siri atma khalsa

I am currently using a timer that gives 18 hours light.  I am turning off 10 pm to 4 am.  I can't stop the light from exiting the roof, which is lexan, and isn't very bright, the side light in the 24 to 30" the lights are suspended above the seedlings goes out by my pool and then reflects up several trees.  I am certainly concerned about causing light pollution to my neighbor's yard and wasting the light.  I am growing ornamental datura seedlings that respond to intensity and length of light.  These seedlings also get very weak if they are leggy.  The extra light also seems to help my brugmansia cuttings, which supposedly respond more to heat, but certainly don't seem to mind some extra light.  Both of these are part of my program to slow the gopher activity down in my food forest.  I am growing plants that are toxic to gophers, but have economic value, in between my fruits.  I have significant problems with gophers destroying my figs, dragon fruit, and artichokes.  I make some rather sophisticated gopher bags and I trap what I can, but I am one acre next to 17.5 acres of wild, gopher infested land.  Even herons come by to hunt gophers.  I have catnip mint to attract cats.  I think the crows have become so invasive they are keeping the raptors at bay.  When most of the crows migrate south in the fall, I see the raptors show up again.  I keep piles of rock to attract reptiles and plant plant shelters to allow the reptiles to move form rock shelter to rock shelter.  I have thought of barn owl boxes, but I am close to a road, so I am not sure I have the privacy for them.  

I have a glass greenhouse.  I use grow lights for my seedlings.  At night the light is a bother to neighbors.  Is there a way to reflect the light back into the greenhouse without significantly decreasing visible light during the day?  I can loose some UV and heat without loss of performance as I currently get a little too much of both.  I thought of using exterior rated mylar silvering films on the interior.  The interior can reach 105 (when I forget to open the window) and the humidity is often 90%.  Thanks for your help.

I think the premise that Gert works 48 weeks 10 to 20 hours/week and 4 weeks 50 hours/week is unlikely.  When you look at people living alternative lifestyles, you have to look at energy systems.  Rivers have eddies, and as every Kayaker knows, those eddies are the easy way to move up stream.  Many people in the alternative world use 'energy eddies' to move forward.  Pockets of 'waste' with nutritional value are collected and utilized.  I think these people add value to society, but they must be willing to move to a new eddy if the one they are using dries up.  I don't see their lifestyle as feasible for all.  Their lifestyle is in part made possible by the mass over consumption around them.  I have lived in intentional communities for 40 years.  That can be an interesting game; my advice is to read Animal Farm, because the pigs always move in when things become successful and the Boxer's usually are sold for glue.  The ideal is that you watch everyone else's back and everyone else watches yours.  I have plenty had plenty of disappointment in that arena.  Being of a capable nature, I have never really minded when people draft off me.  Unfortunately, I have had some drafters become opportunists when I am played out.  You can't count on people to always act right.  Much as I would like the world to be different, I walk softly, but I make sure I carry a nice stick.

I don't measure my millionaire status by how much or how hard I work.  I am successful when I am happy and in harmony with my goals.  I think the Gert premise as given here, is like taking herbal capsules instead of pills.  It is the pill mentality that is wrong, not what is in the pills.  Herbs can be utilized like pills, but the point is to use herbs in your cooking, in your diet, so you don't have to 'take pills'.  In the same way there needs to be a shift from doing things you don't like for money, to doing what you enjoy, for life.  Many people will not want to farm or do permaculture stuff (most of my friends), but they are very positive contributors to the wheel (of life).  My legacy's will be soils I have improved, trees I have planted, kind deeds I have done and hopefully some knowledge that I have fleshed out and shared.  The concept that some people are important and others are not is as antiquated as monarchs, and in my mind, comes from thousands of years of monarch rule.  As a physician, I have yet to meet a human that did not find their own self to have value and did not want to be treated with fairness and kindness.  The Koans I gave myself when I was a young man where as follows:  1.  What if no one has ever been like you?  Looking for other people of like mind could become a lifelong endeavor and you would never have time to accomplish your dreams.  So just be you and get on with it.  The one thing you will always be better at than anyone else is being authentically you.  2.  You are on your death bed and your great grandchildren ask you for knowledge.  What are the timeless truths in life?  Truths that will never die?  Spend part of your life acquiring these.  The only thing I really learned following this path is that the only thing of real value you earn in life is the memory people have of you.  That is my 'millionaire Gert'.  :)

Travis Johnson makes some excellent points re: business.  I always looked at cash flow like I look at blood in a patient.  Run out of blood, your business is dead, no matter how healthy the business is otherwise.  Capital outlays from other jobs are like blood transfusions.  Sometimes they are necessary, sometimes your business has a permanent problem and will always be anemic.  Nina Jay brings up the point of homesteading vs farming.  I am currently homesteading in California, that and developing a learning lab for experimentation.  I am close to retirement.  I use my mind for my current job and I work 7 to 10 12-hour days in a row.  I do not know how long I will be capable mentally and physically as a physician (I have a very real daily reminder of the aging process).  Plants require much less intelligence to work, therefore I expect I have at least 2 or more decades of work there.  By prepping the soil, learning the local climate cycles, and finding some niche products, I plan to be able to both homestead and farm this property.  By collecting rare bulb, plant and tree varieties, and creating some of my own, I should have small items with high cash value (small in consumption of space, water, pots, soil, etc).  My  fruit trees are planned and planted so I should have abundant fruit year round.  I learned as a young man that a largely fruit diet can be very healthy.  My goals will be to keep myself busy physically and mentally, but not so much that my body is injured, hopefully turn a positive cash flow so I don't touch my retirement savings (as long as possible), and provide food with a known purity.  This endeavor already provides me with social interaction, and if I need more, then I will sell at the farmers markets.  If all goes under, then I still have my rabbit hole, I sell my home in CA and return to my little farm in NM.  

I will point out though, in response to TJ's post, that profitability is not the only part of the equation, you also have to assess your assets.  If you sell off assets, you are not profitable, and even if you are profitable, if you don't increase your net worth (savings), then your year has just gone by.  I look at profitability as how much I save.  What are my expenses per year, what can I save.  My savings/expenses is the number I am interested in as this is the number that allows me to see if and when I will be able to retire.  In NM, people were land rich and cash poor.  When you saw someone with a new double wide (mobile home) or truck, you knew land had been sold.  Very few people were saving, most were slowly eating off their shelves.  Looking at retirement I also assess passive versus active income.  I use this viewpoint when I look at plants on my property or my investments.  What will be the maintenance costs, labor, etc.  I see the Food Forest project as attempting to move farming from active to passive income.

I will try to be more clear.  I spent 20 years in NM working a small farm and serving as a physician in a poor, under served medical area.  I learned some basic permiculture principles.  I now live in Santa Barbara, work on building a .6 acre food forest, and work part-time as a physician.  It is much easier to farm in California.  Building soils is very easy, compared to northern NM at 6,000 ft.  You add compost and it goes into the soil.  In NM, the UV degrades the carbon so fast that no-till techniques work much better.  Using plants with large root structures that can decay underground makes much more sense than green manure crops.  I started with buckwheat (didn't grow well), moved to wheat and common vetch (common vetch got a virus), then to winter rye and hairy vetch (did this rotation for a decade), then finally decided to go with alfalfa and no-till.  

I had access to dump truck loads of free pine wood chips (no bark) in the form of shavings from making vigas.  I would lay them out in windrows and on the track around the property.  Driving over them with the tractor would help break them down.  I replaced the chips every five years, using the broken chips as mulch (the track was a about 1/3 mile around.  Still, after two decades I had changed the soil less in NM than I have changed the soil in 5.5 years in California.  I do not till, I use gophers for that (my land is sloped).  I am growing subtropicals, learning about plants to hopefully slow the action of the gophers, working with native nitrogen fixers like Ceanothus, currently working with Ashwaghanda (has chemicals similar to ginseng, thrives on poor, alkaline soil).  So far I have found using top composting in the 8 to 12 inch range that I can keep moisture in the soil from last rain in March until mid October.  Gophers and worms will work the soil to a depth of 2 feet (so far).  I am planning on trying some crops that grow well here (squash and pumpkin, beets) to take the soil quality deeper.  I am using arugala, collards, cilantro, borage, broccoli and field peas as ground covers for numerous benefits.  I have tentatively added some hairy vetch and I will be adding basil as a ground cover this spring.  I am hybridizing some passiflora, to develop fruits with ornamental value as well.  I have found that white sapote grows  faster and stronger than citrus.  Mango grows as fast but is less productive, so far, than citrus.  Fino de Jete and El Bumpo are fast, aggressive growing Cherimoyas, that taste much better than citrus, easily raised from seed.  The pollination problem with Cherimoya is improved by minimal pruning and using flies to help with pollination.

I agree with the viewpoint that much that is written is not relevant, at least to me.  Whether this is because so few farms are in Sunset zone 24, or because many books all quote, and thus start, from a single source, I can not yet say.  I do know that SoCal has no winter.  Some crops grow in summer, some in winter.  Only if you try to grow European crops in CA do you end up with the 'winter' concept.  Growing crops in 3-D is my current interest, that and looking at soil disimpaction and mulching through root mass.  Whether permiculture will ever replace monoculture as a viable economic entity, I do not know.  I agree with prior comments that much profitability of current systems is from subsidy and uncalculated environmental/future costs.  I do see permie research occurring at a University level.  I also see permie goals and lifestyle as an 'across cultural' unifier.  And I do find that the philosophies developed in permaculture translate into other fields of research, changing the goals of the research.  I think this is very valuable.  Yvon Chouinard in his book, Let My People Go Surfing, The education of a reluctant businessman, calls those young people passionately developing a new sport or craft, dirt baggers, based on their willingness to accept poverty to accomplish their goal.  He also notes that his goal was not just to develop environmentally friendly products, but to develop a new business model.  Just so, I see the permie lifestyle as an attempt to develop a new life model.

My permaculture is not profitable.  I spend $6k/yr on water alone.  I spend $12k/yr on misc.  I now have found people to trade plants and seeds.  I had a 3 acre farm in Northern New Mexico which I worked for 12 years.  I still own the land.  I never made money on it.  I did learn a lot about no-till farming, ponds, irrigation systems, tractors, welders, etc.I still lose money on it, and I don't sell it because I have 60 ft giant sequoias I raised from seedlings, a pond with beavers, ducks and water lilies.  I started a food forest on a piece of property in Santa Barbara where my property taxes are more than my mortgage, utilities and property taxes in New Mexico.  If I worked at my job as many hours as I work on my land I would more than  double my income.  If I were to count everything I have eaten by the pound, I am sure the cost would be about $500-1k per pound, if I don't count pumpkins, cost of the land or property taxes.  I certainly don't spend more on my hobby than my friend spends on his airplane.  What do I get for my investment?  I get to experiment with living things.  With plants I get to play with genetics, environments, harmony, aesthetics, recycling, composting, all at a very low risk level.  At work I deal with people at a very high risk level.  The attitudes/philosophies that I develop gardening become a permanent part of my being everywhere I go.  I don't care if I lose money because I am part of a group of people that are experimenting.  When I look back at what I could find on permaculture in the 80's versus now, wow.  That is the thing about science.  You slave for years to discover one fact, one piece of the puzzle, that people then learn in 2 minutes.  (Just like the Zen story of the man who spends his whole life digging a tunnel through a mountain to save people's lives.  When done, people walk through the tunnel in mere minutes.)  The alchemists trying to turn lead into gold, started the modern science of chemistry.  100 years from now, people may look back at what we have done and see it as foolish.  Maybe the only way for mankind to survive this technology is to become cyborgs.  Sounds far out, but that is one solution to competing against groups of people with access to massive quantities of privatized data and computing power.  I do think that Frank Herbert really fleshed out some of the various options for survival in Dune.  Whether those survival models are the ones that will materialize isn't relevant.  What is relevant is painting your life the way you want, and putting your shoulder to the wheel in the way that you enjoy or think you can contribute.  For me, the permie movement a logical outgrowth of the hippie movement, but instead of centering around ideologies and art/music, it centers around the concept of sustainability.  But this is just one group of humans idea of survival.  

As a physician, I started out studying herbs, TCM, naturopathy, yoga, meditation, diet.  What I found is people on all sides drawing hard lines, fanatics I would call them.  I met a prominent permie suffering from congestive heart failure that could have benefited from some of my western medical knowledge.  A motto I believe is "Alternative and dead is not a victory".  With plants, sure you can be a fanatic with alternatives and you just lose some plants.  With people, you can lose lives and friends.  I think what the question of economic viability brings forth, is questions about reality, imagination and fanaticism.  When I went to medical school I asked in our cardiology block, "what about Dean Ornish's work on cholesterol and heart disease?"  The teacher led the class laughter as I was the obvious alternative student.  Once there was a profitable anti-cholesterol drug, the 'pro' research just poured in.  The desired LDL level changed by 2 standard deviations and finally a study was published stating that 6 months of lipitor at 80 mg/day was the same as stenting or bypass.  This process took 15 years.  In the mean time, driving across country as a vegetarian became easier.  Friends who started health foods and products became millionaires (some failed on the way) and had their products bought by mainstream food and household manufacturers.  Does alternative medicine really work?  This question is much the same as the permie profitability question.  Certainly, healthy food, clean water, restful sleep, rewarding relationships and jobs all play a part in health and when all of those are optimized, then you run into genetics.  Genetics are like the soil you grow you crops in.  Changing genetics is not something we know much about.  What will work?   What will be successful?  It will take a lot of time, money and effort to solve this problem.  But in the mean time, I was talking with a friend who is working on the climate change problem about the concepts of permaculture, and he decided it would be useful to try to develop deep ocean permaculture with kelp.  Now a whole new area of science has opened up.  Will it become profitable?  We will see.  For now, like most people playing with permaculture, the dream is there, but the reality is not.  The only way I can see permaculture working for a vegetarian is to either breed fish, like koi, as part of an aquaculture project, raise collectible or sellable animals or plants, 4 crop with solar or wind energy or have a gig like yurts or bed and breakfast.  Remember, when you are competing against the big boys, you are competing against cheap foreign labor and 'energy slaves' (cheap petroleum/coal/nuclear energy) and an industry that has been government subsidized for over 100 years.  

If you want to get some idea of what will happen to permaculture in the near future, watch what happens with the culture of marijuana as it becomes legalized.  You will get to see what happens to an alternative/underground science when money, education and talent move in.  Do I think this is all bad?  Not at all.  Because the marijuana counter-culture demands organic cultivation, and the profit curve is there, you will also see a huge growth in production organic techniques.  There are people that think you can cure any illness with diet and traditional techniques.  I would remind you that pesticides are really a post-WWII development so if eating organically solved our medical problems, we would have solved our medical issues 100's or 1,000's of years ago when everyone ate organic, there was no acid rain, etc.  Clearly, if it didn't work then, it won't work now.  But that does not mean there aren't many things that we can do to influence the expression of our genotype.