Functional Permaculture Chicken

Compost System

Probably the single most important intervention I made in the garden was instituting a compost system in the very back section early on. When I moved in to the house, this area was badly organised and overgrown, with piles of grass clippings, weeds, general household junk, and garden waste with logs, branches and twigs intertwined.

I took the time to work through this waste, because I believe the compost system to be the ‘engine’ of the garden. Without recycling of waste materials and energy, there can be no good crops, no adequate disposal, and the system becomes clogged up and broken. Building the structure and fertility of the clay soils of the garden is also a major priority in terms of food production. Making energy and materials flow smoothly in this part of the garden is about closing the loop.

I also discovered a large rusted brazier which came in handy for burning off the excess woody and other combustible material. As mentioned in the Natural Energy Survey, I sorted the woody material into ‘large, medium and small’ wood ranging from larger logs to twigs suitable for kindling. Most of this was recovered from the pile and stored/ cured under the large Leylandii trees at the back of the garden for about a year to become used on the log fire, or if still too wet (and likely to spit) it was earmarked for the chimnea. Tidying the rear part of the garden up also permitted me to make the back fences stock proof, using only materials I had come across as part of the tidying process.

The brazier was not the only find during this process. As I excavated the pile, it became clear there was a chest high, 6ft x 3ft ‘U’ shaped brick structure which seemed to have been an outbuilding at one point. Although it had concrete as its base, it served as an ideal location for the compost pile, and permitted me to operate two different piles of garden waste simultaneously. This allowed me to institute an alternating system; one year building up a compost pile, whilst using the other.

There was a very large mound of (mostly) grass clippings which lay under the trees and had been kept in a reasonably dry state. Because of its size and location, it had not rotted down in the conventional slightly anaerobic slimy way, but had instead turned to a type of leaf mould. This would make for excellent compost, and so I felt like I had unlocked a time capsule of useful material which could be fed into the compost system but over a period of time to aid its decomposition. My approximate ‘golden’ ratio was

1 part fresh grass clippings
1 part green waste, clippings, etc
1 part leaf mould from the pile

That is, until the chickens came along, when ‘1 part of chicken manure’ was added to the mix. This served as a kind of ‘turbo power’ for the compost mix, and I have never really looked back. Taking the time to reorganise this area has proved very beneficial, and rewarded the effort I have put in, but the best part is that it will now continue to reward that initial effort because of the sustainable nature of the design. Whether it is building a green school, a water purification system, or a humble composting system, such sustainable design gives features a self sustaining energy of their own, which is typical of Permaculture projects, and which elevates overall function of the whole.

Two Interviews with David Holmgren

 

These two interviews with David Holmgren, co originator of the Permaculture concept (along with Bill Mollison), were amongst the first videos I watched on Permaculture, and I still find them inspirational and motivating.

Gerrard Winstanley, True Leveller

Gerrard Winstanley (1609 – 1676) was a Quaker reformer and political activist during The Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell. Winstanley was one of the founders of the English group known as the True Levellers or Diggers for their beliefs, and for their actions. The group occupied public lands that had been privatized by enclosures and dug them over, pulling down hedges and filling in ditches, to plant crops. True Levellers was the name they used to describe themselves, whereas the term Diggers was coined by contemporaries.

For libertarian socialist scholar Murray Bookchin there is a coincidence of political projects between German Protestant revolutionary Thomas Müntzer and Winstanley. For Bookchin "In the modern world, anarchism first appeared as a movement of the peasantry and yeomanry against declining feudal institutions. In Germany its foremost spokesman during the Peasant Wars was Thomas Muenzer; in England, Gerrard Winstanley, a leading participant in the Digger movement. The concepts held by Muenzer and Winstanley were superbly attuned to the needs of their time — a historical period when the majority of the population lived in the countryside and when the most militant revolutionary forces came from an agrarian world. It would be painfully academic to argue whether Muenzer and Winstanley could have achieved their ideals. What is of real importance is that they spoke to their time; their anarchist concepts followed naturally from the rural society that furnished the bands of the peasant armies in Germany and the New Model in England."

from "Ecology and Revolutionary Thought" Lewis Herber. (Murray Bookchin).

Cover Design from the remastered 1976 film Winstanley

"So long as the earth is intagled and appropriated into particular hands and kept there by the power of the sword......so long the creation lies under bondage."

~ Gerrard Winstanley Fire in the Bush 1650

"England is a Prison; the variety of subtilties in the Laws preserved by the Sword, are bolts, bars, and doors of the prison; the Lawyers are Jaylors, and poor men are the prisoners; for let a man fall into the hands of any from the Bailiffe to the Judge, and he is either undone, or wearie of his life."

"Buying and Selling is an Art, whereby people endeavour to cheat one another of the Land.......and true Religion is, To let every one enjoy it."

~ Gerrard Winstanley A New-years Gift for the Parliament and Armie 1650

Last Child in the Woods

Richard Louv, author of Last Child In The Woods, provides a well researched account of how children and young people are becoming estranged from nature, and how this is affecting their physical, psychological and social health. He coins the term nature deficit disorder to describe the maelstrom of problems we are building up by cooping up children for long hours in the classroom or their bedrooms with computers. In addition to epidemic obesity, immune, sensory and poor musculoskeletal development in the manner of battery hens, Louv shows how giving over green space to corporations for malls and retail parks is causing psychological and social impacts far beyond those anticipated, including alienation, mental illness, crime, drug addiction, and inability to communicate effectively.

The Guggenheim

With the news that teachers are increasingly being surveilled in the classroom, it is worth noting how the structure of many new build academies is based on an eighteenth century prison designer Jeremy Bentham.

Bentham first proposed the idea of the Panopticon in 1791. The concept of the design is to allow a single watchman to observe all the inmates of an institution without them being able to tell whether they are being watched or not. The fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched or not means that all inmates must act as though they are watched at all times, effectively controlling their own behaviour constantly. The name is also a reference to Panoptes from Greek mythology; he was a giant with a hundred eyes and thus was known to be a very effective watchman. This is the principle behind CCTV and IT surveillance, sometimes called the Information Panopticon.

Bentham always conceived the Panopticon principle as being beneficial to the design of a variety of institutions where surveillance was important, including hospitals, schools, workhouses, and lunatic asylums, as well as prisons. In particular, he developed it in his ideas for a "chrestomathic" school (one devoted to useful learning), in which teaching was to be undertaken by senior pupils on the monitorial principle, under the overall supervision of the Master and for a pauper “industry-house” (workhouse). Thus the human touch of "teachers" or "prison wardens" becomes a much reduced necessity. The lasting psychological effects on academy children (who incidentally are not even allowed outside to play in one Panopticon school) remains to be seen.

Here is a montage of academy and prison designs all mixed up. At first glance they are indistinguishable. And the last word is left to Foucault.

Carl Jung: The Soul of Nature

"Through scientific understanding, our world has become dehumanised. Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos. He is no longer involved in nature and has lost his emotional participation in natural events, which hitherto had a symbolic meaning for him. Thunder is no longer the voice of a god, nor is lightning his avenging missile. No river contains a spirit, no tree makes a mans's life, no snake is the embodiment of wisdom and no mountain still harbours a great demon. Neither do things speak to him nor can he speak to things, like stones, springs, plants and animals."

~ Carl Jung ~

Storage of Root Vegetables

Wendell Berry on Food

“The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared food, confronts inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived. The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality.”

“Eating with the fullest pleasure – pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance – is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living in a mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.”

“A person who undertakes to grow a garden at home, by practices that will preserve rather than exploit the economy of the soil, has his mind precisely against what is wrong with us… What I am saying is that if we apply our minds directly and competently to the needs of the earth, then we will have begun to make fundamental and necessary changes in our minds. We will begin to understand and to mistrust and to change our wasteful economy, which markets not just the produce of earth, but also the earth’s ability to produce.”

“But even in the much-publicized rebellion of the young against the materialism of the affluent society, the consumer mentality is too often still intact: the standards of behavior are still those of kind and quantity, the security sought is still the security of numbers, and the chief motive is still the consumer’s anxiety that he is missing out on what is “in.” In this state of total consumerism – which is to say a state of helpless dependence on things and services and ideas and motives that we have forgotten how to provide ourselves – all meaningful contact between ourselves and the earth is broken. We do not understand the earth in terms either of what it offers us or of what it requires of us, and I think it is the rule that people inevitably destroy what they do not understand.

from The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry

Medicine Wheel Herb Garden

Good Book on designing a Medicine Wheel, and the theory behind it:
The Medicine Wheel Garden: Creating Sacred Space for Healing, Celebration, and Tranquillity by E. Barrie Kavasch

How to Build a Herbal Medicine Spiral: Resources

How- to guides can be found at:
Little Mountain Haven: How to build a herb spiral
The Micro- gardener: 4 steps guide to building a herb spiral

Grow the Revolution!

Permaculture: A Quiet Revolution

Henry Kissinger once famously said  “Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.” He also said "If you can't hear the drums of war you must be deaf." The Independent reported in January that some still think Kissinger while in office 'yielded much that was little short of evil' and he has been accused of 'war crimes, crimes against humanity, and … offences against common or customary or international law.'  

Permaculture: A Quiet Revolution is the perfect repost to the psychology of control and dominance that Kissinger and the political class represents. The start of this video quotes Bill Mollison: "I teach Self- reliance, the world's most subversive practice. I teach people how to grow their own food, which is shockingly subversive. So yes, it's seditious, but it's peaceful sedition." 

A Farm For The Future

BBC Natural World (2008-2009: Episode 14 of 16) Duration: 50 minutes

Wildlife film maker Rebecca Hosking investigates how to transform her family's farm in Devon into a low energy farm for the future, and discovers that nature holds the key. With her father close to retirement, Rebecca returns to her family's wildlife-friendly farm in Devon, to become the next generation to farm the land. But last year's high fuel prices were a wake-up call for Rebecca. Realising that all food production in the UK is completely dependent on abundant cheap fossil fuel, particularly oil, she sets out to discover just how secure this oil supply is. Alarmed by the answers, she explores ways of farming without using fossil fuel. With the help of pioneering farmers and growers, Rebecca learns that it is actually nature that holds the key to farming in a low-energy future.

What I like about this episode is not so much the twee, Vaughan Williams 'quintessentially English' flavour, although it is good to see how permaculture ideas can be moulded to a traditional temperate grassland system. I am more impressed at how it logically conveys the intimate level of integration which is possible when small scale, low tech, mixed agriculture design is employed. It makes sense on every level.

Bill Mollison: Global Gardener

Bill Mollison is co- founder of the sustainable agricultural system called Permaculture. In 1991 he made a 4 part series of programs called Global Gardener, which showed how permaculture could be applied to several ecotypes, along with some of the wider principles (community, self reliance, energy & nature conservation, etc). I like this series because it provides a really good overview of how permaculture works; that it is a flexible system, and not a proscriptive 'one size fits all' formula. Plus it has a good feel to it. It puts a smile on wearied faces sick of this deadly industrialised maelstrom of technological food production.

Bill Mollison Quotes

Edge Effect in Marram Grass

Marram grass (Ammophila spp) is a xerophytic dune- dwelling plant in Europe. It has some unique anatomical adaptations of its leaf structure which permit it to live in sandy conditions, where it stabilizes dune structure and provides a windbreak and contributes substantially to being a topographical feature in its own right. It is a great example of an microscopic edge effect which goes on to become a macroscopic edge effect.

The grass blades are curled in the manner of a drinking straw, creating a closed micro environment in which the lower epidermis is enclosed. This is significant because it is the lower epidermis which is vulnerable to water loss via transpiration. By trapping a column of moist air within the leaf blade, much less water is lost. To enhance this effect, the cuticle upper epidermis, exposed to the elements, is thickened and waxy.

But the xerophytic adaptations of Marram grass go further than that. Microscopic examination of the lower epidermis reveals a series of longitudinal involutions which replicate on a small scale the curling effect described above. This further traps water in a humid column. Additionally, the stomata (holes in which water is lost from the lower leaf surface) are sunken into pits which serve to strengthen this effect in triplicate. The whole structure is reinforced by stomatal hairs which raise water potential adjacent to the leaf surface and slow transpiration.

Taken together, the adaptation of the anatomy of the lower leaf surface in Marram grass serves to generate an edge effect by design. These small changes, amassed over each blade of grass, permit extensive colonization of the beach margin with profound impacts on coastal structure and wildlife. 

Permaculture Word Cloud

Permaculture Principles

Permaculture & Sustainability

Natural Flow Patterns

I recently went for a days walk in the Peak District of Derbyshire. An area of great diversity, it is conventionally split into the northern Dark Peak, where most of the moorland is found and whose geology is gritstone, and the southern White Peak, where most of the population lives and where the geology is mainly limestone-based. My walk was around Kinder Scout, which is a moorland plateau and National Nature Reserve in the Dark Peak. Part of the moor, at 636 metres (2,087 ft) above sea level, is the highest point in the Peak District. The start of the walk was Edale in the Hope Valley, the commencement of the famous Pennine Way long distance walk. The edges of Kinder plateau are known as gritstone edges. They contain precipitous boulders and rocks which have eroded significantly over a geological age, and as the howling wind rises out of the Hope Valley of Edale to meet the plateau edge, they have become excoriated and ribbed into crooked yet enigmatic formations. Some of them are known as The Woolpacks, as they resemble wool stacked and ready to be sent to mills in the neighbouring cities of Manchester and Sheffield at the beginning of the industrial revolution. I include some photographs I took during the walk.