Howdy fellow perma-mind! Here you will find my thoughts, my findings, my rants, nice ideas from all over the web about anything permaculture. From time to time, I deliver a longer type of article to keep you occupied when the weather is capricious on the farm. Thanks for stopping by. Rija
Volunteer Day at Ark Eden: An introduction to permaculture for our members
Another post from the archives (29/04/2014):
That looks like a keyhole garden
About two weeks ago, we've organised a workshop on Lantau Island at the permaculture farm Ark Eden.
The aim of the workshop was to provide hands-on experience with permaculture concepts to members of GSLHK while providing Ark Eden with a pool of enthusiastic volunteers.
Ark Eden was founded in 2006 by Jenny Quinton with a mission to educate people of all ages on the very real need t o live in a more sustainable way to safeguard the environment. No wonder Ark Eden and our group get along so well, given a the similary of our respective missions. Ark Eden is however active at running high profile campaigns and their site receive 5000 visitors a year.
Their permaculture gardens are relatively recent but Marnick and Danie and the rest of Ark Eden team have done a great job there already.
Lantau Island is the largest island in Hong Kong and is located at the mouth of the Pearl River. Ark Eden is located on the hill side near Mui Wo on the south-east side of the island.
We took some of our members up there. Most of them were new to farming or permaculture.
We had very interesting activities going-on on the day:
Garden beds that use banana leaf+stone for the edges
Setting up netting against birds
Making a trellis for tomatoes
Building of a contraption for sieving soil
A bit of TLC for the living fence
And of course we had our signature potluck lunch:
After lunch, Danie took us to a a stream with a pool which was populated by fishes who feed on dead skin.
The feeling was weird at the beginning but everyone got over it and eventually enjoyed that impromptu fish therapy.
Below is a list of resource of permaculture concepts that cover the activities we've done on that day:
Article about Banana circles mentioning the leaves technique
Bamboo trellises
Article about Bamboo polytunnel:I'm sure we could adapt it to make the structure for the netting over the beds
There is a keyhole garden at Ark Eden. The keyhole design pattern allows for a very efficient access to the whole garden bed. That design and other designs are explained in a brillant book called "Gaia's Garden, A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture" by Toby Hemenway.
How important is permaculture?
Below is a 47 minutes mainstream answer that is clear and convincing.
Because the documentary is oversimplifying a little the situation on cattle grazing, and doesn't talk about rotational grazing, it is best to complement its viewing with Allan Savory TED talk's video: How to green the world's desert and reverse climate change.
Also there is another cause of mass deforestation that is not talked about in the documentary, that affects lots of forests in Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia. The kind that everyone of us on the planet are guilty of, because we are the ones handing the dollars to these corporations who are destroying the forest for our precious palm oil, bio-diesel and paper and other stuffs.
As such, I think permaculture is as much about regenerating functional ecosystem as encouraging the humans in it and and at the other side of the world to live a much less materialistic and wasteful life. The story Of Stuff is a great video to illustrate this point. The world is too global. Solutions have to be brought on multiple plane at the same time.
One important concept in the documentary is when John D. Liu talks about the source of wealth and its derivatives and how society is valuing the derivatives more than the source of wealth ("Green Gold").
Well, as the story goes, China only undertook that regeneration project shown in the documentary because the World Bank convince them that it will cost them more not to do it (cue the dust storm and the state of the Yellow river). That seems hard work to come to that. Why don't schools teach kids about what has real value in this world and how everything is connected together? In Vietnam, aspects of permaculture are taught to grade 7 as part of the normal curriculum. So it's not hopeless.
Anyway, it illustrates another important role of permaculture: education. Therefore being a permaculturist is to be ready to create curricula, teach it and convince schools to take it, and create your own school if they say no.
Please do share these videos with your friends and family.
It is an acronym that stands for:
Vuon (garden)
Ao (fish pond)
Chuong (animal sheds)
It's a set of ancestral techniques used by Vietnamese for farming.
I heard of the term while I was researching about an upcoming leisure trip to Vietnam.
I was wondering if there are permaculture sites I could visit there. Then I stumbled on this conference paper where I saw VAC mentioned for the first time:
http://permaculturewest.org.au/ipc6/ch06/vanman/index.html
So I set myself to try to investigate VAC during my trip to Vietnam. Here is my humble report.
VAC in Vietnam
After seeing so many houses with pond, garden and live stock when driving through villages you could think that everyone is doing VAC. However although it is really popular in North Vietnam, not everyone is doing proper VAC.
Many villagers are shop-keepers or other small businesses and VAC represent for them a side activity. Their homestead's surface is usually smaller than the farms who do full VAC and they are not able to live of their system. I've been able to visit two of these full VAC practicing farms.
The other significant learning I made was that VAC is taught to grade 7 in schools as part of the normal curriculum.
The basics
The typical VAC site looks like the diagram below.
I have seen the biogas system in only one site which was the biggest one. That site had a pigs pen of 20-30 pigs. I wonder if one needs a minimum number of animals to make biogas worthwhile.
Examples
At this homestead, we could see medicinal plants growing near the main house.
It had two ponds, one for fishes and one for turtles.
The fish pond was large (swimming pool size). The turtle pond had a recess to allow the turtles to lay their eggs.
The turtles are the surplus that the family sells at the markets.
We visited that house.
They had a very large pond (stadium size) and a large pig hens.
They generate biogas from the pig and use water based plants to feed the geese and make the food for the pig.
However for the feeding pig, they supplement it with commercially purchased food. Pigs and fishes are the surplus they sell to markets.
In our host's home there wasn't a pond but a large garden of fruit trees and lettuce. The dog kennel and chicken hens were side by side and together generated a lot of heat. So the airing area for drying clothes, the dry storage for food, and the open fire cooker were all around them (Vietnam has a very humid climate in February). My host doesn't pretend using VAC, they still need to buy some food.
In all the sites we've visited and also in the backyard gardens of villagers they use banana trees as hedge and they do use asphalt road as a strategy for their water systems. For example by growing lettuce on the lower side of the road and let gravity guide rain water toward the edibles before ending in the stream. They also practice composting and the policy of the minimum distance between were garbage is created and where it's stowed away.
Because the primary objective of my trip was something else and because almost no Vietnamese I've met can or are willing to converse in English (I can't speak Vietnamese), I couldn't get much deeper in understanding the design principles, the practical considerations and the problems faced and solved nor could I have time to explore more houses.
In particular, I wish I could see how the (underground) bio digester works or know whether chickens element have interaction with other animals or plants.
Furthermore, Vietnam is the second larger exporter of rice and it is easy to guess when travelling through the countryside.
There must be positive some beneficial interactions between the rice fields and the VAC systems, but I couldn't figure out any (the cows in the rice field, they must be up to something, and what happen to the rice husk?).
Also I would like to see the differences between regions in Vietnam, and also to find out whether VAC has been used to regenerate the lands damaged by the wars and how it is used to improve self-reliance and resiliency of impoverished communities.
I'm hopping I can visit again.
Two years ago, I have organised a group visit of the Mapopo Community Farm. It happened to be the 4th Sunday of the month which coincided with the vegetable and handicraft market at the farm.
It was also a time of festival, where different type of fun and family orientated activities took place including cooking workshops.
We have managed to secure an english speaking guided tour of the community and it was very enlightening and covered more than I expected initially.
I came expecting a tour of farming techniques in action, but we also got a passionate hymn to the defence of community farming.
The Mapopo Community Farm is part of the Ma Shi Po Village.
The village has been inhabited by several general generations of mainland immigrants that rented a plot from indigenous people.
Most of indigenous people sold their land to a property developer who want to transform the place into a collection of high-rise apartment complexes. The village is nowadays only half of what it was before, as the south part has become two apartment complexes.
Most of what remains of the village are farm lands. Some migrants luckily bought their farm land from indigenous people. But most of the plots have been bought by the property developers. The relocated former inhabitants still come back to clandestinely farm on these plots and and there's a cat and mouse game being played between the property developer's goons and the guerrilla farmers. It's worth noting that the property developers took action before the government plan on town planning was finalised.
The Mapopo Community Farm has become a rally point for all the farmers in the village. In addition of educational and CSA activities, they are campaigning to preserve community farming and for a better cohabitation between housing estates and farmers communities.
This is a tough battle. In my opinion, the prime directive of nature and biodiversity conservation and the growing population, combined to the shortage of land in HK, means that continued construction of high-rise housing is ineluctable.
Thinking in term of permaculture, and considering the urban heart as the centre of energy, I reckon these New Territories farmlands makes excellent Zone 2 and 3 activities. I think that rooftop farming, vertical gardens, indoor aquaculture, urban bee keeping and urban guerrilla gardening make excellent Zone 1 activities. It's not necessarily a tough sell for property developers: They spend money to provide community management in apartment complexes.
If they are willing to devolve this role to the residents and that residents use a CSA based approach to make use of the zonal activities, resident happiness will increase, and community management as well as energy management inside apartment complexes will cost less for property developers. National parks and other conservation areas could act as Zone 4 and Zone 5 and left to the government to be controlled.
From just a farming perspective, some farmers are still on chemical fertilisers but the Mapopo Community Farm is helping more and more farmers transitioning to organic practices.
They also organise the collection of waste from nearby restaurants to be used for composting. That was the first I saw soya byproduct waste and fish guts successfully used for composting.
The Mapopo Community Farm was founded by the third generation of mainland migrants Becky Au and Cho Kai-kai.
You can watch their TEDx talk at TEDxKowloon below (if you understand Cantonese).
I used to live in London where I have never really known the people who the closest lived to me. The rare contacts I had with my neighbours were friendly and felt like a glimpse to a lot of could-be if only I were to connect with them better. It was usually because they needed my help with something or the other way round. After moving to Hong Kong, I found it harder to get to know my neighbours.
In Hong Kong, I discovered Friends of the Earth's Power Smart competition where households, commercials organisations and buildings management companies participate in a contest of who can reduce electricity consumption the most with some good incentives.
Having started using it in London and continuing in Hong Kong, I am a frequent user of the Meetup.com project. This project inspired by the grass root solidarity seen in the aftermath of the NY 9/11 event try encouraging people from all other the world to connect in the real world (not online) with other members of their own interests based local community.
Some of the activities of Meetup.com have a social or environmental engagement motivation but they are not prevalent, and, in my experience, although organised events are localised geographically, the attendance is rarely made of people from the same neighbourhood or of the neighbourhood of the event.
On a separate note, I felt some admiration towards these people reported in the news who were spontaneously sharing their working power supply with members of their local community after the passing of devastating hurricanes.
These observations mixed together have sparked one big realisation in my mind:
A neighbourhood community can have a soul, a culture that has the potential to do good in a more effective way than individuals and households and can do so outside the constraints and limitations of governments and large NGOs.
People from the same neighbourhood share a very strong binding that they don't necessary realise:
Their "home" is next to each other
They "live" next to each other
External factors can "affect" them collectively
They could be in position of "need" or able to "help"
They could be "friends" if they try
They can have fun, learn and work to solve issues "together"
Microcosm of many social, health and environmental issues
There are a range of problems that are threatening either our habitat, the fabrics of human society, or the human health, that have manifestation at the layer of a neighbourhood community.
Examples of such issues include on the environmental side: energy inefficiency, waste recycling, carbon footprint. From a human health perspective, there is the concern of clean water, pollution, and safe dwelling, whereas societal issues that have strong resonance in a neighbourhood include: loneliness, domestic violence, the taking care of the elderly, vandalism.
Of course these lists are not exhaustive and in the other hand there are surely issues that cannot be solved well when tackled from this layer.
The right impact
It can be very resources consuming to reach to individuals and make them change habits and keep these new habits. It is worth it as a starting point but it doesn't scale.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, reaching a very large amount of people in organised areas often requires some form of government support and/or validation. Getting such support and making an impact at this level is highly desirable, but social innovators are then very much dependent on local and/or national government policies.
Encouraging a neighbourhood community to work together on social or environmental issues doesn't have the full range of complexity of governmental involvement and yet it has a bigger impact than single individuals, households or even communities that are formed around weaker commonalities.
Also a neighbourhood community can last a very long time as it is based on a fixed geographical commonality. So if the community is strong, the positive efforts can become a neighbourhood culture and survive the passing of generations.
Another potential advantage of a neighbourhood community is cross-pollination. People move in and move out of neighbourhoods. When they go, they can tell people about the good of their former neighbourhood. And if there was a permanent platform to support the neighbourhood's collective efforts, it would be even easier for movers to reference their doings and maybe adapt and replicate them in their new neighbourhood.
Priming the community
However for a neighbourhood community to be able to do anything it has to exist in the first place. In cities like Hong Kong, I feel it is very easy to lead a life connected to our work, family or friends networks exclusively and to the detriment of our relationship with our local community. We need the tools and the incentives to allow for a neighbourhood community to be created or assembled.
Make it last
Even if a neighbourhood community exists, as people move out or die, there are always the risks of the neighbourhood long term efforts to dwindle and for a neighbourhood culture to be lost. The cyclic emergence of community leaders need to be encouraged and community culture need to be transmitted. We need personal development structure for aspiring community leaders and culture transmission mechanisms for the community ethos.
The obstacles and incentives
The comfort zone for typical urban dwellers can be an obstacle to the formation of neighbourhood communities.
By observing other communities, and identifying what make them tick, we might get a clue on what incentives we can concoct and adapt. Examples of communities or approach that, in my opinion, we can learn lessons from:
The Village-like neighbourhoods in London (like Mary Lebone village) and Paris (Bercy village)
Former dwellers of Hong Kong's now destroyed Walled City
Hong Kong's community of rooftop dwellers
Singapore government's urban and ethnic development policies
Hong Kong's Sham Shui Po neighbourhood
Some general concepts to explore are:
I) gamification (like the Power Smart competition that can be adapted for example to a carbon footprint competition between neighbourhoods)
II) togetherness (festivities and celebrations and other bounding events, may be we can take inspiration from corporate and sport team building).
III) self sufficiency (explore economic, health and environment benefits for encouraging the community to practice mutual help, service exchange, skills exchange, community farming, group shopping, internal "freecycling", community-driven building renovation and decoration)
IV) branding and communication (build a common image that the community can identify to, make the community ethos known to the world, connect to other communities, may be adapt city twinning to neighbourhood twinning)
Other obstacles I can see are the latent or explicit conflicts between neighbours. Families issues would also cause dwellers to not open up to their neighbours. The communities should consists of enough dwellings to make the effects of these conflict marginal.
Another potential obstacle, in the case of Hong Kong, is the sheer amount of people circulating in public spaces which may cause people to stick to their household and close friends whenever they can.
Not a problem, not a solution, but a win-win system
Rather than seeing neighbourhood communities as a problem in need of a solution or as a solution to all problems, I see them as a system that can:
help people unite to gain a better, more sustainable life and better control of their common destiny
help social, health and environmental entrepreneurs solving a range of issues locally and then scale by cross-pollination and export of the community ethos.
I think the world needs platforms to help this type of system to form, to act, to last and to propagate.
If you are in Hong Kong, block the Saturday 9th January 2016 in your calendar.
I’m partnering with Teressa Siu of Lotus Life TV to bring you an half-day of workshops where the health of people and the health of the planet meet through organic gardening and healthy cooking, neatly packaged in a retreat atmosphere and within the authenticity of a family urban garden.
Check out the details below and come and join us for an event of practical eco-knowledge, healthy practices and creative activities.
A quick chat with Dennis McClung serves as a virtual walkaround of his wildly fruitful garden pool…
How did this all start?
We grew up in Los Angeles—my mom was in the FFA.
What’s the FFA?
Future Farmers of America.
In LA?
Yep. She was from Compton.
THE Compton? Your mom was a farmer from Compton?
Yep.
Do you know if you’ve inspired other garden pools?
Oh, absolutely. We’ve given tours to aerospace people—they want to put one of these on the moon. Even the FBI has come to check it out as a part of their disaster response strategy—in Phoenix, we have 10,000 empty pools. This kind of farming could feed a lot of people with very little resources, and they’re very quick to set up relative to the typical fields. We hear from people all the time who have done it or who are planning to, from all over—right now I’m writing an ebook to help other people get the same kind of system up and running.
A nationwide-spreading, self-sustaining desert oasis with roots in Compton. I like it.
Yeah. Me too.
+++
CHICKEN COOP
We found a bunch of shelving from a closed-down grocery store in a dumpster, and with a bit of jerry-rigging, we made it into our chicken coop. The waste drops through the netted floor of the coop, straight into the water—this promotes the algae blooms that make our pond so healthy. It’s beneficial chemically speaking, but it also means we don’t need to clean the coop the way you usually would.
The chickens are real wanderers—they eat the bugs and dig holes in the yard. Once the sun goes down and they come back in, we close it up and next morning, there’s eggs. They’re happy, and so are we.
SOLAR PANELS
Solar panels aren’t the kind of thing you can find in a dumpster. We bought the cheapest ones, and as our energy consumption increased, we added more panels one or two at a time to run our irrigation pump and LED lighting. They’re hooked up to 12-volt boat batteries, and it’s about as simple as wiring a car radio.
PLASTIC BUCKET HERBS
We grow sweet Genovese basil, cinnamon basil, and oregano year-round, and fed it with pond water. One of the challenges with growing in pots is that you don’t want to burn the roots with mineral build-up that open soil would otherwise flush out. We use fish emulsion to mitigate that—it’s totally natural, organic way to add high-nitrogen nutrients, which keeps container-bound roots happy.
POLLINATOR-FRIENDLY WILD FLOWERS
We attract bees with purslane, nasturtiums, and marigolds (which the chickens also love, and it makes yolks so nice). The bees can see the color through our tarp, and once they find their way in they go around and pollinate everything. We stick to heirloom variety vegetables and herbs, because they’re easier for the bees to open and pollinate. We’re careful about seed-saving because those varieties have a hundred years or more of thriving in this climate—we let 10% of our crops go to flower.
RAIN GUTTER PLANTERS
You can get a ten-foot stick of rain gutter for about five bucks. Because we use hydroponics, we can squish the plants closer together. We introduce earthworms to all our gutters, and they eat all the sludge from the pondwater, which in turn, brings micronutrients to our system, and helps keep it clean and flowing. 180 lineal feet of rain gutter carries the water around, through the clay pellets and vegetable roots and back to the pond—and when it returns to the fish, it’s full of good bacteria, which converts the ammonia in the pond into nitrate, which is plant food.
TILAPIA POND
There’s about 800 pounds of fish in the pond at any given time. The biggest one I’ve caught so far was seven pounds. They grow really fast—every once in a while, we have to put a predator in there to keep things balanced or else the ammonia levels would be too high for the system to handle. We have two tortoises and a turtle, and once a year or so we put one into the pond. One turtle can eat about a hundred fish in a day.
UPSIDE-DOWN TOMATOES
We’ve put vining tomatoes in the buckets—grape, cherry, and roma—and they grow down along with the basil, and they hang down from the rain gutter too. Vining tomatoes versus bushy ones just keep growing larger and larger. We keep them in alternate cycles of seeding and growth and harvesting, and this gives us tomatoes year round. When we give tours, I always let people taste them—they’re incredibly good.
THE WATER SYSTEM
When we bought the house it was roofed with shingles, which made the rainwater unpotable. We re-roofed it with aluminum, and now it’s a great water-catcher as well as being much better in terms of energy-efficiency. Roof water and rain funnels into the pond, the pump distributes it through, and gravity carries the clean water back down. So it’s a closed-loop system. We save our graywater as well—we use all biodegradable soaps and after it passes through about ten feet of the clay pellet gutters, it’s pure—just like a filter. When we don’t need the excess graywater for our main system, we use it on the roots of our fruit trees (And you can too!)
GRAPE VINES
We started the vines in the very beginning—they’re still in dirt. By the time we converted to hydroponics, the roots on the grapevines were so large that it wasn’t feasible to convert them as well, so we left them as they were and they’re doing great. Everybody always asks how I pick our grapes—I wade out into the pool, which is 16 x 16 feet and 3.5 feet deep—to pick the lower ones, and I climb up top and lift the tarp to pick the top ones.
DUCKWEED FOR CHICKEN FEED
The tilapia pond gives us duckweed for the chickens, and the chickens give us food for the fish. We grow larvae for a calcium supplement—it’s black soldier fly composting. The larvae breaks stuff down very fast. In six weeks we have pure compost, versus at least 16 months for the same result with worm composting. The grubs are high in calcium as well, and the chickens love them, and of course they need the calcium for their eggs.
More on Dennis’s garden pool at DARK RYE’s Roots Issue
When the Earth is ravaged and the animals are dying, a new tribe of people shall come onto the Earth of many colors, creeds and classes, and by their actions and deeds shall make the Earth green again. They shall be known as the warriors of the rainbow.
Old Native American Prophecy (via permacultureandhomesteading)
Permaculture designers, deep ecologists, urban gardeners, organic farmers, weekend gardeners, guerrilla gardeners, soil scientists, conservationists, social and environmental activists, appropriate technologists, carbon farmers, hunter-gatherers, park rangers, horticulturalists, botanists, sustainable consumers, ethical investors, recyclers.
Paper that folds itself … when it gets hot. This is the creation of TEDx speaker Ata Sina, who coats paper with special thermoplastic polymers that shrink when heated — making strong, sturdy, lightweight creations that can support more weight than your average origami.
Sina hopes his paper will someday allow you to buy a paper couch and watch it assemble itself, or craft booklets of toys that come to life with the help of a hair dryer.
I don’t actually think reliable off-the-grid food security through permaculture was totally possible before the social internet, so in that way, I think it’s a radical kind of futurism: not a primitivistic, back-to-the-land racket.
There is no way that I could have acquired 200+ species of perennial food plants—in under two years—before internet seed and germplasm swapping, and international private purchasing was possible. An endeavour like mine would have taken decades, connections, and a considerable amount of money. It’s taken a loner like me two years, an eBay account, and a few hundred kroner.
Furthermore adding to that, social Internet has allowed me to easily reach out to individuals and groups to come volunteer at our farm and to make the corresponding logistics trivial to manage
Sally J. Smith is an environmental artist who creates ethereal sculptures that illustrate the simple beauty of the natural world. Her works exist in complete harmony with their surroundings, as her materials she builds upon are found entirely on site. Her Land Art 2015 wall calendar from Amber Lotus Publishing showcases photographs of twelve of her earth art sculptures.
When I was in high school, BRICS was just an acronym. Never realised these countries have actually formed a club. They mentioned the new bank is hoped to fund infrastructure projects. I do hope their definition of infrastructure projects includes renewable energy, large scale bioremediation, carbon farming, sustainable materials, etc.. Because these are no small countries, their natural resources are vast and threatened by their large economies.
In immaculate greenhouses, Mexican laborers are ordered to use hand sanitizers and schooled in how to pamper the produce. They’re required to keep their fingernails carefully trimmed so the fruit will arrive unblemished in U.S. supermarkets.
The produce may live in luxury, but those harvesting it live in squalor. A Los Angeles Times investigation found many workers are held against their will. Those who attempt to escape are beaten.
