Principles of Permaculture (via southern Oregon and the backyard...)

Principles of Permaculture, via southern Oregon

Stacking Functions-- chickens help with compost

1.     Practice protracted thoughtful observation, rather than thoughtless action.

2.     Hold resources at the highest level.

3.     Everything gardens.

4.     Use locally available resources.

5.     Waste is an underutilized resource.

6.     The problem is the solution.

7.     Work where you are wanted.

8.     Work with nature, not against her.

9.     Plant natives first, proven exotics second.

10. Plant edible and medicinal landscapes.

11. Start small and diverse, harvest your mistakes.

12. Stability comes from a diversity of relationships.

13. Stack functions.

14. Distribute the surplus.

15. There is a limit to how much the system can absorb.

16. Optimize rather than minimize.

17. Design systems that self-manage.

18. Consider relative location.

19. The primary client is the site.

20. Optimize edge; begin in favorable locations.

I would ad three more:

          Be in love with your life.

          Live deliberately.

          Some years are just cabbage years. They will pass.

Chicken Tractor Photos

Nest box and roosting area

With nest box door open for egg collection and cleaning

Nest box door closed

interior roof

side veiw, door open

opposite side from nest box door

Distribute The Surplus

       

    Distribute the Surplus. It is one of the founding principles of Permaculture. And one of the tasks is to discover these surpluses and where to pass them on, reaching another Principle, which is “The problem is the solution.”  Usually, at this time of year, I am in the middle of one of my favorite Distributions, which is fresh figs from our tree. But this year is a little different. We had a deep cold snap in the valley last winter, and many fig trees died back to the ground and are coming back as shrubs. That did not happen to mine; it was both ancient and protected, but it suffered some serious damage. This summer, more energy has gone into leaf production than figs, and many of the figs that are ripe are high in the branches, up in the bird’s half of the tree. There will be enough for me to dry for winter treats and the fresh ones are amazing, sun-warmed and sweet as honey. But we do not have a surplus. A problem.

            Half a block away, the prune plum tree in the back yard of our rental house is bent over with fruit. The branches are almost breaking as the plums ripen. They lean over the fences, which sag under their weight. Deep purple plums, dusty and sweet, cling to the branches. I have hauled home baskets full—dried them, made plum jam, pickled them, and baked two upside down plum cakes—and I’ve cleared one branch. It’s a problem. Our tenants began the distribution pattern. One took bags of the fruit to work. The next day, his co-workers were looking at him expectantly. “More plums?” they asked. He obliged. While doing house repairs, I brought bowls over to both of the neighbors. Then school started. I work with at least sixty people. I brought a large basket of plums. They were gone in twenty four hours. “Yes!” I thought, and gathered another basket.

Within a few days, the counter of the staff room held a huge bowl of plums—and a bag of apples. Then there were some zucchini. Tomatoes. Peppers. Flowers. Lemon cucumbers. The attendance clerk bought a food dryer from Bi-Mart and asked for a bag of fruit to dry. I obliged. Two other people wanted plums for drying. More plums piled into baskets, brought into school. By now, I have left a trail of dropped plums from my house to work; like Hanzel and Gretel, I can find my way home again.  Conversation in the office revolved around drying time and fruit prep. It is easy, I assured them. Cut the fruit in half, push it out a bit to expose more surface, and put it in the dryer. I dry my fruit until it is almost crispy, because I don’t want to worry about mold. Then, I pour it into quart canning jars (everything in our house is stored in canning jars) and stash it on the basement shelves. No dipping, no freezing, no fuss.

The overflow of fruit is almost over for the year. My green beans and tomatoes are slowing down, the zucchini plants all have powdery mildew, and the plums that remain are almost over ripe. I will probably pick one more round for the school counter Monday evening and call it good. But, this year, I have learned that the surplus is not always where you believe it to be, and there is always a home for fresh fruit. 

Plum Upside down Cake-- from Moosewood Desserts

1/2 cup butter

3/3 cup brown sugar

2 eggs

1/4 cup buttermilk

1 cup flour

1/4 cup cornmeal

1.5 t BP

.5 t cinnamon

.5 t salt

2 t vanilla

Cream butter and sugar,  add eggs and buttermilk, then dry ingredients. 

Before pouring batter into pan, line it with 6-8 plums, cut in half. Then pour 1/4 cup of melted butter and 1/4 cup of brown sugar over the plums.

Bake in 350 degree oven until done, flip and release while still warm. A spring form pan makes this easy.

One More Year

 I put in the soaker hoses today. It’s always an adventure. First, wrestle the hoses out of their winter storage place in the dead shower stall in the basement (don’t ask…). Then, lay them out, one bed at a time, connect to the Big Hose, turn it all on, cross your fingers, and wait for the inevitable geyser.  There it was, in the middle of the pumpkin and zucchini bed. Water spraying everywhere but on the plants. Deep sigh. Turn the hoses off, find the bag of hose repair parts which I bought in bulk a few summers ago, dig out the right screwdriver, cut the bad spot out, place the repair pieces in, tighten down the hose clamps on either side, and turn the water back on. Good to go for another year.

 The new beds are more susceptible to leaks because of the nature of the system.  Years ago, we had a community garden patch which we used for growing potatoes and dried beans. After the first year, we bought sweat hoses for the entire patch, which saved on water and time. When we left the community garden for more beds in the backyard, we brought the sweat hoses with us, but they were too long for the beds. Never ones to waste anything, we cut them in half, wove them through the beds, bridged the gaps with a truly ancient hose, also cut into pieces, and hose repair kits (and hose clamps), and went to work. It’s not a bad system, although the old beds, where each sweat hose branches off of a common tube and can be turned on and off independently, is better.  And, every fall, I vow to change the new beds over—and, every spring, I run the old hoses One More Year.

When I had finished the hoses, I turned to the brush pile, planning to side-dress the garlic patch with freshly sifted compost. Mark was working in the back and directed me to the half full barrel. I picked it up and the last little bit of handle fell off. It was a good trash can, twenty years ago, but after ten years of being battered by automatic garbage trucks, we moved it out back to haul leaves and brush—and compost. I wiggled it across the grass, through the garden gate, and over to the garlic bed, dumped the contents, and brought it back to the brush pile. It’s got at least One More Year, I thought.

I walked by one of the “new” garden beds and saw that the bottom board was rotting through, but I propped it up with an old piece of garden bed fencing and it was good for One More Year. After all, the beds will all need replacing soon. When it was dinner time, Mark carefully took down the picnic benches, which we had fixed last summer with a couple of solid planks across the top, for, of course, One More Year.

There’s a pattern here, one, which separates farmers, even small scale ones, and gardeners.  My friend Maureen has a beautiful garden, just lovely. She works on it steadily, striking just the right balance between casual floppiness and tidiness.  Something is always blooming. Trees are always pruned. She has pathways of different materials. She is a Gardener. There is no fraying binder twine gathered in a bucket, mixed in with the tail end of a ball of yarn. There is no HUGE pile of bio-mass in the back yard; they send dead hedge pruning off to the city composting system. She waters by hand, deeply, once a week and weeds while she works. When I go out to Sunbow Farm, with its amazing soil and huge plants, it looks more like home. Hoses everywhere, tilting garden benches, trellises held up with binder twine, old tarps, piles of leaves composting down…. everything used to the max and beyond.

 One More Year.

Cardamon Cake—from the 1977Moosewood Cookbook

This is best the same day or the next morning for breakfast. I’ve made it with margarine and non-fat yogurt, and it is still yummy, but…

2 cups of butter

2 cups of brown sugar

Cream together until light and fluffy. Scrape the bowl a few times, just to be sure.

Add: 4 eggs and 2 t vanilla.  Beat in well.

Sift together:

4 cups of flour

2t BP

2.5 t BS

1.5 t cardamom

.5 t salt

Add and mix. Put half of the mixture in a tube pan and even out. Then sprinkle .25 c of brown sugar, 1T cinnamon, and .5 cups of chopped walnuts in. Add the rest of the cake. Spread out evenly.

Bake until done in 350 oven, a little over an hour,

Permaculture is organized around  the concept of zones—putting things most often needed closet to the house. It works best, of course, when you have a clean slate to work with (which we did) and when the “zone three” of your yard is not also the floodplain for the entire neighborhood.  However, we have done the best that we could with the concept. Raspberries, Sungold tomatoes, and the bay tree are right outside the door. The dining table is in the back alcove, protected from sun and wind, five steps from the kitchen. Blueberry bushes catch your sweater when you walk by after putting your bike away. A little further out into the yard are the vegetable gardens and the afternoon reading seats, and then the chickens and bees occupy the far corners of the yard, which would be zone three. Then we move further outward; work, library, movies, and groceries are all a short walk from home.

We visited a further zone this weekend. I think of it as zone five--the trails that ring Corvallis. MacDonald Forest, Fitton Green, Finely Wildlife refuge, and the arboretum are a huge part of our lives and we walk through them in all weathers. This weekend, we climbed to the top of Mary’s Peak, our local four thousand foot mountain, highest point in the Coast range, and indicator of when to plant beans (when the snow is no longer visible from the soccer fields).

The hike leaves from Conner’s Camp, about 2500 feet high on the shoulder of the mountain. It leads through a Cathedral forest of tall straight Douglas Firs with a heavy understory of vine maple, fairy bells, and ferns. From the trail, we can catch glimpses of the hazy valley below, but the walk is silent. The trail climbs steadily  for several miles and we know every step. As we walk, we watch for the patch of coral root orchid that lurks in the shadow of one huge tree, the first monkey flowers of the season at a seep, and the anemones that wink in the darker shadows. I keep the plant list and each flower is, after ten years of this hike, an old friend. There are other landmarks as well, like the bench where the chickadee eyed Maureen’s hair for a nest last year and the steps right before the last steep ascent before the parking lot.

It is always a shock to climb from the woods to the car-filled lot near the peak. There is a road to the top, which we have taken several times, and it is a popular afternoon drive. The wind whips across the empty spaces and everyone scrambles for a jacket. Right where the trail emerges, yellow and purple violets mingle. After a quick stop at the outhouse, we head for the alpine gardens of the peak. Red penstemmons, purple phlox, and yellow wallflowers huge the ground in a carpet of color. We join the groups at the top, settle into a protected area, dig out lunch and plant books, and settle in for a rest. Some days, we can see the ocean and Mount Hood; other days, we can barely see the trail. Sunday, it was partly cloudy, so the valley lay before us on one side, the clear-cut patchwork of forest on the other.  We could see, however, our entire watershed, which is always a deeply rooted feeling.

After lunch, we descend. There are always a few plants we missed on the way up to be noticed and recorded, but the mood is more subdued. We have been to High Places once more, looked over our corner of the world, and are heading downhill towards dinner. Life is good.

 Beet Greens and Ricotta Pie

Make a pie shell. While you are at it and covered in flour, make two so you can have a rhubarb and blackberry pie as well.

Chop a large bunch of beet or chard  greens fairly finely. Chop an onion. Satee both until tender. Add salt, pepper, and a bit of nutmeg.

Mix about four ounces of ricotta cheese, 2 eggs, and about half a cup of milk. Mix into the veg. Pour into the pie shell and bake at a 350 degree oven until done, about 45 minutes.

Salvaged Wood

No wood heads for the landfill from our backyard: It is all salvaged on site. For years, this has not been an issue, but, after a major tree pruning winter and two fence replacements, we have piles. Several Large piles.  I’ve been working through them, now that the food processing season has slowed down. 

            The first step is sorting. There are three categories:

1. Reusable: Dry and not rotting.  All nails pulled, piled in the wood loft of the shed. Used for garden beds, fencing, art, signs, trellises, shower stalls, boxes, shelves, repairs to the coop, stakes, crib slats….etc.
2. Firewood:  Dry, with some rot or small pieces. All nails pulled, cut to size, piled in the basement, preferably in size and dampness piles.
3. Compost: Clearly rotting, breakable by hand. All nails pulled, broken down to compost fast, and piled in the back corner to be eaten by pillbugs. Later, it moves into the pompost pile.

Nail pulling is a key step for all wood recycling. I don’t like tetanus shots so we have to be sure that no nails turn up in the firewood ash or the compost piles years later. It’s a peaceful task, once I have the station set up. I bring a picnic bench back under the hazelnut trees, find the large and small crowbars, the paint can half full of nails, and a hammer, and set to work. There’s something satisfying about wrestling pieces of old fencing apart, reducing them to their original boards, and sending them over to Mark to be cut down with power tools.  Bunzilla and Lucy look on while the chickens root through the old boards for new bugs. I’m about done with the nail pulling project, so we just need to saw and sort before the rains begin.

Spicy Slaw:

Several people were dismayed to find a large cabbage in their CSA box this Tuesday evening and the trade box was overflowing with rejected heads. So sad...we were thrilled. Mark immediately lobbied for this slaw, best eaten with local Indian Woman beans, wrapped in large tortillas. Fastest dinner ever, if the the beans are cooked.

Slice the cabbage very thinly.  Perhaps slice a carrot or two as well, for color. Mix some mayo, a chipotle pepper in adobo sauce, sour cream or yogurt, salt, pepper, and a little cider vinegar together in the bottom of the salad bowl. Toss the cabbage in. Taste and adjust. 

Eat dinner. 

Good Fences

     

      Good fences do make good neighbors, as Robert Frost argued. Ours, built twenty years ago, was dying. Part of it sloped over when an ice covered tree landed on it two winters ago; the back was twisted down by a freak gust of wind last spring. When a lively large dog with a Frisbee throwing owner—with poor aim, so the Frisbee landed in our yard several times—moved in next door, it was time to take action. One dog chasing after a toy could bring it all crashing down.

            The fence came down last Tuesday afternoon, when it was 98 degrees in the sun. For the most part, it took little effort. Luke, who wants to be a woodworker, was able to whack the fence boards off with a small crowbar and used his hands to bring down the rotten railings in small chunks. He piled the boards in the backyard to be denailed and turned into other, smaller, projects. The posts took a little more effort, but with a clever hand chainsaw, they were filed off at ground level. We could see into the neighbor’s weedy, dry yard. Their dogs wandered over for a dog treat and to watch the cats. Lucy came over to watch the dogs. It was an evening of stand-offs.

      

      The next morning, Mark Meyer began the rebuilding. He started with the posts around 8:30, struggling with rubble next door and some tight working spaces, until two. “I think,” he announced, “I’m going home for a few hours to take the dog down to the river. I’ll be back this evening when it cools off.”  Posts were done by dusk, the final hour of work supervised by the dogs. The next day was railings, on a similar schedule. Prep, we agreed, always takes longer than you think it will. The structure of the new fence was clear.

            Friday morning, I slipped out early to start watering the garden. The soaker hoses are old and there are gaps in the crop rows where we’ve eaten the plants, so soft jets of water shot into the air throughout the plot. I cat down with my tea and a cat in the cool morning. Birds arrived—bushtits and chickadees—discussing the water and insects, perching on plants and the fence frames. Slight sounds filled the air. Birds. Water. Cars a block away.  Cats purr.

            By Friday evening, the fence was completed. The fence boards alternate lighter and darker, six inch and eight inch, down the row, glowing against the darker posts and rails.  Mark Meyer climbed up on the end to attach cat steps to the roof, so that Kayli can still perch on the neighbor’s garage, even when she is an old kitty. There are shelves three and a half feet high all the way down to hold tools and bricks, garden poems and art. The plant life is enclosed;  the garden has a linear structure, rather than flopping  everywhere. The chickens and rabbit can run free. We are surrounded, once again, by protective wood.

Rhubarb and Red Currant Preserves

7.5 c rhubarb, chopped

2 oranges, zested

2/3 c of orange juice/water

3 c sugar

Place in the jam pot, stir, cover, and let sit 1-4 hours, until rhubarb releases its juice. Boil gently for 15 minutes, then add:

2 c red currants, stemmed

1t nutmeg

Cook until gel stage—either eyeball it or by temperature. This preserve is forgiving and jams nicely….

Place in jars with ¼ inch of headroom and process for ten minutes. I use the beloved steam canner.

I’ve been considering two principles of permaculture this week: Distribute the surplus and The Problem is the Solution. The first is easy—the second, not so much so.




Distribute The Surplus happens, formally, twice a year. In the spring, we send off the extra tomato starts into the world. I’ll start eight to twelve seeds for each variety, which means, in a good year, we have about 80 extra plants. They leave home in April. People now wait for the announcement. In fact, Nancy starts asking several weeks in advance. The other event happens in the fall, when the fig tree comes ripe. The branches bend down almost to the ground, heavy with fruit, in late September. It ripens over the course of several weeks, coming to a halt only when the fall rains turn figs into fig bombs. It has been dry a long while this year, so we have an extended harvest. I’ve made fig jam and dried about five quarts, so I am about to pound the sign into the ground. “Yes,” it reads, “You can pick the figs. But be respectful of the garden plants.” Strangers and friends will be harvesting our fruit all week long. Distribute the surplus. It is good karma.



The problem is the solution has puzzled me for a long time. It sounds good—a change in perspective, in thinking, can resolve the problem. But how does that play out? This Saturday, I think I figured it out. It was a home football game and the Beavers have been winning, which means more “Go Beaving” in our neighborhood. We are not fans of the Beaver Bellow so we left town. We climbed up to the top of Rooster Rock, with a lovely view of the Cascades as far as The Sisters in the smoke hazy distance. We spent the afternoon reading and writing on the mountain top, listening to the wind in the firs and the quiet buzz of a few flies. It was lovely. It solved two problems for us as well—we never leave town in Fall because we are too busy and we don’t like the Beaver Bellow. The problem is the solution. Two problems solved. We came home to a potluck supper with friends.



Applesauce Cake from the mid-seventies (can also be made with figs)

2.5 cups of flour (half whole wheat is nice)
1.5 cups sugar
1.5 t baking soda
.25 t baking powder
.75 t cinnamon
.5 t cloves and allspice

1.5 cups of applesauce (or squashed figs)
.5 cup of oil
2 eggs
handful of raisins and walnuts

Mix dry ingredients together. Mix wet together, add wet to dry. Pour into tube pan or a 13 by 9 inch pan.

350 oven until done