Coffee Permaculture Style vs. the Typical Morning Madness

Le Café - Also a great place for a beer!

You know you're getting old when you start making, or at least thinking, “when I was young, we used to ____” statements. While being the singer and guitarist in a heavy, primal sounding rock duo keeps the old feelings at bay, I must admit that these types of statements are becoming more common for me. For example, when I was young we used to make our own coffee. Yup, it's true, we used to make it ourselves. I started drinking coffee in second year university when I had a co-op job at the Ministry of the Environment and our department had a regular, household coffee maker situated on the wall outside my open concept cubicle. The payment system consisted of putting down a tally mark when you took a cup. The coffee making protocol dictated that if you finished the pot you made another. Way back then we even made (and still do make) our coffee at home. No cartridges were used and the percolator did not look like R2D2.  Now it's an everyday occurrence to instead see a 20 car traffic jam outside the Tim Hortons before work. At the risk of sounding unpatriotic (and it is currently hard to be patriotic when being led by the Harper government), I ask the question: is a “Timmie’s coffee really that good that you feel the need to rush and wait in line to get one? And for those that feel the need to answer this question, please don't, as it is rhetorical. I certainly don't want to get up early just to line up to buy a product that I can better make at home at a much lower cost. And I don't think coffee makers are pertinent anymore in government departments or companies –coffee making has been taken over by commercial corporate interests. The days of gossiping around the floor coffee pots are long gone.

I have some good coffee memories from when I did my PhD in Québec. In the mornings, we made super-strong coffee in the lab coffee pot and our supervisor could sometimes hear us laughing over our morning brew as he came up in the elevator, despite it being located at the far side of the hall. I remember my next-door neighbor enjoying a tiny cup of espresso while leisurely standing in his front yard doing nothing but soaking in the sights and sounds of the neighbourhood. When I did go out for coffee the atmosphere was much different than here. At one local café it would take about 20 minutes for your cappuccino to be made and when the owner brought to you he would serve it with pride, as if it were a great masterpiece. And it was. I made the mistake one day of asking him for a decaf and was sternly lectured on the merits of “real coffee”. That was the first and last time that I made that mistake. Coffee at his shop was an experience and not just a robotic routine.

With these thoughts in mind, I humbly present to you “Le Café”.  I constructed it in my backyard between nectarine and peach trees that I planted with my kids a couple summers ago. The bricks were picked up free from the side of the road following a tip from a friend who saw them and knew that I like to scavenge and reuse building materials. They only took about an hour to lay. While they are not entirely level, I think that only adds to their old world charm. The soil I dug while laying the bricks became the raised beds that encircle Le Café. The beds are planted with Shasta daisies, Echinacea, sage, and chives. I also added some night scented tobacco, as I thought that their evening perfume would add to the atmosphere while enjoying a glass of wine on the café on a moonlit night (and that maybe I could use their nicotine containing leaves in an organic bug spray...).  And that brings me to the aspect of design that was the driving force behind building the café.  It wasn't so much about typical landscaping elements such as plants or colors, or even standard Permaculture design concepts such of us multiple functions, or stacking of elements. Instead it was based on how I wanted to feel - I wanted to create an experience, a place to slowly drink my home brewed coffee and just enjoy the beauty of the gardens around me. Designing in this manner is perhaps best conducted by asking yourself a couple of questions: What kind of life do I want to live? What do I want to see myself doing?  Waiting by myself idling in a car to go through a coffee shop drive-through is not one of my answers to these questions. Judging by the typical expressions on the faces of the people in said lines I can’t see that is high on their list either, they just have never really thought about it.

In contrast, let me share today's morning coffee experience with you. I am sitting in the café writing this entry and so far have been visited by a robin that sat on the top of the Mulberry tree, a cat that was peaking out from underneath said tree, albeit not at the same time as the robin, in the play area that my daughter has constructed that we refer to as “the restaurant”, a squirrel that was climbing over the clay oven’s woodpile, as well as several chickadees, sparrows, cardinals, and goldfinches that have flown over in their morning travels. The kitchen window behind me also opened up and I was treated to a sweet good morning hello from my daughter. Now this is how you have your morning coffee! Permaculture is about designing a sustainable lifestyles and I will argue that my manner of having morning coffee is more in line with this than the typical morning madness.

Please feel free to share how you are designing the experiences that you want to have into your permaculture and life plans! 

Incarcerated for the unlawful containment of decaying organic matter?

Incarcerated for the unlawful containment of decaying organic matter? Don’t laugh! It could happen. Recently councilors in London, Ontario, Canada discussed a staff recommendation to that would limit home composting to a one meter square area at the rear of yard with a maximum of 4 covered bins. What the ferment is up with that?  Orest Katolyk, manager of bylaw enforcement, stated, “There is an issue with compost piles. We have looked at composting since the mid-90s. Some homeowners take composting very seriously. We are looking at very reasonable regulations on composting, probably the most user-friendly composting regulations in Ontario, based on the research we did.”  Sorry Katolyk, you are wrong. Thankfully London Mayor Joe Fontana had a more enlightened view and questioned the need to create a new bylaw when, as Katolyk admitted, there have been VERY FEW COMPLAINTS!!!!!  Once again, what the ferment? While no changes were made, the City will be further discussing the matter.

There is just so much wrong with this story that I don’t even know where to start. How about with the fact that there have been hardly any complaints concerning composting. This falls under the “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” rule. Hey Londoners, your tax money is being used to pay salaries and expenses to research and find solutions for a problem that doesn’t exist!

In terms of permaculture and ecological design it makes no sense. We want to mimic nature, after all, nature’s systems have been able to maintain themselves for quite some length of time. Nature is the ultimate recycler, the supreme composter. In a forest leaves grow on the trees, die, fall to the ground, decompose, and release their nutrients to be once again used by the tree. Am I the only one that sees beauty in this? Confining composting to a one meter area hidden both in bins and at the rear of the yard makes the process seem dirty and shameful. NIMBY! Not In My Back Yard! I will celebrate nature’s recycling process in all of its glory! I will use bins, I will use piles, I will sheet mulch, I will dig it in. I will even step out my side door and just throw something decayable in a general backward direction with full confidence that nature will take care of it using the same techniques that it has used over the last several billennia. If I want, I will put a composter near my back window so that I can add organic material directly from the kitchen (this is using the permaculture relative location principle. I will sleep soundly knowing that my home composing is not wasting tax dollars on a green bin system that burns fossil fuels and emits carbon to collect and carry resources that I can use at home to a distant location to be composted and then once again collected and transported burning more money and fossil fuel in the process. Think deeply on this, green bin programs will not last.

To finish I want to quote Canada’s former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau who summed up my feelings when he stated that, “There’s no place for the state in the backyards of the nation”. Or something like that.

A garden bed that I started rehabilitating with sheet mulch last fall.  Winter compost has been thrown on the bed periodically. Would each incidence count as an infraction under the recommendations that were proposed in London? Am I a bad apple? Is bad apple bad if it can be composted to recycle its nutrients and help new apples grow?

More information on London’s compost controversy can be found at:

http://www.londoncommunitynews.com/2012/03/no-consistent-food-security-policy-column/

http://www.londoncommunitynews.com/2012/03/city-to-change-rules-on-garbage-and-graffiti-but-not-composting/

The Problem is the Solution: We Must do it for the Children!

http://transitionculture.org/2009/01/07/the-problem-is-the-solution/

One often repeated, and somewhat puzzling, permaculture principle is that of “The Problem is the Solution”. What this means, or at least what I think it means, is that problems are challenges that provide unique opportunities to change. For example, the cartoon shows the “problem” of rising gas prices. One of the solutions to rising gas prices would be to use alternative modes of transportation including bikes. Now think of the advantages of riding a bike. They are cheaper than cars, do not pollute, do not have to be insured, don't take gas, and provide you with (perhaps well-needed), exercise.  Of course there are problems with riding a bike as well, but these once again are opportunities to find unique solutions for.

One of the biggest problems facing the world is that of overpopulation. The problems associated with increasing populations are nothing new; Thomas Malthus wrote about them some 200 years ago. He basically stated that if a population exceeds the resources available then it will be reduced through “misery and vice”. In biological terms, this is related to the concept of the carrying capacity of a given area of land, i.e., the number of organisms the resources of a given area of land (or water) can support. Populations crash, and by crash I mean large numbers of individuals in the population die, when the carrying capacity is exceeded.

Discussions on the growing world population and the dangers it poses can be somewhat numbing with all the facts and figures that you can find on the Internet. For example, the world's population is at, or is fast approaching, 7 billion people. A billion is a number that I find hard to comprehend (is nothing compared to a trillion, which is a number that is commonly thrown around when discussing the debts of countries…). To better perceive the immensity of a billion, David Schwartz in his book “How much is a million?” writes: "How big is a billion? If a billion kids made a human tower, they would stand up past the moon. If you sat down to count from one to one billion, you would be counting for 95 years. If you found a goldfish bowl large enough hold a billion goldfish, it would be as big as a stadium."

Comparison such as these put the large size of these numbers in perspective. You can also put things in perspective by looking at how things change through time (my background in paleoecology, the study of past ecosystems, makes me particularly sensitive to historical changes). For example, my grandfather on my Dad’s side was born in 1898, at the time when the world population was at approximately only 1.6 billion people. This means that in only 100 years, in the lifetime of someone that I knew, the world population has more than quadrupled! There will come a time when our population will exceed the Earth's carrying capacity. It is very possible that we already have and are only surviving thanks to one time infusion of stored solar energy commonly referred to as fossil fuels. In any case, no one can argue with the fact that you cannot have unlimited growth on finite resources.

So, how does this all relate to the permaculture principle that the problem is the solution? Well, one way of looking at it is to see that children are the problem. After all, if the population is growing them they are the ones that are increasing in number. If humans are to continue living on Earth then our children (and their children, and so on) will have to be able to live on it in a manner that is within the Earth's carrying capacity. What better way to do that than by teaching them the knowledge needed to design sustainable human habitats based on ecological principles and observations? In a word, Permaculture!

With this in mind, last week I started designing permaculture lessons that I could teach my two kids. While they have been subject to many informal lessons while we garden or talk about world issues, they have not been taught permaculture in a formal manner. To help develop the lessons, I took a lesson plan template that I had from teachers college and modified it so that I could create permaculture lessons in an organized manner. The original template had a box where one listed the Ontario curriculum expectations that would be covered in any given lesson. I left this box in so that I could match my permaculture lessons with the Ontario curriculum so that when I eventually, hopefully, someday, have a teaching position, I can easily bring permaculture to a wider audience in the classroom.

Teaching my own kids permaculture is directly aligned with permaculture's prime directive, “The only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children. Make it now". It also follows several permaculture principles in addition to the previously mentioned The Problem is the Solution. It has a Local Focus that follows the concept of “think globally, act locally”.  It makes use of Onsite Resources, namely, my kids. With only two students, it starts at a Small Scale, but can be scaled upwards by teaching the lessons in the classroom and sharing the lesson plans with others. I would also like to state that it follows another permaculture principle that I have humbly coined, which is a call for action: Positive Steps Despite Pessimistic Predictions. This neologism reminds us that the race isn’t over yet and to keep going despite the odds.

In my next blog I will write about the outcomes of my first lesson with the kids. Will a third student be added? Stay tuned to find out...

My kids in the garden a few years back

Propagate Good Times!

Propagate good times! Come on! Were going to propagate and have a good time! I am sure that I'm not the only person that sings this tune while taking stem cuttings to propagate new plants. There are a wealth of books and Internet sites that concern the proper way of cloning plants through stem cuttings and I do encourage you to peruse them. You will learn about soft cuttings (current year stems), hard cuttings (previous years’ growth), rooting hormones, rooting mediums, etc. Knowledge is power and these techniques will help you ensure a high degree of success. However, an over-abundance of information can lead to paralysis through analysis, where you don't take any actions because you are stuck trying to find the correct or best method of doing something. Sometimes you should just do it! In its simplest, propagating is cutting a bit off a branch or stem, stripping the leaves except for a few at the top, and placing it in container of soil or bottled water. Many plants and shrubs will give good results with this technique regardless of whether or not you are using soft or hard cuttings. If it doesn't work, you have only lost a cutting…

The pictures below show some red currant and black elderberry plants that I propagated by simply sticking stem cuttings into containers filled with either sand or potting soil. I save the containers that plants come in to propagate plants, but have also used empty Pringles cans. In my backyard or on top of my fridge there are always a few containers with cuttings rooting in them. It is a great way to extend your garden plants and save money. In the In addition, the rooted plants also make great gifts, particularly because they cost nothing!

Now get out there and propagate some good times! Out of curiosity, does anyone else sing “My Mycelium” to the tune of “My Sharona” when they are cultivating mushrooms?

A red currant plant that I rooted in a sand-filled juice carton

Red currant and black elderberry rooted in potting soil

Home-style Guerrilla Gardening

Guerrilla gardening refers to planting flowers or vegetables on land that is not your own. Often the land is abandoned or is a bare patch that belongs to the city. Guerrilla gardeners do these plantings for many reasons including making a green political statement (Food Not Lawns!), beautifying empty or brown spaces, and growing food for themselves and others. The practice takes its name because the plantings are often done in a secret, “guerrilla style” manner due to the fact that it is occurring on land that is not theirs. While I do not belong to a para-horticultural organization, I have done a little bit of guerrilla gardening on my own property. I will describe one such covert action that occurred when my better half went shopping.

My mission was to turn my side yard, which resembled a sparse, barren, steppe-like grassland, into a life-sustaining, food producing patch of goodness (see Potato Patch Pictorial below). I only had a couple of hours to perform the operation, so I had to move fast. I quickly overturned the sod in a semi-oval perimeter around the four clumps of zebra grass. I then worked inwards turning the grass over. Yes, I know, permaculturalists always preach against digging in preference to creating no-dig mulch gardens. However, I am not against doing a quick dig, as it can give both the plants and the soil forming process a head start. It is also handy to turn the grass over if you happen to be a little short of mulch, which is often the case. The next step was to empty a few bags of leaves onto the freshly turned earth. I always try to save my leaves just in case I get the hankering to make a new garden patch. I also added a little bit of peat moss to the soil. Please note that I try not to use peat moss because its use results in the destruction of wetlands. Potatoes were then placed in rows on top of the leaves and soil. Finally, I covered the whole patch with wood chips. You can get free wood chips from your handy dandy local tree cutter. They are usually more than happy to dump a load of chipped trees on your driveway or yard, as it means one less trip to the city recycling centre or wherever they have to bring it.

The whole operation only took about two hours or so. The best part was when my spouse came home and complimented me on my work. She liked the empty, Zen-like aesthetics of the grass coming up through the wood chips. The best part was when she said, “you aren't going to plant anything in it, are you?” You would think that she would know me better by now...

Potato Patch Pictorial

The side yard. So unproductive. So barren.

Digging around the zebra grass.

'Taters ready to be covered with wood chips.

The finished product with potato plants coming up.

Bigger potato plants!

Check out more on guerrilla gardening at: http://www.guerrillagardening.org/

A Revolution in Fence Design

Something I do read when I read my books is to turn the page corners over on pages where I find interesting passages or thoughts. Then, when I reread the book, it amuses me to try and re-find what had previously resonated with me. The other day I was once again reading Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance when I came across not only a bent corner, but an underlined sentence, “ When you live in the shadow of insanity, the appearance of another mind that thinks and talks as yours does is something close to a blessed event. Like Robinson Crusoe's discovery of footprints on the sand." I can't say if this is true or not. I was likely just being hopeful. In reflection though, I think I felt a bit like this when I first found the permaculture design manual while browsing the stacks at the London Public Library. Before you start lowering my coolness factor by a few notches, I'll have you know that I am permanently banned from this library, as I believe is my brother. In any case, the information and philosophy of the book seemed to make so much sense to me; it was like I found something that I didn't even know I was looking for. So they live happily ever after right? Not really. I think that being a permaculturalist in our type of society and civilization can make you feel isolated from the masses. It is probably the same in any type of movement that wants to totally reconstruct society along different principles than it is currently following. And the further down the path you go, the more estranged you will feel. Of course you are regarded as the crazy one for wanting to design something along sustainable ecological principles instead of living as if we have unlimited renewable earths (which is totally insane). Ah, to be able to take the blue pill of the Matrix… T’would be so much easier. Once you know though…

Alrighty, this blog was supposed to be about building a fence. Hopefully it will tie back together with my rambling introduction in the end, if not oh well. In permaculture, a fence is not, CANNOT simply be a fence, as that would mean no stacking of functions. Let’s backtrack a bit so I can explain a bit more about what I mean and give you a glimpse of the permaculture design process. First the problem: the western edge of our property faces a road and offers a perfect view of our yard to anyone passing by and to our neighbors across the street. Don't get me wrong I like my neighbors, but I also like to do tai chi and yoga in the backyard and it can be a bit unnerving when there is an audience. So the main function of the fence, as defined by the problem, would be to block the view to give us some privacy. I could of course buy some lumber to make it but then that brings in the problems of cost, chemicals in pressure-treated lumber, and the destruction of forests, etc. Luckily, because of my policy to try to not export nutrients and material from the property, I still had a huge pile of branches from two trees that took down this winter to make room for some full sun garden beds, as well as some fruit trees (you have to break some eggs to make an omelet). Free indigenously grown building materials! Furthermore, instead of a single function fence, why not use the branches to make a trellis for the vertical gardening of beans, peas, cucumbers, tomatoes, morning glories, et cetera. As a bonus, the wall would be situated behind the kids’ “restaurant” that is located under a weeping mulberry, which I have previously written about. It will further define their restaurant area and give them something to munch on as well. Nothing like a living living space for the kids to play in. So, instead of a consumptive single observation barrier, we would have a multi-purpose observation barrier/trellis/wall/food system. That is what I mean by a stacking of functions.

Many hands make light work so I asked my son if he wanted to build a garden fence with me. He said, “I'll help you with anything you want in the garden Daddy.” Music to my ears. He asked what we were going to make the fence out of and I pointed at the massive, inter-tangled branch pile and said, “Some assembly required,” which he found pretty funny. There was nothing really difficult about making it. We dug holes and placed upright delimbed branches them with a bit of cement to make them more stable and then affixed horizontal branches using rope and square lashing. I found the instructions for the lashing I on the internet. The bed around the trellis still has to be dug and/or mulched, but that can wait until next weekend.






Most of the reactions the fence have been positive. My kids like it, my wife likes it, even my sister-in-law likes it. I even had a couple stop along the street while I was making it to tell me that they liked it and that I should check out their parent’s garden. However, a friend of mine commented on a picture of the fence I posted elsewhere, “Is that to keep the neighbours’ kids out of your pumpkin patch??....I’m scared just looking at pics of it....oopppsssss.....sorry Deb...I wasn't supposed to say anything about Paul's garden....” (Deb is my wife and he was referring to how she often doesn’t like my ideas I imagine). Of course he was just teasing; we are always ribbing each other. I do think though that even though he was joking, it does highlight some of the underlying views that people have about my style of gardening and ecological landscaping design, i.e., it is off-the-wall, so to speak. Thus the tie in to the beginning of this blog, something that can make me feel more at one and inline with nature can at the same time make me feel estranged from society. As for being scared, I agree with them. The fence/observation barrier/trellis/living wall/vertical garden is only the TIP of the iceberg of what I have planned. And the plan calls for a COMPLETE restructuring of civilization, if it is enough to only restructure it, and that IS scary. One way to pull it all down is to start growin’ your own. Why would growing your own food be a threat to society? Because it is free, for, as Daniel Quinn says, our civilization cannot have free food, if it were free, who would want to work?

Paul Jasinski’s Foundation Books

The other day in an earth science class that I was teaching I mentioned that there are a number of books that I regard as my “foundation books”. These are the books that have shaped (or confirmed?) the way that I look at the world, how I interpret it, and how I respond to it. Some people in the class wanted me to post a list of the books. For better of for worse here they are:

Ishmael – An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit, Daniel Quinn
The Story of B, Daniel Quinn
What makes Quinn’s books interesting is his ability to step back and see things that we are so immersed in that they seem to be the natural order of things. He is like an alien anthropologist examining the earth and its inhabitants. These books deal with how and why our culture is destroying the world. Ishmael has a really interesting take on the Garden of Eden creation myth and how it ties into what we call the agricultural revolution, one that really makes sense. Another important point is that it is not humanity that is flawed, but our civilization. There is a difference between the two.

It think Daniel Quinn’s other books are better written that Ishmael but I would still start with it, as it is a quick read with some really deep concepts. The Story of B expands on these concepts in a much better literary fashion. All of Quinn’s books have something to offer.

Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond
I like this book because it is kind of scientific parallel to Ishmael and deals with how civilization has developed over the last 13 000 years. He discusses the preconditions that were necessary for the agricultural revolution and why it didn’t happen in other areas of the world.

Collapse – How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond
I think it is kind of funny (well not really funny) how our society seems to have an “it could never happen to me” attitude to disasters and cultural collapse. There have been many societies that previously flourished and then collapsed due to combinations of climate change, resource overuse, and a lack of societal response to warning signs of an upcoming disaster. This book provides several examples of these collapses. It is a good follow up to Guns, Germs, and Steel, which focused more on the build up of civilizations.

Shovelling Fuel for a Runaway Train: Errant Economists, Shameful Spenders, and a Plan to Stop them All, Brian Czech
A great book looking at economics from an ecologist viewpoint (and there really is no other way if you want to have a planet to live on). This book basically says something simple: you can’t have unlimited growth on finite resources. He argues for a zero growth or steady state economy. Besides linking the economic and ecological systems, he also discusses how changes in societal perceptions and choices could help overthrow our current system. What would happen if rich people, instead of being looked upon as powerful and successful, were regarded as wasteful and as resource/Earth destroyers? What if this was part of the “mating game”, where people did not want partners that were rich because they had an understanding of what this actually meant to the Earth and the rest of society? Well, for one, I would likely be a hell of a lot more popular.

Permaculture – A Designers Manual, Bill Mollison
Switching to the applied and practical, permaculture is a design system for constructing sustainable (i.e., can survive (and thrive) through time) human settlements and agricultural systems that use principles derived from observing natural systems. This is the classic permaculture “textbook”. Even after having it for years I am always finding new stuff in it or reinterpreting things that I have already read before. The key point of this book is the word “design”. Let’s design something that works. Right now our systems are not working and they don’t seem to be led by design. Also key in this book is The Prime Directive of Permaculture, which is, “The only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children”. What would happen if all of our decisions and designs were shaped by this directive? Get this book and start designing and implementing a positive, sustainable future.

I also suggest reading David Holmgren’s books including Permaculture – Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability. Holmgren is the co-founder of permaculture and offers a bit of a different viewpoint. The Earth Care Manual – A Permaculture Handbook for Britain and other Temperate Climates by Patrick Whitefield is another good book. In fact, I think you should read them all.

Gaia’s Garden – A Guide to Home Scale Permaculture, Toby Hemenway
This is the book that I would have liked to written. It is permaculture at the garden scale and shows how to design a garden that mimics natural systems for maximum outputs and minimal inputs. Learn about no-dig gardening, polycultures, garden layers, importance of biodiversity, edible weeds, garden guilds… A must have for any gardener.

The One-Straw Revolution: An Introduction to Natural Farming, Masanobu Fukuoka
This book outline’s one mans journey from scientist to a sort of farmer/monk. He developed a system to grow rice and grains with no pesticides or fertilizers. While his methods would have to be adapted to other crops and regions, the point is that food can be grown in a sustainable, non-destructive manner. To me his philosophical outlooks are just as important as his farming techniques:

“If we do have a food crisis it will not be caused by the insufficiency of nature’s productive power, but by the extravagance of human desire”.

“And the scientists, no matter how much they investigate nature, no matter how far they research, they only come to realize in the end how perfect and mysterious nature really is”.

So these books (along with perhaps The God Delusion and Zorba the Greek) pretty much sum up my viewpoints and perspective of the world. It should now be pretty easy to figure out my motives for wanting to transform my yard into an urban garden and why I don’t really care what the neighbours may think (in fact, I would argue that those who are not urban gardeners are either not thinking or are simply uniformed). As always, I am interested in hearing your thoughts and views on these books or the subjects contained within.