Allen Sapp Healing Garden

Well, I’ve been neglecting the blog for some time and it’s time to get back at it.

Last spring, I went out to visit Kjelti Anderson at the Allen Sapp healing garden, a project she was leading to create a native plant healing garden behind the Allen Sapp gallery in North Battleford. Click here to see their Facebook page. Kjelti wanted some input about water flow in and around the garden, so I came out with my handy dandy camera (with a smudge on the lens -sorry about that) and filmed the garden and our discussion. I’m planning on getting out there soon to film the finished product, so stay tuned.

It’s done in 5 parts, because we had various interruptions and breaks to go into the gallery to thaw out – it was only April, after all. It’s interesting as it unfolds; there’s a point where it seems there will be a lot of work to recover, and then as we discuss it more, we discover it’s not really as big of a deal as it seems.

Part 1 – surveying the general area. Interrupted by a beeping piece of machinery in the parking lot.

Part 2 – continuing with the overview.

Part 3 – me standing on another piece of land thinking about what you could do with it

Part 4 – where Kjelti goes “aaaarrrgggh!”

Part 5 – maybe it’s not so bad after all, and plan for a swale

 

Creating a Food Forest – pre-blitz

Man, unbelievable how easy it is to forget about your blog completely. Now that it’s been something like 7 months, it’s time to get caught up, and I’ve got a few videos to show.

First, here’s the pre-blitz video of the yard. We did the blitz at the end of August. I didn’t get out and film right after the blitz was done, but now that it’s spring again I will get out and film the results and get them posted.

First, here is the backyard in all its wild glory before the permablitz, before cutting down the weeds, etc. It’s pretty crazy

Next, a video of the front yard. I had done some work already as you can see, because in a previous video the pathway ran downhill. I say in this video that I had shown some of my experimenting in a previous video. Unfortunately, I can’t find that video.

The backyard, right before the blitz

and finally, the team working in full production, making a lot of noise and going like stink to fill in the swales

 

Creating a Food Forest – the front yard

Okay, I posted a little while ago that I was going to be blogging this, so I’d better get moving as things are steaming along.

This is a short video to show what the front yard looked like. Pretty standard square grass area. We had put a pathway across it but, as I point out in the video, it was flowing downhill – not so great.

up next will be showing the “before” state of the backyard

 

Creating a Food Forest

After getting my Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) last summer, things have really taken off. It allowed me to learn a lot of new stuff, and meet a lot of interesting like-minded people. Some of those people have now started the Permaculture Research Institute of Saskatchewan, an organization dedicated to advancing the study and practice of permaculture in the province.

To that end, we have been doing “permablitzes,” a work bee where volunteers show up and overhaul somebody’s yard, with a focus on water harvesting, pathways, and food production. My yard is up next, so I need to get my design done.

One thing that’s distracting me is working on my front yard. I have been inspired to convert my entire yard to a food forest. It’s no secret that I’ve never really liked grass. A lawn in an urban yard isn’t really big enough to do anything on, like play football, and it turns brown every summer unless you water the snot out of it. So, I’ve been working on the front yard myself, gradually eliminating grass and and adding fruit bushes and trees. I have snapped some shots and taken a bit of video, and will be posting progress over the next little bit. I have been doing some serious experimenting with ways to overpower the lawn without just bringing in a bunch of topsoil and covering it.

so, stay tuned, more to come

 

(more) Permaculture in Saskatoon (in Winter)

so, the course did happen after all. It was a two-day affair this past weekend, during the first major storm of the year.

Notwithstanding the weather, the course was very informative and entertaining. Jesse Lemieux, from Pacific Permaculture, is very passionate about what he does – you could tell that.

It was great to meet other like-minded people and get to talk to them. One of the biggest drawbacks of a short course like this is that you have limited break times, which makes it difficult to find time to chat with everyone who is there. By the end of the second day, I think I’d gotten about half-way through the group.

Word is they’re organizing something for the summer as well. That should be interesting if I can find time to get to it.

 

Permaculture in Saskatoon (in Winter)

I just found out about this. Right now, Saskatoon is listed as TBA. I hope it comes together because I’ve been reading a lot about permaculture and would really like to get in a room with someone who knows a bit about it. Will have to follow this and see what happens.

http://www.pacificpermaculture.ca/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=81:inroduction-to-permaculture-january-2009&catid=19:courses&Itemid=78

 

Fun with Urbanite

As we work in our yard, we’re constantly discovering cleverly buried bits of concrete. Not sure where they came from – presumably they had torn up a sidewalk or something and didn’t want to pay to haul it away. Instead, they buried it around the yard. It’s great fun – makes evey new attempt at landscaping an adventure!

The term for this waste concrete is “urbanite.” it is one of the most abundant rock-like substances in the world because we so joyously rip up old concrete and discard it like it was nothing. Fortunately, it can often be reused. Many rubble foundations in environmentally friendly houses will use urbanite.

Well, this weekend, I decided to make use of some of this urbanite  Where I live, we’re still allowed to have yard fires, as long as it’s in a suitable container. Home Depot et al sell many, many of those expensive build-yourself curved brick firepits. I had built one last year by just stacking the urbanite, but my kids seemed to think it was a climbing toy and kept knocking the top row off. So, while planting an apple tree this year, we came across a decent amount of good ol’ prairie clay, which I dug up and put to use.

Last year, I went to a straw bale building workshop in Craik, where I learned how to make earthen plasters. So, I used the clay, some sand from the kids’ (now unused) sandbox, and some straw that I have (intending to use as mulch), and mixed up an earthen plaster to act as a mortar.

Here are some pictures. I will post a follow-up in the future to let you know how it turned out. It’s got a tarp over it to allow slower drying of the mud right now. Hope it’ll be ready for next weekend.

Mixing the mud

One Batch Finished

The Finished Pit

Filling the holes in the bricks

 

Tripartite Altruism

I’m reading David Holmgren’s Permaculture book right now, which has some interesting stuff in it. A little while back, I came across a reference he makes to Howard Odum’s description of a “tripartite altruism” in nature, where 1/3 of energy is required for metabolic self-maintenance, 1/3 is fed back to lower-system providers, and 1/3 is contributed upwardly to higher-order system controllers. He uses a simple example of rabbits to illustrate this. Rabbits eat to keep themselves alive and reproduce, their manure fertilises the grasses that feed them, and the old and weak are preyed upon by higher-order predators.

He then goes on to talk about modern society, and how we reflect Odum’s tripartrite altruism in the ways in which we live. We earn a living in some way, and out of the living we support ourselves. We also buy things which “support the higher-order system controllers,” and we support the system through our taxes. As he points out, though, there are no feedback mechanisms to tell us how much to consume as part of the system, or how much to contribute to the “greater good,” especially in today’s world, where our societal support systems are constantly being eroded.

In the end, he suggests that we consider allocating “one-third of our time to providing for our material needs, one-third to self-development and reflection, and one-third to wider societal benefit,” which brings me to the crux of this post.

This sounds great. I’d love to figure out how to do this. It is very difficult, however, in our modern money-based world. To be part of “the system,” you have to earn money. Let’s assume, for simplicity, that there are 12 productive hours in a day (removing time for meals and sleep and such). So we would have 4 hours for work (to meet our material needs), 4 hours for self-development, and 4 hours for wider societal benefit. In a week, this would be 28 hours of each. Now, in our modern world, a “regular” full-time job is around 40 hours a week, and many people have to work longer hours than that, either to make enough to live or because the job demands it of them. For the sake of simplicity, though, let’s keep it at 40 hours, which means we’re already out of balance by 12 hours/week to the “work” side of things in our “normal” society.

Now, I have a pretty good job and am reasonably well paid, enough that I could work less and earn less and we’d still be okay in terms of meeting our material needs. I am fortunate in that respect. The catch is that I work in a full-time-oriented office world, which expects that staff will be working the aforementioned full-time hours. There is no real mechanism for me to work less than that, other than to get a part-time job in a retail environment or something. The catch there is that the reduction in the amount I make would at least partly have to be made up for in greater hours worked.

So, how do you do it in our society? Is it possible to follow Holmgren’s suggestion and still work at a professional job and live in an urban area where you’re not really supporting yourself in many ways (other than by earning money)?

 

All About Ishmael (Finally)

okay, I’m a little late to the party on this one, but I finally got around to reading Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn. So, now it’s time to chat a bit about it. A word of warning: if you’re even more of a laggard than me and you haven’t read it, then be careful because the following will contain spoilers.

The book begins with the main character (who never gets a name) responding to an ad for a pupil, who must be “willing to save the world.” He discovers his teacher will be a gorilla, who has learned to communicate telepathically. That’s pretty much it in a nutshell – the rest of the book is basically just a series of conversations between the two. Sounds rivetting, I know, but it is quite a book. If you’ve ever wondered about life, about why we might be here, you will find this a very interesting read.

The gorilla (who was named Ishmael by his original benefactor) begins teaching the man that there are two “stories” being played out by humans. One is by a group he calls the Takers, and one is by a group he calls the Leavers. The Taker story is much more recent than the Leaver story, and the Takers represent the dominant culture in the world (our culture).The Taker culture and mythology began with the advent of an agricultural society. He considers the story of Cain and Abel to be about the agricultural society sweeping aside the hunter-gatherer societies, as opposed to a literal story about two brothers.

There are some great lines in the book. I don’t have it in front of me right now so I’ll have to paraphrase. One of the best is when he’s talking about living outside of the laws of nature. He says that ignoring the laws of nature is like a man stepping off a cliff because he doesn’t believe in gravity. Gravity doesn’t care if he believes or not.

As the book carries on, we see that the two dominant cultures on Earth are vastly different. The Takers basically feel that they are God, and the Leavers consider themselves to be “in the hands of the gods” (notice the difference between the big “G” God and the multiple gods).

I will stop here, so I’m not really throwing out as many spoilers as I thought. If you are interested in any one of mythology, philosophy, religion (though probably not too terribly religious or you may take offence), and especially if you have a feeling of dread about the state of the world and how long man may last in it, then I recommend picking up Ishmael and giving it a read.

I’m now on to The Story of B, the second book written by Daniel Quinn. It kind of picks up where Ishmael left off, but not quite.

But more about that once I’ve finished it.

 

More on Passive Solar up here

Just a quick one today, for those of you following along at home. Been spending too much time on the type-up comedy blog lately (but it’s fun!)

I was talking to someone at the SES function who has a passive solar house, here around Saskatoon. She was telling me that, in -27 temperatures like we just had last week, they actually had to open windows in their house because it was too hot.

So, I guess passive solar will work even up here. She did say, however, that in December it’s not as effective, largely due to the fact that the sun is so low on the horizon. She also said December was cloudy. I don’t remember that, just that it was really, really cold.

When I get a minute I will talk about Ishmael, which I finally read. It was quite a book. Hope to get to that soon.