Norris Thomlinson

Thanks for the post. In Hawai'i, I've been growing Plectranthus barbatus as a chop-and-drop space filler with vibrant flowers, but hadn't tried it as toilet paper. After trying it once, I like it a little better than the commonly used Coleus scutellarioides (syn C. blumei); the barbatus seems to have somewhat stronger leaves. My preferred species is still the weed/feed tree Melochia umbellata, who makes soft large leaves. That would be hard to grow in temperate climates though.

I live on land owned by friends, who recently set up a WWOOF host profile. For those without a WWOOF volunteer profile, after reading the description of the WWOOF opportunity you can email my friends at alternateroot@protonmail.com if you're interested.

Here's the text of the listing:

We are Diga and Jasmine, a down-to-earth couple who love growing and preparing local food.  We steward this 7-acre tropical homestead amidst towering old growth mango trees, singing coqui frogs, and a plethora of exotic fruits growing on multiple shades of green foliage.  We seek connections with people who want to make the world a better place, using land work, food processing, and relationship-building as the medium.  We share our meals with gold-dust day geckos, wash off the day’s work in outdoor showers, and enjoy our days off at the coast, making music, or going on excursions in nature.

Food self-sufficiency requires so many skills!  Your 25 hrs/wk will look something like this:

In terms of traditional farming, yes, you will be planting seeds, maintaining greenhouse/outdoor nurseries, and planting annuals/perennials in the ground.  Here in the tropics where so many of our staples are propagated vegetatively, you could just as easily find yourself harvesting and planting cuttings of perennial greens, nitrogen-fixing ground-covers, and living fence-posts, or spreading propagules of chayote, banana, pineapple, air potato, and cassava.  In terms of harvest, you will become adept with a variety of picking poles for breadfruit, avocado, or papaya.  You might find yourself on ground-crew for a coconut-climb.  Depending on the season, you’ll dig-out and clean uhi (Hawaiian yam), taro, cassava, ginger, turmeric, achira, leren, and other roots.  

De-taping and spreading cardboard sheet mulch and planting into it with perennial ground-covers is an on-going activity, as we transition away from lawn.  You will spend some time operating hand-saws and loppers to remove invasive weed trees and expand orchards.  

You might be surprised to find out how much time it takes to PROCESS local foods, once harvested.  To make dried fruit and gluten-free local flours, you’ll process, slice, and/or grate jackfruit, banana, breadfruit, and cassava (along with a whole list of more infrequent foods), taking responsibility to tend our 2 solar dehydrators.  You’ll use the manual Saladmaster to grate everything from green papaya salad to cabbage for sauerkraut.  You’ll learn to use a machete to crack coconuts, and a butter-knife to remove the meat.  You’ll make your own coconut cream, and learn to enjoy coconut in many other ways, from spoon-meat to sprouters.  

Regular maintenance of food-growing areas requires “chop-and-drop” work, using a variety of sickles, machetes, or hand-pruners to cut back and mound biomass plants into mulch rings around crop trees.  At least once a week you’ll work with guest permaculture designer Norris, who in addition to his proficiency with permaculture principles, is also a wealth of knowledge about tropical permaculture species and techniques.  In season, Jasmine will walk you through hand-pollinating vanilla, as well as the coffee and cacao harvest, from ferment to roast.  You will harvest seeds from nitrogen-fixers such as pigeon pea and crotalaria, as well other plants, for future sowing.

A portion of your time will be committed to keeping your space clean and to regular infrastructure maintenance, which can include cleaning window screens, to operating a pressure washer, mopping, dusting, sweeping, and weeding around the edges of structures.  There will be rotating work-parties facilitated by any of the landʻs 3 long-term residents, to ensure you can access the breadth of our knowledge.  You’ll have access to electronic curriculum materials and to our online land work-sharing project, if you’d like to dig deeper into the information-based theory and practice of permaculture.

Living in a tropical forest means a willingness to coexist with insects.  Despite all our structures being raised and screened, bugs and mildew have ways of getting in, so expect the occasional cockroach, the mildly irritating false blister beetle (https://www.biisc.org/pest/false-blister-beetle/), and benign black ants inside.  We provide sprays, soaps, and scrubbers to deter.  We have taken a lot of care to control for mosquitoes (by eliminating standing water), so you’ll find their presence quite mild.  We’ve also work diligently to eradicate the Little Fire Ant (https://www.biisc.org/pest/lfa/) from this property, to ensure the experience of being able to immerse yourself in your work and play here.  One disease that is no joke is rat lungworm (https://www.biisc.org/pest/rlw/), which can cause mild to severe illness, lifelong nerve damage and even death.  Please read the RLW page and be ready to diligently follow our instructions on how to avoid contact with this disease.  For protection in the event of injury or emergency, this farm requires that you show proof of insurance before making a commitment.  Terms of your plan must meet the minimums of the volunteer card premium plan, which is reasonably priced at $79 for 6 months (https://www.volunteercard.com/).

We currently have two screened cabins—each would ideally house two people.  Each structure is comfortable and self-sufficient, equipped with a kitchenette (cold food storage, propane 2-burner stove), outdoor shower, hot water, toilet, bed, electricity, and internet (for a nominal fee).  Our Bridge House structure (queen bed) is a studio space, ideal for a couple who are comfortable living close together, or for the right single applicant.  Our OWL House can be configured in different ways to accommodate either one individual; a couple; or two friends who are intimate enough to share semi-private toilet and shower, but sleep in separate spaces.  

Most meals will be taken individually in the WWOOFers’ own accommodations.  WWOOFers have the opportunity to make daily use of foods from the land, which includes plentiful year-round starch (cassava, breadfruit, air potato, `uhi), year-round perennial greens (bele spinach, chaya, Okinawan spinach, sweet potato, katuk, longevity spinach, sissoo, honohono and many more), honey, coconut and its products, avocado (8-9 months of the year), papaya, chayote, and, seasonally, citrus, mulberry, jackfruit, abiu, rollinia, mountain apple, starfruit, and surinam cherry.  Seasonally we have legumes, squash, herbs, ginger, turmeric, lemongrass, galangal, hot/sweet peppers, jackfruit seeds, and breadnut.  If you want to live 100% from the land, that is probably possible here!  We will also provide coconut/avocado oil, apple cider vinegar, salt, dry beans, and a few other staples.  

If you are a prospective match, we’ll make sure to iron out details with you about specific purchased staples before a commitment is made.  Meat, if desired, currently must be purchased individually, pending the implementation of our feral pig trapping design.  At times, opportunities to help butcher wild pig will be available to interested WWOOFers. Regular food processing sessions will happen at the farm’s main house kitchen, where we’ll also host a weekly community meal (with meat or vegetarian options).

We employ many practical, self-sufficiency skills such as coconut-frond weaving, bamboo-building, and beekeeping.  You’ll get a chance to pick up some of these arts if you are interested.  We’ve both got background in Zimbabwean marimba ensemble, and will sometimes play music together on some of our many instruments.  Diga plays piano and writes; Jasmine knits and enjoys the fiber arts.  We are forming an intentional community, and seek WWOOFers who are familiar and align with community-living (visit ic.org).  

Our neighborhood has many other small farms and homesteads, some of which youʻll get introduced to through our weekly Trading Post or through hyper-local social networks you can join.  Within walking distance through cool, shady dirt roads and forest trails (1 hr) are several spots where you can get to the coast and wade in tide pools.  Just a 15-minute walk away is a retreat center that often offers yoga, Qi Gong, sound healing, or other classes.  Pahoa is a 25 minute drive, and can be reached via ride-share with us, friends, neighbors, or even via hitchhiking (pretty common and easy in our area).  There you’ll find markets, banks, the post office, library, hardware store, pharmacy, laundromat, restaurants, and other smaller businesses.  The city of Hilo is a 1 hr drive.  It is possible to coordinate your timing to catch a bus from Pahoa to Hilo for the day.  

Puna has many weekly gatherings open to the public including Bee Dance, Ecstatic Dance, Kehena Beach, Uncle Robert's, Kaimu Market, and Maku`u Farmerʻs Market within a 30-40 min drive.  Every two weeks, we can help WWOOFers with a lift to Pahoa to take care of laundry or shopping essentials, and occasional other rides.

We’re looking for initial commitments in the range of 1-3 months.  To fine-tune our experience with each other, we invite conversation and feedback in the moment, or at brief daily check-ins before starting work.  Additionally, WWOOFers are encouraged to attend a weekly Heart-Share meeting as an opportunity to share your feelings and experiences as well as exercise deep-listening.  The goal with Heart-Shares is to optimize how we relate to one another.

Prior to making any commitments, we expect to have a robust series of communication exchanges with prospective WWOOFers—including a video chat—to dial in compatibility.  This is done to avoid poor outcomes, such as the need to ask a WWOOFer to leave before the term of their stay (which we do reserve the right exercise).  For the WWOOFer who is the right fit, our occupancy schedule sometimes allows the opportunity to extend your stay month-by-month.  This scenario is offered and renegotiated two weeks prior to your end-of-stay date.

Please take all the above policies as an expression of our care to foster mutually-satisfying relationships and a genuinely positive learning environment.  If our profile resonates with you in most ways, donʻt hesitate to reach out!

Crawford has posted some encouraging updates at the link above. If you haven't yet signed the petition and/or emailed the trustees, it's worth doing so. Keep the pressure on them!

Good topic and good list!

When I lived in Portland, OR, where fennel was more or less a weed, our chickens eagerly ate the seeds from stalks I cut and carried to them. I didn't do it enough to estimate how much poundage they would eat per season. Chickens can self-harvest mature seeds from plants, or you could harvest and store to ration out through the winter. I wrote a post about this way back when: Fennel seed as a calorie crop.

I also wrote Integrating Chickens Into Your Food System.

If cowpeas grow well for you, they should be a valuable feed.

Elaeagnus berries with seeds may be valuable.

A guy on YouTube was trying to grow okra for seed.

I've seen chickens eat raw sweet potato, though I don't know how much they would really eat.

I'm still experimenting with this, and don't know how well it grows in temperate climates, but I see potential for rice bean, *Vigna umbellata*. It shatters small rice-grain-like seeds which I assume chickens will eat. The "Green" variety from ECHO grows as a vine, so it may work well to grow it on the paddock fencelines. Some can fall into the paddock and be eaten, and hopefully some will self-seed from just outside the paddock where the chickens can't reach it.

Mulberries are probably a protein crop; my understanding is that chickens relish them more for the gazillion tiny seeds than for the sugars.

I forget what website first made this "click" for me, but chickens require a diet with a majority of calorie-dense food. A supply of greens and fruits is important for nutrition, but mostly they need seeds and meat. (Roots are intermediate in calorie density.) At my current homestead (in Hawai'i), we're developing poultry paddocks with heavy canopy and not much ground vegetation. (The main predators here are mongooses who ambush chickens but aren't much of a threat if chickens can see them coming.) Some of the canopy will drop food for the poultry (mulberries, Jamaican cherries, cassava seed, acacia seed), but the main contribution of all the canopy will be leaves and branches and roots feeding the soil food web and generating worms and insects for the chickens and ducks. We'll also throw all kinds of biomass in, whether directly edible or not. We can occasionally harvest finished compost/soil to redistribute the nutrients elsewhere on the land.

This isn't super relevant to those in temperate climates, but it's a fantastic study from subtropical Australia which I can't believe I didn't discover until a year ago, of how eagerly chickens ate seeds of hundreds of species: Upgrading the scavenging feed resource base for scavenging chickens part 1 and part 2.

Hi Daniel,

I live on Papaya Farms Road and could connect you with some good people to meet and sites to visit. I also host events in Pahoa on the second Sunday of each month, at the Pahoa Urban Food Forest. The events run from 11 til about 2, with a class/discussion, tour of the developing food forest, and plant keiki (propagule) giveaway. Moosage me to talk more, and/or get on the event mailing list.

Caesar sent me 4 varieties a year ago (thanks!)  I'm very motivated to find more diversity of the species. For me, air potatoes are second only to ulu (breadfruit) as a staple carbohydrate (my criteria are ease of growing, no soil disturbance, ease of harvest, ease of preparation, and availability.) Here's a report-back on what I've learned so far:

Mae-sai yellow: I planted 4. One vine made 50 or more small bulbils. After 3 20ish minute boils in changed water, they're still super bitter. I consider them inedible.

"very probably" (Caesar wasn't positive) Tefoe purple: I planted 4. I didn't compare the vines super closely to Caesar's photos, but at least superficially they do look like his Tefoe purple photos. At least one vine made several medium bulbils. The flesh is purple. If Joe Tefoe returns to this thread maybe he can say more, but in a listing where he's selling it, he says the edibility is unknown. But for me, as with Mae-sai yellow, 3 boils left them still super bitter and inedible.

CV-1: I received one small bulbil. The vine grew well last year but didn't make any bulbils. It's growing well again, so I should get some yield this year.

Saipan purple: I received one medium-small bulbil. The plant produced one large and several medium-small bulbils. I cut the large one in half to replant half (which is now shooting up vigorously). After the disappointments of Mai-sai yellow and the very probably Tefoe purple, and since Caesar described needing multiple boils of this, I expected I wouldn't find this variety useful. We already have the "Hawaii" variety here*, which only needs 20-30 minutes of steaming, so I wasn't motivated to do a careful trial with the Saipan purple. I boiled it for "a while" (maybe 30-40 minutes?), then tasted it expecting it to need a change of water and more boiling and thus for me to stop caring about the variety. But it had no bitterness! I didn't have any more bulbils I could try cooking, but I suspect it didn't need nearly as long a boiling as I gave it.

Needing to peel the tough skin off the Hawaii variety is the biggest drawback to this as a main staple. It's not *that* difficult or time consuming, but it is a drawback. My friends discovered that they can steam bulbils, then slice them thin and roast them with the skin still on, and the crispiness of it all makes eating the skin unnoticeable. So I wonder whether, even if the Saipan purple needs more cooking than Hawaii's 20ish minutes of steaming, the Saipan might work well steamed (or boiled), then sliced and fried to give it that extra cooking time. I should have lots of bulbils to test cooking requirements after this season.

For this season, I ordered what were listed as D. bulbifera from thailandplant on Ebay. Caesar wrote that he got what he calls "Nonthaburi yellow" from them years ago, but I think he's lost that variety. This listing shows bulbils with white flesh, so not the same one Caesar got. But the seller confirmed that this one is edible after 30 minutes of boiling, so I ordered a batch. The seller sent 6 instead of just the 3 promised by the listing, and so far 2 have sprouted well; 1 rotted; and 3 still have a chance. However, the vine is D. alata, not bulbifera. I'm a little disappointed, but the pictures show decent sized bulbils, so I think this could still be a useful aerial crop.

I messaged with the seller about the species misidentification and asked about the one Caesar purchased, which isn't listed for sale at this time. The seller sent some pictures of what looks like true bulbifera, and said it's used by most people only for medicine, but is eaten by people in hill tribes. This variety has yellow or orange flesh, and though I'm not positive they're the same, the pictures do look like Caesar's Nonthaburi yellow. The seller wrote:

The hill tribes eat Dioscorea bulbifera because they eat anything they can find. For other people, they tend to eat Dioscorea alata because its taste is better and it can be cooked in various ways, both savory and dessert. Dioscorea bulbifera has to be roasted to eat and if you want to boil it, it literally needs to be boiled in 2-3 changes of water as you said. So if you would like the one that is easy to cook, I recommend Dioscorea alata. You can boil it for only 20 minutes. Or if you boil it with coconut milk and add some sugar and pandan leaves, it's delicious.

So I don't think the Nonthaburi yellow is worth reacquiring.

Priorities for reacquiring seem to be CV-2, Sena, and Odisha yellow as known good edible types. "Mexico" and "Africa" might be good too, though there isn't enough info in Caesar's posts to know much about them.

I'm not able to send out air potatoes at this time. But I expect to be organized for selling seeds and corms and bulbils of various species by the end of the year, so can help then with spreading the varieties I have.

Interwoven Permaculture sells a few different Dioscorea bulbils, including "Hawaii" bulbifera (2 for $35).

And a tangential share: Our "Hawaii" variety starts making immature but yummy bulbils in July, which you can pick from the vine. Fully mature bulbils drop on their own from about November through February. Another friend found that he could keep stored bulbils edible until June by breaking off any shoots once a week. So with a little work, this is nearly a year-round crop!


* Note: I've lived in Hawai'i since 2012, and have only ever heard of one variety of bulbifera. Though I could be wrong, I believe that "Jim's Hawaii" and "Hawaii" and the one that's common in my area are all the same.

I haven't posted here before about the books and plants for sale. I have a few gardening books & field guides, plus miscellaneous fiction, cookbooks, construction books, etc:

http://discountpermaculture.com/norris/agora.cgi?cartlink=Books_for_sale.htm

And permaculture-oriented plants and seeds for sale. PLANTS ARE FOR PICKUP ONLY IN PORTLAND. I can mail seeds (and books):
http://discountpermaculture.com/norris

I'm probably moving in early March, so need to clear all this out by then!

Norris
http://farmerscrub.blogspot.com

Sale pending on the house! (To someone who learned about it by watching Paul's "Sustainable Food - People Per Acre" video!)

Kyle, I just sent you an email...

Norris

I think I planted a single 1 gallon pot, maybe divided into two divisions, which have filled out the area I described in about 4 years. I'd describe it as spreading pretty quickly.

Norris

I have the 2-3' tall solomon's seal. From my latest blog post:

"So far our asparagus is a very poorly yielding crop in terms of calories per space it takes up--only 280 calories from maybe 10 plants using maybe 30 square feet? Our solomon's seal gave 2/3 the calories from a similar area but growing in heavy shade on the north wall of our house, under timber bamboo, with lungwort, lovage, and wood sorrel in there as well. And we didn't even harvest as much of the solomon's seal as we could have."

Tastes as good as asparagus to me. Highly recommended.

It's normal for it to die down in the winter; not sure if there are other signs of death concerning you, Charles.

Norris
Portland, OR
http://farmerscrub.blogspot.com