AKG #5 - Hickory at last

Robb - After almost 3 years of pondering and planning, debating and deciding, we have at long last come home to Hickory North Carolina. Or to put it more accurately, we’ve come to Hickory to make a home. From Seattle, to Bermuda, to England, with several visits to Hickory over the last 12 years, we have not yet had a real place of our own, a place to settle, a place to put down deep roots. Now, finally we have a home to practice the basic permaculture principle of long thoughtful observation, in our rocking chairs, on our front porch.

Jacq - But we’ve found our house, rented for the last ten years, trashed. The gutters were non functional which meant the crawl space was getting wet.  We found all the carpets ruined, the laundry room a moldy wreck, and every surface in the house caked with grease and grime. The landscaping around the house was littered with plastic bits, cigarette butts, screens from the windows, and beer bottles. A portion of the lawn had been used as an extra drive and the grass was destroyed, the earth compacted and topsoil washed away.

Robb - But there were also happy discoveries, most of the gardening tools and and other equipment left with the house are still present and functional. The stove, ceiling fans, refrigerator, plumbing, while filthy, all still work. None of the double glazed windows we installed are broken. As our managing agent says, “the place has been hard lived in”.

Jacq- It goes without saying that Hickory is very different from England, we have already had temperatures ranging from near 90ºF or 32ºC to 48ºF or 9ºC, blistering sun and driving rain. We’ve seen violent thunderstorms with close lightning strikes as well. America is a dangerous place!  Having visited many times before, the deep South held no fears for me, but life is always full of surprises.  Within two days I had almost stepped on a four foot Black Racer snake, I had been stung on the belly by a hornet and was dodging bees the size of helicopters!  Within three weeks I disturbed a snake by my front steps, albeit a non-venomous garter snake; said snake ended up in next door’s bird box up a tree later in the afternoon chomping on a chick; our neighbour casually climbed a ladder, caught and relocated the snake and laughed at my alarm.  Next, taking in the laundry from the line at dusk a week later, my alarm turned into terror, as a pair of Robb’s boxer shorts came alive as I began to unpeg them, flapping violently in my face!  Robb heard my squawks of astonishment as a large bird exited one of the legs at speed, expostulating at having its roost disturbed.  I await the next assault upon my person and have recently succumbed to paying out for health insurance.  But we’ve also seen bluebirds, baby rabbits, and my favorite, hummingbirds, all from the comfort of our rocking chairs on our front veranda. But don’t believe that sitting around in long thoughtful observation is all we’ve done, we have been hard at work.

Robb - So in the first month, excepting the few hours we slept, bathed and nourished ourselves, we have created about 500 square feet of growing area about 80% of which is currently planted. Here is how it breaks down:
We’ve built 4 raised beds, mostly from timber sourced onsite or scavenged, and filled them with 6  cubic yards of compost enriched topsoil we had delivered and 1 yard of well composted horse manure we scavenged at a friend’s barn. They’ve been mulched with hay we scavenged as well.  Following the permaculture principle of stacking functions, each raised bed is carefully planned to create terracing in our sloping site and thereby reduce rainwater runoff and increase absorption and storage in the soil. The biggest bed has been built behind the first major terracing project built out of upright sawn pine logs. We will construct a stone wall in front of the logs as they rot over the next year or two.

Jacq - We’ve  created a nursery area under the carport where I’ve brought on over 500 plants in various recycled pots and scavenged seed trays. Robb also built a small wire enclosure for protecting vulnerable seedlings from the local bunnies.

Robb - I planted a bamboo bed with a barrier to keep it contained and Jacq added some veggies to share the space. Nearby, under an aging dogwood tree we’ve established the herb bed which is close to the kitchen.

Jacq - We’ve put in 80 feet of corn, beans and squash  in 4 sections out by the road and on the west boundary. The corn will support the beans and also screen the road and the ugly cinder block wall beyond. The squash will provide ground cover and keep down the weeds while the beans will provide nitrogen to both.

Robb - A gift of comfrey and nettles from a wonderful herb seller at the farmers’ market was a boon.

Jacq - And recently we’ve planted 9 bush cherry trees, 3 blueberries, 11 raspberries, 3 blackberries, 1 pecan tree,  25 strawberries, 10 perennial flowers, and 3 grape vines.

Robb - In addition to the all the planting, we’ve trimmed, pruned, mulched and generally tidied up the yard including the first thinning of the magnolia, which we thought was just a tree but is actually a grove. All prunings are either used to build frames and lattices for climbing plants, composted or put in the firewood pile. We are using scavenged cardboard under all beds and as sheet mulching, and around our holly hedge we’ve sheet mulched and  topped it with pine straw in an attempt to lower the soil ph for the blueberries and peppers we will plant there.

Jacq- Robb established a compost pile and a leaf mold pile, which is already full, started a second one and we have a healthy turf pile building up. He has also started excavating clay from under the house to enlarge the workshop and generate clay for cob building projects.

Robb - As our clothes washing machine is currently our of order we developed a clothes washing method utilizing a 5 gallon bucket and a plunger.  There is a rather interesting story behind this that you can read about on the blog at: Almost the lowest Tech Washing Machine

Jacq - We cleaned and reattached the gutters and set up four rainwater harvesting barrels to store around 120 gallons.

Robb - We loaded about 15 van loads of household stuff from the family storage unit into the house. This is all stuff from my parents’ house left over after the yard sale when we sold out. It includes a variety of tools, clothing, books, electronics, furniture, plywood, 2x4s, and kitchen items which have made our lives easier and more comfortable.

Jacq - Robb set up a preliminary workshop under the house where the crawlspace is head high and has managed to get his old car running.

Robb - I’ve mowed the lawn 6 times with my human powered push mower; thankfully every time we add a growing area the mowing area decreases.

Jacq - We purchased some electronics necessary to get a small solar electric system up and running which should soon take all household computer use off grid.

Robb - Oh yes, and lest I forget, I most humbly bow down, Jacqui has done a massive clean up of the house. I helped strip about 350 sq ft of very nasty synthetic carpet and vinyl flooring. But the real work was all Jacqui. And all that scrubbing has done wonders for her arm muscles.

Jacq - We’ve also been helped along the way by neighbors, friends, and family. I arranged a car share with my sister and she has been most helpful in many other ways including a gift of 10 bags of straw for mulch, the next door neighbor has given us all the logs from a tree cut down on her country property and taken us there to pick them up with her truck and trailer. Our insurance agent has become a friend, given us horse manure and hay and helped us transport furniture from the storage unit. We could not have come this far without all this assistance and we are very grateful to everyone. We are rediscovering southern hospitality and finding ourselves welcomed into a community, surely the basis for personal growth and for the growth of our sustainable living project in the years ahead.

Robb - Our permaculture principle for this episode is from “ The Permaculture Home Garden” by Linda Woodrow and it goes right to the heart of what we have been doing since we have been here: scavenging.

Jacq - “In natural systems there is no such thing as waste. Everything is food. Everything is a resource for the next part of the cycle. A major tool in my kit is an eye for the resource value of everything that once lived. Organic matter helps prevent erosion, conserves moisture, provides a buffer against extremes of temperature, and is one of the main forms of currency with which I pay my co-workers. Everything that once lived is food for something that inhabits the garden - either the chooks, the compost micro-organisms, the earthworms or one of the thousands of other species. Through them, and sometimes through a sequence of them, it can be converted back into food for crop plants and thus for me.”

Robb - You can keep track of our project and see photos as well at sustliving.blogspot.com. Thanks for listening and until next time, remember, if it doesn’t forward your personal or community sustainability, it’s probably not worth paying for.

Raised Bed Gardening the Organic Way

The next AKG podcast audio contribution.

You can download the latest episode at The Alternative Kitchen Garden website, listen to it in the audio player here or just read the transcript of our bit below, but it would be a shame to miss the AKG content.

"In the last episode we mentioned the shade structure we are planning for the south side of the house in Hickory North Carolina. Due to the intensity of the sun at that latitude we will eventually extend it to the SE and SW sides of the house as well. This structure forms a boundary between the house and the gardens.

Today’s permaculture tip is from “The Woodland Way - A Permaculture Approach to Sustainable Woodland Management” by Ben Law published by Permanent Publications in 2005.

“Wherever species, soils, elements, or natural or artificial boundaries meet, edges appear. Edges are highly productive environments. ... If we look at the edge between woodland and grassland, we find that the edge contains both species from the woodland and the grassland, as well as the species unique to the edge itself!”

This edge idea helps us to introduce the Permaculture concept of Zones.

In the book “Permaculture: A Practical Guide for a Sustainable Future”, Bill Mollison discusses 6 distinct zones. These are largely based around how much time is needed in each. For instance, a chicken coop might be visited more than 400 times in a year to gather eggs and manure, deliver water, cull, and perform maintenance whereas an oak tree may be visited only once or twice to collect acorns. Therefore it makes more sense to place the chicken coop close to the house and leave the oak tree in the woods.

Here are the zones according to Mr. Mollison, moving from the woods to the house;

Zone 5 is for the wild; unmanaged, lightly foraged and generally left alone, used for study, a place to learn the rules of the locale. This will be quite small on our 1/3 acre.

Zone 4 will be even smaller, it borders on the wildest areas and typically contains pasture and larger ponds, which we will not have room for, and minimally managed trees and shrubs for foraging and fuel.

Zone 3 is more for commercial use; livestock (only chickens for us) and crops for sale, natural or minimally pruned trees, storage and animal barns, water storage, vegetative windbreaks and habitat.

Zone 2 is less intensively managed with small ponds and hedges, home orchards and kitchen crop beds.

In Zone 1 are areas needing more frequent interaction; kitchen herb gardens, chicken laying coops, seedling propagation areas, rainwater tanks, small quiet livestock, and household waste recycling areas. To quote Mr. Mollison “In this zone, we arrange nature to serve our needs.”

Zone 0 is the dwelling and it’s attached structures, including potted and trellised plants and associated animals.

As our most urgent need is to get zone 0 prepared for occupancy, we must first consider how our structure interacts with the surrounding environment. The shade structure forms the interface with the surrounding environment.

In our design we’ve referred to The following principles from a Toby Hemenway slideshow at the Natural Building Convergence in May of 2002, it is available at the “I love cob” podcast archive at ilovecob.com/. The author of “Gaia’s Garden; A guide to home scale permaculture” Mr. Hemenway discussed the concept of “The Unified Landscape”.

#1 How can inhabiting the site be a net gain for the environment?
#2 How can we tie buildings into the site aesthetically and functionally?
#3 How can a building heal its own damage to the site, as well as past damage?

These principles take into account the effects of construction including materials production; be it mining, logging or petrochemical manufacturing, transporting those materials, as well as detrimental effects of construction; such as soil compaction, erosion, and habitat degradation.

Subsequent to construction there are the effects of inhabiting a site; energy and resource use, waste issues, and the long term effects of the structure such as impermeable surfaces and daylighting changes.

Hopefully while minimizing these negative effects we can compensate by capitalizing on opportunities created by the site; such as onsite resource collection, use and recycling, as well as creation of microclimates and increasing edges, thus achieving greater biodiversity. And lastly, by taking over the site we hope to increase human stewardship compared to its current use.

Our shade structure, with integrated conservatory and solar panels, and the added terrace it is built upon will be instrumental in accomplishing many of these goals as it will drastically improve the passive solar performance of the existing house and will generate electricity for various activities around the site. The conservatory will not only heat the house in the winter but will provide a platform for seedling propagation and growing of tropical plants like bananas. The timber frame shade structure will provide vertical growing space, as well as the beginnings of an integrated rainwater management system. We’ll discuss rainwater harvesting in the next episode.

And that’s it for this episode. Thanks for listening and until next time visit us at sustliving.blogspot.com. We’ll leave you with a quote from Gary Paul Nabhan “ One permaculture application does not necessarily make a long-term solution; it generates new challenges in an ever-evolving setting. Our role is to participate in ecological succession, not to freeze the landscape.”

The Sustainable Living Project podcast episode #2 at AKG

Here is the transcript of the next episode now playing over at The Alternative Kitchen Garden Podcast.

"While still in England and waiting for Jacqui’s US visa, we are doing the initial planning for our off grid permaculture based lifestyle and educational project in the suburbs of Hickory North Carolina.

We hope to demonstrate that a low impact, ethical, resilient, comfortable, healthy, and convenient lifestyle is possible in existing suburban developments. You can keep track of our progress on this podcast and at our blog, Sustainable Living at sustliving.blogspot.com

Our project will be sited on 1/3 of an acre with a 1950’s era, brick and timber framed, 1800 sq.ft, 2 story home. It has grid supplied electricity, gas, sewage disposal and water. Since we bought the property we have installed double glazing and loft insulation, and have done some landscaping to reduce moisture under the house. It has been rented out for 8 years while we have been living in the UK and Bermuda.

We plan to occupy the site in the spring and are currently studying the basics of permaculture design in the hopes of making fewer mistakes at the outset. Eventually we will attend a permaculture design course that is based in the same growing region.

The Permaculture tip for this episode is from Permaculture: A Practical Guide for a Sustainable Future published in 1990 by Bill Mollison

The “Principle of Self Regulation - The purpose of a functional and self regulating design is to place elements or components in such a way that each serves the needs, and accepts the products, of other elements.” Thus “to enable a design component to function we must put it in the right place.”

As we apply this planing principle in our garden design, the siting of veggie gardens, fruit trees, biomass crops, compost heaps, leaf mould piles, water features, glasshouses and chicken coops will all require careful observation of the interaction between existing structures and environmental conditions. For example: a compost heap generates heat which can be used to warm a greenhouse or a chicken coop.

We will gradually transition to an off grid lifestyle which adds additional planning considerations regarding energy, waste and water. The placing of the energy systems will be governed by existing structural orientation, solar exposure and available wind patterns to which we will have to adapt.

Extensive collection of rainwater will require changes to the roof which is laid with asphalt tile. Dealing with waste onsite will require a whole series of design decisions which will be influenced by local regulations, relations with the neighbors, and our own ability to reduce waste producing consumption.

Some of the first design questions we are considering in detail relate to food production and initial structural modifications to increase the efficiency of passive cooling and heating.

Currently the clay subsoil is covered in a thin layer of topsoil, hosting lawn, shrubs and a few shade trees. How will we quickly create the large amounts of soil needed for growing? We will need a fast composting process with more inputs than our own property can provide and are considering a kitchen and garden waste collection scheme with our neighbors. This should foster an ethic of co-operation with our neighbors, a key principle of permaculture.

But how will the neighbors respond to this project and the obvious changes in the appearance of the property that will follow? What can we do to manage that issue? As we hope to spread the permaculture ethic, it is important to keep the neighbors happy. We are looking at where to put hedges and fences to screen less attractive items like biogas digesters, materials storage and compost piles. Any hedges will need to have productive qualities including biomass, habitat, and fruit, and fences will need to be durable but ultimately biodegradable; we are considering, bamboo and blueberries for this.

Next, Hickory is very hot in the summer and cold in the winter. What is the first thing we should do to reduce energy use in the house? Fortunately, we have excellent solar exposure along 3 walls of the house and this plentiful supply of energy needs to be properly utilized. In the summer we will need to utilize the excess solar gain on the south side of the house to produce ventilation, drawing cool air in from the North side. The first structural change will likely be the addition of a shade structure along the south side of the house that will block the sun in the summer but not in the winter.

This shade structure will also provide vertical growing space for climbing plants like cucumbers and grapes, further shading the area immediately surrounding the sunny side of the house. This interface between shelter and growing area will be the subject of our next episode when we’ll discuss the permaculture concept of zones.

And that’s it for this episode. If you have any questions about our project or this episode please leave a comment here at the Alternative Kitchen Garden Site or at our blog sustliving.blogspot.com."

The Sustainable Living Project podcast episode at AKG

I have been a regular listener to the Alternative Kitchen Garden podcast for some time now and when Emma at AKG asked for correspondents to add content to her podcast I jumped at the chance. We are honored to be a part of her effort to help folks build resilience through food growing.

Jacqui and I have recorded the first episode which begins the documentation of our planning process for The Sustainable Living Project in America.

You can find the podcast containing our content here. Please see the transcript below.

“Introduction - Hello this is Robb and Jacqui from the Sustainable Living project. We are in the planning and design stage of establishing an off grid permaculture based lifestyle and educational project in the suburbs of Hickory North Carolina USA. Our goal is to demonstrate that a low impact, resilient but comfortable, healthy, and convenient lifestyle is possible in existing suburban developments. You can keep track of our progress on this podcast and at our blog, Sustainable Living at sustliving.blogspot.com

Initially taken from the joining of the the two words permanent and agriculture, permaculture has evolved to encompass many aspects of sustainable living. Indeed the prime directive of permaculture is that, quote, “the only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children”, unquote. That’s from Permaculture: A Practical Guide for a Sustainable Future published in 1990 by Bill Mollison, a text we are studying for guidance along our path.

We believe that taking responsibility entails addressing the impacts of all aspects of our lives; food, water, shelter, waste, energy, consumption, and travel. We have chosen not to have children which does simplify things somewhat. On the other hand this has freed us up to live higher impact personal lifestyles. Up until now we have enjoyed living in and visiting far flung locations. This has left us with a carbon debt, or as we like to call it carbon karma, that we feel must be paid down. We believe that a permaculture based off grid lifestyle offers us the most effective path to achieve carbon equity.

Along the way we hope to rekindle our connection to natural cycles, build better health by growing and eating our own high quality organic food, establish household scale resilience as a response to the challenges of peak oil and climate change, and also to help build community scale resilience by starting a transition initiative.

Each episode will feature a different permaculture principle and how we are applying it to the design and eventual implementation of our project. We’ll get started with that in the next episode, for now we’ll leave you with The Principle of Cooperation from the aforementioned text by Bill Mollison - “cooperation, not competition, is the very basis of existing life systems and of future survival”

Outro - And that’s about it for this episode. Thanks for listening and until next time visit us at sustliving.blogspot.com”