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  • From: "Anne Erlandson" <aerlandson1972@hotmail.com>
  • To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [permaculture] Re: PDC thread
  • Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2004 16:26:33 -0700

Hello all,

I was just chased indoors by the rain, from working in my garden and thought that I'd try to throw a little optimism into the mix:

I took a PDC last Dec and it changed my husband's and my lives. After taking the course, I began to draw up a site plan of my suburban lot and began to design some pc principles into my garden systems. I decided to put in a bunch of fruit trees, fruiting shrubs and perennials and self sowing edibles (I haven't quite figured out the vine thing yet). I decided to relax my tendency towards orderliness by mixing flowers with kale, lettuce, potatoes, chard, strawberries, fruiting shrubs, and weeds (pre-approved for usefulness of some sort - not just chickweed and quackgrass). I still have my vegetable garden area with lovely straight rows, but when I had extra seed potatoes and garlic and shallot cloves, I just stuck them in the ground in my new beds (which I had sheet mulched over existing lawn). This afternoon I was cleaning up a new bed formed last spring when I (or rather my hubby) jackhammered halfmoons out of our asphalt driveway forming a snaky paved path and four large new beds. I'd planted this particular bed with 2 aronias and one goumi, 4 chrysanthemums, and later 5 pepper plants. I had strewn various salad greens in the bed in the spring which fed us many salads and when I let them bolt were swarming with buzzing insects. Sunflowers volunteered towards the back of the bed and this morning after the night rains the migratory birds were perched on the older heads pecking out the seeds. While I was cleaning up the beds I yanked out the old potoato vines which had contributed lovely foliage and flowers all summer and to my surprise pulled out dozens of big potatoes! I guess I shouldn't have been surprised - I mean, that's what they usually do - but, when I'd stuck those extra seed potatoes in the sawdusty horse stall sweepings which I'd used to mulch the rocky nasty soil that I'd uncovered under the driveway, I didn't really expect any actual food from them, I just wanted to have something growing there for aesthetics and to get that little piece of land going! (This is my first year growing potatoes in my veggie garden and I am just amazed and awed by those little guys! There's nothing like digging around in the dirt and finding FOOD!)

That was kind of a tangent, but anyways, somehow my enthusiasm for pc infected my husband and we went out and bought a piece of old pasture land with some woods at the back. We plan to eventually leave our urban lifestyle (which, until I found out about pc suited us just fine), build ourselves a strawbale or other appropriate construction little passive solar cottage with solar and wind power, rainwater catchment, Humanure style toilets and greywater and live as sustainably as we can. We've sold our Prius and bought a diesel VW which we run on bio-diesel so that our trips out to our land don't negate the whole point of what we're doing (send your dollars to farmers in the mid-west, not to that craziness in the Middle East).

We've been trying to hold in our enthusiasm for this new project so as to follow the sage advice of living on a new piece of land for a year before starting anything, but we were just had to do a few little projects. We put in a wind break to shelter the pasture land, cleared out a big blackberry thicket, built a temporary shelter, and started clearing out the alders in an old pond.

All this time we have been sharing our new interests of permaculture, natural building, bio-diesel, etc. with all of our friends and family and acquaintances, dentists, people we meet at music festivals, grocery clerks, etc. In short to anyone who will listen. :) And I fully expect that this informal dissemination of these valuable ideas are like seeds strewn out: many will fall on infertile ground, but some will germinate and come to fruit.

We went to the Natural Building Colloquium East this summer to get some hands on experience with these techniques. It was fabulous, the best part possibly being the slide shows shown at the end of each day - very inspiring and thought provoking. I just wanted to share with you something that Tim Owen Kennedy, one of the presenters (I'm pretty sure that it was him that said it), said: "Don't beat yourself up for not being now where you want to get to." Or something to that effect. I would add that it's probably better to not beat others up for not being where you want to be either. I try to remember that everything is a process, especially the changes that we're all trying to effect.

One last thing: The people who took the design course with me (I think that we all paid except one person who had some kind of work exchange worked out) were all very sincere about learning the coursework, mastering the principles, and absorbing the information available to us. There was no one there who showed any signs of sleeping through the classes or just skating through. One of the most profoundly affecting things about the course was spending that intensive time with what I would have to call soulmates. We were all there for the same ultimate reason, drawn by the idea of Permaculture and all that it promises for the future. Every one was fully present for every waking minute of the 2 weeks whether it was showing up on time for the classes, talking about related subjects during meals, participating fully in hands-on work outdoors, coming back after classes to watch optional videos and slide shows and presentations, staying up late working on projects. It was very intense and everyone gave 100% and tried to squeeze in every drop of learning possible and at the end half of us were sick and all of us were exhausted. It was one of the best experiences of my life.

Well, it looks like the rain has stopped, so I'm back outside! Potatoes for dinner!

Anne in Seattle

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