fear encountered, moving on...

the thing i feared most about getting any farm animals was that i would mess up and they would die prematurely or unintentionally. so we were given three beautiful chickens and now we have two!! my jack russell terrier, riley, broke one of our chickens, forcing us to kill it after one week with us. believe me, i felt terrible about this; i wasn't paying attention to riley and he got in the pen and got to the chicken in a flash. i spent the morning with my friends stacey and jeremy, who processed the chicken for me, as i've never had to before. note to self... i need to learn how to kill and clean a chicken; my husband won't do it!!!

now that the worst has happened, i feel a tentative sense of relief because i know i won't make that mistake again. maybe i'll make a different mistake, but maybe i won't!

i really wish there was a book that was a real introduction to keeping chickens. i read chicken tractor and storey's guide to keeping chickens and still i didn't know that i shouldn't put the chickens on their roost. (apparently one should wait until they're strong enough to get there themselves or they'll get stuck there and get panicked, thus exciting a dog and distracting a person.)

anyways i am learning as i go. they seem happy as i've adjusted their house some and they seem to love worms, slugs, kale, and clover which is great because i have lots of these. and they won't eat an incapacitated garter snake.

they're doing a great job at building me an 4' x 8' garden patch of chicken sheet mulch in the chicken tractor!!! no eggs yet, but i'm patient!

The Food and Climate Connection

joel salatin is coming to my neighbourhood!!

this is a fantastic story from australian broadcasting corp. on joel salatin from polyface farms in the shenandoah montains in virginia.

http://www.abc.net.au/landline/content/2010/s2919477.htm

this man is a hard-working genius who lives everything he talks about. you'll want to allow 15 minutes for it.

new sheet mulch garden this year!

our piece of land is a lovely soil specimen, filled with clay, clay, and more clay!! so, last year (summer of 2009), on the advice of someone who shall remain nameless, we spent hundreds of dollars to buy top soil and sand, and to build raised beds that allowed for 120 sq feet of growing space. we had allowed for two feet of space around each bed - for a wheelbarrow - this accomplished soooo much wasted space!!

so this year we lengthened the garden by 6 feet and removed the raised beds. we sheet mulched the entire space except pathways to get around. this is called a keyhole design. theoretically nothing is further than 2.5 feet from a path - an arm's reach - except that our inexperience led us to forget about the angle of fall of the sheet mulch layers - like dirt. so next spring we will need to widen the paths - by piling up some of the fallen layers on top. next time i would build the sheet mulch so that it is 3.5 - 4 feet wide and then allow 2 feet width for each path. then when the soil shifted and some fell towards the path, i would still have a nice wide path and be able to reach the middle of the bed!

so this is what the first end of the garden looked like when we finished the sheet mulch, but before planting. the one plant that is in there is a lemon balm that we mulched around.

starhawk on permaculture

i have been curious and excited by starhawk's variety of work and teachings for twenty years. here again, she and i "meet" in understanding the importance of this complex system of designing and using biodiversity!!

Ollas

Ollas (pronounced “oy-yahs”) are unglazed clay/terra-cotta pots with a bottle or tapered shape that are buried in the ground with the top/neck exposed above the soil surface and filled with water for sub-surface irrigation of plants. This irrigation technology is an ancient method, thought to have originated in Northern Africa with evidence of use in China for over 4000 years and still practiced today in several countries, notably India, Iran, Brazil (Bulten, 2006; Power, 1985; Yadav, 1974; Anon, 1978 and 1983) and Burkina Faso (Laker, 2000; AE Daka, 2001).

Ollas may be the most efficient method of local plant irrigation in drylands known to humanity due to the microporous (unglazed) walls that do “not allow water to flow freely from the pot, but guides water seepage from it in the direction where suction develops. When buried neck deep into the ground, filled with water, and crops planted adjacent to it, the clay pot effects sub-surface irrigation as water oozes out of it due to the suction force which attracts water molecules to the plant roots. The suction force is created by soil moisture tension and/or plant roots themselves.” (AE Daka – 2001.) The plant roots grow around the pots and only “pull” moisture when needed, never wasting a single drop. “Ollas virtually eliminate the runoff and evaporation common in modern irrigation systems, allowing the plant to absorb nearly 100 percent of water.” (City of Austin Water Conservation, 2006.)

To use ollas in a garden or farm, one buries the olla in the soil leaving the top slightly protruding from the soil (ideally the neck of the olla is glazed to prevent evaporation or it should be reasonable to apply a surface mulch that covers the neck of the olla without spilling into the opening). The olla is filled with water and the opening is then capped (with a rock, clay plate or other available material to prevent mosquito breeding, soil intrusion and evaporation).

this is picked up from:

http://permaculture.org.au/2010/09/16/ollas-unglazed-clay-pots-for-garden-irrigation/

LIP (living in permaculture)

living in permaculture - i spent the last week wanting to go to australia to do an internship in permaculture at milkwood or tagari or elsewhere. to go anywhere i could learn more about permaculture - seeing it in action. it has been quite a process - budgeting and trying to arrange my responsibilities. it would mean at least a two month committment, $2500 flight, lost wages (possibly a lost job), dog care for two months, missing planting season here on the west coast of canada, etc.

the upside would have been exchanging canada's winter for australia's summer and learning SO MUCH!!! one major down side would be to have spent $4500 (all told) so i could work on someone else's property instead of spending that money here, on our 5 acres!!! i have taken the permaculture desgn course and yes, in all likelihood i will make mistakes, but they'll be my mistakes and whatever infrastructure - like fencing - will still be there. and I WILL LEARN!!!!!!!!!!

thus i am setting a budget to get as much as i can out of the money - first things first would be a plan including a topographical map of our land and home!!!