permaculture

["Anne Erlandson" <aerlandson1972@hotmail.com>]

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

_________________________________________________________________
Check out Election 2004 for up-to-date election news, plus voter tools and 
more! http://special.msn.com/msn/election2004.armx