The Art and Craft of Living with Nature

More Green!

2011-01-15T10:27:00.001Z

Hi, I'm back.
Before I say anything else, I just have to admit that regular blogging is not going to happen any more. This year I'll try a bit of reverse psychology on myself and say I won't write much on this blog. Maybe that will cause me to surprise myself occasionally with a new blog entry?
Over Christmas I updated the permaculture part of our website, and I am busy putting together everything for a great course offering. First up are a few taster sessions, both in Cahersiveen and in Killarney.

I just wrote a piece about one of the more in-depth courses coming up after that.

'More Green!' is all about propagating plants - from seed, from cuttings, by grafting, budding, division, layering etc...

I'll sneak this in here, and make it count as a blog entry!

Just add time.

Good gardeners think long-term.
Do you have a healthy, strong-growing plant? Propagate from it now.
You may start by collecting the seed - you may start by taking a small cutting – or even just by pegging a shoot down towards the soil. The whole process may take a season. It will be two to three years before you are looking at a stong, well-grown plant that cost you nothing but a bit of knowledge and patience to produce.
I guarantee, by that time, you will be delighted to use it either in your own garden, or to swap it with friends for other plants.

If you have any kinds of plants in your life – even if it is only a geranium on a windowsill, or a few pots of herbs by the back door – then propagation is the Next Frontier!
You have nothing to lose and much to gain.
This course is for you if you have never done more than buying plants from a garden centre. The process of propagation will make you more intimately aquainted with your plants. Just watching the miracle of, for example, a dry little stick turning into a whole new plant with roots, leaves, flowers and fruit, adds a whole new dimension to your gardening experience.
On the other hand, if you have already tried your hand at growing your own plants before, and had dissapointing results, this course will be useful to you to gain an overview of your propagation options, and identify the right strategy for your problem. There will be time for questions on specific plant's propagation requirements.
Learning plant propagation is an open-ended learning process.
People often start out by seeing a leafy cutting in a jar of water on someone's windowsill and imitating this. Later, they realise that, with a little more knowledge, they can take cuttings of many other plants.

I remember, as a child, sticking an onion into a flower pot and - weeks later- proudly serving up my home-grown onion greens as a seasoning at dinner. Soon after, I planted fat runner bean seeds and had dreams of my bedroom turning into a green jungle as the plants stretched up along the window pane.
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At the moment, people are cutting back on all kinds of luxuries, and are assessing ways to make something out of very little. In that sense, propagation skills are valuable asset to have.
After taking this course, the range of plants you grow will expand manyfold as you get into the habit of asking friends and neighbours for tiny snippets which, in time, you can easily turn into magnificent specimens.You will be able to decide which propagation method to choose for which plant.
While I will mostly stick with giving general guidelines during this course, I will also outline specific techiques for plants particularly suited to the Irish climate, and those especially desirable or important, such certain herbs, vegetables and fruit.

We will also talk about grafting.
Grafting is an exciting form of propagation that offers many advantages over simply growing from cuttings.
Most fruit trees are grafted, in order to achieve higher and earlier yields.
My neighbour has a nice selection of low-maintanance shrubs in her garden. Pointing to a small willow tree, she said to me:"That one was sold to me as a weeping willow – but I suppose it wasn't one at all."
Looking at it now, we see many long shoots growing up from the ground – straight up in the air, with no weeping to be seen (or heard!).
Now, you have to know that small weeping willows are usually grafted. The weeping part flows down elegantly from the height that a straight root stock provides. Something must have happened to damage the growth of the tree above the graft - so the weeping willow part died off, and now the lower portion of the tree - the rootstock - is all that remains.
We now have the option of repeating the graft and turning a very unremarkable looking shrub into the elegant feature it was originally meant to be.

Growing from seed is easy with most of the seeds commonly available in shops. But once you explore a bit further, there is world of adventure waiting for you. Again, this can be done at very little cost. One packet of seed will supply you with an abundance for the garden, and more to give away. Many seed catalogues offer up an enticing range. Have you ever thought of growing one entire hedge of roses from seed? Or a small forest of eucalyptus trees? Crab apples to add colour to you native hedge? Alder trees for an inexpensive solution for that damp neglected corner of your land?
The amount of plant species to choose from is so much larger than one you would find in a garden centre. Many of these seeds will need a little bit of special treatment to germinate successfully. I will introduce you to the mysteries of seed dormancy, stratification, vermiculite etc, and guide you to success with your seedlings.

During this course, you will get a chance to do some practical propagation work. Groups are small, so there is time to address individual questions. You will also receive course notes to take home.

For bookings, go here.

Hens

2010-01-24T12:42:00.003Z

Last spring we acquired 33 hens. It was a bargain I couldn't refuse. (At a good price and one free for every ten!)
I wasn't quite ready for them...
Bad combination, but one apt to occur in the homesteading game.

Neighbours who heard about my latest enterprise regaled me with stories about the mink. There is a mink farm not too far away from here, and appearantly these animals can squeeze through incredibly small gaps. The mink, they tell me, is way worse than the fox who may kill a hen or two to satisfy his hunger. The mink will kill all the hens you have with bloody abandon, even if he doesn't care for eating them.

To make a long story short, I still don't know if that's true. To this day the only animals The Tracker in my family has been able to track anywhere near the chickens are the cats and an occasional rat. The rats are more interested in the compost pile my hens forage in. But the cats are absolutely fascinated by the chickens Especially the little-boy-cat, Lucky, will sit and watch them for hours. You can see the steam rising from his black head, trying to decide whether getting into that cage would be a good idea - or not.

When I built my first hen house, I took all the advice to heart, however, and built a strong wooden box from two large wooden crates and scrap timber, with no gaps absolutely whatsoever.
It's not built to the best design, but one has to get to know animals and their behaviour first, in order to built them perfectly designed accomodation.
A shelf runs around the back wall and the shorter two side walls. The hens roost on that at night. Chicken shit accumulates there, and I either clean it out or throw more straw on it every now and then.
I noticed after a while that the hens were shaping these mini-dungheaps so that there would be a ledge for perching at the very front. I realize now that they naturally like to curl their feet around something at night.
I added a rail which they now perch on, suspended a few inches above the original shelf.
That whole shelf idea is not the best because of the dung accumulation, but I did it to provide enough space underneath for all the hens to lay eggs, protected from droppings.
As it turned out, they all lay eggs in one, and at the most two, places under these shelves. The best set-up would be a house with rails to sleep on and inside this a small box which accomodates the egg-laying nest.
It's even better to have this box attached to the outside of the house, so you can open it by lifting the lid, and take out the eggs without having to stoop down into the hen house.

The roof of this particular one is not quite resolved yet, because I had planned to build a little greenhouse on top, to take advantage of heat and CO2 produced by the hens, but that may happen in time...

I soon after built an outside run for the hens. This one is supposed to be mobile, so that it can be put in place over a garden bed, letting the hens pick out weeds, cultivating the soil with their scratching, and fertilizing it at the same time. This is what they call a 'Chicken tractor' in permaculture.
I will experiment with this in the future, but last year my garden was not really happening yet, and in practice this cage was a bit too large to be moved. It had a box attached for sleeping and egg-laying. Without that, one has to put the hens to bed every night and catch them every morning, adding chores to the long list.

I added straw from time to time as bedding, and had good material for the compost heap when I moved the cage. The whole set up was chicken-mesh wire over a wooden frame, with 10, 20 cm of mesh buried into the ground.

These hens were in their second year of laying last summer. And they did lay!
I was giving away dozens of eggs every week.
Eggs are good for trading with friends, and for establishing community connections.
I find that selling them in shops is not an option as every grocery shop in town already stocks local free range eggs. If I ever get around to selling surplus vegetables, I may sell eggs together with those, maybe in a box scheme.
I am happy to have so many hens, because I need to make a lot of good quality compost this year, to get my garden going. But in future I will probably keep less hens, and maybe of more interesting breeds. The ones I have are just ordinary Rhode Island Red - the same ones they use for commercial egg production.
Right now I only have 23 hens, as I gave some away.

When I had the hens in that outside run, I noticed that they started to eat their own eggs.
A frantic search through internet and books gave me a few clues.
There was some scarily drastic advice, such as 'clip their beaks', and 'kill any hen with yellow on its beak immediately, cause she will keep eating eggs and teach the others to do it!' - And: 'Never feed eggs shells to hens unless dried and ground, or they will learn to eat their own eggs."
I made a few less drastic alterations.

My own take on the situation is now:
Eggs need to be laid in a dark space, so the hens can't see them, or else they will pick at them.
Drying and grinding egg shells is too much work. Feeding egg shells to hens is very neccessary, as they otherwise need mineral supplements, such as oyster shells. It will not increase egg eating.
Hens who ate eggs were probably stressed or bored. The cage was a bit small, and not enough fresh forage available.

As soon as I could get around to it, I remedied the situation by adding a large run to the original hen house.

This now doubles as compost heap.
More on the compost-hen connection in a future post.

The Polytunnel

2010-01-15T18:05:00.007Z

A big polytunnel.
Six meters wide and twenty meters long.

Predictably, this was a daunting structure to put up.
Predictably, I am seriously pleased with it.

I also predict vast amounts of vegetables, herbs and fruit to be emerging from its doors this coming summer!!!
I will report back on that one.

I started clearing the space for this tunnel last winter. Between many other projects the item 'get ready for polytunnel' never quite got crossed off the list until late summer this year. And this was long after the thing itself (in all its bits and pieces) had been delivered at the beginning of May.
I decided to put the tunnel very close to the road. This is a going to be a centre of intense activity, and it is important to have an easy path for inputs and outputs.
The next thing to consider was how to orient it with regard to the sun. The long axis faces due south, as recommended by the manufacturers.
Shelter, luckily, is a given. I have some trees and hedgerows on all sides of the tunnel. I had to strike a balance there between retaining these for shelter and removing some to reduce shading.
It is possible to do without shelter for a polytunnel, even in an extremely exposed site. I know of large tunnels on islands off the west coast.
You will have to invest in an extra strong framework, which will be that much more expensive.

At the time when I had roughly established the site, a digger was doing some work in the village, and it wasn't long before I asked him to help me put the finishing touches to my work.
This allowed me much better site preparation than I had planned initially.
Adrian, the digger driver, did a neat job.
First, he levelled the whole area, burying branches under under peat soil (outside the footprint of the tunnel), effectively creating raised beds, and tidying up the appearance of this place, in preparation for a garden all around the tunnel.
Then he dug a drainage channel down the middle of the footprint and filled it with stone (6” to 10”).
I later blinded this off with a layer of recycled plastic and fine gravel. This is now the main path, a drainage channel and a heat store, all in one. (Polytunnels heat up quickly in sunshine, but also cool down quickly again. Adding thermal mass always helps.)

Since I had the help of the digger, we added a pond, along the south side of the tunnel.
It is not very deep (about 1m), as Adrian, who has a lot of experience with ponds, was worried about the possibility of the whole tunnel sliding sideways into the pond. He was telling us wild stories about digging foundations for a house in the bog one day, and having the whole site slide into the hole by next morning.
We wanted the pond for - again - a variety of reasons:

It's fun. And pretty.
We could maybe have fish in it.
We could grow water plants in it.
Increase of biodiversity.
Light will get reflected off the pond and into the tunnel.
The area is already very wet and not useful for much else.
Aebbhric wants to do bushcraft exercises on a log layed across the pond (sounds like fun if you don't mind getting wet...).

None of us were too sure if the pond would fill up properly (without a liner).
It was dug during very dry (for South Kerry) weather, filled up within days, and has never looked like drying out since.

So far so good. I was ready to set out the foundations.

I bought the tunnel from Polydome in Birr, Co.Offaly.
It came with a whole book on how to set out the site, do foundations and erect the tunnel.
Overall I am very happy with their product and service. Some things in the booklet could have been expressed more clearly, and I would possibly have made some mistakes if I had not asked more questions.
I am hugely impressed with the fact that they delivered the correct amount of parts. There were many, many moments when I thought they had made a mistake. But it always turned out to have been myself that had jumped to the wrong conclusion.
Erecting a polytunnel yourself is very much like putting up flat-pack furniture.

It's harder than it should be,
you wish you had the money to pay someone who knows what they are doing,
afterwards you see how easy it really was and you consider going into business doing this full-time.

Setting out the foundation is probably the most daunting part of any polytunnel project.
You have to take your time with it, there's no way around that.
I chose a foundation option that was different from the usual:
Normally you dig fairly shallow holes, fill them with concrete, and set 40cm foundation poles into it.
The hoops are later fitted into those foundation poles.

When I first chose the site for the tunnel, I dug a test hole. I dug through two meters of peat before hitting gravel/silt.
Concrete foundations do not 'get a grip' in peat soil. I talked to man from Polydome, and he recommended extra long foundation poles (2.7m).
Polydome also supplies 'Anti-sinkage bars' for boggy ground conditions. They get attached to the foundation poles at soil-level, and, through resting on the soil, prevent the poles from slipping any deeper.
I did not buy any, and used logs from trees felled on-site for the same purpose.

When it came to ramming these poles more than two meters deep into the ground, we had to be a bit inventive. Aebhric would hang on to the top of the pole, and it would go down nearly far enough. Then he would do the rest with the sledge hammer. I had to protect the tops of the poles in various ways.
It was difficult to get them into the positions I had measured out so carefully, as there is a lot of leeway for a the top of a long pole to end up in a different place to where it has gone into the ground.We did our best to keep them level, but still, the positioning is not perfect, and this has impacted on the end result, meaning the plastic is not stretched evenly in some places. But I can live with that.

After the foundation poles were in position, Aebhric was busy with classes again, and I was on my own with the rest of the frame work.
I just kept at it, and bit by bit I got it all assembled over the next few days.

Summer was over, and I was getting nervous about getting the tunnel done before the weather would turn from bad to worse. Luckily there came a fine spell, and on September 27th, I was able to assemble a crew of helpful people.
Thanks to Adriano, Dessie, Christie, Matthew and Aebhric, we got the huge sheet of plastic unrolled and up over the framework very smoothly.
Adriano, a friend who had put up a smaller Polydome tunnel the year before, was 'project manager', and relieved to see the cover go on so easily.
I must say, having a friend who has done this before, is psychologically very important.
It is possible to ring the manufacturer with questions, but it is more reassuring to have a friend on hand for all the little uncertainties.
Cutting the plastic sheet to size, for example: It's simple, in theory, to measure the correct length, once, then twice, then cut it.
But it's nice to be able to ask a friend who has done this before: Are you sure now?!

After that my crew helped me fill in the trenches I had dug along the sides of the tunnel. The edge of the plastic goes into those, and then you fill them up with soil. (In my case, again, as peat is a good deal lighter than ordinary soil, we used fine gravel instead.)
We fixed the plastic in a few places along the gable ends, but it was another days' work at least, for Aebhric and me after that, to fix it all securely.

There was an exciting moment when I cut the opening for the door, and I first looked into the fully covered interior of the tunnel. The sun had been shining, and heated the soil inside, so that the tunnel had filled with steam. As I cut the door opening, billows of tropical steam left it, and gave me a first taste of the garden heaven I am to experience in the future.

Why, you may ask, did I not get a smaller tunnel to start with?

pure greed
I have been gardening for long enough to know that I am serious about it
anecdotal evidence suggests that people always want another polytunnel after they've had one for a while
I want to use the space for teaching

If I had considered a smaller sized tunnel, I would have tried to build one myself, DIY-style.
I may still do that, if I run out of space.

When I ordered that size of tunnel, I did not realize that a 20m tunnel is much higher than, say, a 12m tunnel.
My one is about 4m high. That means I will want to do a lot of vertical growing. I will experiment with climbing plants like beans and tomatoes, of course, but I may also add shelves or hanging baskets.

Lack of ventilation is the root of all evil inside a polytunnel.
It will take some time to find the right combination of vertical planting to still allow for enough air to get through.

People have asked me what I plan to grow, and I say - not very helpfully - 'everything', but I really mean it.
I am planning to grow all the vegetables we like to eat, including many that would do perfectly well outside. (Of those I will only have a few plants inside, for a guaranteed crop, and more outside).
I want to try some things I have never been able to grow before. Tomatoes, and peppers.
I also want to grow as much fruit as possible.
It is so difficult to get high-quality fresh fruit in Ireland, and I miss it.
I will grow strawberries and rasberries. I will get a grape vine and a kiwi. I am also tempted to try an apricot tree and a cherry tree.
All the space in between veg and fruit will be filled with herbs and flowers.
Nice picture isn't it? I will post some pictures of the real situation here later this year.

The truth is, I have no idea how well things will grow for me.
Polytunnel growing is not something you learn in one season.

My soil is not great.
I decided not to import any topsoil.
20m x 6m is a small enough area to attempt some soil amendment therapy. I added a large amount of sand to the peat soil. I got cow manure, which, mixed with straw, is rotting down in piles.
I made a large worm compost pile which should be ready soon.
I will also add grow green manure crops wherever I have space available.
Finally, I bought one ton of 'rock dust'. Peat soil is extremely low in minerals and trace elements. Cultivated soil in general often is deficient in minerals, and Seers' rock dust is a product that is supposed to remedy the situation and improve growing results substantially.
The rock dust should also take care of the PH balance in my case.

The rock dust is still sitting in its large bag outside the tunnel. I am reluctant to add it to the soil indiscriminately, as I want to set up some kind of test to see if it really makes a big difference. I want to add it to some plants, and not to others.
I have heard, in the past, that the soils our food crops are grown in are often very depleted in terms of trace elements, and that therefore the food is not as nutrient-rich as it should be.
I feel that if I am trying to grow food at all, I want to grow food that is not only tasty, but healthy.
Vitamins are not everything. Trace elements are also vital to good health.

One last thing I want to mention on why I am excited about the polytunnel: propagating plants.
At some stage every serious gardener get bit by the propagating bug.
Plants are expensive in the garden centre.
Seeds seem quite cheap, until you get addicted, and want to try a large variety of them every year.
Propagating plants from cutting is a wonderful way to increase your plant collection, or get enough plants together for a hedge.
It seems to me that a polytunnel, with its high humidity, offers ideal conditions for this.

So far, so good. The tunnel is up, the plans are made.
I have even some twenty seedtrays filled with compost and seeds of trees, shrubs and hardy perennials.

I am about to check up on the worms in the worm compost, and later on in the week I will sow some early lettuce.
The recent cold spell put me off work in the polytunnel, but now that it has all thawed out again, there is nothing to stop me from All-Year-Round-Gardening.

A look around the garden

2010-01-06T22:05:00.008Z

Things are deceptively quiet in the garden at this time of year.
The cold weather has driven most players underground or indoors.

Most notably, the slugs have quit the field.
If you count the pigs as contributors to a future garden site - and I do - then they are probably the most active workers. Every day they are out there, picking through mud and bare grass. At feeding time, ten to fifteen small birds descend to share the feast, and contribute their mite to fertilizing the future garden.

This is the time of the year when the seed catalogue fiends are most active in their lair – only coming out to commit long lists of gardening catalogue numbers to the postal service.
Those numbers grow in the fiend's imagination...mainly just before drifting off to sleep...into green groves and riots of colours.
The fiends live on very little real food at this time of year. Maybe a little Christmas chocolate or a biscuit or three. Mostly, though, they receive their sustenance from imaginings of a future bounty.
Pumpkins and courgettes, fat with homemade compost. Seven different varieties of tomatoes. Peas and beans climbing to improbable heights in the polytunnel. Pickling cucumbers! Achocha and Amaranth and Mizuba and Kale. Brussels Sprouts and Cauliflower with never a spot or a caterpillar.
For spice, the whole clan of the herbs is a given, occupying all empty space between the veggies. But for a more ethereal flavour, try a bit of this Cornflower blue. Or Gazania red. Or Poppy plum purple.
And for a full burst of sunlight flavour, sample this melon, this strawberry, this grape!

...Meanwhile, back in the real world, I contemplate last years' survivors, here in the bog.
Don't ask me what I did last spring, but it was not sowing seeds.
Some time in early summer, I got around to mounding up some of the peat/dung slurry the pigs had created. As an experiment, I sowed some acid soil tolerant plants into drills which I had filled with a little store-bought compost. There are some few survivors from that experiment, hanging on, even now, but I will give that one a few more years before I report back on what works, and what doesn't.
These plants got an extremely bad start, as they were sowed late, into undecomposed peat soil, just before the only prolonged spell of hot weather we had all summer. What germinated, got attacked by a huge army of slugs later on.
...What NOT to do...

I remember now, I HAD prepared a large bed of bog soil, mixed with some gravelly stuff, in late winter, and sown it with onion sets in spring. They dissapeared, also beaten by the wetness/unpreparedness of the ground, and the slugs, maybe.
Slugs were definitely to blame for the Jerusalem Artichokes' near extermination. These are extremely vigourous tubers, and they sent out sprout after sprout, only to have that eaten off by the slugs, which often even burrowed down to the tubers to eat them hollow.

I have no doubt that I will eventually grow both onions and Jerusalem Artichokes successfully. The way they perished last year is a good example of how neccessary it is to give plants a good start. They need good soil conditions and reasonable weather to get strong enough to defend themselves, until they get big enough to be fairly unnassailable.
When you think about it, no one ever complains of a full-grown tomatoe plant dying for want of water (the roots will have gone deep enough into the ground to find it), or a whole courgette plant being devoured by slugs (individual leaves eaten of such a vigourous plant will not matter).

Now to the only success story of the year: Young trees, which I bought last winter, and didn't have time to plant out in permanent positions, survived quite well, and can look forward to better treatment this coming year.
I had made a bed out of fairly pure peat. The sods were not even that well broken up, probably with air pockets between them in places. Either side of the bed was a drain, so at least things didn't get waterlogged.
Thus I encountered what is probably going to be the most persistent weed on this type of land: Rushes. After one summer season the whole bed, in between the trees, is covered with them.
Rushes are easy to weed out when young, but nearly impossible to get rid off when they have formed established clumps. I have experience whith rushes growing in grassland. I cut them again and again with a strimmer, to little effect. Young rushes will be controlled by grazing animals, but established clumps are not palatable to them, and will grow undisturbed, competing with the grass.
A good use of rushes is to cut them and use them as mulch, or as a cover of cardboard mulch. They are light and provide air spaces, so that worms can work on the soil surface undisturbed.

But the trees did ok, and that can all that can be said. I got a wide selection from Future Forests in Bantry, and also some Cob Nuts from Fruitandnuts in Co. Mayo, and some apple trees form Seedsavers just to see what would do.
Scots pine, Monterey pine, Holm Oak ,Yew and Sweet chestnut (10 of each) are all doing well. Aspen was happy. (I didn't get any other type of Poplar, but will do, in the future. Some German friends told me people used to plant them near houses in order to lower the water table).
I didn't even try alder or birch, as I know they will do fine on our land. I collected seed from those last autumn, and they are germinating in boxes in the polytunnel.)
A lime tree and a ginko and three apple trees, rowan and whitebeam, some wild cherry
I lost one or two of a variety of willow trees, not sure why, but they don't really like poor soil. I also lost the majority of ten Western Red Cedars, which is a bit of a mystery, maybe they didn't like the transplanting process.
I have various soft fruit, which produced the odd berry, even rasberries.
I have eleven blueberries in pots, which have a lot of growing to do yet.
Some comfrey roots I got from Seedsavers had a hard time ever emerging above ground, because of greedy slugs. But once they are strong, comfrey plants are a great asset to any garden.
I got about 13 cob nut trees, and they are looking good, with still some of their beautiful large leaves on the twigs, together with catkins.

Most of the trees are going to be transplanted into raised beds, filled with broken up peat, mixed with any quantities of sand, fine gravel, rock dust and compost that I can manage to scrape together and transport to the various sites. I will mulch around the trees with cardboard to reduce competition for nutrients and water in the first few important years.

I am planning to create some more garden beds. I have not quite decided on the right site, sunshine being at a premium here in the forest.

One of last year's biggest projects consisted of erecting a large polytunnel.
More of that in the next post.

All in a day's work

2009-12-21T18:25:00.005Z

I've chosen Winter Solstice as the date for resuming my blog.
The sun went down behind the mountain which shelters our home around three o'clock today, and the last of the light is fading now, at five. Tomorrow, thank goodness, the sun will rise again and stay with us a few minutes longer.
The recent cold spell has given me a great appreciation for the warming power of the sun, and I look forward to a new year.

Living the way we do, we are affected by seasonal changes more than your average Western consumer-being.
All the electricity we needed came from four solar panels during the summer. For months now we have had to supplement that by running the generator occasionally.
We are awaiting delivery of a micro-hydro system, which will allow us to harness the power of a small stream coming down from the mountain.
The combination of power from the sun in summer and power from the water in winter should work perfectly, and supply all our needs. Those needs are deliberately kept small - LED lights have proved excellent in their ability to light up our home during these long nights, using an amount of electricity that is just about negligible.
Computers account for most of our use of electricity. Apart from that, we need small amounts for rechargeable batteries for mp3 players, and the radio, and occasionally power tools.

This year, again, I have really noticed how much the shortening of the days affects what we can get done in one day.
In theory it is possible to simply do less outside, and more inside, where things can be kept going under artificial lights. We do tend to take things more easy, though, after a long and busy summer. Now that we have no students around, we enjoy a relaxed schedule - simply doing one thing after another, as it presents itself.

I have not written on this blog for many months. Partly, things got just crazy busy here in our first full summer of running the school.
Partly, also, a blog lends itself better to entries concerning conclusions one has come to and projects one has finished.
The work here on the land has been quite different from that.

After 'a days work' I could hardly ever draw a finish line or a conclusion. Mostly, several different projects get worked on in one day. I feel lucky when I have three or four hours of uninterrupted work.

Living on the land and off the land inevitably brings with it a list of chores.
According to the online dictionary:
chore (chôr, chr)
n.
1. A routine or minor duty or task.
2. chores Daily or routine domestic tasks, especially a farmer's routine morning and evening tasks, such as feeding livestock.
3. An unpleasant or burdensome task.

Yes, I thought there were some unpleasant connotations!
I really do like doing my chores. For me, the unpleasantness arises from the fact that they can take up too much time, and not allow enough progress with whatever project I am working on at the time.

When one is starting out in the homesteading business, all chores need to be first learned, organised, established, and periodically reviewed and re-organised.
Feeding the pigs and the chickens is easy now and takes little time. But in the beginning, it took days and days of work to build their shelters, establish fencing, organise feed stuffs. Some jobs, like building a convenient little shed to house the feeding stuff have yet to be completed.

Chores are something one needs to do, independent of whatever else is going on in one's life. Also, independent of weather conditions. In really wet weather chores tend to be done hastily and sometimes not completely.
I do enjoy a nice, dry sunny day, when I can carefully wash the chicken's drinking trough (which normally only gets re-filled), give them an extra bit of straw to pick through, and lean on the fence, watching them at it.
Training the ponies is a chore I only take up every other day or so. There simply isn't enough time for that, even now, in winter. Often the weather is too bad for any of us (ponies or humans) to get enthusiastic about training. So, progress is slow in that regard.

Today we took them both, Honey the mare, and Sophie the foal, out for a walk. They hadn't been on the road in a few days, and surprised us with enthusiastically trotting up the hill. I could hardly keep up with Sophie. We all got thoroughly warmed up!
Honey slipped on the ice a few times. But she was 'going like a train' - a beautiful sight to behold - I could just imagine her in harness, pulling a cart.
Hopefully, by next winter solstice, we will have that organised, and she can pull a cart, jingling bells, pulling us through a winter wonderland...

This is the first time I mention ponies on this blog, and this again makes it obvious that a lot has happened since I wrote here last.
I will catch up by writing about a few of these new, and old, projects in the coming weeks.

2009-04-22T12:36:00.012+01:00

An introduction to Cultural Mentoring,

and a book review of Coyote's guide to Connecting with Nature

Cultural Mentoring: To bring us to life before we die. To initiate us into the moment.

(Jon Young)

I first encountered Jon Young at a workshop held in Portland, Oregon, on a mild March weekend in 2007.

This workshop had a long title which I have now forgotten. But it included foreign sounding words like Regenerative Design, Eight Shields Mentoring, Permaculture, and the sub-text: ‘Planning for the next 7 Generations’.

My incentive to go to this workshop was my husband’s gentle insistence that I really had to meet this man who had been such a great influence on his life.

“He saved my life’, he said, somewhat melodramatically; but as I understand later, this statement is one Jon Young hears fairly often.

This, to me, is not so much a testament of how wonderful Jon Young is (though, even meeting him only two of three times, he is now one of my greater inspirations), but an indication of the dearth of true vision in this time of accelerating change.

I do not want to go into the general blight of modern society, but suffice to say: Many people are looking for more.

The US has its own particular history, with specific responses arising from their particular issues, both cultural and environmental.

I feel privileged to have been introduced to these responses, during the twelve months I spent in the ‘Hippie-capital’ of the US - Portland, OR - and during visits to both Jon Young’s home in Northern California, and Tom Brown’s Tracker School in New Jersey.

Having returned to Ireland, I am now trying to integrate those teachings with the exciting developments going on in

Ireland

The teachings of Permaculture, Organic Growing, Green Building etc., have become more and more widely available, through dedicated teachers such as those of the Organic Centre in Leitrim, ‘ the Cultivate Centre’ in Dublin, the ‘Practical Sustainability’ course in Kinsale and the spread of the Transition Town Movement.

I am proud of the ‘Transition Town Movement’ in a personal way – Not because I had any hand in its meteoric rise (from Kinsale, Ireland, via Totnes, UK, all the way to the US and beyond), but because I had the privilege to attend the Permaculture Design course taught by its instigator, Rob Hopkins.

It is fascinating to watch people over the course of years - people like Rob Hopkins, Graham Strouts and Andy Wilson - come into their power through life-long dedication to particular concerns, which clarify and crystallize over time.

To see their progression from the person who had certain big questions, who went on to do lots of practical work -- as well as thinking, talking and writing on the subject, to people who now present their conclusions in coherent and imaginative ways -- be it a book, classes, or an eco- village -- has been more than inspiring.

The ‘Energy Audit’, recently published by the Sustainability Institute, for example, did not happen without Andy's – many years previously - cutting turf on the side of the ‘Big Hill’, and wheeling it home in a self-built handcart.

The Book ‘Coyote’s Guide to Connecting with Nature’ is the collaboration of many people active in ‘The Art of Mentoring’ and Nature Education in the US, and three people in particular -- Jon Young, Ellen Haas and Evan Mc Gown.

Without Jon, this book, and the education programmes the book details, would not have happened.

As soon as one turns to Jon, though, he looks back over his shoulder in turn, pointing to the long lineage of what he calls ‘Coyote Mentoring’.

Jon traces this lineage, from his own teaching (first founding Wilderness Awareness School, then teaching independently) and many years of association with mentors such as Ingwe (an Englishman adopted into the Akamba tribe in Kenya), and Tom Brown Jr. (founder of the ‘Tracker School’), down to many generations of elders, from a wide variety of cultures.

Jon's inspiring presence is that of a man who knows what he stands for and who feels the light of encouragement of the elders and of the traditional knowledge he now embodies.

It is a delight to meet him in person and listen to him weaving his stories.

I still see him, laughing infectiously, turning to his audience with a reference to some nature experience familiar to all of us – Such as not noticing that a bird had been sitting there all the time, watching him, while he was unaware; -- or reverently talking of a teaching received in Hawaii, finding in their tradition of ‘Forgiveness’ a missing piece of his jigsaw; -- or, closing his eyes, picturing a story in his mind’s eye, as he transmits it to his spellbound audience.

With Jon I always have the sense of him pulling together all the teachings he has received over his lifetime, and, in bringing them together, synthesising them into something greater.

He stays rooted in traditions, expressing gratitude and humbleness all the way. At the same time he has shaped a form of education that is his own unique and important contribution to the challenges we now face.

During the workshop I attended in Portland I took copious notes, and here is a synthesis of them, together with a review of the book ‘Coyotes Guide to Connecting with Nature’ published earlier this year.

How do we know what is good for us, and what is good for our children?

How do we decide what is worth preserving and what needs to be changed in our modern and often hectic lives?

How do we find a way of treading lightly on the earth?

People will often tell you things like: ‘Your body knows best’, or: 'You only have to listen within yourself, and you will know the answer.'

But one needs to bear in mind that experience creates perception.

An example: The experience of eating food saturated with sugar creates the experience of finding wild, natural foods inedible. Another one: The experience of playing computer games creates the experience that a walk in the woods is boring.

Jon Young calls this intuitive knowledge the ‘body radar’ and makes the point that this radar is only as good as the information it has been imprinted with through past experience.

Only an accurately working body radar and a finely tuned intuition allow us to make appropriate decisions.

Only when we know, through experience, the different qualities of being alive -- for example, a strenuous, exhilarating outdoor occupation in contrast with the sleepy comfort of surfing the net on a couch in a coffee shop – only then are we able to make accurate decisions about what is good for us. “Ok, one more video game/ another hour in the coffee shop will be alright. But I’m aware that there will be a certain price to pay, therefore I’m limiting it to just one more.”

If, on balance, we eat more sugar-rich foods than not, how can we know that our taste-buds are giving us accurate feed back?

Our senses need to be finely calibrated in order to give accurate feed back.

Only equipped with this frame of reference can we trust our body radar.

The point begs to be made that this is one reason why people in the western world seem to make such staggeringly bad choices – from enjoying junk food, to using the TV as a babysitter, to electing blatantly incompetent politicians.

But Jon steers clear of negative rhetoric, leaving people to draw their own conclusions.

He goes on to explain ways to calibrate your own Body Radar. Thus he conveys an empowering feeling that we can actually do something - start with ourselves.

Someone in the audience asks him to name the most important practice (‘core routine’) for achieving this: “If I had to name a single one, it would be Listening for the Quietest Sound”, he replies.

Chapter two of the book ‘Coyote's guide to Connecting with Nature' gives the outlines of 13 of these 'Core Routines', which, if practised regularly, calibrate body radar and enhance awareness -- along with examples and explanations of their importance.

'Sit Spot', for example, is the practice of finding a special place in nature and then becoming comfortable with just being there, still and quiet.

Together with the next one, 'Story of the Day', these are powerful tools and can, on their own, change lives, as many other habits of re-connection will follow naturally.

'Story of the day' is about processing information received and relating it to another person or through another medium.

Jon tells of his aunt sending him out to collect something from the surrounding countryside, some herbs or similar, and then asking him many questions on his return, making him think back and assimilate information he never realised he was taking in at the time; unanswered questions making him pay even more attention at his next outing.

“These two routines, Sit Spot and Story of the Day, feed each other constantly, like call and response. ... The antidote to Nature Deficit Disorder may be this simple: get people to spend time in nature, and when they return, be there to catch their stories.” (p.31)

Other 'core routines' included are: 'Expanding our Senses', 'Questioning and Tracking', 'Wandering', 'Mapping', 'Survival Living', 'Journaling', 'Thanksgiving'.

These are routines Jon Young himself has been practising all his life, as becomes clear when he interrupts his talk to say: “Did anyone hear the song birds go quiet? That must mean there is a predator in the area. I've been listening while I was talking, and I've been waiting to see a hawk swooping nearby.”

Jon has studied with many different elders and has collected a wide array of tools to help others learn these skills. His strength lies in his understanding of the learning process involved in this process of re-connecting.

Every time we learn something, a process called brain patterning happens.

Any experience results in electrical impulses in the brain, and, if these are often enough repeated, these in turn set up patterns in the brain. Thus, a difficult activity is turned into a habit.

In: 'What we miss: The flip side of Brain Patterning’ (p.16), he says:

“If your culture’s gaze turns inside to computer screens, you won’t notice the natural world. Everything out there appears to be a wall of green. ... Brain patterns that get us to notice certain things mean, by necessity, that most everything else goes unnoticed... For many people in urbanized areas nowadays, wild nature doesn't really exist in their perceptions of the world. We find this to be an enlightening and yet also scary realization. No surprise then, that very few people notice when the landscape starts to change in response to our human actions, when rabbits lose their habitats and disappear, when frogs stop singing. Yes, a few--the scientists trained to see such things--will notice. To almost everyone else, those subtle happenings in nature are lost. As a culture, unless we can shift our focus of attention, we'll continue basing our choices on a sense of reality that doesn’t include the rest of nature.”

We all carry habits of complete separation, of disconnection with the natural world.

Prime examples of this would be computer games; but also spending time with any other forms of media, or inside houses, or at work. We need to balance these habits with something equally powerful, or we inevitably lose connection with nature.

To achieve efficient and effective learning, four variables need to be present: mind focus, sensory input, curiosity and edge experience.

This means, in practice, that a person who is open and ready to learn needs to be presented with information tailored to that person’s specific interest and need, in a multi-sensory way. This information needs to be just sufficiently beyond that learner’s current level of knowledge. Too little beyond ‘the edge’, and the learner gets bored, too far beyond, and the information cannot be taken onboard. (Thus the common experience of reading a book a second time and finding ‘new’ information.)

In a rare reference to modern evils Jon concludes that this means the current educational system is “a mistake”, and, as some (in particular Richard Louv, with his work around ‘Nature Deficit Disorder’, who, by the way provides a foreword for the book) would argue, “this may not be an accident, it may be by design”.

When asked about alternatives to the current educational system Jon suggests home schooling and project-based learning.

His next statement has profound implications -- and implicitly underlies the purpose of that weekend’s workshop, as well as Jon’s life-long quest to refine his mentoring system.

“If this generation is responsible for the awareness of the next one we need to teach kids to be fully in this world.”

Awareness, in this context, means a connection to the earth and its intricate life-sustaining web, knowledge of the consequences of our actions on that web, and the response-ability to care for it.

Jon describes the journey each child needs to make in order to find what they are particularly good at, and which will lead them to excel in a field they are uniquely suited to. This journey goes from curiosity, to being passionate about something, to finding one’s gift, to becoming a visionary.

The facilitating of this process is, in a nutshell, what ‘The Art of Mentoring’ is all about.

The people I mentioned above, whom I admire in the Irish context of facing up to the coming changes, have all made a similar journey, and they found their vision by being open to all the mentoring available around them, be it from important people in their lives, or books, or practical experiences.

But how much easier is any such process - and how much faster and therefore effective - when it is nurtured in the way Jon’s teaching suggests.

We all know intuitively how empowering it is to find one’s own unique gifts and we all long to find a steady path to follow.

Legends are written on this theme. The aspirations of our culture for the expression of individuality are rooted in this, although skewed out of all recognition by consumerist pre-occupations.

As Jon says in the introduction to his book:

“At its very best, Coyote Mentoring helps individuals realize their full potential to the benefit of their community.
…The mentoring draws people gently to the edge of their knowledge and experience, and guides them to new territory. This repeats through a cyclical pattern of visits, explorations and relationship-building that allows for real connection to occur in its own organic way.”

Jon has coined various expressions for the teaching style he advocates: 'The Art of Mentoring', 'Cultural Mentoring', and now, for his latest book, 'Coyote Mentoring'.

“Coyote is known for cunning adaptability, craftiness, and ability to survive anywhere. These qualities likely led to Coyote’s mythic connotations among the indigenous people of North America.
... In Europe, (similar stories feature) Fox. ...When things go wrong and humans or animals don't know what to do, when none of the traditional approaches work, the Trickster shows up. With some wacky, out-of-the-box approach that at first seems ridiculous, Trickster cleverly makes things right. …
The worldwide presence of such stories tells us that the Trickster is a vital figure in human societies. In fact, Trickster in human form almost always causes the huge leaps in cultural change. Gandhi was the Trickster when he said he'd topple the British oppression by marching to the sea and making salt. Jesus was the Trickster when he threw the money-changers out of the temple, and when he let himself be led to death when no one else understood why. Buddha was the Trickster when he denounced the luxuries of the most sought-after position of Prince in order to free humans from suffering. Even Bill Gates of Microsoft was the Trickster when he dreamed of a computer in every home and began the selling of clunky boxes with screens and keyboards. Can't you hear the laughter aimed at these fools?
Yes, at first they seemed a little crazy, a little off their rocker, a few cards short of a deck. But Trickster is the driving force of evolution. It's the figure that changes things by doing the outlandish so well that the outlandish becomes the new accepted norm. Then another Trickster comes along to shift that norm, and on and on. …
We use a radical approach without textbooks or tests, we simply begin with the roots of nature education by engaging people in direct experience with the plants and animals just beyond the edge of their back yards. This book hopes to inspire you and coach you, the nature mentoring guide, into stretching your own creativity. We offer you a bunch of tools and strip them down to underlying principles that you can apply to your situation. Like a book on gardening, we don't know what exactly will grow in your place with your folks, but we can give you the principles and encourage you to innovate with them. Then these tools will become yours.(p.7) …
Coyote’s Guide does not call you to go backwards to nature, to run off to the woods to survive. Your teaching must embrace the solid scientific curriculum that qualifies a well-trained naturalist—such as proving facts, using technical names, and replicating results. However, a felt sense of connection and kinship will always remain at the root of Coyote Mentoring.
When we embrace fact with imagination, and combine logical evidence with intuition, we develop intellectual understanding through first-hand experience.” (p.10)

Reading this book from a European perspective can, at times, be a frustrating experience, because of the different context for Nature Education in Europe.

During my stay in the US, I realized that ‘Wilderness’ has a place in the North American psyche which cannot be equated to a European sense of ‘Nature’.

We in Ireland cherish our green environment, but are aware of it having been influenced by thousands of years of cultivation, in the context of which ‘Wilderness’ is something deliberately left uncultivated – either out of lazy neglect, or romantic idealism. Thus, wilderness is something returning from a cultivated state to something more expressive of its unique untamed nature.

In the US, ‘Wilderness’ is an idealized state of natural being, almost of innocence. It is felt to stem from a time when European settlers had not yet spread to every corner of that vast land, a time when hunter-gatherer societies lived in harmony with untamed nature. This is, as I say, an idealized sentiment, but it is one that inspires many people to conserve nature and become more aware of the few precious scraps of nature around them

Even though North Americans have been incredibly efficient at destroying wild ecosystems, they still have many wild places left, and so many species of mammals and birds in particular, that, in comparison with Ireland, one can experience ‘wilderness’ in the US in a way we in Ireland can only dream of.

Thus it is not easy to transfer some of the suggested exercises into an Irish context.

A game of finding as many different species of plants as possible is not terribly exciting in a Sitka Spruce plantation. And try to play hide-and-seek in it!

‘Survival living’ (p.250) describes the challenge to be in Nature with a minimum of modern conveniences. But why bother trying to make fire with (possibly wet) wood, when in Ireland, since times immemorial, anyone stuck for a light for his pipe could just walk into some neighbours’ house and take a light from their fire?

Another very important tool that nature provides to the nature educator working in the US is the presence of hazards. It is true that we in Ireland are glad not to have to deal with bears, cougars and poison ivy, but these potentially dangerous presences are an important motivation for people to pay attention.

Is it really necessary for us to look around with ‘Owl Vision’, and listen with ‘Deer Ears’ (p.227), when the worst that can happen in Ireland is that you may miss seeing a hare?

This is quite a problem for anyone wishing to use Jon’s mentoring model in a European environment. Important motivating factors (variety of rare and exciting wild life, hazards, real possibility of getting lost in a remote place) which he uses routinely are simply not present here.

Without these motivating factors, teaching is still possible, but relies more on already existing stores of enthusiasm in the student.

During the weekend workshop, Jon suggested building community on his cultural mentoring model, thus creating spaces for ‘the next seven generations’ to flourish.

Important aspects of this community building would be Commitment, Cultural Mentoring/ Nature Education/ Awareness training, Elders as facilitators, the principles of Peace Making, facilitating the emergence of visionary leadership, and the principles of Permaculture.

I like the way Jon is opening up the process of Nature Education towards what is its ultimate higher goal:

Bringing out the best in people, teachers and learners alike, while working towards preserving the natural world.

Thus it makes sense to re-think his approach for a European context, and include anything that would serve that purpose.

As the Irish natural environment is influenced hugely by human intervention, it is necessary to take account of that fact and, rather than promoting a hands-off approach to nature preservation, actively guide towards a more sustainable land use practice.

In our own teaching approach, as well as teaching from a Coyote Mentoring Perspective, we incorporate the principles of Permaculture as a way of re-creating beneficial relationships, and, through the way we use our land, pass on this knowledge by teaching through example.

The information contained in ‘Coyote's guide to Connecting with Nature' is well presented, but incredibly dense. It will need many different readings, at many different stages of development - both of mentors and mentored - to be fully appreciated.

The book is divided into two sections: ‘Mentor’s manual’ and ‘Activity Guide’

In the first, Core Routines are explained, as I have mentioned above.

Then follow chapters on Child Passions (using these as teaching tools, as well as using the art of questioning, story-telling and music-making).

Book of Nature lists the various elements of the natural world which wait to be discovered, such as Hazards, Motivating Species (“Things to Catch, Eat, Climb and Tend”!), Plants, etc, together with commentary and resources lists.

The Natural Cycle introduces Jon’s way of using the eight points of the compass as metaphors for natural cyclical processes, and how this applies to the learning/mentoring process.

Indicators of Awareness uses that same ‘Eight Shields’ model to elucidate the learning journey and genuinely asses progress: Starting with Common Sense in the East, to Aliveness and Agility in the Southeast, Inquisitive Focus in the South, and so on, down to Quiet Mind in the Northeast.

Wrapping the Bundle is aimed at facilitating the transition from theory to practice: There’s a review of the ideas presented so far, and then an analogy borrowed from ‘primitive’ fire making:

“These Layers of intention…may behave as the starter materials – like shredded cedar bark, cottonwood bark, or thistle seed fluff – for weaving together a nice, tight tinder bundle. All that’s needed is the coal of action. That’s where you come in and what the rest of this book is about. Each Activity combines specific layers of intention meant to produce specific results of nature connection.” (p.216)

This first half closes with an invitation to make this way of teaching your own:

“Eventually, momentum builds, the ideas actualize into your own brilliant, unique mentoring style – and the fire burns into magnificent shapes no one could predict.” (p. 218)

Part two, the ‘Activity Guide’, offers a huge palette to choose from.

Going back to the Core Routines, it explains ways to let students experience them. After these follow activities for Setting Up the Learning Landscape (Four-Directions, Fire Keeper, Nature Museum, etc.), and activities for increasing sensory awareness, and games where students take on animal forms.

Tracking, Plants and Wandering, as well as Trees and Survival Activities follow.

Community and Ecology Activities, such as Wildlife Survey, Exploration Team and Ideal Ecological Vision complete the list.

Each activity is explained in detail, often illustrated by a story. There’s a ‘how to’ section, clearly written from a perspective of having tried and tested these activities a hundredfold. There always follows an ‘Inside the Mind of the Mentor’ section helping to clarify what mental processes the mentor is hoping to evoke in their students.

A section on ‘Alternatives and Extensions’ gives helpful hints on making this exercise suitable to individual circumstances, such as age and state of awareness.

“As you choose activities for your lesson plan, you can consider which Core Routines are practiced through the activity, which Child Passions are tapped into, which parts of the Book of Nature are emphasized, where the activity fits in the Natural Cycle, and which Indicators of Awareness are being cultivated. This interweaving of theory and activity will allow you to create, adapt, or otherwise "cook" your own activities in your own local ecosystem.
Once people break out of their indoor comfort zones, develop lively habits of awareness, and realize their own fascination and inner drive to learn more, the Book of Nature will teach the rest. Coyote Mentoring is ultimately about stepping out of the way, so that people can find the Coyote within themselves."

The production and appearance of this book is of a piece with its philosophy:

It is a versatile tool kit which comes with sound theoretical footings.

The information is presented in a wide variety of ways, giving a kind of multi-faceted (almost multi-sensory) reading and learning experience.

Sidebars add comments and additional information throughout,

Beautiful pictures and drawings add colour, inspiration and a touch of magic.

There are tabs all along the sides of the book making it easier to find chapters.

The book closes with a list of Coyote Mentoring organisations from all over the world, and a list of books for suggested reading.

In a beautifully written afterword, “Coyote in Context”, Jon widens the focus to shine a light on the interplay of mentoring with the culture it is invariably embedded in.

“Culture is inevitable. It happens, one way or another. It is the vessel in which our thoughts, perceptions, and emotions are formed through the subtle, recurrent influences of our everyday.”

He talks about his own teaching experiences and about the importance of working on improving the culture the teaching takes place in.

“Your journey as a mentor to facilitate nature connection in children and adults alike is just beginning. As your powers grow, you will discover a need to foster a village culture that holds, protects and integrates the accumulated understanding of what it means to be a human in deep connection with nature.”

“We do this”, he concludes, “because we believe in the urgent necessity of embracing everything we’ve learned up to this moment as human beings on this planet. Then, together, we can form a vision of a diverse, abundant, and lasting web of cultures where many generations can thrive and grow to their greatest potential. Here coyote can again work the edges of the fields and meadows of our awareness. And the soil, once hard-pan and cracked, will become a soft, rich loam so coyote can leave a trail where our children may freely follow.” (p.377)

Coyote’s Guide to connecting with Nature by Jon Young, Ellen Haas & Evan McGown is available at: www.coyotesguide.com

There is a crack in everything

2009-02-10T05:58:00.010Z

...That's how the light gets in.
(Leonard Cohen)

We've been having a discussion, over in Zone 5, on the merits of rigorous scientific analysis.

Graham has been putting his foot down against the infiltration of hard established facts and procedures by all that comes under the label of being alternative. As he argues, in the case of medicine,

“alternative” means in effect a therapy for which there is insufficient evidence- ie no peer-reviewed good-quality clinical trials. If a therapy has been demonstrated to work better than placebo it is no longer “alternative” but merely “medicine”.

Going back over many well-reasoned entries (and some rather heated debates), I find this has been a theme for him for quite a while. This particular strand of discussion started when Permaculture Magazine published an article about the merits of Geomancy (a use of dowsing to help with decision making in gardening/permaculture about site preparation, sowing, plant placement, etc.) :

"I have been in debates of this kind for many years and have many times fallen foul of others for stating these opinions. I have even been told by one permaculture teacher that I “should not express these views” (that fairies dont exist) because I was “upsetting people with good intentions”. I am not questioning the good intentions of people who believe in fairies or geomancy, but I would like to challenge directly the validity of these beliefs, and certainly their relevance for permaculture.
A common response to this is a rejection of science and rational thought as being the source of environmental destruction, and a yearning to revert to earlier animistic beliefs, placing instinct and emotional/sensory feelings above rational thought and enquiry.
This idea is in direct contradiction to what the environmental movement owes to science. It is through science that we know about the likely effects of global warming. It is through long and hard scientific enquiry that we know the true extent of the destruction of the biosphere, the increase in resource consumption, the loss of species and the increase in pollution. It is also through science that we have the benefits of so many aspects of the modern world, unsustainable or otherwise, including computers, magazines and other information technology that help us spread our ideas. We should not take the benefits of science and then reject its methods and demands for rigorous investigation just on a whim of our feelings. Feelings are fickle and not dependable for uncovering the truth.

In that latest entry, "Bad Science - and Good", Graham quotes Ben Goldacre's book Bad Science.

‘Big pharma is evil’, goes the line of reasoning, ‘therefore homeopathy works and the MMR vaccine causes autism’. This is probably not helpful.

He goes on to make some excellent points:

Back to why people still think this stuff works: well, the placebo effect is a fascinating topic in itself, and is explored in the following chapter. If you know nothing of science at all, you might be forgiven for thinking this must be a deeply mysterious subject that maybe proves “mind over matter” or “quantum healing” or something. But in fact, like everything else, it can be studied scientifically. Strange though the results may seem, Goldacre takes us through some of the best experimental data on the subject of the placebo effect, finding for example that two sugar pills may work better than one; that the colour of the pill may effect its efficacy, as will whether it is administered by a man in a white coat with letters after his name.The same may be true for a range of other alternative therapies which people swear blind are curing them- acupuncture being a good example, but also anything from Reiki to Aromatherapy- nice people giving you lots of care and attention in comfortable “healing” environments can work wonders- why wouldnt you feel better afterwards? Far preferable to the perhaps abrupt and peremptory 2-minute consultation you might get in a cold doctors’ surgery- which is precisely why many doctors are indeed willing to refer patients to an alternative practitioner who, for a price, may in reality be more help than they doctor can be- especially if it is for a chronic condition or a condition for which there is no complete cure anyway.
Many kinds of back and knee- pain and similar conditions come under this category- there may indeed by lifestyle causes, or you might just need a nice rest. No reason why a massage wouldnt help you to feel better- but that is a little different from claiming some esoteric cause for presumed healing powers of a therapy. There is no substitute for well-conducted clinical trials to establish the true efficacy of a treatment.
There is also the issue of “regression to the mean”- people often seek help at the peak of distress, after which many illnesses tend to revert to a “mean” or average degree of severity. This is not always the case, but these kinds of conditions are typically the ones people claim have been cured by alternative therapies. Fact is, lots of things just get better by themselves or at least fluctuate and improve, and a bit of TLC can help this along nicely.

Here I absolutely agree. From my own experience with ‘alternative’ therapies, I can say: I don’t think any of them helped ‘cure’ me particularly - (but I never had anything particularly wrong with me in the first place).
On the other hand I strongly feel that I did need the search for health and balance which the process of seeking help entailed, as well as the positive, loving attention received from often quite charismatic people.

Another quote from the 'Bad Science' book:

…the placebo effect is about far more than just a pill: it is about the cultural meaning of the treatment. Pills don't simply manifest themselves in your stomach: they are given in particular ways, they take varying forms, and they are swallowed with expectations, all of which have an impact on a person’s beliefs about their own health, and , in turn, on outcome. Homeopathy is a perfect example of the value in ceremony.

Do we not have a lack of ceremony in our lives?

This process and these people empower and encourage me to look after my own health better.
I have also found that practitioners of ‘alternative’ therapies encourage me in sticking to a value system that is completely different from the mainstream.
Any healthcare practitioner is in a position of power and influence. It is good to have at least some of these have a holistic, caring and reverent outlook on the universe, just as a counter weight to what has become the norm.

So these therapies do fulfill a real need, even if this is often not the one they proclaim to fulfill.

It is important to step back from whatever healing process one is engaged in from time to time, and take a closer look at the particular healer involved, and one's own participation in the process. It is important then to take stock of how much is ceremony, and whether the form this ceremony takes could be got at by other, maybe more appropriate means.
Graham does comment on the huge amounts of money involved, not just in mainstream medicine, but also in the alternative field. There is no doubt that enormous scams are going on within both. It is true that money skews views and makes people cling to beliefs.
I wish all health care providers could be humble as to their claims, and more affordable. This would allow individuals to make their own journey to health — even if there are a few twists and turns along the road.

'Daharja' comments on Graham's blog:

On the issue of midwifery, it is also interesting to note that mainstream practices are often not evidence-based. Cord traction, induction by assumed post-dates, delivery in a supine position and automatic dispensation of pitocin are some obvious examples of mainstream obstetric practices that have been proven dangerous, unnecessary and to increase the likelihood of complications, yet are still routinely practiced.
In other words, just because something is mainstream does not mean there is any sort of science behind it at all - and many so-called ‘alternative’ practices are actually evidence-based traditional ways that have refused to die, simply because they work.
Labels of ‘mainstream’ and ‘alternative’ are often not useful. What all of us need in the field of medicine and health care is evidence, study, analysis, and education. All of these seem to be not as widespread as they should be in our health care culture.

She also makes the point:

Finally, the simplest way of all to care for our health - prevention - is still not taken seriously. Despite massive and irrefutable evidence that lifestyle choices make huge differences to our state of health and wellbeing, our medical system is geared to fixing damage once it occurs, rather than preventing illness in the first place.

And another commenter, 'Matt', rightly adds:

There is a significant problem in that many people can’t or won’t change their lifestyles and demand drug therapy - it will take a long time to change people’s perspectives [and yes, the medical profession are to blame for that dependence in the first place].

Let me stray off-topic for a minute, to mention an article by Curt Cobb on today's Energy Bulletin, in which he argues for a need to look beyond the flood of information readily available today on internet, etc, to aquiring a different type of knowledge:

Putting into the proper context what information we actually do need for something other than aiding and abetting our consumption--for, say, understanding public policy--requires conceptual training that can only come from reading well-written books and articles and engaging with other rigorous minds who challenge our own point of view. That is a much slower training process, and it will never occur at Internet speeds.
Environmental education giant David Orr likes to say that what we lack is "slow" knowledge. It is easy to learn how to take down a whole forest with a chainsaw. That's fast knowledge. But as I wrote in a previous post:
Teaching people the importance of trees in creating and protecting the soil, encouraging biodiversity, preventing runoff, storing carbon and influencing climate is a task that requires time, concentration and reflection. It assumes a body of knowledge about the natural world that most people simply don't have and therefore must acquire. And, it assumes an eye trained to look for subtleties in the natural landscape. Moreover, such learning does not yield the immediate and visible economic benefits of the chainsaw.
But even if we take the time to acquire the slow knowledge we need, we cannot solve the knowledge problem with more information. The world is too complex to comprehend by merely apprehending its parts. And, no human being can see all of the universe or even his or her part of it well enough to give anything but a very fragmentary account. We will always have huge areas of ignorance, particularly about the long-term consequences of the actions we take to reshape the ecosphere to our purposes.

This article stands very well by itself, but I would here like to link it to another of 'Matt's' comments on Graham's blog (especially the last sentence):

As for ‘alternate’ therapies - Graham is absolutely right in that anything that can be proven does become incorporated into mainstream medicine. However, it is important to understand that the nature of double-blind trials is not equally suited to all therapies and not all experiments are equally well designed so there is room for doubt along the way as we receive conflicting results. It’s also important to remember that to fully grasp the results of a paper it’s not always sufficient to have a ‘grasp’ of science but to fully understand the nature of the underlying problem - and we are not all experts in everything.
The difficulty that science has with ‘alternate’ therapies is partly due to a weakness within science itself - in that it can measure small things well [just read the odd PhD abstract for the average level of detail], but there can be great difficulty in areas of overlap and as most areas [particularly with drugs etc] are funded by business, we don’t always have all the data.
I think that is is this perceived weakness that ‘New Agers’ latch on to. They see a conflicting report [for example - just how much wine a day is healthy? The goal posts are constantly changing] and harp on about science not being able to see the whole picture, themselves failing to understand that science IS looking at the bigger picture, by looking at a LOT of little pictures and that this takes time - a lot of time.

What, then, is important for an evaluation of what is good or bad science and which healing methods are valid or unproven – or, indeed, with regard to all types of important decisions we face?

A) Rigorous, scientific, unbiased research is necessary, the more the better.
Even if it is theoretically possible, this will often not happen. Research may be hindered by lack of time, lack of current understanding or lack of resources, indirectly,-- as well as, much more directly, by greed-induced bias.
B) It is important to be conscious of an emotional bias for making decisions. None of us can be free from this.
A simple example would be: "I am conscious of the fact that I am very familiar with brand name x through advertising that I've been exposed to. This suggests to me the feeling that I know and trust this brand. This is a faulty emotional reaction and I will be careful not to base my decision on this when I make my purchase."
C) 'Fast knowledge' can be useful, but 'slow knowledge' only can provide a basis for sustainable decisions. Both on a personal level (That's why life consists of so much trial and error), and on a planetary.
Yes, both Aspirin, and - dare I say it - Homeopathy, will work within the right context - but both can be mis-used as 'quick fixes', if used unquestioned for long periods of time. It takes an onward – never-ending - journey towards true sustainable health, for which these can be only milestones.

What I really wanted to do --- she says, pages and pages later --- was draw your attention to Ran Prieur's blog entry today.

Today I want to write about metaphysics. When I was staying with Rosemoon near Asheville, she mentioned how well homeopathy works on her chickens, which would seem to disprove the objection that homeopathy is all placebo effect. My position is different from the standard pro-homeopathy position, that it works independently of the beliefs of observers, through a kind of objective mechanistic science that we don't quite understand yet. And my position is different from the standard anti-homeopathy position: that it works purely through the ability of the mind to heal the body, which we can't explain but never mind, it's not important, nothing to see here.

I think that "mind" or "awareness" is the fundamental stuff that reality is made of, that the whole universe works like a dream. I'm not sure if there's one dreamer or many dreamers, or if there's anything outside the dream; but in any case, if mind, not matter, is fundamental, then everything is the placebo effect. Even splinting a broken bone is faith healing -- it works through the faith artifact of physical matter, which is extremely powerful because everyone believes in it.
(Update, February 10th: My statement that "mind, not matter, is fundamental" is still stuck in the western industrial-age separation between mind and matter. Suppose that reality is both mind and matter, the same way that light is both a particle and a wave. Depending on the context, sometimes reality behaves like objective physical matter and sometimes it behaves like a dream, but those are both just models we use to make sense of a single unified thing.)

One of the rules of reality creation, which some new age people have trouble grasping, is that it's not solipsistic -- it's collective. I don't know how much of the negotiation is by consensus and how much is by domination of will, but in either case, it's useful to talk about "belief fields" or a transferable placebo effect. Getting back to chickens, they have weak minds, so if you have a strong mind, you can heal them through your belief, especially if your belief is backed up by the beliefs of others.

This could explain why so many giants of alternative medicine, like Wilhelm Reich, have been very strong personalities healing weaker personalities.
...
I've found that I'm highly resistant to suggestion. The nice thing is that I'm immune to most propaganda. Ten thousand TV commercials have failed to give me any desire to buy a new car. But I'm also resistant to good suggestions. Even though I'm a big champion of alternative medical treatments, they rarely work on me. Pretty much the only stuff that works on me is stuff that works on everyone.

I like all the points he is making there (yes, I'm a fan), but the one pertaining to this discussion could be summed up as follows:
The existence of "belief fields" or a transferable placebo effect can not be quite discounted, as they would certainly explain many things in today's world not readily explainable through science or logic. It is not possible to be sure how these "belief fields" work or can be put to use by humans.
This may sound like fuzzy logic, but I am all in favour for keeping a door open for the possibility for there being more out there than we can rationally grasp, and, of course, I am not alone in this.
I remember my Permaculture teacher, Rob Hopkins, giving us a short presentation on Crop Circles. He did not do this in order to assure us of their existence, but to give us an aesthetically beautiful example of the unexplainable in our world.

Until we have All The Answers, it may be more useful to train our minds to --- yes, question everything thoroughly and look at it in its own context as well as in other contexts ---
but also to take an overall view of knowledge and accept that it has accumulative qualities, that it is formed from hard facts as well as layers of first-hand experience, and only time can reveal its true wisdom.

I agree with Graham that it is important to take a stand and draw lines in the sand.
Slow knowledge is nearly impossible to use in arguments in a discussion with a person of the opposite mind. By its very nature slow knowledge allows only like-minded people to share and explore opinions.
So it is necessary to use fast knowledge - hard facts from research articles and from the internet - which prove something, but yet never manage to do justice to the full picture, in order to make a point... and gain a point... and dispute a point.
There comes a time where groups of people get beyond point-scoring and arrive on the same page. That's when facts lose their importance, and people work towards the same goals, out of an intuitive (slow) knowledge of what decisions to take.

Group consensus needs to be challenged from time to time , but maybe not routinely challenged. In all the revolutions of human history, great and small, this happens inevitably.

In the meantime:
'If it works for them, let them carry on.'

Challenge becomes necessary - and often fruitful for both sides- when the assumptions of one group conflict with that of another - or when they become tools of domination over others.

I agree with Graham's taking his stand, and I can respect Alanna for taking hers.
The discussion is necessary, but in the end I say: Let Permaculturists keep their distance from Geomancers, and vice versa!

Let us all be humble as to what we really know.

Better than Puppies!

2009-01-07T08:24:00.023Z

Bang on time they arrived.

On the morning of the 24th, Kerry the pig left her shelter to attend to her breakfast, and I was left staring at something very alive in that cozy straw-filled shelter...

Mother Pig's nest-building instincts proved to have gone no further than making a nice big hollow in the straw into which to deliver her offspring. That put an end to my theory that the danger of the sow lying on and crushing one of her young, as sometimes happens, could be averted by me providing an escape space in the narrow angle of my A-frame shelter.

In the first few hours of their life, this warm hollow was all the piglets knew. Escape, no doubt, never entered their mind. And within a day or two they were way too vociferous and strong to be crushed by any loving 150kg female.

There were six little piglets, lined up in a row, leaning their bodies against each other for warmth.

As I touched each one of them, they would give a little jump forward.

Their eyes were open straight away.

These are animals on the prey side of the great predator/prey divide. Thus their first instinct is to spot danger and get away from it.

Like all young animals, they were not really cute straight away. They looked oddly thin, wrinkly and long-legged.. Obviously custom-made to fill out -- as soon as sufficient food presents itself.

They changed rapidly in appearance over the next few days, and now they are as cute as buttons.

When they are lying down and not actually asleep, they play that age-old game “Piggy in the Middle”.

They lie all lined up against each other, until one of the outside ones gets cold, and makes a bid for a place in the middle of the line. The piglet deprived of one warming flank soon notices something amiss, and makes it's way towards the middle, too. There it collides with the piglet coming from the other direction, with the same intention.

Hours of entertainment, right there.

Then that game that I played with little plastic discs, on a carpet surface, long ago. The one where you have to press on the edge of the disc to make it jump forward, into a little pot or similar target. It was called 'Flea hopping' in my German childhood, but my husband informs me that this is 'Tiddlywinks'! Well, here we have the origin of it, in touching a piglet's bum to make it jump.

Seeing the astounding speed and agility with which a pig will run to the feeding trough – very counterintuitive when one is only familiar with static pictures of big fat pigs – brings to mind old fairy tales in which dangerous boars were the terror of the woods.

Experiencing these archaic animals brings with it a resurfacing of cultural memories. Pigs, like other domestic animals, are part of our collective unconscious, and deeply entwined with human evolution.

It was Christmas, and I was a bit busy, trying to do some justice to that season, so I didn't take too many photos after the first day. Today I went out again to take some, and it is due entirely to the good automatic focus of the camera if they came out, because these piglets are now moving faster than light.

They ventured outside after only two or three days, first out of curiosity, then to establish toilet areas (they are such clean animals, they would never foul their nest), and then to generally get their snouts dirty – in a very clean way, if you know what I mean.

They root around in the soft peaty mud, and slurp from the puddles. They are not yet interested in the solid food their mum spills from the trough. (There are always several interested birds lurking, though.)

They seldom stray on their own. They move around in little gangs of threes and fours.

If I try to hold them or pick them up, they squeal like possessed.

I try to touch them as much as possible, to make them tame, but I expect they only will get really tame when they are weaned and dependent on me for food.

In the first few days they acquired lots of little scratches – either from siblings' hoofs or from the spruce branches of the hut.

By now their skin has toughened visibly, and the scars are healed.

They also used to shiver when away from skin contact with the others, but now they seem always warm enough.

They had a little bit of hair from the first, and now they are well covered in beautiful, soft, copper brown hair.

There is one runt, and also one markedly bigger animal, and all the others are varying sizes in between. There are three males and three females.

They do stray beyond the electric fence (I keep only the upper of the two strands connected to the battery), but, as there is plenty of our land around it, I am not worried that they will go too far.

Rose, the other female we originally purchased, is in an adjoining enclosure, with the calf hutch for shelter. She must be a bit lonely, especially at night, but, as neither shelter is quite big enough to accommodate the two adults and six piglets, I don't dare put them together, for fear of a dispute.

By the way, in the days before the farrowing, before I put a dividing fence between the two girls, they had the choice of calf hutch and spruce-branch A-frame –- and they choose the A-frame every single night.

Now, as the piglets make their way into the new year, I have again gained another piece of confidence in animal husbandry. And we have gained six more companions for our adventures here on the bog.

What a happy Christmas.

Christmas Preparations…

2008-12-04T20:16:00.015Z

One of our pigs -- Kerry -- is due to farrow on December 24^th – or thereabouts.

She has got really heavy and I'd better get ready for the big event

What we need now is a place for her to farrow.

I've read that close to the time her nest-building instinct will kick in.

Well, my nesting instinct kicked in today, as I was putting the finishing touches on her new hut. I nearly moved in myself.

All through the building process I had no fixed ideas on how it should be built, and they kept evolving.

A farrowing hut not only needs to keep out wind and rain.
As there is a danger of a sow's lying down on top of piglets by mistake, it also needs to have a place the piglets can escape into. This is often achieved by installing metal bars, just the size for a piglet to slip under, along the walls of a farrowing pen.
I decided to go for an A-frame design, so that piglets can escape into the low angle of the wall if need be.

I was prepared to put a fair amount of work into this building, so that it could become a place for the piglets to live for as long as we keep them.

At first I had decided to build the hut from recycled building timber. When I cleared the site between the trees, I realized that I had plenty of building materials right there to hand, and could save myself carrying all that timber from far away!

To keep the building off the damp ground, I built a kind of pallette - a raft foundation, one might say - out of woven spruce branches (same techniques as I use for paths).

Using Spruce logs, I then put up a skeleton A-frame, to which I added ribs -- or rafters. I fixed all these together by tying them with string, but later added nails, as I was using freshly cut logs, and wasn't sure if they would shrink much and thereby loosen the ties.

I had planned to add horizontal ribs to act as support for plastic sheeting, which I would weigh down by tying down some natural material easily to hand, such as spruce branches or heather (for aesthetic and for durability reasons).

After felling the trees for the frame (Aebhric helped me; we used the two-man handsaw), I was left with a lot of spruce branches.

So when I looked around for options for the ribs, it seemed natural to use those, and the easiest way to fix them in place was to weave them through the ribs.

Weaving is a great option for fixing and strenghtening any structure, especially an irregular, organic one. Nails split timbers and require a good deal of strength. Ties can loosen over time. Screws can be a good solution, but seem a bit out of place in a rustic structure. Weaving literally goes with the flow.

When that was done, I got a bit side-tracked interior-decorating the hut, and nearly moved in myself during a wintry hail shower: In my quest for spruce trees earlier, I had had to cut some heather, and I spent some time pushing individual sprigs into the weave from the inside. Given a big supply of heather, one could end up with a beautiful draft-proofing inside finish.

I'm not sure what shape Kerry's nesting instinct will take, but I can imagine her pulling on anything loose in her quest for nesting material, so I won't bother with that for now.

So far, the hut was far from weatherproof.

Aebhric, my husband, teaches how to build a 'debris hut' during some of his bushcraft classes.

The basic idea is to arrange any type of natural material in a thatch-like way around an A-frame just large enough to crawl into. If well build, this will keep you warm and dry for the night. There are many different ways to go about this, depending on time, materials to hand, and also on how long one expects to use it.

I had build one once before, and slept fairly warm and dry in a forest in Oregon.

Now, as I contemplated putting some cushioning material between the spruce branches and the plastic sheeting, so that it would not get punctured, I thought back to that experience, and decided to risk it:

I would not use any plastic, but instead rely on the rainproofing effect of a very thick layer of spruce branches.

Getting enough branches for this, proved to be quite a big job, but arranging the branches like a thatch over the A-frame was very satisfying work.

Starting at the bottom, I stuck the ends of the branches into the woven framework. I worked my way up to the top adding as much branches as possible, all pointing downwards.

The whole was finished off with a 'cap' of large branches, which effectively tie down all the others. These are tied together at the apex, and sewn into the structure with string lower down.

Now the hut is rainproof (will report back on exact degree of this...), and quite draft proof (except maybe in a storm).

To minimise wind coming in through the entrance, I fixed spruce branches and heather in such a way that they protect the opening.

--- Update, ten days later: We had a whole day's flood-like rain, and eventually some drops of rain worked their way through, but mostly near the sides, towards the bottom.
...And these pigs are forest pigs, after all. They are used to a few drops of wet!

Pigs

2008-11-17T11:46:00.002Z

I can't wait to increase the diversity in this woodland by planting a wide variety of trees, shrubs, perennials, annuals and climbers.

In the first years the emphasis will be on soil improving plants. Also on fruit bearing trees and shrubs which will take some years to bear fruit and thus need a head start.

You may ask: 'What does that have to do with pigs?'

It's a lot of work to plant and propagate plants, and I could use some help with that.

Students of Permaculture are always excited when they come across the idea of the 'chicken tractor'.

Hens, confined in a small space, will scratch and root up weedy ground, take out slugs, insects and their eggs, and most of the weeds and grass.

When moved onto fresh ground, they will leave it behind nice and manured and in fine tilth, ready for sowing seeds into.

One big step up from this concept is the Tamworth Pig.

Tamworths are reckoned to be the closest to the old British forest pig. They are a hardy breed, being able to cope with both cold and windy conditions, and thus suited to the outdoor life much better than the commercial breeds.

The quality of their meat is supposed to be excellent.
It is their natural habit to root through the ground, eating grass, roots, and even soil, to supplement their diet.

With golden coloured hair over reddish brown skin Tamworth pigs are quite beautiful animals.

They can be confined by electric fence. Concentrated on a small piece of ground, they will dig over every inch of it.

“…Pigs are also used to manage deciduous forestry. They can be released into a forest shortly before felling to help to clear the undergrowth. Pigs prefer eating the leaves and roots of bracken and brambles to those of small trees. (Harris, R. 2003 Making a start with woodland pigs. Quarterly journal of Forestry 97 (1) pp51-54.)

"After felling, their rooting helps to give an advantage to growing saplings.

Pigs can also be very destructive. It is important to keep them away from rare woodland plants, to keep them at a low stocking density, and to move them on once they have cleared the ground sufficiently. Otherwise they can destroy the ground flora and wildlife cover."

(Compassion in World Farming trust 2006: Animal welfare aspects of good agricultural practice: Pig Production.)

In my internet search about pig keeping I came across Rebecca Hilmann’s website

Her E-Booklet: 'Rearing Weaners for the Table, A Beginners Guide' is a useful and encouraging read. It’s good -and so rare on the internet - to have information geared towards Irish conditions.

Two months ago we bought two eight month old females from breeder Billy Collins in Nenagh, Tipperary.

On the day Billy wasn't able to meet us, but he had done that previously and given us a lot of good advice and encouragement.

He has taken great care in raising these animals, as is obvious from the fact that they are as tame and calm as 150 kg creatures can be!

It makes life so much easier for all concerned if animals are handled on a regular basis and used to interactions with humans.

So, with the capable help of Billy's mother (who sent them off with a sprinkle of holy water, christening them ‘Kerry’ and ‘Rose’) and two sisters, we loaded these dauntingly big animals into our trailer and brought them down to South Kerry.

It was not the easiest to bring them into the woodland, through trees and muddy patches, but we managed by putting strands of electric fence tape (not switched on) either side, which they respected well enough.

As soon as they put their feet onto the land, their snouts went down and started rooting through the soft mossy ground.

We learned that you can't herd or hurry up a pig. You can only gently encourage it, and block its view with a board, or sheet of cardboard, if it feels inclined to stray off the path.

Well, we got them into the area we had fenced off for them, which includes a house I built for them from scrap wood and harvested trees.

Within a week they had reduced the soft bog ground to mud, removing all green vegetation. I then moved them on to a new patch, still with access to the house.

Four weeks later they had finished with all the ground around the shed and I realized it would be necessary to have pig housing that could be moved on easily.

So we bought one made from plastic, originally intended for calves. It is very sturdy, and just right for two pigs. It has no floor, so I place it on a ‘cow mat’ (another fantastic plastic product) plus some straw for making a cosy nest.

Pigs need constant access to water. I simply place a bucket on the ground which they drink from in a very mannerly way, which I refill from rainwater harvested from the roof of the pig house.

When they are finished drinking in that mannerly way, however, they get playful and tip over the bucket, so I dig it into the ground a little bit.

I also see them drinking from puddles in the mud.

They respect the electric fence very well. They did occasionally test it with their snout -- and a loud squeak! – but by now they don’t come near it except by accident.

Young pigs need to be confined by an additional wire mesh fence, as they will otherwise slip through it quickly, without receiving a shock

At present we feed them the only pig ration easily available in the local shop, but since this mix includes genetically modified soy, I want make up my own mix, as soon as I can get around to it.

Billy used to supplement their food with dried seaweed meal, and I would like to experiment with offering them fresh seaweed.

Bog soil is low in a lot of minerals, and both pigs and soil could do with this additive.

Pigs do eat slugs, which is another bonus.

If contemplating the use of pigs for soil work, careful consideration needs to be given to the soil type, and what this will do to it.

Ragmanslane Farm in England write this on their website: “We would like to use pigs to do a bit of ploughing, but we are on silty clay and an unringed pig (we ring our pigs to stop them rooting up the pasture) left to its own devices will take the structure out of the soil in less than a week - long before it has turned all the ground and eaten the roots with textbook obedience - leaving it resembling concrete. On our land there are perhaps two weeks of the year when the soil conditions are good for pigs to be turning it. This requires an approach that is soil orientated not pig orientated ie the pigs need to whipped out as soon as it rains and put somewhere else - OK for a backyarder, but quite tricky with a large number of pigs that suddenly require housing, feeding and watering elsewhere.”

Clay, in particular, can be tricky to work with. Clay is made up of very fine smooth and cohesive, plate-like particles derived from the decomposition of rock.

When these particles get moved around in combination with water, they tend to align themselves flat against each other and form a mass that will not hold much air and dries out hard as brick.

Thus, letting pigs root around your clay soil would destroy your soil structure.

Soil Structure is essential to facilitate plant growth. It is maintained by plant roots, humus and clay minerals.

Earthworms, proper drainage and deep-rooting plants, incorporation of organic materials and/or sand, all contribute to form a healthy soil structure.

Since we don’t have a good soil structure to begin with, I am happy to let the pigs make a start in creating it.

I intend to use the peat mud to create raised beds. Having roots removed from the soil also helps with digging and creating drains.

Here is a picture of an area I had intended to make into a garden for a few months now.

Before the pigs' arrival, I mulched it with cardboard, hoping to break down the grass-root mat by early spring.
Now that I had the help of the pigs I simply removed the cardboard (which had not achieved much yet), staked the electric fence around it, and let the pigs have at it. Three weeks later it is now ready to turn into a garden.

I often find myself drawn to working next to these two gentle ladies.

When I feed them I take the opportunity to stay around and cut some brambles, gorse or low hanging willow branches, or work on creating a path nearby.

They are great company and it feels like we’re a good team.

I’ve done enough hard 'jumping on the back of a spade' -- trying to cut through grass roots -- to appreciate the help they give me with working the land more easily.

I give them a scratch and I talk to them, and this way my confidence in handling them improves.

At this stage they easily follow me and my bucket (after a night’s fasting) whenever I want to move them further into the woods.

We don’t particularly aim to breed pigs, or rear them for the table. But, since Billy has a pedigree boar, the opportunity seemed too good to pass up, and we decided to put one of them – Kerry - in young. She will be farrowing towards the end of December.

If anyone in or near Southwest Kerry is interested in a piglet, please contact me…

Paths

2008-11-16T20:44:00.003Z

The Sitka Spruce forest we are working in was planted 20 years ago. Being planted on poor bog ground, it hasn’t done particularly well. There are some fine specimens of Spruce trees, but more of them are only middling. Some have failed altogether and never grew to more than a metre, or died off to make way for shrubby willow trees.

Many areas require thinning. Even to be able to walk though and get to know them is difficult because the lower branches (which no longer hold any needles) have not yet died off and fallen to the ground.

Creating light, and a way of seeing and assessing parts of the forest, has been a priority during our first months here.

Inevitably - this being bog – we were next faced with the problem of tracks becoming paths, and paths becoming muddy ruts.

I experimented with different, low-impact ways of creating paths.

I started out by simply throwing the lower branches of the spruce onto the ground as I was cutting them, thus creating a path to walk on at the same time as creating a ‘tunnel’ to walk through.

Thus I recreated the classic ‘broom stick effect’: Step on one end of the branch and have the other end come up to hit you. Or stumble against an end and have the whole thing rise up to trip you up in various entertaining ways, just when you are carrying something especially heavy and awkward.

All those branches soon had to be removed from paths and piled by the wayside

Next I used gravel over plastic over spruce branches.

It looks good (quite ‘japanese garden’- with the moss and a few ferns planted by the wayside!) and lasts very well. I did about ten metres of it.

It takes quite a bit of effort to disguise the sides of the plastic, and build up little earth berms to ensure the gravel won’t slip off the path. Also, moving the gravel seems too much like hard work for any larger path project.

I will keep using it for some high-use areas that I want to look particularly neat.

I had read an account of using bundles of sticks, tied with string.
These have traditionally been used to create paths, and are now used in wetland creation and stream side restoration projects.
An excellent use for small dimension timber and brushwood.

Enraged with skidding around the sides of muddy puddles, I one evening got out the big ball of jute string and started tying bundles.

By fall of darkness I had abandoned this as too time consuming for the length of path I needed, and started developing a way to weave the branches together to form a continuous path.

The basic idea is to stick the end of each new branch I weave in under the existing weave (the start is made by sticking them into the ground).

The spruce branches are very well suited to this, as they are ‘flat’ (the side twigs coming from the main branch are on one plane), and the side twigs serve to hold and stabilise the parallel branches and create a fake ‘weft’.

This, with practise, and an abundant supply of branches to hand, is quite fast.

It takes a bit of getting used to for walking on.

‘Walkability’ can be improved, were required, by a particularly close ‘weave’.

This type of path tends to become a bit slippery in wet weather, and it helps to throw some straw on the surface. I use the straw bedding that I remove from the pig house, (which, by the way, is reasonably clean) after the pigs have finished chopping it up into small bits.

This method for creating paths follows good Permaculture principles, using the end product (potentially a waste product) of one process – cutting tree branches to create space and light – and making it the raw material for another process– creating paths.

By closing that loop I save time and effort that I would otherwise have expanded on ‘waste’ removal -- carrying and piling branches, maybe getting in a chipper to dispose of them -- and remove the need to bring in materials for path creation (no need to bring in gravel).

How long these paths will last in the damp conditions, remains to be seen, but they are easily repairable with materials readily to hand.

I made one other experiment, cutting up logs into foot to six inch long segments (with a two man handsaw, no less!) and pounding them into the ground.

It looked nice, but, in the soft bog ground of a stream side edge, it wasn’t stable enough and I ended up infilling between the logs with gravel brought up from the stream in a bucket.

I did that for a few short metres, and then reverted back to using used silage plastic under river gravel for the rest of that particular short path.

Work on 'cutover bog' land. A Permaculture Approach.

2008-11-06T19:32:00.003Z

Using Permaculture design principles, we are finding ways to make the most of our land, which consists of cut-over bog, densely planted with Sitka Spruce.

Blanket bog covers most of the valley in which it is situated. We are aware of the fact that this landscape has been in the making for thousands of years.

At some point in time people began using the land to graze livestock on, and also for the production of fuel.
Turf cutting involves drainage, removal of surface vegetation and cutting of peat.
Maintenance of rough pasture involves drainage and periodic burning in order to control shrubby plants like heather and gorse, as well as pioneer species trees like willow and birch.

Twenty years ago this land was planted with Sitka Spruce. Drainage ditches were dug by machine every ten metres, fertilizer was probably added. Then followed the planting of the trees, most likely by hand.
Two or three years ago a grass fire swept through some part of the plantation and killed some of the trees.

Since we arrived on the scene, about 6 months ago, we have been considering how to best look after this land.

Bog soil is quite an ‘extreme’ type of soil.
Soil normally consists of mineral matter (clay, silt and sand particles), organic matter, water and air. In bog soil two of those components are largely absent: Mineral matter and air. We are left with a mix of water and organic matter, which has very specific characteristics (e. g. acidity), and provides the basis for a very specific ecosystem.

Sphagnum mosses, in effect, ‘pickle’ themselves, and thus, over thousands of years, form the meter-thick deposits we have come to know as peat, bog or turf.
The Irish Peatland Conservation Council have an informative website, which explains how peatlands are formed, plus factsheets on many related subjects.

Here are a few interesting points taken from those pages:
‘Peat is a soil that is made up of the partially decomposed remains of dead plants which have accumulated on top of each other in waterlogged places for thousands of years.
...Peat is brownish-black in colour and in its natural state is composed of 90% water and 10% solid material.
It consists of Sphagnum moss along with the roots, leaves, flowers and seeds of heathers, grasses and sedges. Occasionally the trunks and roots of trees such as Scots pine, oak, birch and yew are also present in the peat.
...Another factor which contributes to the accumulation of peat by preventing the growth of soil micro-organisms is the acidity of the ground water. In bogs, the acid nature of the ground water is produced y plants known as bog mosses, or Sphagnum species.
...Sphagnum mosses can hold up to 20 times their own weight in water.’

Being the Peatland Conservation Council, they also have pretty strong views on the use of peatland for forestry:
"Afforestation so fundamentally transforms the peatland ecosystem that it is effectively destroyed.
The fauna and flora are lost, and the physical attributes so altered that even if forestry ceased, any reconstitution of the previous ecosystem would be impossible."

Afforestation severely changes the habitat of flora and fauna adapted to the specific niche a bog represents, thus forcing them to leave or die out.
Lowering of the water table dries the peat, allowing oxidation to occur which releases carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.
On the other hand, the likelihood of flash-flooding is increased. This, together with overgrazing and more severe weather patterns, increases the risk of landslides.
There are further effects, downstream – literally: Acidification and eutrophication (algae blooms) of water bodies have become problems only recently acknowledged.

An Taisce comments on current Irish forestry practices in general:
“Under ‘business as usual’ there will continue to be damage to water quality, loss of biodiversity, and landscape impacts, all of which result from a lack of commitment from the sector to enforce the relevant legislative obligations and guidelines.”

Legislative obligations and guidelines may or may not be enforced. A problem of equal magnitude is the fact that government policies from which these stem keep changing as new data becomes available – or, as the damaging effect of previous policies become too obvious too ignore.

Thus, in this area of Co. Kerry it is now no longer possible to obtain permission to plant a forest like the one that was planted here twenty years ago. A forest which received government support in the form of grand aid at the time.
This area now falls into a category of land at risk of acidification of its waterways, with subsequent effect on fish health, fishing and tourism.

(A deposit that forms on the leaves of, in particular coniferous trees, is acidic in nature, and gets washed by the rain into waterways which are already on the acidic side, due to the peat soil they flow though.)

This reminds me of government policies regarding mountain sheep production. During my ten years in Ireland I was able to watch in mystification while first farmers where encouraged to keep as many sheep as possible, then asked to get rid of as many sheep as possible. And now policy makers scratch their heads and wonder how to get back some of them little white dots that used to look so pretty on the hillsides…. Oh, don’t get me started! A ten-year old could have organized things better.

I am not the first to suggest that it be left to the farmers on the ground, who have generations of experience behind them, to manage the Irish countryside. Previous centuries have seen the use of sophisticated farming systems, which included mixed grazing, crop rotation and careful draining by hand – together with observation and experimentation and a deep-rooted love of the land, born out of dependency on it for all daily needs.

On the other hand I can see that precisely that connection to the land, that utter dependency and loving intimacy have been absent in many cases throughout Irish farming history. Therefore there probably was a certain degree of need for direction from government and EU agencies, in order to suggest better farming practices to those who have, for one reason or another, lost some of the skills and resources necessary for good land management.
Throughout Irish history, people have been torn away from the land they worked, through eviction, through emigration, and increasingly now through the freedom to choose a different life style.

The priorities of Western culture have moved away from ensuring the survival of future generations on the same piece of ancestral land.

What counts now is a degree of mobility and willingness to make use of global market conditions in order to achieve improvements in material wealth and comfort, even if farm land gets degraded, abandoned or completely paved over in the process.

The global economy, with abundantly available cheap energy subsidizing transport of goods from all over the world, has allowed us here in Ireland to be less careful in preserving the fundamentals of sustainable farming.

World market policies ensured that small farmers everywhere were squeezed out of the market, in favour of ‘agribusinesses’ and multinational corporations who have little or no connection to the land they worked, seeing it as a resource to be exploited and discarded when spent.

Why should we worry about potato crops in Ireland when we could simply import them from Greece?

Why should we try to grow more demanding crops like tender green beans, when we could get them neatly packaged in cellophane, labelled ‘

Kenya'

Today Irish farmers are still doing a great job providing certain agricultural products. But, as it no longer is necessary to work exclusively within the parameters of Irish climate, soil and farming skills base, a lot of resilience has been lost.

If we are ever forced to rely less on imports and feed Irish residents from Irish soils, this will become abundantly clear.

Permaculture, with its emphasis on holistic thinking, may have an important role to play in rediscovering sustainable land management techniques.

On his website, David Holmgren, the co-founder of Permaculture says:

“Good design depends on a free and harmonious relationship between nature and people, in which careful observation and thoughtful interaction provide the design inspiration, repertoire and patterns. It is not something that is generated in isolation, but through continuous and reciprocal interaction with the subject.”

According to him, key design principles include “Use and value renewable resources and services”, “Use small and slow solutions” and “Creatively use and respond to change”.

Fundamental to any design are also the three “Ethical Principles of Permaculture”:

Care for the Earth (husband soil, forests, water and all other resources)
Care for People (look after self, kin and community)
Fair Shares (set limits to consumption and reproduction, redistribute surplus)

In a globalised world that is becoming less resilient, less fair and more prone to sudden changes, it is important to strike a balance between preserving traditional skills and discovering new techniques in order to develop a sustainable relationship with the land which we may increasingly come to depend on.

On our land in Co. Kerry, Ireland, we are now involved in a process of learning which will never cease as long as we are here. This will increasingly overlap with a process of developing the whole site along permaculture guidelines.

It will be useful to step back from these processes periodically, and draw conclusions from initial tests and experiments, and to re-evaluate design ideas.

I intend to use this blog to record developments, share ideas and invite feedback.

Present challenges:

This type of land is unsuitable for intensive agriculture for a variety of reasons.
“In terms of agricultural use, peat soils have weak structure, high water content, insufficient soil aeration and poor thermal properties resulting in suboptimal physical properties and yields of grass.”
Its low PH level and low fertility add to the unattractiveness.

It has traditionally been used for turf cutting and rough grazing.

Only recently government incentives made it profitable to try to wrench an added profit from this type of land by planting fast-growing Sitka Spruce. The economic viability of this remains yet to be proven, while it is already obvious that in most cases this practice is already having a negative environmental and amenity impact.

Various measures carried out in the course of the land uses mentioned above have destroyed its capability to regenerate itself and maintain itself as a bog.

It now comes under the heading of 'reclaimed peat land', which means that it has been brought into relatively intensive cultivation.

In the conventional view of 'intensive agriculture = good', this type of soil will always produce less than other soil types and is therefore hardly worth bothering with.

The only alternative conventional agriculture sees to using it for forestry, is to dig up the roughly two meters of peat with a digger, bring some of the subsoil to the surface, and add copious amounts of fertilizer.

Our challenge is now to look at this type of land from a Permaculture perspective, and discover management practices that are non-traditional yet viable and sustainable.

These, in combination with traditional management practices, should help us increase biodiversity and resilience of this ecosystem as well as providing a yield that hopefully can sustain us in the long run.

I fully acknowledge, by the way, that this phase of experimentation can only take place in the ‘breathing space’ provided by the globalised, fossil-fuel dependent economy which I am trying to find an alternative for.

List of goals for the near future:

learn about characteristics, behaviour, problems and potential of peat soil
establishment and maintenance of paths, getting to know all areas of the land,
learn about weather patterns and effects on the land
research on possibility of incorporating animals into the design ( I have in mind pigs, hens, some grazing animals like small pony or goat, and also, very importantly, earthworms!)
research on establishing tree and bush fruit and nut crops (The temptation is great to start preparation of ground for planting of tree and bushfruit, as well as nuts, on a trial basis. This seems urgent, because they need a few years before they bear fruit. There is one large open area in particular, where I am planning to plant some, but it would make more sense to wait until the ground has been prepared by labour-saving methods such as mulching / employing animals to reduce groundcover (grass etc.), and also until drainage has been improved.)
research on soil improvement (lime?)
find out what resources the land offers and how to use them most productively

I wrote the following 'project outline' and sent it to the local man in the Forest Service, in the hope of getting some interest from him and advice on possible grant-aided schemes – We don't fit into the native woodland scheme, for example.

He wrote back a very short email expressing complete lack of interest and pointing to the current economic climate as making the support of such a project unlikely.

Well, it was worth a try, or was it...

Project Outline

Sitka Spruce plantation

planted in 1988
bog (depth estimated 2 meters) over gravel
drainage ditches every 10 meters – with several large ditches running along south and north boundaries

Assessment:

A full assessment will only be possible after paths have been made to access all areas of the plantation and soil samples have been sent for evaluation. This work is now in progress.

A cursory assessment, made by walking the boundaries, and walking into the plantation in about six places for 100 to 200 meters and evaluation of Google earth aerial photos suggests the following:

The plantation has done moderately well in certain areas, but not satisfactorily in a commercial sense (Maximum average diameter 16cm (at 1.3m height), average max. height 10m). There are three areas which could be deemed to have failed – with trees averaging 1m after 20 years.

These areas comprise in size 1acres, 1.4 acres and 0.2acres – 2.6acres overall.

The reason for this localized failure is not immediately apparent. Drainage does not seem to be the determining factor. If soil depth turns out to be comparable to the other areas, it must be concluded that fertilization was carried out only in patches. Soil samples will clarify this issue.

A local man suggests that failure is due to the fact that the bog was not cut away enough in those areas. Why this would impede growth is not clear, but the fact that the three 'failed areas' are situated on higher bog levels than the rest seem to confirm this.

Other vegetation present: salix spp., molinia, ulex europaeus, heather, bog myrtle, bramble, birch, holly, ferns, honeysuckle.

There are several large specimens of willow interspersed throughout, most notably at the south end, where they have taken over a large area, and all along the larger drains.

Some medium sized Birch trees are present and would profit from removal of competition by SS.

Holly is only present as seedlings.

Alder, which should be very suitable for this type of ground is not present.

Coillte planted alder in an adjoining piece of land within the last ten years, which should provide a seed source in future.

The ground is difficult to traverse due to the presence of small drains, gorse, and hummocks formed by molinia/sphagnum moss. In addition, the lower branches of SS have not quite died off yet. Removal of these will greatly improve access.

Vision

Our approach to this project is flexible and adaptive.

While we are 100% committed to this place and to certain management principles, we are willing to accept guidance from the process itself and from the emerging knowledge of what is possible here.

Our management principles are grounded in the Design Principles of Permaculture and Native American Philosophy.

The use of herbicides and pesticides will be completely avoided.

We will follow organic growing guidelines as a matter of course.

restore biodiversity

fell SS, starting with those who can be deemed to have failed, and, as time and resources allow, proceed to take out larger specimens, especially in order to remove competition for established willow and birch trees
replant with suitable species, starting with natives like willow, alder, birch, and also testing the suitability of trees of special interest to us, such as cedar and a variety of crop-bearing trees and shrubs
omit replanting in specially chosen areas, to add interest and allow native light-demanding vegetation to succeed

improve access

make walkable paths
cut bottom branches of trees
even out ground/remove hummocks/mulch with wood chips
remove prickly plants like brambles/gorse

improvement/regeneration of soil

send soil samples to be analyzed and consider adding lime and rock phosphate, according to recommendations in certain locations
planting of large percentage of alder and other nitrogen fixing plants
improve drainage
clean out existing small drains by hand
cut back willow near larger drains
examine possibility/necessity of bringing in a small digger to improve drainage in areas intended for crops
fertilize areas intended for crops with compost and farmyard manure
examine the possibility of including grazing (goats/pony?) or rooting/scratching (pigs/chickens?) animals in localized/confined areas, to help with soil and vegetation management

manage successful areas of existing plantation

non-thin strategy may be advisable, as ground is wet, and winds occasionally very strong
localized application of fertilizer by hand
where practicable and advisable, thin by hand (chainsaw?) for production of firewood (also investigate possibility of small-scale production of charcoal)

convert most of the acreage into an amenity area, suitable for activities ranging from Permaculture and Nature Education to the teaching of Bush Craft and Outdoor First Aid training

provide paths
provide open, meadow-type areas
reduce prickly vegetation
encourage local wildlife
increase beauty, biodiversity
provide labels on plants with info on name, use, etc.

grow crops

vegetables for home consumption
blueberries for cash crop
improve soil sufficiently in specific locations to allow planting of apple/pear/nut trees and soft fruit
make use of existing SS for shelter and , where appropriate, plant additional shelter belts of native trees, thus creating shelter from wind as well as 'sun traps'
production of mushrooms grown on decaying logs for home consumption or cash crop
growing of perennial herbaceous plants
(edible, medicinal, bee/insect or otherwise useful)
growing of dynamic accumulator plants such as comfrey, biomass willow, nettle (if soil fertility allows)

Tools/Resources:

We intend to make maximum use of available resources, while minimising the amount of interference with the natural process of woodland regeneration.

Both of us are committed to spending a substantial amount of our time on carrying out the necessary work. We see this as a long-term project, taking decades to accomplish.

We may occasionally bring in volunteers to help.

We will initially use handtools, and later consider acquisition of appropriate technological equipment, such as chainsaw, wood chipper, strimmer.

Ground vegetation will be controlled by various methods

strimmer
mulch with wood chips and cardboard
animals