Permaculture Design in Lake County

Villa Sobrante resident Massey Burke has been working in Lake County for the last several years, bringing natural building to the community through public projects.

This spring, Villa Sobrante resident Lindsay Dailey will be working in Lake County as well, teaching a Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) course. Permaculture offers the framework, tools and methodologies to work with and within natural systems to create beneficial change. Those who learn these skills have the potential to transform a garden, a farm or even a community. Many have found this course to be one of the most beneficial courses they have ever taken and the skills are invaluable.

Transition Lake County, Dancing TreePeople Farm, LakeFuture, and Edge Ecology will host the PDC in Upper Lake this spring over 5 weekends:

April 16 &17
April 30 & May 1
May 14 & 15
May 21 & 22
June 4 & 5

For more information, email Lindsay@EdgeEcology.com or visit http://www.lakefuture.blogspot.com/.

The newest pod

Somehow 2 months have gone by since I've written a thing. I'll start with the newest structure that has popped up in the backyard village. It all started with a lot of these:

I believe around 700 to be exact.

These adobes- just soil, sand, straw and cow manure- were made to go into a structure called a Nubian Vault, which is a style of earthen vault building revived by the Eygptian architect Hassan Fathy that does not use any formwork, and therefore can be done without any wood. Our friend Stevan who studied the technique with masons in Burkino Faso was looking for places to build some of these vaults where they could be observed over time, and we gladly gave a portion of our yard for the purpose of vault research, and to make a stylish new home for our expanding flock of poultry.

Here we are looking through the front door to the back kick wall. These two kick walls were built prior to the workshop and are the walls that the adobes will lean against to make up the vault. The little box is the future chicken door.

Here the plumb bob is being used to transfer the dimensions of a catenary arch onto the kick walls. It is the shape the vault will follow, and is the inverted shape of a chain hanging between two points. Guide strings will be strung along the length of the building between the traced out form on both kick walls.

Stevan demonstrates the angle at which to lay the first adobes that will make up the vault during the workshop.

You can see the walls growing as the process gets further along. It was an extremely graceful structure to watch emerge.

And more still... you can see the angle of the rows of adobes clearly here.

Here you can start to see what happens in the middle when the different angles from the two ends come together in the middle.

Meanwhile the girls are checking it out from their old coop next door. They've started laying eggs, we're getting 6-7 a day from 10 chickens, ranging from tiny "practice eggs" to larger double yolkers. Unfortunately they've also started eating the duck eggs...

More pictures and updates coming soon!

Visitors from India

Last week we had the opportunity to host two men from the western state of Gujarat, in India, at our house.  It was their first time to the states, and we were honored that they chose to spend time at our house in El Sobrante of all places.  It is a long story how they ended up here, but the short of it is that Massey and I met Himansu briefly in India this winter, and told him to stop by when he came to the states.  Himansu was traveling with Ramu, an artisan from a tiny rural village who makes quilts, to an international craft fair in Santa Fe.

Himansu runs a textile business that employs Ramu and other quilters and embroiders from Gujarat, but does lots of other things too, like record tribal folk music in earthen buildings in Gujarat and Rajastan.  Ramu is also skilled at many things.  He declared our site soil to be a wonderful clay and proceded to show us how to do Lipon- the traditional Gujarati way of doing decorative earthen work on walls.  He dosnt' speak English (save for a few words) and we learned limited Gujarati in the past week so communicating was a delightful challenge, and mostly done through Himansu, who translated.

Below is Ramu, in our clay soaking pit, processing our site soil, and horse manure, to make Lipon with.

This became a great opportunity to work on the wall-- that has been sitting rather unfinished out front for a very long time-- so an early morning plastering session turned it red, from some clay soil somebody brought back from up north.

Next, Ramu showed us how to do Lipon, by rolling snakes out of a careful mixture of clay soil, screened dried horse manure, wood glue and water, and pinching them tightly to the wall.

Over the course of about 3 or 4 days, we had lots of helpers, and lots of gawkers, and met more of the neighborhood than we'd previously met, because pretty much every body who passed by was compelled to stop and comment or ask questions.

The pattern was drawn by Massey and inspired from a bed sheet with an old Mogul pattern she'd originally picked up from Himansu in Gujarat.  Himansu calls it "nervous elegance" referring to the drooping flowers that are scattered throughout Mogul designs.  I liked his description.

We removed some of the bamboo and used base plaster to sculpt designs in the openings, a method also inspired by Gujarat.  Mirrors are often embedded in the design, though for our wall we decided against mirrors and instead used mica, which was traditionally used before mirrors.  It looks beautiful.

More pictures to come.  The roadside is now complete as well, and the roof is next to protect all this fine work...

Thanks to everybody who helped with this intricate work and a big thank you to Ramu and Himansu as well.

Oh and one last picture for your amusement... the bamboo trailer wasn't quite up to the bicycle rickshaw standards of India, but we thought we'd give it a go for airport transportation :)

Exciting Harvests

Summer... The days have been chilly and windswept as the fog rolls in and out.  Ah the Bay Area.  Today was hot and sunnny, and it was a lovely reminder of what summer means some places.  Here are some pictures of exciting harvests we've had lately that I just have to share:

There are so many dried favas. Plenty to have for planting this winter, and some to eat too.  I've never cooked dried favas before.  

Potatoes are sooo much fun to harvest.  These were pink inside too, large and delicious and there are more out there.

Also, three kinds of citrus.  Only a few fruit per tree at the moment, but they are young trees, and guess what?  They are delicious!  We sampled this navel orange, and a mandarin that were sweet and juicy and sun-warmed scrumptiousness. 

The bittersweet harvest was the beehive.  After all that crazy swarming this spring, looks like our hive didn't make it.  So lots of beeswax to clean, honey to drain, mead to ferment, pollen to pick out of the comb.  Glad we caught one of the swarms.  Now to figure out what happened.

And there is loads of garlic.  About 5 different kinds, currently, hanging in the unfinished closet in my house in the back yard drying as it's a relatively shady/cool/out of the way spot.  

Interns at the Villa

Back in May we were lucky to have 2 amazing highschoolers working with us.  They'd come initially on a field trip and decided they wanted to do their senior project here, so they came back for the month of May and contributed loads of hard work and enthusiasm doing everything from processing tons of material for plasters and earthen mixes, building compost, putting irrigation in the garden, pouring a floor (along with their moms who came for a day too!), shelling fava beans... a lot was done for sure.  Thanks Cora and Hailey!   Here is a sampling of pages out of the book they put together for their presentation at school: 

And the really awesome thing is they liked us enough to come back! So we get to have them around helping out some this summer too.  

Why I Garden

Last night I went to a seed saving talk with Bill McDorman, the man most famous for traveling to Siberia in 1989 in search of plant diversity.  Behind the Iron Curtain he found a world cut off from the influences of industrial agriculture, growing more varieties of tomatoes than anywhere else in the world out of true necessity to feed themselves.  

It was a passionate and facinating talk and a good reminder of why I garden.  Sure, there are many reasons.  I like planting seeds, watering them, watching them grow and then getting to eat fresh food out of my own garden.  It's fun.  I like being outside.  But Bill reminded me of the importance the work of a gardener holds for the future, and the startling numbers which  I've heard before, and often forget because my mind dosn't seem to hold onto numbers like that.  That we relied on 1500 plants for food in the 1900s.  That in the 80s, 30 plants contributed to 90% of our food, and just 4 of those plants, to 75 % of our diet.  And now?  Half of our calories in all of America come from soda.  Yep, soda.  And what's in that?  Corn syrup.  Corn.  Where are we going from here?  Where can we go from here?

Though the facts are depressing-- that we are making a rapid transition from a history of 10,000 years of genetically diverse agriculture to a agricultural system that relies on only a few species grown with chemicals and genetic modification and things such as terminator genes which mean the farmer can't possibly save seed but has to buy them again from the seed company-- the reminder was important.  As a gardener, the way to protect our food source and survival for the future is to continue to grow as many varieties as possible, and to save that seed.  I don't want to just eat corn.   And besides the fact I don't want to, what's going to happen when diseases wipe out this one major crop- more susceptible as a single species than diversity.  

Today, newly inspired and still in the spring rush to plant plant plant, I dug through our seed box and came up with a little jar of about a dozen varieties of dried beans that my aunt had given me for Christmas years ago (thanks Irene!), and I hadn't really gotten around to planting huge numbers of yet for various reasons even though I thought it was the coolest gift ever.  They are absolutely beautiful and have names like Yin and Yang and Vermont Appalousa and are all different colors and sizes.  I planted up half or more of each type.  Yeah our garden is filling up, but there is always more space.  An overwhelming amount of space at times to take care of, plant, water, harvest from... but I can't think of many more important things to do with this little piece of land than build topsoil and plant and save seeds.

We are lucky to have BASIL,  a seed saving library based out of the Ecology Center down in Berkeley, that I haven't made full use of but am glad to know exists, and last night I was just alerted to maybe the first ever seed library that is in an actual library, out this way in Richmond- the Richmond Grows Seed Lending Library.  Check it out!  Or if you don't live here... save some seeds, plant them again, give some to your neighbor... start your own seed library?

Quick snapshot of the front-back yard...

Oh its looking so good in the backyard... snapped some pictures on my way to get kale in the drizzly rain tonight.  Over the tops of the kale and the lush bed of ripening strawberries is Sasha's cob house with its new plaster from the work party back in April(a belated thank you to everyone who helped!)  My favorite is the little nicho in the buttress behind the door...

And here, inside, is the second layer of earthen floor that was done last week with the high school interns and their mothers, complete with tubes laid throughout it to carry solar heated (and maybe occasionally fire heated) water and make the floor cozy and warm.