we can expect 250 to 400 thousand gallons falling on our property per year. A typical household in Hickory NC uses 68,400 gallons per year, not including lawn watering. I’ve seen estimates that 10,000 feet of lawn will require an additional 312,000 gallons per year.

The large amounts of food and biomass we plan to grow would normally be expected to need more than the average lawn for irrigation but we believe that by using sensible permaculture techniques to increase the moisture retaining properties of the soil we can use less. Our demand should easily fall within the supply.

The key is to keep the rainwater from running off the property too quickly. Storage is to be accomplished in three ways: tanks to store clean water for household and garden use fed by rooftop collection, small ponds and reed beds to treat grey water and collect the overflow from the roof, and in ground storage via swales and raised beds with deep, rich soil. A swale is a ditch dug on a contour designed to interrupt run-off and allow water to slowly sink into the soil.

Instead of a single permaculture tip today we’ve got 8 principles of rainwater harvesting from an interview on Sustainable World radio with Brad Lancaster author “Rainwater Harvesting for Dry Climates”. You can find this interview at sustainableworldradio.com in the podcast archive. You’ll probably recognize the permaculture influence in these principles, the book is recommended by many permaculture practitioners.

1. Long thoughtful observation of how water behaves on site.

2. Start at the top of watershed. Our property has a slope to it, so we will need to address water flow from the top of the roof to the bottom of the property.

3. Start small and simple. As the house currently has an asphalt tile roof, we will start by installing water butts on our carport which has a tin roof.

4. Slow it, spread it, sink it. We will be installing swales and terraces on the property to reduce run-off, and to increase absorption and storage.

5. Always plan for overflow as a resource.

6. Maximise living and organic groundcover, no bare earth, no standing water (mosquitoes need 3 days of standing water to breed)

7. Maximise efficiency by stacking functions, for instance: use tanks as thermal mass and use berms on the down side of sales as high and dry paths; also, raise lots of moisture rich plants to cool the property in the summer.

8. Long thoughtful observation. Get the feedback; what works and what doesn’t.


And that’s it for this episode. Thanks for listening and remember you can visit us at sustliving.blogspot.com. We’ll leave you with another take on water, slightly edited for brevity, from Sandra Postel, Post Carbon Institute Fellow,

'I think with water there is certainly not a facing of reality yet. It is a major issue that we have to deal with. There is so much we could do with the water that we have to meet our needs in a more efficient and productive way. It is very easy to see how we could save 25% of our water use in most situations if we put our mind to it and planned for that. Each of us has a water footprint, water is in everything we use everyday, embedded water. To the extent we use less paper or buy fewer clothes, and recycle those things when we are through with them, to the extent we move our diets down the food chain, consume less red meat, we shrink our water footprint. Which means we are leaving more water for other people and other species. But only if we get real about the issue and proactive about the solutions.' ”

The next AKG podcast audio

The audio widget has been down for a day or so. it's now working and I have changed the file to the newest episode of the AKG podcast with the latest contribution from The Sustainable Living Project.