s. ayalp

Anne Miller wrote:What did you learn from the Greening the Desert Project?

So many things! I like taking notes, so I ended up with over 60 pages of them. :)

A few things relevant to this post might be:

War! We don't usually take that into consideration when designing new systems. I do account for economic conditions, high inflation, and similar issues since I live in Turkey, but war was definitely not on my list. One thing I learned about war is its lasting impact on people. It creates patterns that continue for generations. For example, when people are displaced from places where their families have lived for generations, animal husbandry can become a backbone of their lives rather than agriculture. It provides food security, a sense of home, and so on. These patterns aren't necessarily limited to war, or even caused by war. I've seen many people who moved to a different culture continue keeping goats, chickens, and other animals. There are many other patterns, too. For example, things that don't require immediate attention (for survival) tend to get neglected, such as garbage management.

For any lasting impact, a bottom-up approach is essential. You can go there, show people how things work, or even create a living, functioning example. But you always need to shape the development around the needs of the community. You can build the biggest swale, turn a desert green, but if that's not what people are asking for, they won't really see it. They'll know it's there, they'll know it works somehow, but they won't truly see its value. It'll just be a temporary green spot in the desert. Apparently love isn't enough. Being part of the community isn't enough. Most importantly, simply showing people what's possible isn't enough. You need to understand and address the burdens and problems they face, remove the barriers that prevent them from seeing the value of what you're doing, and respond to their actual needs if you want the project to last.

I did the towel test. I waited four days for my towel to dry inside the project area. Eventually, I had to take it out to the street, and it dried in less than half an hour! Geoff Lawton clearly demonstrated that permaculture works in one of the harshest environments imaginable.

And so on.

Some things I've experienced and witnessed over the past year have got me thinking.

Whenever we talk about permaculture — what it is, what it does, what it's supposed to achieve — we always seem to come back to permanence. Designing permanent systems, self-sustaining systems, and so on. Even when we talk about successful projects, we tend to emphasize how they've managed to survive over the years. A 50-year-old food forest, for example. So naturally, we tend to think the ultimate test is whether a system can stand on its own, or whether it can be passed down from one generation to the next (or even from one family to another).

But is that really the ultimate test?

I'm not so sure.

Hear me out. :)

Last year, I visited the Greening the Desert project. I walked around and had a look at the place. Geoff was sharing his experience and perspective with his usual seemingly endless energy. Nothing wrong there. But what about the site itself? To be fair, if they hadn't taken us into the garden and pointed out the swales, I don't think we would have found them. Some of the trees weren't doing particularly well. You could tell that a tremendous amount of work had been done there over the years, but the biogas digester, for example, was sitting unused in a corner. And there were quite a few other things like that.

As far as I know, the project had already been handed over to the next management team. So that transition we talk so much about had already happened. Then what was the problem? But this post isn't really about Greening the Desert.

The same goes for my own work. For the past four years, I haven't been able to properly look after my garden. Life has thrown more than a few personal challenges my way. If you saw the garden today, you'd find a complete mess. Half the time, you can't even tell what's growing where. And that's what got me thinking.

What if the ultimate test of a permaculture design isn't whether we can pass it on to the next generation, but whether it can survive the hardest periods of our own lives?

What happens when we get old? When we get sick? When we can't take care of the garden for months, or even years?  How much of our system survives? More importantly, how much of it continues to function? We try to design systems that can withstand droughts, floods, frost, and all sorts of environmental challenges. But what about our absence? Our own limitations? Those periods in life when everything else takes priority? Maybe the greatest challenges we face in our own lives are also the greatest tests of the systems we design. After all, don't we have to finish the race before we can pass the baton?

Just thinking out loud.

Hurricane Polo is going to dump some serious amount of water to that region. I want to use one of my wishes - I hope someone can document those swales in action. Like a timelapse or anything actually.

Or might miss. Hopefully not

Ok here is my problem. English is not my first language. I don't use it daily (other than my work, engineering stuff). So when time comes and I need to write something about gardening, permaculture etc I struggle to express myself. I can write 10 times more, express myself 5 times better in Turkish.

What I have been doing recently is that, I write whatever comes to my mind, Turkish, English, any language. Then feed it to AI and ask it to translate and edit it. At the end I need to edit AI's version too, because it is usually full with junk. Nevertheless it is like 10 times less stress for me. I can create a post in 10 minutes, instead of  an hour of correcting vocab and grammar.

I also dont want to see permies turn into an AI junk bin - as it happened to all social media platforms. But I want to post more, share more. A lot of stuff happened in the last 4 years and more to come...

What you guys think?

This might be a little off-topic, but my observations on Solomon’s remineralization approach are roughly as follows.

Anything below 20% is basically a total loss. For example, if boron is below 20%, you are likely to see all kinds of problems related to boron deficiency, as well as problems with nutrients that depend on boron. Calcium is a good example: fungi and soil biology cannot move nutrients around properly without boron, and calcium itself is large and relatively difficult to move.

Between 20% and 40%, deficiencies tend to show up mostly as reduced yields.
Between 40% and 70%, I have found that a functioning soil ecosystem can compensate for most deficiencies. At this range, I did not need to add much more directly to the soil. Regular foliar feeding was enough to produce very good crops and yields.
Personally, I do not think there is much need to push beyond 70% when dealing with living soil. At that point, the biological channels seem to be working well: no foliar feeding is needed, and visible deficiencies largely disappear.

If you want to go back to where you started, just burn the plant material. Burning turns organic material back into mineral salts, and you lose much of what you were trying to build biologically. We made that mistake once.

For large areas, however, I have found Solomon’s approach much harder to apply directly. This is especially true in dry farming, where things become much more complicated. It depends heavily on what you are planting and how much rainfall you expect. For example, if you are growing wheat, you need to pay particular attention to the minerals wheat is most sensitive to. Wheat has a strong requirement for Zn, and phosphorus availability is closely involved in that system. So in practice, you may need to spread mineral corrections over two to four years, or concentrate each year on correcting the nutrients that the current crop is most sensitive to. Gradually, the overall mineral balance will improve. But one thing is essential: plant material needs to go back into the soil. Another option is to import suitable organic material—for example, properly selected oilseed press cake after the oil has been extracted—or other organic residues with a useful mineral profile.

In the end, mineral balancing really comes down to a few practical questions. In dry climates, adding mineral salts can become risky very quickly because the threshold “too much” can be way less than what is needed. You can improve the numbers on a soil test, but realistically it may take eight to twelve years to do it safely and biologically. At the same time, there are plants that are naturally adapted to mineral imbalances or high salt conditions—many of them are species we tend to call invasive. You can use those plants to capture excess minerals, build biomass, and bind those salts into carbon. And suddenly, you are doing permaculture! :)

If you are importing organic material, there is another question: can the economics support it? And more importantly, what exactly are you importing? They use a lot of nasty stuff to extract oil from oil seeds. Do you want those in your soil?

So, long story short, my experience goes as: anything below 20% should be corrected as soon as possible. Try to get above 40%. There is probably little reason to push much beyond 70% in a biologically active soil. For large areas, correct minerals gradually—either by addressing the crop’s most critical deficiencies one by one, or by combining gradual mineral balancing with cover cropping during the rainy season. You want to grows much as organic material so anything -humic acids, foliar feeding- all are on the table. Go crazy with cover crops while mineral balancing. And never, ever burn the plant material.

Hope I didn't go waay out of topic :)

I pee on it.

Actually I add it to the compost pile while building it and occasionally - like every morning- pee on it :)

I used to add a lot of stuff, make mixtures, rock dust, minerals all sorts of stuff. I dont know how or why but pee+ biochar works the best. Fungi also likes it.

Thanks! So it seems like there is the black oil seed sunflower and that is it's name. It is one stem and single headed.

While searching I came across Peredovik oil seed sunflower which is poly headed (southern exposure seed exchange). It seems strange that there is like 150 heirloom corn variety for flour,but just few oil seed sunflower.

I am gradually transforming a 11 acre conventional sunflower-wheat plot into a mixed permaculture- market garden - demonstration plot project. It will take couple more years for the process to be complete. Meanwhile I have to learn how to grow wheat and sunflower. It is fun to see how some increase in organic matter content and mineral balancing does to production.
Here is the problem I am facing right now. Sunflower seeds -hybrids- are way too expensive over here. So much expensive that, it almost costs as much as all other inputs. So I did what was expected of me and tried to stabilize f1 sunflower. Then I hit to a rock wall. Unlike wheat - which even F2's perform well,  F1 sunflower seeds are like tomatoes - F2's has nothing to do with F1. Million heads, some tiny flowers some massive flowers. Stalks way too thin or way to thick - some look like Boa trees.

I have been searching for heirloom sunflower seeds for seed oil production. Not the ones for bird feed, not the ones for eating, but for seed oil. While it was easy to find heirloom wheat varieties it has been extremely difficult to pinpoint a single heirloom that was used for seed oil in say 1950. Am I missing something? Why are all varieties for seed oil production F1's? Is there anyone selling old varieties?

I know there will be some loss of production per acre and also oil percentage, but cost saved from buying expensive seed each year should help with the math.

Thanks!

buffalo wings pizza ( at a place called Zetti's)
Oh I miss them so much!

I went to UB for two years, We were eating buffalo wings 5 days of a week, detoxing in the remaining two.