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Permaculture Update
A Pile of Rocks As promised, I have more photos for you. Roger and his team have worked with all stops out for this last month and a half. Lots of heavy labor, skilled work and planning has been done. One of the big decisions that needs to be made next is about water. Besides digging a couple of unlined rain catchment ponds, which will perculate run-off into the soil and be dry most of the year, should there be a lined pond that would stay wet all year for birds and other wildlife. This pond would be cleaned by filtering the water through a bog area. Also, should I invest in a huge above-ground water tank to collect the thousands of gallons of water that pours off my house roof during rainstorms? So we are interviewing pond builders, and having pow-wows with other professionals who know about water.In the meanwhile, many trees and small plants have been planted, about half the pile of urea spread and tilled in.
Tilled and mulched I am not an advocate of tilling in healthy soil. It tears apart the microbes and underground inhabitants that are what changes dirt into soil. About twelve years ago when I first moved here, I succumbed to those enticing Troy-Bilt tiller ads and purchased a 6 HP tiller; an enormous investment at the time, but with all this weedy property I thought it would help me ‘fix’ the soil. The tiller came dismantled. After a lot of trouble putting it together and getting it running, the machine I bought turned out not to be a tiller, but a device that endeavors to separate your arms from your torso and dislocate each vertibrae in your spine, all without actually tilling anything. The Troy-Bilt ad photos that show a neatly dressing young woman casually standing by her tiller pushing it with one hand, leads one to believe that the tillers are easy to run. Actually, the lady in the photo is having a good time only because the tiller isn’t turned on! She’s leaning on it! Someone made all those groves in the dirt with a hoe, because that tiller sure didn’t! You may surmise from that rant that I didn’t have much luck tilling, so the machine sat in my shed until recently. It was just repaired and yesterday, having been starved for so long, it tried to eat Roger as he used it around my property. Roger is a big, strong man, so I don’t feel so badly about having been so unsuccessful with using the tiller that I wanted to chain it in a dark celler where it wouldn’t hurt anyone again. Despite the evil tendancies of this machine, much urea has been tilled in around the planted trees, which is the first layer in the plant guilds that form the edible forest garden. Under the trees, other components of the guilds are being planted. Those components perform what roles plants in a natural forest hold: mulchers, groundcovers, shade, insect-attractors, nitrogen-fixers, and nutrient-miners. The guilds will grow larger as the project unfolds.
Jose and Roger with the first load of rocks Rocks are a wonderful focal point in any garden, and we needed a lot of them. With predicted rain this weekend, and the probability that the 10-wheeler wouldn’t be able to access the yard with the soil any softer, sped up the delivery date to… ASAP. Two deliveries of boulders were deposited today, and starting at 7 am tomorrow, several more loads will be dropped. I can just see all the lizards on the property rubbing their little hands together in anticipation of a great king-of-the-hill push-up contest. Two sections of my wooden fence had to be disassembled so the truck could pull directly into the yard. Later, the boulders will be placed with a small Bobcat. This is a nice mixture of rock, and this first load pictured shows the largest of the boulders. This is about 12 tons of rock. I can’t wait for time alone to go climbing! 🙂
I asked Roger if he knew a really good carpenter to help build some items for me, and he did. Local carpenter Jay Tull was brought into the job and is also a craftsman of skill, inspiration, problem-solving, and a lot of fun ideas. He made two top-bar bee hives first of all (I’ll go into bee hives in another post, as well as my blue bee garden), using almost all leftover materials on the property. They are beautiful. Next, I wanted to build a little fenced area to block off my trash and recycling cans so my long-suffering neighbors didn’t have to look at them anymore.
Garbage Can Closet or Guest House? So with lumber and more of that broken concrete (which actually came from his property!), he and Roger’s team are working on an incredible enclosure that probably should be a guest house! The walls, made of leftover fencing, and a gate will be added probably tomorrow after the cement all dries. Jay suggested that the cement chunks be cemented in rather than surrounded with gravel for easy hosing down. There is room for a planter on the side! Another project Jay is working on concurrently is a chicken tractor.
- Chicken Tractor in the Making
There are many websites devoted to just images of chicken tractors. These are portable chicken coops that rest on the ground. The idea is that the chickens root around in the ground weeding, pooing, eating bugs, etc., which is all extremely healthy for the birds and great for the soil. Then in a few days you move the tractor a little ways and set it down and they start on a new batch. I found a photo of one I liked, and Jay is building it almost entirely out of used wood from my old sheds, and wheels off my old gate. It works like an extremely heavy wheelbarrow; apparently the image I gave Jay to work from used two people to move it, but he’s adapted it for one person. I’ll show you the finished version in a couple of days. We’ve already joked about entering it in the Fallbrook Christmas Parade.
Other things that have been going on are the building of benches and seats for viewing areas around the property, using the materials that are here.
Jose and Francisco, Roger’s team, have stripped some of the palm trunks and cut them into chairs. This shows one set up on the newly repaired erosion area just above the barranca. Along the fence are planted more stonefruit, and on the other side of the fence are planted berry vines. The seat overlooks the mature toyons, sumac and willows that grow down the embankment, and a great place for bird watching. A garden isn’t a garden if there aren’t resting places for you to just sit and listen. 
Stumps along the Liquidamber AlleeToday Roger saw an adult kingsnake under the native plants on the embankment, and it startled and slithered away. I think this may be our annual visitor to our upper pond and birdbath. Every summer he shows up once or twice looking for mice and getting a good long drink from our pond, then disappears. I’m hoping he has his eye on our gopher population.
California Slendar Salamander So the loud machinery, sounds of screeching rocks sliding on metal, and the whiff of urea continues on my usually quiet and unobtrusive property. Some day in the near future it will again be quiet, and all the animals I’ve scared off will return. Actually, many birds have been enjoying the piles of brush, and Roger has encorporated some brushy piles into the design just to allow the birds and bunnies and lizards small havens.
These piles are small, and are located well away from the house so as not to cause a fire hazard. Also I was sorting through the stack of old plywood on the weekend and uncovered two California Slendar Salamanders. One was larger than the other, so I think that was the female. I removed them to my upper pond area so that they wouldn’t get squished. These wonderful discoveries of life on my property make me all the more determined to complete this project in as a compassionate and organic way as possible. My two elderly dogs, Sophie and General Mischief, have been having such a hard time of it. They lived their lives here outside, sleeping on an old futon in a small garage-type building. Now that they are both deaf, and Sophie likes to sneak out to go visit my long-suffering and wonderful neighbors, I’m afraid of them being injured with the gate opening and closing and large trucks pulling through. So, for the first time in their lives, they’ve had to adjust to living in my library on a sheet-protected couch. You can see how hard it is for them:
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Spring Is Here
Spring is here Today I really felt that Southern California had shrugged off Winter. It was warm and a little humid out, my Satsuma plum is in full bloom, and my desert tortoise (endangered species; I’m his third owner and he’s licensed) Homer came out of hibernation in the closet. He’s still sleepy and grumpy, and I can relate to that.
I also saw the first Red Diamondback Rattlesnake today, newly emerged from hibernation, sunning itself in the cleft of a boulder about head height. My hiking buddy Alex and I were at Santa Margarita River Preserve, and there was this somnamulant reptile soaking in the sun and enjoying the radiating warmth of the rock. We posed right next to him or her, and he or she didn’t care. This would not be the case on a hot summer’s day!
This intermediate dry spell is important for the construction of the permaculture garden because the soil is still too wet to allow trucks down on the property. We are investigating the best way to create the ponds, which at this time will incorporate a dry rock creekbed that will catch and channel rainwater and allow it to perculate into the soil, another pond for water holding, and a possible natural swimming pond. The swimming pond works on the same concept as a natural greywater system. Beside the swimming area is another deep area filled with different grades of rock. Water plants which clean water with their roots are planted on top in a naturalistic way. Water is pumped into this area from the bottom, and as the water rises through the gravel and plant roots it becomes clear, then is transported into the swimming area. No chemicals needed; in fact, chemicals would ruin the biological balance of the pond. The swimming pond is clean and ready for human use, and also provides riparian habitat, food and acts as a watering hole for many animals. They are popular in Europe and other countries, and are slowly catching on here in America. Of course, people throughout time have swum in gunky swimming ponds; this is just making one for oneself. This is a YouTube link to a UK pond builder. He is hawking a video on his project, which is only available in the UK and thus wouldn’t play on US DVD players, but this short video tells a lot about swimming ponds: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JoQthEBl6U . Clicking on this link will navigate you away from this page. I just love his Liverpudlian accent.
Today I became the owner of clumping giant bamboo, and a Buddha’s Hand citron. So very cool! The bamboo can be used for all kinds of structures, and with the citron I can make my own candied fruit for desserts. Did you know that candied fruit is called succade? Nope, neither did I.
Creepy, but fun and very fragrant. The fruits are mostly peel, and are used to scent rooms and clothes in Asia. Also planted were various stonefruits, including 4-in-1 apples, apricot, cherry, pear, peaches, nectarines and Asian pear. I also became the proud owner of two little kumquat trees. They are loaded with fruit, and since they were purchased from an organic nursery, this crop doesn’t have to go to waste (you eat kumquats whole).
So, after a morning of Zumba at the Fallbrook Community Center, planting and feeding my many animals, then four hours of intense hiking, my legs are trying to get me to walk upstairs to bed and stay there. Sounds like a good idea to me.
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The Monster in the Pond
Ok, ok, I’ll succumb to popular demand and tell my pond story. A number of years ago I came into possession of free pond liner and flagstone. My daughter and I hacked down a juniper that had taken over our front yard, pickaxed out all the roots and rocks, and after watching many YouTube how-to videos, built our Perfect Pond. I indulged in waterlilies, a priceylotus, and some other cute little water plants. We set free a few mosquito fish, and enjoyed our organic water feature. Well, it was better than we ever thought. It attracted birds, dragonflies, and Pacific Chorus Frogs. In fact, in early February, every frog in the county makes its way over to our little 400 gallon pond and begins their mating calls. They are so loud that we’ve had to shine a flashlight out the window at night to quiet them down to hear a movie! Soon we had evidence of amphibian genetic success.
Frog spawn! Then tadpoles, and tiny frogs that mostly disappeared somewhere until the following February. The mosquito fish found similar romantic success and soon numbered in the hundreds.
Other than giving the non-human youth a Lover’s Lane, as it were, the pond had its ups and downs; the raccoons just loved getting in and knocking over the expensive lotus plant, so it never flourished. Some very creepy flat-headed black wormy things appeared in the filter, the dragonfly larvae looked like the stars of B-movies in miniature, and some of the plants tried to take over the world. After a few years, I decided that there was too much plant growth and it needed to be thinned out. With rubber gloves on hands and an explorer’s enthusiasm, I went in. (Oh, and by the way, NEVER put pea gravel in your pond, no matter how many people say to on the Internet or in books. It’s too sharp to stand on, it can wreck your liner with its pointy edges, and it makes a dead biomass on the bottom of your pond. Thanks, I had to say it. I hate pea gravel. That’s my rant for the night.)
So I was doing all right, standing in my knee boots, groping around under the murky water pulling and untangling long root and stem systems of these too-happy plants, when suddenly…. I felt something. Something that wasn’t right. Something that was too large to belong in our little pond with its one gallon happy plants in it. Something that felt long and nobby like a huge slimy neckbone. A monsterous, nobby, slimy neckbone.
Now, I’m not a squemish person, nor one to back down at a challenge, but this THING was so not right that I was dropping it and getting my boots out of that pond pronto. After watching to see if it had followed, and satisfied that it hadn’t taken offence, I decided on perhaps an abridged version of the ten-foot-pole ploy, and used a rake to gently heave it out of the water. It was all tangled up in my wonderful waterlily leaves, so I tried to untangle as gently as I could, crooning soothingly to it as I worked. Then, to my horror, I discovered that …. the monster neck WAS my sweet little waterlily! How could that have happened? In only three years!
The one gallon black plastic pot had apparently fallen over (thank you, racoonies), and this plant wasn’t going to wimp out like the lotus. Ohhhh no. It grew out of the pot and made a U-turn heading back towards the light. The neck was about 3 inches in diameter, about the size of a human’s, I’m guessing, but more alien. Observing the true underwater nature of my waterlily made me feel like Rosemary of Rosemary’s Baby fame: my little darling was a slimy hideous monster. So, I did the only rational thing I could think of. I shoved the whole darn thing back into the pond, prodded it with the rake (the plant grabbed the tines, I know it did!) until I couldn’t see it anymore (the arch of the neck kept protruding from the water surface! I had to almost beat it underwater). Then I went in the house and had a hot bath to get the slime and smell off of me, and try to recooperate. You bet I locked the doors.
In conclusion, the invasive pond plants were ripped out, I exchanged some water to help keep the biomass alive, and I learned something about myself. I’m not afraid of black widow spiders, snakes, heights, caves, or blood. I am, however, afraid of two things. One has been a long-standing fear of high-school-aged students, dating back to before I even was one, and I don’t think anyone will challenge me on that one. The other thing I’m afraid of is that waterlily in my pond. Its been several years now since this incident, and under the water its been growing… growing…. I haven’t waded back in there since.