I have a pile with enough sticks and corrugated cardboard to keep it aerated, and enough paper products (napkins, paper towels, kleenex) to keep it uniformly moist. It's on concrete, and has never released any liquid.
I put enough browns on top to keep out the smell. The top three inches dry out in my California climate, so the very top is never the good stuff.
It doesn't run very hot, but chicken bones disapper in a couple months. Not yet sure how quickly the newfangled polylactic acid spoons and forks will go away, but half-inch sticks need six months or so.
Apples and potatoes will get you through, if you have a little bit of butter too.
Potatoes are not quite a complete food, but milk is a nice compliment to them.
You've probably read about what that same upheval did to Cuba, in terms of the food system. It seems they didn't have such strong a traditions of urban gardening or of low-input farming, but they seem to have learned quickly enough.
If you want to bury a water system (to prevent evaporation, say, or to change its thermal properties), two common options are building an overhang or filling it with gravel. People sometimes take measures to prevent sediment or biomass from filling in between the stones, but not always.
A French drain is basically a gravel-filled drainage ditch. What Robert built in the above link has a storage function as well as a re-direction function...if I understand correctly, the idea was to restore the seasonal creek that had run through his property before development, and add a less-seasonal pond to irrigate with, but build (part of) his garden on top of all that.
I would be tempted to use it as a thermal reservoir, too, bringing water and/or air from the gravel bed to a heat exchanger in the house if inside temperatures became uncomfortable. Using air as a working fluid appeals to me, because the whole system could be driven by a solar chimney, which drives air more forcefully when the sun is hot or when the air is particularly dense, i.e. when the house is more likely to need climate control.
I don't know much about this, but would it be worthwhile to start apples from seed, and then graft onto (some of) the saplings that make it?
Especially if you have neighbors who prune apple trees, this would save some money. And it would probably give root stock that is better-suited to the soil, both through selection and through early acclimation.
The Botany of Desire has convinced me that some fruit should be grown from seed, even if almost all of it is only good for cider, to give room for new apple varieties to emerge. I don't fully trust Pollan on technical details, but he says the genetic diversity of seeds, even in industrialized apples, is quite good.
All that I've read says charcoal works best when it's smaller than 1cm, and has been soaked in something nutrient-rich, like urine or nearly-finished compost.
I would not be surprised if worms eat some of the charcoal. It would be interesting to pick through some of the worm castings in a few months, and see if they have helped to incorporate it.
You might make friends with people in the trades, and take scrap/demolition waste off their hands.
Gypsum (drywall) is really good for tomatoes, and as a water sponge. The float valve from a toilet can be used to keep your chicken trough, or a bottom-filled planter's reservoir, full. There are lots of options in this same vein.
Other types of work nearby might also produce things you'd find useful. Arborists are often eager to get rid of scrap wood. I bet the convenience store would be willing to part with coffee grounds and filters.
You might consider making charcoal if you happen upon more dry wood than you can otherwise use. Plans for gasifier stoves built from coffee cans and stove pipes are all over the internet, and most can be adapted to save charcoal after all the wood gas is gone.
This would me more elegant, in my humble opinion, using flour and sourdough starter rather than sugar and active dry yeast. As the instructions mention, it works by emitting CO2 (I think moisture helps, too), should draw other biting insects. And having dead insects in it will eventually attract carrion seekers.
A bat box might also be worth considering, if there's a species that would do well there.
My father gets a free one made of thick plastic sheeting from the county every year, but they're poorly-ventilated. He takes an hour or so with a brace and bit, and widens all their 1/4 inch holes to a 1 inch diameter.
I do OK by mixing small twigs into the pile, so that it has enough strength to hold its own sides vertical (even the occasional overhang). I only turn it every couple of months, though; otherwise this would be too much work.
I am intrigued by the idea of an open, perforated tube down the center of a solid-walled bin, analogous to a Kelly Kettle. I'm not sure they sell these in a tumbling system, but I think that would work well. I've mostly seen them built into ordinary barrels.
I have read that ducks love to pick spent birdshot off the bottom of their habitat, and the incessant rubbing of stones against the shot in their gullet gives these ducks lead poisoning.
Mollison's Design Manual doesn't mention this mineral milling action as one of the outputs of a chicken, but I wonder if it could be useful. Particularly, I wonder if mixing appropriately-sized charcoal pieces into a bird's grit would be worthwhile, and what effect it might have on the bird. I also imagine supplying grit of two different hardnesses, the softer one containing trace minerals needed by the bird and/or the soil, might be a less-laborious method of producing rock flour.
How far do you suppose you'd have to go to find vegetable farmers in a similar climate, to consult with? Are there old people around, who gardened before the green revolution?
I overwatered some lavender, too. Probably overfed it as well. So I guess we're all stupid together.
I have had some really good lavender ice cream.
Wikipedia seems to think za'atar is oregano, though wild hyssop and marjoram are two other candidates.
from Google: Apparently lavender mulch repels insects and molluscs, but lavender plants themselves sometimes die if the soil they grow in is covered in mulch.
3. I read a good pruning book that started by saying the author learned it all by returning to trees he had pruned one, five, fifteen years afterward.
The basics: The shape and extent of a plant is a history of which buds have grown, and how quickly. Hormones flow through the plant, shifting the odds of which bud will grow: inhibiting hormones flow down from higher parts of the plant and are destroyed by sunlight, so highest-up, farthest-out, best-lit buds tend to win. You can sever buds or pick them out to limit the plant's options. Reaching in with a thumbnail early on can keep a tree from wasting nutrients on leaves that won't catch any sun, fruit that would break it in half, or on branches that would throw it off balance or strangle other branches. Plants heal from wounds, but they heal better if the person pruning knows how this happens and what to expect.
1. I have read that cuttings do much better in damp enclosures, and that picking off 2/3 of the leaves serves the same purpose as limiting sun exposure (i.e., reducing moisture loss), but works better.
2. You might consider placing old tires or pallets full of mulch and/or earth (or something similarly cheap and sturdy) to block their way. That will give you some variety of height to work with, and not take much space away from useful gardening. You might even find an arrangement that doesn't block bipeds.
Another thread here lists a free source for the permaculture design manual on-line.
You may want to spend some time talking to the locals about their practices and attitudes. There are probably some very good ideas that haven't got much traction to be found near you, if you ask around for who has tried strange things. I bet it would also help your teaching effort, both by building your reputation as a collector of good methods, and by helping you to build a curriculum that meets students where they are. I've heard from several sources that people tend to surprise you as to what they actually want and need.
Last, I bet you can learn a lot by walking all the erosion channels on the land. I imagine lots of specific places will spring to mind as you read passages about storage and diversion, if you are familiar with what has happened the past several rainy seasons.
Some of them give me the willies, and some of them don't. I've had years of chemistry education and solid training in chemical and radiological safety, and I learn more all the time.
Anything is toxic at some point, even oxygen. Even pure water. Even nitrogen (enough of it is a narcotic!).
Compost microbes can break any bond between C, H, N, O, S, and/or P, unless we're talking pure carbon, which isn't toxic. Compost systems buffer away any pH or redox toxicity. They even handle some heavy metals, like Cr, in respectable quantities (so it's OK to compost leather goods).
The only hair products I can imagine that a compost pile would not break down are mineral pigments and simethicone. The only health problems I'm aware of from siloxanes are mechanical effects from implants (basically blisters from internal rubbing) and toxicity from reactive silanes, which aren't present in cosmetic-grade simethicone. Pills of it (Gas-X, Phasyme) have been taken by huge numbers of people, regularly, for a very long time, without problems.
Long story short, I'm not worried about any but a small class of industrial chemicals making it through the composting process with their toxicity intact.
I don't trust compost to break down halogenated hydrocarbons, like PCBs and dioxins. It can't handle so very much B (which means I go easy on the corrugated cardboard and never add briquette ashes) or Cu (nix on any blue-dyed paper goods that burn with a green flame). And I don't trust it for the nastier heavy metals, like Pb, Hg, As, or Cd.
At a yard sale, I found a book about trace elements in agricultural soil, which showed in tedious detail how high pH and competition form Ca ions would prevent uptake of other metals into roots. It included peer-reviewed studies where lime was effective against lead and mercury contamination, among other heavy metals, as long as enough Cu, Zn, and Fe were added back to keep the plants healthy. But that will only be a back-up method.
>up to five feet and plant in the sides.
Young children will be working here, so the top of the 5-footers would be out of their reach...which could be a good thing. Well worth considering.
Hydrogen weighs more than carbon for a given fuel energy, anything less dense than a box of diapers is un-economical to ship by modern methods, and charcoal for soil is "half-baked" compared to charcoal for fuel.
Yes, atoms of hydrogen are lighter than atoms of carbon, but each one only forms one bond, and the energy available is just the difference between bonds within the fuel and bonds in the combustion products.
Just as whiskey can be a value-dense way of transporting corn to market, charcoal burning removes hydrogen and oxygen, so that a kilogram of coal burns for many more joules than a kilogram of wood. Which was very important before the industrial revolution.
Unfortunately, a fuel-joule of charcoal also has a lot more volume than a fuel-joule of wood, and the comparison is even worse between charcoal and anthracite. That means running a barge or rail car or truck with less weight than it was designed for, and paying more for shipping. (By the way, the reason I mentioned disposable diapers is that they're engineered to be as bulky as possible without increasing shipment expense, because paper pulp is so much cheaper than super-absorbent polymers).
I read somewhere (I think Bungay's Energy, The Biomass Options, Wiley 1981) that the Brazilian coal mines and iron smelters are separated by high enough mountains that plantations of eucalyptus are grown near the smelters and processed into charcoal. I hear it's much better than coal for refining steel, if you can afford it.
The traditional way to burn charcoal, which I hear is dangerous even if done correctly, is to build a bonfire in a pit and bury it as it's burning. There are also lots of wood-gas stove designs on the internet, some of which are designed to produce charcoal. The notion of a lozenge tin can work at larger scales, too: I've heard of using a paint can, and one can even build a large retort. http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Make-some-Charcoal/
Last point: Microbes seem to do better on charcoal that still has some hydrogen, and even oxygen, left in it. People working to re-create traditional terra preta techniques find they do better with incompletely-charred charcoal.
I need to read up on aquaponics. Thankfully, I got a copy of the design manual yesterday. I wonder how evaporation might be kept lower than precipitation, and I imagine the pavement would need some work in order to be water-tight.
Vine crops are almost a foregone conclusion since a fenced yard is mandatory, though I hear growing grapes in this climate isn't trivial. I will definitely look into that.
I'll also look into fungi.com. I imagine any contamination would be old enough that appropriate spores have found their way there already, but I love information.
I think there are plans to break up pavement as well.
I may get a chance to help design a garden for a charter school.
They're using a lot of methods from Waldorf education, and while Waldorf is an intellectual cousin of biodynamic farming, I really don't comprehend alchemical/homeopathic/astrological methods and don't expect them to work for me. The garden is going to have to fit into a small-to-medium plot and into a working-class neighborhood of a large city, which I have heard permaculture can do.
My rough understanding is that biodynamics is to permaculture as Elvish is to Esperanto, so it might be a better fit culturally, too.
I'm wondering what advice you might have.
A little information:
The plot will be in Oakland, CA, where it never snows and doesn't quite rain enough
I have more time to contribute, than money
I can run a compost pile, am good at building/tinkering, and tend to analyze better than I synthesize
I'll likely get access to the property in November, and it might be a community garden until the school opens the following September
The existing soil might be contaminated
Most of the sites being considered are less than a half acre, most have flat terrain, a significant paved area, and existing fences and other structures; I won't know more for months
Craigslist and Freecycle, among other resources, can provide copious local paper, wood chips, fill soil, cordwood, building supplies, furniture, etc. for free pick up, or even with free delivery. Cafes that give spent grounds to a good home and a community seed exchange are among the other prominent resources.
The school will serve families from many different cultures, so parents may offer traditional expertise, and the school will probably appreciate very diverse garden products
My ideas so far:
If the soil is contaminated with heavy metals, lay down broken drywall from demolition sites and/or some other source of lime, and only use the soil above that new, white layer.
Compost any soil where the only contaminant is non-halogenated organic chemicals. I've heard human hair helps balance petroleum in compost, so I might ask some of the local barber shops.
Take delivery of some free wood chips...the company I plan to ask only delivers in 14 yard batches.
If one of the parents knows how to pyrolyze wood safely and in quantity, work with them to make several bushels of charcoal from wood chips and/or cordwood.
Build up raised beds about 3 ft. high to minimize bending over, with cordwood, wood chips, weeds , coffee grounds, charcoal dust, possibly rock flour, outside soil if necessary, finished compost if any is available, and more wood chips.
Plant some winter cover crops, or whatever might be most useful in marginal soil over a northern California winter.
As an engineer, I imagine the kids would enjoy a hand-cranked gravity-fed rolling mill to crush compostables with. I could probably build one from scratch, or adapt it from salvaged equipment, and it shouldn't be too hard to rig it so the crank doesn't turn if the hopper is open.
I'd welcome any advice. The article on hugelkultur was most helpful, as was the forum thread about what to do first on new property.
