Living Outside

The days are longer, the first small wildflowers taking their chances. Rain has not deterred the first migrators, from Turkey Vultures to Hummingbirds. This renewal of activity signals the time for gardeners to begin their toil and bloggers to quit procrastinating! Since the last post, our goats have grown, cherry tomatoes sweetened our tongues, cider has been pressed and snow provided fascinating tracking opportunities. Among all this, there is one change that gives me most cause for reflection.

Last December, we moved out of the house, and into a canvas tent under the roof of the barn. Since then we've been living outside day and night. I can confidently say that of all our against-the-grain attempts to find glimpses of a sane life-way, this has been one of the more profound and successful. A little voice in us --as well as several other well-meaning ones-- fretted about cold, winter, damp, rain, wind, and other unavoidable calamities from which the House would no longer have the power to shelter us. It is widely accepted that conditions such as these are undesirable; this is made clear to us at a very young age by concerned and loving relatives explaining that it is cold outside and hats, mittens, jackets, overcoats, thick socks, insulated boots and scarves will be necessary implements for survival today. By comparison, the House is the culturally accepted haven from harm: Home Sweet Home (and never mind that domestic accidents are one of the leading causes of death in our society!).

In spite of this, it has been fascinating to me to notice not only how unharmed I remain from the ostensibly hostile elements, but in fact how much better I feel. For example, rain is usually thought to be an excellent reason to stay indoors, even if this means staying cooped up in a dim, gloomy house. But meanwhile I'm out there enjoying the song of the rain on the roof, leaves, grass, driveway, and myriad other musical surfaces! I'm amused now at the discrepancy between how pleasant it is to experience rain and the gloominess that I felt when I voluntarily limited myself to the house so as to avoid the hardships of being exposed to the rain! The beauty of the sky-water's earthbound journey, the splashes and drips and gathering into pools and rivulets... Rainy days are not inherently dark, depressing occasions, quite the contrary. It is our allegiance to the dark, disconnected house environment that make them seem so.

Likewise for temperature: I have noticed that while a warm spring day feels nice at 50ºF (10ºC), even 60ºC (15ºC) feels cold in a house. This demonstrates to me how psychology and cultural notions of what constitutes an appropriate range of conditions trump our body's inbuilt tolerance levels. Adapting to the cold has not been so much physiological as a mental shift of what I consider "normal". This has taken very little time, and I am very pleased to now feel quite comfortable whenever conditions stay above or near freezing, even without a coat.  If I get cold, I just increase my activity level, which is the best medicine for preventing a sedentary, "couch potato" lifestyle! The hardest step all day is getting out of a toasty warm bed. But then, better get the hardest part of the day behind you first thing, right?

The level of control over our surroundings that the House both symbolizes and demands is a weight I am very glad to have shed. Now, if we accidentally get the floor wet or drop food, it isn't instantly a crisis demanding immediate action before life can go on. In the House, a wet or dirty floor is either a hazard, or gross. Usually both. Yet any action, from eating to removing a book from a shelf, has the effect of moving the House away from its idealized "clean" state. This means that every moment we live in our House, we live in a situation of cognitive dissonance: the way we imagine a House should be is invariably at odds with the way it is. Even the best housekeeper is fighting a losing battle trying to maintain constant "tidiness". It's like fighting windmills! On the other hand, is a forest ever "messy", despite the absence of a dedicated concierge? So why do we design houses according to artificial standards that are only bound to keep us dissatisfied and in a perpetual control-freak cleaning frenzy mode??

In our present life situation, we keep in a reasonable state of cleanliness only that which we need to keep clean: our dishes, essentially. We use an extension cord and a vacuum cleaner once in a while for the carpets in our tent --living in a tent has not meant giving up on all our fancy comforts! (Actually, one of our carpets is a big old oriental rug that was probably made to go in a tent or yurt in the first place!) The floor of our outdoor area, which includes our rustic kitchen and fire pit, is packed earth over concrete, so no maintenance there. The kitchen counter (plywood covered in contact paper) is both fast and optional to clean. The camping stove also. I feel a great relief that my surroundings do not demand constant attention and maintenance. The culturally-defined comfort standards of the House require great maintenance to sustain, and I am learning now that it is all for rather meager and biologically unnecessary benefits, and at the cost of our life-nurturing contact with the elements. The House not only exemplifies the flawed assumption that we can radically control our environment successfully, but places us in the position of having no choice but to try, and repeatedly fail, to do so.

So far, my spirit has been strengthened by continuous contact with the same forces among which we as a species have evolved. My awareness has grown, from my senses being constantly embedded in a wide and complex landscape, beginning my recovery from the sensory deprivation of the House's restricted and simplified environment. My mental state has improved, and I'll venture that the peak in depression that occurs in winter and is commonly blamed on the seasons can really be attributed to the house-bound lifestyle most people espouse at that time. When I feel the wind on my skin, I take in the sensation and rejoice. I take note of its direction and the implications it has for the next days' weather. In the House, wind is reduced to a draft, a problem, a reason to curse and buy caulking and insulation. When the birds sing, I pause and listen. The Song Sparrow next to our barn has a dazzling array of songs for various occasions. My understanding of bird behavior and my responses to it have deepened considerably. Indoors, I hear nothing but the whirr and buzz of fridge, heating systems, and other unidentifiable nuisance noises. Even the rain, as I mentioned, is an occasion for celebration now.

I believe that part of our biological heritage is a kinship with the elements, animals, changes in the weather. For untold millions of years the genes of our ancestors were shaped by an environment that included bird song, rain, wind, "cold" and "hot", a gentle fade of day into night. Living close to nature then should not stay merely an ideological position but should translate to a physical proximity, indeed, full immersion. The benefits have already shown themselves to be deep and far-reaching, and certainly worth the discomfort of transcending the cultural barriers that make us cling to the House. I look forward to moving away even more from learned symbols of comfort, toward a joyful involvement with the dynamic elements which lies still at the core of the biological expectations of our senses.

Goats

Chris and Idun, Rosemary and Skadi

We got goats! Two nubian doe-kids who we hope will chow down on the ubiquitous "Himalayan" Blackberry, and maybe provide us with milk next year if we decided to take them to a buck this winter. They are incredibly adorable and follow us tenaciously, eating when we stop and calling if we move away (especially if we go in different directions, something they have little tolerance for). The first few days and nights were very stressful though because the kids had just been weaned, and they cried ceaselessly when we left them alone. In fact they lost their voices, and take it from me, a hoarse nubian screaming in distress is one of the most pitiful and heart-wrenching sounds I've heard. Now they're getting used to spending time alone, though they haven't yet gotten their normal voices back fully. Salutations to our neighbors who put up with them, and to bobcat and bear who haven't troubled them, though I'm sure they had a peak through the bushes...

Now we can experiment to see if goats can effectively control the blackberry!

And... we're back!!

Our new home, nestled between prairie and forest.

This is it! I crossed the border upon receipt of my US visa on Thursday, and on Friday was welcomed into our new home, the homestead at a nature preserve in the Willamette Valley, OR. Now begins a whole new chapter in both of our lives, filled with a multitude of adventures which we shall chronicle here. For now, time is to settling in, getting acquainted with the neighbors (tender prairie flowers, melodious feathered dryads, elusive creatures of fur and claw), seeking the Earth's bounty in our garden-in-progress, working with our goats (soon to be acquired) and chickens to manage brush, etc.

The garden into which we pour labor and love!

"Welcome to the USA": the Long-Awaited Bureaucratic Catharsis

Phewww... I just got back from clearing the last immigration hurdle: the interview at the US Consulate in Montreal. It was a quick business, I was in and out in one hour and a half. "Interview" is really a big word; I had been imagining being ushered into an impressive office and scrutinized by a representative of the state with more power than you'd want to shake a stick at for fear of legal repercussions for the next seven generations. In the end I turned in my original documents at one booth, talked to someone in a slightly more private booth about my accent and other niceties and then received my "welcome to the USA" letter. Didn't even have to talk about how we met, what I planned on doing in the US, etc. Great!

Now I will travel back to Vancouver and wait for a package containing my visa documents and passport (which they kept) to be sent by mail. They say I can expect it in less than 2 weeks. Which means I probably won't make it for our anniversary, on the 21st. But soon I shall be on my southward journey, and then on to more thrilling adventures! I hear rumours of bird surveys and natural building and planting hardy kiwis and goumis and other fantastical things... Not long now...

End in sight, and a new blog!

Hello World! With great --though still somewhat reserved-- pleasure, I can say that my forced exile is coming to an end soon. I have the date for my interview, which is the last step in the immigration process. This will be on June 15th, after which I have to wait a few days to receive the visa package; I hope to be able to be in the US for our anniversary, June 21st!

In the meantime I will go to France, to visit my folks. Then back to Montreal, for that is where the interview is happening. And when that is over with, bus trip back to Vancouver to wait out the last few days until the restrictions on my freedom to travel are lifted!

In the meantime I will be staying sane by walking in the tracks of deer, inhaling the intoxicating sent of newly burst Cottonwood buds and erupting elderberry flowers. I have started a new blog to record these experiences and reflections on my journey into nature awareness: http://chroniclesofthewild.blogspot.com/. So in the future, I envision gardening adventures and other concrete life projects (which will be plenty once our lives are allowed to go on) being posted here, while my blog COTW will record the events occurring in the natural world and thoughts on my place therein.

Be well, and if you're in Montreal or in France at the same time I'm there, drop me a line. Smell them Cottonwoods??

Chris

Yet another long-awaited update

Oh my goodness, where to start? So many new things to write about, although one thing remains the same: six months later and Chris is still in Vancouver, though we’re starting to see a hint of a glimmer of the light at the end of that tunnel. That “approve” we got back in January was a big step, but we didn’t really know at the time that we still had a long way to go. Now the last batch of documents has been sent in, and we’re waiting for them to be approved (by a different agency than the previous one) so that an interview date can be set…  but then the interview could be anywhere from a month to three months away, so we hear. Oh, and Chris is going to have to go back to Montreal for the interview, because apparently that’s the only place in all of Canada where they process this particular kind of immigration request. Once the interview is done, however, he should be able to cross the border! So that’s the gist of things for the moment. I’ll let Chris write more about what he’s been doing, if he feels up to it!

As for me, I suppose the biggest news is that I’ve moved to this magical fairyland that has been alluded to in previous posts. Some folks call this place a nature preserve. Some call it Shambhalla. I have yet to discover my special name for this place, but it’s starting to become home. This 270-acre paradise is, in technical terms, a land trust managed by an environmental organization. They acquired the land a few years ago, mainly because it is one of the few areas with a relatively healthy population of the Kincaid’s lupine, which is relied upon for survival by the Fender’s blue butterfly. Both lupine and butterfly are considered endangered, and both only occur in the Pacific Northwest, and at that, mostly in the Willamette Valley. There are a few patches of this symbiotic flower/pollinator pair around, and now this one, at least, is protected, with plans for habitat expansion.

Aside from this, the land is quite varied, although typical of the Willamette Valley: oak savannah, dense douglas-fir forest and younger douglas-fir plantation, broad-leaf maple, some ponderosa pine, open prairie filled with grasses whose identity I do not yet know, a creek lined with water birch and willow, and of course invasives such as Himalayan blackberry and scotch broom. Among the more mobile, the four-legged, that is, we find numerous mule deer, a herd of elk, coyote, fox and bobcat, and their lunch, rabbit, at least one each of black bear and cougar (I have not yet seen very many of these with my own eyes yet, though I see their tracks and scat often). As for the winged, some nights I hear great-horned owls calling back and forth to each other. There are the usual suspects: jays (scrub and Stellar’s), crows, ravens, robins, juncos and chickadees, sparrows and kinglets, sap-suckers, towhees, kestrels, red-tail hawks. And the occasional unusual suspect, such as the Townsend’s solitaire I saw a couple weeks ago. Beautiful little thrush, likely just passing through.

So, how did I get here? Well, on this land is a house. A house and a barn. And some surrounding gardenable land, totaling a couple of acres. This is considered the “homestead area,” and on it live people who caretake the land in exchange for a place to live, and now I am one of those people. The other folks here are A and W, and their on-the-verge-of-crawling baby, C. I met them last fall through mutual friends, and when they told me that they were looking for more people to come live on the preserve, I almost jumped for joy. It’s pretty much everything Chris and I have been looking for: a place to live close to the wild, to do the kinds of work we love, and to live in community with others. And it’s in the part of the world that I have always called home. The only thing that’s missing now is Chris!

I’ve continued to be able to go up to Vancouver once a month, for five or six days at a time. Last time I was there we spent a lot of time planning gardens (there is ample gardening space on the homestead area, and much of it A and W have already been gardening in the two years they’ve been here, but there’s more useable land, and there will be more people to feed this year, so expanding the gardens is a priority.) Those of you who read our blog during last year’s growing season may remember how we tend to plant lots of different things that we have never heard of before. Well, we’re trying to scale that back a bit this year (a tough task for Chris, who has already had me get the likes of cinnamon vine and Queen Fabiola something-or-other). What we’re getting more into now, though, is native plants, and I’ve already got quite a collection of fruit-bearing native trees and bushes, such as serviceberry and high bush cranberry, and the fruit-bearing-but-not-palatable-to-humans such as twinberry and Indian plum. I’m sure there will be a lot more to write on this topic once these wonders start going into the ground.

Another exciting project just beginning to take shape is a kids’ outdoor summer camp that I’m helping organize and at which I will be one of the facilitators; Chris will likely become a part of this once he’s down here as well. It’s still in the early planning stages, but it will be a whole mix of science, gardening, awareness and experiential exploration, art and more… We’ll have some more solid information soon, so let me know if you have (or know of) kids ages 6-13 looking for something fun and amazing to do for a couple weeks in July or August! It will be held on some amazing land right at the edge of McMinnville.

So that’s it for now. It’s been hard to keep up with the blogging thing, and I know we always say that we’ll do better next time. Who knows. We’ll be sure to tell you once things start to pick up in terms of immigration though! And, you know, once Chris is here and we’ve got the garden going, I’m sure there will be lots more posts about that!

Oh, and if you are so inclined, we would really appreciate your energy/prayers/rationally-based thought processes for a speedy approval and interview! Hope you are all doing well, and no matter how strange you may be, don’t be a stranger!

An update, with good news in it!

Rosemary here, to tell you the good news that USCIS has approved our application for Chris to get permanent residency! We didn't have any real doubts that it would happen, but the wait has been long and torturous at times, not having any way to know where they were in the process, if they'd even started looking at our application yet, or how much longer it would take. So now we're waiting for instructions on what to do next, because this doesn't mean that he can cross the border quite yet, just that the longest part is over. Still have more documents to turn in, and the application now goes to the National Visa Center for yet further processing... not sure exactly how long that will take but from what we hear it shouldn't be too long. So we're very happy at least that things are moving along, and hopefully my next trip up to visit Chris will end in me bringing him home with me finally!

Aside from this, I have long been planning on writing a blog post with an update on things in general, but had been procrastinating as I always do (the reason why most of the posts are written by Chris). But this good news has given me motivation to write!

Just over a week ago I returned from another wonderful trip up to BC. I've been able to make it up to visit Chris for a few days every month, which would make this my fourth trip. Each time I've gone up, we've managed to get in a bit of camping, and this last trip took us out to Vancouver Island, where we camped along a logging road a few miles inland from the western coast, a bit south of Tofino. We spent both the last day of 2010 (which was Chris's birthday) and the first day of 2011 on a beautiful beach, catching some much-needed sun through our many layers of clothing, for it was also very cold!

You can see more pictures from our recent adventures in the new album to the left: Adventures in BC!

Aside from spending time up north with Chris when I can, I've been busy back in my hometown in Oregon, busy making connections and getting started on my new journey of midwifery. I've connected with an amazing living opportunity for us once Chris gets down here... but I will refrain from writing more details about it until it actually happens, for, as I have recently experienced, things don't always go as you plan and sometimes a last-minute wrench can change your direction entirely. But hopefully this one will work out!

It has been nice being back in my home region, which I have missed ever since I left it in 2003. I like that it rained on Christmas, and that the temperature these days is hovering around freezing and a few degrees above: it's cold, but not the bone-chilling, eyelash frosting, icy windy frigidness of Montreal at this time of year. And it's getting close to pea-planting time already! And bulbs are already poking their new shoots out of the ground. Oh, and I saw a furry white pussy willow last week! Though I'm thinking that pussy willow might be a bit confused, since we have had a very mild winter so far. I remember pussy willows normally being more of a February finding.

I hope that the new calendar year of 2011 is treating you all well so far! And I hope that I get around to writing more often here! Certainly once our new plans are in motion, we will share them with you...

News from Chris

Hello all, this is Chris, certified stranded alien, reporting from BC. I have been well, biding my time while the US immigration services process my documents. I have been living in North Vancouver, in the guest room of a friend of a friend's who graciously offered me to stay in exchange for some work on the house and the garden. I'm working on week-ends as a handy man to put some money away.

I've also been spending time learning about the local ecosystem, figuring out plant names, what plants were and are eating by local First Nations, the habits of animals and birds. I tasted licorice fern (wow!), encountered a mink in a canyon, and Rosemary and I came upon a bear scat full of mushroom remnants near Rice Lake, a short distance from the urban area. A pack of coyotes lives in the area, and I am determined to find out something about them too. I see bald eagles almost every day on their way to and from the port.

The crows are like a living clock, leaving their roost just after dawn and heading to it an hour before dusk. They come from all over the Vancouver area to roost together. Rosemary and I tried to follow them by car, but we didn't find their final destination, which is probably in the Burnaby area, just East of Vancouver.

Last week-end I went for a hike organized by the Ancient Forest Alliance to a group of old growth trees that escaped the felling during the early 20th c., called the "Temple of Time Grove of Giants" (!!), within walking distance of North Van. The size of these Douglas-Firs and Redcedars was pretty amazing (I think the tallest Douglas-Fir was 96 metres). My wonder was a little overshadowed by sadness though, because we had to walk for hours, go off the trail and up a steep hill, not get lost, to get to this "grove" of only a handful of uncut trees. Such lengths we must go to if we want to see what used to be everywhere!

Oh yeah, I've also started to work on publishing my thesis, which I left behind when I got my MSc a year and a half ago. Not that I really have a great interest in ground beetles, or want to pursue a career in academia at this point, but since I did all this research I don't want to let it rot in a drawer somewhere!

That's all for now. I'll make sure to post about anything exciting!

We have landed

We arrived a couple of days ago in the Vancouver area after driving across Canada from Montreal. Chris has a nice place to stay in Vancouver, and has made contacts with some friendly folks who have offered to show him around. He is studying his options for how to spend the next little while. Gratefulness for webs of interconnection weaving links with friends of friends across the continent!

Rosemary is back in Oregon with her family, with many projects (including petitioning for Chris' papers).

More on our adventures soon.

Starting a Garden from Scratch

This year, like last year, we started a new garden where there had previously been grass. We have therefore had opportunities to try out various strategies. Here’s the outcome of these experiments.

Garden bed preparation

Last year, we tried turning over the sod so that the grass would die and the roots would be exposed and dry up. This doesn’t work: grass is feisty, and just grows up around the edges of the sod, even if the part beneath dies. The implications for fertility and soil life also seem mediocre with this process.

Both times, we tried removing the grass and shaking the earth off the roots. This also leaves a lot of roots and also weed seeds which have been lying dormant, and therefore it takes no time at all for a little jungle to spring up from the earth.

We tried sheet mulching, and this is probably the most successful method. The trouble is it takes a lot of compost and mulch to cover a large area, so this year we: a) removed the grass and superficial topsoil and composted it, b) removed the rest of the topsoil, c) loosened the subsoil, d) laid down the cardboard and replaced the topsoil on top of it, followed by dry mulch (bracken or hemp). This was a long and difficult process which we could have avoided if we had had masses of compost and just done the sheet mulching straight on top of the grass. The ground was very compacted (it had been a horse pasture), which was another reason we wanted to loosen the soil before sheet mulching.

The results were very good; we found that the soil stayed moist for a long time under the cardboard, and we had little trouble with weeds. I think the cardboard took care of any remaining grass roots, while the mulch on top took care of the seeds left in the soil. Sheet mulching was perfect for the nightshades and perennial cabbages. In the future, I think we'll try making it thicker, with more carbon mulch, mixed if necessary with blood meal or some other high nitrogen material, for additional on-site compost production and increased benefits from the sheet-mulching.

For beds in which we wanted to plant seeds (greens, beets, carrots, flowers), we decided not to sheet mulch as this didn’t seem compatible with starting seeds. The greens we planted early did alright because they grew fast and out-competed weeds anyway. Our kale and beet patch was very weedy, though the weeds were mostly very small. Presumably over the years there will be less weeds as the seeds that were present in the ground run out.

Start Small

We didn’t! We really wanted a big garden, something that would be challenging and full of food and lessons. The thing is, the bigger it is, the more dispersed your energy gets and the less effort you can spend on it per surface area. Therefore a larger garden will be less productive per unit of surface area. We definitely observed this as there were always, at any given time, parts that weren’t producing. This is the basic principle of square foot gardening. While in Montreal, I saw square foot gardening as a sort of punishment or affliction that city dwellers have to put up with due to space restrictions. Now I appreciate the underlying tenets: the smaller the garden, the easier it will be to take care of it, and the more productive it will be per unit of area.

The other thing is that we burned out a little after the mad rush to plant of the spring, and pulled back after that from the garden. I think that if we had started fewer plants of fewer varieties, we would have been less overwhelmed and more contented with our garden during the summer. We felt the pressure also to plant any successful seedlings as it was very hard to discard any, but in the end our garden was a bit too dense and unwieldy. So, when starting our own seedlings, we need to remember that some of them will need to be sacrificed for the others to grow optimally.

Also, a new garden usually takes a lot of raw materials: compost, mulch, sticks for trellises, maybe some garden furniture, stones or other landscaping stuff. Therefore starting small and really enhancing the fertility and beauty of the garden seems like a better course of action than spreading mulch too thin to be effective or running out of compost/manure half way through. After the first year, hopefully mulch plants will kick into action and the compost pile will be yielding, which will provide the resources for a successful expansion.

Plant Selection

I think that starting with lots of perennials and a few annuals would be a good balance. Perennials need time to get established, so I’d recommend putting them in first, so that in the second year there will already be a bunch of stuff growing and you can concentrate your energy on expanding on that. If you plant just annuals the first year, you will have to start all over again the next time. Annuals are not the best use of energy (or money), in the longer run.

On the other hand, it's good to make sure that some really reliable producers are included: I'm thinking about chard, beats, kale, herbs. Stuff that most likely you'll get more of than you want, unless you try very hard to mess things up. And also, I wish we'd used more earlier producers. We had very little before mid-July and the first tomatoes. Early producers like turnips, beats, greens, spinach, kohlrabi, while not the most exciting to eat (I think), are really nice to have around for their fast growth. They really help to extend the season both ways.

Planting patterns

We were a bit obsessed with companion planting this year. It must be said that in winter, when the garden is just a dream and we long to be outside with the sun warming our bones, thinking about plant combinations is like fantasizing! In the end though, companion planting is a nebulous pseudoscience which should be taken with a pinch of salt. It’s very hard to know what combinations are going to work (marginally) better than others, which you learn by observation rather than book/internet research anyway. So, no point sweating over that too much!

Rows

We’ve been resisting planting in rows, which we saw as an unnatural imposition of puritanical will upon the naturally flowing patterns of the plant world. The fact is, I think that some things benefit from being planted in rows, especially root vegetables (our broadcasted carrot seeds didn't come to any good, and we were mostly powerless to effectively care for them, spread all over the place as they were) and some alliums that need to be fairly weed free and thinned correctly. It’s virtually impossible to effectively weed young plants that aren’t in rows! Rows make is easier to identify young seedlings, and to thin them when the time comes, and then also to harvest them. Ease of harvesting was something we totally didn’t consider at the end of a rugged winter, when it was unimaginable that harvesting, that holy sacred grail, could ever be anything but pure bliss! It's really something that needs to be planned for in order to make the best use of the garden's gifts!

On the other hand, bigger plants that grow for the whole season, like tomatoes or peppers, don’t seem to need to be planted in lines as much (except maybe for ease of trellising, and, again, harvesting). Plant guilds, which are something we are just beginning to explore, also brings an end to the need for rows, but this is sort of beyond the scope of a veggie garden.

Conclusion

My biggest take home messages from this year are: we must make sure to manage our energy for our own pleasure and for the benefit of the garden (start small, don't waste energy on marginally beneficial plants, use perennials rather than annuals when possible), and relax about the theory: stuff like companion planting, soil fertility, etc., which you learn as you go along anyway, rather than sweating over volumes of gardening books that usually don't agree anyway. A creative balance of experimentation and sure shots will ensure learning and satisfaction will both flow from the garden.

Three Sisters Musings

So now I’m sitting in the back of the motor home, and we’ve just passed Ottawa. This is a good time to spend reading and writing blog posts! Reading through Toby Hemenway’s “Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture” (what an awesome book!), I came across a discussion of the Three Sisters. Since returning to Turtle Island (aka North America), I’ve also had conversations about this guild with other gardeners. One of our friends even has a tattoo of the Three Sisters on his calf! So here are some more thoughts that came out of all this. It seems to me that the main benefit of this guild over separate patches is to the corn, which, according to one Jane Mt. Pleasant of Cornell University, yields about 20% more (measured in calories) than corn grown alone. Plus you get some squash and some beans in the deal, but I think that if you want a serious amount of beans, you need a separate bean patch (which is easy enough to do).

I’ve been puzzled by the mound pattern of planting for the corn and beans that I have seen in several instructions. They describe mounds about 20 inches across and 12 inches high, or some variation of these dimensions. I never quite understood the point, except maybe so that the ground would heat up sooner in the spring. The method described in Gaia’s Garden seems to make more sense in this respect: corn is planted 3 or 4 kernels per hole, about 3 feet apart. No thinning is done as you want 2 or 3 stalks per hole, which explains the planting distance. It’s only when the corn sprouts that you mound it, which helps warm the ground and speed up the growth of the corn. Beyond this, bean and squash planting occurs in the same way, about two weeks after the corn has sprouted. The author recommends inoculating the beans to ensure the presence of nitrogen-fixing bacteria.

Another thing that could really help boost squash and bean production is adding some pollinator attractors, just like the Anasazi of the Southwest added the Rocky Mountain bee plant (Cleome serulata), thereby bringing in the experience and blessings of the insect nation. We noticed that our squashes were aborting from lack of pollination, and to be fair with the bees, who are undoubtedly doing their best as it is, the squash flowers were fairly few and far between at any given moment, and they were hidden beneath a dense canopy of leaves. In addition, pollination would require pollinators to visit a male flower first, and then a female flower, of the same squash species! So, some early blooming flowers would be a small compensation for the efforts of insect visitors.

In the future I’d try the method described in Gaia’s Garden. I think a lot of people get discouraged after trying the Three Sisters once, especially if they are used to another method that worked pretty well for them, but considering the variations in the planting instructions it is only to be expected that results will vary.

Our changing plans

So, we still have a few posts in the works to conclude about our garden this year, but first, something entirely different.

We have both flown back to North America, and our plan was to go from Montreal to Oregon, to live there (where Rosemary's family comes from). We talked to a US immigration officer who said that we could just go there and apply for me to adjust status then (it was a bit complicated applying from France).

Unfortunately, we were informed at the border that this was not true, and I was denied entry (this was a few hours ago). Since we don't have a home in Montreal anymore for me to stay at, we decided the best would be for us to drive through Canada instead of through the US, and to drop me off in BC, where I could wait for my papers. Rosemary has to go back to the US to petition for me, but if I'm in BC we would be able to see each other during this process that could take 1 to 6 months.

So we're happy to have a plan again. The thing is, we don't know anyone in BC, so we've been appealing to our friends to try and make some connections. Do you know of anyone in BC whom I could stay with for a bit? A farm that takes workers?

Europe vs. North America: Sustainable Agriculture

I'm often asked if I miss the country I grew up in, France, or how living in Europe compares to living in North America. I invariably say that I prefer life in the "New World", though the reasons I give tend to vary. I'm not totally sure what the reasons are really, but they seem to center around an increased feeling of freedom, freedom from the conformity and rigidity that has had centuries to settle over every aspect of the life of a European, a sense of the future being still something to be written, something to fight for, to dream, rather than a looming and inevitable social order already determined by the deep ruts set by a bloated, crushing history.

Pondering the difference between these two related, Western societies is a common pattern for me, and so it was when I watched two films on sustainable agriculture these past few months. One film was French, Colinne Serreau's "Solutions Locales à un Désordre Global", and the other was a US/Canadian documentary about permaculture by our friend Donna Read and Starhawk, "Permaculture: The Growing Edge", which we saw at Donna's house when we were there in September.

Both films are based on a similar observation: modern industrial agriculture, like our modern capitalist society in general, is radically unsustainable. Both films then go on to show how restructuring our agriculture (and therefore our society), are necessary steps if we are to develop a sustainable culture.

What struck me though were the different paradigms that emanated from the way the subject was approached. The approach taken by the permaculture crowd and presented in the North-American documentary is that self-reliance on an individual level, or maybe family or household level is the necessary basic condition to build a plentiful, sustainable society. Community is a theme that pervades the film also, but as is explained by one of the interviewees, community is something that the individual needs. In this way, community is seen as an assortment of individuals coming together to seek fulfillment of their basic, individual social needs. Permaculture, sustainability, and community are therefore seen as lifestyle processes undertaken by individuals, and that grow, through the grassroots, into a sustainable society.

In contrast, "Solutions locales..." focusses on the ills caused to society by our deficient and destructive mode of agriculture, and seeks solutions at the level of farms and broad organizations seeking to reclaim a sane way of sustaining society. Instead of seeking an empowering, sustainable lifestyle for individuals, the film seeks to determine how ecological farms can be developed to feed a large number of people in society, or how organizations such as Vandana Shiva's Navdanya seed saving organization can help a whole class of farmers. Much more attention is paid to yield and efficiency, while no mention is made of individual scale matters such as homesteading and the emotional well-being resulting from living a life ostensibly in harmony with the Earth.

I loved both films, and gained different insights from each. From "Growing Edge", I felt inspired and empowered about how individual lifestyles choices can be made in a way that impacts other people; from "Solution Locales..." I gained a deeper scientific knowledge of the problems surrounding industrial agriculture, and a clearer view of a sustainable, societal level of organization. Both films conveyed the priceless humor and good nature of people dedicated to this movement, even amidst the depressing reality that agriculture has a long way to go yet.

Garden conclusion 2010

Our garden adventure has drawn to an end this year, somewhat prematurely as we left France to return across the pond, to continue our North American adventures. I will leave here some impressions and lessons we learnt from this experience, may it help or at least amuse any gardeners reading this!

• The Three Sisters are a lot of fun to play with! (See multiple other posts in this topic)

• Perennial cabbages are amazing!

• 10 varieties of cherry tomatoes makes your plate pretty and your mouth water!

• Chickens are amazing garden companions, I wouldn’t like to be without them!

• Sheet mulching is great; top mulching is key!

• Many things can be started as seedlings, for the better: beets, legumes, cabbages, squash…

• Many weeds are delicious! Few are a serious pain!

Overall when I think of the lessons learned in the garden this year, I think of a lot of things I want to do differently next time:

• Plant lots of early ripening vegetables, even if they are not the usual favourites: beets, turnips, radishes, kohlrabi are great for an early harvest, are really are much better when they come from your very own garden. I don’t want to be waiting for my first tomatoes in mid-July for a first harvest again!

• Greens need to be planted regularly. I know it, but I forget it. We only got greens for a short period this year because we made only one planting.

• More perennials! I want perennial alliums, cabbages, groundcherries (for real! Physalis heterophylla), sunflowers, lovage, watercress, Good King Henry, New Zealand Spinach, etc.

• More guilds! Using nitrogen fixing trees in the garden, creating perennial guilds with walnuts, goumis, paw-paws, wolfberries, currants, maypop, hazelnuts, mulberries, Saskatoon berries, etc.

• Back to more conventional plants though, I want to grow at least a few totally reliable veggies, like chard and cabbage. Things that can be counted on. I’ll be more selective and ignore the dodgy-sounding plants like garden huckleberry or snake gourds. I mean, experimenting is good, but selecting experiments that seem promising beats being indiscriminate and buying anything I don’t know for the sake of novelty!

• There’s no rush to plant early. Plants that are seeded or transplanted into a cold ground will not do well, whereas plants that might be started later will easily catch up. Plant growth isn’t linear in that way, it depends on the weather conditions. Maybe with a good greenhouse or coldframe set up it can still be beneficial to plant early, but otherwise it can be a waste of time.

Looking forward to more gardening, farming, permaculturing wildly in the future!

Garden Huckleberry

One of our garden experiments this year (well, everything was an experiment, really!) was the "garden huckleberry", a nightshade-family fruit totally unrelated to true huckleberries. It is supposedly a cultivar of black nightshade, which would make it Solanum nigrum var. melanocerasum. I have not been able to find a whole lot of information about it, but apparently it is from West Africa.

Garden huckleberry grows into a small annual bush, roughly the size and aspect of a tomatillo plant (though it doesn't flop over pathetically like tomatillos do, bless their leafy hearts). The little white flowers give way to a multitude of green berries that turn black and shiny. We had no problem growing these plants, they had no diseases or pests, and didn't mind irregular watering. They seem to prefer it hot. We got about 2L of berries in our first harvest from 6 plants, which is not bad, I think.

Now, the tricky question is what do they taste like? Well, firstly, you don't eat them raw. They are simply no good. Rather tasteless, slightly metallic, and not worth your time of day. You need to cook them, and not any old way either. First, you need to parboil them for 10 minutes with some baking soda. During this stage, it produces a most amazing green foam (photo). Then you rinse the berries, and cook them with lemon juice, during which process the mixture turns deep purple, and you add sugar at the end. At last, you are supposed to obtain berries that taste like blueberries. Well, my assessment is that they taste like damn bitter blueberries. Rosemary is rather less elogious, and says they taste like bitter sweetened boiled grass.

So basically, this plant is not really worth the time or garden space, and we won't grow it again. I find than regular black nightshade has much nicer tasting berries (and no, black nightshade is not toxic when ripe). A google search quickly demonstrates the overwhelming proportion of people who feel the same way about garden huckleberry, and only a small number of gardeners seem to want to grow it for more than one season!

Honestly though, it would make a nice ornamental plant, but I don't think I'll try eating it again...

Gluten-Freed (my new blog project)

Just a little post to tell readers about a new project of mine. I recently launched a new blog/website about gluten intolerance, including my own story about living with it, and of course, lots of recipes! Well, I don't have tons up yet, but I'll be updating it regularly with new kitchen experiments and discoveries and so on.

For anyone who enjoyed the zine I made last year for the Montreal Zine Fair, this is a new incarnation of the same project. I decided that, rather than writing up a new print zine (at least for now) I'd turn it into a website that would be accessible to more people and easier for me to keep up to date!

Any comments/suggestions welcome! Hope you like it!

https://sites.google.com/site/glutenfreed/

Potato towers update

We have 2 potato towers: one is planted with a yellow variety called "Mona Lisa", and the other is a purple variety called "Vitellotte". We planted them both at the same time, with 10 seed potatoes each (the boxes are roughly 60 cm to a side).

A couple of days ago, we harvested the Mona Lisa tower, since the tops of all but two plants were dried up. We were disappointed to find that no potatoes had been set in the upper layers of the tower. There were only potatoes in the bottom layer. The total harvest weighed 2.8 Kg, more potatoes than we've ever grown, but still way below the rumours of 50 lbs per tower we've gotten wind of. Why were there no potatoes in the upper layers? It's hard to say: we missed a lot of the potato tower action while travelling, and our knowledge of the life-cycle of potatoes is rather thin. It could be that the towers were raised too late, or at the wrong point in the plant's cycle.

Worried about the other tower, we took off some planks to check: there are no potatoes to be seen yet in the upper layers, but there are lots of roots, and the potato plants above are still very green and looking good (see photo). They even look like they are going to flower again. Since my understanding is that the plants set potatoes while they flower, it could be that the tower will fill up to the brim with potatoes then.

I wish I understood potatoes better. The two pieces of information I have about them that have helped are the simultaneous potato formation and flowering I mentioned, and the other is that potatoes are formed between the seed potato and the top of the soil (which is at the basis of potato tower theory). My knowledge of the habits of potatoes stops there, pretty much. Does anyone know where I can get some Potato 101 info, or have any potato wisdom to share? There are so many ways to plant potatoes! How do you do it?

(Minor) Troubles in the Garden

Nothing dramatic has befallen our chlorophyllian friends, and after the rush and hassle of starting sometimes stubborn and picky seedlings and then finding room for most of them, taking care of the garden has been a pretty relaxed job. A few things have popped up though.

A significant number of baby squashes, especially earlier in the summer, have had a tendency to turn yellow and brown, shrivel up and fall off. We are assuming, from doing some internet research that this is due to insufficient pollination, and have tried, when possible, to pollinate them by hand. There are still lots of squashes, and I imagine that when one squash aborts, the plant simply puts the energy into growing another one. So maybe it's not something to be overly concerned about. However, this has made it seem like growing the different varieties of squashes separately instead of all mixed together would have been a good idea (we let the idea of diversity get to our heads I guess); it would definitely have helped for hand pollination.

We have been pretty relaxed about watering, and this has been a very dry summer so far. So even though we have mulch, signs are starting to show. Especially on our tomatoes, which are just starting to produce. What you see on the photo is called "blossom end rot". Apparently it is caused by a calcium deficiency, which results usually from irregular watering (this damages the fine roots and/or inhibits soil life, hence the plant's ability to uptake calcium). It doesn't seem to be too bad though, only a few plants are affected. If we had a smaller garden, watering wouldn't be such a big deal, but the surface area combined with the heat and drought we've seen, and our leaky water collection barrels make it a serious task to water everything often enough. Maybe we must perfect our rain dancing skills!

We've also noticed some yellow blotches on squash leaves and some white ones on the perennial kale. We'll keep an eye on them and report back if it develops into anything interesting...

Weeds

When we came back from our stay in the Peace Factory after 6 weeks, we found our garden in a somewhat change shape. The paths had turned into a one metre high strip of meadow snaking through our veggie patches, which had remained fairly weeds free thanks to the mulch! The plant that had taken over the paths were mostly wild Amaranth and White Goosefoot (Chenopodium album, a close relative of the North American "Lamb's Quarters"; top photo). Both of these are edible, and quite nutritious actually.

Amaranth (photo on the right) has been the most successful weed in our garden beds too, and we have grown quite fond of it. The sacred plant of the Incas, banned after colonization and christianization, is now valiantly resisting Monsanto in various countries, especially the US. There, millions of acres of round-up ready GM crops have had to be abandoned due to a round-up resistant variety of amaranth (aka. "Pigweed"). How can one not love this freedom fighter plant?

As a matter of fact, we don't weed very much at all. Our beds are full of plants: besides amaranth and goosefoot we also have plantain (Plantago sp.), persian speedwell (Veronica persica), dock (Rumex sp.), black nightshade (Solanum nigrum), sow thistle (Sonchus sp.), scentless chamomille (aka. Bladr's Brow, Tripleurospermum inodorum), Queen Anne's Lace (Daucus carota), yarrow (Achillea millefolium), red deadnettle (Lamium purpureum), nettle (Urtica dioica) and more.

So what's the problem with weeds? Why does conventional wisdom have it that gardens need to be weed free? I have difficulty believing that weeds are always bad for all plants in the garden. What seems fairly evidently detrimental to me is if the weeds are big enough that they shade the veggies. Competition for light is something we make sure to minimize by cutting down the weeds that get too large (essentially the amaranth and goosefoot, since the others are generally smaller). We also remove the weeds that are growing very close to our veggie plants, because we presume that they are "crowding" them somehow. And lastly, the other occasion we see it as beneficial to remove weeds is for more sensitive plants: root veggies, alliums, and young seedlings seem to suffer noticeably from the presence of numerous opportunists popping up around them.

For other plants, I wonder if the benefits of the presence of these wild plants doesn't outweigh the costs. Amaranth, for instance, has a taproot, as do plantain, sow thistle, docks, Queen Anne's lace; so when these plants are growing among vegetables with a different root structure, I imagine there is a niche segregation as far as nutrients are concerned. In fact, I wonder if the taprooters don't help the other plants by bringing up deep nutrients and water that would otherwise be unavailable. Periodically, we snip off the weeds that get too big at the base, leaving the roots in the ground to increase soil fertility. By laying the severed weed on top of the mulch, it dries up and eventually decomposes back into the garden bed, returning the nutrients it acquired deep down to the vegetables. I think this kind of "chop-and-drop" green mulching should be beneficial in the long run, right? And even if the effect is not very significant compared to the nutrients brought by applying compost, manure and mulch, it still saves time and effort (cutting weeds is often easier than pulling up, and less disrupting to the soil).

Then there are all the other functions of weeds:

• They are pretty. Think of yarrow or wild carrot. Persian Speedwell is actually an alien plant that was long ago introduced for its ornamental properties.
• They attract pollinators and beneficial predators. Their flowers are often larger and more showy than veggie flowers (aside from squashes!), and help to reach an ecological balance.
• They conserve humidity in the soil when forming a ground cover. This is the case with bindweed for instance, which, though it is often maligned, is actually harmless to some veggies on which it can't get a grip, such as head cabbages, potatoes, carrots, artichokes, leeks and larger varieties of squashes (this information is from a French gardening magazine, "La Gazette des Jardins").
• They confuse insect "pests". Insects that seek plants do so by looking for green things (an insect can't tell one plant from the next from a distance; even if they are following a chemical scent they don't know exactly where it is coming from). If you only have their host plant on a brown background (earth or mulch), they'll have no trouble locating it. If they can't make it out against a green background, or if they land on a weed instead, they are likely to move on elsewhere and leave your veggies alone.

I would very much like to have some way of comparing different weed management methods, but haven't tried doing so this year. Weeds are pretty much all throughout the garden to some degree, mingling with our veggies under our benevolent gaze. Wild amaranth is our most productive garden plant, and our vegetables seem to be doing fine with it there. Why on earth would we think of removing it?

Garden update

The garden has been a fun adventure so far, so full of lessons! The piece of hardened horse pasture we wet to work on in the spring has turned into a patch of half wild, tumultuous greenery. Our absence in May and June did not end in disaster for the garden (thanks mom for the watering), though it did produce some interesting quirks (see "Weeds" post!).

Beets
I can't say I love the taste of beets, but I have come to appreciate their value as a crop. They grow fast, don't need a lot of watering or care (maybe weeding/mulching), and provide both edible greens and roots. They did well intercropped with our perennial kales: by the time the kales had grown to occupy the whole bed, we got a harvest of beets! Oh, also, beets can be started either indoors or direct seeded! They aren't fussy!

Perennial Kale
Talking about the perennial kale ("Chou Daubenton" in French, Brassica oleracea var. ramosa), that has also been a hit. We haven't been eating it as much as we could be, but each plant has become huge bush. It also seems to be somewhat drought tolerant, though it would probably do better if it had more water. It hasn't been attacked by any insects, and seems generally like a hassle-free plant. We're very fond of it! So is one of the horses, who puts her head over the fence to chomp on the tops!

Three Sisters
The 2 three sisters patches have both been doing great. Planting maize and squashes together seems like a no brainer: one grows horizontally, the other vertically. Can't really go wrong, right? The carpet of squashes has now become very thick, and seems to be doing its job of keeping the ground cool and the weeds down.

The one tricky thing has been the beans. They do grow quite a bit faster than the maize at the beginning of the summer, and they seem to find it hard to hold on to the thick stems. In our windy area they get shaken to the ground and have to start all over again (we usually help them, also so that they don't waste their time twirling around squash leaves). So I'd say the one subtlety about a three sisters patch is when to plant the beans in relation to the maize, and that probably depends on the climate and varieties used.

I can't compare the productivity of such a patch to that of separate patches, but I'd say that those people who used this system for survival probably had very large patches. If you think how much a maize plant or a bean plant produce, and imagine 4 plants of each every 1.5 metres, it surely takes a large area to get enough for conservation.

Other Things
In the rest of the garden the tomatoes are becoming ripe and delicious (we got one that weighed almost half a kilo!), the red cabbages are making heads, still requiring virtually no attention from us, the kales are slowly on their way to reaching their goal of 2 metres, the sunflowers planted by the rats are flowering, the garden huckleberries are steadily ripening (though that doesn't mean they taste any better; more on them later), the Peruvian groundcherries are flowering, the pepinos are starting to think they should do the same, the peppers are swinging into action, with some jalapenos coming right up, the tomatillos have given us enough for our first green salsa, and, and, and...