Required Reading for Permaculture

Everybody loves a story, right? They speak to us as humans in so many ways : from scary campfire tales to blockbuster horror, the plays of Shakespeare to story adverts (Kenco, John Lewis, the EDF blob (see below))

some of them are supposed to be culturally significant, and some are supposed to just be entertaining. The trick is spotting which is which. The EDF blob, by the way, is obviously the former : many people feel their lives will not be complete until they can own a little ‘Mr Zingy’.

These books are part of my 70′s childhood : Ah, Ladybird books, as comfortable and unthreatening as listening to the shipping forecast by the fire with a nice cup of tea and a round of toast. A story about a chicken who makes a loaf of bread, and one about an old lady with a recalcitrant pig, which surprisingly, hold the answers to some of the conundrums of community gardening.

The Little Red Hen  is about a chicken who finds some grains of wheat, and instead of just eating them, she looks for help from the other farmyard animals to plant them : none of them is interested in helping with the work it takes to create a whole loaf of bread, until the very end, when they are all keen to help her eat it.

My work life in community landscape architecture is so like this I have often thought of calling my company Little Red Hen Ltd : there are any number of ‘charities’ and ‘social enterprises’ to ‘help’ community groups spend their money, once they have worked for years to form a group and get funding, but no-one who wants to do the laborious work of helping people to learn how to work together for shared aims.

In the other book, the old woman buys a pig, then can’t make it jump the stile to get to her cottage : she asks a dog to bite it, but it wont, so she asks a stick to beat the dog, but it won’t, and so on, until she comes across a cat who makes a bargain, that it will kill the rat if she gets it some milk. To get the milk she has to fetch the cow some hay, and after that everything falls rapidly into place, and the pig springs over the stile at the mere sight of the dog’s teeth, and she does get home that night.

Both stories are about the limits and possibilities of self-interest : it’s legitimate to profit from the fruit of your labour : why should that chicken give away the loaf she’s worked so hard to produce? (I do remember as a child, worrying about what the hen was living off while doing all that work : times were hard in the farm!). Conversely, the old woman is caught in a chain of interdependence that she isn’t able to unlock until she offers something to the people she wants help from.

Are you more like the entrepreneurial & pioneering  little red hen who can do it all herself, or more like the old woman, who wastes so much energy before finally understanding that she must give something to get something?

All about the Pig

The book ‘Farmhouse Fare’ was always on my parent’s kitchen shelf : but I never took the time to read it until last year, when I inherited it, and now I am finding it a compelling insight into how, just one generation ago, everybody knew how to feed a family without costing the earth. It is a collection of recipes sent in by readers of Farmer’s Weekly, published in 1973 :

We are always being berated as a nation, for apparently feeding our families takeaways, kebabs and ready meals because we are too exhausted to do anything else. The book has a whole section on Basic Food Freezing, because chest freezers became commonly available, only in the late 1960′s in the UK, which fact alone is quite mind-blowing. Reading recipes for things like Braised Sheep’s Tongues, and  Turnip Pie,  is like having a lovely browse round an antique shop, then going for a cream tea with your Nan.

The most interesting aspect for me is how they treat meat. It is obvious that in the past, when people reared their own meat, they wouldn’t have turned their noses up at any part of that animal : from the moment it was slaughtered, it was used to feed the family : the blood was used to make black pudding : the internal organs were eaten in the first two or three days, the intestines were used to make sausages : as much of the meat preserved as possible, the bones were used for soup, the head for brawn, the feet for jelly, the tail for soup, the stomach for tripe. We are so distanced from the process of meat production that we can mostly only accept meat that is an anonymous pink slab.

I listened to this really interesting Paul Wheaton Podcast the other day, on precisely this (I’m so into blogging about Paul at the moment!) Here are the links :

http://www.richsoil.com/permaculture/2579-podcast-235/

They also talk about :  http://www.farmsteadmeatsmith.com/

I thought proper butcher’s shops, with sawdust, and trained butchers who can saw you off a hunk of pig, were in decline in the UK, but apparently they don’t exist at all any more in the US, so we should think ourselves lucky. In North East London here, I am spoilt for choice : ethnic and traditional butchers abound in Dalston and the West Green Road in N15.

I confess, I don’t use them. Partly because I am *scared* :  they will laugh and pelt me out the door with off sausages if  they see I don’t know my chump from my clod, and partly because I got given rotten chicken by a butcher in Catford in 2002.

I’m going to get  less pathetic this year : (I’ll revise the above diagram first) : I might even have a go at Brawn :

 

What’s the “Alternative”?

The end of the Mayan calendar, in the world of permaculture blogs, was supposed to herald a new dawn of co-operation and an end to capitalism : a typical example, from realitysandwich.com puts it like this :

“The shift we need to make is to see the world not as a bunch of separate things but as a web of relationships.  We are part of an interwoven whole, and our goal is not to win, but to connect, to nurture, to play, to dance”

and although I didn’t really think the planets were going to align, and pull the world out of its orbit, or that the earth’s polarity was going to reverse, wiping out the global financial system, I did have a small hope that it could be the start of something beautiful…

I was looking today at Damanhur, in northern Italy, which is “an eco-society based on ethical and spiritual values, awarded by an agency of the United Nations as a model for a sustainable future.” and if you look at their website, what’s not to like? You can apply for a New Life : Living in harmony with your fellow humans, investigating your spirituality and maximising your creative potential, doing permaculture stuff : what an amazing three months…

They do, however, ask you to make sure you have the means, from your savings, to support yourself, making a contribution to rent and food etc, for those three months. I know that isn’t much : probably it works out to less than  5 grand, but still, it highlights quite succinctly, how for me, it does seem that access to alternatives to capitalism is only really accessible to those who have benefited from it.

Whatever alternative lifestyle you are looking for needs a substantial ‘surplus’ from work : either your own, your forbears’, or the work of an unknown capitalist slave. Whether you want to live on the dole in social housing (good luck getting that!), immerse yourself in permaculture and go self-sufficient : you’ll need land, enough money to live on, plus time for those ‘small and slow solutions’ to bear fruit, co-housing or ecohousing : all need either capital investment, or a mortgage.

Anyway, I could go on, but I think I have crystallised for myself, the nagging doubts I have about particularly, the ‘homesteading’ way of permaculture : much as I love Paul Wheaton, Permaculture Giant (www.richsoil.com, youtube, twitter, and… hang on… yes,  Facebook….)

for his knowledge, generosity, and energy, I don’t think that each of us getting our own bit of land and doing our individual thing can possibly provide for 7 billion of us, if the end of capitalism is really on its way. Permaculture does maybe have the answer, though, in the third principle of ‘People Care’ : the others being ‘Earth Care’ and Fair Shares’

“Self-reliance becomes more possible when we focus on non-material well-being, taking care of ourselves and others without producing or consuming unnecessary material resources. By accepting personal responsibility for our situation as far as possible, rather than blaming others, we empower ourselves. By recognising that the wisdom lies within the group, we can work with others to bring about the best outcomes for all involved.” (Permacultureprinciples.com)

Those who have benefited from capitalism are able to lead the way in Permaculture : and I look forward with hope and optimism to a time when people belong to the land that maintains us rather than the other way round.

Street Chair

This year I’ve really fallen out of love with Ikea : partly because  my anti-shopping pledge to buy no new clothes  naturally extended itself to disposable exploitation furniture as well! Making myself think through the whole life cycle of  everything I buy has really helped me focus on the real cost of ‘cheap’ things.

And in terms of furniture, the street has been very generous with its gifts to me this year. In many large cities, they have a system whereby on a certain pre-arranged day, residents can drag out unwanted items of furniture, and leave them on the pavement for the City Authority to dispose of. In practice, this makes cities like Berlin and New York into a wonderland for people who love old stuff. In my bit of London, it’s a bit more random : you just heave stuff out whenever you like, leave it for a few days, and it’ll probably be gone.

I recently ‘asked the universe’ for an old Belfast sink, to make into a small wildlife pond in my tiny back garden, and yesterday, look what I found :

So I lugged it back to mine with the help of my trusty Christiania bike : and believe me those things are heavy! So thankyou, Holmleigh Road!

A few weeks ago, one rainy morning, I came across this :

Beautiful 1960′s radio and record player, sadly missing it’s speakers and with the plug cut off. I haven’t got round to fixing it yet, but I am very excited about seeing if it works. When I found it, that rainy day on the way to school, on Forburg Road, I could hardly contain my excitement! To get it home, I had to knock on the door of a school acquaintance, and look truly mad by asking him to shelter my rescued item until I could get a zipcar to pick it up! It was worth it though. As this detail shows, it was Precision Crafted in Great Britain, and it’s not much you can say that about these days!

In the summer, I found this lovely, possibly Ercol dining chair :

I had gone to talk to a school about the possibilities for rehabilitating an unused space  full of Japanese Knotweed, and was trying to look at the back of it in the Housing Estate between Wick Road and Ballance Road, and this was sitting by the bins. Luckily I was able to balance it on the front of my bike and get it home along the canal tow path. You have to get used to people looking at you as if you are crazy, and being called ‘pikey’ by your friends, but I think in both cases, jealousy plays a part! I love this chair all the more for the fact that it has been painted a revolting shade of green, and been used as a saw bench by apparently the clumsiest DIY-er in the world.  I will get round to stripping off the paint eventually, but in the meantime, I’m happy to keep snagging my tights on it, as I love it more every time I see it.

I also found this year, on Richmond Road, two stained glass lampshades, from the late 1970′s : 

I am not absolutely sure I like them yet, but maybe I can pass them on to someone who would… Which is exactly where this whole ‘find free stuff on the street’ thing can get a little dangerous.  You have to be Really Selective, or you will very quickly find your whole house full of  crappy furniture, and you are a candidate for Help Me, I’m a Hoarder.

Is that a Park in your Pocket…?

or are you just pleased to see me?

Ah, Community Gardens! Even our Illustrious Mayor is exhorting us to create new ones in his programme for 100 Pocket Parks.

As a community landscape architect, and as a volunteer, I have been involved in a lot of these, and generally, I love them. Their benefits to community cohesion, health and wellbeing, and enhancement of the environment are many and various.

Dalston Eastern Curve Garden is lovely : right in the middle of a dense urban area with no other green space near by : every time we go there my son goes Lord of the Flies with the other children there, and has to be dragged away after several hours. My friend Ali, sock genius extraordinaire,  holds a knitting group there, and now there’s a cafe in it, you can even get cake. There’s a gardening group run by volunteers as well, apparently, and they are growing all sorts of amazing fruit and veg.

I love the place wholeheartedly and unreservedly, and love the benefits it brings to the Community, but I have no illusions, and not a little cynicism, about how it was procured and built, because Community it wasn’t.

The project was conceived about a decade  ago, in the Illustrious Council’s plan for Dalston Town Centre : it was a lot bigger at that point, but no matter. The money for it (and it was a lot) came from The Public Purse, and the design of it was carried out by a range of high profile ‘funky’ architects and designers. That huge overengineered building you see there was designed by a team of architects and built by a contractor. Ditto the layout of the garden by a landscape architect ; it wasn’t necessary to consult on the design much, as designing gardens like this isn’t ‘rocket science’ apparently.

I know it is easier to design places without getting too bogged down with the public ; they get in the way, they don’t understand the process, they complain about things you can’t change, they don’t understand why the council can find 40 grand for a garden but can’t sort out the mould on their ceiling. It’s a long process, and it is one you can ignore if your garden can get by on its location, like Dalston Eastern Curve, but if your garden has to depend on the long term good will of the people you hope will love it, then you have to engage them in the process, not just the product.

When I became a landscape architect, I thought I would be able to facilitate  the transformation of the  environment, and communities by the same process : in reality, most companies, including those whose stated aim ii is (Groundwork, I mean you), have found it much easier to simply trot out ‘projects’ on the ground, and blame communities’ apathy for their speedy vandalism and abandonment.

Of course these projects won’t happen without the skilled, educated professionals that bring so much vision, passion and commitment, but whose responsibility is it, if not ours, to make sure these projects have community at their heart.

OFFERED : Sony TV (not flat screen)

I would like a new TV : mine is about seven years old, and has just started doing a weird flippy thing at the bottom, which I am thinking is probably the beginning of the end for it’s poor old CATHODE RAY.

I have just joined freecycle, and so my inbox is full to bursting with people who WANT all sorts of great things, but seem to have only crap to OFFER. : Billy bookcases abound, as do used maternity equipment ( I am a frugal mother, but, Ew!) and, of course, large sized televisions, that will need picking up.

Now, have I got the spirit of freecycle wrong? I thought it was a way of reducing waste by giving away items you can no longer use, NOT as a free disposal service for people who are chucking away a perfectly good, quite expensive item, because they’ve bought a newer, posher, flatter, screener one.

I know I’ll get banned if I do this, but I would like to :

A. Pretend I want their telly, then fail to pick it up. Maybe several times, under the alias of several specially created identities.

B. Email them to suggest a good use for their old telly, as a stand for their new flat screen one.

C. Email them to ask why they can’t use it until it breaks.

D. Email them to ask if I can have their flat screen one, and they keep the perfectly good ‘old’ one.

Meanwhile, I am sitting smugly in front of my soon-to-be-kaput telly, hoping it will get on with it so I can have a new FLAT SCREEN one before Christmas, and not have to feel guilty. Yay!

Yaaa-aawn….

I have been feeling a bit guilty recently about how lazy I’ve become, which is odd because I don’t usually bother with  guilt : it’s the ultimate in wasted effort, and I’m either too lazy or have better things to do!!

A Google search  for ‘lazy person’ gives you lots of fat men on sofas thus :

and lots of humorous aphorisms about the ‘benefits’ of laziness : eg

Language shows our culture’s disapproval of laziness :  its opposites are desperately keen : hard-working, industrious, diligent, enthusiastic, motivated, ambitious. I have myself spent a fair bit of time over the last few days telling an eight year old that ‘I can’t be bothered’ is something to be ashamed about, not a proud boast.

I am, however, just reading The One Straw Revolution by Masunobe Fukuoka, which is an explanation of the author’s experience of natural farming  (no digging, no chemicals, no compost, no weeding) : written in 1975, it’s really challenging some of my ideas about farming : number one being that it’s really hard work : get up at dawn to milk and feed and muck out : grinding work under the sun all day, very little reward, drop exhausted into bed. Fukuoka, though, being not just a farmer but a philosopher, took the view that our apparent need to be working constantly is part of our separation from nature, and that farming ought to leave ample free time for poetry, and enjoying life’s simple pleasures.

Capitalism, which was and is the primary separator of humans from nature,  can’t tolerate this kind of laziness : we must all be occupied full time in chasing money, so we can buy stuff to support the economy, and fill the strange empty feeling inside us : it scares us with the threat of scarcity, and tells us that if we have nothing or do nothing we will be nothing.

Our own dear prime minister, all freshly fired up from two weeks of quaffing among the athletic elites in the olympic machine, has decreed that all children must do compulsory competitive team sports, ostensibly to make them more competitive in other areas of life. All the parents I saw interviewed said that for children, the emphasis should be on fun, not winning, but hey, what do they know? I want the emphasis of everything to be on fun, even for adults!

I have been a hard-working, industrious, diligent, enthusiastic, motivated,  ambitious over-achiever ever since I discovered it got attention from adults. But you know what? I don’t think I can be bothered any more ; can I just have a few chickens and somewhere to grow food?

You Should Be ME!

This Will Destroy You

This is what comes out of Google Image for ‘relentlessly competitive’ : a bored Scottish band sitting in front of a badly-wound hose!

I have been thinking about competitiveness this week : I dunno, maybe being bombarded with sporting events starts to have an effect after a while!

 

As a parent, you quite often come across people who make you question, and ultimately shape, your core values. We went swimming yesterday, my child and I, with the most relentlessly competitive family I know, so while me and my son were playing sharks in the shallow end, messing about with floats, chatting,  and having fun, the kid who could swim already was being exhorted to swim widths for 20 quid, while the one who couldn’t was anxiously trying to make a similar bargain, and being told he’d have to learn to swim first, and to stop touching the bottom with his feet.  Now, I’m all for bribing children, if it’s the only way, but something about the crass way this poor child was being made to bargain for some self esteem in the form of cash made me have to go right to the other side of the pool immediately.

Anthropological studies have shown that people in ‘natural’ hunter gatherer societies, will not do more work than they need to, in order to eat. There are other things to do : play, chew hallucinogenic leaves, have sex, snooze, chat, eat : all very fine, you might say, but no one ever built an empire on that basis, eh? Our system of late capitalism works by removing our innate sense of well-being and self-esteem, and replacing it with an anxious feeling that other people have more than us, and are therefore better, and we should work longer hours to get more stuff so we can wave our cash in their faces, and then we will feel good about ourselves, or they will feel bad, which is more or less the same thing.

There is a part of me that knows that fear of failure is a powerful driver of success : many millionaires speak of feeling that nothing was ever good enough for their parents. Would you rather be the mother of a millionaire tortured by self-doubt and low self esteem, or a contented underacheiver?

 

Only people living under capitalism would even recognise this as a legitimate question.

Interestingly, capitalist economics is based on the premise of a constant line of growth, stretching into infinity : ever increasing markets, with ever more of us having as much as we want of everything for ever. In nature, however, there are no lines, only cycles : growth and decay, reaction and reaction, expansion, contraction, breathe in, breathe out…

Status & Sustainability

I have been thinking a lot recently about my change of career direction : I used to be a Landscape Architect, and now I am a community gardener. I never believed I could get so excited about composting and soil.

When I left college, my contemporaries were all interested in what they called ‘European minimalism’ ; aiming to design high status places in public squares, to work with rich developers and big name architects, and it was all about you getting to design something to show how good you are at design. I wanted to design meaningful places, and help to transform communities through transforming their public spaces : the kind of projects that proper designers looked down on, and probably still do.

It always worried me, that other people in my profession weren’t interested in the slightest in the environmental impact of their work, and I found it extraordinary that it was so difficult, not to mention much more expensive, to reuse or recycle materials already on site, or to specify materials with convincing low carbon credentials.

I am in many ways, much more comfortable in community gardening : I am constantly surprised that people know so little about how to grow food, but glad to be rediscovering my own knowledge, which has all come from experience. A little part of me, though, imagines what my ex-colleagues would think : they must all be earning loads, and working all hours, while I am scraping in a fraction of what I used to get, but still avoiding having to make my son do a 12 hour day so I can. I am thankful.

Can you smell the rain?

I was in Edmonton, North London, talking to a school gardening club about sustainable food growing the other day when I was asked this question : I must have been banging on, as I do,  about maintaining soil fertility, working with nature etc,  when one of the mums asked me this : “Is it true you can smell in the air when it is going to rain? Because all my friends say I am crazy, because I can tell”  and she literally punched the air, and said “Yessssssss” when I told her that you can definitely smell and feel moisture in the air ahead of rain, and that what the wind is doing is also a good indicator of local weather systems.

It reminded me again of how alienated most people are from their environment :  all other animals use their senses instinctively and without question : if they feel a storm coming, they want to take shelter.

If you grow up in the country, like I did (see below!), in the seventies, when parenting was a lot more ‘free range’ than now, then maybe it does give you more understanding of  how nature works. If you are out in the woods a mile from home without even an acrylic jumper,  some idea of how to anticipate weather systems can come in handy!

I don’t see, through my work with schools, very much awareness of  sustainable or whole life cycle growing systems, but an awful lot of “But can you buy that in B&Q?”, and ” we just wanted to grow something quickly, so the kids could see it”, and ” I don’t think we have time for that in the school day”.  But just teaching children that if you plant a seed and water it, it will grow, magical as it is, is only the beginning of the story.

I am happy that gardening is part of the national curriculum, and I appreciate that capitalism has burrowed into all our souls, and made us feel that we can have all that we want, right now and forever, but I think we need to teach the next generation that ensuring food security is not only more complex, but a lot more exciting than simply shopping in a different retail shed.