Marvin Warren

Apologies if this isn't the right forum/heading for this subject, this was just a best guess.

Here's the situation:
Working with a client who wants to build a house on an 8.5-acre wooded parcel. Catskill mountains, New York, zone 6a, 42 degrees N. The parcel they purchased is second- or third-growth forest with some 100-year-old hardwoods - mostly oak and red maple - pine and hemlock. There are some understory species, like trout lily, that we'd like to preserve. Their budget is limited, and they have no idea what they're doing, so my goal is just to guide them into better decisions. They want to grow food, have a teenager who wants goats or sheep, etc. Tree canopy height on the land is about 60-70 feet, dominated by hardwoods.

Main question is, how much land needs to be cleared for a reasonable amount of passive solar and a moderate garden area? I'm figuring a minimum 100' radius from the south wall, just for the passive solar, but that doesn't fully take into account the angle of early morning light, and doesn't give much room for a garden (figuring they'll want to grow standard US garden veggies and perennials that need 6-8+ hours of sunlight/day; they're interested in cultivating mushrooms etc, but will want some full-sun crops as well). How do y'all calculate this? Do you just take solar pathfinder readings and mark the trees that need to be cut, or is there a formula that works? Thanks for any and all thoughts.

Hi Hazel, greetings from (downstate) New York - great to see your book getting more attention! I miss getting to learn with you in person, and I'm glad to see you still teaching and honing your craft. I'm making a living, and saving the money our absurd society demands as a precondition to land stewardship,  as a designer and landscaper, thanks in no small part to you.

I already have a copy of the book, so I'm just chiming in to encourage anyone here who doesn't win a copy to go out and get one anyway, it's well worth the investment <3

Donna Lynn wrote:I've tried four different types of Elderberry near my black walnut trees after reading that they were juglone tolerant.  None of them survived more than a few months or so.   I read that tomatoes and peppers were tolerant, so I tried several of those one year.  Only one hot pepper plant (Anaheim) did well enough to harvest a handful of fruit from.  I got one small ripe tomato off a stunted plant, but that was it.  Most of them got decent sun, at least half day.  The hot pepper that fruited was on the south end and got the most sun out of that group.

I'm surprised by all of this. Both that the elderberries failed, and that you heard that nightshades are juglone tolerant - they're at the top of every list I've ever seen for juglone susceptibility. I wonder what other conditions might have led to the elderberries' demise; I've got a red one growing in the shade of an enormous walnut tree at a client's place, and if it weren't for the deer it would be enormous by now.

Donna Lynn wrote:I need a fruiting or edible groundcover for that area.   Would love to have cranberries or wintergreen, but not sure whether they are tolerant.

I wouldn't bother with cranberries or wintergreen; not only have I not heard of or seen their having any tolerance, they both like highly acidic conditions that you're not likely to see around a walnut. I'd recommend  Fragaria vesca, woodland strawberry as a groundcover and/or gooseberries and possibly goumi in the shrub layer for fruit.

Also, in the original post, when you say sorrel, do you mean Rumex or Oxalis (or both)?

Love this thread! Already updated my database with a couple I was uncertain of/hadn't considered.

I've sort of carved a niche out for myself as the local juglone expert, and in the process I've gained a lot of firsthand experience with our lovely native walnuts. Here's what I've personally tried  and witnessed so far that I haven't seen already listed:
-Allium cernuum
-Asarum canadense
-Chrysogonum virginianum
-Cimicifuga
-Clayonia virginica
-Dicentra
-Diospyros (also of note: the authors of Nut Growing Ontario Style claim that persimmons ripen two weeks earlier under the influence of juglone. Cannot comment on the veracity of this claim but very interesting to a northern grower like me)
-Fragaria vesca
-Geranium maculatum
-Hamamelis
-Helianthus tuberosus
-Lobelia
-Lonicera sempervirens
-Matteuccia struthiopteris
-Mertensia virginica
-Monarda
-Philidelphus
-Polygonatum
-Ribes
-Rosa setigera (so far not thriving, but surviving well)
-Rubus odoratus
-Sambucus
-Smilacina racemosa
-Solidago
-Symphiotrichum
-Stellaria media
-Tiarella cordifolia
-Ulmus rubra
-Viola

I recognize that not all of these are universally considered 'permaculture plants', but they all have their uses, whether food, medicine, groundcover, early-season nectar, etc.
Also, where's this wiki? And in the original post, when you say sorrel, do you mean Rumex or Oxalis (or both)?

Hello Kate!

Having not yet read the book, I'm curious about the cooking methods: woodstove, solar-electric, biogas? I've run up against limitations of all three, even with bridging technologies like hay-box cookers. Curious to hear what you've come up with, and excited to eventually get off the propane cycle.

Thanks for all the thought you put into this volume, and for taking the time to make it available,
Marvin

Mike Haasl wrote:
2. Why not keep client records?  Go for it but in PEP we shy away from documentation tasks preferring action tasks.

My point was largely that you do require documentation, via the journal, photos, etc, and that it's not in a very efficient or intuitive fashion. My actions are growing, propagating, wildcrafting, making preparations, and treating people; you want me to document that to get credit, which I understand, but I'm trying to see whether the system can be made more efficient/intuitive, especially for someone who isn't just starting out, and in the ways that herbalists actually treat people, which is often as a whole person rather than as just a symptom or a disease state. Even for distinct ailments, most of the time all I have is the client's word to offer as proof that I treated the condition, for instance, my giving skullcap, pedicularis, and black cohosh to my housemate when she was suffering from severe headache and neck pain. It helped, but you really only have my word to go on that, although my client notes are eventually going to be submitted to the American Herbalists Guild, for what that's worth.

You're welcome to ignore all this, of course, but I am essentially offering free labor here to help make this a more useful process.

I'm thinking about going for this, but honestly it seems like a lot of redundant work for someone who's been a student for ~20 years and practicing with clients for 5. For instance:
-If one has dried an herb for tea, why take pictures of the infusions/decoctions as well? Maybe for the first one, just to prove one has the concept down, but after that it just seems repetitive and Instagrammy rather than an effective documentation. Why not just keep client records? After all, it's wasteful to make infusions without an intended recipient, unless it's a nutritional preparation like nettles that one can drink nearly any time.
-What kind of quality-control is going into these journal entries? I already saw someone describe mugwort as a sleep aid in this thread, which is a pretty big misrepresentation (it increases the intensity of dreams, which could be seen as a benefit or detriment), and a lot of the information readily available to people is vague and treats nearly every herb as a panacea, rather than assessing them for their strong points with clinical data to back it up; while I understand the value of documentation, I'm more concerned with quality information than proof that someone can write notes (this is also a somewhat ableist way of prioritizing, speaking as someone with a neurodivergent brain). Personally,  I don't have an herbal journal, but I do have a class notebook, many reference books, and pubmed (okay, actually scihub). I take classes only with clinical herbalists with significant experience, and ask questions when I get conflicting information. If I get bored in the wintertime, I *could* crib from Thomas Easley's Modern Herbal Dispensatory, but all that would prove would be that I can copy things down. I'm not saying I'll do that, just trying to point out the need for a different approach here, possibly.
-My apothecary has about 50 different tinctures in it, almost all wildcrafted or grown myself. Do you want me to spam y'all with photos of each jar/label? Each in a different thread? Same for all of my dried herbs? Is there a place where the solar dehydrator I'm building this summer should go?
-my clinic notes are usually a page long for my first session, and grow from there, and I don't think I could ever say for certain that what I offered was what caused the change. I can offer strong correlation, but not causation (sorry Watson). Should I post my whole file on each person, with the name blurred out? What should those of us who treat people rather than conditions do? Often people come in with layers of issues, and the protocols are working to support overall health, sometimes in an allopathic ('this for that') manner, sometimes in a more whole-person fashion. Is there a place for this kind of treatment in the PEP badge? Shouldn't there be? What about all the people I work with who don't fall under any of the conditions listed? Might it be more useful to list categories of conditions rather than individual ones? Examples might be by body system, acute vs chronic, with subcategories, etc. Also, what are our diagnostic criteria? I've treated three people with endometriosis, only one of whom had had surgical confirmation of lesions. Are we going by western diagnostic criteria, which don't acknowledge a problem until a biopsy is done, or can we allow that someone without health insurance but who has debilitating pain 2 weeks/month probably isn't just making it up? Conversely, what are we doing to filter out people 'curing cancer' that was never diagnosed?
-is there any required reading? Are ethics covered? What are our community standards for ethical wildcrafting?

I'm sure I could come up with more, but I've used up enough of your time already, curious to see what you have to say.

Hey Ellen, which snakeroot did you use in the cherry polyculture? The Eupatorium? The Eryngium? The Aristolochia? Cimicifuga? Polygala?
Not trying to be a pain, actually confused here.
Also, have you heard the rumor that nettles help repel fungal diseases? I can't trace back my source on that, but it seems like it would be a useful quality in our humid northeastern climate.
Thanks!

Welcome, doctor!

A question that's been on my mind lately is the presence of pyrrolizidine alkaloids in several of our favorite herbs: Eupatorium, Tussilago, and Symphytum.

We know that some PA's are toxic, but not all; we know(?) that some of the toxic ones are in Eupatoreum perfoliatum. We also know that people have been using these plants as medicine for at least centuries. How do you balance your use of these plants with the risks associated with toxic alkaloids? Is there a safe level of consumption, such that one could use them short-term without long-term buildup in the liver?

Thanks for offering to do this Q & A and for all of your previous work!