L. Johnson

Hey, thanks for your question. Yes, I haven't really been updating this thread or super active on permies for the past three years.

Quite a few sad things have happened in the garden, other wonderful things. I lost a lot of saplings and even the chayote vine seems to perhaps be dying down. Part of this was mismanagement, miscommunication, and differing priorities within my family. I gave up on using my compost pile for edible growies because the feral cats began to make frequent use of it, so now it's just a decomposition pit - frustrating parasite worries!

On the bright side my natsu-gumi tree is flourishing, I have about six blueberry bushes that are producing well, most of the garden has become easily manageable in terms of pruning and cutting the ground cover to make it easy to traverse without fearing being bit by mamushi (vipers). Lately the prunings are perfect for cat deterrents! The mulberry and persimmon trees were tremendous this year (or this past season), our citruses are still going strong.

That's all I can think of at the moment... I'll try to look back and see what else has changed when I have a quiet moment that I feel like procrastinating in.

The garden of my mind is richer than ever : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFzXaFbxDcM
I just recently got a full-time tenure-track academic position and will probably be pursuing a PhD in the near future. Fun things include finding ways to incorporate permaculture principles into my classes. I should write a paper on that... (new seedling potted in the mental greenhouse).

Where I was visiting Wheaton Labs and meeting lots of people from the forums. There were a lot of amazingly energetic young people doing cool things there. Paul was very chill.

Use this thread to share a random dream you had.

I'm bad at visualizing landscapes from text descriptions. Take this suggestion with a grain of salt, but it sounds to my rather novice brain that your situation is a pretty good one for setting up some swales? Geoff Lawton made the swales section of his PDC available for free I think. Something to look into if you haven't and it seems useful.

Ignore me if I'm way off base.

Could you bake them in an oven? You should be able to manage the temperature so that they don't ignite. Should avoid some of the warping problems.

Sounds like an arcology. There's not a lot of information there to make an informed comment about it.

It's hard for me to imagine life in the Arabian peninsula, but I'm assuming the blistering heat and aridity make for considerable design challenges. I can imagine that concentrating population in an planned urban center where efficiencies of scale come into play might pay off even those tremendous expected costs within an imaginable future timeline.

I happened upon this book while doing literature review for my MA studies. I love it. It is an academic book, but it's written in a manner that makes it approachable to general audiences.

I will try to nutshell it: Oral storytelling offers a powerful medium for connecting meaningfully with people and creating space for the listeners to respond. By telling stories of place in those very places the experience of the story may be enhanced in significant ways, especially for encouraging ecological action. These factors are inherently absent in other modalities of narrative like the written word, film, and other recorded works.

There are also countless words of wisdom for storytellers and anyone interested in environmentalism and a sustainable future for humanity.

There is a slightly spiritual or new-age slant to the entire book, but it is balanced somewhat by the author acknowledging the bias and that it may not be something all audiences can swallow, and making an attempt at neutral language and nearly equivalent non-spiritual constructs.

Nanson put a lot of disconnected ideas that I've happened upon myself together into a cohesive text, rich with examples from a life's work as a professional storyteller. More than that he put them together into a meaningful thrust towards a utopian ideal that I can really get behind.

I'd like to do one or more of the following:

- Get back to my journey towards vegetable self-sufficiency.
- Incorporate permaculture and a more future-friendly life outlook into the courses and lessons I teach to a greater degree.
- Convert my cafe space into a permaculture cafe/tavern.

Wow, nice work everyone! 3 more ideas until 101 is reached!

I wonder if there are any concrete ways we can "Study" or "Learn" from sticks. That's where my brain is at these days, but I'm not in my garden much...

Sounds like great permaculture to me. You're cleaning up a polluted area to turn it into a productive one. Cleaning up trash piles isn't fun... it's often tedious for sure, but it is important work. So if it's any consolation, I greatly appreciate your hard work in cleaning up that space!

I've also used magnets for picking up nails in trash piles as mentioned above. It works pretty well! Especially where the litter is loose.

I miss Mexican food... but a guy moved back here after living in the southwest of the US for like 20 years and opened a taco truck! Still I've only had 2 tacos from him since he opened.

Anyway, my answer is tacos. Or just tortilla chips and salsa. I do my own fish tacos sometimes, Japan has good fish!