Eino Kenttä

William Bronson wrote: I love that plant, but I can't seem to get it to spread in my garden!
On a similar note, last night I was making waffle batter with oat flour and I had to keep adding milk so it could remain liquidy.

Do you have a part of the garden where the soil is a bit compacted? The edge of a path or driveway, maybe? That would be a good place to scatter plantain seeds and see what happens, unlike most plants they seem to really enjoy it...

Not a tree, but... Plantain, Plantago major, has the most mucilaginous seeds I've ever seen. Made "porridge" from them once, and had to keep adding water over and over again, since it just kept on thickening. When gathering the seeds, your hands had better be completely dry, or the seeds will glue themselves to your skin. I suspect this is part of what makes plantain so good at spreading. Anything passing the plant in wet weather gets coated with seeds.

I use the whole egg, but I have read that for extremely dry hair you can use yolk only, and for very greasy only the white. No personal experience with this, though. I always use both.

What about other nut trees? So everything in the walnut family is out, as are hazelnuts, but what about almonds for example? If apricots are okay, almonds probably are as well, no? Smallish trees, should be possible in your climate as far as I can tell. Other possible nut trees, entirely unrelated to those your husband is allergic to, would be the conifers: nut pines, monkey puzzles and Torreya species. Most of those are probably way too big for that precise situation, but there is at least one nut pine species, Pinus pumila, which is a shrub. Its nuts are smaller than those of other species, but it might be worth considering.

For the hair, you could try an egg and a bit of honey, stirred up with a fork until the honey dissolves. Massage the egg/honey goop into dry hair, let it be for ten minutes or so, and then rinse out with cool water (anything between ice cold and lukewarm works fine). I've been using this for the last ten years, give or take, and I find it works really well. Back when using commercial shampoo, I had to wash my hair every two days, more or less, or it became extremely itchy and greasy. It took a while for the scalp to readjust to the absence of industrial degreasing gick, but once it did, it stopped producing so much grease, and now I can easily go a week (sometimes more) between hair washes, with no itch at all.

Morfydd St. Clair wrote:I think that many things are random, but the larger effect follows a pattern.  For the fallen-leaf example, a leaf falls randomly (subject to wind, etc.) but fallen leaves will accumulate, and thus be noticed by us, based on patterns like: a depression in the ground, or an obstacle making the wind suddenly drop.

Another example: evolution is caused by random mutations.  The mutations that are passed on are largely passed on because they make the owner more likely to have viable offspring.  Those advantages follow patterns - brighter plumage->more mates, or malaria resistance->more surviving children.

I think this is very close to it. Order or patterns are an "emergent" feature of the world: all the little chaotic, random, basic events add up, over long time scales, to organised patterns. There's a tendency towards increased complexity.

Quantum mechanics tell us that the smallest-scale events of the universe are random in the truest sense of the word, not just unknown to us because of our limited understanding, but unknowable, to anyone. Try as you might, you can never know exactly both the position and the momentum of the same particle, however fancy your equipment. The more precisely you measure one, the less accurately it's possible to know the other. You can never be certain what a given particle will do in the future, you can just work out the probability that it will be found at such-and-such location at a specified time. And yet, all the little interlinked random events create patterns of incredible complexity.

We can to some extent trace the chain of causality: the wind blew like it did because the contours and albedo of the land were exactly as they were, and because the exact pattern of solar radiation heated the atmosphere in precisely this way. Trace it back farther, though, and you end up on the truly random events: where did this precise pattern of solar radiation come from? Why did precisely this many photons of precisely these frequencies end up exactly there? Here we end up back at the quantum unknowables. Trace the chain the other direction, and the wind that blows the way it does partially because of the contours of the land, will also change those same contours. The leaves will end up in the places they do because of the wind, shifting future winds ever so slightly. Mountains will erode in patterns determined by past weather, and the wind will build massive dunes from the liberated sand, which will in turn affect future weather. Everything affects everything, all things build patterns, and yet, all these patterns are built on an enormous number of truly random events.

Pattern and randomness are not opposites, I think, but two sides of the same thing, the heart of the universe.

Right now 5. Two domestics (Flammentanz and Lichtkönigin Lucia), one horribly thorny unknown wild thing that my brother propagated for us (he's a fan of anything spiky) and two Rosa glauca (suckers from my parents' big wild-collected bush). The glauca makes nice rosehips, good for tea at least, but I'd like to get more good fruiting roses. The partner wants more pretty flowering ones. I see a lot of roses in our future... Luckily our garden is big.

One interesting one: in a place where we've stopped by a couple of times when going to the south of Sweden by car, I found the tallest climbing rose I've ever seen. It scrambles probably five or six meters up along the trunk of a massive oak tree, partially supported by smaller trees around it. The first time I saw it, it was flowering. I remember the flowers as being quite big for a wild rose, very light pink. Two months ago, we stopped there again, and it had a few fruits! Needless to say, I gathered them and put the seeds in the fridge to stratify. Hope some of them take!

Oh, that's nice to hear!

We are growing chestnuts. Very early days yet, none of them has fruited, and given our climate (Norwegian coast) we'll probably have to wait for a decade or so for nuts, but they are growing quite well. As for what species we are growing, we've just collected nuts from trees we came across, mostly without known pedigree. Most are probably C. sativa, some I strongly suspect to be crenata x sativa (one lonely small tree with very big nuts in a garden, with plenty of wild-ish sativa trees in the vicinity) and a couple are either pure dentata or dentata x sativa (nuts from a couple American chestnut trees in an arboretum, in an area where there are wild sativas, although not in the immediate vicinity). We're taking a "landrace" approach to chestnuts, plant them all together and let them cross freely, growing out nuts from the trees that do best in our area (if they ever manage to fruit, that is...) Would like some of the other species too, if we can find them, to increase the genetic diversity further.

I just read something interesting here. Apparently, some surviving trees of C. ozarkensis, the Ozark chinkapin, have been found to have even better resistance to chestnut blight than C. mollissima. Now that would be some nice genetics to have in the population! Can probably just forget finding any on this side of the Atlantic, though...

Ooh, interesting question! And a lot of good answers!

Don't know if this is exclusively applicable to permaculture, and it probably doesn't cover the whole thing, but how about these:
1. Diversity encourages resilience
2. Human beings are part of nature, not outside or above it

Hello Dan,

That list looks like a good starting point. I'm spontaneously thinking of a few things.

-About the American chestnut. Are you planning for pure American, or American/Asian hybrids? I assume you have chestnut blight in your area, so if you're going with pure C. dentata, do you have access to resistant varieties?
-Blueberries do best with quite acidic soil, which some of the other plants on your list might not appreciate so much. Do you have different soil conditions (pH specifically) in different parts of your area?
-As far as I can see, the only nitrogen fixer on the list is the clover. It might be a good idea to add a later-succession nitrogen fixing species, preferably a tree, so that you don't stand entirely without N fixation once your trees start shading out the clover.

Good luck, keep us updated!