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.

Overview

Recent discussions on The Oil Drum and elsewhere have thrown the question of sustainability into stark relief. What is sustainability? What makes one thing or system sustainable and another not so? Is there a framework or model for comparing relative sustainability? How do we measure and account for all aspects of sustainable systems?

Permaculture offers a set of specific approaches to these questions, although in some cases more detail is needed. For example, the need to perform “careful energy accounting” is recommended (if not required) without any real guidance as to how one would actually go about this. Holmgren and Mollison seem to agree that Howard Odum’s emergy approach to this issue is the best available tool, but even Holmgren admits to never having learned it.

My goal in this article is to sketch out some of the issues that play into a more comprehensive and detailed approach to sustainability, starting from Permaculture approaches with which I’m familiar.

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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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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.

I got word yesterday that plant tests sent to Cornell Cooperative Extension from our Brighton Community Garden showed positive for Late Blight in tomatoes. Late Blight became an ongoing topic of discussion over the weekend as I taught the second module of the PDC with my friend Kai. Friday I was on the phone to David from Providence and he asked how the weather was up here in Rochester, meaning “has it hit yet?” Same day, the NYTimes had an article on the blight.

Kai told me the Late Blight was the same fungus that wiped out the potato crop during the Irish Potato Famine. Michael Pollan’s book Botany of Desire goes into some detail about this. Apparently the Irish discovered that potato and cow’s milk formed a complete protein, and were able to operate this agriculture “under the radar” of British rule. Potatoes were looked at as somehow beneath Europeans, at the time, and were cited as evidence that the Irish were an inferior race and culture.

In doing my research on a theory of localized economics, I’ve started reading Jane Jacobs, and there’s a Potato Famine connection there as well. The British were successful in Ireland, in a way they weren’t successful in the American colonies, in preventing the emergence of a network of cities. Such a network, according to Jacobs, is the basis for dynamic city growth, and therefore national economic dynamism. According to Jacobs, there were no effective ports, replacement crops, or replacement industries or trades that could have absorbed the shock of the crop failure. The Irish economy of the time was anything but resilient.

Back at the PDC, we had a discussion going about what resilience is. This is one of the central tenets of both permaculture and Transition, that we should build resilient systems. But what excactly does that mean? I read from Odum and Barrett’s Fundamentals of Ecology on two types of stability. Resistance stability means the ability of the system to resist external shocks. Meanwhile, resilient stability means the ability of the system to absorb and recover from such shocks. These two modes appear to be mutually exclusive from an ecological point of view.

From this it emerges that the concepts of stability and resilience are quite different. A piece of glass is quite stable- some windows in my house probably date to its construction in 1902. Yet an external shock could easily shatter the glass, and broken glass is pretty hard to piece back together into a window. At least it requires significant energy input as heat and full remanufacturing process as well as purification. On the other hand a piece of raw dough or a bucket of “Slime” is resilient but not stable. I can mash it all day with my hands or whatever and it maintains its integrity, without the ability to have a stable shape.

As the debate raged around the web this weekend over Sharon Astyk’s posts (I & II) on Permaculture and Transition, Rob Hopkins’s response, and a wild flurry of e-mails, I was out planting and harvesting. So were Sharon and Rob, I expect. I guess my response to all that is: “Enough talk- let’s garden.” Every once in a while its good for me to review just what I’ve been doing when.

I got the first head of broccoli and a handful-a-day of snap and snow peas added up to a stirfry. I’ve got scallions, the garlic are about a month away, the strawberries are over, the black caps are coming in and sweetening. Been harvesting lettuce for about three weeks, and will have chard in the next couple of weeks.

Here’s what I planted. First of all, we made a giant run to the nursery and got a potentilla, gaillardia and a bunch of annual flowers (black violets, spoon flower, zinnia, marigolds, asters) for pots on the porch, and herbs to fill in: basil, rosemary, oregano, lemon verbena, pineapple sage, hyssop, a pink-yellow yarrow, shasta daisy and pennyroyal. All these were planted around Friday.

I’ve had much better success this year starting vegetables from seed, which I attribute to using my own leaf compost, sand and peat mix, rather than sterile potting soil. I’ve had no damping off to speak of, and good root growth. With the exception of shallots, everything has transplanted well. So here’s the progress on seed starts I got in the ground this weekend:

• 6 thai basil
• 3 red cabbage
• 6 brussels sprouts
• 6 cauliflower
• 8-10 green chard
• 10-15 lacinato kale
• 3-5 chamomile
• 1 cucumber
• 2 musk melon
• 10 morning glories
• 1 crookneck
• 2 zucchini
• 4 winter squash (blue, lakota, buttercup)
• 1 pumpkin

I also managed to get in a stake-and-string system for the pole beans and put bricks around the center bed. I also cleaned out the garage, cooked dinner, took the kids to fireworks, and did some reading even.

My sad little failures include now four attempts to transplant some thorny locusts out of the front foundation planting bed to the back yard. I’m curious, in fact, how they got to the front bed in the first place. They don’t seem to be like the other locusts on my property- the leaves are more rounded like a black locust. My working theory is the cardinal who lives part time in the spruce deposited them there, but I have no proof.

As I was giving a talk last Tuesday night, someone was asking about weeds, and I instinctively said that I don’t much like weeding and don’t pull many weeds. My neighbor came over later in the weekend and remarked on my fine crop of dandelions. I said, well yes- they are recycling calcium. Dandelions, plantains and thistles all accumulate nutrients from sublayers of the soil and deposit them at the topsoil layer. This must be a characteristic of opportunistic pioneers and many weeds. I like my weeds.

I’ve been reading some fairly disturbing reviews of the “Food Safety Bill” HR 2749, and wrote this morning to my Congressman, Eric Massa:

Hi Congressman Massa,

I am writing to voice my concern over sections of HR 2749, which appears to be an attempt on the part of large businesses to further lock up and control our food system in the name of safety. I’d be happy to see a bill that actually addressed safety concerns many of us have over our food: end to factory feed lots, rational livestock sewage management, regulation of manipulation of corn and food commodity prices, regulation of anti-biotics use in large feedlots and so on. However, this bill appears to target small and organic growers’ practices without in any way addressing these large concerns.

As an agricultural district, the Fighting 29th is home to many small farms, organic growers and processors, CSAs and home gardens that would likely be affected by the contents of this bill. These small farms and gardens will be critical to our food system in coming years as industrial farming’s problems mount up. These problems include those listed above, and also include rising energy prices, dead, eroded soil, crumbling delivery systems and other issues.

I believe this bill is now in committee negotiations and we have not seen the final text. However, based on what has been released so far, I strongly urge you to use your vote both in committee and on the floor to keep this burden off the back of small growers, organic farmers and home gardeners here in NY-29.

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.