Get your diet localized!

I feel the local food movement is getting some legs. I just wrote an article for my friend Scott Horton's mag Permaculture Activist, musing over an idea that we could develop a strong food web of local production. Researching my topic I got to see some really great projects that people are up to these days.

Out of my own shared yard I just harvested chard, dandelion greens and chayote blossoms. I also gathered some oca, providing some carbohydrates. Oca is an oxalis that forms edible tubers. The strain I'm growing looks like fat, finger-sized grubs (or as Xena graciously calls them, "carrot-potatoes").

The tubers, or corms, grow right at the surface of the soil. I simply follow the fleshy stalks of the oxalis back to the crown, dig around a little and break off the corms, leaving the plant rooted. It's a nitrogen fixer, and is helping other plants in the beds to grow. Covering the soil with leaves is also important to help remind our cats that the beds are not litter boxes.

I tried to disguise the appearance of the oca by quartering the corms before I stir-fried them with the leaves and flowers. I didn't need to disguise their flavor; they taste like very moist potatoes. The chayote blossoms are supposedly edible as well, but I don't think they added anything to the stir fry. Raw, the flowers are sweet. Cooked, they are gritty.

One aspect of eating locally that I glossed over as I wrote is getting a balanced diet. If I surveyed my friends about food sources for potassium (for example), everyone would respond "Bananas." But bananas don't grow here (Christopher Shein is having some success growing bananas at the other end of Oakland, but not here). So, if I grew Jerusalem artichokes instead, what changes in food preparation are necessary? A banana is a peel and eat food. Jerusalem artichokes are dirty, rooty, and need cooking. To eat a local diet requires changes so we eat what in fact grows in our local bioclime.

I'm confident that sufficient calories, carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals can be grown locally, even (and especially!) within a city. I'm less sure about protein. I'm also fairly sure that eating a 100% local, nutritionally balanced diet requires getting used to unfamiliar foods.

A Permie Plant

The chayote is blooming!

It's true California is blessed with an amazing climate. But in my ignorance before embracing permaculture, I thought of winter as an off season. Now I'm enjoying finding crops that are winter crops, like tree tomatoes, fava beans and chayote.

We are using the "edge" of our deck to grow this monster vine. The root is down below next to the gate and fence. I protected it from children, pets, and watered it often and deeply. It took a year to get established well, growing from a spindly, sad little vine (like the sorriest cucumber you've ever grown) to its current glory.

This slim vine is very cold to the touch; on a hot day the effect is almost shocking. I would guess the plant has tapped into the water table and literally gallons of cool water are being transported through this stem every day to nourish all those leaves and developing squash.

I've been told that chayote is a perennial. If so, then this is a great example of permaculture design. I spent a fair amount of effort getting the plant established, it's growing in a margin (edge) adding value, and it offers a stacked function of providing food while enhancing the privacy of the deck.

Checking the Decomposition of the Pee Pee Ponics Raised Bed.

The rich soil in the picture above is made of wood chips and urine.

Pee-pee ponics promises fertile soil from free resources, and it delivers. The wood chips were free, the urine is free, and the end result is beautiful. Why buy topsoil when you can make it so easily?

Gorgeous Greens

"Bob, I'm not scared of you anymore," the four-year-old says in that fresh, open, non-sequitur way they have. Nearby, her mom photographs the poppies and represses a laugh, settling for a secret little smile.

"Oh? You were scared of me?" I think back, and decide perhaps she means she was shy of me.

"Yeah, when we first moved here. But I wanted to live where there were flowers," (giving a little twirl and inclusive hand wave), "and so here we are! It's so beautiful."

"I think so too. I'm glad you're here."

"Yeah."

We pick a few greens together from the raised bed. The plants continue to thrive. Three months on now, the arugula is bolting, so we're eating it as fast as we can so the softer leafed greens can get their turn in the sun.

"This kind is spicy to my mouth," she says. "I'm going to give it to the chickens."

The chickens, of course, gobble up greens like candy, and then bless us with delicious fresh eggs. She pokes stalks through the wire mesh sides of the chicken tractor, the hens cluck softly as they compete for the stems, and she goes inside leaving me alone to appreciate the sounds of green leaves quietly converting sunlight into tissue.

It's a good day, I think, as I munch on baby lettuce.

Old-growth Forests and Atmospheric CO2

Steve and I are in a punctuated discussion. Not long ago, he posted this comment:

"Developers use an awful lot of lumber, all sustainable. In fact, if you believe Al Gore's tripe about carbon footprints, (I don't) wasting lumber is a great way to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere and lock it up in solid form."

I'm less interested in sustainability and more interested in permaculture. Sustainability seems to have been co-opted by the reductionist viewpoint: "How much money can be made from this resource without losing the ability to make future money?" Permaculture seeks to mimic nature's methods so that we end up in a spiral of increasing abundance.

I read a fascinating article by Sharon Levy about trees and CO2 over at onearth.org. Beverly Law, a professor of global forest science at Oregon State University, is using new techniques to study the interaction of forests and the atmosphere:

"Global warming has forced foresters to address the impact of logging on the flow of carbon between forests and the atmosphere, and many in the industry have insisted that stands of young, fast-growing trees capture carbon more efficiently than do older forests. Using a recently developed technology called the eddy covariance method-more commonly known as eddy flux measurement-Bev Law and her colleagues are showing that those assumptions are wrong."

When Steve writes that all lumber is sustainable, I suppose that could be true, in a really well managed forest. One of the difficulties in discussing this is that humans have short memories; the fact that London had to pass a moratorium on new buildings because England was burning up all its trees for firewood (before they discovered they could burn coal) is a fact known only to those who have studied the rise and fall of energy economies. Is a lumber industry sustainable? Trees do, in fact, grow back. Ecosystems, however, take much longer to recover (if they ever do). A lumber industry following permaculture principles would be more than sustainable; it might also reap rewards in improved water quality, better camping/sightseeing, sale of under-canopy food products (such as "wild" grapes, strawberries, currants) in addition to participating in the carbon-offset market.

Inverted Hugelkultur

We're getting most of our ideas for the garden out of Toby Hemenway's Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-scale Permaculture. Aaron, Kevin and I were standing around looking at the nearly 2 yards of fill dirt Aaron got delivered (free).

Aaron said, "I ordered mulch, too, but the arborists put us on a two-week waiting list. What should we do? Should we use this dirt to just fill all the bed a few inches?"

"Let me get the book, and see what Toby says," I said. I found this: Hugelkultur is a central European technique of piling up dead wood and brush, stomping it down, adding some compostibles on top, and then topping it off with a bit of compost and an inch of soil. The stuff on the bottom decomposes slowly and acts like a sponge, releasing nutrients as well as providing water.

When I trimmed the willow, much of the wood was already rotten and spongy. We decided we'd use the dirt we had so far to make a sort of bathtub shape in one of the lobes of the raised bed, then we broke up and soaked down a fair amount of decomposing willow woood, and buried it under some more dirt. We've now got a bed that's a couple of feet high, with a reservior of water and nutrients sequestered within.

"Wow," Aaron said, "all that dirt didn't make much of a bed. I think I'd better get 10 more yards."

Raised bed gardens

It is springtime, and our hearts turn to... gardening! While you can plant year-round in this part of the world, we are taking a break from our normal projects and we're getting the raised beds built. And planted.

We pruned two plum trees, and are using the wood to build woven sides for our raised beds. I also trimmed the willow a bit, so we have quite a bit of nice bendy wood for weaving.

"Hey, won't the willow branches sprout and become a grove?"

"Maybe, but if they do, the fence will then be self-renewing, so that's less work for us, right?"

Ages ago, Mariposa Grove had quite the food garden back here. The soil has been fallow and chicken-enhanced for a couple of years. While I'm a big believer in no-till gardening, it did seem prudent to scoop away the topsoil, build up the bed, and put the soil back. So that's what is mostly happening.


Over here you can see the chicken tractor in action. These beds are more typical of a sheet mulch. We pretty much left the ground alone, and added layers of material on top (there's a reason topsoil is called "top" soil). We soaked cardboard in rain water to use as our weed-block layer. I sowed a dense cover of plants, mostly in the lettuce and brassica families. I included some deep-rooters, which will draw nutrients up and be slashed to compost in place. The plan is to thin entire plants as the bed becomes crowded, until we have a few dozen really star performers giving us leaves to eat.

I also tucked strawberries into the spaces between the woven sides. It should get very pretty. And full of food.

The chicken tractor is in place, on top of the next bed.

Our current system of composting is to toss kitchen scraps to the chickens in the morning. Over the course of the day, they pick through these and render them into eggs and poop and scraps too small for rats to bother with. When the soil under the tractor is good and rich, we'll move it again and finish building this bed.

Foraging

My subconscious still plays the tape of my mother telling me not to eat plants because they are poisonous.

I went on a very pleasant hike yesterday, and along the way, I sampled white sage (whew! nice mouth rush on that), ate several manzanita berries (tastes like dried apples), nibbled at a few species of flowering plants, and finally had two nice full bunches of elderberry (see the pic).

Do I know what I'm doing? ...Yes, sort of. I'm at the "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" stage. I can recognize certain species of plant, and in other cases, the genera, and I have participated in some group foraging. I know how to pay attention to animal droppings to see what they are eating, and if it seems to be good for the animal or not.

I can recognize poison oak.

I'm also tuned in to muscle strength/intuitive sensing for whether something might harm me or not. So when I eat a mouthful of elderberries, I feel the dynamic zing! that tells me these are excellent in moderate quantities.

Most of our food plants aren't native, such as bananas, apples, almonds, and many of the green leafy types. Yet, there are native food plants for this area, such as elderberry, huckleberry, reedmace, and I want to be at the forefront of bringing those into our diets.

Stephanie's Rrrroof

Friday, I found this gem as I wandered around the Oakland side of the estuary. Stephanie Rubin built this combination doghouse and living roof (Red Rrrroof), seen here next to a gorgeous little rock garden/native plant community. Stephanie writes, "I built the doghouse as a sort of prototype and I want to start selling the houses."

That would be very excellent! Many yards that I see, with dogs, look pretty barren. Lifting the green above all the digging and playing and chewing looks like an elegant solution. Contact Stephanie through her email.

Teachable moment: Aphids

You don't have an aphid "problem;" you've got a ladybug deficiency.

Are your aphids experiencing a population explosion? Chemical eradication is out. Harmony is in. Let the aphids show you which plants need some nutritional support, but make sure you're providing habitat for predatory species (planting forage crops, such as clover, make it easy to build up reserviors of beneficial insects).

A busy couple of days

We got 2 cubic yards of dirt delivered. My newest housemate and I shlepped it up to the raised beds. She made more trips, but I carried two buckets at a time. We carried about 1000 pounds of dirt up to the deck. I didn't make an herb spiral, after all; I modified it into an "S" curve, since the back of the planter isn't very accessible. Nick and Caity moved the remaining dirt over to the edge of the driveway so we can get the cars in and out. They did a great job; you couldn't see a speck of dirt left from where the pile had started.

Here it is, after she planted all the new plants. I'm not an herbalist, but I can recognize rosemary, lavender, chives, nastertium, primrose, chamomile, comfrey...

Comfrey, you say? Isn't that a deep-rooting plant? Why yes, it is! Hopefully we can use this space as a nursery and grow more, to plant down in my yard and continue the process of building some topsoil.

I also tended the beehive. The new honey is sure tasty! Those sweet little workers have grown comb across multiple top bars; I'm sort of at a loss about what to do. I've called Julia.


Sunday Caity and I went on a little bit of the Natives Garden Tour. We loved Jenny and Scott Fleming's garden! 1.5 acres on a hillside, started in the 1950s, this amazing garden is home to 200 species of natives, has amazing lava rock staircases throughout, and a cute waterfall to sing to you as you look out over the bay to the Headlands.

The garden is quite vertical; I bet that there's more than 2 acres of growing space. I am very inspired by the naturalistic mixing of so many species, all in their respective zones, but spread deep; ferns, sorrell and wild ginger at your feet, huckleberry and currants at your findertips, dogwood and fremontias over your head, and aspens and redwoods towering above all. Pipevines and vine maples link everything together, but tastefully, not in a tangled way.

I'm thinking quite seriously about how verticality works into my plans. Under the plum tree, I could plant redwood sorrel and native California strawberries, with some comfrey to draw nutrients up. Then a rose (cultivars and natives) insectory level, California native grapes, and then the plum tree canopy. There's room for one or two more levels in there, but someone with some knowledge should let me know what to plant.