End of winter round up: Part 3

THE GARDEN

In the past four years, I have moved at least four times which has made creating a garden difficult.  I am just about to move again.  This will hopefully be a more permanent move, as Will and I are buying a house together and we don’t intend to leave it for at least seven years.

My original idea for this project was to design a roof garden for the roof here at the flat, but I didn’t live here at the time and that made observation difficult, so instead I did a design for the house where I was living with my friend Ben.  Some of it was implemented, some of it was not, as you would expect from a design for a place you are renting.  I have yet to see whether the random seed experiment has had lasting effects or whether the green alkanet has got the better of the self-seeded nasturtiums.

On moving into the flat, I reconsidered the roof again as a growing space but concluded that while it had an amazing south facing aspect, it was high on limiting factors – the main one being the wind.  Being realistic (which is what I am all about now, don’t you know…), I knew it would take a lot of infrastructure in the form of wind-breaks and barriers around the outside to make it into a useable growing space.  As I predicted that we would move again, I decided that putting all of that work in wasn’t worth it at the moment.

Instead what I did was knuckle down to learning more about gardening.  I did a composting course and a course about growing food in small spaces (actually, I am still doing that one really, as I didn’t keep up with it while it was on).  I have read quite a few inspirational books (but need to read more).  What is still outstanding is doing a course in garden design.  Not permaculture design, but ‘where to put plants so they look pretty type design.’  I also want to learn more about perennial plants and guilds and also get some experience of ducks and chickens within a permaculture system.  I am leaning towards ducks, I have to say…

But ducks come later.  When we move in, I am going to spend a year growing in pots and observing the plot before making any significant changes (as I am a good little permaculturalist), so I have a whole year to fill in the knowledge that I think I am lacking.  Apart from those few areas, I am feeling really really ready to take on a plot of my own again.  I haven’t really had that since I gave up the allotment, and I feel like I have learned a lot from that experience.  The biggest lesson?  Start with a small piece of land that is right outside your door, and when you have done everything you can to that, get somewhere bigger and further away.

The design I do for my new house is going to be the one that I submit, so I consider all of the designs I have done for gardens up to this point to be practice for that.  I am glad that I have done it this way.  I really have a chance to properly implement the design I do for my own garden, and I am at a place where I think I know enough about all of the things and systems involved to really do it well.

Action:  Start observing garden when we move house

 

THE LARDER PROJECT 

I absolutely love this design.  It progresses slowly but surely.  I started with grand designs and then realised that my goals were both ill defined and very difficult to achieve, so I here’s where I got a bit more real.  In terms of my plan of action, I have more or less done all of the things that I put on my ‘can do now’ list.  Making jam in bulk and bulk buying cheese are as yet undone, but I plan to do at least the first one this summer.

I got really good at making chutney to take to work with oatcakes and cheese for my lunch, but then I observed that I was essentially eating a jar a week of what is really, vinegary jam (I don’t like low sugar chutney) and that it probably wasn’t very good for me.  Instead of doing that, I decided to experiment with fermented pickles and made the  kimchi recipe from Sandor Katz’s wild fermentation.  That was a big success, though it honks of garlic and is mildly embarrassing taking out in the canteen at work.  I also started making fermented soda this year too.  Lactofermentation is part of my arsenal now!

So, I guess we are on the ‘soon’ and ‘later’ tasks of my plan of action.  They were:

Soon

10)  Investigate getting a freezer for the loft and get one if appropriate

11)  Build cutting garden and develop conceptual plans for real garden (this is part of the garden project)

Later

12) Investigate sources of apples and berries for fruit snacks

13) Build solar dehydrator

14) Buy electric dehydrator

15) Get a pressure canner

16) Learn to can

Getting a freezer can happen as soon as we move house, but the other projects might take a little bit longer.  I am most excited about learning to use a pressure canner so that I can ‘put up’ food that is not soused in sugar or vinegar.  This is a really American way of preserving and hardly anyone does it in the UK, but I have found someone!  Her name is Gloria Nicol and she recently ran a workshop with the Secret Garden Club which I sadly missed because I was doing something or other (probably related to scything).  Gloria, if you are reading, please teach me to can!

Dehydrating, whether electrically or solar powered, may have to wait until next year, but the larder project is coming on, it really is.  I have my three month stock of food, and now I need to work on growing and preserving as much of it at home as possible!  I don’t mind if this switch over takes a while as small and slow solutions are the best, as we all know…

Action:  Learn to can

 

FORAGING

It has been such a long winter that I forgot the natural world was out there…  Last year I was out on the downs, foraging (actually botanising) with my iphone in mid April.  Now it’s the end of May and the new, brilliant greenness of the world is still burning itself into my shocked retina.

This design hasn’t formed itself properly in my mind yet.  I know what it’s probably going to be, but that relies on other projects coming together first, so I am happy to let this one slide for a while.  This one is going to be a small design that can go from start to finish in a few months and the key aims of it will be to both learn and teach.

Action: None at the moment 

 

End of the summer round up: part four

Nearly there, people, stay with me.  This is the last post…

Project eight: Wild food (foraging)

This is a project that has been on the cusp of being clear in my mind for about a year, but has never quite made it.  What’s been going well is that I have been doing a reasonable job at educating myself in botany and mycology and have been taking opportunities to learn where I can.  What’s challenging is that I am still not clear on the ‘project’.  I have several very good ideas for this project but haven’t yet committed to any of them.  If I am honest what’s holding me back with this one is that I want to include other people in this project but I have been badly burnt by working with community groups in the past (don’t ask…) and the thought of actually working with other people and having to make decisions with them gives me the mad fear.  However, I have pledged to myself not to make decisions based on fear, so this is no excuse.

What I want to use this project to do (my vision) is to teach me and others about about forageables – and botany and mycology in general.  Whilst I want the main yield of this project to be knowledge, I also want it to be fun, and I want it to not be a whole load of hard work that I am in charge of.

Next step:  I’ve actually done quite a lot of work on this project that I haven’t written up, so I need to sit down with that and firm up what my objectives for this project are and then analyse whether the ideas that I have come up with hit all of those objectives.

 

Project nine:  Wild wood (coppicing)

This project is still in the surveying stage and the surveying is going pretty well.  Last winter I spent a week and a half in the woods with Blackbark, my friends’ coppicing business.  I learnt a lot from it and one thing I am glad to have learnt is that I don’t really want to make coppicing into a business.  To do this I would have to invest in a lot of expensive equipment that I am not too happy about using (chainsaws, pick-ups).  I have decided that the coppicing project will be a way of providing for my own household needs (firewood and building materials) and I can therefore stick to handtools which would be completely impractical in a business context.  As this project is chugging away so slowly (there is not much I can do during the summer) there isn’t really anything that I have found too challenging yet.

Next step:  My next step is to start volunteering reasonably regularly for Tottington Woodlanders in order to skill up.  I’ve already volunteered for another Blackbark workweek next year.  I’m happy with that for now.

 

Project ten:  Teaching Permaculture

I have been progressing slowly but surely through the Brighton Permaculture Trust teacher training scheme.  I observed the course twice, then taught a section of it which went very well.  I developed some materials for that mini-teach which I’ll be able to use again and develop.  My teacher training and years of experience as a teacher kicked in again for this project and I was glad to  feel that that part of my life was useful to this part.

What’s challenging is that I am letting this project drift along.  Because it’s very structured, I am letting that structure dictate the speed at which I progress and I think, actually, I could be a little more proactive about this.  I need to give this project a bit of a kick up the ass.

Next step: Find out what the ‘next step’ in the teacher training scheme is.

 

Some overall conclusions and priorities for next year

One thing that I am noticing with all of my projects is that whilst I have tried to design a livelihood/lifestyle that means I am outside as much as I am inside, that’s just not happening at the moment.  I feel like I have had a very ‘inside’ year.  A large part of this is not having a garden.  Also, after having done all the inside admin and marketing for scythe courses, I then didn’t really get to do much of the teaching outside.  Arranging things so that I am outside more is an issue that needs to be fixed for 2013.

Random seed experiment: An Update

Well, there has been at least one benefit of the constant, constant rain – the seeds from my random seed experiment have come up.  I call it an experiment… in part, it was completely random, I used seeds that I had had hanging around for years that my mum had got free with gardening magazines.  I paid no attention to when they should be planted or how close together – I just sprinkled.

Secretly though, in my head, I had some aims.  I want to create a ground cover mix that is edible and – if not perennial, then at least self-seeding.  I wanted to see what came up first, what grew the fastest, what would like that area the best.  I planted Linum (Dazzler), Chard (Bright Lights), Rocket (Sky Rocket), French Marigold (Red Brocade), Nicotiana Affinis, some kind of nasturtium, Calendula, Portulaca (Sunshine Mixed), Love-in-a-mist (Summer mixed) and one lonely sunflower seed.   So far I have seen evidence of the chard, rocket, nicotiana and nasturtium.  It’s entirely possible that I’ve missed some of the other seedlings in the melee – I don’t really know what Love-in-a-mist seedlings look like.

You won’t be surprised to learn that the rocket seedlings came up first.  Rocket is brilliant!  It’s fast-growing, snails don’t seem to care very much about it, tasty and bloody expensive.  The nasturtiums weren’t far behind and the chard chased them.  The chard seedlings are perhaps a bit leggy from having to strive against the other plants for light, but we will see what happens.  If they don’t make it, I won’t be too sad as I don’t like chard all that much.  I am trying a kind of chard exposure therapy though, as I think that it will be a very useful vegetable after the apocalypse 😉  They’re quite a pretty variety though, so even if we don’t end up eating them, they’ll make the base of the tree look bright and attractive – which is a key part of the design.

In the other spot which I seeded – between two bushes – the seedlings got to a certain point and promptly keeled over.  I think they just don’t have enough light – that spot is completely barren of life.  A rethink for this area is needed…

The process of intimate observation is fascinating though.  I have never looked so closely at the things that I have grown before, and this has led to not really knowing why things are going right or wrong which has led to more failure than is strictly necessary.  I also think that spending such a long time observing and learning about wild plants has really given me a lot more insight into what it is the damn things want when you’re trying to grow them at home

Get moving.

I woke up this morning feeling pretty bad.  The problem, I decided, was that I wasn’t at all fit and that I didn’t get outside and in nature enough.  I felt frustrated and trapped – and this despite the fact that I rode 70 miles around the Isle of Wight at the weekend and that I’ll be spending two days frolicking in woods this week.

Perhaps it was because of the big bike ride and the days in the woods.  I felt that zing of health in my skin and realised that it hadn’t been there for a while.  I got a bit teary-eyed for the time that I was really fit – when I was training for a marathon and working as hired muscle at Staplefield Organics and I went wwoofing in Devon and threw hay around like it was candy floss.  Yes, I mentally edited out the time that I was so tired from all of that that I tipped my dinner onto a gas hob (I just turned the frying an upside down) and was so out of it that my housemates had to turn the gas off, remove my dinner and then sit me down.

One of the ‘problems’ is that, while training for the marathon has given me the belief that I can get fit, I think I lack the faith that I can stay fit without giving over my whole life to it.  I am reluctant to start any kind of running regime, for example, because I know that I am only motivated for training for an event, and that training for an event can easily take over my life – and right now, I don’t want it to.

Wait a second, I thought (through the tears).  This is a design issue, really.  If I can maximise the opportunities for getting fit, being outside, and maintaining mental equilibrium through the things I am already doing, then I’ll only have ‘the surplus’ to deal with.  I won’t have to tack exercise on as an extra in my life, which I am really starting to resent doing.  Plus, if fitness, getting into nature and good mental health are designed into my projects from the start, then this will make maintaining those elements much easier.

I decided to do a PMI (plus, minus, interesting) analysis of what opportunities for getting fit, being outside and working with nature and maintaining mental health my current projects had.  Here’s what I came up with…

Scythe teaching:  Whilst scything itself is really good for mind and body, and teaching scything is great for mental health because you feel like you’re passing on an interesting skill, there is a lot of admin associated with running courses.  Marketing, answering questions etc locks you to a computer and keeps you inside and it can impact badly on your mental health if its not going too well.

I am already working on the administration question, but it struck me that what I really needed to do was get outside and scythe more.  Sometimes its as basic as that…  I have resolved to track down some spots where I can get a bit of practice in.  This is especially important if I want to do well in the competition this year (by ‘do well’, I mean win), which I do…

Pen to paper/Localise:  When it comes to getting fit, being outside and maintaining your mental health, writing is not the first activity you would turn to.  I’ve always known that in order for me to be able to write, I would need to offset it with other activities that got me outside and moving around.  It was one of the key premises behind designing my diploma (which is essentially a ‘life redesign’) in the way that I have.

But writing is still really important to me.  Theory, as well as practice, is important.  While I still think that the combination of writing and outside activities is a winning one, I have some work to do on zoning.  Sitting down and thinking for a few hours makes it really difficult to get up and do anything else like go to the woods, or go foraging. You just don’t want to, even if you know you’ll feel great once you’ve moved your fat arse off the chair.  Having half a mile between you and anything resembling nature, as I do, makes it even harder.  It needs to be outside of the window, winking at you coquettishly as if to say ‘put your pen computer down and come out and see me.’  The answer is that I need to be in the countryside, but there are reasons why I am not there right now, so I’ll have to pencil that one in as a ‘work towards.’  What was interesting when I was doing this exercise was that I had never really thought about motivation as a zoning issue before – or at least I had never really applied it beyond ‘put the plants that need the most attention close to the house’.

Wild Food:  Get fit.  Check.  Be outside and in nature.  Check.  Positive for mental health.  Check.  It seems like this is the perfect project from the mental and physical health point of view.  I was struck, when I was looking at this project how it connects and interacts with almost all of the others.  I think this is because it’s evolving into a botany and observation project rather than one that is specifically about food.  It connects to scything and coppicing because whilst I’m out in a field or a wood I am mentally (or physically) taking pictures of the grasses, flowers and trees that I see, it connects with writing because it gives me plenty of things to write about, it connects to preserving because there are plenty of things out there in the wild to preserve, it connects to teaching permaculture because if you’re going to teach a design system based on observation of nature then you bloody well should have observed nature, and it connects with gardening for obvious reasons.

Preserve-a-thon:  Not a lot of direct opportunities for fitness here, but there is a definite connection to nature.  You’re preserving what you have grown or foraged (or bought locally) often using natural processes like fermenting.  Given that I don’t have a big space to grow anymore, I thought some more about teaming up with other plots from a preserving point of view.  I don’t want the responsibility for them, but they might appreciate some help in preserving their produce in return for me getting a share of the produce.  That would get me outside picking things and working with other people.  I shall have to explore this idea further.

Wild wood:  Coppicing has plenty of opportunity to get fit, especially if the coppice hasn’t been worked for a while and you’re dragging fairly big logs around.  It can go so far as to be really really really tiring!

Teaching Permaculture:  This is a kind of inside and outside job.  Teach inside then take everyone outside to look at examples in nature, then back inside again.  It won’t get me fit, but it’s a great way to consolidate what I am learning whilst being outside in other capacities.

The edible flower garden:  The small amount of space here doesn’t really give much opportunity for working on fitness but it is being outside and working on the amount of ‘nature’ close to where I live.  In that sense, it’s really good for mental health because it’s lovely to come home everyday and see a profusion of green.

This was a really interesting exercise to do, and it reminded me that I am on the right track but I just need a little tweaking now and then.  Instead of whining about fitness and being inside all the time I need to look at my projects and look at what I could do outside to progress them and then go and do that.  So, the answer is, get up and move around which I could have told myself before I started – but sometimes it takes a little analysis to work out how and when to get up and move around.

Foraging with my iphone

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was writing all day yesterday (an article for Permaculture Magazine) and by around four o’clock, I just wanted to shake the words out of my head so I went for a forage.  Ostensibly, this was a forage for nettles so that I could make nettle soup, but never let it be said that I cannot stack functions (Permaculture parlance for do more than one thing at the same time).  I took the opportunity to learn some new plants.

In my foraging course last year, it finally occurred to me that, learning all of the edible plants and ignoring the rest would be a bit like learning all the vowels in the alphabet and ignoring the consonents.  You need the whole alphabet for words to make sense.  So, I stopped trying to be a forager and started trying to be a botanist.  You can see the archive of plants that we learnt on the course here (if you’re on Facebook and friends with me, that is)

I use my phone to take pictures of things that I don’t know.  This time I made the mistake of trying to be artistic and only taking Hipstamatic photos (that’s why they look super-saturated and old-school).  If we’re talking ratios (and I am all about the numbers these days), I would say that Hipstamatic photos decrease your ability to identify a plant when you get home by about 30%, which is equivalent to the amount that they make your blog look nice.  So, next time I would take one picture for identification purposes, and one for artistic blogging purposes.  Actually, I cottoned on to this pretty quickly, and actually made some videos of some of the things that I didn’t know, so that I could see the plant from different angles.

When I get home I use various books and internet sources to identify what I’ve taken pictures of.  My two favourite at the moment are these.  William gave me Flora Britannica for my birthday.  It’s brilliant!  When I grow up, I want to be Richard Mabey.  He writes about nature so well.  This is more of an encyclopedia than an identification guide, but I love it for the portraits he paints of the plants and their place in history and mythology.  Botany in a Day is a very exciting book that I have yet to get my head around fully.  It teaches you to identify plant families and their characteristics so that you don’t have to learn every plant in your world individually.  It’ll take a bit of studying, but I’m planning to make this part of my foraging design.  What’s missing from this collection, I think, is a good plant ID book with big, clear pictures.  Something like Roger Phillips mushroom guide but for plants.  Suggestions are welcomed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m in the middle of doing my design for my foraging project and I am pretty excited about it.  I’ll start sharing it when I’ve got more done.  It’s going to involve lots more looking in books and some dressing up…

Ways of thinking about plants – what my foraging course taught me.

This year I spent six months doing what was billed as a ‘Foraging and Mapping Course’ through the Centre for Community Engagement.  It wasn’t like any other foraging course I had ever been on before.  For a start, it was much longer.  We spent one day every month for six months walking the same paths and seeing how the plants had changed.  There was much more of a focus on identification skills and much less of a focus on listing what we could eat.  In a way, it was much more of a botany course than a foraging course, but of course, to be a successful forager (i.e. one that can recognise food that won’t kill you) you first need to be a botanist.  It made total sense to identify all of the plants and then work out which ones you can eat, rather than knowing only the ones you can eat and being ignorant of everything else.  Plus, only knowing the ‘edible’ species is a very small part of foraging.  Most plants can be used for something – food, medicine, cordage, fuel.

Here’s Anna Richardson, the tutor, teaching us about how to use the points of the compass – north, east, south and west – as a tool to think about where a plant is in its cycle.  This was a really useful shorthand – a trick to make thinking about plants quicker and easier.  Here’s how it works:

North: all of the plant’s energy is in it’s roots, there’s not much to see above the ground, the plant is preparing for new growth.

East: the first shoots are appearing, the plant energy is drawing up from the roots into the body of the plant, there is lots of energy in the leaves.

South: the plant is in full flower, the plant energy is fully in the body of the plant and mostly in the flowers.

West: the plant is setting fruit and preparing to return the energy to the roots.

 

The compass points correspond loosely to the point in the year – many plants are in North in the winter.  But plants have different cycles.  There are some that flower in the winter, putting them in South during the coldest months.

Anna also taught us about the songlines of the Indigenous Australians.  Songlines are paths across the land that mark the route followed by the ‘creator-beings’ during the Dreamtime.  They’re recorded in songs, stories, dance, and painting.  What’s interesting about songlines is that someone with knowledge of the stories can navigate across the landscape by repeating the words of the song – an intimate connection of landscape and culture.  We were encouraged to name the landscape features that we looked at according to the stories and ‘culture’ that we as a group were generating – like kids naming the places around them because they are mostly ignorant of the ‘real’ names for things.

Thinking about songlines made me think about how I related to the natural world and I realised that, like most things, I related to it through story and narrative.  I extrapolated the idea of songlines from places to plants.  I realised that I was the most successful at identifying plants when I created a story around them. Last winter, when I was dog-sitting in Bolney, I really focused on learning trees without their leaves.  Taking the dog for a walk in the woods, I would make up characters for the trees that I was seeing.  Young ash trees reminded me of a kind of alabaster Statue of Liberty, holding a black torch (the black bud).  Hazel stools, with their leggy formlessness, reminded me of teenagers.  Beech trees were muscly, and frankly rather attractive.  Almost immediately I was able to remember what plants looked like – something that had never happened when I tried to remember how many leaves they had.

The Monumental Turf

I’ve been interested in foraging for a few years.  When I was doing the 100 mile diet (a project where I only ate food that came from within 100 miles for a year), I set up a foraging group.  The idea was that we would go out for a forage every month, but like many of my good ideas, I soon found that I didn’t have the time or energy to organise this.  The google group remained though, and as time went on, more and more people have joined, until now there are around 45.  It has found it’s own way of working too.  What usually happens is that someone will send out an email asking if anyone wants to go on a forage, and usually people do, so off they trot.  I have found it interesting to watch how something has found its own level and maintained itself  – not through good design, but largely by accident.

Having not done anything forage-y for a while, in the summer I decided I would reinvigorate my foraging career by inviting my friend professional forager Andy Hamilton (he of the elderflower champagne recipe) to come and lead a forage.  I did some marketing and got a bunch of people together.  Unfortunately, despite getting to Brighton and getting to the park when we were going to do it, Andy then got really sick (it turned out later that he had something wrong with his liver) and had to go home.  So Stefan (dreadlocks, green t-shirt), Caroline (dark hair, rust coloured cardigan) and I had to lead the forage.  It actually turned out that when we pooled our resources, we knew loads.  This is a picture of the feast that we had afterwards.  We had a dandelion fritter production line going on.  One thing I learnt from organising this forage were – always get money off people first.  If Andy hadn’t been ill (and hence no one paid anything), I would have ended up considerably out of pocket on this one as people who told me they were going to come, didn’t and I would still have had to pay Andy the same amount of money.  Lesson learnt there…

The forage I organised was inspired by a course I was doing.  Ever eagle-eyed, I managed to find myself a six month long foraging course – paid for Sussex as part of their green week outreach activities.  When I say six months, it was one day every month – but it was designed like this so that we could return to the same spots and observe them at different times of the year.  This course was so interesting that I think it deserves a post in itself.  Here are some of the participants checking out a small area of grass and wild flowers.  You could literally spend hours looking at even such a small piece of turf.  It was a lesson in pure observation…

NB: The title of this post is stolen from a 1503 painting by Albrecht Durer.  He was someone who knew how to observe.