Well, it has been a slow couple of days here at the WildCraft Permaculture. It has pretty much rained for the last two days, everything is soaked to the bone. The garden is in good shape however, it appears that the combination of ‘hilling’ my rows and heavy mulch allowed much of the water to drain away. I went ahead an put in another rain barrel on my roof gutters today, but it is too late for all the water I lost. Incidentally, you would not believe the kind of water you can harvest from your roof. A little half day rain more than filled my one 55 gallon barrel. Which will bring me to yet another project once I get time to get some photo’s and a nice little instructional on hydro-dynamics and water-saving. One thing I am beginning to take some interest in is the re-use of something called ‘gray-water’.

Gray water: From some of the preliminary research I have done, utilizing gray water is a bit touchy of a subject. Some web sites I have come across express the warnings of gray water, however I am theorizing that if I apply the oxygenation technique that I used in my compost-tea project, I will get a somewhat clean water recycling system. The one set-back I foresee is that we are a family of 7, which means a LOT of gray water to deal with, so without some kind of major water reclamation project, I am not sure this is do-able for me right now. I am thinking maybe as a test, to only put the kitchen sink on the project, maybe the dishwasher as well. But to do sinks, dishwasher, washing machine, AND showers may prove to be an overwhelming phosphate situation, which means we would have to go with some kind of low-phosphate cleaner for dishes and washing machine. With 7 people our washing machine is pretty much a non-stop operation.

EM-1 Project: Well, it has almost been 10 days for my first gallon of activated EM-1 and very little has changed in the system. It would seem that you do not really need an air-lock of any kind. I have a second EM-1 system working right now using sorgham instead of blackstrap molasses as the activator and it is pretty much behaving like the first one. There seems to be very little to no activity at all in the systems. Not like other fermenters I have seen in action. I anticipated alot of gas by-product, but it seems that the microbes at work produce very little to no gas during metabolization. Either that or I completely screwed up the activation of the EM-1. Without an oil-immersion microscope there is really no way for me to know for sure. An oil-immersion microscope runs about $700 for a decent one, and you can use it to take samples and count microbial density manually. I would really love to do this, so I could post something more concrete in favor of EM-1 and it’s activation, but alas I simply don’t have the funds to blow on such a set up. So at this point I guess I just have to take the companies marketing literature and accept the notion that it is working.
Compost Tea Update: You can definitely tell the compost tea system is working. I harvested out about 2.5 gallons of tea from the 5-gallon bucket. I replaced it with 2.5 gallons of dechlorinated water harvested from my roof-water collection system, and added about 1/4 cup of sorgham molasses to activate the microbes. The nice thing about using the last 2.5 gallons as an activator is that the microbes get a heck of a kick start. There is froth on the top of the water, and NO odor whatsoever. The aerobes are working magnificently. I have thought about adding some EM-1 to the system, to see if the Bacillus subtilis gets to rocking, but again that would make me go back to getting an oil-immersion microscope to do microbe counting to be sure it was working, and EM-1 is just way to dang expensive to just throw into the compost tea.

Garden Update: I have pretty much gotten all of my tomatoes into play in the garden from their starter home, and am getting ready to set up a raised bed for lettuce, and cabbage. I will probably attack that this weekend, along with planting some lima beans, and a variety of different herbs that really need to get into the dirt. I have an herb bed but it is getting a bit crowded right now, and I am trying to reclaim some space. In addition to it being an herb garden I also use it as a test-bed for a couple of tomato plants I have never grown out before.   One of the great things about permaculture is that it really makes you rethink ’space’ requirements for things.  It is amazing how close you can grow stuff and it is one of those things that really make me ponder why farming-gardening is done today.  With a heavy mulch system you don’t need to find ways of squeezing tillers in-between rows, so you can cram a heck of a lot more things into the usable growing space.  Most seed packets you read tell you to plant tomatoes roughly 12 inches apart.  This is just plain nonsense.  You can easily plant tomatoes 2 inches from each other, and plant rows 6 inches apart.  All you need is just enough walking space to harvest and work the plants.  So you learn to plant in ‘chunks’ instead of rows.  The only thing you really need to be careful of is tiny seed which can easily be over-seeded, as I have done with my radishes an turnips this year. I planted WAY to many and sowed them WAY too close.

The herb garden so far holds, Lemon Balm, Lemon Verbena, Sage, Basil, French Tarragon, French Sorrel, Lavender mint, (my special) GaelicMysts mint, Chocolate mint, Egyptian Mint, Black-Stemmed Peppermint, Rosemary, Borage, Caraway, Cilantro, Sweet Marjoram, Greek Oregano, and two Sweet Bay trees.  My dill and fennel I planted seem to have wasted away, but I still have Echinacea and a few other things to plant.  The six apple trees I have are doing really well, this is my first year to try that.  The blueberry’s are starting to put on berry’s, the strawberrys have little green strawberries on them, and the blackberries are just green right now.  My grapes are doing much better than last year.  Last year I planted roughly 20 Black Monuca’s and lost them all to a late blackberry winter, with the exception of 2 or three.  This year I added another grape row, and put in Cynthiana and Mars grapes in addition to the 2 or three Black Monuca’s that survived, and they are all doing amazingly well.  I thought I was going to have a repeat of last year, as the grapes had ‘leaved’ out, and we had 2 hours of frost about 2 weeks ago in which all the leaves promptly wilted and died.  I was just sick.  But the secondary and tertiary buds (I didn’t know grapes had these) came into play and are now doing just nicely.  I don’t anticipate any more freezes as the night-time temperatures have averaged out to 50-60 degrees, and average day time temps are in the 70’s to low 80’s.

Now if I can just keep everybody from drowning! 

When discussing some of the little microbes found in EM-1 (effective micro-organisms) I mentioned the theory that the technology mixture developed by Teruga Higa was most likely a batch of gram negative microbes, yeasts and fungi.   As usual within the scientific community there are ALWAYS abberations.  You know, like ‘i before e except after c’ and its exceptions?  Well, Bacillis subtilis is just one of those exceptions, which is why scientists use words like ‘mostly’ and ’sometimes’  B. subtilis happens to be a gram POSITIVE bacteria, and also happens to be one of those few microbes who metabolize just fine anaerobically.  It was once believed that B. subtilis was an ‘obligate aerobe’ meaning that it HAS to have oxygen to metabolize or grow, however recent studies have pretty much confirmed that the gram positive, semi-aerobe does just fine in an anaerobic environment.

It is an important microbe as well, it is not only used as a soil inoculate for agriculture, but it has also been used in the manufacture of the anti-biotic ‘Bacitracin’ which is a topical medication to prevent infections.  It is bactericidal that inhibits the synthesis of cell walls, and can be especially toxic to kidneys.  Be careful to note however it is the ‘Bacitracin’ that is harmful to kidneys NOT the B. subtilis itself.  In addition B. Subtilis is used in the manufacture of the enzyme ‘penicillinase, used in the pharmaceutical world as a diagnostic agent.

B. subtilis is also incredibly tough, as most gram positives generally are.   Forming a spore when environmental conditions are unfavorable, and going into a kind of dormancy until conditions improve, where they wake up and begin dividing like mad. As if that were not enough, B. subtilis also sprouts flagella that allow it to move, very, very fast for its size.  Probably the toughest aerobe I have ever seen, B. subtilis actually ALTERS its metabolic activity based on the amount of oxygen present.

One thing to be sure about ’subtilis’ is the fact that it is very, very good for the garden.

About a month or so ago, my parents came down for a visit from their Claremore home.  With them, they brought three boxes.  They happened to be cleaning out their storage facility and found three of my boxes from around 20 years ago.  Talk about a time capsule.  As I began rummaging through the stuff I had thought was worth keeping, I found several journals that I used to keep, and I began going through the pages.  It is amazing the junk that occupies our thoughts when we are young.  They say that in your youth you are very much idealistic and your thinking is full of the way the world SHOULD work.  As I have aged (like wine they say)  I have found myself not be less idealistic but more.  The difference is that my thinking is much more honed and precise as far as what is important.

I know this has nothing to do with DIY for the most part, or wildcrafting, or gardening, but I wanted to take a few moments to stress the importance of journaling.   Now I am not talking about the standard crap journaling they make you do in school where the pages are full of meaningless banter, however a journal comprised of projects, problems and solutions and how you have come about taking on said task/project is very important and can be a heck of a thing to hand down to the next generation.  One thing my dad has told me ever since I was young is that ‘we have lost something’.   My great-grandmother was a full-blooded Cherokee Indian.  Now keep in mind this was back shortly after 1900, so she was a ‘real’ Indian.  A full fledged herb growing, walk with the land Indian.  She could walk you through the woods for a week and you would never be hungry, nor would you have to expend tremendous amounts of energy killing things to keep fed.    She knew about the land and what it would provide, she understood the healing properties of the things that grew, but unlike her Indian forefathers she did not happen to pass down the knowledge through stories or unwritten journalistic dialogue.  Or rather if she did no one was listening.

She has been gone for some time now, and I really did not know her but the truth of the matter is that this knowledge is dying.  In our current world-environment so much is mass manufactured that we do not have to think for ourselves really, all we have to do is keep the engine of economics running and spend every last dime of our paycheck to survive and the machine keeps turning.  But there is a problem, and it is a problem that we do not talk about.  If we DO talk about it, we get sidelong glances and awkward stares from those around us.  If we talk about it, our posture is suddenly perceived as some strange Armageddon bent Davidian and we run the risk of ATF agents running in and snatching up our children, whether we are truly a threat or not.

I am not a conspiracist, nor am I a religious nut waiting for the day for everything to fall down singing “I’ll Fly Away” while reading the headlines, however I AM a student of history, and one thing that is for sure, is that every nation has times in its existence where it is tested by fire, famine and flood.  In the good ole USA we havn’t had a true testing in over 200 years.  Sure we have had hardship and environmental mis-haps and I want to be sure here not to undermine those tragic events but all one has to do is take a good hard look around the globe and know that it is really pretty easy here.  Seriously, when was the last time a U.S. tank rolled down New York and ran over protestors?   Or when one type of American, raised machetes and killed close to a million of another type of American, like the tragedy in Rwanda?  What saves us from turmoil here is the fact that we keep spending our cash.  As long as the economic machine keeps rolling we have nothing to worry about.  But what if that machine were to stop?

Consider the fact that most Americans spend 30% above their income, and that the average American carries $8,000 or more in credit card debt.  Consider that the number of bankruptcies have double in the last ten years, and as of October 2003 the total American consumer owes a total of roughly 1.97 TRILLION dollars, which incidentally does not include mortgages.  Granted, these figures are averages, and according to some reports more than half of American carry very little debt, but even at that, just a little less than half of Americans are in WAY over their heads.

Now, let’s pile on some more stats.  The Baby Boomers are retiring, and employers are flat out worried about this, and let’s stop to think for a moment that the children of the Boomers and the Boomers themselves just did not have that many children.   Generation X’ers are having even less children, which means much less in the way of human working capital.  You would think that this means alot more jobs, but that is not what happens.  When you have 100 Doctors retire, but only 20 to take their place how many hospitals will actually be able to keep their doors open?

I could go on, but I don’t want to focus on the bad news here, I do want to focus on the fact that someday sometime the information in your little yellowed, bent-paged journal may actually have the knowledge to help someone feed themselves.  Whether it is how you composed your composting system, or your use of water management, or the creative roof-top garden you created, that project might just be important enough to save a life, or two, or more.  I personally hope we don’t see the testing that China, or Africa, or the Middle East have to face, but if we do, is there a wad of information we can pass down to ensure the heritage of the next generation?  What is the point of having a lot of ’stuff’ if when we leave this earth, there is no one left to enjoy it?  What good is a Ferrari?  I’ll take a raised bed, and a bucket of worms over that monstrosity any day of the week.

Remember this?

Well, it looks like something is going on in there. Today I went out and watched it for about 10 minutes, and I saw an air bubble process through my airlock. This means fermentation is taking place. I sat a bit longer and saw a second one! This is not the bubbling fermentation I usually see when making beer, but it is action, and that means stuff is happening! I can’t wait till next week, when I can start using this stuff.

I just recently had a comment from RI Greening on my last post, and I was going to simply respond to it in the comments section, but my brain went into overtime and the ‘reply’ became a bit longer than I was originally intending, so I decided to make a small post about it. To summarize Mr. Greenings comment;

“Frankly, that’s (borrowing renewable compost from your local lot) a lot more appealing to me than going to my local garden center to buy a bale of peat moss that was trucked hundreds of miles from a (now destroyed) Canadian wetland. “

The concept of DIY comes with a lot of baggage. Good baggage, but baggage nevertheless. Why would you want to DIY? It generally takes a LOT more time, and when I say ‘a LOT’ I really mean it. Nobody gardens the old fashioned way because it’s easy, that’s for sure. There has been nothing ‘easy’ about any of my projects this far. However, here are the benefits I get from DIY’ing particularly with regard to my garden.

1. Total Control:  I have control over the ENTIRE process, or I have control over parts of the process I believe are the most important.  I have control over the plants, when they are watered, how they are watered, and with what they are watered.  I have control over the harvesting, how the garden is harvested, when it is harvested.  This control is bound by certain limitations as well, and it is the limitations that add that value from year to year.  Unlike big growing corporations like ‘Bonnies Plants’  I can’t afford to pillage the dirt, I HAVE to be responsible because it is the only dirt I own.
2. Cost of Developing:  If you don’t take into account the cost of time, doing your own gardening is relatively cheap, much cheaper than going to the grocery store, spending $80 and leaving with 2-3 bags of which only half the contents are edible ‘out of the sack’.  And it is at this point where I want to draw correlation to Mr. Greenings comment.  What exactly is cheap?  Well we have to evaluate the real cost of goods.  First of all, with regard to Peat Moss in Canada, you have to own the land, that costs money, you have to have the peat moss, you have to pay labor, you have to pay for equipment and hard assets, you have to pay for a supply line and time to research it, you have to pay for the transportation of the peat moss all the way to the garden center, who pays to store it, then charge an extra mark up.  So I ask you, how cheap is Peat Moss?  Well, I bought a bag of it from a local retailer and I’ll tell you it is NOT cheap at all.  In addition, my soil is already acidic enough, I don’t need more peat raising my PH.  Now, the cost of completely covering a garden in peat, or amending the soil with store bought additives can be ridiculously high but aside from that there are other costs also.  The cost loosing the peat bog, the cost of the environmental impact on the peat.  I don’t know how it was gathered, was the owner conscientious about the harvesting or did he/she just go in there with a back-hoe and indiscriminately rip up the earth?  Will the area in which he/she harvest be able to repair itself reasonably or does he/she have a plan to replenish?  You see, I have control over that process when I go WildCrafting, and harvesting from the earth.  And that is worth the labor invested, hands down.
3. Superior Product:  By DIY’ing you can obtain a much more quality product at a fraction of its retail value.  I’m poor, but I do have additional time, so instead of getting ANOTHER job to pay for a quality product I prefer to do it myself.  Anyone who has ever eaten a garden tomato will agree with this 100%.
4. And finally, DIY is all about selfishness, I mean seriously, the bursting pride you have when the end of the year harvest comes and you can stick your thumbs under your overalls and say, “Yup, I did this!”  is too much of a reward to pass up.