In classic permaculture style, within the problem lay the seeds of the solution. The deforestation due to conventional agriculture in these surrounding hills has caused soil erosion and during the rainy season much of this rich volcanic black top soil is washed downstream. This annual bounty has been redirected through the Ijatz site using a sequence of channels and sink holes, which in turn slows the water flow enabling the nutrient rich humus to be captured and stored on site. The earth has been moulded to create slopes, edges and contours essential for increased growing opportunity.

During the dry season any rainfall is held in the pond sequence, maintaining the local water table which is the source for the hundreds of trees and plants. While the flora perpetually contributes biomass to improve soil fertility, a micro climate suitable for growing has developed in what is essentially a few acres on the edge of town. Prior to the establishment of the Ijatz project, over one hundred homes were annually flooded in the immediate vicinity. Currently, the site can receive flood water to the depth of more than a metre during the wet season. A perfect demonstration of a multifunctional permaculture design element, the banana circle has provided the solution. Acting as a pump, that most excellent of pioneer species, the banana simply sucks up and holds this water. The spaces between the rubbery concentric rings of a banana tree are simply saturated in water. The centre of the circle becomes a compost heap for any site prunings while the worms of the vermicomposting stations make short shrift of sections of banana trunk. The composted output is another useful income stream for the coop. Of course, let us not forget nature’s own delicious potassium stick – the banana itself! All this and the local community benefits from dry homes throughout the rainy season too. This in turn satisfies one of the cornerstone ethics of permaculture: people care – positively affecting the local community.

Banana circle

The project is only thirteen years in the making and boasts a diverse range of trees and plants that reach every level of the canopy. Timber is harvested and the bamboo stands are about 6m tall. There are a number of guava, grapefruit, lime and lemon fruit trees. A vine layer producing a vegetable called güisquil (sechium edule) when boiled is similar in texture and taste to a tender swede or turnip. There are several other local tropical plants that contribute roots or leaves to the kitchen table. The annually deposited soil is then built up to form raised beds for growing vegetables. My three week stint centred around reinstating the vegetable and herb beds preparing them for fresh seedlings, including lettuce, coriander, frijoles (beans), parsley, celery and radish. This soil food web is teaming with life and I encountered countless worms, spiders and other small creatures. Thankfully, the nesting cobra we stumbled across only wrapped itself around Pancho’s arm (the head gardener). No harm done – sadly only true for Pancho!

The core focus of the Ijatz cooperative is coffee production. On the final day of my visit, the ladies of the cooperative harvested fifty kilos of coffee beans ready for processing. However, they collectively own several plots of land on the slopes of the now extinct Volcán Tolimán. Through the cooperative, the workers have generated a stable income which has funded educational programmes on child care and nutrition. They also have discussions to understand where their high value product sits in the open market. I was invited to describe the drinking habits of Europeans. My talk was graciously received even though my Spanish is woefully short of adequate.

If you are interested in volunteering your time and energy to the assist the Ijatz project and you have a command of Spanish language you can contact them directly at asociacionIjatz (at) gmail.com otherwise I can advise you. Volunteer opportunities exist throughout the year.

Read my follow up article about how Ijatz manages its core business – coffee, using permaculture principles. You can follow my blog at www.kevpermatour.blogspot.com as I travel Central America gaining permaculture experience working towards my Diploma in Applied Permaculture from the Permaculture Association Britain.

Then came, what one of my elders have called, the Western Syndrome. For thousands of years there has been a syndrome (We call it a SYNDROME because the definition of the word describes it perfectly; syn•drome n, a group of things or events that form a recognizable pattern, especially of something undesirable) that has moved around the earth consuming intact cultures by replacing our rooted stories with distant tales and a commerce that carries no responsibility for the land that sustains it. And now, the story of broken-hearted people who have no origins place who move continually west to flee their oppressors only to find they have become the oppressor themselves of the intact peoples they encounter in their flight. This story has repeated itself in untold ways for millennia and it runs deep in most of our blood and bone as it plays itself out in our daily lives and worldviews around the world. This syndrome is not just carried or transmitted by one particular grouping of people defined by race, creed, or color but has affected and been purported by us all and continues to do so.

In my Permaculture education and design work in the West African country of Liberia, I have found myself often in a face-off with the Western Syndrome in its quest to cull life from communities to gain a profit, mostly for large western corporations. I soon found that one of my roles as a permaculture educator coming from the so-called “developed” world was to dispel the myth that the “western world” only leads to a glorious future. In Liberia, many of the people, young and old, will adopt nearly anything “western” as a personal sign of status and progressiveness. Where I was first confronted with the reality of this is when I went to visit one of the student’s midwifery clinics, which was close to where I was facilitating a permaculture design course.

When I arrived at the clinic, which was well made of mud bricks and palm thatching, there were women, some pregnant, others with babies and children all about on benches, playing, sitting next to a cooking fire, and others were weaving baskets as they they shared stories, laughed and tended to the little ones. One particular woman was walking about with a spray can pumping away to keep the spray mist constant on all the leaves of the plants that were all about. My curiosity hoped it was a compost tea she was using to fertigate the plants, yet my intuition knew differently, so I went to see what the magic concoction was that was so necessary to spray around this clinic for women and children. It was DDT. I was shocked. As I read the label on the can she was re-supplying her sprayer with, it only had the warning, “fatal if swallowed” and the name of an American Chemical Company. My heart sank in the dark reality of standing face to face with the Western Syndrome.

I asked the woman who was spraying the DDT, what her reasons for spraying were, and if she knew about the repercussions of using this biocide. She replied, “We have to use it to kill the bugger-bug which destroys our crops. They have got so bad since the war that we have no choice but to use most of the few dollars we make to buy this chemical or we lose our food.” She also shared that she knew it would make her sick if she drank the chemical, but nothing else.

Later that day in our Permaculture Design class, consisting of 25 students, some of whom were respected elders in their community, others who were barely adults, and all who are from a wide range of backgrounds in education, traditions, tribes, languages, and beliefs, I asked them, “what is this bugger-bug?” It was as if I had incited the devil itself as the translator shared in the common tribal language my question. Everyone stirred, some even grew fiery red in the face as they explained how the losses of their crops from this little beast could mean the difference between life and death for whole families and communities. They also shared how they were told that they should spray to kill mosquitoes that bring them malaria. When I asked them about the DDT they used, they spoke to it as a type of savior, yet a costly one for people who on average make $2 a day for 8-10 hours of hard labor. None of them knew anything of the long-term travesties that are caused by this chemical and why it is illegal to use in most “western” countries in the world including the country of origin of the spray found at the midwifery clinic – that being the USA.

I spent some time gathering some information about DDT to better inform them and myself of the chronic effects of this toxic substance. I shared the gamut of research that detailed how DDT is an endocrine disruptor and has other chronic effects on the nervous system, kidneys, liver, the reproductive and immune system, it is a carcinogen that contributes to cancer and is one of the nine persistent organic pollutants, which more importantly for the midwifery clinic, accumulates most intensively in mammals in the mother’s milk. Needless to say, they were horrified.

When everyone began to settle down a bit, one elder asked the very important and relevant question, “So what else can we do about the Bugger-Bug if we don’t use DDT?” I certainly did not have the answers, as often I don’t when it comes to regional knowledge of place. So in full Permaculture style, I replied, “Let’s go ask the Bugger-Bug?” So right then and there, with very quizzical looks abounding, we all got up from our makeshift classroom and went out into the adjoining landscape to ask the bugger-bug what can we do to survive together.

We all walked into a recently cleared area of rainforest where the debris had been burned-off and the land was laid bare and exposed except for patches of mono-cropped maize and cassava. The bugger-bug abounded, busily gathering leaf material from the crops and bringing it back to their growing mound in the middle of the clear-cut. We found that their mounds were rich in detritus and bird manures and seedlings of the native forest were sprouting all around it. Their growing mound looked like a miniature forest mountain, rich in diversity and nutrients.

We then left the middle of the clear-cut and went to the edge of this mono-cropped farm where the forest and the maize intermingled and to everyone’s surprise, the bugger-bug was significantly less prevalent and the damage to the crop was minimal. In-fact, anywhere we went that had diversity of plant species with a mulch layer on the ground there was minimal damage by the bugger-bug.

We finally ventured deeper into the forest to observe how the bugger-lived there in a natural setting and found that they were so diminished in numbers within the forest that we had a difficult time finding any damage at all from them on the understory plants. They seemed to only be feasting on the leaf drop from the canopy trees and had significantly less numbers than in the clear-cut areas.

In true detective fashion we then assembled our observations and clues that we gathered and low and behold, a story of true forest stewardship emerged. Our little bugger-bug was a “keystone” pioneer in the forest regeneration process. It seemed that this termite would live peacefully in the forest until the time where a complete devastation of the forest occurred, then it would spring into action to assist the forest in rebuilding its structure. Its numbers would increase and then they would search out plants, especially unhealthy stands of plants, to begin its soil building, mound-raising process. As their mounds grew from their efficient gathering, they would soon be the highest point in the landscape where birds of all sorts would perch. Thanks to the birds, their mounds were seeded with myriad types of plant life and from there, the forest would regenerate outward in concentric ring-like patterns.

The spell of the bugger-bug had been broken. We excitedly went back into class where we applied our new learning into the design of a food growing system that incorporated diversity in both annuals and perennials, layering in both space and time, and deep mulching that is most analogous to the structure of a natural forest. We then began building our demonstration farm using these practices learned from our bugger-bug teacher. One elder shared with me while pointing to their 150-foot high ancestral tree, “I will give thanks to these little bugs for I know without them we would not have our forests.”

At the very root of Permaculture is the knowing that we must live in integrity with the world which sustains us. The Western Syndrome cunningly distorts our ability to take responsibility for our lives through the many faces of globalization and often leaves us barren of integrity whether we are aware of it or not. The bugger-bug story illustrates that with our work as Permaculture teachers and designers, we have a duty to honestly read the pattern languages around us and incorporate them into the conscious design of how we live in support of that which gives life.

~~~~~~~~~

Warren Brush is a certified Permaculture designer and educator as well as a mentor and storyteller. He has worked for over 20 years in inspiring people of all ages to discover, nurture and express their inherent gifts while living in a sustainable manner. He is co-founder of Quail Springs Learning Oasis & Permaculture Farm (a few of their offerings include: Permaculture Design Certification courses for Youth called Sustainable Vocations, PDC for Adults and Sustainable Aid Courses among many other offerings), Wilderness Youth Project, Mentoring for Peace, and Trees for Children. He works extensively in Permaculture education and sustainable systems design in North America and in Africa through his design firm, True Nature Design. He can be reached through email at w (at) quailsprings.org or by calling his office at 805-886-7239.

www.quailsprings.org; www.sustainablevocations.org; www.mentoring4peace.com; www.treesforchildren.org; www.truenaturedesign.net

Further Reading:

• Which Came First – Pests, or Pesticides?
• Pesticides, and You

It’s taken a while to find the time to sit down and report on Part B of our earthworks here at Rosella Waters, near Cairns in far North Queensland. Phase I Part A was documented whilst the process was taking place. This latest update however will rely on memory and hurried notes made during the process, together with numerous photos. Large excavations such as the two large dams we constructed in part A are considerably easier to direct and far less time consuming than the finer detail work using smaller machinery as we experienced in putting in Part B.

Once again we had an excellent earthmover that came on the recommendation of the guys who did the two large dams. Sparky, as he is known, is a very knowledgeable and experienced earthmover, having spent a great deal of the last 40 odd years driving a 46 tonne excavator, building large scale dams, roads and “opening up new country”, as the saying round here goes. Now he runs a private earthmoving business and has at his disposal an 85HP bobcat and a 4 tonne mini excavator with numerous attachments. All of the following work was done with these two small machines.

The first part of the process in Part B was to construct a gabion rock wall at the very top of our system, in the gully that feeds our two dams. Previously, we had done a catchment analysis and based on the 1000mm of rain we receive per year, we arrived at a figure of 5,000,000 liters moving through it. We used this figure to calculate levels and engineer our spillways, level sill heights, the freeboard on the dam walls, trickle pipes, lock pipes, etc. The gully in question begins on our neighbour’s property. It is fed from the hill behind it and also from the diversion drains the road department puts in on the dirt road leading to our front gate. The catchment is predominately regrowth after being cleared 30 years ago with two dozers and a ball and chain. The catchment area is not a well functioning bio-diverse eco system and as such there is little water infiltration and a lot of sheet flow that brings top soil/sediment run off into our system. During the wet season of 2008 we did a small trial by hand building a rock wall just inside our fence line to get an idea of how much material would be trapped and how long it would take to fill up. After only 3 rain events, the small rock wall was fully backed up with silt 1.5 feet deep and the moisture remained just under the surface of that material well into our dry season. With that experience and the slight scar constructed at the back of the Lap Pool dam during its construction, we decided on a larger than first thought gabion, to (a) repair the damage caused by the construction of the Lap Pool dam (b) trap silt/top soil and sediment, preventing it washing through our system and ultimately ending up on the Great Barrier Reef, and (c) provide a small scale example of a solution to dry eroded gullies, that run like rivers in the wet, utilizing a “waste” product of local agriculture.

The “waste” product I speak of are the mountains of volcanic rock that many farms in the area have piled up in massive windrows. Farmers spend up to $4000 an acre to pull them out in preparation for planting avocados, potatoes, mangoes, bananas, sugar cane, etc. Rosella Waters sits right on the edge on an ancient lava flow so the farms that surround us are littered with such rocks, some as large as a car down to rocks as small as a grapefruit. We approached our neighbours up the top of the hill, who grow avocados and mangos, and who had recently put in a mass planting of new trees. Prior to that they had a 20 tonne excavator and dump truck working for a week to pull every rock out. They followed this by traversing over the land with a pickup and five workers pulling the grapefruit sized ones out by hand. Anyway, they were more than happy for us to go onto their property and select as many rocks as we liked from the windrows, which they had conveniently separated into different sizes.

Gabion rock wall trapping silt/sediment & top soil

The cost in building the gabion was therefore the time for Sparky to load up the individually selected rocks into his tip truck and then place them one by one with a claw on the end of his excavator arm. The process took two days in total and we estimate that it cost us close to $1800 to build. As we had large rocks to work with we decided against both “keying in” the base of the gabion wall into the side of the gully and constructing a net meshing to encase them in.

The volume and more importantly the velocity of the water coming down the gully in this case didn’t necessitate us doing either. Choosing the largest rocks first, we placed each one exactly where we wanted to create a firm base on which to construct the wall. It was built much in the same way as a dam wall is built, starting out wide at the base, six meters in this case, and tapering up to two meters wide at the top. The height of the gabion is nearly three meters. After placing each rock, Sparky would firm it down, swivel it around until it was firmly wedged. This in itself is more difficult than it might seem and does take time, but it is VERY important to get right. In all, the wall required 7 full dump truck loads of rock to construct. Once the main frame of the wall was complete we got another two loads of grapefruit sized rock which we have since placed by hand to smooth out the top of the gabion, thus providing a great access path across the gully that we can push a wheel barrow across, drive an ATV over or lead a goat and cart. To repair the scars at the side of the back of the Lap Pool Dam, just in front of the gabion wall, we placed some large rocks on the ledge and back filled behind the rocks with some top soil we had had set aside from the construction of the two dams. This was immediately cover cropped with cowpea and a crotalaria variety called gambia pea. All of the seed we used to cover crop was bought from a local seed merchant as seconds, which means there is a low strike rate (around 40%) but at $1 per kilo and having used the correct inoculant, we gained excellent coverage and stabilized the area. It’s important to remember that seed is the cheapest herbicide!

The next element we tackled was the overflow swale and spillway connected to the larger Mushroom Dam at the bottom of the property. We decided that after completing the gabion it would be best to start at the bottom of the system and then work our way back towards the front gate so that by the time it was all done, Sparky could load up and head off without risk of doing any damage with his machinery.

The first swale was only fifteen odd meters in length and had a level sill spillway half way along it that would spread the overflow of the system over a 3 meter wide area right on a broad ridge point, making it very safe to discharge and presenting no danger of causing an erosion gully. The construction of this small element proved to be a major turning point in our working relationship with Sparky. In the end it took the best part of a day to complete, due to a number of factors including our newfound language barrier. There were some important miscommunicated terms that needed clarification as we went: level sill spillway, back cut, swale, swale mound, swale dish, bottom of the swale dish and most importantly LEVEL. The idea that we wanted to construct something that didn’t run and was in fact perfectly level and on contour was quite a paradigm shift for Sparky, as in his words he had “spent his whole life draining landscapes” and what we wanted to do was quite the opposite.

The swale needed to be constructed on a steepish slope and we decided that we wanted it to hold 300mm of water in the base and have the top of the swale mound 800mm high – thus a substantial 500mm freeboard on the swale mound. The freeboard on the dam wall is one meter, so if ever there was a chance of water spilling over it would go over the swale mound first. It is unlikely to occur as we have “over engineered” things, but if it did the swale mound can be repaired with a shovel unlike the dam wall! What we soon discovered in constructing the swale was that due to the slope of the land we just wouldn’t have enough material to make the swale mound as high as we wished. The answer was to dig further up the hill from the back cut, as gently as possible, in a 1:1 cut. We didn’t want to dig too far up the hill so we adjusted the level of the swale mound back to 700mm high and with a three-meter long level sill spillway, the swale mound still wouldn’t be at risk.

First swale constructed leading off the Mushroom Dam

The data records for the region showed that the largest single 24-hour rain event in the last 30 years had been 284mm. We rounded this out to 300mm and built the spillway to be able to deal with ½ cubic meter of water per second. Together with another spillway on the swale connected to the opposite side of the dam wall, we have more than ensured the dam wall’s safety. Another safety margin we designed into the system was a 110mm lock pipe set at the bottom of the Mushroom Dam wall. The lock pipe is 27 meters long and goes right through the bottom of the wall. On the outlet side there is a butterfly valve, which can be opened wide in the event that the spillways aren’t coping. At the bottom of our system, and being our primary aquaculture dam, it also means we can drain this dam if needed. The dam also faces West, which is likely to be the direction of any fire entering our property, so in the event of a fire we have the added security of being able to drain 2.5 mega liters of water in that direction.

For ease of construction we built this first swale with the 85HP bobcat, equipped with a 1.7 meter wide tilt bucket. Time is money with earthworks, so we decided to make the swales a bucket width wide. Sparky started by running across the slope with his bucket following the back cut line we had marked out, corresponding to the high water mark of the dam. The spill was flicked down slope forming the first part of the swale mound. Once we had the basic shape and marked the position of the level sill spillway, Sparky used his tilt bucket to scrape beyond the back cut line up the slope to get the material we needed to gain the swale mound height we were after. We also took quite a bit of material from the area leading onto the dam wall, progressively cutting back to smooth out the sharpness of the cut. Sparky did a great job and we can easily drive through this area and up and onto the dam wall, giving us access to the other side of the property. The swale runs dead level at 300mm deep all the way through, from the exit point at the dam to the end of the swale itself. On the final scraping run we asked Sparky to tilt the blade slightly down slope in the swale dish, meaning that water will be predominated into the swale mound during rain events. With our first swale complete, fully seeded and earthmover trained we we’re ready to attack the rest of the design. Together with a mix of gambia pea, cow pea and pigeon pea we also planted sweet potato cuttings, aibika, cassava, pumpkin seeds, etc… giving us full cover leading into the wet. In the last few days we have started to receive our first rains in 9 months, so now we have a good base in which to begin our major plantings.

The next swale was a short one connected to the opposite side of the dam wall. It was constructed in the same fashion and care was taken again to ensure a smooth driveway leading off the dam wall for ease of access. With not much room to play with within our boundary line, the swale was extended right up to the fence line with our neighbours and the three-meter level sill spillway will serve as discharge of excess water into the creek below, and also as access to behind the dam wall and our Zone IV area of the property.

Moving further up the slope, we then tackled the 25-meter long swale connected to the Lap Pool dam. With this swale we had a few important decisions to make. Firstly it was going to be the Lap Pool’s only swale and only level sill spillway, the overflow from this leading to the Mushroom dam. The placement of this level sill was therefore vitally important as it would be the major source of water that fills the Mushroom dam and we also have future plans for structures connected to the 6m x 3m jetty we placed on the dam. We saw the opportunity for the level sill to be a feature and a potential wet/dry growing area, in close proximity to the jetty and eventual cabin connected to it. We decided to step the overflow down into a further two level sills before it entered the Mushroom dam.

The step down spillways leading overflow from the Lap Pool Dam swale into the Mushroom Dam. Jetty posts in waiting.

In this way, we slow down the volume of water, create further edge and add an aesthetic feature in the process. The level ditches are slightly wider than the level sill on the swale itself and together with generous amounts of cover crop seed, we planted clumps of vetiver grass to further stabilize the area and slow down water flow. We used the same technique on all the level sill spillways. With such an abundance of rock at hand and a couple of quite steep spillways to stabilize, we saw this as our best option. On two steep spillways, we planted out clumps of vetiver grass across the slope, starting at the top and offset all the way down. Then we placed rocks from the bottom up, starting with larger rocks in an arc, wider than the spillway, followed by smaller rocks all the way up the spillway wall face. We left a 200mm space around each of the vetiver clumps and now 3 months later we have a very stable, rock wall face to our spillways, with large clumps of green vetiver grass breaking up the brown.

Back on the Lap Pool swale we asked Sparky to dig ½ meter deep x 1 meter long x ½ meter wide ditches within the swale dish itself. These ditches will hold water for longer than the rest of the 300mm deep swale and as such become growing zones for some wet crops. We now have these ditches planted out with Taro, with water chestnuts on the edges, all of which is shaded by bananas growing at the inside edge of the swale mound.

Lap Pool swale with newly planted Taro and water chestnuts in the pits and banana on the edges.

Again the whole swale was cover cropped with cowpea, Gambia pea, pigeon pea and dotted with cassava, Aibika, sweet potato and pumpkins. The larger long-term support species and variety of fruit and nut trees are now ready to be planted. We had considered putting all of plantings in at the same time but with no rain at all for close to 9 months we decided to get cover crops and shorter term nitrogen fixers going and wait for the beginning of the first rains before putting them in. The earthworks couldn’t be put back to a more appropriate time due to the availability of machinery.

The rice paddy system was by far the biggest challenge. To look at now, it seems all we have done is push a little dirt up to make a wall and dig a couple of holes for the ducks to live near. In a sense that’s true, but the process of constructing the 1:300 diversion drain from the Lap Pool dam to a duck pond connected to a rice paddy (the overflow of which runs along a diversion drain with a 20mm fall over 20 meters, to another duck pond connected to another rice paddy, the discharge of which drops down into a 25 meter long bio-filter which is itself a level sill spillway), dropping water into the Mushroom dam wasn’t that simple! Plus, the overflow of the second duck pond, leads to a short swale with level spillway that drops down to a 20-meter long swale, the spillway of which also drops into the bio-filter before being discharged into the Mushroom dam. Phew.

The rice paddies with bio-filter below. The beach area is on the edge of the Mushroom Dam with the back side of the Lap Pool Dam wall behind it.

A great deal of gravel road base material was taken out of the rice paddy area and we used this to repair/construct a proper ringed access road, our main access road on the property. The road has now been graded correctly so that water will run into drains leading along side it directed to water storages. On the road we have placed 150mm x 50mm x 4 meter long blue gum planks in sets of two, 4 inches apart, at an angle across the road, every 10-12 meters. We first heard of this idea from Rainbow Valley Farm in New Zealand who has the same system on much steeper roads. As water runs over the road it only has a short distance to run before it drops down into these drains that run across the road at a slight angle. By not allowing the water to build up speed over the road surface the material stays on the road rather than down the bottom of the hill, with obvious benefits.

The diversion drain leading to the 1st duck pond needed to fall at 1:300 and be set low enough in the Lap Pool dam so that it was the first water to leave the dam as it filled. We can regulate this fact by capping the end of the 150mm pipe. The level at which we set the150mm diversion pipe was 450mm below the high water mark of the dam which also corresponds to the level of the level sill spillway. That is 150mm lower than the depth of the swale and the level at which water exits the dam into the swale. As I said, setting the pipe at that level ensures we can control when the water heads to the duck ponds. We have a 30,000 L concrete water tank connected to our shed with approximately 100,000 L of potential roof catchment. We needed to decide what to do with the extra 70,000L. In a minor brain wave, we came up with the idea to pipe the overflow through a 90mm pipe down the side of the tank, under the road and into the 150mm diversion pipe with a t-piece. At the entry point into to first duck pond, we have rocked the spill and next to the 150mm diversion drain pipe we have another 150mm pipe under the road that collects all the water in the drain running alongside the road. At the end of the drain along the side of the road we have dug a meter deep silt trap, concreted the base and placed a grill over the top. This will keep silt out of the duck ponds and provide another source of potting mix from the material that does ultimately come from the road.

The main issue we faced with the levels we were dealing with was to get the duck ponds as high up the slope as we could, leaving us room to put in the proposed rice paddies. The duck ponds would end up being quite small as a result and have a 800mm slope at the back of them from the ridge road. We saw this back slope as another opportunity to be creative and decided to step this down in 300mm wide ledges to the high water level of the ponds. The end result is a duck pond amphitheatre on both ponds! This stepped area will be fully planted out with duck habitat and forage, shading the ponds in the process.

Duck ponds at the back of the paddies, connected by a diversion drain. The amphitheatres at the back of the ponds are well cover cropped and stable.

The two ponds are connected by a diversion drain that runs from 1st pond to 2nd pond, with a 20mm fall over its 20-meter length. This isn’t a great deal of fall, but it’s enough. It has meant we have been able to keep the 2nd pond up as high a possible to give us room for the paddy below. The water from the duck ponds are released into the paddies by way of gates we picked up from an old rice farmer up here. They used to grow two crops a season using the channel that leads from Tinaroo Dam as a source of their water. One of the reasons they gave it up was when the cost of water went from $8 p/ML to $18 p/ML. Now they flood irrigate sugar cane instead. We swapped the four gates for a case of beer and made metal plates that slide into the 3mm gap in the concrete gates, to control the flow of water. The same gates are used at the exit end of the paddies, to discharge the nutrient rich water into the bio-filter below before it heads to the Mushroom dam.

The bio-filter that acts a level sill, taking nutrient rich water from the paddies as well as the swale in the background at the base of the chicken tractor system, overflows into the Mushroom Dam.

The two paddies are separated by a meter wide bund and surrounded by a meter wide, meter high bund with a slight grade. All of this will become a growing zone for duck forage, mulch and some soft fruits such as pawpaw and banana. The meter high bunds, once planted out, will become a living fence keeping the ducks in the paddies during the rice-growing season. We plan to grow rice using the integrated rice and duck growing system I had learnt whilst living with Takao Furuno and his family in Japan. Takao is a social entrepreneur with the world economic forum with his rice duck growing system and has an excellent book out through Tagari publications titled “The Power of Duck”.

The short swale connected to the second duck pond drops down into a longer swale, which will form part of our chicken tractor system. This 20 meter long swale lies at the bottom of the contour chicken runs and borders the Mushroom dam. It’ll take excess nutrients from the chicken system and grow some large trees on the north side of the dam, providing shade. Due to this swale being constructed on less of a slope than the first, it was built with the four tonne excavator. Working from the downward side of the swale, the bucket cut on the back cut line and the spill was dropped to create the swale mound. Following Sparky along with the laser we ensured that the swale dish was 200mm level all along. It doesn’t need to be within a mm but it does help to make the dish as level as possible so as to get an even distribution of water along the swale in lesser rain fall events. Obviously the best way to check that level is to fill the completed swale with water and adjust accordingly with a shovel. It is cheaper to do this in your own time than to pay $100 an hour for a 4 tonne excavator to do it.

“Hairy Harry” stands tall on the island at the back of the Keyhole Dam.

The final element to put in was the Keyhole dam at the entrance to our property. We named this pond the Keyhole, as it is the key to the system that connects water on both sides of the property. The Keyhole sits on a central ridge that dissects the property and the idea was to create a small water storage in our Zone 2 area that can move water through either the system described above or to future water storages on the river side of the property, or both. We decided how large a storage of water we wanted and marked out the approximate position of the dam wall for Sparky to follow. We set a target level for our high water and corresponded this to the position of the two swales that were to direct water to the Keyhole via 150mm pipes placed under the access road. The wall was built using the bobcat, layering wetted clay followed by numerous track rolls with the same machine. Using the excavator to dig the hole of the dam, material was mixed using the tilt bucket with me standing close by, hose in hand, making sure there was the right amount of moisture to make the clay bond. Dam and pond walls are all about compaction and with enough of the right clay, a little mixing if the material is good and bad, and the correct amount of moisture, things should seal. We decided to create a small island at the back of the Keyhole as an aesthetic feature, duck habitat and for the fact that the palm we’ve named “Hairy Harry” was too good looking to lose.

Once the Keyhole was built with a 400mm freeboard on it, we set about marking the back cuts of the two swales that were to connect to it. The Mediterranean swale (so named due to quite granite soils in that part of the property) leads out towards the header tank and drops its spill down into the Lap Pool dam. It is connected to the Keyhole via a 150mm pipe, under the road with a slight 20mm drop towards the pond so as to not get stagnant water sitting in the pipe.

The Mediterranean swale connects to the Keyhole Dam via a 150mm pipe under the main access road. The level sill spills water into the Lap Pool Dam below.

The end of the pipe can be capped, if we wish to keep water in the Keyhole dam and direct any overflow via the 150mm pipe under the road on the other side that connects the Council swale to the same dam. We called that one the Council swale because its main catchment comes from a slight improvement to the dirt road the council recently graded. It was graded sloping towards our fence with no drain so in large rain events we would get large sheet flows of water moving through the landscape causing unnecessary erosion. We asked Sparky if he wouldn’t mind creating a little spoon drain 100 meters up to the neighbours gate entrance and directing that water through the culvert under our road entrance. The five meters beyond the culvert to our fence line continued as a drain before entering our property where it then becomes a level swale directing a substantial volume of water through the 150mm pipe, under the road, into the Keyhole dam and ultimately through our entire system.

Considering the volume of material we are likely to receive from the dirt road, we placed a 200mm deep x three-meter wide silt trap just inside the fence line. This can be dug out by hand when necessary. The level sill spillway of this Council swale directs overflow to a gully, which in future may become a dam or a large gabion, subject to future test holes to check for clay content.
Either pipe in either swale can be capped to control the direction of water movement through our system. This small dam feature is something we are really happy with for its aesthetic beauty and complex simplicity in functionality.

This spoon drain runs 100 meters long and will direct a large amount of water through our system via the Council swale that connects the Keyhole Dam.

For our first major earthworks the complexity involved in the design was substantial. It was quite a big undertaking, made even more so by the birth of our second son Dylan smack bang in the middle of it all. At this point I must give special recognition to my darling wife Georgie who at 41 weeks pregnant, kept us fed and watered, took all the photos and spent considerable time standing there with FRED ( Forever Ridiculous Electronic Device) i.e. the lazer level staff and receiver, in 33′C tropical heat. We took close to a year observing the site, designing, listening and talking to others, re-designing and planning the earthworks and the immediate repair work after they’re done. Once the earthworks began, concept became reality and the two can be quite different no matter how good the planning. Each evening after Sparky had left we spent time talking things over and making decisions for the next day’s work. We gave our laser level a really good working over, it has been a great investment; I don’t imagine we could have done all that we did without it.

Now that the mainframe infrastructure is in place, a little water is in the dams and the site is green with cover crops, the system has literally come alive. From seemingly nowhere frogs have descended upon the water storages attracting ever-increasing numbers of birds. The place must look like a red-light sale at a discount store – a hydrated green oasis in an otherwise dry landscape.

Overlooking the system from the header tank. A transformed landscape.

A natural spring we knew existed has started to recharge with the water in the swales from irrigating the cover crops. It moves through the sub-soil leaking out into the side of the dam. Our hope is that this recharged system will help to keep the water level more constant in the Mushroom dam by offsetting any evaporation.

In all, the earthworks took close to two months to complete from start to finish with a total of 16 days of actual earthworks involved. With the start of our seasonal wet season rains upon us, the next three months or more will be spent busily planting, planting and more planting. We know Sparky is coming back when the wet really hits – we made a pact to sit down with a beer together in the pouring rain and watch the system operate in full flight. Through a local NRM group we are also planning an open day, for local farmers to come and see the system. These major earthworks are just the start of a great adventure in the development of our Permaculture demonstration site for the wet/dry tropics of Northern Australia, Rosella Waters.

Often, as I’ve travelled and lived in different parts of the globe, I’ve stood on mountains and beaches and looked around, somewhat wistfully, trying to visualise how those landscapes would have looked a few centuries ago. I’m sure you’ve done it too.

Many, if not most, of these places were once vast tracts of old growth forest, with rich diversity in flora and fauna. Natural biological water cleaning systems were in place, as the hydrological cycle was efficient and largely unmolested by man. Most places still had rich, dark soils and no chemicals had yet been employed to stamp out soil life.

These were the days of 280ppm. We lived then with respect, if not even fear, for a nature wide and wonderful – never for a moment thinking we could one day be the cause of these vast and mysterious systems collapsing wholesale.

But, that was then. The industrial revolution, in combination with the exponential function that has taken the human population into a steep hockey stick incline (it took from the dawn of time until the 1800s before we reached our first billion people, but we’ve multiplied that almost seven times in the two centuries since), has landed us in a world that looks vastly different today.

Reluctantly putting visualisations aside, now as I scan the landscapes in front of me, it’s mostly just cities, tarmac and a massively inefficient waste-of-space large-scale industrial monocrop agriculture. Cycles of precipitation and transpiration have been interrupted as we’ve cut down forests, ploughed the land, and almost universally determined to pipe precious rainwater directly to the ocean. Water tables worldwide are falling and many rivers no longer reach the sea while often the land is parched, eroded and turning to desert.

And, oh, all that carbon! Razing forests and churning soils has been a mass eviction of CO2 into our atmosphere. For the last fifty years – the period we call the ‘Green Revolution’ – we’ve been hastening this process further through additions of soluble nitrogen which results in nitrous oxide emissions (almost 300x more powerful a greenhouse gas than CO2) and which is now also seen to have even further detrimental effects on remaining forests.

Our before-abundant oceans – the massive heat and CO2 buffering mechanism we’re blessed with – are now taking in far too much CO2, changing seawater’s pH to the point where it’s interfering with basic processes for crucial members of the food chain: coral, molluscs and plankton.

Over the last few years I’ve spent considerable time examining these issues. The more I dug into it, the more depressing it got – not only because it’s looking increasingly like we’ve already passed the dangerous threshold (see also) that risks systemic environmental meltdown, but also because popular understanding of the problem is so linear in view. The chain reaction of the almost global recession of glaciers and the melting of the greenland, arctic and antarctic ice sheets and permafrost are the result of greenhouse gas concentrations from the 1980s, with a lot more damage yet to occur from today’s greater concentrations (see here for a summary of today’s noted changes), and yet mitigation has been almost entirely focussed on reducing fossil fuel consumption, only. Being a little ‘less bad’ does not a positive make. We can’t just reduce our emissions, we actually need to be sequestering GHGs out of the air – now! While reducing fossil fuel consumption is imperative, highlighting this alone sidelines the far more holistic course of also reinstating our soils as the massive carbon sink they once were. Increasing soil carbon not only has significant potential to ameliorate the climate change problem, but in doing so we increase soil fertility, improve soil structure (critical for water- and oxygen-holding capacity) and productivity whilst decreasing plant disease and insect attack (think improved nutrition and less chemicals). And, significantly, if we were to take these things a little further, developing biodiverse food forests to relocalise food production, we can also increase heat reflecting cloud cover whilst repairing/reinstating the hydrological cycle that supports all life on earth.

In other words – the focus of governments has only been on reducing emissions and the focus of trigger happy geo-engineering advocates has only been on ‘adjusting’ the world to accommodate our lifestyles, whilst little thought has been given to restoring natural biological mechanisms that would do most of the work for us, better, and for free. Like many aspects of modern civilisation, we find ourselves yet again dealing with symptoms and not root causes.

It’s with these thoughts in mind that I introduce you to The Biology of Global Warming (182kb 8-page PDF), which was originally published as pages 7-14 of the Dec 2006 – Jan 2007 edition of Nature and Society, the bi-monthly journal of the Nature and Society Forum.

The key point of the document is to ask the question why CO2 emissions were already rising before we really made much, or any, headway into mining for coal and drilling for oil. The answer is obvious:

• "Substantial de-forestation and farming of the Middle East, Europe, North Africa and North America prior to 1750 resulted not only in the release of vast quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere through the burning of timber and associated loss of soil organic matter but also the destruction of the carbon bio-sequestration of these forests."
• "…the destruction of up to 80% of the earth’s primary forests by humans during industrialisation could have resulted in a marked loss of natural cooling capacity and therefore increased global warming, particularly as biological systems increasingly need to shade and cool the planet from incident solar radiation."

To acknowledge these simple facts is to get us halfway to working on actual solutions. Harness biology and natural symbiotic relationships, I say, because through imitating natural systems in our food production we can initiate a ‘geo-engineering’ program that comes without side effects or risks and that holds significant promise of providing for human need in a manner that doesn’t put our race at odds with every other organism within the biosphere.

We now have no choice but to address global warming through its primary and initial cause. We need to rapidly re-establish natural cloud albedos and their cooling effects. To do this we need to re-establish the bio-systems that provided the transpiration and cloud nucleation processes on which such cloud albedos and cooling effects naturally depend. To help restore and support these bio-systems we need to biosequester carbon in forests but particularly soils so that they may enhance the natural infiltration and retention of availability soil water on which forest transpiration and cloud albedos depend. – The Biology of Global Warming (182kb 8-page PDF)

Postscript: Although perhaps controversial, I also personally believe that in such efforts we’ll need to quit our narrow views on maintaining only native flora, and work towards building food-providing ecosystems everywhere – systems that mimic natural forests in function but that utilise productive edible plants and trees alongside non-invasive support species.

Further Reading:

• A referenced restatement of the above PDF (PDF)

Download: You’ll see the option to download the 913 megabyte MP4 file at bottom right side of this page.

YouTube: The video can also be watched on YouTube, in four segments, here, here, here and here.

Greening the Desert II (including Part I) – Greening the Middle East
(Duration: 36 mins)
Tips for playing: If it’s slow to load, turn off High Definition (HD) on the player.
If you still have problems, click play (on low or high def) and then after it’s started,
click on pause. The video will then continue to buffer into your computer.
Play once fully loaded.

I would like to take the opportunity to thank Kelly Kellogg at this juncture. Kelly donated initial funding that enabled the purchase of the land for the Jordan Valley Permaculture Project site (aka ‘Greening the Desert – the Sequel’). But, upon watching the Greening the Desert Part II video, Kelly was inspired to donate an additional $20,000. These gifts are very encouraging to us as we try to solve problems at source (teach a man to fish…). Others who may feel inspired to donate to help us move this work forward faster can do so here.

A little background on the video follows:

Children in a school playground, Al Jawfa, Jordan Valley

When there’s no soil, no water, no shade, and where the sun beats down on you to the tune of over 50°C (122°F), the word ‘poverty’ begins to take on a whole new meaning. It is distinct and surreal. It’s a land of dust, flies, intense heat and almost complete dependency on supply lines outside of ones control. This is the remains of what was once called the ‘fertile crescent’. It is the result of thousands of years of abuse. It is a glimpse at a world where the environment – whose services provide for all human need – has all but completely abandoned us. This is a glimpse at the world our consumer society is inexorably moving towards, as our exponential-growth culture gorges itself at ever-increasing rates.

The original Greening the Desert video clip has been watched hundreds of thousands of times and has been posted to countless blogs and web pages in the datasphere. Although only five minutes long, it has inspired people around the globe, daring the lucid ones amongst us, those who can see the writing on the wall, to begin to hope and believe in an abundant future – a future where our survival doesn’t have to be based on undermining and depleting the very resources of soil, water, phosphorus, etc. that we depend on. The work profiled in that clip demonstrates that humanity can be a positive element within the biosphere. Man doesn’t have to destroy. Man can repair.

In the clip at top I introduce you today to Greening the Desert II. I shot the footage for this video last month (October 2009) and edited it on location in the Dead Sea Valley in Jordan – the lowest place on earth, at 400 metres below sea level. Much of it was shot in or near the village of Al Jawfa where I stayed, which is effectively a Palestinian refugee camp that has morphed over the decades since 1948 into something resembling a functional small town. It was first shown to delegates of the ninth International Permaculture Conference (IPC9) in Malawi, Africa at the very beginning of November and is now being released for general consumption. The video will take you to the original Greening the Desert site, letting you see its present condition after six years of neglect when funding ran out in 2003. You’ll also be introduced to our new project site – the Jordan Valley Permaculture Project, aka ‘Greening the Desert, the Sequel’ – and see some of the spin-off effects within Jordan from the influence of the original site; promises of much more to come.

The work we’re undertaking in Jordan is in accordance with what we call the ‘Permaculture Master Plan‘, where the project’s future is assured through funding from running educational courses. Project sites thus become self-sufficient, and self-replicating.

Geoff Lawton instructs students in a school yard in Jordan, one that PRI has
just created and begun the implementation of a design for, so its
many children can see, experience and learn permaculture first hand

Through this work we envision thousands of educational demonstration sites worldwide – all inspiring and teaching communities around them how to begin to tackle at root the massive challenges we now face after decades of short-term profit-based thinking has all but ‘consumed’ our planet and dismantled the social constructs that the human race has always depended on for its survival. Through this work we see desertification stopped in its tracks, and reversed. We see this century’s dire water issues getting resolved. We see productive work for millions in bypassing the irrelevant efforts of our ‘leaders’, to instead build a new kind of culture – a culture based on cooperative effort and learning. It’s a culture where its members have regained a sense of their place in creation, where they become land-based stewards of remaining resources; creating a culture where we at last find ultimate satisfaction – promoting and building peace and low-carbon, relocalised, community-based prosperity.

We have many such ‘Master Plan’ projects in various stages of development worldwide, and a steady stream of enquiries from people around the globe wanting to get involved and help widen this cooperative network. Perhaps it’s time you took a look at Permaculture? After all, do you have something more worthwhile to do?

Jordan Valley

We’re pleased to announce that we’re partnering with the makers of the video above, WeForest, to help establish self-replicating permaculture reforestation demonstration sites in accordance with our Permaculture Master Plan, in several worldwide locations – starting in Zambia in the first instance. Our Geoff Lawton has just agreed to be on their advisory board, and we’ll be working to supply guidance, knowhow and staff to pioneer these projects.

This is just one example of the many encouraging collaborative results we get as people boil current events down to their only logical conclusion – discovering we need to quit battling nature and get busy harnessing biological synergies to repair the earth and rebuild sustainable community interactions.

Geoff Lawton and Darren Doherty are the two highest profile people in Australian Permaculture when it comes to broadacre water harvesting earthworks. They’ve both had success in some very tough environments, and yet it’s interesting that their styles are quite different, particularly when it comes to infiltration strategies.

This article is a short comparison of their approaches, along with an idea I had recently for amalgamating the benefits of each.

To help illustrate, I’ve put a set of boundaries on a section of a topographic map (figure 1.1). 

Figure 1.1 – Base Map

I realise that both Geoff and Darren would be salivating as they looked up the hill at the potential dam sites above, but I’ve deliberately left them out of the equation to keep things simple and limit the comparison to their infiltration strategies.

Similarly, although I haven’t marked it in, each of them would put in a small dam/wetland/silt-trap in each of the valleys to dissipate the flow coming on site and prevent their mounds blowing out.

Geoff Lawton’s approach

Geoff’s style for infiltrating water into the landscape is to use swales (often connected to dams but that’s another story). His aim is to catch water as high as he can in the landscape and use the dead level swale to spread the water across the length of the land. This water is held in the swale, giving it time to infiltrate into the soil, and it then plumes downhill, recharging the ground water for the benefit of trees planted below (figure 2.1).

Figure 2.1 – Soil water movement after swale infiltration
See this animation for more details

He often builds his swales with a bulldozer, resulting in a large capacity (eg a bulldozer blade wide and deep as in figure 2.2 – the back and front walls are battered on the subsequent passes).

 
Figure 2.2 - Front view of a bulldozer building a swale 

This is well suited to the sub-tropics where 50-100mm events are common and also in arid areas where the few rain events that occur can be a deluge. A large volume of water is held in the swale, giving it time to infiltrate into the landscape, for the benefit of the trees planted below.

A design constant we can work with is that water flows at 90 degrees to contour, both above and below the soil surface. Each large red dot in figure 2.3 represents an even amount of water that has infiltrated along the length of the swale. The red lines show the path that the water takes as it moves down through the soil profile.

Figure 2.3 Swale infiltration (red) path

Natural water flow in the landscape

A natural pattern in the landscape is that valleys are moist whereas ridges are dry. You can see this in the vegetation in any undulating National Park you go walking in, with lush, moisture loving plants in the valleys, and dry sclerophyll forest on the ridges.

In figure 3.1, each large blue dot represents an even amount of rainwater that has infiltrated into the land above our boundary. The dotted lines show the path that the water takes (90 degrees to contour) as it moves down through the soil profile. This image clearly illustrating why it is that the ridges are much drier than the valleys.

Figure 3.1 – Movement of soil moisture

Darren’s argument against swales in some instances

In figure 4.1 below, I’ve overlayed the swale infiltration path (figure 2.2) over the top of the rainfall infiltration (figure 3.1). As you’ll notice, the swale tends to direct far more water towards the valleys and hasn’t really fixed the issue of our dry ridgelines.

Figure 4.1 Swale infiltration (red) in relation to moisture entering site (light blue)

Recognising this issue, Darren prefers to set out tree lines using a keyline pattern. In this aerial shot of George Howson’s agroforestry property, ‘Dalpura’ (figure 4.2), the tree mounds aren’t on contour but rather they gently slope away from the valleys (the naturally moist areas) towards the ridges (the naturally dry areas), therefore aiming to even out the moisture levels across the landscape.

Figure 4.2 Dalpura tree lines from above

He creates his tree lines using a ripper and mounder, common in forestry plantings, which have a small gutter on the upper and lower sides which help to direct the water.  This is a cheaper and more fuel efficient option than a bulldozer or excavator, and works well in climates where rainfall events are generally consistent but small, such as in many temperate landscapes.

The green dots and arrows in figure 4.3 indicate the infiltration of the keyline mound during a small event. Water has been directed away from the valleys and encouraged to infiltrate on the ridge instead. You’ll notice that when combined with the water naturally moving down through the landscape from above, the moisture distribution is far more even than in the swale in figure 4.1

Figure 4.3 – Keyline mound infiltration (green) in a small rain event

Despite the obvious benefits, one downside I see to this approach is that the gutters on the sides of the tree mounds have a relatively small water holding capacity. If the landscape has dried out significantly, for instance during a long drought, it’s highly possible that the soils will become hydrophobic, and therefore there will be little water infiltrating as it travels along the gutters. During a large rain event, which occasionally come during the summer when moisture is most needed, due to the small capacity of the gutters, only a small amount of water will be held and given time to infiltrate. The rest will spill over the mound and down the ridge (figure 4.4). This would particularly be the case where there is a large catchment above as in the example used.

Figure 4.4 – Keyline mound overflow during a large rain event

(Note: At this point, I should mention that despite Darren’s mounds being smaller than Geoff’s swales, he places one for every line of trees, meaning that water infiltrates right at the base of each tree. Also, in the widescale forestry example of figure 4.2, the pasture in between the rows has been ripped using a keyline plow, which further increases the infiltration capacity. Similarly, when water does spill, it is in the best place possible – right up on the ridge where the water will fan out and have further opportunity to infiltrate)

The comparison in brief

Geoff’s swales – hold plenty of water in a large event but distribute the water less evenly in the landscape below

Darren’s keyline mounds – distributes soil water more evenly across the land, but holds and infiltrates less during a large event.

The keyline swale

With the benefits of each in mind, I came up with a hybrid, which you could call a keyline-swale.

It’s built just like a swale, set out on contour, except that the base of the swale isn’t level, rather it slopes from the valley out towards the ridges.

To build the keyline-swale, pegs are set out on contour. Starting at the ridge, a mark is made on each peg, rising at 1 in 500 towards the valleys. This is the guide for the blade depth (figure 5.1).

Figure 5.1 – Side section view of a bulldozer building a keyline swale

During a small rainfall event (figures 5.2 & 5.3), water is directed along the trench from the valleys to the ridges, where it infiltrates in a very similar pattern to Darren’s keyline mound.

Figure 5.2 Side section of a keyline swale during a small rain event

Figure 5.3 – Keyline swale (dark blue) infiltrating during a small rain event

During a large event, the water would fill up along the length like Geoff’s large swale, however the water depth wouldn’t be constant. One possible benefit of having a greater depth of water out on the ridges is that there will be more pressure here, causing water to infiltrate at a faster rate than it will in the valleys (figures 5.4 5.5). As the water level drops, it will of course infiltrate the remaining water on the ridge.

Figure 5.4 – Keyline swale full

Figure 5.5 – Keyline swale (dark blue) infiltrating during a large rain event

If this was a temperate climate where large rainfall events are rare, on this landscape I would go for a keyline swale at the very top of the property, and then use Darren’s keyline mounds parallel to this down the slope. This means you’ll get the benefits of water being infiltrated at the base of each of the tree rows (by the mounds), hydration of the ridgelines, while also capturing any large flows that enter the property, infiltrating them right at the top of the slope.

~~~~~~~~

Cam Wilson runs Forest Edge Permaculture Design, a Melbourne based consultancy offering permaculture Design, Education and Implementation. See the website for more details.

I completed my PDC in January ‘09 with Geoff at Zaytuna farm, along with a lovely range of fellow students from the far reaches of the globe. I sincerely hope they also post stories to share – come on guys, it’s time to be brave!

I returned to my home in south western Victoria (Australia) a changed woman, and I sometimes wonder what it was I use to believe in before I was transformed.

So returning home with fresh eyes for the world, I have set about transforming everything that I can cast my Permaculture web over. So hopefully I will have more than one story to tell!

My climate is cool and almost coastal ( I am 15km inland). There is a prevailing south westerly winter wind blowing fresh from Antarctica, and almost no frost. Our rain is mostly in winter and spring; our summers reach the mid thirties but usually for no more than a day or so before dropping. However last summer (Jan/Feb) set a new precedent; our hottest consecutive days, high thirties to low forties for four to five days in a row, a significant and dangerous change for us.

With a new thirst for experimentation, I have been doing informal trials and generally playing around in the garden, all the while observing and forming new questions.

So what is the story with the apricots and the weeds?

My three year old apricot trees were growing alright, considering they were planted traditionally, in an area of lawn, had never been watered, and had generally been pest free, besides a nibble from a curious horse in their first year. However I was keen to see what improvements I could make to the soil for fertility and water infiltration, and I wanted to practice increasing soil carbon on a home scale.

Firstly I sheet mulched the area with large quantities of fruit and vegetable waste from the local supermarket (diverting it from producing methane in land fill). I covered it over with all our cardboard and shredded paper waste, and then I topped that off with pea straw and old rotting grass hay.

I built up a few double reach beds in between the trees with compost and planted up some broccoli and cauliflower seedlings. I also broadcast the entire area with a winter cover crop seed mix containing oats, barley, turnips, radish, broad beans and kale to name a few.

I stood back and let nature take its course.

What I have experienced is the most beautiful and magnificent act of nature I could have dreamt for.

I harvested the broccoli and cauliflower heads as they matured then left the stems to continue growing. The pea straw grew peas and the rotting hay grew every grass and weed species available and imaginable.
The veggie waste produced a few surprises, peach and avocado seedlings (great for understock), garlic and onions. The entire site has an understory of potatoes, soon to be uncovered and enjoyed.

Many of the plants have grown exponentially in the past few weeks as they bolt to seed, radish and turnips at two metres, and hemlock (a local weed) heading on to three metres.

This abundant growth is building delicious topsoil and hosting an enormous quantity of soil biota.
Rainfall infiltration has been so advantaged that I have not experienced the usual winter run off from my land, despite our best winter rainfall in five years.

The brassica flowers are full of bees, all contributing to honey production and the whole place is alive with predatory wasps. Lots of the small local bird varieties such as willy-wagtails and fairy wrens reside close by, all consuming, producing and living contentedly in the abundant surroundings. (We should all be so lucky.)

Snails evidence a duck deficiency

The arrival of a warmer burst of weather is heralding the next succession of production. Tomato and pumpkin seeds from the veggie waste have been patiently waiting for their turn to appear. The drying off of the broad beans, barley and oats means its time for the chooks to get lucky. The seed-eating birds will collect the majority of the fallen ones but hopefully some will escape to begin the process again next autumn.

I suspect the nearby rose bushes are hiding and protecting a few birds’ nests hidden safely away from the neighborhood feral cats.

The apricots have set enough fruit to support a decent taste test and maybe a few jars of jam. But look out next season!

I will begin to chop and drop to favor the next round of production and I imagine I will find some other unexpected treasure amongst the bounty.

Outsiders who think of the Northwestern United States as an expanse of evergreen forest neglect the predominance of this other landscape. Even locals tend to forget that before there were crops, much of the region was semi-desert, a sea of sagebrush seldom more than waste high. Long before I reached Milner Dam, hundreds of square miles of irrigated desert told me of its presence.

The dam was unimpressive in construction, and not more than eighty feet tall. It did not cling to scenic canyon walls like the famous Hoover Dam. The reservoir it backed up was shallow and weedy. There is only one thing notable about Milner Dam; it is where the Snake River ends. The Columbia Basin is the most heavily dammed watershed on the planet. But of its 76 large dams, Milner is the only one that halts a whole river. The day I visit, a mere trickle escapes over Milner’s walls. The resulting stream is small enough to step over. In the past, there have been occasions when no flow escapes at all. Starting in Yellowstone National Park, and draining over 35,000 square miles, what is left of the mighty Upper Snake is whisked away by Milner’s massive twin canals.

I’d long known about the depletion and pollution of my region’s aquifers, the near extermination of the salmon runs, the saltation and erosion of the soils, the loss of habitat to agriculture, and everything else the big dams meant. I knew of the brutal water wars, of plans for the construction of still more dams and canals. I knew of droughts, and still more drought anticipated with the changing climate. But seeing Snake die had me more concerned than ever about water. And as it turned out, water became a pivotal theme in my trip.

My next stop was the FNA Ranch, in West Central Idaho, to see my friends, the Pagliaros. The Pagliaro’s property occupies the margin between the vast Palouse wheat growing region and the largest wilderness area in the lower 48 states. The family had recently moved here from Las Vegas, eager to pursue a lifestyle they refer to fondly as permaculture. Idaho is overrun with urban refugees and homesteaders stalking the simple life. The mountains are dotted with hobby farms and cabins of all kinds. But from the moment one sees it, it is obvious that the Pagliaros are doing something unique with their land.

A large pole barn with steel roof has become the base of FNA’s operations. Such structures are commonplace in the vincity, but the Pagliaro’s is the only one I’ve ever seen fitted with gutters, pipe, and large tanks. In fact, in my entire life, the Pagliaros are the only people I’ve met who collect rainwater. As a child, I remember helping my father route the rain gutters of our home to a gravel filled channel that ran off of our properly. The idea was to keep the rainwater from washing away our lawn (which we irrigated from the aquifer with automated electric sprinklers). At FNA, the policy is to collect as much rainwater as can be contained. The full brilliance of this strategy can be fully understood only when one considers the constraints of the local climate.

The reason that evergreen trees cover much of the Northwest is because they are supremely adapted to dormant season precipitation (unlike deciduous trees, which require more growing season rain). Despite plentiful snow, the shrub steppes and lower forests of the Northwest are so dry in the summer that they are considered semi-arid. In other words, the Northwest bares the misfortune of receiving most of its moisture in the winter, when plants cannot use it. And because of the region’s mountainous topography, much of this winter moisture runs off, into swollen rivers, when the snow melts in the early spring. Climate models predict that snowmelt will be happening earlier in the years ahead, making things still more precarious for thirsty plants.

Lack of growing season water presents a crucial problem to farmers growing non-native crops. The agriculturalist’s solution has been to store winter runoff behind massive in-stream dams. The Pagliaro’s solution is contrastingly small scale, simple, and rational. Using rain-fed water tanks that never seem to go dry, this family has plenty of water for their garden, their animals, and their household. Their pipes and tanks represent one less straw sucking away at the West’s diminishing stream and ground water. It’s reason to hope.

The rain-tanks aren’t the only way the Pagliaros are trying to store water. Plans are underway for a series of level earthen water catchments called swales, which will intercept runoff on the sloping land and soak it into the soil. But these swales won’t be planted to conventional crops like wheat or potatoes. The swales will receive a planting of tree and shrub crops, which are better adapted to using deep soil moisture. I am helping the Pagliaros come up with a diverse mixture of food producing trees and shrubs which will be suited to the local conditions, many of which are native. The result will be a “food forest”, a situation in which plants and associated animals coexist and benefit each other mutually, much like a native forest. Eventually, the food forest itself will help conserve water, by shading the ground, and protecting soil moisture with a thick layer of humus.

My next stop is in Southeastern Washington State. Despite being famous for Seattle’s rain, parts of Washington receive as little as 12” of precipitation annually. My friend Bill is tenacious enough to live in one of these parts, getting his own permaculture homestead off the ground. His property is surrounded by the bleakness of wheat growing country; dry, empty, and ugly. It is not well known what Southeastern Washington looked like before the wheat fields. Intact examples of this particular ecosystem are rarer than old growth forests are on the coast. However, I am fairly certain that trees have not naturally occurred here since the Ice Age.

Bill has a water problem. This wouldn’t be so bad if Bill could grow desert crops (palms, mesquites, and olives come to mind). But Eastern Washington winters are only barely conducive to peaches, freezing solid any hope of a desert oasis. As if to spite Bill further, Washington State has made it illegal to harvest rainwater. Helping Bill make an Eden out of his freeze-dried forty acres has been a fascinating puzzle.

A breakthrough in that puzzle came as a lesson from nature. “Scabland”, is a term used to describe the parts of Southeast Washington which are too rocky to grow wheat on. These scablands are comprised of coulees, cliffs, and mesas, eroded into basalt bedrock. The walls of such formations often have piles of broken rock about their base. Being a berry enthusiast, I noticed that the best place in the steppe to find serviceberries was on the north side of such rock piles. In fact, the north sides of a rock piles are about the only places that stay green in the summer. Research revealed that botanists had already named this phenomenon, calling it a “talus garland community”. I’ve since become obsessed with talus garland communities.

Such communities support plants that would otherwise be found only along streams. Talus garlands support the primary native pome and stone fruits (Amelanchier and Prunus), two species of currant, an elderberry, several hawthorns, roses, edible greens like nettle and goldenrod, as well as naturalized species like cherries, plums, apricots, grapes and apples.

It seemed obvious to me that mimicking a talus garland would be a great way to grow woody plants on Bill’s dry land. But before we tried to build such a mimic, we tried to understand how they work in nature. Why are talus garlands so green? We came up with several theories:

• Shade from the southern sun minimizes evaporation and causes winter snow to melt later in the year
• Drifting snow collects in the loose rock
• Piled stones condense moisture from night air (thanks to the Designers Manual for the hint)
• Stones protect soil moisture from sunlight and arid air
• Stones minimize competition from grasses
• Stones protect plants and debris from fire
• Freshly eroded basalt provides ample mineral nutrients
• Stone provides an ideal growing surface for lichens, which speed the breakdown of rock and fix nitrogen (lichens are the primary nitrogen fixers in some deserts)
• Loose stone provides some protection from browsers, especially during early growth
• Stone piles provide habitat for animal associates, like packrats, cottontail rabbits, marmots, chipmunks, snakes, lizards, ext. Animal associates distribute seeds, provide manure, control pests, ext. (Rabbits and marmots are very tasty themselves)

Research revealed that “stone mulch” had been used to grow everything from grapes to cotton in Old and New World deserts since ancient times. However it worked, rocks were the trick we needed. And so Bill and I formed plans to build a waist-high wall of stone mulch over his long abandoned lawn.

Ironically, homesteaders of the past had made every effort to rid their land of stones, and finding large piles of this unwanted material was fairly easy. Bringing the stones back to the land felt somewhat vindictive. In a matter of hours we constructed a pile a few meters long. The finished product was crude but natural looking, a Zen rock garden of sorts. I’d brought along some Cherry Plum pits I’d collected at the Pagliaros and scattered them about the rocks.

Only time will tell how our experiment will fare. Yet as I drove back to work, whizzing past the grandeur of the land I love, I knew that the answers where out there, somewhere. Seas of green forest, roving herds, and wide clean rivers were still thriving in spite of human mistakes. It seemed that if we could only tap into that wild vitality, there would be no need to suck the West dry.

Bill Mollison at Trinity College, Melbourne All photographs © Craig Mackintosh

I had never been to Melbourne before this week, but from my very short exposure to it over the last few days, I can already sense that it is a very strange place….

Take yesterday for example. I was in town, and noticed someone had dropped their purse on the sidewalk. There was a lot of foot traffic, and so, standing at a distance, I watched to see what people would do – you know, once they noticed it. Would they pocket it and hurry off? Would they look around for its owner, or maybe a policeman to hand it to?

Unfortunately, neither. Instead, I was mortified to see people – in full view of passers by – just sit on it. I mean, who would do that?

Another example. Here at Trinity College, where the latest Bill Mollison/Geoff Lawton PDC has been taking place, Geoff escorted me to the dining hall for breakfast. Standing before two impressive looking wooden doors, he asked me, with a hint of mischief, if I knew Harry Potter. Perplexed, but sensing something ominous, I could only respond that I’d heard the name, but that was all. With that, Geoff swung the doors wide open, and, with a degree of apprehension, I stepped in.

Although expecting something unusual, everything seemed to check out okay inside. At the same time, it was hard to shrug the nervousness off. I don’t know what it was, but I had this strange feeling – you know, like when you feel you’ve been somewhere before, even though you know you haven’t.

It was kind of creepy. Inexplicable.

The Dining Hall in Harry Potterville, Trinity College, Melbourne

PDC students come to learn wizardry

The course has been going very well it seems, although, to be honest, I haven’t sat in on many classes. I’ve been on missions in the area instead. But, during my short classroom visits I’ve enjoyed watching a tremendous tag team in action. Sometimes Bill and Geoff were teaching in turns, sometimes simultaneously. It was always interesting. When teaching together, their immense knowledge, vast experience and biting wit had people learning and laughing continually.

Bill Mollison and Geoff Lawton teach a PDC at Trinity College, Melbourne

84 novice warlocks, witches and wizards and their teachers (centre)
Click for larger view!

Respectively, the two of them have worked magic worldwide – doing the impossible in some very strange and faraway lands. People have watched as they’ve turned barren hillsides into flowing springs, sand into fruit. They’ve even created hope where there was none, and out of the most basic and unexpected elements – soil, water, air and biological agents.

They’ve also inspired many to learn the craft.

Speaking of which….

Angelo, the Urban Wizard

On one of my Melbourne adventures I stopped in the suburb of Preston, at the house of a certain urban wizard called Angelo. I knew immediately that he was a wizard because of his cat, Louie.

Lavender is an excellent companion and medicinal plant

Louie has a tail that can take any shape he wishes. Just after my arrival he went through just a portion of his repertoire; there was the corkscrew (which is just as you’d imagine), the backridge (where his tail lies flat along the entire length of his back), the spiral, the wave and more. As convincing as this was, though, there was even more evidence that Angelo was a wizard than just his cat, as we shall see.

Angelo wasn’t always a wizard. A few years ago he was just like you and I – at least until a certain mysterious girl got him reading strange books and experimenting with various plant potions.

Up until this time, Angelo had always been a computer systems engineer (yes, just like Neo). Then, one day, a strange wind blew and Angelo happened upon an advert on the interweb – for one of Bill and Geoff’s courses. Along he went, down the rabbit hole and all the way to Harry Potterville. The rest is history. (Just a short history though, as that was only last September.)

Angelo must have been wizard material, as up until recently his parent’s yard was a strange cross between a typical English style garden (full of roses and ornamentals) and an overrun jungle, and today the section is something else entirely.

A wave of those hands and who knows what could happen

Prior to the course, Angelo’s ‘garden’ consisted of many kinds of plants scattered about the property – but mostly all in pots. It was container gardening mayhem. After the course, and after some negotiations with his parents – his absentee landlords – he decided to liberate his plants and reconnect them with the earth.

Babaco fruit – related to Paw Paw

Angelo only transformed two garden beds at first, but, with a full sense of the power in his hands, he was soon working his magic on more. Unwanted plants disappeared, the land got flattened, new plants appeared. From what he said, the new plants ‘communicated’ with each other (I couldn’t hear them, but maybe it’ll come to me in time) and had special mysterious relationships too.

Then, thinking he was getting short on space, Angelo also shrank the lawn by half – simultaneously growing the garden. It seemed there was nothing he couldn’t do.

I walked about, following Angelo’s enthusiastic steps, getting a sore hand trying to write down all the enormous array of plant species he has in this space (I gave up in the end). Geoff talks about the garden being the ultimate health food shop. If that is the case, then Angelo’s yard is a health food shop and apothecary complex.

An infant Duck Potato

There were dwarfs in the land as well he said. Dwarf oranges worked to shade raspberries, and there were dwarf nectarines and peaches. By planting early, mid and late harvesting trees, he ensured an extended harvest period. Not all of the fruit trees were dwarfs though, but their tight spacing and spring and summer prunings kept them at a manageable and very productive size.

Nashi and Williams pears were planted next to a north facing heat absorbing wall – planted on wires 18 inches away so as not to cook their leaves.

There was comfrey under mandarin, nasturtium under apples. There was cat thyme (his sidekick Louie liked to hang out here) and yarrow, pomegranates, goji berries, the small and potent alpine strawberry and yellow, cherry and pineapple guavas. There were blueberries, red and black currants and grape underplanted with hyssop, lemon geranium and strawberries.

Angelo grew potatoes in pots – the regular variety in soil, and ‘duck potato’ (or arrowhead) in water. Even blackberries, which can run amuck in a garden, were present – kept in a pot to keep them in check.

A clump of stinging nettle was left in situ, a great home for the preying mantis and aphid-eating ladybird. All kinds of sage had their place, along with tansy, lemon balm, citronella, scented geraniums, fever few, growth-enhancing fox gloves, and insect-confusing wormwood. There was tree mugwort, a fast-growing windbreak that doubles as an excellent medicinal plant for woman’s problems, triples as an excellent cane coppice, and quadruples as a nice high roost for cat-avoiding, insect-eating birdlife.

It seems even wizards have to listen to their parents. The roses had to stay, but they got underplanted with strawberries, sorrel and aphid-repelling chives.

Scotch broom – most regard as a ‘weed’, but here it’s a great
nitrogen-fixing companion for fruit trees

Angelo, like all wizards, was very conscious of the movement of the stars. Trees were planted on the south side so as not to block light for smaller species, and being deciduous, they were perfect in front of windows – blocking the harsh summer sun but allowing winter warmth to stream through.

Angelo’s serious plant diversity reduces ‘pest’ problems to an absolute minimum.
Some are decoys, some are repellents, and some are habitat for predatory insects.

Angelo, though still in the league of apprentices, already has his eyes set on even more advanced sorcery. He has a roachberry (or soda apple or devil plant) – a rather imposing, tall and prickly plant – that he plans to graft eggplant and tomato onto (same family), which then magically allows a significantly increased yield of each.

A goldfish (perhaps a former girlfriend or misbehaving pet?) comes up to say hello.
The azola doubles in quantity every month – great food for the worm farm

Angelo is conjuring up huge quantities of fresh, nutrient-dense, chemical free fruits, berries, vegetables and herbs – much of which are largely invisible to ‘pests‘. The health and vitality you can squeeze out of mere metres of urban space seems like pure alchemy to me! I’m looking forward to visiting Angelo and Louie again, in the summer months when I fully intend to sit on his wood-chip mulched paths and gorge myself on foods you rarely see in our long distance, centralised industrial food system – the berries and fruits that just don’t transport well across continents, but that transport just fine from plant to plate.