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The Summer was amazing, mostly due to the experience of seeing all our plants, bugs, and fungi doing their exuberant Summer-thing: growing and multiplying. Some plants shot into the air. Others hung out more or less their initial size, but hopefully growing taproots or something to boost them more next year.
There is so much to share; here are just few before-and-after pairs to get started.  It is September 23 and the entire Summer has passed. It was busy, fun, and there was no time for writing blog posts. Some recapitulations of what happened will follow. Here, for now is a photo review of the food forest as seen from the third floor window from February through September...
All permaculture books emphasize the need for guilds around trees. The guilds are the collection of plants that work together to support the tree and each other. Even through the books have diagrams on how to build them, I was still confused (maybe it’s that first level of learning thing!). Today, we built one together with our coach, David Homa, who came down for the day, and now I understand! It is so cool.
 This post is a closer look at the wire-stringing step from our post on how to build a free-standing espalier. This “How to” assumes you have already done everything up until the wire stringing step, which means your hook eyes should already be screwed into your wooden posts.
Just to recap, we used:
The espalier method of growing fruit trees allows you to create living green fences and to grow more fruit in a small space. We have built a couple of free-standing espaliers at Big Foot as one of our living laboratory experiments with different approaches to growing fruits and nuts. A free-standing espalier consists of two or more strong, tall, posts in a line, with two or more horizontal wires strung between each set of posts. The trees’ branches are trained along the horizontal wires over the first few years of the trees’ growth.
Using the method described here it took us about two person days to complete a 36 foot wide and 7 foot high espalier with 4 posts and 4 wires between posts. This is a general guide for how to build a free-standing espalier.  When a very large project needs to be done, in traditional communities, everyone gets together for a day or a weekend, to do it together.
The Amish or Menonites in this country still do this. A small community of skilled people can build an entire barn in just a weekend (see the chapter on this in a lovely book by an MIT grad who goes to live with a Menonite community for a year: Better Off). In the permaculture community (can we call it that?), we do something similar. A group of people gets together and spends the afternoon making a big push on a garden project. Call it a permablitz, or a garden raising, or raising the food forest.  The other day, David Homa came to work with Ruby and me for a day and walk us through a couple of aspects of building a permaculture food forest: amending the soil based on our soil tests, sheet mulch over an existing lawn, and building a hugelkultur.
 Finally, late in March, the snow melted, and we were able to get back out into the garden. Our first effort was to lay out the paths. Paths are a garden's arteries, ideally guiding us on pleasant and efficient ways to get from one part of the site to the other. The also delineate the different parts of the site: the chestnut grove will be between the two main paths; the fruit grove will be to the right of the west path; the pasture starts and the end of the paths, and so forth. This was also the first activity where we actually transformed a part of the design into real, full-size, three-dimensional space.
What you need:
Materials (see post on collecting on how to get this).
 The past couple of days I shoveled 15,000 pounds of dirt and poop. Yep. And I -- a moderately fit, middle-aged lady -- did it with a shovel. I know, because the weight-limit on the rented flat-bed truck was 3,000 pounds, which I reached four times, and nearly reached another 3 trips. OK, I had some help. The dirt and the poop was loaded into the back of a truck with a front-loader, and I drove the truck into our driveway. But from there, all of it got hand-pushed on to our driveway with my shovel.
 To help us put our food forest in place, we're working with David Homa, to come and coach us a couple of days. In preparation for the first coaching day, David sent me a list of materials that we'd need: cardboard, used coffee grounds, horse manure, loam, woodchips. All of these things, interestingly, can be obtained as waste products. Here are some of the stories from our experience.
 Early in March, Land of Plenty came and cleared the Norway Maples to make room for the food forest shrubs and trees. Charlotte, Ruby and I spent a couple of days making permaculture piles of branches and duff.
The stickies on the scrum board were moving from the "Planned", to the "Ongoing", to the "DONE" column. Things were happening! It was so exciting! Then we had a snowstorm...  Root magic is when you take a little stick, or a little seed, and you coax it into making roots - the foundation of plant life. No roots, no plant life.
 After Land of Plenty left, as I mentioned, we had two huge piles of brush, taller than a person, in the yard. The original plan was to rent a chipper to turn this material into wood chips for paths, figuring it would take one work-day with Ruby - Ruby is our wonderful live-in intern/woofer, who helps out two days a week in return for room and board. Unfortunately, it turns out, you can't rent chippers of a usable size for us. So, what to do with two gargatuan piles of brush?
 Dear Friends and Family,
I mentioned we are moving woods from the back of our property to the North-east side in the previous letter. To say “moving the woods” is somewhat deceptive, as trees are not easily moved. What you end up doing is you you re-move the woods, by cutting trees, and then plant new ones elsewhere. Our woods consisted of many Norway maples, which are not particularly beautiful, or edible – they are a non-nitrogen fixing, colonizing tree (great for taking back deserted human waste-land). We also have two Elms, a treasured suburban tree that was decimated by Dutch Elm disease, and a Catalpa, which fixes nitrogen and produces pods, which we decided to leave as canopy trees over the planned hillside with hazels.  Dear Friends and Family,
At the back of our yard, we have the “woods”. When Charlotte and Josephine (our girls) were small, these were a mysterious place, in which grew the “Witch Tree” with a twisted, hollow trunk, and where one might find treasures, such as an ancient china figurine of a man. I loved the woods, too, because we kind of let Nature do her thing there, with minimal interference, such as keeping choking vines at bay, and planting edible or medicinal native plants such as the Ostrich fern for fiddleheads, ramps, Black Cohosh, and sweet woodruff.  Dear Friends and Family,
One of the things I am really excited about this Spring is another class – Applied Permaculture with David Homa near Portland Maine. This course is eight Saturdays, once a month, going out to sites and doing real work – pruning, grafting, planting, soil building – all the practical skills one needs for building and maintaining a food forest. Where my first permaculture course last year was a lot of really good and useful classroom learning, this one is all about learning by doing.  Dear Friends and Family,
On Saturday, we started our first Real Work in the food forest to be: taking down lots of saplings and brush. We don’t like to take down trees and bushes, but we also want to create the space for our intentional plants, ones that are really good at producing food for us or for wildlife, or super providers for the soil in our little micro-ecosystem. It was exciting to get outside and use some muscle power to move a lot of stuff around.  Dear Friends and Family,
The scrum board is a tool to help a team go through a project efficiently and effectively, with flexibility, while having fun. Often, in projects, people make a huge project spreadsheet with rows of tasks, organized in order, and time, in weeks or days, going across the top. They fill in the week or days for each task, one following the other, so you get this nice cascade of going down your task list over time. This is called a Gantt chart. The problem is it never works out as planned.  Dear Friends and Family,
And finally… after taking a design class, after writing a synthesis document, after getting to know our land, and making time, and going through the Process …. we have a design, a paper version of our vision! It is very exciting! Above is the drawing of it...  Dear Friends and Family,
Have you ever seen a drawing of a garden design? The swoop-y paths, and the green circles that mean “this is where you put X”. How do they get there? I don’t know how others do it, but I can tell you about our process: how the design grew slowly bit by bit in many iterations, with lots of looking things up, how we hit a road-block, and how it all came together.  Dear Friends and Family,
The Synthesis Document is a kind of getting to know yourself; the other side of this is getting to know your Land – or site analysis. I learned about site analysis from the Permaculture Design Course I took last year, discussed in an earlier letter.  Dear Friends and Family,
After we had agreed that we would work together, Mark said the first thing we should do would be create a Synthesis Document with all the jobs and functions that this project will need to fulfill. This document will help guide the design – because we will be able to look at the design and check off how all the jobs and functions are going to be met.  Dear Friends and Family,
The other day, we had a big snowstorm. It dumped 12 inches (30 cm) of the white stuff, and made everything very beautiful. Around here, with snow means snow-shoveling. As the storm eased up, I headed outside, and grabbed our shovel, which consists of a blue curved metal shaft (ergonomic), a blue plastic handle, and a blue plastic blade. With this simple tool, I proceeded to pick up snow, and toss it some feet over to the side of the paths or the driveway. Pick up, toss, pick up, toss. Like leaf-raking, this is an energetic-but-meditative repetitive rhythm of body movements. It gives a good work-out in the fresh air — in winter wonderland surroundings. It’s a bit like going skiing really, except in your driveway with a shovel. I felt so good! It occurred to me that the shovel is an exquisite example of appropriate technology – it is only as high-tech as minimally necessary, while utilizing Nature’s engineering of the human body effectively, and providing us a tune-up as we work. |
