From a food perspective, this time of year is definitely the high point. Due to the funky weather we’re just getting tomatoes now, but I’ve also got tons of summer squash, basil, peppers, onions, kale, chard, chamomile, calendula and herbs. The giant growth winner is clearly the mullein, now two years old that tops out at about 9′ tall. This is a good thing, as my allergies are kicking in big time and I’ve needed to make several batches of mullein-goldenrod-sage-chamomile tea, which is quite nice with honey.

I whipped up a Claremont Salad yesterday with cabbage, onions, pepper, cucumber, carrot and parsley all home grown. Then today I made a spur of the moment green salsa with extremely local tomatillos, cayenne, garlic, onion and coriander seeds.

Meanwhile I keep re-potting seedlings and putting in new seed. I cleared one of the raised beds last weekend and have stuff sprouting already. I put in soy beans, parsnips, several kinds of lettuce, cress, onion and I forget what else- dill maybe. This polyculture mix has worked well for me over the last two years. I re-potted a bunch of wild flowers the children started, as well as larspur, asters and my new prize, black mulberry.

Couple of weeks ago I discovered a black mulberry down by the old railroad bed and brought a couple ripe fruit home to try and start. Kai and I were talking about how you don’t see a bunch of seedlings under mulberry trees, but I’ve since discovered the reason for this. I frequently walk along the Canal Path east from Pittsford village, and down where Mitchell Road crosses the canal there’s an old mulberry. One day I watched a herd of chipmunks scrounging the fallen berries. Another day it was ducks. So very few berries escape notice long enough to take root. However, the berries I collected and planted sprouted easily and are now growing vigorously. I put 12 into larger pots and I’m looking forward to seeing if I can get them through the winter.

I finally set up my first rain barrel, a birthday present from my dad last year. Just need to run the gutter downspout to the top, drill a hole and put in some screen to keep the detritus out.

I should probably strap the barrel to the side of the house. Haven’t filled it up yet to see how the tires handle the weight. The elevation is needed to be able to get enough pressure out to the garden beds.

Wow- what a day.

I got to the conference around 8:30 and was able to get registered and headed toward the first breakout on Small Scale Aquaponics with Craig Hollingsworth, a professor here at UMass. The themes of this talk were start small and learn by doing. But take away the learnings Craig had to offer, like be careful to close any valves you open and don’t pull out the temperature regulation mechanism without putting it back in.

He had three 300 gal. tanks with very simple filter and sump, with PVC to circulate water. Here we see use of a secondary hydroponic plant system to make use of some of the nitrates coming from bacteria on gravel in the long blue containers, which take the fish ammonia (NH3) and convert it to N03. The water is still very high in nitrogen, so the plants tend to be very leafy. The basil seemed to do the best of any. There were numerous pest issues with the plants which I conjecture has to do with this high nitrogen input.

The simplest system was growing Blue and Nile Tilapia. The Blue are hardier but smaller. He’s hybridizing the Blue and Nile, and offspring are almost entirely male and have the hardiness of the Blues but are larger like the Nile. Other tanks had large mouth bass. Interesting comment is that food value always has lowest value in the market- the Bass are recreational, and get a higher price.

Craig mentioned a very successful enterprise in Turners Falls, Australis Aquaculture, which is supplying Barramundi across the country. Some of his tips include having ground faults on all the electrical, and a central floor drain is very helpful. When I asked about costs, he said the basic 300 gal tank system was under $2000 but didn’t have any numbers on energy usage. There seemed to be a lot of energy input in terms of lights for the plants. There’s probably a good hybrid system with fish in the dark and plants in the light. In fact, later Will Allen showed this pattern, where the plants are above the fish water and basically shade out any algae growth.

At lunch I ran into Phil Botwinick who I’ve been dying to connect with since meeting him at last years NE Permaculture Convergence. I told him I was coming to his talk on money: Lifting the Veil and Taking the Gloves off. He’s been behind a series of screenings of the Crash Course, and Chris Martenson will be here tomorrow to talk, which I’m very excited about.

After perhaps the largest, coldest burrito I ever ate and the final cup of coffee served out of the student union food court, I headed over to Isenberg for a talk on Dismantling Legal Barriers to Sustainability, given by Scott Kellogg, formerly of Rhizome Collective in Austin, TX. I was really looking forward to this, and it ended up being a little short on specific tactics. One attendee had the best advice: beg, grovel, moan and make nice with the neighbors and officials. Another take away for me was that there’s a fairly random patchwork of regulation and regulating bodies. In some states the State is hard to deal with, in others, the local public health board. We talked about the usual suspects: greywater, humanure, chickens, compost and rain barrels. Strangely, rain capture is illegal in some western states, where municipalities claim ownership of the rain. Regulations are often used to promote or stop development in a locality. Setting precedents and understanding where local officials are coming from, such as their need to protect public health and not put their necks on the line for something, are keys in getting these practices moved forward.

Phil’s talk was next, with the help of his colleage at Local Energy Solutions, Sharon. Phil donned the tin foil hat and the gloves, which he was to later take off, and slowly, gently led into  this discussion about money. At first I was wondering how he was going to approach it, as there were members of the audience who didn’t know, for example, who Greenspan is. But after the first minutes the discussion sort of shaped itself. Leading off was the concept of how banks create money in a fraction reserve system, which is that they generate it out of thin air. The general agreement between all players seems to be to never call in all the debts, or if they do, to make the US Federal Government (e.g. us) pay for it.

So that all was a bit more rudimentary than I hoped, but the fractional reserve piece is significant. After the talk, Phil, Tom, Sharon and I agreed to meet for breakfast tomorrow.

Finally I had to run home and take a shower and get some real food before Will Allen’s talk on Growing Power. The only thing I can say about his presentation is just the sheer scope of what he’s managing is pretty impressive and throws down the challenge to us all that we are thinking too small. He’s employing up to 100 people, managing thousands of volunteers, and has dozens of projects all running at once, all based on starting with soil creation with massive composting operations. Granted, he’s been doing stuff for 16 years, but he reiterated the play nice theme. He said make yourself an asset to the community and they’ll totally defend you when the City comes down, or whatever. Also, it’s pretty clear he has outstanding organizational skills and has a good team. Many of the volunteers who started as little kids are now running things.

So, I said I was going to take it easy and not pack the whole weekend with stuff, but that was quite a lot for one day. I bought a DVD of the Crash Course, and I’m going to see how much of that I can get through tonight. Nighty night.

One of the reasons for staying here, aside from the fact it’s half the price of rooms up closer to Amherst, and aside from the big white man presiding over it all, is the fact that its a short walk to Chicopee Reservoir. The coffee’s so bad here I had to go to McDonald’s (hey, the late Paul Newman says it’s organic) on the way, hoping for a peaceful walk by the water’s edge. When I arrived I found:

I was trying to come up with a good caption for this. Sustainable Beach Straightening- NOT!? Why we’re all going to die? Resource Use 101? Creating Disorder from Harmony? Your Tax Dollars at Work? This after the customer in McDonalds was complaining about the sales tax. “We call it Taxachussets” said the barista, or whatever they call burger-flippers nowadays. Notice the guy has a hearing protective device on. So much for quiet.

Well, on I go to the conference. I’m missing Dave Jacke’s talk on the spiritual side of forest gardening as well as David Yarrow’s integrated food and energy workshop. Luckily, Phil is giving his Two Faces of Money talk this afternoon, and there’s a workshop on legal barriers to sustainability. Then of course Paul Allen’s keynote tonight. More to come…

After crazy driving all day, including a little side trip down to Hartford to see my sister- and brother-in-law’s new house and deliver a big gold mirror and old picture, and pick up an electric mower for my dad, and getting lost in downtown Hartford (plenty of signs for 91 South, but none for North), I got up to the conference just before 8. Registration had closed so I went into the main ballroom (packed with people) to hear Paul Stamets lay it down with regard to mushrooms.

I first heard about Paul at my first permaculture class, where I learned that mycelium networks communicate ecological information across great distances, distribute nutrients among plants across species, even to the point of moving growth from a damaged side of a forest to the other side. So my expectations were high and Stamets gave an outrageous talk on the many amazing qualities of fungi.

Here’s a link to a partial version of Paul’s talk.
First, he told us about Amadou (coincidentally I’ve been listening to Amadou et Mariam), a mushroom with historical roots, as it was used to carry fire from one place to another. Paradoxically, when boiled in water, Amadou mycelium are highly flamable and were used in Europe to create firearms.

Then he described a symbiotic relationship with a fungus and grasses allowing them to grow in 160 degree water at Yellowstone. He showed old growth forest with baby hemlocks on the floor thriving, although there was insufficient light for photosynthesis; they were being “fed” by mycelium in guild with alder and birch trees. Recently an aquatic gilled mushroom has been discovered. We have identified only 10% of the estimated 150,000 species and a theme of the talk was “how little do we know.”

Mushrooms are similar to humans in that we both inhale O2 and exhale CO2. Fungi have generally anti-bacterial properties, and as they de-compose they specifically select bacteria essential to plant growth. Mycelium nets contain bladders that hold and transport water over great distances. The largest organism on earth, a honey mushroom covering over 2200 acres was shown from aerial photos.

Mycelium networks form a highly optimized, redundant network structure, and behave like neurons: as information or chemistry is passed along a network path it grows in capacity. The information appears to batch and pulse and this was shown in a microscopic movie of transmission along mycelium nets. Fungi have been shown to have survived, indeed been sole survivors of two previous extinction events.

Then, Stamets got into some very interesting practical applications. First off, mycelium remediation of hydrocarbon-poluted soil, which reduced hydrocarbon counts from 20,000 ppm (2%) to around 200 ppm over the course of 8 weeks. This experiment used oyster mushroom. He mentioned the fungal production of enzymes cellulase and lignase which are effective at breaking down wood and cellulose, then later showed a bottle of “myconol” lit and burning as a candle.

He pointed out that mushrooms are hyper-accumulators of heavy metals, so the oysters growing in the old hydrocarbon-polluted dirt are no good for eating, but you can create more mycelium by taking the base of the mushroom and rolling it in the ubiquitous material cardboard. In fact sheet mulching is so effective because it creates conditions very favorable to mycelium, which by the way are favored by earthworms. Stamets scoured the literature but found no science published on preferences of earthworms for mycellated vs. non-mycellated material, so he conducted his own experiments.

Then he showed a filtering system created from mycellated woodchips stuffed into burlap sacks and used to create a swale on contour. This was very effective in reducing e coli in runoff from farms into waterways.

Perhaps the most amazing story he told was when he was asked by a National Geographic photographer to gather a very rare garcon [sp?] mushroom which only appears in Douglas Fir snags in old growth. They were out on a boat in Desolation Inlet, BC looking along the shore for evidence of this rare fungus. After several hours the photographer asked about a Haida pictograph site and they went to visit and found garcon growing right there. The shape had a strange Venus of Willendorf resemblance. Later it was discovered that Haida artifacts in museums were carved not from wood but from garcon.

There was some more about the anti-tubercular qualities of this particular mushroom and the great medical benefits of using mushroom products that are not only anti-viral but anti-bacterial as well; most deaths from viral infections are caused by the follow-on bacterial infections. He also patented a process for eliminating carpenter ants and termites using mycelium.

For me, though, the real kicker was the idea of “packaging” seeds and mycelium in innoculated cardboard. This has great guerilla gardening potential, can use the mail system, etc. He showed a baby “old growth” forest of hemlock, birch, cedar grown this way.
I don’t think anyone minded that Stamets went on for about a half hour longer than scheduled and he received an standing O for his great work. It was an amazing kick off to the conference.