PETER LIGHT (1943

Peter Light 1943 2021

& Boo

Permaculture Design I'd like to start this article with my definition of permaculture and design; then make a short statement on "doing it alone"; then present my personal path to permaculture in order to put my approach to design - the what and how - in a historical context; proceed to a recounting of my first design; and, finally and principally, talk about how I am applying permaculture design principles to the present phase of my life. I hope my words will be precisely germane to the topic, and really useful for everyone doing permaculture or "thinking about it," particularly those currently grappling and struggling with permaculture complexities - as I am - in their minds and on the ground. Permaculture and Design When I lose track of what permaculture is all about, I remind myself that above all else, unlike a regular hobby farm, market garden, truck farm, or homestead, permaculture is, above all else, a designed agriculture, rather than just a hodge-podge of components. I tell folks that permaculture is a designed integration of agriculture and human habitation meant to provide for all of human need - food, fuel, fiber, water, medicine, building materials - in as small a space as possible starting at your doorstep, first, by reducing our needs and wants and living simply, and then by applying design principles, utilizing vertical space, filling every niche, and using a wide mixture of mostly perennial, multifunctional plants and other components - with a special emphasis on trees - arranged in self-supporting, interactive guilds within a built forest of multiple levels and open spaces. Design made manifest is, finally, about putting components together to make something function, which is about action or performance intended to be both effective - which is about the actual production of, or power to produce, an effect; and efficient, which is about doing it economically, without waste of time, effort, and resources. Thus, in the case of permaculture design, it allows us to better manifest the Prime Directive: "The only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children. Make it now." A Caution It might be helpful before and while proceeding with this essay, and with any design we might do as individuals or small family units, to remind ourselves that Mollison always intended the word "permaculture" to mean not only "permanent agriculture" but also permanent culture. One person does not a culture make. It takes a village to properly maintain all of us, let alone raise a child. Mollison wrote of needing a least 30 adults, carefully chosen, as a minimum for real 100% sufficiency. Where does that leave most of us, even in this rarified world of permaculture practitioners? It may be our greatest failing, that we are often working alone, or with partner and children only, or with some version of what I call pseudo-community. Despite everything, most of us are still without vernacular, intentional community, and, to some extent - relative to our aims and accomplishments - having to acknowledge that no matter the production at our doorstep and beyond, our dream of true, viable, community-sufficiency is either unformed, in its infancy, struggling, floundering, fading, compromised, incomplete, or unfulfilled. All this is to say that we need to remind ourselves of our impossible post-industrial task as we berate ourselves for not getting everything done that we want to do, even just within the current parameters we are working in, not to mention the larger vision of the necessary Eden, and the extent to which we are still forced to have blood on our hands. My Background Each of us has had our own, unique life trajectory leading up to our interest in permaculture and design. Each path is no doubt affecting how and what we are manifesting in our lives at this moment, and how we approach living a "permaculture lifestyle." I sometimes have trouble making distinctions between what that might mean and look like vs the lifestyle I adopted well before Bill Mollison's brilliant gift to the world. How much of my path - whether universal or idiosyncratic - may be helpful to yours is hard to know - but because I am trying to root this article on my personal experiences. I hunch and hope that how it unfolded for me [deletion] will be interesting and relevant, and that this preamble to the main body of information on permaculture design I wish to present will be tolerated, if not forgiven. For the most part, since 1962, I have been blessed to have consistently found a way to live my life exactly as l have wanted to - each time, radically outside of the box. The first two essentials for success were having a vision of what I wanted to do, and then just starting, trusting that at the very least - which is a lot! - I wouldn't starve or freeze to death. Each time I dropped out, I had no specific ideas of how, financially, I was going to "follow my bliss," but each time the way opened before me, my livelihood flowing out of the lifestyle I had chosen: a roof, a meal, a couch, a day-job for a week or a month, a cash crop. Two other essentials for success were actually not having much money, and, finally, living completely off the grid and away from stores so I couldn't spend any money! That freely chosen way forced self-reliance! It was only after my successful leaps into the unknown that I encountered the book The Seven Laws of Money, by Michael Phillips, and was affirmed and gratified to see that the first chapter was entitled "Do It!" Somehow, I cannot separate my success with permaculture design from these four basics: Get clear about what you want to do, start doing it, don't worry about the money, and keep it small and simple. Nevertheless, despite having lived simply since adulthood; despite 30 years of vegetable gardening, ten years in the woods, two permaculture design courses. and a ten-day hands-on; despite reading, studying, thinking, and doing permaculture since 1987; and despite occasionally teaching permaculture, I have only been able to consider and begin executing a full-fledged design twice - once in the '70s, ten years before I heard the word permaculture; and once now, developing for the past two years. In contradistinction to this, my daughter described the first as utopia, and my grand-daughter the second - after only four months from scratch - as paradise. Seeing as both echo Bill's suggestion that permaculture is the creation of the Garden of Eden ("and why not?"), I take both characterizations as some validation of what I did and do. They will be my main references as I try to understand and explain how I accomplished the first one, without the knowledge I have now, and how I am proceeding this time. Forward to the Past: The Storm Bay Design Root influences and events led, in the summer of 1967, to a fervent desire to live off of the grid in southwest B.C., "chopping wood and hauling water." I was well equipped: As a child, I grew up as a middle-class kid in Vancouver, across a tree-lined street from a 1.4 h (3 a) park, and two blocks from Burrard Inlet and the beach; I loved nature; I vacationed every holiday on a small truck farm in the Frazer Valley; I knew how to use and sharpen simple hand-tool; I had built a log cabin with a friend with axe and cross-cut saw when I was 12. The back-to-the-land dream was also aided by the fact that, as I have indicated, I had already twice successfully gone through the experience of radically unhooking from the dominant paradigm: out of university into the ban-the-bomb movement; and out of that into city hippy explorations. I had embraced Thoreau's and Gandhi's ideas and had taken some kind of vow of voluntary poverty by early 1966. Ten days of planting trees for B.C. Forestry ("What!? You mean they hire hippies?") in the spring of 1967 paid for all our second-hand tools; ten days the following fall doing the same bought a three month supply of food. On October 23, my daughter was born. On November 27, literal last dime flipped off the stern of the boat, we were gone: ten miles up Sechelt Inlet by water or air to Storm Bay - beyond roads, electricity, telephone, T.V. In the case of my first design that followed, I was not consciously following any permaculture principles or methods. They hadn't been yet been invented or articulated. I knew I wanted to build a log cabin in the woods, and grow my own food; I'd grown up with chickens and goats, so figured I'd get some of them. I wanted to learn the wild edibles and medicinals; I figured I'd fish, hunt, and gather. I did do all that. The goat only lasted a few months. Hunting soon fell by the wayside, despite my father having lived on deer, moose and bear for ten years in northern Alberta, homesteading a quarter section, before I was born. Fishing took a lot of time, sometimes with no catch, but it was a nice break. The emphasis soon settled into mostly gardening and gathering, then chickens, then bees. How did I start? What determined the design? How did I end up with such a beautiful and productive little clearing in the woods? Overall, it is hard to go wrong if you are poor, small, simple, full-time, and determined to directly provide for yourself, your family, or your intentional community, Is it almost unnecessary to know anything about design or permaculture principles given those parameters? I had a small abode; I was limited by the size of my clearing; I owned no power tools with which to extend my reach beyond my grasp. It is hard to go wrong when you have so little distance to go! The first step was choosing a site. I knew I did not want to be right on the water, where the other collective landowners intended to build, and where I would be exposed to all manner of boaters seeking the calm and fertile waters of the protected bay for vacation and recreation. I also wanted to be close to the creek that flowed down just off the eastern edge of the 28-acre property. Just off the upper corner, I decided on the only suitable spot, almost level and already a clearing. Then I made a couple of fairly serious design errors. I sited the cabin at the south end of the clearing so that it shaded the first few feet of ground immediately in front of the north-facing doorstep, while the other, down-hill side of the building was shaded by the close-by tall trees of the forest. These problems were solved when the cabin burned down four years later. and we moved into what had been destined to be a tool-shed and work-shop. It faced south-east. We had down-sized from 16'x24' with two 16'x8' sleeping lofts at either end (which wasn't all that big itself) to a 12'x12' of cedar pole and shake with one 8'x12' sleeping loft. Simplify, simplify, simplify. Smaller is beautiful! But I am ahead of myself. The next stage was the vegetable garden. It's location was obvious - the rest of the clearing.. Having been limited by my criteria for the location I chose, focused on building my log cabin, and, in the meantime, living a canoe paddle away on the other side of the bay, I didn't even bother to check the soil. When I started with the garden, once we had settled into our new home a year and a half after I had started it, I found that basically there was none! It took years and much effort to sieve out the rocks and add humus. The design process usually proceeded in a pretty simple and obvious way. Other elements were subsequently placed around the perimeter of the garden: the woodshed nearest to the door, a root-cellar close by on the other side, a garden shed and chicken coop at the top of the garden. All of this was in what I would now call zone I, all still within not more than about 50 feet from the doorstep. Because of the small size of the clearing, coupled with my driving desire to produce as much of our food as possible, it seems natural that certain practices advocated by permaculture were adopted. Using vertical space mandated pole beans, of course, and combining the vertical with the idea of multiple function, we put the two bee hives on top of the hen house and grew giant squash up and over our second cabin. Ruth Stout turned us on to permanent mulching, an example of "designing from nature." It was obvious that we wouldn't waste our own manure, or any other resource, for that matter: sawdust was sifted out from the floor of the woodshed and used in the outhouse and as a first fine mulch around emerging seedlings; I stopped piling and burning branches when I realized the tremendous waste of energy, and began using everything down to an inch in diameter as firewood, placing the rest here and there to rot down; wood-ash from the stove was of great value; garden and kitchen scraps went to the chickens, where the deep-litter became the compost pile, the hens the workers constantly turning the pile. Their energy was also used to break-up the large maple leaves we had in great abundance - if used whole as mulch, they formed dense, impenetrable mats; in a compost pile, they impeded the shovel when turning the heap. It was with the introduction of the chickens, and more particularly, the installation of a number of netted runs, that my creative juices really started to flow, and I began inventing an agriculture that I thought at the time was new and unique. Actually, it probably was, except that another guy was inventing it on the other side of the world at the same time! In other words, this is when my little enterprise really began to look like permaculture. I started by enclosing a permanent straw-yard with old fish net, which is freely available here on the west coast of Canada. That soon led to making three runs surrounding the central one, with three gates allowing separate access to each at different times. We planted an orchard of nuts and dwarf fruit trees in the small pastures, as well as an understory and ground-cover of clover, comfrey, and other herbs and multifunction plant species for hen and human. The bees pollinated the fruit trees and visited the clover flowers for honey. The chickens did not eat the bees or the flowers, but fed on the leaves of the clover, which was also adding nitrogen to the soil. The leaf-drop from the trees provided mulch and more richness. The chickens were fertilizing the orchard with their droppings, and helping with digging, mixing, earthmoving, and pest control. Oh yes, they also provided eggs. Before my move out of the city I had had a romantic notion of what our family lifestyle would look like. All during those years in that Garden of Eden it felt to me as though we were living in the middle of that romantic vision. Back to the Future: Designing in the Here and Now Moving to a new spot on my rural property here in Roberts Creek on May 9th, 2015 has enabled me to initiate a full-on permaculture at the best site I have ever started with: full sun all day and all year, and good soil and lots of water. This opportunity to finally once again manifest a complete design - this time with full awareness of permaculture - coupled with this chance to write about design, has focused my attention like never before on the principles and practices that are guiding me, helping me to understand again what permaculture is all about. The preparation for a permaculture design starts with a whole-site analysis: wind, sun, slope, aspect, gravity, and resources already present on and near the site: water, soil, wood, sand, gravel, rocks, plants, etc. Having lived on the property for 17 years at another location, I was already familiar with these intrinsic parameters, and I had been deeply considering the area where I am now for six months before I moved my trailer over. The execution of the design starts with the doorstep. The next task is determining destinations. The third, laying out the paths to these destinations. And the fourth and fifth, making path-side picking beds and activity areas. That leaves the rest of the space to be gradually filled in with components. This sketches, for me, in broad and primary strokes, the on-ground framework of a system. It begins to clarify and simplify the design process and helps me to get started with developing a permaculture. Determining the Doorstep. The principle determining factor influencing the location of one's doorstep is sunlight. It takes supreme precedence over all else. Not being oriented to the south, or having buildings or large trees casting serious shadow onto zone I and II, is a type-one design error that must be avoided; otherwise, a satisfactory permaculture design will be prevented or seriously diminished from the very beginning. Water and soil right at one's feet are the next factors to consider. How wet or dry is the location? How fertile is the soil? Deficiencies or excesses of these are easier to correct, however. The Destinations. I already knew where my van would be parked, in a pre-existing space half-way up the driveway with room for two vehicles 100' from my doorstep. I didn't want it closer, because I didn't like the idea of regularly driving it through and into intensive food production areas, due to exhaust pollution, the space it would take up, and the shade it would cast, although I do want to be able to occasionally off-load supplies of bulk materials closer to where they are going, preferably directly into the wheelbarrow and to where they are [deletion] to be used: Firewood, manure, grass clippings (delivered), and mulch material immediately come to mind, although increasingly my system itself is supplying those resource. Other relatively distant destinations are the home sites of other tenants, the bottom of the driveway at the highway, and other further-away areas of zones III, IV, and V: the orchard, the lower field with trees and much bamboo, and routes into the woods. It is best to have multipurpose destinations so that there will be many reasons to use the full length of the paths to observe and tend what is growing along them. Not having these multiple reasons is almost guaranteed to sabotage what we are trying to establish and maintain in less used parts of our system design. Sometimes there is more than one way to get somewhere. If one route gets obstructed for any reason, even a small area may not get visited for months and months, so that no monitoring of what is happening is taking place: rot, tree-fall, plant decline, blackberry growth. Sometimes, one route is shorter and simpler, so that the path looping through the orchard is seldom taken. A solution is to make that one's beginning more beguiling, the entrance emphasized and entrancing, the path easier to traverse. Much of what applies to the distant destinations is also applicable to those that are closer to ones abode, distributed within and throughout the first two zones, from chicken house to outhouse, from manure barrel to raspberry patch. The Paths I noticed a long time ago that much of my hippy homesteading lifestyle consisted of walking around moving material objects from one place to another. Consequently, I pay particular attention to the number of steps I will have to take to get from my doorstep to various components; and to the precise layout of the paths. I spend a lot of time meticulously laying out the exact routes and gentle curves of the paths, using tape-measure, rope, stakes, and flagging tape. I place and shape for their function, and I shape for the aesthetics. The curves often develop naturally or are obviously indicated. Often there are objects or land-forms to pass around. Not only are the curves pleasing to the eye, and to the body in motion, but crenulations mean a greater length of path - and therefore user - interfacing with the landscape, an increase of edge and bed for more diversity and productivity. The principle path, down through the center of the 4.6-acre property from one corner diagonally to the other, is and will be five feet wide, broad enough for two people to walk comfortably side by side. Next, the main paths branching off from it, to, through, or around large distinct areas - the orchard, my zone I and II, etc. - are four feet wide. The principle paths within each zone, three feet. Finally, the net-work of access to and through each individual part of each zone - garden beds, individual trees, out-buildings within feet of the house - are two feet wide. The ground immediately in front of my bottom step, which is two steps from my door, is an intersection of three paths; within another 25 feet, there are a further 35 branchings, some proceeding onward and outward, some doubling back. Path-side Picking Beds It makes so much sense to be growing food - especially food that is eaten often, and plants that need much attention - alongside all the paths. I am beginning to work with the idea that along well-traveled main paths extending through multiple zones, path-side picking beds in zone II can be thought of as extensions of zone I, and those in zone III as an extension of zone II. Path-side picking beds in zone I might be two to three feet wide, with mostly annual vegetables and some perennials; the others, in the more spacious zones, can be three to five feet wide, with taller plants such as raspberries, espaliered dwarf fruit trees, small vines, Jerusalem artichokes, asparagus, etc. in the back, with a mix of annuals and perennials at their feet. Another value of planting alongside paths is that taller plants on the south side of east/ west paths do not shade other plants, but rather, mostly only the path itself; and taller plants along paths running north/south are in rows oriented as recommended for tall plants in a vegetable garden. This is a useful strategy to maximize sun exposure and minimize unwanted shade. I try to establish low-growing Dutch white clover, Trifolium repens, on all my paths, even very wet sections that have had to be surfaced with drainage rock. Clover is more desirable than most plants that will otherwise colonize bare ground; it is the only plant I know that is listed as trample-proof, not just trample-resistant; it helps immensely on paths that would otherwise get moderately wet, muddy, and slippery during the rainy season; it is a bee plant; the leaves and flowers can be eaten; it fixes nitrogen for the plants whose roots are growing under the path; and it can be mowed or scythed for mulch and chicken food. Activity Zones Activity zones, or work areas, need to be considered at the same time that the path-side picking beds are being determined and laid out. These areas are places for wheelbarrows; garden tools; liquid manure and rain barrels; garden hose outlets; compost piles; and off-loaded supplies, recyclables, soil, clippings, prunings, leaves, manure, flats, and plants that are coming and going. The closer these areas are to the doorstep, the smaller they are; further away, they can be larger. Because these spaces are at the expense of ground to grow food in, and push everything on one side of them further away from the epicenter of the system if they are expanded, I've tended to turn a blind eye to their need, or the size they should be. But they are necessary, and cannot be overlooked if we wish to have a well-functioning design that is not crowded and littered with obstructions. Filling In This is the meat and potatoes of a permaculture design. This is when the real work begins. This is where things get complicated. This is when I try to bring maxims to mind, teachings to bear, and personal life learnings to the fore. This is when I feel I need to remember - all at the same time - everything I know about permaculture and all the parameters of the plants I am trying to site! It seems that this siting of plants is mainly what we doing once the large spaces are defined by the skeleton of the system we are creating - once the locations of the house, destinations, and paths are determined. We start with the largest species first, and that is what I am in the middle of doing, trying to find the correct location for the trees and shrubs I acquired last year, and potted up for the winter then because I was no where near ready to decide where to put them. I am finding this to be the most difficult part of designing so far. Despite knowing each species' ultimate height and width, their sun/shade, wet/dry preferences, their permaculture zone range, and all the other factors that are necessary to take into account, I find myself walking around for hours agonizing over their placement. The problem is compounded by a number of factors. One is other components already sited; another, wanting to put certain fruits in chicken runs; another, Martin Crawford's "plus 30%" spacing rule. Suddenly, areas where I thought I would be planting Sea Buckthorn, (Hippophae rhamnoides), more Saskatoons and elderberries (Amelanchier and Sambucus), a mulberry (Morus), and a clump of sweet-shoot bamboo (Phyllostachys dulcis) seem to be ruled out. What I am having the hardest time with is the placement of these trees and shrubs on about an acre of land that is already at least a third planted with trees, (deletion) another third in raspberries, currents, and blueberries; and a third more open ground with comfrey and old garden beds. (deletion) The principle difficulty is sunlight and shade. There is so much to take into account. Yes, height and width for a start, but more particularly, the height and width that the particular tree in hand will likely attain here, or there, or over there. How closely can they be spaced if I put them in a single hedge-row? Yes, deciduous or evergreen, but if deciduous, what percentage shade in summer and winter? If it is a single tree standing alone in relationship to an area of sun-loving annuals and perennials, how much loss of production will that understory suffer? Perhaps here is where that fabled, fertile ground of mistakes might lie. With the limited experience I have had with this crucial stage of permaculture - siting large and medium sized plant elements in a landscape already haphazardly occupied - it might be a time to finally just act, try out some possibilities, remember "design over time," over-plant with the aim of thinning out after a few years of early production, allow some areas to form a crowded thicket, or be prepared to removed some to transplant elsewhere if it becomes obvious that they are in the wrong place. Maybe my mistake was going a little wild when I suddenly discovered two local sources for many of the "rare and exotic" fruits for edible landscapes, and bought more than I could use! I'll find out soon enough. Target species and Guilds One thing that can help is the idea of target species, and guilds. There are tens of thousands of living, breathing components to choose from and apply to a permaculture canvas. Mollison famously wrote - in his field notes in the 50's - and I quote from a limited memory from his autobiography Travels in Dreams: "The forest seems a simple thing. I think I could build one." But if we are modeling nature, then we are modeling complexity. This can be overwhelming to a designer. It is sometimes useful to chunk complexity down into smaller, individual parts. One of the ways I am finding helpful to do that is to think of each tree and shrub that I locate being a "target species" that becomes the start of a guild of plants radiating out from it. It has been further useful to consider these developing guilds as islands that merge. Design from Nature I am excited to look at how vegetation has re-colonized the sides of the local two-lane highway that cuts up the coast past my property. I see such good examples of the abundance and diversity of "the edge," of multilevel stacking, from grasses in the hard-packed gravel within inches of the pavement, to the firs, hemlocks, and cedars that mark the edge of the forest after clear-cut road construction. In between, there is a mix of indigenous and native plants: western red alder and scotch broom; evergreen saplings and Himalayan blackberry. It is of particular interest to study what grows along the north-facing side of the highway, and to note what produces a credible yield in areas receiving less sun. I also note the mix of opportunistic species - indigenous and otherwise - and their changing relationships with each other and other plants. The only species that can seem to dominate at times is blackberry, which is not, however, one that is being targeted as part of the current misplaced hysteria about so-called invasive plant. There are many, many other lessons that can be learned from observing how nature arranges itself, and applied to permaculture design, but space must limit my comments here now. Design Over Time This of course is just one more damn thing that adds further complexity to our considerations, but it is one that I am recently finding useful. If a plant will start producing in a short few years, but will take decades to reach full size, one can plant that species - say, for example walnut - at half the distance, and then cut out every other one as they begin to crowd, utilizing the wood for lumber or firewood, and using the space opened up for other, shorter-lived species. Conversely, one could plant the large trees at a normal spacing (plus 30%), and interplant with short-life shrubs that will be ready to be removed as they get crowded out. (start here tomorrow!!!) The above is but one example of using this design principle. Space here prohibits more, but we should bring the concept to mind as we proceed with our work. It is actually a sub-set of "design from nature" where we can look to find other examples. Making The Best Use Of I often bring this maxim to mind as I go about my permaculture design and maintenance, the daily chores and the tasks at hand. Because most of these involve walking around and moving objects - often resources - from one location to another, I have noticed that the "best" of this rough translation of "aprovecho" often means consideration of the urgency and appropriateness of a need, and the time and effort that will be expended fulfilling it - how far away will the resource be used? how much processing will be involved? Today, two examples arose. In one case, I am pruning raspberries and laying the cut stems on either side of the rows and woven through the middle, as mulch, as I do every year. An easy decision: returning biomass back to the soil right on the spot where it was created. The other example: Last year I harvested my four-year-old coppiced willow for firewood and was left with many, many branches, half of which I laid across my driveway pull-out and two-car parking area, there to be broken up and pulverized by the movement and weight of my van and the vehicles of occasional guests and customers. Today, one year later (design over time), getting ready for a load of road base to be put down on the parts of the area that are wet and muddy, I raked off and into piles all the broken up and rotting down organic matter on its way to becoming topsoil. The closest place to use this material was along the driveway, mulching a short stretch of one edge of the willow coppice, not something that really needed doing, but close at hand. I started doing this with the coarsest material, but it didn't seem appropriate for the mixture that remained. I could use it whole to create mounds in wet areas where I intent to transplant some bamboo - Fargesia murielae - but the area isn't ready yet, and I'd rather not dump it somewhere else until it is. I could also sift it through, first, a quarter inch screen for some fine rich soil for part of a planting mix, and then through a half inch screen for part of a coarser potting mix, finally using the coarsest remaining material as at least a base for some mounds. This was a lot more work, but was off-set by the value that accrued. I opted for this use. "Protracted and Thoughtful Observation, Not Protracted and Thoughtless Action" Also not a option is to jump to the first thought that occurs to us, to rush to a decision. It is seldom necessary to do something right away. It is usually possible and always desirable, if we have any doubts, to "sleep on it" - for a night, a week, a month - letting both the conscious and unconscious mind work on a good solution to some problem we might be having trouble solving. This maxim ties into "making the best use of" and helps avoid extra work and difficult corrections. I applied it to a pile of slabs I obtained when I broke up an old concrete pad I discovered under an old shed that I had moved 50 feet to make way for the arrival of my re-located travel-trailer home. The pile sat 15' from my doorstep, some of it for a year, while I worked around it and considered how I might best use the material, preferably somewhere close at hand. I was pretty sure I knew how I wanted to use the space the pile was occupying, but I certainly didn't want to move the slabs out of the way and make another pile of them while I was figuring out where their final resting place would be. Their first use was for a herb spiral five feet from my door; finally, the rest were used for edging around some small garden beds right at hand, and the largest pieces for flagstones for a close by very wet and muddy section of the principle approach to my abode. Waste Not, Want Not I learned this from by Dad - who homesteaded in northern Alberta during the depression - and internalized the message. It is the same as "A penny saved is a penny earned." It is identical to Mollison's maxim "All pollution is waste; all waste is pollution." It goes hand-in-hand with voluntary poverty: I do not mend my socks because I am poor; I am "rich" because I mend my socks. I have found that an important part of this maxim is separating materials and taking things apart. Both result in individual components that are often more useful and less of a hassle separated than when they were together in something broken, not used or wanted, or mixed in a jumble of parts - and components are what a permaculture design is composed of! There are innumerable examples of this. Once or twice a year I sift the floor of my wood shed for sawdust for my outhouse, soil mixtures, and to plant in (part of my Totally Weedless Gardening Strategy); and for the larger material to burn in my little stove, often for cooking during the summer. I usually take nails, screws, hinges, latches and other hardware out of old lumber destined to be built or mulched with, or used as fuel. I have a Quonset hut filled with stuff I won't throw away because I know there are parts that could be used, and [deletion] often are. Speaking of Waste One of my imperatives is to live and demonstrate living inexpensively or free; another, self-sufficient and free; another, how to survive various collapses, to unhook from the mainstream. Sometimes these overlapping and similar imperatives can be [deletion] at odds with each other; other times they dovetail perfectly. I've recently been powerfully struck, for example, by a conundrum arising from a conflict between them, arising now that once again - since August 15, 2016 - I have chickens as a principle component of my current permaculture design. Once again, they are being free-ranged in a number of pastures; and once again, for now, at least, I am having to depend on some commercial feed for maximum production. Fortunately, egg sales from the 28 hens easily pay for that feed. However, they don't have to pay for - and neither do I! - [deletion] the great volume of fruit and vegetable scraps I acquire for them once or twice a week directly from the produce department of two or three local supermarkets. Once again, I am brought face-to- face with the waste of perfectly good food that accrues hour by hour at these outlets. Not only that, but much of it is organic! Today, for example, I picked up four full plastic bags from two supermarkets, about 200 pounds of food, all of it edible. There is a minuscule amount of mould or rot - all of it today's fresh waste! It is impossible and silly not to divert the best for human use, but it is much more than I and my seven tenants can possibly consume. I'm thinking of starting a food-bank and soup kitchen! One could say that by introducing one element into my design - the chickens - I have eliminated the need to do permaculture! I get to eat all the produce I could possibly want, including many kinds of fruits and vegetables I would not usually buy or even grow, [deletion] much of it organic - for free and scant minutes of work, So I ask myself: Why bother to grow my own? The only answer that really makes sense is that I will be no less vulnerable as the California drought continues, the water runs out, and the trucks stop rolling north. Although I would still be demonstrating an aspect of living cheap and free, I would not be showing how to prepare for survival by unhooking from mega mainstream agribusiness. And what would be left of my on-ground, beautiful, healthy, and rewarding lifestyle? Nevertheless, it is something I continue to ponder. Chickens I have chickens mainly for the work they do for me, eating and scratching their way through a landscape. Over and over again, I have been unable not keep up with the rampant growth of various grasses, bedstraw, buttercup and blackberry overwhelming the old orchard and environs in zone III that I have been developing and trying to maintain. I'd lost the battle at least three times before I got the chickens, at which point I could not even find the trails I had made, let alone walk them. Wood and branches were buried. Fallen apples hid in the weeds. I couldn't see the extent of the few but large blackberry vines snaking their way back into the space and through the tangle. Within two months, the whole area had been transformed. Most of the species of grass - the principle weed of Zone II and III - had been eaten, the others scratched and trampled into submission. So, too, the dense mats of buttercup, which the hens also hardly ate. As they worked, I was able to easily access the blackberry canes that I needed to remove. I recovered the firewood they uncovered, and piled up the branches they exposed. The 15 or 20 huge comfrey plants had been consumed down to their central leaf rib. Wherever I wanted them to work more intensely, that is where I would throw a few handfuls of scratch. Any day now, as soon as I get this article finished, I will be sowing Dutch white clover, crimson clover, kale, and mustards in all the runs; other useful plants have self-sown, including those pernicious grasses, now a problem made a solution: chicken food! The Hen House and Immediate Surrounds I'm housing my 28 hens in a 12'x12'x14' pyramid. The beauty of this form of construction is that just four structural members - in this case a single 14' x 12" length of western red cedar (Thuja plicata), quartered with sledge and wedge - frame the roof and walls! I built the hen house over a pond I created with a spill-dam in a four foot deep ditch. It is intended for ducks, to give them some protection from predators and, as part of a 75' series of small ponds exposed to varying degrees of sunlight, for biomass production - for food for me, them, and the chickens; and for fertilizer and mulch: watercress excels for this purpose. My Developing Pasture System Design I am also in the middle of designing and putting together a pasture system for the poultry which will allow the birds to be ranged over a wide area all around my zone I in many, many runs of various shifting shapes and sizes. A version of a chicken tractor system, it is comprised of a half dozen or so 75' lengths of poultry wire that can be used separately or easily clipped together; and ten or twelve 10' lengths of tunnel 12" to 18" in diameter and made of stucco wire that can also be clipped together, end-to-end, or to an opening in a pen cut to receive them. The sections of fencing have bamboo poles woven through every five to ten feet, with about a foot projecting at the top and the bottom. One end is slanted, the other flat across the top. Each section can be rolled up and carried by one person to an area to be enclosed. The tunnels are for moving the birds from their straw-yard immediately around the coop through a pasture or pastures that are not yet ready for them and need protecting, to one that is ready to be grazed and cultivated. The flexibility of the fencing and the easy of driving the poles into the soil with a rubber mallet as it is unwound means that it can take any shape the landscape suggests and the designer wants. It can extend out to loop around an individual plant or guild, or bulge in to exclude it. Using the attachment point to the principle run as a pivot, the fence can be shifted every few days to create multiple small plots of ground to be intensely grazed for a few days and then planted with cover-crops or food forest element. With the addition of a length of tunnel, this range and flexibility is greatly increased. The fencing itself can even take the place of a tunnel at times by being moved into the shape of a one-foot wide passageway running 35' to another erected enclosure. The tunnels are light enough to carry one in each hand. I don't think I'll need many more than a dozen to connect to anywhere I want my birds to work for their meals. Making it on the Farm: Design for a Living From the Land Dropping out with no or very few bucks is, in the beginning, similar to taking flight like a cormorant. Launching from a low rock or floating log, at first you swear it's going to do a belly-flop, its little, short, skinny, barely feathered wings beating like crazy, its belly dragging on the water. When it finally gets truly airborne, you almost breath a sign of relief, you almost feel like cheering. It never gets very high, but it sure can skim along. [paragraph] Finding your way financially by starting to do what you really want to do first is a lot like that, but something always presents itself. The few other folks up the inlet near where I lived in the seventies each found their way. One was a shake-splitter; one, a prawn fisher; a couple were on welfare for awhile. Some.... I met a farmer's son studying agriculture at a college in Olds - a prairie town in Alberta, Canada - when I was there to give a talk on permaculture. The two things that most excited him about my presentation was the idea of creating and using vertical space (he grew up and lived on [deletion] flat land); and the thought that he could plant [deletion] mint just outside his door, and later walk out from his kitchen, pick some, and go back inside and make tea from it! What stuck me most forcefully about his approach to agriculture was that he and his father were growing alfalfa and hay on 6000 acres - 2000 owned, 4000 leased - north-east of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan (even flatter than Alberta), had realized a net income of $500 the previous year, and were one million dollars in debt, while I was rapidly paying off a mortgage (in six years) with my old age pension and rent from a gaggle of illegal tenants, and was earning enough to live on comfortably from just 35 plants in an area 20'x30', and - other than the mortgage - was not in debt. I was able to do this because I chose to live a life of voluntary poverty, because I trusted that somehow Universe would provide, and because I selected and elected to grow a plant species of high economic value - [deletion] one of Bill's suggestions for how to generate an income from the land. This plant grew out of my lifestyle long before I grew it out of the ground and, unbelievably, despite our almost non-existent flow of money for the first three years in Storm Bay - living on a child allowance of $6, and then $12 dollars a month, and happenstance - out of the ground for three years before it occurred to me that it could provide a living. I was just so excited to be able to follow the enjoiner, new and radical at the time, to "Grow yr own." So I came to my livelihood honestly, an outlaw specializing in victimless crime. The way chose me. It became the basis for a small family business, but only one part of our self-support system. It allowed us to stay home with our children. It enabled me to do permaculture full-time. I wonder sometimes if this is a hidden, untold story of permaculture. Maybe an issue of this magazine could be devoted to "Pot and Permaculture." Impermanence To add some perspective to our lives, it might be helpful though sobering [deletion] to remind ourselves of [deletion] the likelihood that permaculture isn't. Permanent. When designers walk way from a decade of work, or die after a lifetime of effort, the chance that they will leave anything more enduring than archeological traces (one of my permaculture teachers, Rick Valley, observed that a post hole would be recognized as such in 10,000 years) is slight. Here on the West Coast, grasses, bedstraw, and broom; Himalayan blackberry, and alder; wind and water; and rot and mould will initiate the conversion through successional changes back to a climax forest of fir, cedar and hemlock. Only with the formation of truly viable intentional communities with a clear vision, many agreements, lots of tools to resolve conflict, a good location, and blind luck can we hope to have our designs prevail for more than one generation. But it is still not likely. Connections with essentials are long past. We can only practice being here now and non-attachment as we practice our permaculture craft, and congratulate ourselves that our footprints are so light that they will be hardly noticed, and will soon fade. From Lawrence Ferlinghetti The World Is A Beautiful Place The world is a beautiful place to be born into if you dont mind happiness not always being so very much fun if you dont mind a touch of hell now and then just when everything is fine because even in heaven they dont sing all the time The world is a beautiful place to be born into if you don't mind some people dying all the time or maybe only starving some of the time which isn't half so bad if it isn't you!!!

PETER LIGHT (1943 - 2021)

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