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In November 2008, I decided to go out on a financial limb and buy the property next door in order to sponsor a community permaculture garden in the Green Acres Neighborhood of Bloomington, Indiana. An ongoing report onf the origins, difficulties, thrills, successes, failures, and whatever else comes up as a group of people grope toward manifesting a collective vision during the great global descent into a far simpler way of life that, depending on our level of awareness, will create either coherence or chaos.A synopsis of the GANG project in 2009, and looking ahead to 2010 . . .
The GANG’s first year featured eight one- or two-day workshops taught by a professional permaculture teacher, Keith Johnson. Our goal was to show people how to grow a permaculture garden from seed to harvest, March through October. This series drew from eight to a fifteen people per workshop, about one third of them from the Green Acres neighborhood.
(Confession: my goal was to get on-the-ground permaculture training for myself. Though I took the two-week permaculture certification course three years ago — an experience that completely transformed my world-view — what I did not get from the training was how to actually go about doing a permaculture garden.}
Also, last year, we had a cadre of four to six people from the neighborhood who could be counted on to work for one two-hour session each week to keep up the garden in between workshops.
And, we held a celebration workshop/party at the end of the year to learn how to put the garden to bed and then gathered to eat and talk afterwards. About a dozen people participated in this final closing day for the garden’s first year, including one new person who joined us in response to the flyer we hand-carried to all 433 homes in this neighborhood.
[See previous blogs for all these events.]
(You might think one person from 433 households a poor, even pathetic! response. And yet, it was what I expected. We’ve got to remember that by engaging our neighborhoods we are reversing several generations of increasing disengagement. It’s difficult to get new people in the neighborhood interested now, but once local food production becomes a necessity people will realize the importance of pulling together to help each other survive and even thrive in what may otherwise prove to be a very difficult and chaotic environment. The point of the flyer was not so much to draw new people to the project, as to let them know this neighborhood garden exists. And more people than usual did walk by the garden that afternoon to see us working together there.)
In general, the garden has already begun to function as a place of interest in the neighborhood, as shown by the number of people who walk by it daily, many more than prior to the garden’s inception. In this function, the garden is indeed helping to build community spirit by enlivening the atmosphere within which we live in ongoing and unexpected ways.
At the very end of the year we lost one person in our primary two-house homestead, Tom, who left to take the next step on his own path. That leaves three of us in two homes: my niece Megan, my son Colin, and myself. Megan is about to move into the DeKist house with Colin. That leaves me alone here, in welcome, if temporary, solitude. I have feelers out for the next appropriate person to move into this house a few months hence. The third home of our little Urban Farmstead, in back of the other two, is still peopled with the young permaculturists. We held one potluck together in the early winter and look forward to further development of our cooperative venture in the spring.
Looking Ahead
This year I see three goals for the GANG garden:
1. To build the rest of the infrastructure needed to get the garden to where we want it.
My son Colin has volunteered to do most of these projects, including: completing the transformation of the garage at DeKist into a neighborhood reskilling center; completing the creation of a shady picnic area by the pond with tables and benches; extending the garden to the front yard of the DeKist house by building permanent cold frames (with removable covers); and building a tool shed for the GANG garden tools that were provided by a Small and Simple Grant from the city’s Housing and Neighborhood Development department.
Also, Melissa Clark of IU will utilize the GANG garden as the on-site location for her SPEA class to design and build a state-of-the-art compost system.
2. To again hold a series of classes and workshops, this time by utilizing a number of permaculture and/or organic gardening teachers. Need to decide what the series shall consist of, who the teachers will be, and whether or not some of them will be combined with the city’s Parks and Rec Gardening Gardening program special topic classes.
3. To attract more worker bees for the ongoing garden work, especially since three of last year’s workers are not going to be available. (Two are leaving town to create a permaculture garden on land they bought in Ohio, and one is pregnant.)
To address the last two goals, I have decided to hold a number of meetings with people and organizations with whom we might possibly partner.
So far, I have met with I met with Vickie Provine of Bloomington Housing and Neighborhood Development program, Michael Simmons of the Bloomington Parks and Rec Department, and Stephanie Solomon of Mother Hubbard’s Cupboard, a local food pantry. I plan more meetings with other interested parties in the near future.
Here are some ideas which have bubbled up during these first three meetings.
With Vickie on January 13:
In response to my need to know about other community and otherwise public gardens in the community, we conceived the idea of HAND sponsoring an educational bus tour of the various community gardens, with someone present from each garden to explain how it functions.
Vickie then set up a meeting on January 21 with Michael Simmons, an Advanced Master Gardener who operates the People’s University at the Parks and Recreation Department and runs the Grow Organic Educator Series (GOES) as well as other special garden topics.
Michael came up with four ways that Parks and Rec might partner with GANG:
1. To hold some of its regularly scheduled classes at this garden location.
2. To hold a class at this garden for Green Acres neighbors and others that he would teach and/or for him to be a featured speaker at one of our monthly GANA meetings.
3. To offer the GANG garden as a site for recent GOES graduates to intern for their 100 hours of community service.
4. To put the GANG garden on the GOES graduates list-serv and the Bloomington Organic Gardeners Association (BOGA) list-servs for possible garden volunteers for continuing education.
Michael and Vickie discussed further the idea of a city-sponsored garden tour. Michael also suggested that I contact the Local Growers Guild, the Permaculture Guild, and the Bloomington Organic Gardeners Guild as possible sources of both teachers and worker bees.
The elephant in the room in terms of any partnership with the city is the issue of liability, especially since this is a community garden on private land. I knew this would be an issue, and had investigated the idea of event insurance for the 2009 workshops, but the cost at $200 per day was prohibitive, and I decided that in order to jump start the garden last year I would just carry the liability risk myself. To that end I also personally paid for about two/thirds of the educational and materials cost of the 2009 workshop series, with the rest of the costs carried by the fees we charged for them.
I am unable to sustain this level of financial commitment to the GANG garden in the future. Thus this new approach of various kinds of partnerships that will both meet the GANG garden’s needs as well as enhance interconnectivity among all the community gardens in Bloomington.
As for the liability issue, Michael told me about the American Community Gardening Association and its list-serv, and mentioned specifically Jack Hale, in Conneticut, who has done a lot of research on insurance issues for community gardens.
As part of the same discussion, I mentioned that the city has committed to adapting its ordinances to the directives of the Peak Oil Task Force Report. (If you have not yet read this report, released in late 2009, DO! It’s both visionary and very very interesting. Find it on the Bloomington city’s official website.)
This report includes the idea of gardens, gardens, everywhere, of all kinds, throughout Bloomington, in order to promote food security, sustainability and resilience during the coming years when transportation expense skyrockets. I will approach the city with the idea of asking it to help solve this problem of liability for those who wish to donate the use of their private land to grow a garden for the public good.
The next day, January 22, I met with Stephanie Solomon of Mother Hubbard’s Cupboard. Stephanie came up with a great suggestion: that the city (Parks and Rec and HAND) sponsor an annual Spring Equinox Garden Call-Out Party at an appropriate venue (Rachel’s café comes to mind, since it is so spacious).
In Stephanie’s words: “The Garden Call-Out would showcase the different opportunities for community gardening in Bloomington.”
Possible partners:
Green Acres Neighborhood Garden
Mother Hubbard’s Cupboard Garden Program
Parks and Recreation Community Gardens
Parks and Recreation People’s University- Grow Organic Educator Series
Monroe County Cooperative Extension Office Master Gardeners
Permaculture Guild
Students Producing Organics Under the Sun (SPROUTS)
Hilltop Garden and Nature Center
Others?
At the Call-Out, a representative from each garden would be present to describe their garden and its needs for the coming growing season. The goal of this event would be network the gardens, gardeners, and the people who are interested in helping the community gardening movement in Bloomington. In the case of the GANG garden, I would announce that we are seeking 1) a group of people to help decide what this year’s workshops should include, 2) teachers for this year’s garden series, and 3) worker bees.
Stay tuned. More soon!
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Mulch materials: straw (from Nathan’s truck, we used ten bales) and leaves (in the bags, 32 of ‘em)
About a month ago, I got it into my head that we needed to punctuate the ending of this first year of our GANG garden with a sort of closing ceremony, as a way of formally completing the task we had set for ourselves — to learn how to grow a permaculture garden from seed to harvest.
I’m all for closing ceremonies; to me it’s part and parcel of learning how to honor and appreciate the full meaning of the various cycles in our lives. To me, everything needs to be seen in terms of cycles, even relationships. Just the other day, I was telling my niece Megan that I see personal relationships with men that same way. Whenever I commit myself, it’s not to the person but to the process between us, and that process is, hopefully, conscious, and deserving of appreciation from day one on. Moreover, unlike seasonal cycles, we cannot know how long an interpersonal cycle will last. A committed relationship does not necessarily go on forever, or ” ’til death do us part.” What counts is the quality of our connection; what counts is that we “show up,” be fully present in our interactions, from beginning to end. And whether the cycle lasts for one day, one year, or several lifetimes, it is a wondrous learning opportunity for the two souls involved. For all the important cycles of relationship in my life, when the time came to transform the type of connection we had with one another, we held some sort of a closing ceremony.
Likewise with this garden. Though we had planned for an entire growing season, and we did meet our expectations, we were fortunate that nothing interrupted us. Oh, we did get slowed down for a while, due to the city of Bloomington seeing our fence as “too high” for its codes. We pointed out that a serious food garden needs to be impervious to deer, and since the city does not yet have a deer policy, and wants to encourage urban and community gardens, there is a serious contradiction that needs to be transcended. And I’m sure it will be in time.
So we were slowed down by the process with the city, and didn’t manage to do everything we had planned — like a compost bin for the garden; or setting up the picnic tables from the two industrial spools that sit out there, too high for easy picnicking until we partially bury their bases; or constructing our tool shed. Because we don’t yet have a tool shed, and because we got a $1000 Small and Simple Grant from the city for tools, we have been storing the tools in my basement until they could be safely stored outside. So, part of the day we had planned involved getting those tools labeled, upstairs, and out into the garden.
Kevin (who wrote the grant) and Kimberly inventory the treasured tools before bringing them upstairs and out to the garden.
So . . . back to how we planned our closing “ceremony.” We decided to have a work party and a potluck. And I must confess, part of the reason that I wanted to do this was not just because I needed closure, as per my philosophical principles regarding cycles, but because I had no idea how to winterize a garden, to put it to bed; and since we had completed our eight workshops, my usual way of learning how to do a permaculture garden was not available.
I decided to ask Nathan, a permaculture designer with a lot more actual experience gardening than I, to direct the process (thanks, Nathan!), which I knew, would be a lot of work, so best done in community, by a gang. (And it did turn out to be three solid hours of hard work: removing most of the plants and clipping them into sections for mulch; mulching the beds with first a bit of dirt, then goat poop, then leaves, then a thin layer of hay, and finally straw; and creating two new garden beds from scratch, the usual lasagna layering, starting with cardboard and paper.)
How to begin? Tom, Dex, and Colin get started . . .
Susan cuts up tomato stems . . .
Ann and Tom at work, cutting, cutting . . .
Several of us crafted the wording for the flyer (which, unfortunately, I can’t figure out how to upload to this post), and niece Megan did the visuals and graphics, illustrating it with her photos from the garden’s harvest. I then asked a few neighbors who have been active in the garden to help distribute the flyers inside the front doors of all 435 households in our Green Acres Neighborhood! If ten people would volunteer, I knew it would be an easy task, and said so. Eleven people came forward! — including Valerie, who comandeered five of her children to each canvass a block or two.
I knew full well that this flyer would probably not generate many gardeners for our closing celebration, but it would help to educate those who live in Green Acres as to the garden’s existence (we do not yet have a sign up, since we are still working things through with the city), and perhaps help spark others to start their own gardens, preferably in community. (It’s more fun! And it germinates the attitude of sharing tasks and bounty). Also, since the population of this college town neighborhood is 66% registered rentals, mostly college students, I imagined this flyer lodging in the minds of students so that when they return home to their own communities they will have been impregnated with the idea of starting or joining a serious food garden project of their own.
So the purpose of the flyers was mostly educational. Meanwhile, we also announced the work party and potluck celebration via our GANA (Green Acres Neighborhood Association) email list, and put up signs around the neighborhood. So it would have been difficult not to know about it.
It turned out that those who came were the usual stalwarts, plus one more, a very shy young man who used to deliver our newspapers, and who walked up to the garden gate with his rake. We were all so glad to have him join us, and welcomed him profusely into the garden. All together about 15 of us — who by this time feel not only neighborly, but tribal — enjoyed the beautiful, warm, sunny Saturday afternoon and on into the evening.
While we were working in the garden, Megan was hard at work in our house next door (kitchen window visible in back of Tom).
Making fresh pumpkin pies and soup from the garden . . .
Here is Megan’s tale from her domestic domain:
I found as i was making the food that i was tapping into the energy of what it must have been like centuries ago in the peasant landscape of rural europe. Of people going out to the fields to work and staying home to feed the tribe. I really really liked that feeling, and of the responsibility of it, which I knew that I could offer well. I am not built to handle heavy farm work. But in a kitchen, I can contribute well.
The menu: perhaps good to include to show the way of using what is harvested that day, and of the importance of traditionally prepared food for it’s high nutrient value.
Bone Marrow Broth chicken soup with rice and garden veggies
Pumpkin marrow soup with pumpkin and herbs from the garden
home made from scratch pumpkin pies with pumpkin from the garden
home brewed spiced apple cider
lacto fermented beet/carrot/ginger on the side
Other people brought breads and desserts and side dishes that were equally yummy.
Noura and Zayneb helped in the kitchen chopping veggies.
Noura cuts vegetables for soups.
So it’s done. And the GANG looks like an idealized version of a winterized garden. Whodathunkit?! And note hoop houses and back of cold frame — all planted for winter crops — in the final photo.
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Note: When my Auntie Ann told me she’d be away for the October Permaculture class at our house, I offered to relay the experience for this blog. What follows are the nuts and bolts of the teachings for the day, plus a bit of my own personal context to the learning. Enjoy. – Megan
We began the day with another of Keith’s fabulous indoor lecture/slide shows…this one on the why’s and how’s of extending the growing season into the cold winter months.
The primary reason to do this is to be able to feed yourself with your own two hands all year round. (There is a lot to be said for why this information will become lifesaving in the next decade or two… Needless to say, if climate change and peak oil wasn’t enough to poke you skittering towards growing your own food, then the steady inflation of the dollar just might.)
To start, Keith read us a quote from the book, Reinventing Collapse, by Dmitry Orlov. It really set the tone for why we need to be winter gardening.
Dmitry was born in Russia and grew up during the collapse of the Soviet Union. He witnessed and remembered what happened, and now as an adult he has used this experience to compare against America’s own economic descent. He tells us that in post-collapse Russia, “…10% of all Soviet Union farmland was allocated to kitchen gardens. That accounted for some 90% of domestic food production.” And, in the USA economic culture where supermarkets import fresh groceries from either California, Florida, or Mexico, “food shortages are almost guaranteed.”
Almost guaranteed??? Upon hearing this I began to have a personal, internal reaction. My adrenaline began to run. After all, I had just moved from the central valley of California…where much of that breadbasket harvest was feeding the States. I’d seen what it takes to make an orange appear on a Midwest table in the Fall. Daily I would drive to work through orchards, pastures, some of the worst air quality in the nation, and the occasional pesticide cloud blowing across the highway (cough, cough). In the health clinic where I worked I would see people coming in for persistent symptoms whenever there was aerial crop spraying. My body felt uncomfortable. It remembered well the effects of being accidentally sprayed with pesticide, twice, and its long and detailed recovery.
As Keith continued to discuss the scenario of a nation of people dependant on an outside hand to feed it, the adrenaline merged with my fear over the very real possibility of not having access to food.
I flashed on a nightmare I‘d had a week before: I was one of a group of people fleeing a large west coast city by walking the highways out of town…behind me the cement cityscape was in mass panic from violent gang competition over resources.
Which then morphed into a memory of the trauma of hurricane Katrina (which my family in Louisiana had directly experienced) and how most people had lost everything except their lives in the storm. I remembered the news showing apocalyptic images of people taking to the interstate by foot, gunfights near the hospital, looting, and hungry/dying people left on the streets waiting for that outside hand to help them.
I could barely breathe by the time my brain had chain-linked one thought to the next and landed me squarely in post hurricane reality in the middle of my living room in Indiana. All this from hearing a Voice of the Times warning us to be ready.
Perhaps it was the collective sigh in the room, but I remembered to breathe again. After all, I was sitting safe, warm, and well fed on that cold windy day. I then decided that mass panic, apocalyptic competition over resources, and violence would just have to wait. I was busy learning permaculture right now. And besides, if I, my farmstead mates, and our Green Acres neighbors and all of Bloomington began to apply these principles to their verdant green lawns to feed themselves, we’d probably avoid that scenario altogether.
Can you imagine it?
Back to the lecture. As for how to do the winter garden, there are basically three types of ‘houses’ you can give your plants to grow in while it’s cold. These are a cold frame, a hot frame, and a green house.
In a cold frame, essentially you put a box with a removable clear cover over your greens and position it so that the Southern light comes in. The box enclosure decreases the range of temperatures affecting the plants from the outside, and also creates a warmer micro climate that the plants can grow in, replete with dew. In the bitter cold of winter, you can drape a blanket over the cold frame at night to help insulate better.
One variation on the cold frame concept is the ‘Wall-o-Water’, which is a series of connected upright plastic tubes that surrounds your plant. You fill the tubes with water, and it stays upright on it’s own. It freezes and defrosts with the sun, and as a result, retains enough heat energy to protect the plant and also melt snow around it. One home style way of doing this cheaply is to surround your plant with a tightly enclosed fairy ring of large soda pop bottles (minus the lids) and fill with water for same effect. In our area, you can put tomatoes out in March using this particular variation.
Another cold frame variation is to have a dome of chicken wire or fencing placed over the garden bed, and drape with heavy clear plastic on all sides.
In a hot frame, you are making a source of heat to grow underneath the plants in the ground by using manure to compost. To do this, you would basically create a cold frame, except beneath it you would prepare the soil differently. Dig into the ground and first put down 6-10” of manure, then apply 6-8” of soil, then plant your veggies in this, and cover the whole thing with the frame. The manure composts and voila! Instant heat. An easy way to make this at home is to line straw bales up in a rectangle and put your manure/soil pit in the middle. Then plant the veggies, and rest a window or old sliding door or clear plastic on the straw bales. Hot frames are better than cold frames because they add heat, and are also better for a crop that matures quickly.
For both frames, you must be careful to monitor the temperature in the microclimate, and on sunny days prop the lids up or open a vent in the frame if needed. It’s amazing how much heat can build up in there.
The third structure in which to grow winter food is the greenhouse. In fact, the practice of using greenhouses to grow in the cold months is spread out across the world…with one location in Almeria, Spain, producing around 40% of all the food that feeds Europe in the winter. They accomplish this through 49,000 solid acres of greenhouses.
veggies harvested from late October: green tomatoes (to fry up), string beans, cherokee yellow wax beans, turnips, radishes
Here is a list of the veggies we can grow locally in one of the above structures in our winters….these are hardy in the cold.
Arugula – great in a simple hoop cold frame with one sheet of plastic thrown over it
Beet greens
Broccoli Raab – small broccoli, but fast growing
Carrots – if you start at the right time in the fall- you can harvest later in the year
Chard – can just keep going for years if you let it bloom and go to seed. It‘s very durable. Once the stem is too long, you bend it over and bury it, and it will keep going
Chicory
Endive
Escarole
Claytonia – also called Miner’s lettuce. Self sows every winter and provides a crisp, juicy green UFO saucer shaped leaf. This was always my favorite plant in California…it could grow in light or shade, and in a wet place.
Collard greens – fine out doors with no protection – often it will grow locally into January
Dandelion greens – grow perpetually
Garlic Greens – just harvest the greens
Kale
Kohlrabi – if planted in September. It makes a great coleslaw as well as a fermented veggie
Leeks – need to be planted before the bitter cold. Can take a lot of cold once growing. Ok under a cold frame
Lettuce – a good variety is “marvel of 4 seasons’ as it’s hardy, and also ‘Winter Marvel Bid” lettuce as it’s very durable
Mache – doesn’t need a cold frame
Minutina – variant of wild plantain, and tastier
Mizuna – brassica in mustard family, very light in mustard flavor
Mustard greens – use a hot frame
Pah choi – use a cold frame
Parsley
Radicchio
Radishes – grow quickly, you’ll have a crop in a month
Scallions – also fast growing
French Sorrel – many varieties of this
Spinach – very durable. Plant in October under cold frame and you’ll have beautiful spinach by December
Watercress – doesn’t require pond to grow, just keep it very damp
Succession planting keeps the harvest continual. If you need further guidance on when to plant what for winter gardens, invest in a good seed catalogue. It will teach you all the information you need to know about how far apart to plant, when to plant, etc.
After this lecture, we went outdoors. Our tasks were many:
– to weed the beds to be wrapped in cold frames
– to plant the starts into the beds
– to make a hoop cold frame and place it…just take fencing and arc it over the ground. You can anchor the plastic wrapping around it by having the hoop edges punch through it into the ground, and then place a heavy rock on top of the structure. To ventilate this kind of cold frame, you just lift the plastic on one end of it.
preparing plastic to be draped over hoop house cold frame
– to make a lidded box cold frame and place it…See pictures below that document the process. With just a little smarts about how to use power tools and construct a box out of wood and nails (and with an affinity for gussets), you can imagine how easy it is to make a box cold frame.
cutting up one large plywood board to construct a cold frame.
attaching corner reinforcements
applying supports for the center divider of cold frame
attaching center dividers to the support
measuring the gusset for the lid frame
a completed lid frame, framing Keith!
using a staple gun to attach clear plastic sheeting to the cold frame lid
attaching the finished lid to the cold frame by using a hinge
one lid down, one more to go...
placing the cold frame box in the garden, over a prepared bed
Many thanks to all who came by to say hello and participated in helping construct frames, weed, and plant! Including farmstead neighbors Nathan and his recently born daughter…
Neighbors Nathan and Winnie visit the garden
It turned out to be a gorgeous sunny afternoon… one of those timeless days where post-apocalyptic internal quiet met the welcoming green kingdom in the garden…
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(Thanks to dear neighbor and fellow new gardener Jane Spearman for these and almost all the other photos on the workshop blogs.)
September 26 dawned cool and grey, a good day to be in the kitchen. It was also the day when the local permaculture guild was gathering to teach each other how to take care of their bikes; and, even more tempting — ’twas the 16th annual Lotus Festival weekend. (For those who don’t live in Bloomington, google it: an annual five-day celebration of exceptional musicians from all parts of the world that requires hundreds of volunteers and draws thousands of participants.)
I had asked our teacher Keith if maybe we could end at around 3 p.m., so as to catch a bit of Lotus in the Park on Saturday afternoon, but he felt that the workshop would need the entire eight hours allotted. (That’s the problem with planning a series of workshops way in advance! I didn’t think about the conflict with Lotus.)
Well, amazingly enough, seven people had their priorities set for survival skills, the ones our parents practiced with their parents and grandparents, and utilized during World War II when rationing spawned victory gardens and canned vegetables took them through the winter.
The slide show on various methods of preservation lasted about two hours. I was able to stay long enough to hear about just how many many ways there are to preserve food, as enumerated on the cover of a book our teacher Keith recommended: Preserving Food without Freezing or Canningby “the gardeners and farmers of Terre Vivante: “Traditional techniques using salt, oil, sugar, alcohol, vinegar, drying, cold storage, and lactic fermentation.”
What took me away was a pre-planned tour of the garden by a class from the Grow Organic Educator series (as taught by the Bloomington Parks & Recreation). As the initiator and historian of the GANG (Green Acres Neighborhood Garden) — still only six months old now!— they wanted me to conduct the tour and talk about what we’ve been doing. So I told them its origins as a community garden and commons, about our ongoing dialogue with neighbors, the city planning department, other neighborhoods, and the media.
As we toured the garden, someone would point to a plant and ask a question; often as not, I would say I had no idea! That this is my first year as a gardener, that everything that I’m doing is new to me; that luckily, the workshops are helping me and everyone else get up to speed on how to grow a lush and bountiful permaculture garden in a single season. I told them how I had bought this property next door to my house specifically for the garden, but that it had turned into a gift that keeps on giving. Once the student tenants that had occupied the house when I bought it left, room opened up for it to house others of like mind one of whom, it turns out, is my own son Colin, who has just moved here from the Boston area after many years of dreaming about it. Colin is in the process of creating a local business, Bloomington Pellet Company, to make and sell pellets made of hard wood ash and leaves for wood and pellet stoves. (Pellets, unlike wood, are carbon neutral, and burn much cleaner than wood.)
I told them how my niece Megan had also moved here, from California, in June, to live in my house with me. How Megan and Colin and his housemate Tom (a wonderful local who has just moved home to Bloomington from New York City after many years away) eat dinner together most evenings, and help each other out in any way we can. How our two households are also aligning with the occupants of the house that abuts both these properties, since they are also oriented towards the philosophy and practice of permaculture. We plan to eat with them at least once a month, and perhaps more. Meanwhile, we are in the process of designing the landscape for the three properties together. So far, we’ve decided to have a single center for compost; we have just created fences and gates that will allow our dogs to mingle but not leave; we share the lawnmower, ladders, a chipper, tools, and our various skills.
Told the group that we are going to insulate the garage that goes with the garden property and make it into an unofficial reskilling center, for those who want to share old skills. Since the city does not yet have a slot for such a center in its planning code, we’re just calling it a workshop, like those in other residential garages. And after all, that is what it is, a shop to “work” in with your friends and neighbors, meanwhile relearning old skills that will be more and more important to know as time goes on and this bloated industrial civilization continues its evitable descent into a much slower, less materialistic, more elemental and, ultimately deeply connected and much more nourishing way of life.
By the time I finished telling of our vision for our Urban Farmstead I walked back into the living room and the slide show was over.
So, preserving food. How to begin?
Then we got going.
Keith brought some vegetables (and see his food dryer below. We got both mine and his going) . . .
I went out and harvested others from GANG to preserve . . .
Looking back on that afternoon, I have a kaleidoscope of impressions: of skinning and cutting vegetables into various sizes, depending on the method of preservation — like cabbage, for sauerkraut:
peeling kohlrabi, for what? Can’t remember . . .
Tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes, all to be dried . . .
of preparing kale leaves for drying (we tossed kale pieces in oil and seasonings for kale chips) . . .
of trying to find a spare cutting board, knife and a station to work at, but getting so tired of standing and so full up with people that I finally took myself out to the porch.
Then there were the physically challenging times. Like pounding the sauerkraut or pressing down the kimchi (both processes of fermentation that create probiotics and digestive enzymes):
Putting beans into jars for preserving with vinegar (and lots of spices at the bottom of jars — dill seed, celery seed, fresh garlic):
Drying “che,” a large, sweet berry, Chinese in origin:
Around 2:00 p.m. I went out into the GANG again and gathered veggies for a lunch stir-fry:
Unfortunately, at the end I added chard and mustard greens, and those mustard greens were over-ripe. You had to chew them so long that they turned into a giant wad of what felt like gum. Live and learn!
Oddly enough, we were done by 3 p.m., as I had originally envisioned, but the weather was so lousy that nobody wanted to go to the park for Lotus. Instead, we sat around as the beans came to a boil. Took them forever. 
Even little Emma started to relax . . .
Next up? Planting garlic. Remember to put the pointy end up, about two inches down, separated from other bulbs by about six inches.
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HARVEST, both Plant and Human . . .
First there was lettuce and fennel and mustard greens and peas and cabbage and beet greens and of course chard, and last but not at least, the so-called “weed” lambs’ quarter, loaded with minerals. Then cucumbers and onions. So far, only a single broccoli, with others about to take its place (the brassica family in general has been hit or miss: no cauliflower, small cabbage heads, hollowed out brussel sprouts . . .)
The sunflowers finally topped out at 12 feet! All along, overflowing pesto from basil and other herbs that we lavish on stir-fried greens, make into salad dressing, and freeze into cubes.
Then pumpkins. About seven altogether, most still greenish. The first to turn gold was big and perfectly shaped. We placed it on a stump, visible from the street, like a trophy. Okra! Peppers, medium-sized green ones and little red ones so hot their cut edges terrify my fingers.
Just now coming on: gorgeous, sensuous eggplants!
Acorn squash. Ten of ‘em, most on one grandmother plant. We ate them at our first ever “Urban Farmstead potluck” two weeks ago. Too bad I forgot to take pictures of the crowd jammed into my screened front porch:
• my niece Megan, who arrived from California in June, and who lives in this house with me;
• brand new occupants of the house next door that abuts the GANG garden — Tom, whose family settled here generations ago, and my son Colin, both just transplanted, from New York and Boston respectively;
• and from the third house, also newly moved in — Nathan, Maggie, their daughter Lulu, and the sisters Teal and Siri.
Combined, we create an intergenerational mix in our 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s, plus four-year-old Lulu and her brand new sister or brother due to arrive by home birth any time now. All that’s missing is a teenager — a slot that Tom’s daughter will fill next summer.
So, not counting visitors, when the baby is born we’ll be ten strong. We’re talking about combining our compost heaps into one and starting a worm compost, plus deciding how to place fences strategically for the dogs from two houses to be able to hang out together. Nathan spotted some old spools in a downtown dumpster that we’ll turn into picnic tables (one for adults, the other the kids’ table) for the GANG garden.
We have now begun to manifest that three-house Urban Farmstead that Nathan and I dreamed of years ago. Tom and Colin eat with Megan and me on the porch most evenings. I’ve been sharing my lawnmower with Nathan’s house for years. We’re all looking into what else we will only need one of rather than three, and how we can help and share with each other as we collectvely and proactively surf the coming energy descent with joy, abundance, celebration, and neighborly connectivity.
Meanwhile, as soon as those acorn squashes vanished down our gullets, vast numbers of tomatoes let go of their green. All sorts of tomatoes, heirloom, cherry, golden, red, and so on. (And I don’t even like tomatoes!)
Our first-year GANG lasagna permaculture garden with hardly any real soil has, with the help of strategically placed soil amendments, been producing so much — plus, not enough neighbors are taking advantage of the harvest — that I felt frantic, having never really “put up” food before. Visions of sweaty-browed canning kitchens with goo all over my white apron left me cold. Plus, I have the distinct feeling that canned food is more “dead” than either freezing or drying.
Nathan had no such qualms. He and the women in their house canned a bunch of the proliferating cukes and gave five jars of them to us.
Talking about tomatoes with next door neighbor Aggie, she said, “Well, what I do is just wash them whole, put them in a zip-lock baggie and pop them in the freezer! When you take them out for soups later, just rinse them and the skin comes off.”
Wow! Done. Three bags of tomatoes later, Nathan happened to mention how much they enjoy their Excalibur food dryer (a birthday gift from his wife Maggie). So that got me on dehydrators again (I had spent an hour or two researching months ago), and I ordered ours, nine-trays worth, that same day.
A week later, that dryer was working day and night for three days, and will go to work again probably tomorrow.
Here’s niece Megan preparing ground cherries to dry. Note the jar of dried tomatoes and a zip-lock bag of dried kale/cabbage in the background. We’ve also dried bush beans from the garden and peaches from the farmers’ market.
Megan has also shown me how to create fancy-looking herbal oils just by immersing our dried herbs into olive oil. We let them sit in the sun for awhile to bake in the flavors.
All in all, this first summer of our transformed way of living has proved to be both enlightening and light-drenched. A rich, encircling, spacious cornocopia of sinuous, synergistic complexity that leaves me dazzled, exhausted, and exhilarated.
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[Please excuse the blurry group shot . . .]
For the sixth workshop in this series of eight on how to grow a permaculture garden from seed to harvest, no work in the garden was planned. Instead, we spent the first part of our day in my home downloading information from Keith and his extensive slide show. Then we took a walkabout through the neighborhood.
Though the original title of the workshop mentions drought, this year southern Indiana featured the opposite problem: too much rain. And, as Keith says, part of the solution to either problem is the same: MULCH.
The information fell under three main topics:
• climate and microclimate
• details about soil care, and water management
• selection and placement of plants
As usual, the amount of detail was overwhelming to me, but I will give a few examples. Meanwhile, what comes through loud and clear in any permaculture discussion is the complexity of interrelationships among plants, animals, insects, topography, weather, soil conditions, climate, and so on, plus how small interventions can create significant system-wide changes.
Here’s a slide of the many bugs found in gardens!
Each one has a life history, and its own relationship with the plants and other bugs that can either benefit or harm what’s growing there. Notice lots of ants? They’re probably feeding on aphids.
Any plant that attracts sucking insects probably has a Calcium deficiency. Solution: add calcium!
Plant narcissus and daffodil around fruit trees to protect from voles, moles and deer.
In general, pest control is best achieved through making sure the plants are healthy, as it is the weakened plant that attracts the pests.
Though it’s easy to wrap one’s mind around the principle that everything’s connected in the abstract, for each person there does seem to be one eureka moment when permaculture snaps into focus with a huge Aha!
That moment happened to my niece Megan (she’s the one in red pedal pushers and sandals on the walkabout photo above) at this workshop. Megan recently moved to Indiana from California to live with me in my home and this workshop was her first permaculture immersion experience. About an hour into the morning all of a sudden she muttered under her breath, “I get it! I get it!” When I mentioned it later, she said, “Yes, all of a sudden, I saw there was hope.”
Exactly. Permaculture is what the world’s children need to know about, and permaculture can be the curriculum through which all other “subjects” are taught. With permaculture as both our philosophy and our practice, we realize that we can re-create and magnify nature’s natural striving for abundance, in any location, no matter how barren or wet, high altitude or low, urban or rural, or ruined.
More and more, we are waking up to the fact that humanity is rapidly reaching overshoot in both population and resources that feed the so-called “growth economy.” That our only recourse is to reverse the centuries-old gospel of “progress” by rapidly converting from a growth economy to a steady-state economy where inputs and outputs match. We have been swallowed by the whale of our own bloated policies, and now wallow in the underbelly of an unprecedented, ugly or beautiful, either/or situation that can be turned from one to the other via powering drastically down into permaculture and other sustainable practices that do not require endless non-renewaable resources. A perma-cultural understanding of the world — that resources are finite, that everything is food for something else, that diversity is the key to sustainability, that functions can be stacked in amazingly inventive ways, that the edges are where the action is, that we can work together to generate yield and share it with others, and so on — this expanded and deepened way of seeing and being and acting can gradually transform what appears as an increasingly bleak, Mad Max future into a vibrant, shared, paradise.
As I recall, Megan’s eureka moment came just after Keith had been talking about how, in a desert climate, a man invented a contraption to pull behind a trailer that cut little divits in the hard crusty sand. These divits would then fill with water, and catch seeds from the wind. Birds would then come to drink the water, and drop more seeds with their poop. Very soon, plants started to grow in these tiny microclimates created by taking a single scoop out of the sand and relying on the flows of nature to do the rest. This is a great example of how a simple, low-tech intervention can create system-wide effects.
Take another example: the Venturi Effect. (This photo just wouldn’t right itself! But then, as you can see by the slide, the Venturi Effect works no matter which end is up or down . . .)
By funneling wind or water flow through a narrow opening, the velocity of the flow increases, and we can utilize this increase in a number of ways, depending on our situation. In a hot desert climate, for example, we might place our home directly in front of the opening in two rows of dense trees in order to take advantage of the compressed air’s cooling breezes.
What counts in permaculture, is to join the capacity for long-term and detailed observation of the way nature works with the imagination to think in surprising new ways.
Imagine how thrilled children will be when they wake up to the fact that rather than being born at the end of time, they have come in to inaugurate eternity — the capacity to live well and abundantly by learning how to work together to replenish and enhance natural resources indefinitely.
Think globally, work locally. In order to work with nature locally, we need to understand local climate.
This part of Indiana, used to be zone 5, with five months of the year frost free.. Due to ongoing climate change, it is now zone 6. Within any zone there are microclimates, places either markedly warmer or cooler than their surroundings. Notice, for example, how much cooler it is under a shady tree than standing on an unshaded asphalt road.
I used to live in the Tetons of Wyoming, and would stand in awe of how slopes that faced different directions created dramatically different vegetation, due to amount of sun and exposure to prevailing winds. Backcountry skiers are well aware that the probability of an avalanche is much higher on south and east facing slopes warmed by the sun.
Whereever we live, we can mitigate the prevailing climate somewhat to create our own microclimate. We do this by becoming aware of solar, wind and water flows through the environment with the aim of catching and holding flows and putting them to work. With what we’ve learned about what’s actually happening in our own site we then can create a design that places trees, plants, and buildings to take optimal advantage of these flows. For example the “venturi effect,” above.
Here’s few more little “facts” that I took in my notes relating to the growing season and to the soil:
• Roots will grow as long as it’s 50° or higher.
• Most brassicas (brocoli, cauliflower, cabbage, etc.) get sweeter after a frost (they can be planted from early spring through July).
• Peas, lettuce, brassicas, beans, parsley are all okay, even with frost.
• gypsum “defloculates” clay
The Walkabout
Since we weren’t going to work in the garden, but couldn’t absorb too much information at once, we decided to do a walkabout in the neighborhood, going to people’s homes who were in the workshop, and checking out their gardens.
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First stop: Nathan’s house, just east of the GANG garden.
Nathan showed us this great trellis leaning against the south wall of the house that was growing, of all things, lima beans! He took down the old, dying maple tree in his south-facing front yard, and is filling it with vegetable garden plots of various kinds. He showed us how the rest of the grass is going to be sacrificed next year to squash plants.
From there we wandered to the next street over, where two of our workshop presenters live, side-by-side.
The single most astonishing garden sight that afternoon was Kathy’s garden, years in the making. As she says, “I basically take the jungle approach to gardening.” In it, flowers and berries and vegetables shared the space with very little room to squeeze down its narrow aisles.
Kathy’s garden is situated in the only available sunny space in her otherwise shady yard, dominated by an enormous old maple tree. Next door, Jane and her husband, new owners, are still trying to understand how to work with their even more shady land, and have created a large hugelkulture bed with some of the fallen wood that they have collected. Jane plans to put a garden in her side lawn out front, facing south, next spring.
We kept walking, passing a new little street corner garden, one of many that are springing up in this and other neighborhoods throughout the city. Even in advance of the inevitable shocks produced when we will no longer be able to afford to transport food long distances, the local food meme seems to have taken root in the culture at large, and seeding a back-to-the-land movement right where we live, in our cities and towns, and meanwhile, helping us remember that we are neighbors who can help each other, share both the struggle (and its steep learning curve, to remember all that our ancestors once knew). In short, that we are all in this together.
One more street over, and we came to Kevin and Valerie’s houses, again side-by side. These neighbors had decided to share the space between their houses and create a garden there together.
[HugelKulture videos: once I figure out how to edit and upload them to this site]]
On our way back we were treated to the sight of an urban wall (the side wall of the new Sahara Mart on 3rd Street), perfect place for growing vines. On stone or brick walls, vines can be a wonderful insulators for both heat and cold. But what kind of vine?
[urban wall video, eventually]
And of course, all along, we kept wondering about different plants that we’d notice along the way, their names, and possible food value. Usually Keith would have a whole tale to tell about any plant, it’s common name, its Latin name, where it grows, the kinds of conditions it grows in, what plants it likes, what pests like it, what parts can be eaten or used for medicine, etc. But here’s one that even stumped Keith.
[seed pod video, soon!]
All in all, a very satisfying day that will take time to integrate.
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Accustomed to finalizing a new blog post after a workshop by Wednesday of the following week, I saw today as a make-it-or-break-it afternoon. I hadn’t even started to learn how to edit; instead, I was stuck on wrestling with the interface that links imovie software with videos from our new Flip video.
After two hours I suddenly stopped, realizing that I had to reconfigure my expectations. It was either that or drive myself crazy! I had been determined to have little video vignettes for our 6th workshop, “Drought and Stress-Free Home and Garden.” Instead, by arbitrarily adhering to time-structures of the past, I had added unnecessary stress to my own inner home and garden — and, to top it off, forgot to drink water, which dehydrated my already acidified (through stress) condition.
Once again I must acknowledge and even honor my essentially Luddite nature that prefers to move slowly and remember to breathe. And yet, because of my naturally amplified nervous system, which does constantly seek to interface with all sorts of technology, I put myself in a continous bind.
As a child of the manual typewriter age, it has always been extremely difficult for me to learn new technological techniques. My breakdown/breakthrough today reminds me of 1985, when several large boxes holding a used Macintosh II and printer arrived in my little office in Jackson Wyoming from San Francisco. The considerate former owner had identified each plug and where it goes with large letters on masking tape to help me plug everything in successfully. So by the end of the first afternoon I felt triumphant.
But then, the task of actually learning how to use that machine when no one else in my office wing yet had one felt so daunting that even thinking about it would shut me down in tears. Day after day I spent flailing, and failing, to master the process. Finally, I decided to just devote exactly one hour a day to the task of learning how to use the computer. That way, at the end of each day I would know that I had made some progress. No matter how long it took, I knew I would eventually interface with at least the word-processing aspect of my new computer as an extension of my own hands.
As I recall, it took me about two weeks to feel reasonably proficient. During that time I let go of frustration. This act of surrender made room for my natural curiosity to arise and fuel the process.
Given my experience this afternoon, it appears that I will have to take the same row-by-row, inch-by-inch approach to learning the intricacies and art of the video editing process.
Meanwhile, just as I had shifted my attitude this afternoon, in waltzed Susan, one of our workshop participants, who drove 20 minutes into town to gift us with a baby water snake! So exciting, that she would go so far out of her way to show up with this symbol of transformation to grace the pond! I decided to name our beautiful little newcomer “Quicksilver,” since I barely got a glimpse as she leaped from the yogurt carton where she had nested among leaves and twigs to a cozy safe place between the slabs of urbanite that line the pond.
Thank you, Susan! And thank you, universe, for the exquisite timing of this wondrous gift. See Susan Chernak MacElroy’s website: www.soulfulliving.com.
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water hyacinth
Lucille Bertuccio called to tell me that she had some “babies” ready.
“Babies?”
“Yes, my water hyacinth now has two babies that I can give you.”
I hadn’t even known what water hyacinth looked like until several weeks earlier, when she showed me her little pond and pointed them out.
Of all the aquatic plants that neighbors and others who appreciate the GANG have gifted to our pond, this one seems positively royal, queenly! So taken with her beauty and curvaceousness, I was even moved to do some research on water hyacinth — a rare occasion, as I find that, at 66, I’m less and less interested in absorbing and processing left brain data. (So then, why have I decided to learn the intricacies of gardening?)
Almost instantly (as is the way of internet research), I came across a very interesting link:http://www.humanflowerproject.com/index.php/weblog/comments/water_hyacinth_double_edge/.
Aha! So this plant is a hated “invasive,” i.e., powerful, fertile and adaptable — like coyote, raven, and kudzu. Much belittled — so thoroughly has it choked waterways world-wide — that some call it “the world’s worst weed.” And yet, like hemp (another hated plant) hyacinth has a multiplicity of uses! Water hyacinth absorbs heavy metals (so can be used for bioremediation), and its fibers and powder can be made into a variety of products, including houses and furniture!
Besides a variety of aquatic plants, our GANG pond now sports five growing goldfish, all about four inches long. One might be a koi; I did introduce several expensive koi along with at least a dozen 29 cent goldfish on several occasions early on, but just these five survived. I only counted a few floating bodies. What happened to the others? Raccoons?
Also stirring the waters are lots of other, darker colored little fish. We first noticed them when about a half-inch long; now they’re the size of pet store goldfish. A new generation of half-inchers has snuck in recently. Did all these fish arrive as eggs from birds’ legs? Or was the new generation spawned from the old one?
Mysteriously, the swarms of tadpoles that I blogged (and bragged) about earlier have mostly disappeared, though at least one frog regularly plops into the water secretively just behind anyone who walks the rock rim. Doing more internet research (what’s gotten into me?) I discover that tadpoles are eaten by other fish, as well as animals and birds. Not only that, but they even eat each other! So maybe we now know how the goldfish more than doubled in size so quickly . . .
Here are more pond photos, taken Saturday morning just prior to the July 25th workshop:
swale between the houses, bog that leads to the pond, and bridge; leftover cardboard in for making lasagna beds in background
closer . . .
looking south from the pond to garden
east end of pond
west end of pond
Nice, eh? And after only three months. (See blogpost for Workshop #2: the Pond). All we did is dig it, line it with two layers of old carpet sandwiching 6 ml plastic, rim it with urbanite (recycled concrete), introduce a few aquatic plants, and presto! Neighbors’ and Nature’s generosity took over. It’s the permaculture way.
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Shaking various materials through the grid to create potting soil for seedlings
OUR DAY BEGINS
Saturday, July 25th, dawned cool and rainy. We were prepared, since Keith had brought over the stuff needed for this workshop, including two tables and various containers with mysterious ingredients, and set up a work area in the garage on the other side of the house from the garden. (Not surprisingly, he had to hide two giant bags full of beer cans first. The house itself is still a student rental, and will transform in three weeks — we hope! — after we go before the Board of Zoning Appeals in late September for a zoning variance — into a Healing and Community Center. The grungy garage will be remodeled into a community re-skilling center.)
We began, as usual, with a slide show.
This particular slide show lasted two hours and crammed with information on planting times and methods for various plants on the list shown above (three pages to the list!) plus innumerable side discussions stemming from our questions. It’s amazing how little some of us know about elementary gardening methods, and even more amazing how willing we are to display our beautiful ignorance and determination to learn! Though after each slide show I come away feeling as if most of the data whistled through one ear and out the other, what did register is that each plant has its own set of unique needs and that our teacher Keith’s enthusiasm and seemingly endless internal data bank powers us through even those times when we feel most overwhelmed.
From there, it was out to the garage for a lesson on the alchemy of seedling soil.
KEITH’S ALCHEMY OF SEEDLING SOIL
Keith’s recipe for seedling soil, handed to him from an organic farmer eons ago:
• 2 – 5 gal. buckets compost
• 1/2 bag sand (1/3 bucket)
• 1/2 bucket vermiculite (or perlit or peat or leaf-mould)
• 1 bucket native topsoil (from the site to be gardened)
• 2 cups calcium powder or 4 cups cal-phos.
• 1 cup greensand
• 1 cup humate
Somebody asked about wood ash. He said just a little bit would be okay, like between 1/2 cup and 1 cup. So I got some from my yet-to-be-cleaned-out-from-the-winter firebox.
Keith then showed us how to push all the materials through a 1/4 inch screen (this one hanging suspended from the rafters and the mixture falling onto cement below). Easiest way is for two people to stand at either end and push it back and forth.
If you look closely at the ingredients in the 1/4 inch screen, you’ll notice that the darker parts are lumpy. Yep! That’s the clay-like native soil we took from our garden. Lumpier than usual because of all the rain. (See photo below.) We dug a number of buckets just to get a little bit of native soil to squeeze through the grid.
POTTING THE SEEDLINGS
Keith makes sure that the soil is even and that the trays will be level (so water won’t run to one side and the seeds drift there too). He then uses the corner of a simple wooden stick to press shallow indentations for rows. The plant identification markers are pencilled onto pieces of old venetian blinds. (Hint: re-usable venetian blinds last forever.)
Just a pinch of seed dribbles into a full horizontal row.
For the cup-type trays, a tiny indentation into each cup made with finger tip.
Two or three seeds per indentation:
Once seeds are in the soil, he covers the entire tray lightly with a scattering of the mineral material and then levels the bed with the same wooden tool used to make the indentations. Then he stacks the trays.
IN THE GARDEN
After a great lunch of stir-friend greens from the garden (lambs quarter, collard, several types of chard, cabbage, fennel, basil, kale) the threat of rain receded and we moved into the garden. First, we moved the trays from the garage to a “table” made from old pallets and some stones that were lying around (putting them up off the ground discourages slugs).
Next, he showed us how to prepare a bed for direct seeding. First, temporarily remove the mulch (in this case, straw) and scruff up the soil with a stick (or in the case of the first photo below, the very end of a shovel. Do not turn over the soil completely!)
Next, in the case of bush beans, as shown here, for each row make a wide shallow depression and scatter the seeds widely throughout.
Finally, cover the bed lightly with some of the mulch that was removed, leaving the rest for when the plants begin to peak through.
Since there had been so much recent rain, we didn’t water the new beds, though Keith did show us how to water the seedling pots with a light spray so as not to move the seeds. (A few weeks earlier Keith had reminded me that when watering plants with a hose, remember to check the temperature of the water when it first starts squirting out, in case recent heat has made it hot. Hot water can kill plants.)
The rest of the afternoon we spent planting — alone, in twos and threes, and all together. A good day. The photos below also show the condition of the garden now. Hard to remember that it was a muddy mess with no obvious life in it only a few short months ago.
Nancy with injured elbow and bush bean seeds
(Notice how she is sowing the seeds one by one rather than scattering them widely, as her trench for them is narrower than Keith’s was.)
Lucille works another bed
Kathy among lambsquarter and collards, weeding
Susan and Ann work another bed
All together now, one, two three . . .
And four . . . (the above three photos look south, this final one look north, towards my house).
As ever, after this workshop, I felt a sense of deep satisfaction. Such a collective accomplishment! Unlike my abstract mental work, working with the soil gives instant and continuous feedback. As does work with others. Really wonderful, our dialogue with each other inside our common purpose of learning how to grow a permaculture community garden. Really wonderful indeed, this natural, ancestral communion with nature — once we remember to slow down, breathe deeply, and dig our toes and fingers into the ground.
P.S. We even had time to put a finishing coat on the inside of the ferrocement part of the fence. Will blog that tomorrow, as well as two other blog posts: one, the current condition of the pond; the other a series of unidentified plants that I would like your help with! Ahem!
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Introduction
It felt strange, late afternoon Sunday, as we stood around in an exhausted state admiring our handiwork, to realize that we were now inside the garden and had to go through a gate to get to the outside. We could still see through the fence, and anyone walking by could see us — as we intended. But not without a long process of deciding how best to render the fence both transparent and strong enough to repel deer. Indeed, I ended up driving across town to Menards not once but twice during that long weekend, to exchange one fencing material for another.
The garden had been spilling out of a formerly featureless sunny green lawn, at the intersection of Overhill and DeKist streets. Inside the fence, it looked intentional. Putting a frame around the garden snapped it into a gestalt, as a figure upon a ground, rendering the project meaningful.
Of the eight workshops, this one and the pond workshop were two-day events, requiring enormous endurance by those who elected to remain for both days (second day attrition rate for both workshops was around 40%). Like the end of Sunday for the pond, our fence left us feeling both exhausted and exultant. However, unlike the pond, we were not yet done! Six of us agreed to meet again Wednesday afternoon, July 1, to complete the job.
We had planned to do the entire fence in ferrocement, but when the figures came in for the cost of materials, we elected to make only about a 24-foot section of this material to anchor the garden at the corner opposite the pond.
The day begins
The forecast for Saturday, June 27th, called for 95 degrees and high humidity. And on this day and the next, we were to build a fence high and strong enough to keep out deer? I, for one, was filled with trepidation. Would anyone even show up? (Would I show up were I not hosting the workshop?)
In a burst of panic, I raced to the store shortly before people were due to arrive for a watermelon to slake thirst on what was bound to be a sodden, miserable day. Just to be sure, I grabbed some purple and green grapes, too.
And lo and behold, the day turned out to be not nearly as hot and humid as predicted. But we still devoured the fruit.
Slide Show
We began Saturday with a slide show on various types of unusual fences, lots of them from England, some with living bushes and trees. And, we viewed slides showing examples of the various ways ferrocement can be used. Ferrocement (ferro = steel plus cement).
From Wikipedia: “Ferrocement is a composite material which is used in building or sculpture with cement, sand, water and wire or mesh material—often called a thin shell in North America. Ferrocement has great strength and economy. It is fireproof, earthquake safe and does not rust, rot or blow down in storms. It has a broad range of applications which include home building, creating sculptures, repair of existing artifacts and building boats and ships.”
What Wikipedia does not say: ferrocement is labor intensive. The ferrocement portion of the fence took by far the most time to construct.
Here it is, showing three stages of construction:
The process
First, the 6″ wide rebar mesh is attached to the structure created by steel poles and and rebar.
Next, expanded lath mesh is attached to both sides of the 6″ rebar mesh with metal crimps using a clever little hooked tool that twirls the ends together. VERY important to crimp the two pieces of lath mesh as close together as possible — as we discovered when trying to spread the cement on the outside of the mesh only to watch it moosh into the space between them. . . The metal crimps are then cut close to the mesh so that the cement will spread without obstruction.
Finally, the mortar is spread on, as evenly as possible. Our teacher, Keith Johnson, was mixing the mortar (cement plus sand) in a wheelbarrow as we went, so as not to get it too dry or too wet. A real art! As is spreading the mortar. It took me quite a while to get the hang of it, under Keith’s watchful direction.
By the end of Saturday, we had managed to get only the bottom third of the fence done. 
Meanwhile, Keith showed how to take bamboo sticks, bend them over, tie and brace them to make a trellis. Our trellis will both support climbing plants like beans and berries and creates a semi-private area for our soon-to-be-built picnic table next to the pond.
Sunday
Sunday dawned clear and again, not nearly as hot or humid as the week before. But would people show up? We still had to complete the ferrocement fence as well as build the entire rest of the fence. . .
So grateful when most did show up again, after a grueling day for what they knew would be another fun, but grueling day.
And this time the fence work went much faster.
Since the fence had to dry before we spread on the final tier, we decided to do the rest of the fence after lunch, to be created out of 6-inch rebar lath. 
Compared to the ferrocement, this part of fence-building took only a few hours to complete, gates and all. Though rough, we see it as functioning akin to a wall in an urban neighborhood, blank space for community expression. Rather than painting a wall, we will be weaving into the metal lattice plants of various kinds, whether growing from the bottom up, or hung like wreaths, or interwoven in interesting designs, this wall will be an interactive part of the garden. I would love to see children each take a section of the wall and make it their own, putting up and taking down things they have made and want to show or share, an ever-changing, ever-growing and evolving skein of community spirit.
So though the garden is now “fenced,” its skin is relational, serving not only to “protect” (from deer) but to display the endless abundance of human and plant creativity.
Wish I could show a picture of what’s in my mind’s eye! As soon as something appears on the fence, you can bet it will also appear on this blog.
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