Dave de Basque

I think we need to adopt a different frame of mind about these problems.

We've spent a century or two building up a whole society based on short-term thinking (booting the problem to the next generation, i.e. now), enormous scale (sexy and powerful at the beginning but bringing equally enormous problems over time), and concentration -- of wealth, of water, of topsoil, of information systems, of human population, etc.

We are collectively driven to these unsustainable solutions, and because someone finds them economically "efficient" at a given moment we keep on taking this course. Even though the time of reckoning has already arrived, and we are trying to solve the problems created over the last 50 or 100 years with dwindling natural resources, grandiose decaying infrastructure, and decreased knowledge of natural systems as humans are now mostly urbanites who get our information via TikTok rather than our own eyes and hands.

I sometimes think of the mentality of many (or all?) groups of North American Indians by way of contrast. The "seven generations" principle of the Iroquois, the plains Indians carefully managing how many buffalo they harvested at a time in order to keep the herds bountiful, and many more examples. Perhaps because they didn't have a boss worried about quarterly profits telling them what to do and they didn't keep GDP statistics, they made normal, sane decisions that seemed to reflect a deep knowledge of how nature actually works, and complete respect and care for future generations.  They were investing in nature rather than mining it for short-term personal gain or grand visions of empire.

Permaculture, for me, is a way of looking at whole systems and infusing a bit of the spirit of wisdom and sanity of many indigenous cultures into our Western tech-centered mentality. "How does nature solve this problem?" is a great question.

Phil makes a very good point. With people on the land, and being sensitive to it, they can restore water cycles, recharge springs and aquifers, green the desert, restore clear-cut rainforest, etc.

I think in the end we'll have to change our way of thinking and our way of life. Eventually we will need loads of people all over the land taking responsibility for managing their little bit of nature with a view to restoring working natural systems rather than trying to tweak the problematic infrastructure that our old way of thinking created. That's what permaculture thinking has brought me to think, anyway.

For small-scale systems, where possible it's good to design in a de-silting pond or two on the way into a water storage pond. They can be relatively small and dredged frequently, using the fertile topsoil they contain on your farmland. A big dam I wouldn't know what to do with, there are so many big-industrial problems rolled into that dilemma.

I watch the top video and think, what to do with all the glyphosate and other toxic gick in that silt, even if you dredge it? I don't know and personally I'd rather work on creating practical alternatives to that whole dysfuctional system.

I'm going to be experimenting with living mulch this year in my "balcony food forest" and would appreciate feedback.

I want this thread to be useful for lots of people, not just for me, so if you have comments that don't apply to my situation but might apply to other people, please go ahead.

I was inspired a few years ago by a video from the UK of someone who planted a food forest with loads of different berries among other things, and used strawberries as a living mulch throughout. That accidentally led them to set up a side business with organic jams. Can't find that video now, but here is a similar one.



My main goal with living mulch is to retain moisture in the soil and protect from the blazing sun. Also, obviously, be nice to the main crop. Strawberries have the advantage of being perennial too, so no need to replant annually. And then there's the "stacking fuctions" bonus too... strawberries! The main crop I care about is tomatoes, and the main problem with tomatoes here is late blight (phytophthora infestans), so air circulation as fungus prevention is key.

My situation: I'm growing in grow bags and small planters on a long, narrow southish-facing urban balcony that gets blazing hot in the summer. I have zero problem with snails and slugs, which is a new situation for me! The soil is bagged stuff I mixed myself. A big problem for me is evaporation. The smallish planters sit directly in the sun and can overheat very quicly if the soil is dry. The big (40L / 10 gal) grow bags are made to allow air permeation which is good to keep the plants from getting root-bound but also allows more evaporation.

One fear: The sun might be too much for the strawberry plants. Though I had some in planters last year and they mostly survived (a few died from rot in rainy periods but it doesn't seem like the sun killed any). We will disappear for a couple of weeks in the summer and someone will come every few days to water plants, but not daily and not thoroughly, just what they're willing to do. Last year it wasn't a disaster.

Any notes from experience on strawberries as living mulch, or any better ideas folks might have, are great. Thank you!

One of the things I love about grape vines is that if I string up a wire in any direction, the vine (sometimes with a little help) will grow reliably along it and will leaf out and produce shade about 20cm/8" either side of the wire. Would passionflowers or hops do some equivalent of that? I've never had either.

Another question I have is about minimal pruning. I'm wondering if I can get away with doing absolutely none. We're now heading into late winter, and there are still some sickly looking green leaves in protected spots, lots of ratty little branchlets... So far I've just been letting nature take its course. The growth tips look pretty fried all around. I don't know if cutting back a bit would actually stimulate growth or if I am just creating busy work for myself. If my objective is leaf coverage and not fruit.

Thanks everyone for your contributions.

Does anyone have pruning or other advice for grape vines being used for shade, rather than for actual grape production? I mean, I don't mind grapes but my key objective is getting dense branching and lots of leaf cover where they grow. I have a couple of vines I planted last year to prune, and maybe 4 more new ones to add for this coming summer.

Background is that I have a long south-facing balcony that gets blazing hot in the summer. Some areas are protected with awnings and some really can't be due to things protruding from the house. I grow loads of things in planters and grow bags on the balcony.

Last year I started my project to get some shade on the walls of the house that are not protected by awnings. My go-to for this purpose is grapes, as they leaf out during the hot weather and lose their leaves, opening up your views again, in the winter.

I had uneven luck with my plants last year. My new Muscatel vines did fine planted in grow bags by themselves. Three others, two local varieties and a supermarket special, which I planted each in a grow bag with a tomato plant, all died. I think that grapes and tomatoes are bad companions.

Any pruning fertilizing etc. advice from folks to maximize leafing and branching rather than the usual goal of maximizing grape production? Any advice on new varieties or types of varieties to get for the new plants?

I got a load of kiwis in the late fall, and prospects to get more, so I decided to ferment some. I read the same thing -- add a grape leaf to keep them "crispier" (maybe not the right adjective for kiwis but I was hoping for them at least to not turn to mush). They were great and you have to eat them fairly quickly.

For future batches, I harvested a bunch of the last nice grape leaves on my vines, stuffed them into a jar, filled the jar to the brim with spring water + 3.5% unrefined sea salt solution, put a little round of "oven paper" (like wax paper without the wax) on top of them, closed the jar, and let them do their thing. They bubbled a little bit for a while and have been just chilling on the shelf ever since, now I'm going on 3 months. I'm happy with the result so far. No blanching necessary. They seem pretty shelf stable for a ferment.

As far as my location, I'm in a windy, dense, small urban location but close to a river, 100m from managed forest, and more forested mountains all around - I probably don't have as many spores in the air as a homesteader in the middle of a natural forest, but I will have a decent number I would imagine.

When unititated guests come over and I want them to try my fermented treasures, I try to skim the mold off the top of everything before they arrive. Gotta be strategic you know.

There are a lot of reasons that reducing or eliminating plastic interests me: health/avoiding ingesting microplastics, environmental/avoiding spreading toxic gick around, history/didn't people manage without this 100 years ago?, and maximizing self-sufficiency just so we don't all become incapable, helpless consumer blobs, like, can't I make some really nice stuff with the natural materials around me?

But the real reason I posted this now is I'm reading a book (Ecology of Fear by Mike Davis) in light of the latest round of fires that swept through Southern California last month. He pointed out (in 1998) how the skyrocketing use of plastic in construction of everthing from houses to apartment buildings to skyscrapers makes them go up in flames much quicker and billow out loads of very toxic smoke. So it was really the fire aspect of toxic gick that motivated my original post.

Which I mention just in case anyone has anything to say about that.

S. Marshall wrote:

Dave de Basque wrote:…

I love these suggestions!  
I didn’t intend to cover those windows but to cut the cattle panels around them. I did assume that wall may be too high for the dry and tough conditions in my climate, but thought VA creeper may work. I love the idea of trying these other plants and did not know about this database!  I will certainly check this out.

An awning would be great for these windows but we get 80+mph gusts and would hate them to rip off. I use exterior sun shades on those which considerably made a difference keeping our home cooler— with the interior cellular shades up it’s even cooler than before we have the exterior shades). The only problem was the wind, so I secured wires to keep it in place.

I love the idea of simply training vines up wires!

Hey S, glad you like the ideas and definitely do check out the PFAF database — it's a gold mine! Those folks put in a lot of work to help people like us with plant varieties.

I think I need to try to explain myself better as far as what I'm envisioning. So first of all, no it's not a "real" awning, it's just leafy vines trained to work like a real awning. I have started to do that on the south-facing wall of my flat which also gets real toasty in the summertime. And where we also get some pretty brutal windstorms a few times a year that send anything that is not weighed down flying and rip any real awnings that anyone left open to shreds. The grape vines last year suffered in the windstorms but survived, so they seem a lot stronger than a "real" awning.

What I would do to build what I'm thinking of is set a series of metal posts in concrete in three rows. One parallel to the SE side of your house and continuing that side towards where you took the second photo from. The height would be the height of the bottom of your roof at that side or a bit lower. The second row of posts would go in the middle of your SW wall, starting from the peak of your roof, and up to the height (or almost) of the peak. The third row would sit on your deck and go up to the height (or almost) of the edge of the roof there, and parallel to the other two rows. Anchored in maybe a concrete block or something and braced maybe against the railing.

So I would run sturdy wires through the tops of the posts, following your roofline, maybe a bit lower than your actual roof. I think you'll need wires about 30cm/1ft max. apart to get good leaf coverage. If you can find a way to get a few cross wires going, especially on the diagonal 45-degree-ish, the way the vine's shoots will be growing, that will enhance coverage.

This will make kind of a "tunnel" of green that will be as if your roof and the sides of your house extended further. How far is up to you. In Denver at the very end of summer (~Sept 20) and at 4pm, the sun will be at 22°, so that is possibly the lowest sun angle you'll want to protect against. Run a line from the lowest place on your building you need shaded, out at 22°, and that should be the end of your "tunnel." To simplify a bit. I don't know if I'm explaining myself so that you can see what I'm seeing, but hopefully.

Run grapes (or whatever vine you settle on) up those wires and sit back and relax. It might take 2 years for them to grow long enough to get full coverage up at the peak. Make sure you get a sturdy vine like a grape that won't collapse back on itself as it grows uphill at the angle of your roof.

This is just my theory by the way, I have not trained grapes to crawl up a bare wire at a steep angle like the angle of your roof, but my instincts say this will work fine, especially if you can get a few crosswires going somehow. I don't want to be on that ladder personally with the terrain you've got, but maybe there's something a bit hillbilly style that you can rig up throwing a spool of thinner wire over the main wires once they're set up... those kind of things are above my pay grade though, it's just an idea.

Emmett Ray wrote:
I lived in a few different places in Europe and absolutely loved it.  The natural beauty and the people were always my favorite things about everywhere I've ever lived.  But, the laws in Europe?  So many of them seem to be ridiculous for the sake of being ridiculous and restricting.  Centuries of structures still stand today that weren't built with a single piece of plastic in them.  How in tarnation did the world survive for thousands of years without current building scams, I mean regulations?!

I hope you'll update us on what you find out.  I'd be interested to know.

Hey Emmett, I wish you the best in your natural building quest! Yes Europe is great on a lot of levels. I even appreciate some of the laws. For instance, I live in a pretty densely populated, mountainous rural area. You look at the surrounding mountains and you see forest. And old stone farmhouses dot the landscape in areas where there was some minimal sunny, arable land. If you want to build a new house in the mountains, the answer is no. Renovate an old farmhouse, OK, clear a new area and build, no. It really keeps urban sprawl down and makes the towns compact and lively.

However, OTOH, yes, Euro bureaucracy on a lot of levels has a very high frustration factor. A lot of what they want to regulate is a good idea on some level, as humans left to our own devices often go wild and rain on everybody else's parade without a second thought, but it's often done in a way that's loaded with Catch-22's, unclear and roundabout procedures, slowwww decisionmaking, and of course the first answer to everything is normally "no." Definitely hostile to innovation and heavily favoring doing the same-old, same-old and going through established channels for everything. Personally, I'll take it though, if it's my tradeoff for a beautiful landscape, towns that are nice, prosperous and interesting, and a cohesive society where people know how to get along with each other.

Matt McSpadden wrote:Maybe, but it would be very hard and very expensive to do.

There are vintage electrical companies that still sell cloth covered wire. You could use metal boxes. I suspect there may be some ceramic outlets available somewhere... though I have not found any for US plugs. Most outlets use plastic now.

I think it would be nearly impossible to create a system of running water in a house that does not use plastic. It is still ok to use copper pipes for the interior. Steel pipes for drains. But you are going to have a very limited selection for faucets and fixtures... almost all use plastic. The biggest issue is in the well. It would be nearly impossible to get a non-plastic pipe down a deep well. And most well pumps probably contain plastic as well. (and I'm not sure cloth covered wires would stand up to sitting in water to run the pump). If you had a shallow hand pump well... perhaps. But the pressure tank uses plastic... and without it, you would need to setup some sort of gravity feed system for running water. And most of those tanks are plastic. Maybe with the right shallow water hand pump, metal tank, with gravity feed through copper pipes and industrial faucets... maybe?

I don't like plastic, and I seek to reduce the usage where I can. But it often means I have to do things differently than I am used to.

Thanks Matt for the thoughtful reply. So, in minimizing plastic but working in the real world, not getting too wildly impractical, in what areas do you really think that eliminating plastic altogether is impossible or super-impractical? I'm just wondering what you yourself would advise to a friend or client.

Just wondering, in places that have the usual "modern" building codes, if it's possible to build to code plastic free, for all the reasons a person might want to do that.

I'm mainly thinking of electrical wiring and pipes. Is there any such thing anymore as electrical wires coated in anything but plastic?

And as far as pipes, I have heard locally (though I don't follow these things closely) that for a lot of uses here, in the code, copper and other metal piping is no longer acceptable and plastic is mandatory.

Can anyone educate me? I realize building codes vary hugely from location to location, but anywhere in the highly regulated consumerist world will do. I just want to hear what's possible in this respect.