News from Chris

Hello all, this is Chris, certified stranded alien, reporting from BC. I have been well, biding my time while the US immigration services process my documents. I have been living in North Vancouver, in the guest room of a friend of a friend's who graciously offered me to stay in exchange for some work on the house and the garden. I'm working on week-ends as a handy man to put some money away.

I've also been spending time learning about the local ecosystem, figuring out plant names, what plants were and are eating by local First Nations, the habits of animals and birds. I tasted licorice fern (wow!), encountered a mink in a canyon, and Rosemary and I came upon a bear scat full of mushroom remnants near Rice Lake, a short distance from the urban area. A pack of coyotes lives in the area, and I am determined to find out something about them too. I see bald eagles almost every day on their way to and from the port.

The crows are like a living clock, leaving their roost just after dawn and heading to it an hour before dusk. They come from all over the Vancouver area to roost together. Rosemary and I tried to follow them by car, but we didn't find their final destination, which is probably in the Burnaby area, just East of Vancouver.

Last week-end I went for a hike organized by the Ancient Forest Alliance to a group of old growth trees that escaped the felling during the early 20th c., called the "Temple of Time Grove of Giants" (!!), within walking distance of North Van. The size of these Douglas-Firs and Redcedars was pretty amazing (I think the tallest Douglas-Fir was 96 metres). My wonder was a little overshadowed by sadness though, because we had to walk for hours, go off the trail and up a steep hill, not get lost, to get to this "grove" of only a handful of uncut trees. Such lengths we must go to if we want to see what used to be everywhere!

Oh yeah, I've also started to work on publishing my thesis, which I left behind when I got my MSc a year and a half ago. Not that I really have a great interest in ground beetles, or want to pursue a career in academia at this point, but since I did all this research I don't want to let it rot in a drawer somewhere!

That's all for now. I'll make sure to post about anything exciting!

We have landed

We arrived a couple of days ago in the Vancouver area after driving across Canada from Montreal. Chris has a nice place to stay in Vancouver, and has made contacts with some friendly folks who have offered to show him around. He is studying his options for how to spend the next little while. Gratefulness for webs of interconnection weaving links with friends of friends across the continent!

Rosemary is back in Oregon with her family, with many projects (including petitioning for Chris' papers).

More on our adventures soon.

Starting a Garden from Scratch

This year, like last year, we started a new garden where there had previously been grass. We have therefore had opportunities to try out various strategies. Here’s the outcome of these experiments.

Garden bed preparation

Last year, we tried turning over the sod so that the grass would die and the roots would be exposed and dry up. This doesn’t work: grass is feisty, and just grows up around the edges of the sod, even if the part beneath dies. The implications for fertility and soil life also seem mediocre with this process.

Both times, we tried removing the grass and shaking the earth off the roots. This also leaves a lot of roots and also weed seeds which have been lying dormant, and therefore it takes no time at all for a little jungle to spring up from the earth.

We tried sheet mulching, and this is probably the most successful method. The trouble is it takes a lot of compost and mulch to cover a large area, so this year we: a) removed the grass and superficial topsoil and composted it, b) removed the rest of the topsoil, c) loosened the subsoil, d) laid down the cardboard and replaced the topsoil on top of it, followed by dry mulch (bracken or hemp). This was a long and difficult process which we could have avoided if we had had masses of compost and just done the sheet mulching straight on top of the grass. The ground was very compacted (it had been a horse pasture), which was another reason we wanted to loosen the soil before sheet mulching.

The results were very good; we found that the soil stayed moist for a long time under the cardboard, and we had little trouble with weeds. I think the cardboard took care of any remaining grass roots, while the mulch on top took care of the seeds left in the soil. Sheet mulching was perfect for the nightshades and perennial cabbages. In the future, I think we'll try making it thicker, with more carbon mulch, mixed if necessary with blood meal or some other high nitrogen material, for additional on-site compost production and increased benefits from the sheet-mulching.

For beds in which we wanted to plant seeds (greens, beets, carrots, flowers), we decided not to sheet mulch as this didn’t seem compatible with starting seeds. The greens we planted early did alright because they grew fast and out-competed weeds anyway. Our kale and beet patch was very weedy, though the weeds were mostly very small. Presumably over the years there will be less weeds as the seeds that were present in the ground run out.

Start Small

We didn’t! We really wanted a big garden, something that would be challenging and full of food and lessons. The thing is, the bigger it is, the more dispersed your energy gets and the less effort you can spend on it per surface area. Therefore a larger garden will be less productive per unit of surface area. We definitely observed this as there were always, at any given time, parts that weren’t producing. This is the basic principle of square foot gardening. While in Montreal, I saw square foot gardening as a sort of punishment or affliction that city dwellers have to put up with due to space restrictions. Now I appreciate the underlying tenets: the smaller the garden, the easier it will be to take care of it, and the more productive it will be per unit of area.

The other thing is that we burned out a little after the mad rush to plant of the spring, and pulled back after that from the garden. I think that if we had started fewer plants of fewer varieties, we would have been less overwhelmed and more contented with our garden during the summer. We felt the pressure also to plant any successful seedlings as it was very hard to discard any, but in the end our garden was a bit too dense and unwieldy. So, when starting our own seedlings, we need to remember that some of them will need to be sacrificed for the others to grow optimally.

Also, a new garden usually takes a lot of raw materials: compost, mulch, sticks for trellises, maybe some garden furniture, stones or other landscaping stuff. Therefore starting small and really enhancing the fertility and beauty of the garden seems like a better course of action than spreading mulch too thin to be effective or running out of compost/manure half way through. After the first year, hopefully mulch plants will kick into action and the compost pile will be yielding, which will provide the resources for a successful expansion.

Plant Selection

I think that starting with lots of perennials and a few annuals would be a good balance. Perennials need time to get established, so I’d recommend putting them in first, so that in the second year there will already be a bunch of stuff growing and you can concentrate your energy on expanding on that. If you plant just annuals the first year, you will have to start all over again the next time. Annuals are not the best use of energy (or money), in the longer run.

On the other hand, it's good to make sure that some really reliable producers are included: I'm thinking about chard, beats, kale, herbs. Stuff that most likely you'll get more of than you want, unless you try very hard to mess things up. And also, I wish we'd used more earlier producers. We had very little before mid-July and the first tomatoes. Early producers like turnips, beats, greens, spinach, kohlrabi, while not the most exciting to eat (I think), are really nice to have around for their fast growth. They really help to extend the season both ways.

Planting patterns

We were a bit obsessed with companion planting this year. It must be said that in winter, when the garden is just a dream and we long to be outside with the sun warming our bones, thinking about plant combinations is like fantasizing! In the end though, companion planting is a nebulous pseudoscience which should be taken with a pinch of salt. It’s very hard to know what combinations are going to work (marginally) better than others, which you learn by observation rather than book/internet research anyway. So, no point sweating over that too much!

Rows

We’ve been resisting planting in rows, which we saw as an unnatural imposition of puritanical will upon the naturally flowing patterns of the plant world. The fact is, I think that some things benefit from being planted in rows, especially root vegetables (our broadcasted carrot seeds didn't come to any good, and we were mostly powerless to effectively care for them, spread all over the place as they were) and some alliums that need to be fairly weed free and thinned correctly. It’s virtually impossible to effectively weed young plants that aren’t in rows! Rows make is easier to identify young seedlings, and to thin them when the time comes, and then also to harvest them. Ease of harvesting was something we totally didn’t consider at the end of a rugged winter, when it was unimaginable that harvesting, that holy sacred grail, could ever be anything but pure bliss! It's really something that needs to be planned for in order to make the best use of the garden's gifts!

On the other hand, bigger plants that grow for the whole season, like tomatoes or peppers, don’t seem to need to be planted in lines as much (except maybe for ease of trellising, and, again, harvesting). Plant guilds, which are something we are just beginning to explore, also brings an end to the need for rows, but this is sort of beyond the scope of a veggie garden.

Conclusion

My biggest take home messages from this year are: we must make sure to manage our energy for our own pleasure and for the benefit of the garden (start small, don't waste energy on marginally beneficial plants, use perennials rather than annuals when possible), and relax about the theory: stuff like companion planting, soil fertility, etc., which you learn as you go along anyway, rather than sweating over volumes of gardening books that usually don't agree anyway. A creative balance of experimentation and sure shots will ensure learning and satisfaction will both flow from the garden.

Three Sisters Musings

So now I’m sitting in the back of the motor home, and we’ve just passed Ottawa. This is a good time to spend reading and writing blog posts! Reading through Toby Hemenway’s “Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture” (what an awesome book!), I came across a discussion of the Three Sisters. Since returning to Turtle Island (aka North America), I’ve also had conversations about this guild with other gardeners. One of our friends even has a tattoo of the Three Sisters on his calf! So here are some more thoughts that came out of all this. It seems to me that the main benefit of this guild over separate patches is to the corn, which, according to one Jane Mt. Pleasant of Cornell University, yields about 20% more (measured in calories) than corn grown alone. Plus you get some squash and some beans in the deal, but I think that if you want a serious amount of beans, you need a separate bean patch (which is easy enough to do).

I’ve been puzzled by the mound pattern of planting for the corn and beans that I have seen in several instructions. They describe mounds about 20 inches across and 12 inches high, or some variation of these dimensions. I never quite understood the point, except maybe so that the ground would heat up sooner in the spring. The method described in Gaia’s Garden seems to make more sense in this respect: corn is planted 3 or 4 kernels per hole, about 3 feet apart. No thinning is done as you want 2 or 3 stalks per hole, which explains the planting distance. It’s only when the corn sprouts that you mound it, which helps warm the ground and speed up the growth of the corn. Beyond this, bean and squash planting occurs in the same way, about two weeks after the corn has sprouted. The author recommends inoculating the beans to ensure the presence of nitrogen-fixing bacteria.

Another thing that could really help boost squash and bean production is adding some pollinator attractors, just like the Anasazi of the Southwest added the Rocky Mountain bee plant (Cleome serulata), thereby bringing in the experience and blessings of the insect nation. We noticed that our squashes were aborting from lack of pollination, and to be fair with the bees, who are undoubtedly doing their best as it is, the squash flowers were fairly few and far between at any given moment, and they were hidden beneath a dense canopy of leaves. In addition, pollination would require pollinators to visit a male flower first, and then a female flower, of the same squash species! So, some early blooming flowers would be a small compensation for the efforts of insect visitors.

In the future I’d try the method described in Gaia’s Garden. I think a lot of people get discouraged after trying the Three Sisters once, especially if they are used to another method that worked pretty well for them, but considering the variations in the planting instructions it is only to be expected that results will vary.

Our changing plans

So, we still have a few posts in the works to conclude about our garden this year, but first, something entirely different.

We have both flown back to North America, and our plan was to go from Montreal to Oregon, to live there (where Rosemary's family comes from). We talked to a US immigration officer who said that we could just go there and apply for me to adjust status then (it was a bit complicated applying from France).

Unfortunately, we were informed at the border that this was not true, and I was denied entry (this was a few hours ago). Since we don't have a home in Montreal anymore for me to stay at, we decided the best would be for us to drive through Canada instead of through the US, and to drop me off in BC, where I could wait for my papers. Rosemary has to go back to the US to petition for me, but if I'm in BC we would be able to see each other during this process that could take 1 to 6 months.

So we're happy to have a plan again. The thing is, we don't know anyone in BC, so we've been appealing to our friends to try and make some connections. Do you know of anyone in BC whom I could stay with for a bit? A farm that takes workers?

Europe vs. North America: Sustainable Agriculture

I'm often asked if I miss the country I grew up in, France, or how living in Europe compares to living in North America. I invariably say that I prefer life in the "New World", though the reasons I give tend to vary. I'm not totally sure what the reasons are really, but they seem to center around an increased feeling of freedom, freedom from the conformity and rigidity that has had centuries to settle over every aspect of the life of a European, a sense of the future being still something to be written, something to fight for, to dream, rather than a looming and inevitable social order already determined by the deep ruts set by a bloated, crushing history.

Pondering the difference between these two related, Western societies is a common pattern for me, and so it was when I watched two films on sustainable agriculture these past few months. One film was French, Colinne Serreau's "Solutions Locales à un Désordre Global", and the other was a US/Canadian documentary about permaculture by our friend Donna Read and Starhawk, "Permaculture: The Growing Edge", which we saw at Donna's house when we were there in September.

Both films are based on a similar observation: modern industrial agriculture, like our modern capitalist society in general, is radically unsustainable. Both films then go on to show how restructuring our agriculture (and therefore our society), are necessary steps if we are to develop a sustainable culture.

What struck me though were the different paradigms that emanated from the way the subject was approached. The approach taken by the permaculture crowd and presented in the North-American documentary is that self-reliance on an individual level, or maybe family or household level is the necessary basic condition to build a plentiful, sustainable society. Community is a theme that pervades the film also, but as is explained by one of the interviewees, community is something that the individual needs. In this way, community is seen as an assortment of individuals coming together to seek fulfillment of their basic, individual social needs. Permaculture, sustainability, and community are therefore seen as lifestyle processes undertaken by individuals, and that grow, through the grassroots, into a sustainable society.

In contrast, "Solutions locales..." focusses on the ills caused to society by our deficient and destructive mode of agriculture, and seeks solutions at the level of farms and broad organizations seeking to reclaim a sane way of sustaining society. Instead of seeking an empowering, sustainable lifestyle for individuals, the film seeks to determine how ecological farms can be developed to feed a large number of people in society, or how organizations such as Vandana Shiva's Navdanya seed saving organization can help a whole class of farmers. Much more attention is paid to yield and efficiency, while no mention is made of individual scale matters such as homesteading and the emotional well-being resulting from living a life ostensibly in harmony with the Earth.

I loved both films, and gained different insights from each. From "Growing Edge", I felt inspired and empowered about how individual lifestyles choices can be made in a way that impacts other people; from "Solution Locales..." I gained a deeper scientific knowledge of the problems surrounding industrial agriculture, and a clearer view of a sustainable, societal level of organization. Both films conveyed the priceless humor and good nature of people dedicated to this movement, even amidst the depressing reality that agriculture has a long way to go yet.

Garden conclusion 2010

Our garden adventure has drawn to an end this year, somewhat prematurely as we left France to return across the pond, to continue our North American adventures. I will leave here some impressions and lessons we learnt from this experience, may it help or at least amuse any gardeners reading this!

• The Three Sisters are a lot of fun to play with! (See multiple other posts in this topic)

• Perennial cabbages are amazing!

• 10 varieties of cherry tomatoes makes your plate pretty and your mouth water!

• Chickens are amazing garden companions, I wouldn’t like to be without them!

• Sheet mulching is great; top mulching is key!

• Many things can be started as seedlings, for the better: beets, legumes, cabbages, squash…

• Many weeds are delicious! Few are a serious pain!

Overall when I think of the lessons learned in the garden this year, I think of a lot of things I want to do differently next time:

• Plant lots of early ripening vegetables, even if they are not the usual favourites: beets, turnips, radishes, kohlrabi are great for an early harvest, are really are much better when they come from your very own garden. I don’t want to be waiting for my first tomatoes in mid-July for a first harvest again!

• Greens need to be planted regularly. I know it, but I forget it. We only got greens for a short period this year because we made only one planting.

• More perennials! I want perennial alliums, cabbages, groundcherries (for real! Physalis heterophylla), sunflowers, lovage, watercress, Good King Henry, New Zealand Spinach, etc.

• More guilds! Using nitrogen fixing trees in the garden, creating perennial guilds with walnuts, goumis, paw-paws, wolfberries, currants, maypop, hazelnuts, mulberries, Saskatoon berries, etc.

• Back to more conventional plants though, I want to grow at least a few totally reliable veggies, like chard and cabbage. Things that can be counted on. I’ll be more selective and ignore the dodgy-sounding plants like garden huckleberry or snake gourds. I mean, experimenting is good, but selecting experiments that seem promising beats being indiscriminate and buying anything I don’t know for the sake of novelty!

• There’s no rush to plant early. Plants that are seeded or transplanted into a cold ground will not do well, whereas plants that might be started later will easily catch up. Plant growth isn’t linear in that way, it depends on the weather conditions. Maybe with a good greenhouse or coldframe set up it can still be beneficial to plant early, but otherwise it can be a waste of time.

Looking forward to more gardening, farming, permaculturing wildly in the future!

Garden Huckleberry

One of our garden experiments this year (well, everything was an experiment, really!) was the "garden huckleberry", a nightshade-family fruit totally unrelated to true huckleberries. It is supposedly a cultivar of black nightshade, which would make it Solanum nigrum var. melanocerasum. I have not been able to find a whole lot of information about it, but apparently it is from West Africa.

Garden huckleberry grows into a small annual bush, roughly the size and aspect of a tomatillo plant (though it doesn't flop over pathetically like tomatillos do, bless their leafy hearts). The little white flowers give way to a multitude of green berries that turn black and shiny. We had no problem growing these plants, they had no diseases or pests, and didn't mind irregular watering. They seem to prefer it hot. We got about 2L of berries in our first harvest from 6 plants, which is not bad, I think.

Now, the tricky question is what do they taste like? Well, firstly, you don't eat them raw. They are simply no good. Rather tasteless, slightly metallic, and not worth your time of day. You need to cook them, and not any old way either. First, you need to parboil them for 10 minutes with some baking soda. During this stage, it produces a most amazing green foam (photo). Then you rinse the berries, and cook them with lemon juice, during which process the mixture turns deep purple, and you add sugar at the end. At last, you are supposed to obtain berries that taste like blueberries. Well, my assessment is that they taste like damn bitter blueberries. Rosemary is rather less elogious, and says they taste like bitter sweetened boiled grass.

So basically, this plant is not really worth the time or garden space, and we won't grow it again. I find than regular black nightshade has much nicer tasting berries (and no, black nightshade is not toxic when ripe). A google search quickly demonstrates the overwhelming proportion of people who feel the same way about garden huckleberry, and only a small number of gardeners seem to want to grow it for more than one season!

Honestly though, it would make a nice ornamental plant, but I don't think I'll try eating it again...

Gluten-Freed (my new blog project)

Just a little post to tell readers about a new project of mine. I recently launched a new blog/website about gluten intolerance, including my own story about living with it, and of course, lots of recipes! Well, I don't have tons up yet, but I'll be updating it regularly with new kitchen experiments and discoveries and so on.

For anyone who enjoyed the zine I made last year for the Montreal Zine Fair, this is a new incarnation of the same project. I decided that, rather than writing up a new print zine (at least for now) I'd turn it into a website that would be accessible to more people and easier for me to keep up to date!

Any comments/suggestions welcome! Hope you like it!

https://sites.google.com/site/glutenfreed/

Potato towers update

We have 2 potato towers: one is planted with a yellow variety called "Mona Lisa", and the other is a purple variety called "Vitellotte". We planted them both at the same time, with 10 seed potatoes each (the boxes are roughly 60 cm to a side).

A couple of days ago, we harvested the Mona Lisa tower, since the tops of all but two plants were dried up. We were disappointed to find that no potatoes had been set in the upper layers of the tower. There were only potatoes in the bottom layer. The total harvest weighed 2.8 Kg, more potatoes than we've ever grown, but still way below the rumours of 50 lbs per tower we've gotten wind of. Why were there no potatoes in the upper layers? It's hard to say: we missed a lot of the potato tower action while travelling, and our knowledge of the life-cycle of potatoes is rather thin. It could be that the towers were raised too late, or at the wrong point in the plant's cycle.

Worried about the other tower, we took off some planks to check: there are no potatoes to be seen yet in the upper layers, but there are lots of roots, and the potato plants above are still very green and looking good (see photo). They even look like they are going to flower again. Since my understanding is that the plants set potatoes while they flower, it could be that the tower will fill up to the brim with potatoes then.

I wish I understood potatoes better. The two pieces of information I have about them that have helped are the simultaneous potato formation and flowering I mentioned, and the other is that potatoes are formed between the seed potato and the top of the soil (which is at the basis of potato tower theory). My knowledge of the habits of potatoes stops there, pretty much. Does anyone know where I can get some Potato 101 info, or have any potato wisdom to share? There are so many ways to plant potatoes! How do you do it?

(Minor) Troubles in the Garden

Nothing dramatic has befallen our chlorophyllian friends, and after the rush and hassle of starting sometimes stubborn and picky seedlings and then finding room for most of them, taking care of the garden has been a pretty relaxed job. A few things have popped up though.

A significant number of baby squashes, especially earlier in the summer, have had a tendency to turn yellow and brown, shrivel up and fall off. We are assuming, from doing some internet research that this is due to insufficient pollination, and have tried, when possible, to pollinate them by hand. There are still lots of squashes, and I imagine that when one squash aborts, the plant simply puts the energy into growing another one. So maybe it's not something to be overly concerned about. However, this has made it seem like growing the different varieties of squashes separately instead of all mixed together would have been a good idea (we let the idea of diversity get to our heads I guess); it would definitely have helped for hand pollination.

We have been pretty relaxed about watering, and this has been a very dry summer so far. So even though we have mulch, signs are starting to show. Especially on our tomatoes, which are just starting to produce. What you see on the photo is called "blossom end rot". Apparently it is caused by a calcium deficiency, which results usually from irregular watering (this damages the fine roots and/or inhibits soil life, hence the plant's ability to uptake calcium). It doesn't seem to be too bad though, only a few plants are affected. If we had a smaller garden, watering wouldn't be such a big deal, but the surface area combined with the heat and drought we've seen, and our leaky water collection barrels make it a serious task to water everything often enough. Maybe we must perfect our rain dancing skills!

We've also noticed some yellow blotches on squash leaves and some white ones on the perennial kale. We'll keep an eye on them and report back if it develops into anything interesting...

Weeds

When we came back from our stay in the Peace Factory after 6 weeks, we found our garden in a somewhat change shape. The paths had turned into a one metre high strip of meadow snaking through our veggie patches, which had remained fairly weeds free thanks to the mulch! The plant that had taken over the paths were mostly wild Amaranth and White Goosefoot (Chenopodium album, a close relative of the North American "Lamb's Quarters"; top photo). Both of these are edible, and quite nutritious actually.

Amaranth (photo on the right) has been the most successful weed in our garden beds too, and we have grown quite fond of it. The sacred plant of the Incas, banned after colonization and christianization, is now valiantly resisting Monsanto in various countries, especially the US. There, millions of acres of round-up ready GM crops have had to be abandoned due to a round-up resistant variety of amaranth (aka. "Pigweed"). How can one not love this freedom fighter plant?

As a matter of fact, we don't weed very much at all. Our beds are full of plants: besides amaranth and goosefoot we also have plantain (Plantago sp.), persian speedwell (Veronica persica), dock (Rumex sp.), black nightshade (Solanum nigrum), sow thistle (Sonchus sp.), scentless chamomille (aka. Bladr's Brow, Tripleurospermum inodorum), Queen Anne's Lace (Daucus carota), yarrow (Achillea millefolium), red deadnettle (Lamium purpureum), nettle (Urtica dioica) and more.

So what's the problem with weeds? Why does conventional wisdom have it that gardens need to be weed free? I have difficulty believing that weeds are always bad for all plants in the garden. What seems fairly evidently detrimental to me is if the weeds are big enough that they shade the veggies. Competition for light is something we make sure to minimize by cutting down the weeds that get too large (essentially the amaranth and goosefoot, since the others are generally smaller). We also remove the weeds that are growing very close to our veggie plants, because we presume that they are "crowding" them somehow. And lastly, the other occasion we see it as beneficial to remove weeds is for more sensitive plants: root veggies, alliums, and young seedlings seem to suffer noticeably from the presence of numerous opportunists popping up around them.

For other plants, I wonder if the benefits of the presence of these wild plants doesn't outweigh the costs. Amaranth, for instance, has a taproot, as do plantain, sow thistle, docks, Queen Anne's lace; so when these plants are growing among vegetables with a different root structure, I imagine there is a niche segregation as far as nutrients are concerned. In fact, I wonder if the taprooters don't help the other plants by bringing up deep nutrients and water that would otherwise be unavailable. Periodically, we snip off the weeds that get too big at the base, leaving the roots in the ground to increase soil fertility. By laying the severed weed on top of the mulch, it dries up and eventually decomposes back into the garden bed, returning the nutrients it acquired deep down to the vegetables. I think this kind of "chop-and-drop" green mulching should be beneficial in the long run, right? And even if the effect is not very significant compared to the nutrients brought by applying compost, manure and mulch, it still saves time and effort (cutting weeds is often easier than pulling up, and less disrupting to the soil).

Then there are all the other functions of weeds:

• They are pretty. Think of yarrow or wild carrot. Persian Speedwell is actually an alien plant that was long ago introduced for its ornamental properties.
• They attract pollinators and beneficial predators. Their flowers are often larger and more showy than veggie flowers (aside from squashes!), and help to reach an ecological balance.
• They conserve humidity in the soil when forming a ground cover. This is the case with bindweed for instance, which, though it is often maligned, is actually harmless to some veggies on which it can't get a grip, such as head cabbages, potatoes, carrots, artichokes, leeks and larger varieties of squashes (this information is from a French gardening magazine, "La Gazette des Jardins").
• They confuse insect "pests". Insects that seek plants do so by looking for green things (an insect can't tell one plant from the next from a distance; even if they are following a chemical scent they don't know exactly where it is coming from). If you only have their host plant on a brown background (earth or mulch), they'll have no trouble locating it. If they can't make it out against a green background, or if they land on a weed instead, they are likely to move on elsewhere and leave your veggies alone.

I would very much like to have some way of comparing different weed management methods, but haven't tried doing so this year. Weeds are pretty much all throughout the garden to some degree, mingling with our veggies under our benevolent gaze. Wild amaranth is our most productive garden plant, and our vegetables seem to be doing fine with it there. Why on earth would we think of removing it?

Garden update

The garden has been a fun adventure so far, so full of lessons! The piece of hardened horse pasture we wet to work on in the spring has turned into a patch of half wild, tumultuous greenery. Our absence in May and June did not end in disaster for the garden (thanks mom for the watering), though it did produce some interesting quirks (see "Weeds" post!).

Beets
I can't say I love the taste of beets, but I have come to appreciate their value as a crop. They grow fast, don't need a lot of watering or care (maybe weeding/mulching), and provide both edible greens and roots. They did well intercropped with our perennial kales: by the time the kales had grown to occupy the whole bed, we got a harvest of beets! Oh, also, beets can be started either indoors or direct seeded! They aren't fussy!

Perennial Kale
Talking about the perennial kale ("Chou Daubenton" in French, Brassica oleracea var. ramosa), that has also been a hit. We haven't been eating it as much as we could be, but each plant has become huge bush. It also seems to be somewhat drought tolerant, though it would probably do better if it had more water. It hasn't been attacked by any insects, and seems generally like a hassle-free plant. We're very fond of it! So is one of the horses, who puts her head over the fence to chomp on the tops!

Three Sisters
The 2 three sisters patches have both been doing great. Planting maize and squashes together seems like a no brainer: one grows horizontally, the other vertically. Can't really go wrong, right? The carpet of squashes has now become very thick, and seems to be doing its job of keeping the ground cool and the weeds down.

The one tricky thing has been the beans. They do grow quite a bit faster than the maize at the beginning of the summer, and they seem to find it hard to hold on to the thick stems. In our windy area they get shaken to the ground and have to start all over again (we usually help them, also so that they don't waste their time twirling around squash leaves). So I'd say the one subtlety about a three sisters patch is when to plant the beans in relation to the maize, and that probably depends on the climate and varieties used.

I can't compare the productivity of such a patch to that of separate patches, but I'd say that those people who used this system for survival probably had very large patches. If you think how much a maize plant or a bean plant produce, and imagine 4 plants of each every 1.5 metres, it surely takes a large area to get enough for conservation.

Other Things
In the rest of the garden the tomatoes are becoming ripe and delicious (we got one that weighed almost half a kilo!), the red cabbages are making heads, still requiring virtually no attention from us, the kales are slowly on their way to reaching their goal of 2 metres, the sunflowers planted by the rats are flowering, the garden huckleberries are steadily ripening (though that doesn't mean they taste any better; more on them later), the Peruvian groundcherries are flowering, the pepinos are starting to think they should do the same, the peppers are swinging into action, with some jalapenos coming right up, the tomatillos have given us enough for our first green salsa, and, and, and...

The kindness of family, (animal) friends, and strangers (Recent Travels, Part II)

(Please scroll down to read Recent Travels, Part I if you haven't already)

We had a fun couple of days in Italy. The only full day we were there we spent hiking over hills and through vines out to San Gimignano (shown here), a very interesting little town full of medieval skyscrapers (15 still stand of the original 72 towers). The next day we got in my parents' rental car and headed north, stopping for the night in a little Alpine town just across the French border called Briançon. That night we ate dinner in a restaurant that actually served several wild plants in our food, which was neat. The next morning we walked around in the mountains a bit and found most of them; some we could identify but others remain a mystery. We then continued to drive north and made it back to Chris's family's place. It was nice to come back after about five weeks of being away, and especially exciting to see our garden! Chris says he wants to write about the garden, so I'll stick to the travel adventures and you will hear from him soon about how our plant friends have been faring all this time.

We spent a few days with both of our families together in once place for only the second time, funnily enough almost exactly two years since the first time, which was when we got married. It was neat to show my parents around the place where we have been living, and to feed them food right out of our garden.

After a few days we packed ourselves back into the rental car and headed north again, this time for Antwerp. Some people reading this may not know that we lived in Antwerp for a year when I was a kid. Going back was fun; it's interesting to see how my 7-year-old brain remembered things a little differently from how I found them this time. The trip was exhausting though, as we had lots of old friends to see and places to revisit, and it was very, very hot. But Antwerp is a really nice city (as far as cities go) and it was a lot of fun rediscovering parks I used to play in and plazas I remembered walking through.

After a few nights in Antwerp we drove up to Amsterdam to see some more old friends. Again, a lot of running around, but Amsterdam is also a really neat city, with all its canals lined with gorgeously rundown houseboats. Walking around the city was really nice, and we also took a day trip out to Den Haag and Utrecht. After two days in Amsterdam, my parents flew back home and Chris and I stayed on for a few more days. We moved from our city youth hostel to a campground about 15 minutes outside of the city, where we rented a tiny little cabin. The percentage of hippies increased dramatically. It was nice to get out of the city, and the countryside is really beautiful out there, even if it is very developed. We rented bikes, which were really more like tanks than bikes, but it worked out fine because there was not a hill in sight and we were never in a hurry to get anywhere. We didn't go back into the city much, but spent most of our time exploring the area. We found a really nice wild park on a peninsula sticking out into the Ijmeer, the southernmost of a series of connected lakes that eventually lead to the North Sea. And just outside this park a flock of sheep were grazing, and they were the friendliest sheep we'd ever met:

[Check out our photo album on the left, "Adventures in Italy, Belgium and Holland", for more encounters with animal friends!]

So, we eventually headed off once again, this time back to France and back to Chris's family's place. And surprisingly, we had the hardest time hitchhiking out of Amsterdam. For some reason very few people stopped, and those that did were only going to the next town. We finally decided to be proactive about it and I started asking people at a gas station just outside of town if they'd give us a ride. We managed to find a guy going all the way to Paris (who later told us that I'd freaked him out a bit, as I approached him just as he was hiding his newly procured weed stash in the back of his car). We'd been hoping to go more toward the south and avoid Paris, but since we'd had such bad luck so far, we decided to go along with it. Turns out he was making a brief stop in Lille as well, and for various reasons (including that his driving was becoming more and more erratic and aggressive, as he was late for his first day at a new job due to non-stop traffic jams we'd been encountering all afternoon) we elected to get out there. After a couple of short rides to get us to better hitching spots we finally got picked up by a really nice guy who, upon hearing that we were probably just going to find a forest to sleep in that night, invited us home with him. We'd been having good conversations in the car, sharing gardening tips and the like, so it seemed like a safe enough deal. We got to see another part of France, the area around Laon, which is really beautiful. We had a nice dinner with him, drank some regional wines, and got to see his garden. In the morning, he drove us around a bit more (all the while saying how he wished we could stay a whole day so he could take us on hikes and show us more of the area) and then eventually dropped us off at the nearest highway entrance.

There was very little traffic, but in not too much time we were picked up by an orthopedic surgeon with a passion for cheesy dance remixes. He was driving a moving van to his new home. Veeeerrrryyyyyy sloooooowllllyyyyyy. By the time he dropped us off we were way behind schedule and starting to get worried about making it back that night. It also turned out he'd dropped us off at the wrong place to get to the highway we wanted, but luckily we got a quick ride with a local woman to a better place. However, as we were standing at the entrance to the highway with our "Lyon" sign, another hitcher who'd just been dropped off coming the other way ran over to us and said that we wouldn't find a ride here; trust him, he hitched this route all the time. Instead, he said we should walk a couple of kms to the next service station, since everyone there would be going in the right direction at least. It felt like an unbearably long walk in the heat, which had been growing over the last few days, and once there we decided to not waste time with our sign and just ask people up-front if they'd take us. Seems to get us rides a lot faster, since more people say yes than would think to stop for us if they were driving past us.

Our next ride made up all the time we'd lost with the doctor. This guy cruised along at 180 km/h. That's 111 mph. Luckily though he wasn't going all the way to Lyon, so we spent less than an hour with him. Dropped off at yet another service station, we found a couple going past Lyon who agreed to take us. They were quiet, and we were exhausted, so we didn't do much talking, but they were super nice and actually went a bit out of their way to take us into the city, to the train station. We got there just in the nick of time to take the last evening train down to St Clair les Roches (the closest station, only about 15 minutes from the house), where we were picked up by Chris's dad.

And so now here we are, back again, relaxing a bit. We only have just over a month until our European adventure comes to a close. Crazy to think we've been here for six months already. And that so many new and unknown adventures await us!

A long night in Italy (Recent Travels, Part I)

Well! It's been a month (and a whirlwind of activity!) since the last post. The days have been going by so fast, and we've been all over the place.

Not long after my last blog update, Chris and I said goodbye to the Peace Factory and thumbed our way back across France, but this time with Italy as our destination. There, we met up with my parents, who came to Europe for a few weeks to travel and see old friends (and us!). In Tuscany they had rented rooms in a villa along with a few other couples who are longtime friends from Oregon. We made it there in time to spend two nights with them in this beautiful old stone house that once was a monastery. A highlight was the plum tree that was just ripening and gave us a few delicious plums each day.

Which reminds me, I should backtrack a bit. Our journey out there was an interesting one. Hitchhiking took us to Montpelier, Nîmes, Marseilles and Aix-en-Provence, where we were lucky enough to catch a ride with an Italian who could take us most of the rest of the way. We knew we couldn't make it all the way to Tuscany in one day, so we planned to find a place to spend the night around Genoa and then take the train the rest of the way the next morning. This Italian businessman was on his way home to Milano, so he'd be turning off the highway just before Genoa. Now it could have been partly that he spoke very little French or English and we spoke very little Italian (well, virtually none), but I think it was mostly that he was just a bit mixed up as to where we were. He recommended dropping us off a while before Genoa because there was a larger road-side service station where we'd be more likely to get a ride the rest of the way than if he took us further, where there were only small stops. So he left us, saying that if all else failed we were just up the hill from Savona, and it would only take a few minutes to walk into the town. Sounded fine to us. And we didn't have a map of Italy, so we couldn't verify. Not that we thought to question him anyway, he being Italian and us not being very familiar with Italy. The service station turned out to be a bust; hardly anyone came through it, and the sun was getting low on the horizon. We decided to walk into Savona and see if we could just catch a train from there, or find some place to sleep, like maybe the beach, for the night.

The walk into town was amazing. Fruit trees galore! Most of them were in people's yards, but when they hung out over the road and we could reach them, or pick up fruits that had fallen to the ground, we didn't stop ourselves. We were soon stuffed with plums and peaches, and in our giddy delight we never stopped to think that maybe we weren't in Savona after all. It was a few kilometers to the beach; we figured we must be on the outskirts of town and that if we made it to the beach we'd be able to walk along until we got to the downtown area. I'd actually been in Savona once before, though only for a few hours, and remembered that the train station was really close to the beach, so this seemed like a good thing to do. And oh was it nice to put our feet in the Mediterranean after a long hot day of traveling!

The beach was all built up and sectioned off into terraces with lounge chairs, like much of the European Mediterranean coast is. Not so good for finding a place to sleep. We kept walking and ended up talking to someone who pointed out the train station to us off in the distance. It didn't look familiar to me, but we kept on our way and found ourselves in a very small little downtown area of what turned out to be Ceriale, which turned out to be about 40 kilometers away from Savona. Right, just down the hill. It was almost dark by the time we found the tiny Ceriale train station. The ticket booth had a sign saying that it was closed indefinitely (indefinitamente; didn't need to know Italian to figure that one out). The automatic ticket machine didn't work. It was too dark to hitchhike and there didn't seem to be any place to stay. We eventually found a bus going in the right direction, and were lucky enough to get to the stop right before the last bus of the evening passed (though the bus came 20 minutes late, when we were about to give up on it, thinking that maybe the schedule had changed or we were reading the timetable wrong). This bus took us to Finale, about 30 minutes down the road, where we were a bit bothered to find that the automatic ticket machine in that train station was also broken, and the ticket booth didn't open again until 6 the next morning (the train we wanted to take from Genoa to Florence left at 7, so we would have had to leave Finale earlier than 6 to get there on time). After wandering around for a couple of hours, we ended up finding another bus to take us to Savona. We reached the Savona train station in the wee hours of the morning and found that the automatic ticket machine there was also broken. We weren't too surprised by this point. We thought we'd take our chances getting on a 4:30 am train to Genoa anyway and seeing if we could buy the tickets from the conductor. We had a couple of hours to kill and we were pretty exhausted, so we lay down under a tree out the back of the station. The noise of air conditioners and the occasional creepy people walking by kept us from sleep, so we moved inside into the waiting room, which was stuffy but quiet, and slept for an hour or so.

We woke up and got out of the waiting room just after 4, and went out to the platform from which our train was supposed to leave. No one was there yet except for a couple of technicians who were wandering in and out of the train with worried looks on their faces. People began trickling out onto the platform, and then when the conductor arrived she was informed by the technicians that the train was not working. It seemed like they didn't quite know what was wrong with it either. The display board started showing delays, and after an hour's wait with still no working train we started looking around at the other trains and found that one was leaving soon for Pisa, which would take us pretty close to our destination, between Pisa and Florence. Although it ended up being almost 2 hours late, by some miracle this train worked, and we were indeed able to buy our tickets on the train. Things had started looking up! We slept most of the way, but occasionally I awoke to look out the window and see the beautiful land we were zooming through.

My parents ended up just coming up to Pisa to pick us up, which was a relief, as with all the little connections we would have had to take to get to our final destination, and given our luck with the Italian transport system thus far, we may have never made it. Several times during all of this we thought, If only we'd kept hitchhiking all the way!

So, that was our long journey to Italy. I'll stop this post here and continue the tales in a new one!

Peace Factory updates

Still here at the Peace Factory! I've just posted some photos (finally!) on our online photo album too, which you can access by clicking on the link to the left.

Some updates:

We learned how to do Hugelkultur raised beds Sepp Holtzer style, from someone who learned it from someone who studied with him. It was a bit different from how we did it earlier this spring. This method is particularly adapted to dry areas, and the beds, which are made by putting logs at the bottom and then alternating layers of fresh compost material, dry plant material, earth and mature compost, last for 5 to 7 years!

Chris caught a perch in the river with a fishing rod he made out of bamboo, some fishing line we found tangled in a bush, and a hook he fashioned out of a safety pin. Several hours of waiting (and several baits that mysteriously disappeared) finally paid off, and we barbecued our generous benefactor.

The weather has been unusually rainy, and we moved our outdoor bedroom into the warehouse building, at a point where two huge doors open up to what must have been some kind of loading dock, so at least we feel half-way outside still. At night the bats bounce their echolocative chirps off our heads, and at first light a chorus of birdsongs starts winding its way into our dreams. The other morning as we lay in bed we witnessed the first outdoor flight of two young black redstarts who'd been in a nest under our platform. I don't think I want to go back to sleeping in a bedroom again.

We continue to go to the market in Carcassonne on Saturdays to glean the leftovers, and have not been disappointed! Each week we come home with our big packs stuffed to the brim with overripe fruits and veggies, some of which always end up getting squashed due to the vertical nature of back packs. There's a real social network of gleaners there too who share their surplus, exchanging eggplants for heads of garlic, passing around boxes of apricots and green beans so everyone has a chance to take what they need. Even the fruit sellers take part in this, coming up to us to say we should go check out that corner over there; they've got boxes of melons that they're getting rid of. And we continue to go to the local farmer's market on Mondays to see our friends and to see what's been harvested that week. A lot of what they're selling is too expensive for us to be able to afford, but we always come home with a couple of heads of lettuce and sometimes they give us handfuls of broad beans, which for some reason they are having a hard time selling around here.

We've made new friends in Kendra and Paul, who just arrived here from Germany and are planning on spending 6 months here at the Factory, at which point they'll decide whether or not they want to stay more long-term. They've been involved in the project for a while, although long-distance up until last week. It's nice to have people to hang out with again!

Okay, that's it for now. Check out the photos, and watch out for more to come!

The Factory

Rosemary here, writing for the first time in quite a while, with an adventure update!

About a week ago, we left Chris's family's place, where we've been since January, to go off on a new adventure. We left our fledgeling garden in good hands, and as it had been raining profusely for several days prior, our various water collection systems were all full, and the ground under the mulch was plenty moist still. (Turns out that once things warm up, mulching does turn out to be a big life-saver. It might have just been that we mulched that first bed too early.)

Through internet searches of intentional communities in France, we came across the Peace Factory, a start-up community at the site of an old mill and tanning factory about 20 kms northeast of Carcassonne, in the southwest. Their website says "Need a place to stay? We need volunteers!" (it's owned by an English woman, thus the English) so we contacted them and they basically said we could come whenever we want, and stay as long as we want. Sounded good enough to us. 

We hitched out here in one day, luckily, taking six different rides and having to wait and walk a fair amount, but all in all it seemed like we had pretty good luck. And we got to talk with some pretty neat people, and all different kinds of people at that. There really doesn't seem to be any kind of profile for who picks up hitchhikers (except that each ride was either a male-female couple, or a single man; no single or multiple women). We rode with a middle-aged business man on his lunch break; a chill, young, self-employed carpenter who hitchhiked all over europe a couple years ago and plans to start up an intentional community in the next few years; a retail salesman on his way to a market who drove 150 kph (that's 93 mph) down the highway, chain-smoking and music blaring; a fairly straight and uptight-looking young couple on their way to visit an aunt for the weekend (if I'd seen them anywhere I wouldn't have thought they were the kind to pick up hitchhikers!); an older couple who told us a lot about the area we were driving through, which they seemed to really know and love; and finally, a youngish guy all fancied up for a night on the town, looking like a lounge singer or something, with hair slicked back, gold chains, wearing a white chinese-style-inspired dress shirt and white dress slacks. Talking on his cell phone to his mom. An eventful day, but a long one, and we were really happy to reach our destination!

And what an awesome place it is! Nestled in a little ravine with a river (La Dure) running through it, this factory was in operation until 1991. Louise, the current owner and only full-time resident (at the moment), bought the place about 15 years ago, and is now getting to work on trying to turn it into a community. There's a lot of work to do, and she's pretty busy with her own work (she's a Nonviolent Communication teacher, specializing in getting NVC programs into the French school system) so she basically trusts volunteers to do whatever they think is needed around here. We have a little house that we're sharing with three young guys from England, who have been here a couple weeks already and are leaving in a few days, but the weather has been so nice that we've been sleeping outside since we've been here. Louise has given us some NVC workshops (fun to see these super-shy, somewhat awkward  19-year-old guys, who will hardly talk to us, practicing communication!) and has shared with us some of her ideas about how she'd like to transform this place, but other than that it's been pretty much the two of us hanging out, exploring, coming up with ideas and making stuff. 

The exploring part has been my favorite. This place is just crazy, half of it totally run down, the other half in the process of being run down. Buildings full of old metal machinery, piles of stiffened leather, caved-in roofs and missing floors, old cargo elevators, old wooden stairs you tap with a stick to make sure they're solid, and then gingerly step up onto, hoping they won't break, bats galore, and the occasional awesome find, like these cool wooden wheels we're going to bring outside and use as raised garden bed frames. Oh and a big house that had a fire in it a few years ago, and is still full of personal belongings. From the outside it looks like an abandoned mediterranean villa, overrun with wisteria, two giant palm trees growing in front. Somehow an image of feral royalty comes to mind. (Walking through the house, mill and factory buildings actually reminds me of the video games Chris plays sometimes, with room after room of old broken stuff coated in dust, stained walls, dark corners, machinery that hasn't worked in decades, all surrounded by totally overgrown vegetation. I keep expecting aliens or zombies or whatever to jump out from around the next corner. Too bad I don't have my five different machine guns, a bunch of first aid kits and some extra life power. Or whatever that stuff is.)

We haven't completed a whole lot of projects yet, partly because exploring this place is just so fun, and partly because we've also been exploring the surrounding area. The little village, Montolieu, is totally awesome, and is apparently a big tourism destination for the literarily-inclined, with some 15 used and rare book shops, a book and paper museum, and many local artisans of various sorts. And the countryside around here is just incredible. One of the highlights was yesterday when we went for a hike in the hills and came across a perfectly ripe red cherry tree. We climbed up into its branches and spent the next half hour stuffing our faces before continuing on our walk, which took us on an 8-km loop through the hills, through several different kinds of vegetation as we changed altitude and south-to-north-facing slopes. 

Another element to our time here has been some new friends we've made at a local farm. The day after we got here, last Saturday, we hitched into Carcassonne for their weekly farmer's market, hoping to glean whatever we could from the leftovers. Apparently, they're much friendlier toward the end-of-market crowd than they are in Montreal! We had one guy even hand us a whole crate of perfectly-ripe tomatoes. And from another stall we got a crate of squishy, bruised nectarines that made a delicious compote that lasted us all week. Amid the stalls, there was one that stood out as a little different. It was one of only two organic farms that we saw, and it was the only one that had some different kinds of goods, like bags of acacia flowers and homemade veggie pâtés. We talked briefly with the two women at the stall (one middle-aged, another who I guessed was about my age, both who looked a little bit like hippies), and then went on our way. On Tuesday, we went with Louise to the local farmer's market, which is at an organic farm just outside of Montolieu, and discovered it was the same people! And the two women remembered us, especially because as they were leaving Carcassonne after the market on Saturday, they'd seen us trying to hitch a ride back to Montolieu. They'd been full, otherwise, they told us, they would have stopped for us. They invited us to come with them that evening to see a film about agriculture in France, Solutions locales pour un désordre global (Local solutions for a global mess), which was surprisingly very good. Aside from the ending, which was a bit disappointing (hopefully Chris will write a post about why, because I'm running out of time to go into it), we really liked it. And we had a good time with the farmers and their friends, and we've been back to visit them a couple times since then. Turns out the younger woman is an intern there, completing her studies in agriculture. She knows A LOT about organic agriculture in France, about the laws and history and all that, which is really cool. And she knows a lot of people who do all sorts of permaculture-type projects in France, and can hook us up with some other communities to visit where we could probably learn a great deal. 

So, that's all for now. Haven't taken any photos of this place yet, but I'll get on it and post some soon! And I'll also post the most recent photos of our garden back at Chris's family's place on our photo album, because we've gotten quite behind there as well. Really, it has grown and changed a lot since what the current photos show! [Addendum: new photos of the garden are now up! You can click on the link in the left sidebar.]

Hope everyone reading this is well and enjoying the spring! 

Sprouting mixes are fun to plant, but...

We have tried using seeds from sprouting mixes from the health food store, which has been fun, but has produced some unexpected crops.

For a start, we broadcasted some seeds labelled "cresson" (cress). We expected this to mean water cress, which is generally what is meant in France by cresson (cresson de fontaine). Well, it turned out to be peppergrass (cresson alénois). So now we have a big bed of peppergrass!


We also planted mustard from a bag of sprouting seeds. Now that I look back, I see that we should have expected that it wasn't going to be leaf mustard (Brassica juncea), the kind we crave in our salads. It turned out to be white mustard, Sinapis alba. We ate it anyway when it was young; it was better cooked as it was kind of tough and a little hairy, like raddish leaves. The trouble was that it grew a lot faster than all of our other Brassica greens, which we planted all together in a line. But we quickly gobbled it up, and now our more tasty greens can see the sunlight!


We also broadcasted a mix of alfalfa, raddish, and fennel. The fennel hasn't come to anything and the alfalfa seems to be slowly growing (though is it really Medicago sativa? We might not be able to tell until it flowers!). What grew in place of raddish, while definitely a Brassica, is not something we recognize at all. And no raddishes are forming. Again, we'll have to keep watching, unless someone recognizes this plant:

So, sprouting mixes are a cheap way of getting lots of seeds, but you must expect some surprises!

Note to Self: Plant Beans Indoors Next Year

I've been looking at the awesome blogs of people who left comments, and found that planting beans in pots seems to be quite popular: Robert does this for his peas, and Nome for her broad beans.

Our peas and broad beans both got attacked and eaten by a some kind of nocturnal rodent monster that ploughed up the lines of helpless legumes. In addition the first peas we planted didn't grow, presumably because the ground was too cold.

I never really considered planting beans indoors. My philosophy has largely been "if it can be started outdoors, better to save the space, pots and potting soil for the plants that need it". But maybe next year we'll start beans and peas indoors to get an early start. Thanks for the inspiration, folks!

Do-It-Yourself Rainwater Collection

The thing about DIY, we've been finding, is that it doesn't save you time, and sometimes doesn't even end up saving money, but you learn a whole lot in the process. So we could have gone to the store and purchased a 1000L cistern and been done, but we wouldn't have learned all we did about drilling, gluing, plumbing, and the infinite ingeniousness of water to slip through the smallest of cracks. Here's what our water collection looks like now, along with some things we learned.

Our first project was to set up water collection barrels on the doghouses (we're staying at my parents house for most of this growing season, and my mum breads dogs). We used a method we'd heard about at Earth Activist Training: slicing a corrugated plastic tube down one side and clipping it onto the edge of the roof. This worked fairly well, though it's not as easy to do as we thought it would be, and wouldn't work on a lot of roofs. It's also unfortunate that these plastic tubes, designed to cover up electrical cables, only come in horrendous colours!



Next we wanted to put our main water collection unit in the stable, right next to our garden. The water is caught off the roof in a regular gutter, and then comes in through a hole in the wall and down into a line of previously tripe-filled barrels, connected at the bottom.


This is where we did a lot of the learning (a.k.a we had lots of issues). First, it was impossible to find connectors specifically designed for this purpose (such as bungholes). Not knowing the French word for it didn't help either. So we settled for using what turned out to be the cheapest solution, using connectors designed for gas pipes.


So, here is the first piece of advice to anyone attempting to construct a similar water catchment system: make the holes just the right size. This might mean buying a drill-bit, but it's really going to save you a lot of work in the end. We thought we could skip this and make approximate holes, and then use silicon to seal it, but no. Silicon is not meant for this; it does not withstand pressure. So at first it seemed water-tight, but when the barrels filled up water started to seep through the holes (notice that the wooden support under the barrel on the left in the photo above is wet). And once it's wet, silicon won't stick, so you can't add any after the fact. In the end we got some special silicon for swimming pools, and smothered that on, but even that hasn't been sufficient yet. The leaks are very slow, so it works anyway, but in the long run it might get worse.

Another thing to think about: the overflow has to be proportional to the amount of water that comes in. I know, it's logical, but we just stuck a regular garden hose on for the overflow, and now that at last we've had a good rainstorm, the stable is flooded. Honestly, when we started working on this system, what really weighed in our minds was knowing how dry the summers are here. We weren't thinking much at all about the spring rainfall and overflowing barrrels! So yeah, remember to have a large overflow pipe.


In the end, though we got the barrels virtually for free, once you count the price of the connectors, the silicon and so on, this DIY system was far from free, or even cheap. But like I said, we learned a few things, so we don't regret it. And now we have probably a good 1500L of water stored here, to add to the 8000 or 9000L stored in other containers around the place.

We were planning to have another similar setup in another location too, but in the end this one took up all our attention and the other barrels are just outside in their raw state, waiting for us to find them a permanent location.

The Companion Planting Puzzle

So, call me the sceptical permaculturist if you want, but after my rant about mulch, today I'm going to go after companion planting. Not against the principle itself, which is great, but more on the subject of the over-optimistic and simplistic way with which the concept is sometimes approached. At times, I have myself enthusiastically and at length described the benefits of companion planting and how if you plant this plant with that plant you'll not only have an awesome trouble-free garden but you'll also save the world, and you won't even need a revolution! Hurray!

But then when you get down to it, all these pesky questions come up. How close does the borage need to be to the tomatoes in order to improve their growth and flavor? How far apart can you plant patches of calendula and still get their pest-repelling properties? How much marigolds do you need to make any difference to the nematodes? Basically, once you know what plants go together, the question becomes how do you plant them?

One thing I found really interesting while skimming through one of the myriad organic gardening books in a bookstore was that the effect of companion plants varies greatly depending on the circumstances. In "Jardiner Durablement", Jean-Michel Groult gives the example of sage, a companion to cabbage (it repels cabbage butterflies, supposedly). It grows best in a hot, well drained soil, but will give off almost no volatile chemical compounds in these circumstances, whereas it will do so more readily in moist soil, though it might not grow as well. This was really interesting to me, and it makes a lot of sense. The quality of the soil, air and soil humidity, soil pH, nutrient content and so on will all affect a plant's growth and therefore its quality as a companion.

You can start reading up on this subject and just never get to the end of it. But ultimately, I think the best advice is that of Jon Jeavons in "How To Grow More Vegetables": it's up to each gardener to try out combinations of plants and find out which ones work well in the specific context of each garden. He advises to start with combinations of few plants (only 2 or 3), in order to be able to really figure out what's going on.

I think this kind of experimentation is really very valuable, because you can't really rely on lists of companion planting combinations without testing them (and generally the planting details to make these combinations work are not mentioned). And then again sometimes you'll find that some unusual combinations will work in your particular context. In a broadcast bed we threw some peppergrass seeds and some alfalfa (among other things). The peppergrass started growing in patches where the seeds had fallen, and later the alfalfa started growing through the peppergrass. What I think happened here was that since we gave little care and little watering to this bed, the alfalfa seeds only sprouted successfully under the protective cover of the peppergrass, and the patches of bare ground where no peppergrass seed had fallen remained barren of alfalfa also. Who would have thought? Of course, to replicate this kind of thing with other plants you would really need to know the plants' growing habits well. This is the kind of thing you can only figure out by trying combinations of plants in the garden.

Has anyone out there done any interesting experiments? What combinations of plants have you found to work well in your garden?