E-M:/ Permaculture--where Lansing needs to go

[jmgear <jmgear@acd.net>]

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Enviro-Mich message from jmgear <jmgear@acd.net>
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This is from some friends in the Pacific NW (near Bellingham, WA, pretty 
far up toward the Canadian border).  Although this area has more folks, 
we also have a richer growing season (and colder winters!).  This report 
about permaculture installations in the Northwest is inspiring. 

This is what Lansing will need to do--all this stupid grass has to go, 
to be replaced with edible crops, and we all need to learn to put food 
by again.  Michigan as a whole is blessed with a great climate for 
growing a great abundance and variety of things.  What we need is to be 
teaching Michigan kids useful skills in schools---like how to grow food, 
and how to preserve it---so that they can live independently of oil 
supplies.

Here's the report on permaculture:
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This week on Thursday I wangled a visit to a local Bellingham 
permaculture home.  The guy was a younger person, friend of someone I 
know at the college, and he agreed to show my friend and me around the 
place after he got done with work. 

He bought an old small house 8 years ago, and it had the usual gravel 
drive and grassy lawn, just like most of the neighbors still 
have---totally boring American landscape needing constant mowing and 
trimming to fit into the surroundings. 

Not this guy's place - it was a jungle on a nice-sized city lot.  The 
grass in the pathways he simply tramples down as he walks through.  The 
rest is raised beds with perennials or re-seeded plants.  Surrounding is 
fruit and nut trees, with berry bushes underneath - with no spacing 
between, totally thick and very productive.  Probably dozens of species 
of plants. 

He has very little of the standard high-maintenance veggie 
garden---stuff just grows each year and he harvests and pulls out 
invasive weeds and occasionally makes changes to an area.  I liked his 
model for how to replace grassy areas with food in a city lot.  He even 
has chickens in an enclosure with lots of trees and shrubs - and they 
absolutely control weeds on the ground around the plants.  He still has 
to feed them.  When he bought the place, no birds at all - now it's a 
little bird haven surrounded by human devastation (lawns, driveways, and 
streets).

On Friday, we visited another permaculture site on a much larger 
scale---10 acres plus.  The Bullock brothers bought 10 acres of forest 
(doug fir, cedar) on Orcas Island back around 1980---they had studied 
permaculture with Bill Mollison and Holmgren and came from Hawaii. 

At the lower boundary of their property was an old valley swamp without 
the water.  Somehow they re-flooded the swamp as their first action and 
it's still a productive bog with permanent water.  Then they took out 
forest trees in a scalloped pattern in the lower half of the property to 
develop as a food-growing and nursery area, adjacent to the swamp.  They 
built structures on the upper ridge, probably 100 feet above the swamp. 

At the mid-levels, above the intensive growing area, is where interns 
(maybe a dozen?) live and work.  The interns pay something like $100 a 
month to stay there and work under guidance (aka slaves, but with the 
twist that the slaves want to be there and pay for it and have freedom 
to experiment). 

Spotted around the property are 10 composting toilets, very crudely 
built with locally available materials - but highly effective.  The 
little outhouse structures have handles on them, and when needed they 
pick them up and move them on, leaving the composted waste in situ.  
That's then a great place to put a new tree. 

Water management is where they've put in a lot of work - solar PV cells 
(used, previously fried, very cheap, still working fine) drive DC pumps 
that move water from the swamp area to holding tanks up the ridge, which 
then gravity (& also other-pump-pressurized) feeds the highly complex 
watering system.  Orcas gets half the precip that B'ham does, and they 
have a south-west facing slope that makes it quite warm, even hot when 
we were there. 

They have numerous greenhouses without active controls for propagating 
plants and have some semi-tropical varieties in the warmer spots.  They 
have fruit/berry bushes from all over the world, plus some they've 
managed to invent.  For fruit trees, they have a system of keeping grass 
away and nutrients in by planting day lilies right near the tree, then a 
ring of comfrey in about a 6-8 foot circle around the tree.  The lilies 
and comfrey come up each year on their own and bring nutrients to the 
surface, and the dead comfrey is mulch to keep out the grass.  Very low 
maintenance and good for the tree. 

We're gonna do that very soon this summer with our fruit and nut trees.  
I also want to learn to graft like Doug (tour guide) Bullock does so we 
can grow different varieties of fruit on tree-stock that has good roots 
but is presently non-productive---he's done that on many, many trees at 
the site.  I'm also going to be propagating the bushes like mad and make 
the areas I'm developing bush factories galore to help keep down grass 
and make food.  Gooseberries, currants (big on them), aronia, sea 
buckthorn, goumi, thornless blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, and 
so on. 

The only animals are chickens, which they use for eggs and as chook 
tractors (chickens in a movable cylindrically-shaped cage---they totally 
eliminate weeds wherever the cage is) and ducks that they use for slug 
patrol during the non-growing season (I don't know where they go in the 
spring - didn't see them).  Also didn't see any slugs or mosquitoes, 
amazing enough for this area. 

They are now developing another 8 acres of leased land adjacent to 
theirs.  It was hard to figure out the business model - I think the 
interns are one source of income, and the nursery another---they sell 
plants you just can't get anywhere else in No. America.  They also sell 
design/development services in other countries---Nicaragua was one that 
kept popping up in conversation. . . .

The next step up in complexity for permaculture is likely the top 
level---applying permaculture philosophy to a town or region such as a 
county.  Unfortunately, there is no model for that to my knowledge.  
Some wannabes (S.F., Portland, ...) just starting down the road, yeah, 
but nothing in place.  It may be possible for a town like Bellingham (a 
little over 100,000 folks) that's still not totally packed with 
people---but we're infilling as fast as possible still and housing 
prices are way beyond reasonable now & probably not sustainable. 

Bellingham is perhaps small enough that, if we can preserve the good 
growing land surrounding the city, enough food might be grown there to 
support the town and be close enough to the population to get it to them 
even after oil shortages become endemic. 

The city will also need to educate people on the model of the first 
place I visited so as many as possible grow as much of their own food as 
possible and have some joy in the process of doing it.  That would 
inevitably stimulate much better neighborhood relationships as people 
learn to know each other and share ideas that work well.  My big 
question is whether the city, or any city, can get through that 
multi-decade process peacefully enough to actually survive.  If we start 
right now, possibly.  If we wait until the actual gasoline shortages hit 
and prices skyrocket, perhaps not.  I fear we'll soon find out what 
lengths people will go to (even neighbors) when the feeling of panic 
occurs when we can't afford to buy (or cannot even find in stores) the 
food we need.

I have no idea how society will survive on the larger, more dense scale 
of cities with millions of people; how can Japan feed the inhabitants of 
Tokyo without oil to grow and deliver food to their 37 million mouths?

Here's a link to the Bullock bro. farm website so you can read a bit 
about permaculture and see some photos of their stuff:  
http://www.permacultureportal.com/

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