Ludi's permaculture projects

Here's a thread about my proposed and ongoing projects.   

Here's my site plan:



The kitchen garden near the back porch door.  This is about half finished.  I need to dig rocks from the other half and install buried wood beds.  Presently growing Arugula, Fava Beans, Parsley, Garlic, Elephant Garlic, Cilantro, Collards, Beets, Carrots, Sweet Potatoes (just went dormant after a freeze), Tiger Lilies, several kinds of small Onions, Apple trees, Lettuce, Chicory, Sunchokes, Mint, Oregano:



The house rain tank and greywater bed.  The greywater bed grows a small Bamboo plant (could use more water than the laundry provides) and some Canna.  Eventually we hope to plumb the shower to it so the Bamboo will be happier:



The future water garden between the house and the workshop. I hope to have a pond with water plants and maybe some fish, based on what I learn from my aquaponics experiment.  This is a very long term plan because there are many rocks in this area.  The part of the garden not taken up by the pond will be buried wood beds for edibles:



The little aquaponics experiment.  Total system contains about 600 gallons.  I've ordered baby Channel Catfish and Bluegill which I should get in the Spring:





The site of the future Well House, which will be made from rocks and bottles and will contain one of the large tanks.  We plan to install a photovoltaic well pump system.  The Well House is a long-term project.  It will also serve as a cool storage area:



Bottle collection we've been working on for a few years:



The old vegetable garden and orchard which was killed by the drought.  This area is planned for the future Asparagus Farm experiment on the end nearest the viewer and the far end will be an edible Prairie Garden.  Both of these gardens will have buried wood beds.  Fortunately there are no rocks in this area!   :



Not pictured are the large-scale ongoing rainwater harvesting earthworks project and Wildlife Management plan.  The above plan is for the approximately 1 acre "homestead" part of our 20 acres.

We also have some animals; a Border Collie, 3 indoor cats, 2 outdoor cats, 5 sheep, 2 turkeys, and a couple dozen chickens. 

sometime google the bottle house in Copemish Michigan, it has been there since I was a child..it is a couple dozen miles from our house..always fascinated me.

Brenda Groth wrote:
sometime google the bottle house in Copemish Michigan, it has been there since I was a child..it is a couple dozen miles from our house..always fascinated me.

That's amazing! 

Wow!  Tons of stuff going on there!  How do you keep track of it all?  I think that is the one thing that makes me fidgety about the permaculture/homesteading thing.  Once we get out there I know I am going to want to do it all at once...but I know I have to START small and build from there.

I am impressed with what you have going on. 

Thanks!  I'm trying to take the long term view, though I do have a tendency to start more projects than I finish. 

I love to see what others are doing! Thanks for sharing

Nice work. Are you an alcoholic? Haha, geez!

Trying not to be!    It's a few years' accumulation.

Ludi, I have talked to the bartenders at a couple of places I go for coffee (my buddy can't smoke a cigarette in a restaurant) about saving bottles for me when I get closer to time for building.  Just in case you decide you want more light than you have bottles stockpiled ...

Working on the asparagus farm beds:

Will you use the dead orchard for hugelkultur or as a base for climbing plants? I could see the shade being useful for less sun tolerant crops. What will hold moisture for the asparagus beds?

From the last photo it appears that your beds contain wood for moisture retention. A flattish profile would lose less moisture to dry air. Many of the hugelkultur beds I've seen expose to much sidewall to drying winds. I wonder if a membrane could be placed just below the soil level around each bed and sloped toward it? This would suppress all weeds and gather rainfall from a larger area.

It's nice to see the pictures, from what you described in other threads I was anticipating desert like conditions complete with sand dunes and petrified livestock. It looks like there's still hope.

Sometimes it feels like sand dunes and petrified livestock! But I think there is hope. Those dead fruit trees will be cut up and put in the buried wood beds. I'll probably make the beds every so slightly mounded (no more than 1 foot) so when they settle they will be about level with the surrounding ground. I've noticed my other buried wood beds have settled quite a bit.

Looking good Ludi! How much land do you have? I recognize a lot of that vegetation from your pictures.

This is the sort of thread that I'd be interested in seeing more of - people sharing their projects/experiments, successes, and failures. I hope you keep adding to this thread.

Thank you. This thread was inspired by Dale Hodgins' suggestion that we each start a thread about all our permaculture projects.

My husband and I have a total of 20 acres, but the "homestead" part around the house is maybe an acre. I probably won't be able to develop even most of an acre, as I'm a very slow worker! The climate is so erratic here with good years alternating with horrible droughts and catastrophic floods that I've had to completely rethink a lot of my earlier plans, so a lot of work I had done in the past was largely wasted. I've killed so many kinds of plants! But I think I may finally be learning how to grow things here...

Dale, you are like Super Idea Man. You're definitely an inspiration. And other things!

H Ludi Tyler wrote:Dale, you are like Super Idea Man. You're definitely an inspiration. And other things!

If I was to post even half of the ideas running through my head, I'd be locked up for sure.

I remember a couple months ago when I first learned the word hugelkultur and read about it. An hour later I had several reinventions of the practice running through my mind including incorporation with fish ponds, using beavers to chop up the wood, burrying the material in swales in dry climates, using them as windbreaks, putting rock piles beside each one so that snakes can live there and gobble up the rats and mice which are bound to burrow into the beds, and most importantly getting paid thousands of dollars to take other peoples wood waste. It took me two weeks of head scratching and writing to record everything that came to me in that first hour of hugelkultur. Then I went and piled 150 m³ of the material on my property using an excavator to move it all. It wasn't a rash decision. I mulled it over for at least 45 min. before committing.

At this point many of my projects are just talk, but that happened before when I just talked about tearing down a giant hotel by hand and about getting a free house simply by removing it from the site of a new bridge. Those things happened and many of my proposals will happen over time. There's nothing I enjoy more than turning my idle coffeehouse chatter into real tangible accomplishments. The idea I'm most in love with right now is detailed in the thread about "farming urban wastelands." Which I posted in the Homestead section.

Thanks for sharing, looks like lots of fun. You mentioned sheep and turkeys and chickens, how come they're not on your drawing or in your pictures? How are they being connected to your plant systems?

Are there fish in your aquaponics system yet? What kind?

Thanks again

peace and bless

I guess I left them out because I'm not actively working on anything for them right now. I use their poo and waste hay in my garden beds. I do not currently have a good way of integrating them directly into the other systems because of the difficulty of fencing and housing. Poultry housing has to be extremely secure because of predators. Sheep fencing is a pain to install. I'm just the one person doing most of this. 49 year old female person. :p

Only Gambusia, one goldfish and several frogs in the aquaponics right now. I think the fish hatchery will be delivering in the spring.

Well, I think the great benefit of conducting a thread this way will be allowing others to suggest possible connections. For me, the crucial Permaculture principle is Functional Interconnection, and it also tends to be the most challenging. I worked with a system that roosts chickens over an aquaponic pond, it worked well, although they use a removable tray to keep the water from getting overly nutrified which might not work if you have lots of birds. A chicken lagoon might be a good place to experiment with mycofiltration, though. I think either Stropharia or Oysters would be my choice, as both are easy to propagate in non-sterile conditions. The water could then go to plants? Just a thought...

Do you process your wool yourself?

Thanks for sharing!

This is really incredible! For how long now have you been working on this project? Also, I am still learning about permaculture concepts - what is your plan for the bottles?

I like the idea of posting our projects here with hopes that others will have ideas for connecting elements. This is where I am sorely lacking. I love the concept of permaculture, and learning about it has helped me move from "I only want edible plants on my property" to wanting to incorporate wildlife, but in practice, I am still closer to practicing organic gardening than I am to practicing permaculture!

Thank you for the suggestions, oskar. My aquaponics system is far too small to accommodate putting chickens above it, only about 600 gallons. What kind of bed and media would you suggest for mushrooms? Flood and drain? Constant flood? Logs? Wood chips?

I've only done minimal wool processing, just washing prior to sending off to a friend to spin and then to another friend to knit. I wanted to learn how to make felt but realize I'll probably never get around to it.

C, I've been working on this land over the span of about 12 years but not every year, and many years of work were wasted because I was not preparing for this severe drought. Most of my previous ideas have been scrapped.

The plan for the bottles is to use them in constructing the well house.

I have a lot of other smaller projects in mind such as a composting toilet system, a solar cooker (we've tried building a couple with not that great results), a solar dehydrator (my husband built one but we determined it needed to be redesigned so it was retired), and various passive cooling strategies for the house.

I demolished a small tourist complex called the glass Castle and mini golf course. The constructor of this facility failed to give the roof adequate overhang and water got in behind the bottles and rotted out the house. He also used mortar with far too much Portland cement in it. This didn't allow the flexibility needed during the freeze thaw cycles. Any mortar used to encase fragile glass must have enough lime incorporated so that the bottles don't crack.

The inside of some of the structures was quite surreal with all of the different colors and the way light refracts through the bottles.

Good roof overhang, plenty of lime= durable bottle building. Consult a mason on the best mortar mix. Lime is quite caustic so you'll need good gloves. A dust mask is also advisable. -- Happy mucking.

Ludi, do you use the big rainwater tank just for watering the garden or do you use it for house purposes?

Thanks for those tips, Dale.

Rob, the tank next to the house is for emergency potable water. The other tanks are used for emergency, topping off the aquaponics and some irrigation.

So the huge tank is for emergency potable water? What are you doing to treat it so you can drink it? Does it come right from the roof or some other catchment? Thanks!

There's a galvanized metal roof on the porch from which that tank collects water. I bought a Berkey water filter to treat the water in emergencies, but we haven't used it. We did use water from one of the other tanks last winter when the plumbing froze, before the house tank was set up, but we didn't have the filter then so we boiled the water.

Gotcha, Im using a berkey also. Im trying to come up with a system that will collect and treat the water for the entire house.

Re: mycofiltration, I'd suggest chips, that way you'll end up with a mycelial mat to run the water through. I've never tried this so take it with as many grains of salt as you wish...but...I envision perhaps 3-5 tubs (bathtubs, sinks, 1/2 barrels, etc.) raised off the ground, filled with innoculated woodchips. They could either be moved into the water flow (on casters or something?) or the water could be directed through a pipe that can swivel far enough to reach each bed. Then all water flow would be directed to a plant system that could handle whatever nutrient remains. This system would have to be a sort of flood and drain, where you would only let the chickens poop in water sometimes, only flood the mushroom beds when you had adequate water, etc. Just a very rough idea, but I think mushrooms are a very important part of human diets. And I wasn't necessarily suggesting this as a part of your aquaponics, but as a separate system for your chicken coop.

Re: wool, I know a sheep farmer who loves using the dirty/poopy edges of her fleeces for mulch. They hold water in the soil well, and take a long time to break down, might help in your dry conditions. Felt is so simple to make, you really should spend 20 minutes with soap and warm water. To make larger pieces you can just use water and feet on a tarp. There are no tech ways to prepare it for optimum felting but a wool picker should be pretty cheap to buy or make. I'm not sure how you feel about it, but urine was supposedly the first felting agent in mongolia.

Re: bottle building. Is there clay in your soil? Could you use cob instead of cement? Cement and lime are gross, I have friends with some serious lime burn scars.

I would really love to have mushrooms in my aquaponics, as it is an area guaranteed to stay moist enough for them!

I've used some of the wool as mulch.

There's a lot of clay in the subsoil, but I don't know if I can excavate enough to build a structure with. All work is with hand tools.

Something to keep in mind when gathering drinking water from galvanized roofing. I doubt that this applies strongly to you since your water is just for emergency purposes but I searched the net and it turns out too much zinc is bad.--------------- I copied the following which might be of value to anyone thinking of getting all of their water from a galvanized roof. --------Health effects of zinc

Zinc is a trace element that is essential for human health. When people absorb too little zinc they can experience a loss of appetite, decreased sense of taste and smell, slow wound healing and skin sores. Zinc-shortages can even cause birth defects.

Although humans can handle proportionally large concentrations of zinc, too much zinc can still cause eminent health problems, such as stomach cramps, skin irritations, vomiting, nausea and anaemia. Very high levels of zinc can damage the pancreas and disturb the protein metabolism, and cause arteriosclerosis. Extensive exposure to zinc chloride can cause respiratory disorders.

New Zealanders have been collecting drinking water off galvanised iron roofs for generations now. Of course that doesn't mean it's safe though!
Most people have a first-flush diverter, which is recommended for rainwater collection over here. That might rinse off some of the oxidised zinc.

I recall Bill Mollison advises putting limestone in the rain tank which apparently binds metals and renders them less toxic.

with all those projects going on you need lots of beer & wine...looks like fun...I like your greenhouse/aquaponics setup...similar to what I'm planning here, but I'm going for trout since they are easy to get here and are my favorite anyway. Keep us up to date .

I don't envy you the work to come, but there should be great satisfaction from it!

Thank you.

Here's the finished excavation for the central asparagus bed:



Just need to fill with wood.

I'm learning a lot from your thread, as I think your climate and soil conditions come pretty close to mine. Are you planning on planting anything around/among the asparagus beds? Also, what variety of asparagus are you using?

I'm glad the thread is being helpful.

I'm planning to try growing some other plants along with the asparagus, especially those which have proven themselves to be relatively drought tolerant. I think I'll try tomatoes, flat leaf parsley, basil, and maybe a few other things. I'll be growing several varieties of asparagus, the ones I have presently which I plan to relocate to the asparagus farm are (I think) Mary Washington and Purple Passion. I'll probably be using a combination of a few varieties from crowns and others from seed.

Hi Ludi,

What are you plans re mulch? Are you growing some, or can you use the trees? I live in a similar looking dry landscape, but different flora and no drought currently. Looking at your pictures, and the land here, I want to cover everything with mulch (whatever I can get my hands on). We get a very drying wind here, you look more sheltered.

regards,
Rose.