Permaculture hacks that work

On the idea of hugelkultur beds... here are the results of one of mine that is in it's 3rd year of growth. This hugelkultur bed was built to be a privacy hedgerow, wind block, and native plant habitat area. Ultimately it will also be used to keep deer out though the double fence helps with that right now. I also grow strawberries and vegetables (perennial and annuals along with some native vegetables) along it and I'm planning on adding some evergreen huckleberries to the backside of it (they like shade) and a few other edible plants.

So yes hugelkultur beds can work and can really be abundant and filled with life. The birds and other wildlife love this hedgerow and it's already a great privacy hedgerow and the trees planted along the inside of it are just starting to get above the shrubs that face the neighbors (and the deer!).

Edit: I wanted to add that one of the big changes I made with this hugelkultur bed is I stopped using small material. I only used large logs and rounds and then smaller but still 2-4 inch across branches or logs. I was then very careful to add soil in to all the spaces between the large pieces of wood. The result has been a hugelklutur bed that hasn't settled much at all and also doesn't have any major rodent issues. I feel like the small material just makes it harder to get the spaces filled with soil and don't really add much benefit.

Loved this! Thank you for the laughs this morning!

Joshua Myrvaagnes wrote:Un-planting.

Two versions of this:

Method 1

The problem: let's say you want a black walnut in your landscape, but you don't have any seed, nor the time and patience to plant it, guard it from the enemy (i.e. squirrels), etc.  Plus you just moved in in February, and you don't have a time machine.

Solution: un-plant a walnut somewhere in the yard by means of the squirrels, who planted it last fall or even maybe the fall before.  
Advantages include:
--started from seed, not from transplant--keeping hte taproot, healthier tree overall; will probably grow faster and outperform the tree nursery competition in a few years.  I saw a youthbe video fo an apple tree planted from seed fruiting after only 3 years,  I think, a guy in New Jersey who uses a ton of wood chip mulch, I can't remember the name.  But I bleieve the hype.
--it's not going ot be eaten by hte squirrels, because they approved it.
--it's planted in the right spot (according to the squirrels) so it will probably thrive, relative to if it was planted by a person who thinks they're so smaht and plants it somewhere only to find out there's that one thing they didn't think of
--plausible deniability, if the landlord comes and asks why you planted something in the yard
--maybe the squirrels know something we don't--they've coexisted with walnut trees for millions of yeas, and haven't destroyed them all, so somehow maybe they instinctively invest a few in the future.

Method 2:

You can't really get away with having a mulberry tree on your land, but because you are secretly expecting quail (asking for a friend)...you kinda think you're going to need a heck of a lot of mulberries soon.  And you notice that all of the mulberries currently on the land have been hacked down each year.  Plus you happen to see your landlord in the act one day.  So you're pretty sure he isn't going to let you keep it even if it followed you home.

Solution:
Find a mulberry tree literally 5 blocks away, and unplant it say 10 years ago.  Scoop up as many as you can from the pavement and bring them home for your--er--friend's--quail.  Hypothetically speaking, of course.

Now, some of you willl be saying to me, Joshua, that's just roaging, that's nothing new.  But I want ot point out that I didn't think of it until I happened on that mulberry tree--my thinking was too fragmented or compartmentalized, and our human tendency to overspecialize can blind us to the fact that some tasks are best reassigned over to Foraging.  So, I'm just making the connection.

Hm...what else do I want to unplant?  Well a blight-resistant American chestnut of course, I managed to unplant a few in someone's yard (Chinese crosses) in Western Ma this year, but that's not within walking distance...maybe a cow, some trout ponds, a theatre, hyperlocalization so we have no susceptibility to plagues, supportive community who give spoons frequently and appreciate my awesome sense of humor, a cacao tree that is naturalized to Massachusetts, unplanting some better thinking [instert politics here] a ways back in our country...
---
For the walnut in our yard, I think I can act as if I planted it there and he'll be cool with that, it is in a proper place for a tree by human standards.  When the pear tree comes down one day, it will be poised to take over its role in the yard, and meanwhile it gets to be under the pear's wing.  THe walnut doesnt' drop mulberries on people's cars, just giant green blobs of hail that don't attract rats...I think they only ink you if you get them angry or crush them, so there's plenty of time to put up some kind of a garage over that area, decades really.  By that time I may have convinced the landlord that it's in his interests.  I think he's amenable, it's just these things take time.

Our friend, Dr. Redhawk talks a lot about using coffee ground.  I know they work at building soil!

He also talks about using them to get rid of ants.

Today I am working on keeping ants out of my potato bed.  I feel that this solution is going to work for me, too.

Ants decided my potato bed would make a nice home.

I went back to the house and got my bucket of coffee grounds.  I sprinkle the ground where ever I saw an ant.  

Now, I can see they not like coffee ground.  They were running up the garden hose and abruptly turned and ran away.

I put a trail of coffee grounds all around the sides of the bed and all along the garden hose and sprinkler. And on the ground where it looked like they were climbing into the bed.

I may have already posted this, but just in case...this one is called "The Permaculture Flashlight Feature on your Smartphone"

When this is useful: if you need to see down a well, a stove riser, a pit in the ground, or into a dark area maybe under some plants during the daytime.

So, almost anyone nowadays can get access to a smartphone.  Maybe not a signal, maybe not a working phone, but you don't need either of those things to use the Permaculture Feature.  Just download it directly from the sun, and install by angling your cell phone so the screen reflects the sunlight into the dark place you're trying to see.  You should notice a spot moving around as you waggle your phone around, that's where it's shining.  

Works MUCH better on a bright day than the standard cell phone flashlight feature.

Cloudy day? you may need to try again when you can get a "signal."  This permaculture feature automatically downloads when your sun signal becomes available again; however notifications will not be made, you'll have to notice that the sun has come out yourself.  Meantime, you may want to default to the standard (high-tech) cell phone flashlight feature, since it's cloudy.

On a mildly cloudy day it may work better to use a real mirror, or a curved concave mirror if you have one of those.  Or superman eyes.

How this works: the sun is actually a gigantic nuclear fusion reactor.  

Warning, Permaculture sun flashlight app may cause blindness, fire, or locusts.  Probably not locusts, but legal disclaimers have to cover all the bases.  Avoid shining the light directly into your eyes or onto dry grass or tumbleweeds at the edge of a field of dry wood, grain stalks, or dynamite.  

I’m sorry, what is “un-planting”? It sounds really cool, but the way it’s talked about doesn’t give me any clues as to what it actually is.

Here is a simple hack for all the permies with smaller size properties.  A lot of people become new gardeners and new permies over here in Europe lately and often they have single standing houses in rural areas without a lot of acreage. And the garden is coming from mainly having a lawn, where kids can play soccer and we hold bbq etc.

So when you want to start gardening beds or you want to extend your gardening plots you are subsequently confronted with overturning the grass by digging it up and extending your gardening beds. But how to make this quickly usuable land for vegetables.

First consideration : Timing !
Of course the easiest time to do that is just before winter. You plan your extension for the next year. You dig it up - I suggest the dutch method - and you leave the overturned grass sods over the winter and it will already decompose properly.

BUT -- here is the hack.. this also works in early spring!

Step 1 : Over fall and winter, you collect all larger cardboard pieces you can get your hands on. From a box, christmas present delivery, from a neighbour. All works, as long as they are large pieces of cardboard which can cover some substantial ground.  
Preferably , without any , or at least limited print (color chemicals getting into the soil)
Step 2 : very early spiring, when the soil has no frost anymore, you dig your extension and overturn the sods.
Step 3 : Cover it with cardboard, and weigh it down with ,rocks or whatever you got that is heavy.
Step 4 : Let it sit like that in all weather for about 2 months. Nature will do its magic with heat, cold and rain. The grass and unwanted plants have decomposed, the dirt has nicely crumbled
Step 5 : Rework the dirt and start planting.

Variation for being even faster with planting:

Once you have the cardboard on the turned over grass sods of your extension, pile mother earth and good  compost on it about 10 inches high.
Plant directly into that soil.
The cardboard will protect the area from getting filled with all kinds of grass and weed from below, the new plants can grow, they get nutrition from the fiber in the cardboard. And over time, through rain and heat, the cardboard simply dissolves into the ground.

In the end..it is just wood

I used it every now and then and it is a really easy method. Your kids are all grown up, or left the house, you do not need that huge playing area anymore.. this is a quick way to turn it into another part of your overall permaculture ecosystem.

Started reading this and see early entries about aerating water.

If I needed to, I do this.

It is multi-purpose - aerate water, stir laundry, make compost tea, wash soil to separate
clay and sand, . . .  nobody at the laundry thread watched this. I am disappointed.



Only one moving part.

Only one hand needed.

No batteries required.

Just give it a few punps  whenever you pass by.

Paul's concerns about using cardboard:

https://permies.com/t/33167/composting/Pauls-opinion-cardboard-compost

https://permies.com/t/2157/concerns-cardboard-newspaper-mulch

https://permies.com/t/243055/Cardboard-Good-Bad-Permie

I imagine you get this all the time, but I can’t help it notice that you have “lye” in your last name and you posted on a laundry thread!!!

I like that there’s something with just one moving part. I will circle back to this at some point.

Edward Lye wrote:Started reading this and see early entries about aerating water.

If I needed to, I do this.

It is multi-purpose - aerate water, stir laundry, make compost tea, wash soil to separate
clay and sand, . . .  nobody at the laundry thread watched this. I am disappointed.

Only one moving part.

Only one hand needed.

No batteries required.

Just give it a few punps  whenever you pass by.

I leaned some shutters against the window to my basement, to block out light, and attach a blanket with some pushpins to the door, which has a big window, so that there isn’t a whole bunch of sunlight heating up my basement in the summer.

I’d estimate that this reduces the heating of it by about 2000 W for three hours per day, so 6000 W hours of heat that I did not want. My basement is a nice and cool 50°F, and want it to stay that way.

Downside, the shutters have lead paint on them, I couldn’t think of a way to deal with that, and plastic seemed like it was even worse in a way. There’s already plenty of lead paint that has entered the soil by that wall anyway.

The blanket is out of possible rain, all, and mostly out of the wind, and I pinned the bottom up with some staples that were handy so that it wouldn’t drag and get caught in the bottom when you close the door.

This is very Yankee engineering, am open to thoughts, or pointing out where the longterm failure points are!

Joshua Myrvaagnes wrote: Downside, the shutters have lead paint on them, I couldn’t think of a way to deal with that ...

If sunflowers grow in your ecosystem, they have a proven track record of taking up lead out of soil. However, it means that in the fall, you need to cut them down and take them to a safe land-fill, so the lead can't re-enter the built environment. I would try to cut them down before the seeds ripen so birds don't eat them.