I’ve been thinking about putting a small pond at the highest point on the property, above the gardens, as an irrigation source and to have some fish. I bought a liner a couple of months ago. Today, some helpers and I finally set to it.

Turns out 9- and 10-year olds will dig for over an hour! You can see that down below the topsoil layer its very shaly chunky rock. I saved the topsoil and re-built a raised bed with it.

First we’d laid out where the pond was going to be located. This was a space I’d raked leaves into a pile last fall, roughly circular. Then from one end of this we built a spillway that would carry overflow into the topmost swale. We found the digging much easier here so decided to put another, deeper pit down that end.

Next, we needed to do something to protect the liner from sharp rocks. I sent the helpers out to find carpet scraps in the neighborhood, which they promptly found (along with 60 beanie babies at a garage sale). I laid the carpet over the various sections and used a box cutter to cut the shapes.

The scale here is the two main pits are about 5′ by 5′ and the spillway is about 6′ by 2′. The top depression is about 16″ deep and the lower one about 28″ deep. I’m hoping this will be deep enough to avoid freezing so fish can overwinter.

Next comes the liner.

The liner’s 15′ long by 10′ wide, and didn’t quite cover the whole spillway, so I needed to cut an additional piece for the spillway. I’m planning to make a constructed wetland in the spillway with sand and gravel, so I still need to find a way to seal the overlap of the two pieces of liner.

Finally, the moment of truth!

And here it is finally filled. Tomorrow after it has settled for a bit, I’ll trim the excess liner, and line the edge with flagstones.

This week saw the delivery of NOFA’s newspaper Natural Farmer, which is always chock full of amazingly useful information. The paper is quarterly and usually features a pull out section on a particular topic, this one being the topic of Nutrient Density. There’s a fabulous long interview with farmer and consultant Mark Fulford of Teltane Farms in Maine.

In talking about soil nutrients, Fulford offered a very concise useful nugget about soil chemistry, which I’ve tried to capture in the table below.

UPDATE: 20100115: Here’s a better version of the table with original following:

Fulford talks about a lot of things in this lengthy article which I highly recommend. One way to assess soil chemistry is through soil testing of course, but another way is to analyze the weeds growing on a property. For example, dandelions and goldenrod indicate dry conditions, whereas buttercups indicate wet or anaerobic soils. Broadleaf weeds indicate high potassium, low phosphorus. Annual grasses indicate lack of calcium.

Fulford mentions a couple of good books on weeds:

Weeds: Why They Grow, by J. McCaman
Weeds: Control Without Poisons, by Charles Walters

The warm weather in November has got me in a gardening mood, so I decided to build a straw bale cold frame with the windows I found earlier this year. I got 10 straw bales at the local feed store, a couple of 10 foot 2 x 6 and I was ready to go. First I arranged five strawbales in a U shape facing south.

This was across some existing beds, so the soil’s already in good shape. My goal is to grow hardy salad greens in here over the winter: cress, sorrel, spinach, lettuce, chard, chickory. I raked out the mulch a little to create a good seed bed.

I bought a thermometer at the local hardware store to hang inside.

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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.

Sunday was a little bit of a bust- I only had til about 10:15, and the whole show was over at noon. I was starting to come down with the flu, but I dragged myself out of bed early to be there at 8:00 for Phil Botwinick’s talk on The Two Faces of Money. Unfortunately, Phil was in a car accident a week before and wasn’t able to make it.

When I walked in the hall first thing I saw Kelly Keck and his partner David. They were excited about Kristin Gillibrand’s appointment to the U.S. Senate, as she was the Congresswoman from their district. Kelly had previously run for State Assembly or Senate and they said Kristin was like their friend and it was weird that she was now a Senator.

Since Phil’s talk was cancelled I instead went to Carol McNeil’s talk on Soil Testing and Soil Survey maps. Brian Boucheron and I sat together, and he updated me on the work he is doing now as an intern in Scottsville. I’m hoping he’ll do some guest posts here this year. Carol’s talk covered simple soil pH tests you can get from Cornell Cooperative Extension, and an awesome online soil survey mapping tool.

Carol also pointed us to Cornell’s online IPM Field Crop guide.
Finally, I attended Mike Kimball (Essex Farm) and the Thorpes (East Aurora) presenting on their experience with their CSA operations. Mike charges $2800 for the first family member, $2400 for the next, $2000 for the third and all kids under 13 fly free. This seems exhorbitant, but keeps the margins up and the no-money liberals away. Although most of the membership are wealthy liberals, they subsidize many other members, about 115 total, who can’t afford the CSA. It’s all you can eat, with some limits on things like baby zucchini and pork chops.

My impression is that these folks work exceptionally hard for no money. Someone said that they felt they were performing community service by being a farmer, and that was the take-away for me.

I was going to try to live-blog the NOFA-NY Conference last weekend, here in Rochester, but I couldn’t get a good, free Wi-fi connection, and then I’ve been ill all week, so I’m just now getting to it.

I missed the first session Saturday morning, so wandered around the tradeshow and found Mark Dunau talking to the tractor guys. In another life Mark was a playwright, and we got talking about irony and a remark he’d made back in November that I’d thought about since. We were talking about bio-char and he’d said the irony was that so much of the northeast had been de-forested to make charcoal. Later I started thinking that it was the playwright saying that. I started noodling on the connection between a sense of irony (or lack of it) as a connection to some kind of humility, to a connection to landscape in some way. I haven’t got this fully worked out yet, but it was important to think of sustainability as both a science and an art. In fact, art became quite a theme for the day.

Saw Jan MacDonald of Rochester Roots, who we were sharing a booth with, and she introduced me to James Allen, who’d put on a sustainability conference at U of R a couple of years ago. We talked about walnuts and berries among other things.

The next session I attended was on Apples. Lou Lego from Elderberry Pond Farm near Auburn had used a SARE grant to do some real analysis of heirloom and new apple varieties: which were the best for eating, baking, pies, juicing, cider, and drying. Some of the winners included Northern Spy, Pink Pearl, Cameo (best storing apple), Caville Blanc (best baking), Pristine (best eating, best early), Enterprise, Jona Free and the overarching winner Spitzenberg. This one had a story-Thomas Jefferson claimed it was one of his favorite apples, and the descendants of Jefferson’s apple are quite hard to come by. As a novice orchardist, I appreciated the detail of which varieties to look for.

For lunch, Jan and I went out to John’s Tex Mex in the South Wedge and talked about various projects, grants and art. Jan’s a former artist, and used to have studio space in the Searle Building years ago. We talked a fair bit about the creative work involved in gardening and sustainability efforts. When we got back we were both at a lunch discussion hosted by the CSL. Deb Denome, recent winner of the Canandaigua Athena award was there, but didn’t get too much opportunity to talk with her. Met Steve Melcher who runs Odonata Sanctuary just a few miles away in Mendon.

As I was wandering out of the lunch hall in search of better coffee (organic, free trade is nice, but I needed a good chocolatey French Roast) I ran into Maria Grimaldi, sitting at a table with Mike Kimball of Essex Farm. The topic was raw milk products and Mike’s ingenious way of churning butter using a milk can and a trampoline. I picked out a couple of “edges” running between groups at the conference. There was the age differentiator (”kids today”) and there was the meat / veggie divide. The livestock people were certainly very vocal.

Next up was a session from a Cornell post-doc who’d modelled New York’s ability (or not) to feed its population. The concept of a “foodshed” was put out there, and it turns out that Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse are well-positioned to feed ourselves, and of these Rochester had the best relocalization potential for food. New York City, as you may guess, is somewhat less apt to feed itself from nearby land. In all it was estimated that the State could sustainably feed about 5 million, a quarter of our current population.

The results of the Foodshed map are available at http://www.cals.cornell.edu/cals/css/extension/foodshed-mapping.cfm

Finally I ran into Lisa Wujnovich, who’d presented a poetry session earlier. She said that her MFA program was going well and was feeling more and more connected to the writing. Generally, I think she and Mark were happy for the PDC we ran at Mountain Dell and were even perhaps serious about pursuing some of the students’ ideas about labor housing.

The greenhouse still stands, although a little worse for wear as we had a few inches of heavy snow last week, which popped one of the PVC pipes out of the ridge pole. Nevertheless, it still stands, and I patched it up this morning with a little duct tape. Inside, I’ve got a cold frame set up, giving me theoretically 2-3 extra hardiness zones. On Sunday I planted early purple garlic, so I’m still gardening well into December. I ordered some hardy cold-season greens which I hope to start indoors middle of next month and get set out in the cold frame by March 1. That would essentially create an 11 month growing season for me, rather than the usual 7-8 months.

I wanted to summarize some of the accomplishments for the year as it’s getting to be that time.

• Got my Permaculture certificate
• Started teaching Permaculture
• Sheet mulched and swaled half my garden
• Started seriously composting kitchen scraps
• Set up seed starter area in the basement
• Taught an herb spiral workshop at SWAN
• Pulled out all the heinous yews around the house
• Put in a stone wall around part of the front of the house
• Planned the fence for next year
• Grew decent amounts of lettuce, tomatillos, brocolli and carrots and had tiny, first time successes with apples, strawberries and melons
• Attended the Northeast Permaculture Convergence in July
• Read a lot
• Put up a Moodle with Permaculture course materials
• Cleared out the herb bed to revitalize it next year
• Installed several trees, shrubs, bamboo and added lots of new perennials

So that, I would say, was a pretty good and productive gardening year! Next year: fences, greenhouse, rainwater system, pond or two and CHICKENS!

Another goal is to start up the business side of things, so look for a facelift here at Greenerminds in the next couple of months. And don’t forget about the NOFA-NY conference right here in Rochester, January 23-25.

[UPDATE 12/24]: The greenhouse didn’t last much beyond this date. We’ve had two feet plus of snow since then and the thing collapsed into a plastic, duct tape and PVC heap. So I think I’ve come to the end of the PVC pipe-dream and will be building with wood going forward. I’ll post my designs here once I have something that actually makes it through a season!

A couple of months ago I ran into Scott Donovan of Donovan Orchards at the South Wedge Farmers Market, where he was pushing apples and other goodies from his farm. I was surprised because I mainly knew Scott from seeing him in a tie at work, as part of the Finance department.

That day I bought some fabulous organic Galas, and more recently ordered a bushel of these and a bushel of Jona Golds. I’m not any kind of expert on apple varieties, but I find myself more and more interested. I see apple trees in the landscape, especially overgrown strays by the side of the road. But up until yesterday, I can’t say I even knew really what a bushel of apples looked like. Now I know it’s a fair number of apples.

I decided I wanted to try to store them in the basement, so I did a little research. First, Scott advised me to use the Gala’s first, and that the Jona Golds were better storing apples. My research online suggests that hard, crisp apples store better, and sweeter, mushier varieties less so. I also found out that apples respire ethylene, which will rot potatoes, so don’t store them together.

Originally I was thinking I would store the apples in sand, but further research suggested they should be wrapped in newspaper and stored in boxes that are a bit ventilated, such as cardboard. Another tip is to only store pristinely perfect and unblemished apples, as even small bruises will make them more likely to spoil.

GARDEN UPDATE

I’ve been re-reading Eliot Coleman’s Four Season Harvest, which is totally inspiring. I’m starting to think it is possible to be harvesting cold-season greens in the depth of winter here. I’ve got my cheapo greenhouse up, and as of today, the calendula, collards, parsley, broccoli, and even eucalyptus and lemon verbena are doing fine in there. I harvested some parsley, and had a bite of the root (per Mr. Coleman’s advise) which was a bit like a licorice parsnip. I’m very excited by the idea that I could be sowing spinach, kale and salad greens over the next few weeks. Will they germinate? I’ll let you know how it turns out.

I also found that despite major hard freezes over the last week, the brussels sprouts and broccoli out in the cold zone made a comeback. I was about to tear them out last week, but they looked fine today. I’ve also still got some cilantro, which last year was good through about mid-December. I’m getting a very clear picture of warm and cold areas of the garden, and it looks like the main beds are going to need some overstory trees to cut down on frost. I’ve got a couple of black locust volunteers I plan to move out there in the spring.

We inherited a couple of guinea pigs last month and we’ve finally figured out that they love broccoli stalks as a way to get their substantial vitamin C needs met. This is good, becauses the broccoli I grew this year is about 95% stalk, although I did get decent cuttings off the few that grew. I’ll get them in much earlier next year. When I was a kid and had guinea pigs, I used to hate to clean the cage, but now that I’m composting, I almost look forward to adding weekly home grown animal manures to the mix!

We’ve had a couple really light frosts, but this morning we got the first real one. This was a good excuse for me to go out into the garden and see where the frost boundaries are. In general I only had one area away from the house on the southeast edge of the property that looked like it was much affected.

Later, I went for a walk on the Lehigh Valley trail between Clover St. and Quaker Meeting House Rd. I’ve been taking this walk all summer and it’s been very instructive. The trail cuts through a large marsh behind a beaver dam, and there are tons of interesting birds and plants. Today what I noticed more than anything was the leaves raining down off the softwoods- poplar, aspen, plane, sycamore and willow. Since these fall first, it would be interesting to see if there’s some reason for it, in terms of the layering of the detritus in the A0 soil horizon. I also noticed that the aspen leaves have the ability to twirl off a little bit away from the tree stem in no breeze. Again, I have no idea what this means.

I got to teach some parts of the Water chapter down in Hancock this past weekend, particularly around swales, dams and various drain and ditch types. Andrew did some of the other Water and AJ did Soils. We also interviewed Mark and Lisa of Mountain Dell and two teams started design of their property, which has amazing potential. We also watched the Sep Holzer video which was inspiring. Especially, to me, the polycultures he uses. Also learned from one of the “students” that wrens love cabbage worms.They teach me more than I teach them, that’s for sure.

In preparation for teaching I started using a troubleshooting guide in the Designers Manual used to determine mineral deficiencies in soil from plant problems. It’s becoming clear that I need to add lime and green sand to my site, which appears to leach pretty readily.

Several times at NEPC, reference was made to the book A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander. When I got back to town I went straight to the library to get it. Sadly, it was out, but another book, The Timeless Way of Building was in, and I’m glad for this happy little accident [sic].

The Timeless Way of Building (Volume 1 in the series) lays out, methodically, the difference between a built environment that is alive and one that is dead, what makes it possible to create the living one, that is a shared pattern language, how it is possible that normal people like you and I can build these living environments, what a pattern is, how to recognize one, and how to build a shared language of patterns and combine them in specific methods of design. A Pattern Language (Volume 2 in the series) is then, one attempt to build such a language that has general applicability.

Since Permaculture is all about design and a lot about pattern, I am glad to have stumbled onto these books. Which is not to say that they weren’t explicitly recommended in my PDC, or even by Mollison in the DM- they probably were. But they are both critically important books, IMHO, for Permies everywhere.

Here’s Alexander’s definition of a pattern:

Each pattern is a three-part rule, which expresses a relation between a certain context, a problem, and a solution.
The Timeless Way of Building, p. 247

I believe this is what Dave Jacke was referring to when he said a pattern is a way in which conflicting forces get resolved. This is also another way of restating the Permaculture principle: “the problem is the solution.”

Further, Alexander shows how we can discover these patterns.

1. Pick a kind of a place- entrance, window, garden, tree grove, sidewalk, path, hedge, whatever
2. Look around for good and bad examples of this type of place
3. Try to isolate the property the good ones have in common. This will not be a simple property, like a color or size, but will be a relationship
4. Look at the bad examples and define what the problem is with them
5. Expand the problem with any additional information you may have about it, generalize it. What does the space need to accomplish or solve?
6. Identify specifically the ways that the good patterns resolve this problem
7. Give this pattern a specific name which will clearly identify it

This is a very specific and detailed form of “protracted and thoughtful observation,” and is quite similar to the ways both Mollison and Toby Hemenway suggest to identify guilds. Zone and Sector analysis is very good at quickly locating components in an overall site, in a general way. Alexander’s method seems to me much more definitive when you get down to the details of where to place the actual greenhouse, swales, paths, compost bin, chicken coop and so on in relation to each other and to existing components, within or across any zone/sector analysis segment.