The harvest: one baby boy and some scarlet runner beans

You could be forgiven for thinking that things have been somewhat quiet on the Milkwood front of late. But it is not so! 'Tis only that the combination of Permaculture courses, cottage building and baby-making (the gestation part and the aftermath, i mean) has taken up every waking moment for the last little while.

We have been given the sage but belated advice recently to "never combine owner-building and childbirth" - and I can currently attest that the two are not the sweetest of bedfellows. However, this is where we are at. So a quick update on things at Milkwood:

Ashar Fox arrived on the Ides of March to delight and terrify us with his overwhelming yet beautiful presence. Many Permaculture courses were conducted, in Sydney and in Bathurst, and much fun was had. Basecamp got a rocket-powered bath (more on that shortly), and the potatoes were harvested. They did well, but not nearly as well as the Jerusalem Artichokes. We learned that flat-leaf parsley can be your main green, and take the place of spinach in most dishes. We came across a micro-bat nestling in a Drizabone overcoat, and alternately fried and then froze at Basecamp, dreaming of an insulated, passive-solar cottage that will soon rise from the clay on Milkwood (more on that shortly too).

Meanwhile in the world beyond Milkwood, things seem to be every which-way. The newspapers and websites we read seem full of either doom-and-gloom or paint-your-world-green-and-it-will-be-fine... not much of a choice, really - however, we did recently come across this article by Madeleine Bunting in The Guardian which, if not offering a way out of the woods, at least hit the crux of the manner on the head with a small silver hammer. Not particularly cheerful reading, but at least it made us feel somewhat clarified on certain things.

The new Grand Narrative will indeed emerge, methinks. And perhaps we could nudge it along a bit by actively building resilient communities and employing good design principles in the structures we build; be they physical, organic or invisible. And by eating more flat-leaf parseley. And then a bit more. Because the darn stuff is not only high in minerals, its also rampant, frost-proof and unstoppable. Want some? I could probably post you a posy...

Curiouser and curiouser. Recently I attempted to write a ‘Permaculture in a nutshell’ type affair for SuperLiving Magazine – which I assume is a publication for, um, people who like reading about superannuation. Or their lack thereof, given recent global developments. This was a slightly strange commission, as I felt it unwise to make too many jokes about other, more preferable forms of ‘natural capital’ and ‘nest eggs’ – or allude to the concept of not poo-ing in your drinking water and so forth. I also held back on how I felt that everyone should really get together and plant an orchard and a nut grove right now if they really wanted some long-term investments, rather that fiddling with their stocks. However, I managed to restrain myself and here’s what I wrote:

Better living through Permaculture

Growing some of your own veggies, composting your food scraps, redirecting that air-conditioning drip onto the fruit tree on the patio... it’s the little things we decide to do that can lead us toward a more sustainable existence. In Permaculture, these small gestures are sometimes called examples of the ‘one percent rule’ which can, when we do enough of them, add up to significant benefits in our immediate environment - and a happier, healthier and decidedly more interesting life.

Permaculture? Isn’t that just veggie growing or something?

Not by half. Permaculture is a system of design principles for building and cultivating sustainable human habitats, drawing inspiration from patterns in natural systems. And in this case, ‘habitats’ means whatever you call home - apartment, farm, terrace, suburb or even houseboat. A functioning Permaculture system is a habitat that takes into consideration as many of its inputs and outputs as it possibly can, and aims to become as efficient and sustainable as possible for the sake and comfort of its inhabitants. This includes growing food wherever you live (window-sill tomatoes - yum), finding creative and useful ways to reuse waste (what will I water with the bath water today?), thinking carefully about how to make things do more than one job (left in the sun for the afternoon, the back seat of your car is a brilliant spot to rise bread dough or make yoghurt in a flash) and basically working with what you’ve got (Balcony seems too small for a mini veggie plot? Go vertical and harvest climbing beans, peas and passionfruit from the balcony walls and barrier instead).

How to integrate some Permaculture principles into YOUR habitat

Catch and store energy: Energy means things like water, heat, a cooling breeze - anything that passes into your system that you need, try to find a way to catch and store it within your system for your future use. Collect rain run-off in a tank (or a bucket) to catch and store water, paint a sunny north-facing brick wall a dark color to catch winter heat, create the ultimate airflow path to direct and divert that cooling breeze throughout your whole house.

integrate rather than segregate: Aim for multi-tasking in all aspects of your habitat, and try to make sure that everything serves more than one function. This can apply to objects, structures, plants and any other element of your system. For example, remember that north-facing brick wall? As well as painting it a dark color to catch and store heat energy in winter, you could plant a passionfruit vine to trail up it. The northern aspect will help ripen the fruit, the leaves will shield the wall from collecting heat energy in summer, and, being deciduous, the passionfruit will lose its leaves over winter when you want that wall to be catching all the sun it can. That wall is now multi-tasking with the best of them and providing you with both passionfruit and a more comfortable environment throughout the year.

Use and value diversity: Permaculture is big on diversity. Diversity, frankly, is what any stable system hinges apon. An enduring example of diversity being used to stabilize and enhance a system is the French cottage garden, known as the Potager. A Potager garden is a part ornamental, part kitchen garden, where cabbages nestle under roses and beans twine amongst oregano with poppies nodding overhead. The diversity of plants in a Potager, which is frequently without rows of any single particular vegetable, creates an admirably stable system through diversity, where pests are often confused by the riot of shapes and colors, and therefore cannot wreak havoc on more than one of your cabbages before they get picked off by either birds, ‘good bugs’, or you.

 **note: In this article I've used David Holmgren's Permaculture Principles. David was co-originator of the Permaculture concept, alongside Bill Mollison. Both these fine fellows now have slightly different riffs on the same idea, but both are complementary to each other. And both are well worth checking out. David has just re-released The flywire house (as a free download), a book which deals with designs for systems in bushfire-prone areas. Pertinent stuff for those of us in the Australian bush.

Basecamp gardens plan - click for enlargement. As for my illustration skills, that's what happens when you spend your life on a laptop - you draw like a 12 year old... 

Planning, making and planting the gardens around Bascamp has become one of my favourite parts of the week, and we are finally starting to feast on the results! I really cannot believe that i didn't garden for the first 30 years of my mishappen (but oh-so very full) life... what was i thinking? This is great! And you can eat it! Yum.

I started planning the Basecamp Garden as a result of a kick up the bum, thanks to some Canadian friends who stayed here over winter, and who sort-of barged in and constructed a no-dig mainbed next to the caravan. As I've mentioned earlier, up until this point we were trying to keep the Milkwood Kitchen Garden going while living over the hill... and it just wasnt really working. Start at your front step, work from there. I should probably get that statement tatooed somewhere... 

So following the Canadians de-planting (from the Milkwood Kitchen Garden) and re-planting (in the Basecamp mainbed) all existing living vegetables, we had a starting point at the end of this winter past. And then we found out we were pregnant, and I had the standard pregnancy freak-out about shop-bought fruit and vegies (regardless of how pure their label says they are)... add to this we had always been planning to eat off Milkwood as much as possible, we just hand't gotten into the swing of that aspect of things yet... building somewhere to live and establishing hydrology will do that to you... but enough of the whys and wherefores... the point being that we have begun, and it's looking better every day.

I tried to design the Basecamp gardens with a couple of things in mind;

• These gardens are temporary... a one-year-only affair, so there's no point getting terribly advanced regarding their establishment, beyond what is needed for the next two seasons.
• They need to provide as much food as possible for two people plus extras, with surplus for preserving.
  
• The water supply is limited to greywater from the washing machine, water-tank overflow, and a bit of supplementary tank water.
• The site is quite exposed to the West (and to just about everywhere else, actually) so we need to use shelter, aspect and driplines from available structures to maximise growth.
• The caravan, being exposed to the west and therefore the afternoon sun, could do with some protection in the form of summer growth up and over its western end.
  
• It is very hot and dry here over Summer. eek.

And, in short, the above diagram (no comments on my illustration skills, please) is what I came up with. So far, this plan has been working out really well, due to basic attention to the above factors, particularly utilizing aspect, shelter and driplines. All beds are no-dig beds, which is a good quick method outlined here. Oh and of course, extra heavy mulching of all garden beds to guard against evaporation... no soil is visible anywhere in the Basecamp garden, it is all safely 20cm or more under a nice thick mulch of straw, which builds soil as the garden grows. Our yeild is currently such that we are eating out of the garden every day, even though all beds except the rip-roaring mainbed are yet to produce anything of edible size (due to the late frosts here - the growing season is, infact, only just this week starting to get going). There's a couple of features to this design worth noting:

Utilization of greywater + water tank overflow: on the western side of the caravan are two beds that have been build on contour with the slope of the site. Above each bed is a trench path about 30cm wide and 20cm deep, which runs the length of each bed on its up-slope side. Each trench is filled with sawdust. The trench of the upper bed gets a direct output from the washing machine in the Woolshed, and this weekly influx of moisture fills up the trench and proceeds to slowly filter downhill through the bed, and all the vegies in that bed go suddenly wild with delerious thanks for the extra moisture arriving directly at their root zone. If we do two washes, the moisture continues into the trench below it and into the next bed below that.

The second trench, directly up-slope from the mainbed, is lined up to receive the overflow from the water tank which collects off the Woolshed roof. Overflowing water tanks around these parts are an infrequent occurrence, true, but you gotta use whatever water you can, whenever it appears. On the rare occasions when the tank does overflow, the same thing happens - the trench fills up, and the moisture filters slowly down-slope through the mainbed, and all the vegies in that bed similarly go crazy. N.B. a system like this depends apon you using a very greywater-friendly washing agent in the smallest amount possible. Knowing you're going to consume the (filtered) outcome of your washing does wonders for your awareness of such things...

 
Aspect: This is making a big difference to what grows successfully where, given the unrelenting sun. For example, the bed which is against the woolshed is the most protected from the north, which means it is the most shaded. So this bed is primarily planted with greenstuffs - spinach, lettuces, the more tender herbs, and basically everything that will get petulant at being constantly bombarded by full sun. This bed is also down-slope from the washup area, and so gets a residual (again, small but significant) amount of moisture from the leaky pipe coming out of the sink, and the garden tap.

Driplines:  This is one of those highly residual factors that Permaculture emphasizes so much - the collation of a heap of 1% advantages that coalesce to form a sizable advantage... in this case, the advantage of better plant growth due to that itty bit of extra moisture in the form of driplines. In this context, a 'dripline' is the perimeter around a structure where the dew drips off the roof or the eave or just the wall and hits the ground below it. On a farm, (or in a city for that matter) you can see these everywhere if you look closely - it's usually signified by a slight spike in plant growth... either in the height of a line of grass, a different species popping up in a very confined area, mossy patches, etc etc. If you see one of these near a structure, look up. And you'll usually see that there's something for a drip to descend from. At Basecamp, there's a dripline all the way around the caravan, and a particualrly good one off a certain corner of the Woolshed roof. I've made all the beds around the caravan extend under the van, past the dripline. This way, that line of moisture passes into the bed. As for the Woolshed drip, that's where I'm planting my sugarbaby watermelon, which loves all the extra water it can get (apparently, according to its packet).

Other than that, I'm watering everything every second sunset (never in the daytime) and planting twice a week...  and it all seems to be working! Stay tuned for recepies on 61 things to do with silverbeet...  

 
The herb garden, slowly beginning to gather steam after being planted 2 months ago... note that garden bed extends under caravan to pick up that dripline...

How good are these? You probably don't know, so I'll tell you - they're great! Oh and though this looks like a shameless plug saying, basically, *buy stuff*, I'm afraid I have to mention it because they really are splendid. And really, how many other 2009 diaries will you find that contain the gruff but pertinent quote:

"there are two sorts of people in this world - those who poo in drinking water, and those who don't..."

Ok, a little background... the 2009 Permaculture Diary + Calendar have been put together by Michele Margolis + David Arnold over the last 6 months or so. During this time, they invited contributions from people + groups all over to contribute projects and images for the two publications.  I recently bought one of each to see how they turned out, and they are really, really good.

The Calendar has come out as your standard glossy calendar with lovely pictures of people and projects, with all the usual calendar stuff in it. Everything a wall calendar should be. The Diary is a tour-de-force of people, projects, community initiatives and images of permaculture projects, community gardens and all things sustainable. It really is a good read in itself, and then ontop of that it's, like, a diary... the diary also has squeezed in helpful stuff like sowing guides for vegies, a planner section, tips, quotes and all the usuals like phases of the moon, school holidays, and of course the week-to-an-opening actual diary bit.

So yes. That is my rave. Both publications have been independantly and ethically produced, resonably priced, you can do wholesale deals if you want to sell them as fundraisers for your school or community organisation, and they both constitute worthy educational tools and a heartwarming read, all at once. Oh and they'd make good gifts for the upcoming season of gifting that will soon be apon us. So if you must buy stuff, subject your relatives and workmates to recieving something actually useful (that is not a hanky or socks). Who knows - they might just bring you in some of their first crop of tomatoes this time next year as a result...

Here's where you get 'em: PermaculturePrinciples.com are selling both the Diary and the Calendar online with free shipping... hooray for people making their own earth!