Tristan Vitali

Jay Angler wrote:You know you're a permie when you have a "flat rock" pile. And a "small rock" pile.
My son harvested enough rocks from the flat rock pile to line the inside of the coop run, because we don't want the Mom and Chicks to dig their way out.

Just moved the turkey poults out to the lower pasture yesterday. I was relying of the growth of grasses and forbes to "seal down" the bottom of the fencing, which worked beautifully in all but one tiny spot and their little cornish cross chicken leader found it. He led half of them under and into the upper pasture which hasn't been mowed. They were out there this afternoon screaming for papa, lost in the 3 foot tall grasses with the giant "mean geese" on the prowl.

Poor little guys

Since rocks in the pasture are already a bane of my (and my scythe's) existence, we generally use willow as ground-staples to affix the bottoms of the fences. If allowed to root and stay put for a few years, it slowly becomes a hedgeline of its own entangled in the fencing. Works out quite nicely

paul wheaton wrote:Some of you have reported some server outages.  We are trying to hold things together with duct tape and baling wire for now ...  The funds have been sent for a new server, but it takes a bit of time ...

Pro-tip: pre-2012 bubblegum works well as an insulator for frayed wire, but in our post-apocalyptic world, the heavy metals contamination of oft-used sugar substitutes and the microplastics in everything have reduced its usefulness. This was about the time MacGuyver retired to the wilds of Patagonia in an attempt to keep his knowledge-base pertinent.

Perhaps some spruce sap mixed with crushed up charcoal and some wood ash could work just as well ?  Report your findings here!

And, being serious now, hope the setup and transfer runs smooth. Permies is foundational in this (growing) community of "what box? I don't see a box" thinkers.

Suzette Thib wrote:

Tristan Vitali wrote:

Jay Angler wrote:I...oh, and you really know you're a permie when you have trouble settling on which examples of yourself "complicating things beyond reason" to build soil, enhance biological activity, save yourself work and maintenance later, and reduce future heartache to share on a permies thread ;)

"complicating things beyond reason" hahaha! Wow! Well, then, yes. Someone I know was encouraging me to do what is convenient for me at this stage in life...I took it silently and was later so bewildered! I definitely do things that are not convenient and seem to have a knack for even "complicating things beyond reason!" Glad it isn't just me!

Sometimes, "complicated beyond reason" is just what so-called normal people think when they don't understand the overall plot. If you can do "A" through "J" now and incorporate some of "S" through "W" while you're at it, you can stack a whole lot more work into the time and energy spent then having to do each lettered step, one at a time, eventually arriving at "Z" sometime in your 80s (if you make it that long!).

What's more, all sorts of pests, including those "normal people", will look at what appears to be total chaos, complicated beyond reason, and pass it all by, never understanding the value of what they're seeing. This can only be a huge plus when unscrupulous neighbors or worse come looking to find what you have available on five-finger discount ;)

Us permies appear to be complicated people to others, but really, we're just "systems thinkers" that rely on some very basic principals for everything...worth reposting them whenever one gets the chance:

Observe and interact

Catch and store energy

Obtain a yield

Apply self-regulation & accept feedback

Use & value renewable resources & services

Produce no waste

*Design from patterns to details

*Integrate rather than segregate

*Use small and slow solutions

*Use and value diversity

*Use edges & value the marginal

Creatively use and respond to change

* I believe these are the ones that make us and our actions appear complicated to "normal people"

And the promised video - early July of 2022:

Here's a couple shots from a last week, followed by the labeled version of the second one. The first shot was included in the "hugles" picture with the mulberry(ies) labeled. The pond attracts wild ducks and loons, blue herons and I've even seen osprey fly over a few times, but eventually the idea is to move the ducks and geese to this area.

I plan to thin / clear the forest area around the west side of the pond to convert it to more (treed) pasture, then include it into the pasture fencing scheme, before introducing the ducks to this pond. The area with black locusts, mountain ash and grapes is already being cultivated into a "duck forest" the past couple years and the hope is to include button bush along the southern shore line and aronia / chokeberry along the road / beach interface.

Incredible what a little time doing earthworks does to a landscape, and the biodiversity it brings in is downright explosive. What was once a soggy, unproductive mosquito breeding ground...now a chorus of frog sounds from spring to fall, the breeding ground for countless dragonflies and damselflies, and a foraging ground for bees. Of course, we get food from here, too, and lots of it. The nutrient catchment is only another plus as we use the pond for irrigation, plus we take what seems to be literal tons of biomass from here for use in mulching garden beds each year.

And the effect on extreme temperatures is truly amazing - this pond now helps protect the huglekulture berms from early frosts with massive banks of fog and mist through much of the fall, then the cold air coming off the cold water in spring helps to ensure the apricots, cherries and plums near it don't bloom so early that they lose their flowers to the inevitable late frosts.

A properly planned and built pond can do so much, I can certainly see why the "department of making you sad" try to stop many from building them!

I quickly planted the pond with arrowhead, waterlily and cattails, plus seeded the beach and banks with clover, comfrey, lovage and chicory, among many other things. I have no pictures from 2021 due to the camera difficulties, and have only some video from 2022, which I'll post up once it finishes uploading to vimeo shortly.

I have a only this one picture from October 2023 with the foggy lens issue.

The pond isn't finished, of course - only so many hours I had the machine for. Here's the leftover "landing strip" that still needs to be dug out. I hope to rent a machine again at some point soon, but money is always an issue (as in the lack of money). The "penninsula" to the east of the "landing strip" will be staying and currently has a decent size, but fairly non-productive, mountain ash growing toward the southern end of it. I've also put in grapes here and have planted it with comfrey, lovage, etc.

Once "finished" with the digging, the perch pond certain looked a mess. The water levels were low as I was blessed with fairly dry weather during my "big dig - part deux". This quickly changed as fall approached and the water levels have kept up well since, never dropping even close to these levels in the pictures. The "pit" area in the south-west corner of the pond is still 35+ feet deep and even when the water temperatures warm in the late summer to the 70s, the water down there stays roughly 50*F.

Not knowing how much I'd be able to complete ahead of time, I made sure to get the "outlet" and dam built ASAP, just in case. A controlled outlet is as important, or perhaps even more important, then the water catchment itself, especially here in New England where we can easily get flooding rains for two or three years running.

The outlet runs downhill (of course) among the middle of the pasture area - I already had two Lapins cherry trees planted up along the side of the skid trail that acted as an outflow area from the existing soggy, marshy mess we had, so the outlet became known as "Cherry Stream".

I placed a 4 inch pvc swivel pipe into the dam area and clayed it in. The dam has been built up from where it is in this picture by a couple more feet

Once I rented the excavator and had the blueberry pond and cabin pad fixed, the next big thing was to correct the "perch pond" PITS disaster and start excavating clay for the future cabin build. Here I've built out my access road a bit and began connecting the two "pits", filling the one near the access road with mostly topsoil.