Seed Screens/Making Sun-dried Tomatoes

It's seedy season. I'm in the midst of harvesting Lettuce seed, and something I've been lacking for a very long time is a good set of sieves for separating out leafy trash from the seed. Not just for Lettuce seed, but everything else, too.

Tomatoes drying on the roof. Fine seed-screen aft.

There are manufacturers of seed-cleaning machinery who would be happy to sell me a set of seed-screens, but they're very expensive. I've made do with something much simpler.

I made up a couple of wooden frames and scrounged around for various sizes of plastic mesh. Lettuce is a particular challenging when it comes to Right Sizing a screen. 1mm mesh is just a tad too small, but I've been unable to find anything with a (say) 1½ or 2mm gap.

Cleaning Carrot seed has proved to be  too hard on the plastic mesh, and tore gaping holes in the mesh, so I swapped it for a metal Mosquito mesh - also about a 1mm gap. But even that can't take the pace when it comes to Carrots. I clean the Carrot seed heads by rubbing them (gently!) around on the mesh, and the seed falls through, mostly leaving the burs and stalks behind. I quick threshing in the breeze gets rid of the dust, and Carrot seed is done.

I find it funny that people who have never saved their own Carrot seed don't realise that the seeds are prickly. They've only ever experienced machine-cleaned Carrot seed which has had the burs rubbed of in the process. I was there, too, once upon a time. In fact when I tried to send some seed to a friend in Australia some years ago, they never arrived. Instead he received a short note from the Aussie customs to say that the seed was "contaminated with unknown weed seed" and had been burned. I guess we can't really expect customs officials to be seed-recognition experts, too.

Like everything else in a self-sufficient permaculture setup, we aim for "every design element to support multiple functions," and so it is, too, with the seed-screens! We're presently using a couple of the screens to sun-dry our surplus Tomatoes on the roof during hot days. A wide mesh supports the Tomatoes, keeping them off the roof, and the fine mesh forms a lid to keep bugs off while the Tomatoes dry. It takes about 2 or 2½ good, hot days around this time of year to get the Tomatoes good and leathery, though we're experimenting with slightly thicker slices, so this batch might take a little longer.

Tamarillos

Tamarillo (a.k.a. Tree Tomato or Solanum betaceum) always do well for us. They're largely disease-free, and pests don't seem to like them much, either. Well, except for a Baboon, once...

The only problem they suffer from is wind. The branches are very brittle, and have a tendency to break in strong winds. Or when occupied by a Baboon. Or when heavily laden with ripe fruit, as they are right now. On the other hand they seem pretty much immune to the predations of birds and stinging insects thanks to their tough skins.

For some time I have been contemplating growing up a bunch of them to plant as avenue crops further downslope from the veggie garden. This would give us a low-energy-input harvest, and put more of our (sorely under-utilised) land to better use. Low maintenance harvests seem more and more important to me the older I get!

I would like to alternate the Tamarillo rows with Granadillas (which also grow spectacularly well in our soil and climate) and perhaps grain avenues between the rows in Winter. Or possibly interplant the Tamarillos and Granadillas in the same rows! After all, the Tamarillos are much taller, whilst the Grandillas would shade out weeds and grass from the base, and the wire supports needed for Granadillas might help to stabilise the Tamarillos against wind.

The only trouble with this fantasy is that Tree Tomatoes are a relatively unknown crop in SA, and I'm dubious about the idea of producing something that requires me to first educate the market. History shows that the first-mover in such markets almost never makes a success story; that usually belongs to the second comer who enters the already-educated market...

Tamarillos are really easy to propogate. Just sow seed saved from really, really ripe fruit into seed-trays, pricking out into pots or tubes when they reach a size where they're easily handled. I've even had plants self-seed and grow successfully. Transplant into their permanent homes can be as soon as they 15 or 20cm tall. They're not what I would call Long Lived plants, so (like Granadillas/Passion Fruit) I would probably embark on a 3- to 5-year rotation scheme, planting only 1/3 to 1/5 of the total cropping area each year.

We have two different strains of Tamarillo, one being shorter, but I don't see any real advantage to the shorter strain. They don't seem to have been any better at handling wind or fruit loads. I'll probably have to consider planting a wind-break to try and protect them a little.

We use them to make Chutneys and Jams, which are turning out to be really popular barter items at the local weekly swap-meet, since the two of us really cannot consume the fruits of even a single tree. I also munch a whole lot of the fresh fruits while working in the garden, but it hardly makes much of a dent in the crop.

Perhaps I need to buy a Tractor to help with all the work I have in mind... certainly there's much more than I could possibly tackle by hand. I'd probably only hang onto one for a year or two while I carry out all the transformations I'd love to make before selling it on, so I don't view it as a huge money-sink. Hmmmm...

Wild Mushrooms for Ecosystem Development

Found in a tucked-away corner of the garden, just near the cottage...

Happy International Biodiversity Day

In which we embark on a new venture in Mycology

Shiitake mycelium, Day 2.

Funny thing is, the mainstream western press seems to have missed IBD completely. I guess the UN's announcement that today¹(22 May) is International Biological Diversity Day was lost in the noise of all those species extinctions directly resulting from man-made global climate change. (Deny it all you like, the evidence is pretty compelling: we are the cause of global climate change.)


Serendipitously we started a new project last Thursday that can only help – in its own tiny way – to bolster our local ecosystems' robustness. We have started a Mushroom growing project.


Buoyed on by my success in culturing brewing yeasts (despite the significant limitiations of my "lab" setup) I decided to have a go at tissue culturing Mushrooms. The result you can see for yourself... the little grey smudge in the middle of the jar is (hopefully) the mycelium of Shiitake mushrooms-to-be. The other smaller greyish smudges towards the right of the jar are really dings in the agar medium where I cooled the knife prior to excising a tiny bit of flesh from a reasonably fresh mushroom prior to placing it on the agar substrate.

See, it's all part of a bigger permaculture-ish picture... three threads coming together...

Thread One: I've read, watched and heard quite a lot about "Hugelkultur" lately, mostly as evangelised by Paul Wheaton over at permies.com. I like the way that Sepp Holtzer, the guy who has been practising and working on this technique, refuses to get pigeonholed as "doing permaculture", thereby dodging all the Permaculture Dogma that tends to go along with Permaculture True Acolytes. I like his style so well that I think I'm going to steal it... The hugelkulture idea seems reasonable to me, especially since I daily observe decaying tree trunks and logs in the forests and plantations that surround our home, and it is blatantly obvious that the decaying wood serves as an effective water and nutrient reservoir. Then, too, I have long noticed that veggie beds that host a vigorous and healthy fungal life also host the healthiest and quickest-growing veggies.

Thread Two: Reading Paul Stamets' ideas for myco-permaculture, I've been researching mushroom varieties that would (hopefully!) work well in guilds and successions. Based on my reading in Stamet's excellent "Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms", I chose Shiitake for my first mushroom-cloning attempt. Shiitake should grow easily on the growth media most available to us – Pine logs, chips and shavings. The Shiitakes will play their part in decomposing the wood substrate, which should (if my understanding of the theory is not too broken) then be quite well suited, with the addition of compost and soil, to growing other mushroom varieties – probably Portobello (button) mushrooms, but maybe some other variety between them and the Shiitake. After that I should be able to grow veggies in the remaining bed.

Thread Three: I've been doing some work on modifying the brewery² (described here, here, here and here), not to mention brewing up a storm. So I am ending up with lots of spent grain remains from brew sessions. A 40litre batch of beer produces around 25 or 30kg (wet weight) of bran containing some weak sugars in solution, cooked grain kernels, and a bit of starch left unmodified by the brewing process. Ideal stuff for growing mycelium! Then, too, yeast is just another fungus, and has, indeed, been used in experimental trials for sterilising/pasteurising mushroom growing media. A win all ways!

Convergence

So I thought to myself, "Why wait for several years for a hugelkultur bed to gain a natural mycosystem? Why not hurry things along?" And thus was born my mycosphere garden-bed idea... (or is that a "Mike-o-sphere"?)

I plan to build some beds using pine logs, wood chips, shavings,... whatever I can lay my hands on cheap (read: free) and in abundance. These beds will be innoculated with (initially) Shiitake mycelium, and hopefully we will, in the fullness of time, harvest mushrooms. The Shiitake will be followed by further mushrooms in some sort of yet-to-be-determined sequence, thereby rendering the woody core of the bed quite well decomposed. After that I will convert the bed to conventional veggie production. The mushroom growing plays along extremely well with the brewery, and both endeavours demand a small amount of lab culturing, which has been fun to learn about. And, if the Mike-o-sphere beds work out anything like conventional Hugelkultur beds, I should be able to reduce the brittleness of our water-dependence in the garden, because, although the Offialdom Of The Kakistocracy no longer consider us to be a drought area, and. although we have experienced over 50% above average rainfall for May, we are none too convinced that the drought is truly over.

The Garden Route truly is a canary in the coalmine for global climate change...

We simply have to Adapt Or Dye.

---

[1] I guess the UN must have missed noticing that they were scheduling IBD day for the day after The Rapture. Oops.
[2] I'll write about the brewery redesign soon.

Catch Up

There's a pretty good reason for the very slow rate at which I've been blogging here lately: It gets dull and tedious repeating the same litany of woe. I mean, what more can I say?

"Still no rain." 

"It's not raining."

"Things are still very dry."

No. It's boring! And demotivating. It means that there's absolutely no point in busting my butt out in the garden trying to prepare the desert-condition beds for plantings that cannot possibly survive.

Actually, truth to tell, we have had a little rain over the past 10 days or so - enough that I might start to believe that the drought may actually be coming to a (slow) end. Enough to convince me to get off my duff and start clearing the jungle of weeds from pathways, and to stick a few peas and beans into the ground in the optimistic hope that more rain will eventuate.

The Summer past has been a total write-off. Not a single Tomato. Perhaps a grand-total of 6 chiles. If the Bushbuck will leave the plants alone for a bit. The Perennial Rye I was growing -- through the kind offices of Patrick -- eventually died. The dam I use for irrigating seed-trays is (still) so dry that the pump will have to be primed once again before I can use it. When, one day, there's sufficient water in the dam to bother. (Soon! says the optimist in me.) The F2 generation Tomato experiment will have to wait for a second attempt next year.

Even more difficult to deal with is that, by now, I should already have all my Winter crops in the ground, but, with insufficient water for seed-bed care, it looks like we're going to largely miss the Winter season, too. Some things I have plenty of seed -- Cabbage, Onions, Snow Peas, Broad Beans -- that I can take the chance with them and don't mind too much if I plant them and they fail. But there are some -- Kabuli Black Chickpeas, for example -- that I just cannot afford to take chances with. And that means that they have to wait another year before I can bulk up the seed supplies.

Which reminds me... I must plant some Lettuce. It's been very tedious having to buy such basics as Lettuce and Swiss Chard, especially since I've been on a (weight loss) diet where leafy veg features largely. (Lost about 8kg so far! and feeling much improved.)

---

Last weekend we joined a small neighbourhood gathering at the historic Bibbey's Hoek Hotel. No longer a hotel, it is the home of our new neighbour, Sue. She has recently completed a Permaculture Design course, and is determined to remodel the old hotel in a permaculture mould. Perhaps to even start some sort of permaculture centre.This is great news!

Despite the fact that quite a number of us in the Bibbey's Hoek neighbourhood are practising some form of permaculture design, up to now we seem to proceeded in blissful isolation. I do believe that Sue might serve as a catalyst for us working in closer cooperation. Certainly the gathering at her home last Saturday was characterised by an easy neighbourliness and friendliness. Nobody on a ego trip or an agenda. Yay! Maybe we stand some tiny chance of developing a more integrated and sustainable community?

New Family Member

"Myah" (pronounced "Maya") really belongs to Number One Son and his fiancée who are away for a few weeks, staying with her parents in PiEmBurg while organising wedding dress and such. They have been renting the cottageon our property for the past few months.  In the meantime, J and I have become foster-parents and de facto trainers.

Actually, it helps lots to have an older dog around the place!  OB plays a valuable role in teaching the puppy -- now almost 12 weeks old -- that chasing the chickens is strictly verboten.

Myah is pure-bred Labrador retriever (though she's an Animal Welfare case, so without all the certificates,) highly intelligent, and very keen to please, so quite easy to teach.  She chews on stuff all the time, but around here that means plenty of sticks, pine cones, chew toys, so no problems to date with her chewing shoes or furniture.  She also loves to dig!  Sooner or later she's bound to try and help in the veggie garden, and then we'll have a lesson in store, but, with so much "garden" space I really don't mind the odd little hole in the ground.

Only one family member has her nose severely out of joint over the puppy...

Actually she's come around quite well after the first week or so.  Its just that OB (PhD) has never been very good at "playing" with other dogs.  She's wired for "very serious protector of the pack."

Many permaculture practitioners believe that there is no justifiable reason for keeping Dogs and Cats. They are wrong. I cannot count the number of times we would have lost entire crops or the flock of chickens, had we been without OB guarding our interests at night, and I am sure that Myah will be just as good a protector!

A Very, Very, Very Fine House

"A Low Impact Woodland Home" tells the story of a beautiful, self-built, Earth-friendly home in Wales. I want one! :-)

When we designed and built our own house (over ten years ago, now) we were working with very tight cost, time and schedule constraints.  Probably just our own lack of imagination.  So our house is nowhere near as environmentally low-impact as we would like, and not even close to what the Woodland Home achieves.  (I remain convinced that my on-going hayfever battle stems from having moved into the house when the CCA-treated timber was still outgassing noxious poisons.)

I know of several neighbours who would rush out to replicate the Woodland House if they saw it.  And they would be missing the point completely!  One neighbour has imported several large truckloads of sandstone from hundreds of kilometres away for the house she dreams of building (but cannot afford to finance, build, maintain, heat or cool, is too large for her and her family's needs, and in every way represents the malaise of cheap-abundant-energy thinking).  She, too, has completely missed the point.  Another neighbour recently built an additional (timber-frame constructed) cottage on her property atop stilts that raise the floor of the house about 3m above the ground, so as to get a better view.  Every drop of water has to be pumped up to the house, which becomes a challenge during the not-infrequent power outages.  It must be hell in a storm, facing into the teeth of the very fierce Northwester storm winds.  And I'd hate to have to bring in the groceries or buckets of garden produce.

Here we are designing for a totally different set of problems, requirements and constraints than we would face in the Southwest of Wales or anywhere else.  We have a different fund of locally abundant materials.  The point is to make best use of what is locally available; not to import materials from hundreds or thousands of km away.  The Woodland House uses local timbers; we would also use structural timber, being in a forest area.  They use straw-bales as insulating infill for walls; here we would prefer wattle-and-daub, or perhaps cob, since strawbales are unlikely to survive the onslaught of local insects, and we sit on a deep layer of very high-grade clay just below the Earth's surface.  A sod roof is out of the question for us, since we need to harvest all our water from the sky -- no other water source is readily accessible.

So, much as I love and admire the Woodland House, I would shudder in despair if I saw someone here trying to replicate it.  Think local!  Look around you with your eyes truly open to the opportunities and gifts of The Place Where You Find Yourself.

Restore Your Faith

I don't even remember the context.  A (now defunct) Permaculture mailing list...  I must have lusted after a particular book that I could not then afford (nor can I yet).


One of the list participants struck me with a very great kindness:  out of the blue, a copy of David Holmgren's "Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability".



Thank You, Ian!


Your kindness and generosity restores my frequently-battered faith in us humans.

The Ozone-Friendly Way of Gardening

Gardening in the Sun is getting scary.  Over the past couple of months I have had the feeling that the Sun is fiercer.  Its not that the weather is hotter, as such, but the Sun's rays burn harsher, sunburn comes easier.  I seem not to be the only one - numerous people are commenting on this.  Are we really feeling the effects of the worst-ever Thinning of the Ozone Layer, or is this just some sort of auto-suggestion effect?  The sceptic in me says, "Let's leave it at 'I don't know.'" though, honestly, I was feeling this before I started seeing news reports about how how bad the ozone layer is this year.

Three Strands of Thinking...

Fit the First: All this has got me thinking, and observing my veggie beds much more closely.  I'm becoming much more concerned with mulching the surface of beds, particularly at this stage of the growing season, where plants are still tiny, and much of the surface lies open and exposed to the Sun, Wind and Rain.  Expecting a dry, hot and burny Summer, I also need to implement soil-moisture conservation strategies - something I've simply been lazy about for too long, now.

Fit the Second: Then, too, as I have been clearing beds, resuscitating the Hex Project, the whole Hex scheme as really crystalised in my mind - outer beds feeding mulch and nutrients to the mid-ring and inner beds; inner beds providing seed, and so on.  I promise a full write-up - to do so now will just be a distraction from my point for this post.

Fit the Third and Final: Lately I have been stacking crops in time a lot - seeding or transplanting directly into a standing crop that is still a few weeks from harvest.  Having neglected garden-bed maintenance during the year in favour of various other stupidities, I am now paying the price in being very pushed for space for the Summer crops.  And there's nothing like necessity to get the creative juices flowing!  This sort of stacking was pioneered by Masunobu Fukuoka, and, though I have not read his books, I think I have a basic understanding of the principles - far too many ramifications and implications to go into here and now - very deep stuff!  I would love to read of his work and hopefully will be able to afford some of his books soon.

...Click

A click brought on by tripping across "The Road Back To Nature".  I feel that I am advancing to yet another stage in my gardening.  Yet a deeper level of understanding of soil biota, the rhizosphere and how they interact. Yet a deeper connectedness with the Earth herself.

It shows up in funny ways, too.  I find myself apologising to Earthworms I have accidentally disturbed; unwilling to kill obvious pests.  Better to leave them as food for the predators that protect my garden.

The more I learn about growing things, the more I have come to believe that the only limit to the productive capacity of our gardens, is our own knowledge, empathy, respect and understanding

Killing Kikuyu

In response to someone's query on strategies for eliminating grass on the permaculture-oceania mailing list, I bemoaned the difficulty of getting rid of Kikuyu, to which April Sampson-Kelly <email-elided> wrote:

what does kikuyu need?
...
My strategies for replacing kikuyu are based on these observations,
I stop cutting it, i stop light access by covering it with cardboard sheets and mulch (which also serves to cut ventilation and risk of fire, and reduce risk of soil erosion by water or wind)

A Thousand Thanks to April and Jedd for prodding my few remaining neurons back to life...

A walk around the garden with my eyes open was all I really required. Places where we've planted Keurbooms (an indigenous Acacia forest pioneer - no data on N-fixing, though I suspect they do) show that the trees have been successful in out-competing the Kikuyu to the limit of their drip-line.

However! I am in a big hurry. I don't have/want to spend 10 years at this - I need to clear the area to get my self-sufficiency level up and back on track.

I also notice that Cape Gooseberry (Phaseolus something) has been extremely effective at shading-out the Kikuyu in an area where they were allowed to go rampant - they freely self-seed, helped along by the otherwise-bloody-nuisance Mousebirds. So: as soon as the rains stops, and with Spring on our doorsteps soon, I shall be planting a couple of seed-trays of Cape Gooseberry. Along with all the volunteers that usually get weeded out of the veggie garden I'll pop them into the (very long, rank, unmowed and ungrazed for over 10 years) Kikuyu. Once they've killed off the grass they are relatively easy to clear.

Should be rid of the grass in about 18 months to 2 years... Yay!

Irish Perpetual Motion Machine

An Irish company, Steorn, claims to have invented an energy-generation technology that operates at greater than 100% efficiency.  In other words, a Perpetual Motion machine.  They are seeking validation from respected physicists.

Now, I don't mind fools being parted from their money.  But its a bit sad that some permaculture proponents buy into this sort of bullshit.  As a long-time practitioner of permaculture design principles, I firmly believe that the basis of permaculture design is a firm and clear understanding of the fundamentals of thermodynamics.

Even if one does not have a clear grasp of energy principles, pure logic tells us that all the "free energy" machines and theories have to be a load of bollocks:  If I could build a machine that generates "free energy" (or, at least, more energy than it consumes) I would not need to "convince" anyone that it works; I would not need to "seek validation" from physicists or anybody else.  All I would need to do is build just one, and start generating energy.  Then, with the money I earn from teh first one, I would build another one.  Then another one, and another, and another.  Investors would flock to fund me because I would be showing a positive return.  In short order I would take over the world.  (Not that I want to - sounds too much like work - but I could!)

So the moment a company "seeks validation" of their Perpetual Motion machine, I don't suspect, I know: Some con-artist is looking to fleece some unwary investor.

Investor Beware.