The Factory

Rosemary here, writing for the first time in quite a while, with an adventure update!

About a week ago, we left Chris's family's place, where we've been since January, to go off on a new adventure. We left our fledgeling garden in good hands, and as it had been raining profusely for several days prior, our various water collection systems were all full, and the ground under the mulch was plenty moist still. (Turns out that once things warm up, mulching does turn out to be a big life-saver. It might have just been that we mulched that first bed too early.)

Through internet searches of intentional communities in France, we came across the Peace Factory, a start-up community at the site of an old mill and tanning factory about 20 kms northeast of Carcassonne, in the southwest. Their website says "Need a place to stay? We need volunteers!" (it's owned by an English woman, thus the English) so we contacted them and they basically said we could come whenever we want, and stay as long as we want. Sounded good enough to us. 

We hitched out here in one day, luckily, taking six different rides and having to wait and walk a fair amount, but all in all it seemed like we had pretty good luck. And we got to talk with some pretty neat people, and all different kinds of people at that. There really doesn't seem to be any kind of profile for who picks up hitchhikers (except that each ride was either a male-female couple, or a single man; no single or multiple women). We rode with a middle-aged business man on his lunch break; a chill, young, self-employed carpenter who hitchhiked all over europe a couple years ago and plans to start up an intentional community in the next few years; a retail salesman on his way to a market who drove 150 kph (that's 93 mph) down the highway, chain-smoking and music blaring; a fairly straight and uptight-looking young couple on their way to visit an aunt for the weekend (if I'd seen them anywhere I wouldn't have thought they were the kind to pick up hitchhikers!); an older couple who told us a lot about the area we were driving through, which they seemed to really know and love; and finally, a youngish guy all fancied up for a night on the town, looking like a lounge singer or something, with hair slicked back, gold chains, wearing a white chinese-style-inspired dress shirt and white dress slacks. Talking on his cell phone to his mom. An eventful day, but a long one, and we were really happy to reach our destination!

And what an awesome place it is! Nestled in a little ravine with a river (La Dure) running through it, this factory was in operation until 1991. Louise, the current owner and only full-time resident (at the moment), bought the place about 15 years ago, and is now getting to work on trying to turn it into a community. There's a lot of work to do, and she's pretty busy with her own work (she's a Nonviolent Communication teacher, specializing in getting NVC programs into the French school system) so she basically trusts volunteers to do whatever they think is needed around here. We have a little house that we're sharing with three young guys from England, who have been here a couple weeks already and are leaving in a few days, but the weather has been so nice that we've been sleeping outside since we've been here. Louise has given us some NVC workshops (fun to see these super-shy, somewhat awkward  19-year-old guys, who will hardly talk to us, practicing communication!) and has shared with us some of her ideas about how she'd like to transform this place, but other than that it's been pretty much the two of us hanging out, exploring, coming up with ideas and making stuff. 

The exploring part has been my favorite. This place is just crazy, half of it totally run down, the other half in the process of being run down. Buildings full of old metal machinery, piles of stiffened leather, caved-in roofs and missing floors, old cargo elevators, old wooden stairs you tap with a stick to make sure they're solid, and then gingerly step up onto, hoping they won't break, bats galore, and the occasional awesome find, like these cool wooden wheels we're going to bring outside and use as raised garden bed frames. Oh and a big house that had a fire in it a few years ago, and is still full of personal belongings. From the outside it looks like an abandoned mediterranean villa, overrun with wisteria, two giant palm trees growing in front. Somehow an image of feral royalty comes to mind. (Walking through the house, mill and factory buildings actually reminds me of the video games Chris plays sometimes, with room after room of old broken stuff coated in dust, stained walls, dark corners, machinery that hasn't worked in decades, all surrounded by totally overgrown vegetation. I keep expecting aliens or zombies or whatever to jump out from around the next corner. Too bad I don't have my five different machine guns, a bunch of first aid kits and some extra life power. Or whatever that stuff is.)

We haven't completed a whole lot of projects yet, partly because exploring this place is just so fun, and partly because we've also been exploring the surrounding area. The little village, Montolieu, is totally awesome, and is apparently a big tourism destination for the literarily-inclined, with some 15 used and rare book shops, a book and paper museum, and many local artisans of various sorts. And the countryside around here is just incredible. One of the highlights was yesterday when we went for a hike in the hills and came across a perfectly ripe red cherry tree. We climbed up into its branches and spent the next half hour stuffing our faces before continuing on our walk, which took us on an 8-km loop through the hills, through several different kinds of vegetation as we changed altitude and south-to-north-facing slopes. 

Another element to our time here has been some new friends we've made at a local farm. The day after we got here, last Saturday, we hitched into Carcassonne for their weekly farmer's market, hoping to glean whatever we could from the leftovers. Apparently, they're much friendlier toward the end-of-market crowd than they are in Montreal! We had one guy even hand us a whole crate of perfectly-ripe tomatoes. And from another stall we got a crate of squishy, bruised nectarines that made a delicious compote that lasted us all week. Amid the stalls, there was one that stood out as a little different. It was one of only two organic farms that we saw, and it was the only one that had some different kinds of goods, like bags of acacia flowers and homemade veggie pâtés. We talked briefly with the two women at the stall (one middle-aged, another who I guessed was about my age, both who looked a little bit like hippies), and then went on our way. On Tuesday, we went with Louise to the local farmer's market, which is at an organic farm just outside of Montolieu, and discovered it was the same people! And the two women remembered us, especially because as they were leaving Carcassonne after the market on Saturday, they'd seen us trying to hitch a ride back to Montolieu. They'd been full, otherwise, they told us, they would have stopped for us. They invited us to come with them that evening to see a film about agriculture in France, Solutions locales pour un désordre global (Local solutions for a global mess), which was surprisingly very good. Aside from the ending, which was a bit disappointing (hopefully Chris will write a post about why, because I'm running out of time to go into it), we really liked it. And we had a good time with the farmers and their friends, and we've been back to visit them a couple times since then. Turns out the younger woman is an intern there, completing her studies in agriculture. She knows A LOT about organic agriculture in France, about the laws and history and all that, which is really cool. And she knows a lot of people who do all sorts of permaculture-type projects in France, and can hook us up with some other communities to visit where we could probably learn a great deal. 

So, that's all for now. Haven't taken any photos of this place yet, but I'll get on it and post some soon! And I'll also post the most recent photos of our garden back at Chris's family's place on our photo album, because we've gotten quite behind there as well. Really, it has grown and changed a lot since what the current photos show! [Addendum: new photos of the garden are now up! You can click on the link in the left sidebar.]

Hope everyone reading this is well and enjoying the spring! 

Sprouting mixes are fun to plant, but...

We have tried using seeds from sprouting mixes from the health food store, which has been fun, but has produced some unexpected crops.

For a start, we broadcasted some seeds labelled "cresson" (cress). We expected this to mean water cress, which is generally what is meant in France by cresson (cresson de fontaine). Well, it turned out to be peppergrass (cresson alénois). So now we have a big bed of peppergrass!


We also planted mustard from a bag of sprouting seeds. Now that I look back, I see that we should have expected that it wasn't going to be leaf mustard (Brassica juncea), the kind we crave in our salads. It turned out to be white mustard, Sinapis alba. We ate it anyway when it was young; it was better cooked as it was kind of tough and a little hairy, like raddish leaves. The trouble was that it grew a lot faster than all of our other Brassica greens, which we planted all together in a line. But we quickly gobbled it up, and now our more tasty greens can see the sunlight!


We also broadcasted a mix of alfalfa, raddish, and fennel. The fennel hasn't come to anything and the alfalfa seems to be slowly growing (though is it really Medicago sativa? We might not be able to tell until it flowers!). What grew in place of raddish, while definitely a Brassica, is not something we recognize at all. And no raddishes are forming. Again, we'll have to keep watching, unless someone recognizes this plant:

So, sprouting mixes are a cheap way of getting lots of seeds, but you must expect some surprises!

Note to Self: Plant Beans Indoors Next Year

I've been looking at the awesome blogs of people who left comments, and found that planting beans in pots seems to be quite popular: Robert does this for his peas, and Nome for her broad beans.

Our peas and broad beans both got attacked and eaten by a some kind of nocturnal rodent monster that ploughed up the lines of helpless legumes. In addition the first peas we planted didn't grow, presumably because the ground was too cold.

I never really considered planting beans indoors. My philosophy has largely been "if it can be started outdoors, better to save the space, pots and potting soil for the plants that need it". But maybe next year we'll start beans and peas indoors to get an early start. Thanks for the inspiration, folks!

Do-It-Yourself Rainwater Collection

The thing about DIY, we've been finding, is that it doesn't save you time, and sometimes doesn't even end up saving money, but you learn a whole lot in the process. So we could have gone to the store and purchased a 1000L cistern and been done, but we wouldn't have learned all we did about drilling, gluing, plumbing, and the infinite ingeniousness of water to slip through the smallest of cracks. Here's what our water collection looks like now, along with some things we learned.

Our first project was to set up water collection barrels on the doghouses (we're staying at my parents house for most of this growing season, and my mum breads dogs). We used a method we'd heard about at Earth Activist Training: slicing a corrugated plastic tube down one side and clipping it onto the edge of the roof. This worked fairly well, though it's not as easy to do as we thought it would be, and wouldn't work on a lot of roofs. It's also unfortunate that these plastic tubes, designed to cover up electrical cables, only come in horrendous colours!



Next we wanted to put our main water collection unit in the stable, right next to our garden. The water is caught off the roof in a regular gutter, and then comes in through a hole in the wall and down into a line of previously tripe-filled barrels, connected at the bottom.


This is where we did a lot of the learning (a.k.a we had lots of issues). First, it was impossible to find connectors specifically designed for this purpose (such as bungholes). Not knowing the French word for it didn't help either. So we settled for using what turned out to be the cheapest solution, using connectors designed for gas pipes.


So, here is the first piece of advice to anyone attempting to construct a similar water catchment system: make the holes just the right size. This might mean buying a drill-bit, but it's really going to save you a lot of work in the end. We thought we could skip this and make approximate holes, and then use silicon to seal it, but no. Silicon is not meant for this; it does not withstand pressure. So at first it seemed water-tight, but when the barrels filled up water started to seep through the holes (notice that the wooden support under the barrel on the left in the photo above is wet). And once it's wet, silicon won't stick, so you can't add any after the fact. In the end we got some special silicon for swimming pools, and smothered that on, but even that hasn't been sufficient yet. The leaks are very slow, so it works anyway, but in the long run it might get worse.

Another thing to think about: the overflow has to be proportional to the amount of water that comes in. I know, it's logical, but we just stuck a regular garden hose on for the overflow, and now that at last we've had a good rainstorm, the stable is flooded. Honestly, when we started working on this system, what really weighed in our minds was knowing how dry the summers are here. We weren't thinking much at all about the spring rainfall and overflowing barrrels! So yeah, remember to have a large overflow pipe.


In the end, though we got the barrels virtually for free, once you count the price of the connectors, the silicon and so on, this DIY system was far from free, or even cheap. But like I said, we learned a few things, so we don't regret it. And now we have probably a good 1500L of water stored here, to add to the 8000 or 9000L stored in other containers around the place.

We were planning to have another similar setup in another location too, but in the end this one took up all our attention and the other barrels are just outside in their raw state, waiting for us to find them a permanent location.

The Companion Planting Puzzle

So, call me the sceptical permaculturist if you want, but after my rant about mulch, today I'm going to go after companion planting. Not against the principle itself, which is great, but more on the subject of the over-optimistic and simplistic way with which the concept is sometimes approached. At times, I have myself enthusiastically and at length described the benefits of companion planting and how if you plant this plant with that plant you'll not only have an awesome trouble-free garden but you'll also save the world, and you won't even need a revolution! Hurray!

But then when you get down to it, all these pesky questions come up. How close does the borage need to be to the tomatoes in order to improve their growth and flavor? How far apart can you plant patches of calendula and still get their pest-repelling properties? How much marigolds do you need to make any difference to the nematodes? Basically, once you know what plants go together, the question becomes how do you plant them?

One thing I found really interesting while skimming through one of the myriad organic gardening books in a bookstore was that the effect of companion plants varies greatly depending on the circumstances. In "Jardiner Durablement", Jean-Michel Groult gives the example of sage, a companion to cabbage (it repels cabbage butterflies, supposedly). It grows best in a hot, well drained soil, but will give off almost no volatile chemical compounds in these circumstances, whereas it will do so more readily in moist soil, though it might not grow as well. This was really interesting to me, and it makes a lot of sense. The quality of the soil, air and soil humidity, soil pH, nutrient content and so on will all affect a plant's growth and therefore its quality as a companion.

You can start reading up on this subject and just never get to the end of it. But ultimately, I think the best advice is that of Jon Jeavons in "How To Grow More Vegetables": it's up to each gardener to try out combinations of plants and find out which ones work well in the specific context of each garden. He advises to start with combinations of few plants (only 2 or 3), in order to be able to really figure out what's going on.

I think this kind of experimentation is really very valuable, because you can't really rely on lists of companion planting combinations without testing them (and generally the planting details to make these combinations work are not mentioned). And then again sometimes you'll find that some unusual combinations will work in your particular context. In a broadcast bed we threw some peppergrass seeds and some alfalfa (among other things). The peppergrass started growing in patches where the seeds had fallen, and later the alfalfa started growing through the peppergrass. What I think happened here was that since we gave little care and little watering to this bed, the alfalfa seeds only sprouted successfully under the protective cover of the peppergrass, and the patches of bare ground where no peppergrass seed had fallen remained barren of alfalfa also. Who would have thought? Of course, to replicate this kind of thing with other plants you would really need to know the plants' growing habits well. This is the kind of thing you can only figure out by trying combinations of plants in the garden.

Has anyone out there done any interesting experiments? What combinations of plants have you found to work well in your garden?

"Squat" in Lyon

A few days ago, we went to a "squat" in Lyon for a concert. I put "squat" in quotation marks because I feel like the word doesn't quite do it justice. "Huge Autonomous Bastion of Freedom and Artistic Expression" might be a bit of a better description. It was in an abandoned factory, and has been going for nearly a decade. The walls are all painted, sculptures jostle for attention, busses have been parked inside and made into living quarters alongside yurts and various UFOs built out of recycled materials and cob, there is a large garden, chickens, a seemingly permanent buffet of potluck food, zine library, full scale sound systems, bike workshop, woodworking workshop, compost toilets, two or three hundred resident artists... Schoolchildren even go on tours of the place! So, I guess the world doesn't just fall apart when people are empowered to create their own living spaces outside of governmental or corporate control...

Seedlings

At last we are getting toward the end of seedling season. As the little sweethearts get into the ground once and for all, we can finally sleep more soundly at night. No more rushing out in the evening to cover the coldframe in case it freezes, or in the morning to open them so that the coldframe-turned-solar-cooker doesn't burn our babies to cinders. No more worrying about germination temperatures, damping off, transplanting to bigger pots, etc. Hurray for spring!

Seriously, sometimes I thought our seedlings would be the death of me. For a start, we had to find a location to start them. This eventually was the bathroom, the warmest place in our largely unheated house. To help reach a reasonable temperature for seeds to germinate, we put a heat lamp over them. And this is how we got through the seedling season, doing pretty well for tomatoes, peppers, tomatillos and other nightshades, squashes and cukes.

But some plant were stubborn and simply refused to join the garden team in our amateurish setup. Bitter Gourds (Momordica charantia) and Malabar Spinaches (Basella alba) just wouldn't germinate. We ended up with one Malabar Spinach (nicknamed by Rosemary "Malibu Barbie", which probably accurately reflects the temperature sensitivity of the plant!). Not a Bitter Gourd on the horizon. Well you'll say, the most bitter vegetable in the world and a leaf veggie with mucilaginous leaves, not a huge loss. True. I'm not weeping for our loss. Just like I'm not too sad about the Snake Gourds (Tricosanthes cucumerina), which did germinate, but as soon as the weather got in the slightest chilly, and despite our diligence at covering the cold-frame at night, would drop dead one by one until we had none left. Another marginally edible squash that requires special attention and a 2 meter high trellis that we still had to dream up. Maybe it was being nice and saving us the work!

Then once they had germinated, our dear planties weren't out of the woods yet. This is when the dilemma of leaving them in the warm darkness vs. moving them to a sunny but cold window comes in. Never figured that one out. Imagine: you have a pot where you planted numerous Peruvian Groundcherries (Physalis peruviana). A couple of them start coming up. Do you leave them in the dark under the heat lamp for the other seeds to germinate, but most likely letting the early ones get tall and spindly and die, or do you move them to the window, where the other seeds will undoubtedly not germinate because of the cold?

"Damping off" is what you call it when the seedlings get all tall and spindly and thin near the base, finally collapsing or breaking off. It's caused by micro-organisms, fungi or oomycetes (that are not fungi, bacteria, viruses, plants or animals, which I can grasp, but something else entirely, which leaves me totally puzzled as to how to act toward them!). It happens most in moist, warm conditions with little ventilation. Exactly what our bathroom setup was. Our tomatillos got it pretty bad, but surprisingly they kept going, and even after having collapsed they just grew up straight again and now have nothing but a kink in the lower part of the stem to show for it.

So, I feel like I've learnt a few things and figured out what my ideal seedling setup looks like now: a greenhouse/coldframe with good ventilation, watering the seedlings from the bottom (a tray that can be emptied would be perfect), heating from below to promote root development (possibly using a hotbed with manure). Also, I'd prefer to use my own potting mix, with half garden soil and half sifted compost (as per Jon Jeavons' "How To Grow More Vegetables").

Still, how you accommodate a variety of plants with different favourite germination temperatures, I don't know. I mean, imagine you're growing cucumbers (favourite temperature: 15° to 18°C), tomatoes (favourite temperature: 20°C) , Peruvian Groundcherries (25°C), and snake gourds (25° to 30°C), what do you do? I tried putting the most heat loving ones right under the lamp and the less demanding ones further out, but still it's hard to control. And if you're using a greenhouse and/or a hotbed, then it must be really hard to control temperature. Also, does varying day/night affect germination rate?

Anyway, one thing we did get the hang of this time is to plant masses more than you'll need so you don't get a nasty surprise (which worked except for the plants that just plain refused to germinate -- cowards). Now the trouble is we can't bring ourselves not to plant any of them. I guess it'll take another year or a few to get the hang of thinning and selecting plants. But hey, one thing at a time.