Kerrplunk

This weekend I went to the Golden Gate chapter of the California Rare Fruit Grower’s Scion Exchange, and if that is gobbledegook to you you are not alone but you are also missing out.

Plants can do many things humans cannot. One of the most useful properties possessed by many plants is the ability to be propagated asexually from cuttings. (Of course, if you have plants that you don’t want that are capable of propagating themselves asexually, like for instance invasive blackberry, it can also be one of the most annoying properties.) The simplest way to use this property is by cutting a piece off a plant you want, say a neighbor’s superior fig tree, and potting it up with a degree of care. Skill and luck both play a role in getting the cutting to root properly, but once it does it is a new plant that is genetically identical to the one it was taken from. Certain plants do this well–figs are one of the easiest. A side benefit is that many plants propagated this way tend to bear fruit earlier than those started from seed. In some cases, though, their lifespan may be shorter—the plant’s age doesn’t reset to zero the day you take the cutting.

Many fruit trees are not so cavalier about bits getting broken off and stuck in the ground. All is not lost, however—the ancient technology of grafting permits the gardener with a little skill and a lot of chutzpah to cut a piece of a plant and surgically attach it to another, compatible plant. This can be done for many reasons—apple trees don’t produce true from seed, for instance, so all named varieties have been produced by grafting cuttings onto an apple rootstock. If you have an apple tree that produces apples good enough to eat, chances are it was grafted—look at the trunk close to the soil line for a bulge or irregularity in the bark.

Then again, you might have an apple tree that produces two or more varieties, also through the magic of grafting—you can graft a branch onto an established tree to produce a different variety of the same fruit. In fact, because stone fruit are often compatible with each other, some gardeners with small yards benefit from a “fruit salad” tree that bears plums, apricots, and nectarines throughout the spring and summer.

Grafting is a skill that any gardener can develop. It takes attention to cleanliness and detail, and tools such as a sharp grafting knife and some grafter’s tape or parafilm. There are good videos to get you started (peruse the right hand column for more). Not every gardener wants to graft, but if you want to grow fruit trees and you have limited space, it’s an excellent tool in your toolkit.

For the community garden I’ve been volunteering with, I brought back several figs to start from cuttings, as well as pepino dulce, goji, a superior variety of loquat discovered by Katie Wong that she calls Doxie’s Delight (it produced loquats as big as hen’s eggs in her East Bay yard, and there is a loquat seedling sprouting in the garden that needs to be moved anyway), some pluots to try grafting onto a plum or apricot tree, and a couple varieties of apple to try on our apple tree. It’s a $4 donation to get in the door, and scionwood is free. You can pay $3 for rootstock and $3 for custom grafting to be done for you. If you’re in the Bay Area and have never been to the Scion Exchange, keep an eye out for announcements next January. If you live in a different region, look for a scion exchange near you… FOR SCIONS!

I’ve been flipping through this book online as I’ve been researching drought-tolerant plants suitable for creating a silvipasture system for goats and chickens. My plan is to design a management-intensive multicell pasture for dairy goats and a dual-purpose chicken flock that will increase soil fertility while providing excellent milk, meat, and egg production, support good animal health and happiness, and do so in a small space.

The rationale for this mixed-species management-intensive grazing plan is as follows: Goats and chickens are each vulnerable to different sets of parasites. Parasite load on pasture is a big problem for goats. Chickens, however, can consume goat parasites with impunity, and in fact actually benefit from being grazed on a pasture with mammal manure and the insects that feed on it, which in turn make good food for the chickens. For their part, the goats benefit from decreased parasite load and fewer flies. Both goats and chickens benefit from mixed pasture and browse although in different ways—goats prefer to eat shrub and tree leaves and bark, while chickens prefer the growing tips of new grass. But goats also eat some grass and forbs and chickens can benefit from the fruit and seeds of many shrubs. An ecosystem consisting of mixed grasses, forbs, and woody shrubs and trees tends to be more resilient and productive when impacted by animals than an ecosystem of grass alone. This is especially true when plants are selected with care for their mutually beneficial interactions. Animal grazing in such ecosystems benefits plants, animals, and soils most when animals are moved through the pasture, allowing enough time for the plants to rest and recover before they face grazing and browsing again. The benefits of management-intensive grazing are widely accepted and include more robust animal health as well as decreased carbon emissions and even carbon sequestration in soils. Factors to consider in developing a schedule for goat/chicken pasture rotation include grass and forb regrowth periods as well as fly larva and other parasite hatch cycles, factors that will vary depending on climate, plant selection, and season of the year. In some regions a combination of rotation and mixture of plant species may reduce the need for supplemental feed to virtually none.

Limiting factors to management intensive pasture systems include the expense of fencing and the variability of pasture regrowth, which creates the need for close supervision of livestock rotation by a skilled manager. While the former may be mitigated by the use of inexpensive portable electric fencing, there is no substitute for the latter. Limitations of mixing shrubs with grasses include possibly a greater expense to establish, the relative slow growth of some shrubs, and the potential to shade out desired grass and forbs. These limitations can be overcome by carefully selecting complementary shrubs and pasture species, using those that are affordable and suited to your site, and choosing shrubs that grow rapidly.

These are some shrub species I’ve been considering for our site and the benefits and challenges they offer:

(more…)

With all the snowstorms blanketing much of the US right now, I feel a bit guilty that I’m still visiting family in Florida, where I grew up and where it is a cool 72ºF/22ºC outside.  On top of that I’m hearing that in the Southwest, natural gas shortages are leaving many homes without heat. (One Twitterer complains that President Obama caused the shortage by blocking drilling for natural gas and oil; I think this person misses the point that the shortage is caused by the unaccustomed cold weather shutting down refining and distribution facilities.)

We can’t rely on fossil fuels for long—natural gas peak production may be a few years further off than the crude oil peak, which by all reasonable accounts is either here or imminent. With all the attention the generation of electricity gets in the media—and there’s no denying solar photovoltaic, solar thermal, and wind turbine electricity sells pageviews—one of the most crucial problems we will have to face in our transition off fossil fuels is heating our homes.

It is becoming more and more apparent to everyone with the sense and knowledge to see it that global warming climate change weirding doesn’t mean six fewer months of winter. It means more severe weather all around—worse storms, worse droughts, worse snows, and worse summers. So planning for heating our homes is still going to be a major challenge. We need solutions that will keep us as warm as we need to be, without making the pollution and climate change problems worse. And surprisingly I think a big part of that is going to be firewood.

But we’ll need to manage our firewood in ways that don’t just sustain the status quo but actually help regenerate the land we’re part of. And a big part of this, I believe, is going to be establishing coppice systems.

Coppice is the practice of cutting trees so that they resprout from the stumps. Famously, Europeans and Native Americans have practiced coppice silviculture for firewood, basketry, and building materials. Willow is an especially favored species for basketry and certain types of building—the wattle and daub houses of ancient Britain come to mind. But willow makes lousy firewood. So what species coppice well and make good firewood?

Alder, ash, and black locust are all good coppice trees, resprouting easily from stumps and growing quickly. Ash is very good firewood. Reports differ on alder and black locust, and I suspect the efficiency of one’s stove will have a lot to do with how completely these woods combust (on which more later). One species I’d like to highlight, especially for people in the southwestern US right now, is Parkinsonia aculeata, also known as horsebean, jerusalem thorn, and blue palo verde, among other common names.

What’s good about this tree? Well, for one thing, it’s drought tolerant. The effects of global climate change on local rainfall patterns is not yet known, but it’s possible that areas that already get very little rainfall will get even less, and some areas with moderate rainfall will become drier while others will become much wetter. For the desert southwest and arid parts of California, Parkinsonia aculeata could be very useful. It is partly cold hardy, tolerating temperatures down to 18ºF/-7ºC. It is also leguminous, with the potential to restore nitrogen to the soil, although I believe this has not been studied in this particular plant. And when cut it regrows from the stump. It is also good bee forage, attracting pollinators with its bright yellow flowers. Its main drawback is that it can be invasive—because it propagates readily from seed or from cuttings, it’s hard to control. Arid environments help to control its reproduction from seed; it shouldn’t be planted in areas where there is more water than it needs. And here’s where another benefit of this plant comes in handy—it makes excellent goat browse. Livestock eat its leaves and seed-containing pods, and the fresh pods have a sweet edible pulp.

How might you manage this plant, given its tendency to become invasive in areas where it gets more water than it needs?

Well, first, I’d avoid planting Parkinsonia aculeata in moist meadows, streambanks, or near ponds or irrigation. Dry upland slopes are a better place. Second, cut it back on a regular basis for wood, and don’t plant more than you can use. Don’t leave fresh cuttings lying around on top of fertile soil. Finally, graze goats through the planting on a rotating basis so they can browse back new growth and seedlings and eat some of the edible seed pods. Pigs might also enjoy the pods and would probably disturb the ground under established trees to discourage new seedlings, but be careful they don’t rip up the roots of the established trees you’re coppicing.

It’s also important to get back to wood stoves that can efficiently and cleanly burn small-diameter firewood. If we aggravate our air pollution woes with particulates from incomplete burning, we’ll make our situation much worse. If we exacerbate the problem of carbon release by burning up existing trees and releasing their carbon without planting enough new trees to store the carbon we’re releasing and then some, we’ll make our situation much worse.

We’re running out of the carbon trust fund we’ve inherited in the form of fossil fuels, and we need a wise plan to help us live within our ecological means.

Just a short note to say I’m very pleased with the students in my introduction to permaculture course at New College of Florida this January. As so often happens in permaculture learning encounters, I learned as much from them as they did from me. They presented their final project today and I could tell it was exciting, inspiring, and new for their faculty. The project is on the way to implementation over the next year—I am very excited for them and hope they have a lot of fun with it.

I just finished reading A Language Older Than Words by Derrick Jensen, for the first time, although it was first published in 2000. I bought it this morning at a used bookstore and, I’m embarrassed to say, read it straight through in one sitting, like a starvation victim bolting through a heaping plateful of food. I read that way often. The last book I read, a couple of days ago, was Mushrooms Demystified by David Arora, and I managed to space it out over four days—but only because it’s a nine hundred page field guide. I even skimmed many of the less interesting mushroom entries. Derrick Jensen’s book is entirely different, though. I simply couldn’t put it down, as much as I often wanted to. And if Arora is remarkable for making it fun to read entry after entry of thick description of often microscopically distinguishable fungi, Jensen is remarkable for making it impossible to look away from his eloquent description of some of the very worst things, the most objectively horrific things, and allowing me to come out the other side of that experience changed, affirmed, anguished, but not depressed—activated.

It’s a strange experience to read something that tells me nothing that is new to me, rather confirms my own experiences of reality, and feel turned inside out.

There are spaces where I differ with Jensen. He uses the word ‘violence’ where perhaps I would use ‘aggression’ and the word ‘aggression’ where perhaps I would use ‘violence.’ His understanding of sex differs a bit from mine, which is not surprising—what is remarkable is instead that our understandings of sex and the body are so similar, he as far as I know a heterosexual non-transgender man who experienced sexual abuse as a child and I a queer transgender man with no such history. Unlike him, I’m not yet sure that the search for solutions is futile, though like him I’ve come to agree that the solutions we have so far heard proposed are at best inadequate and at worst as destructive as the problems they attempt to solve.

Like Leonard Cohen, I’m longing, praying, to have an appropriate response to these things I see and perceive and understand around me and within me now; their awesome beauty and incredible anguish. It’s not coming yet, not in words; it’s coming in sensations and desires to do certain things and be certain places and participate in certain processes, and not other things, places, processes. There is a change creeping over the land, and it’s not going to be like my new age friends think it will be, and it’s not going to be like the bunker full of ammo people think it will be, and it sure as hell is not going to be like I think it will be, so what is the point of trying to rise to meet it instead of sheltering under the nearest cardboard folding table? Just, I think, to try to rise to meet it. I don’t know if there are salmon on the other side. I hope so. I don’t know if there are humans on the other side. I hope so. If there are, I know we’ll all be changed by the passage. I hope the change is one that makes continuing the destruction we’ve systematized impossible forever.

I’m no longer in a position to frown sanctimoniously at environmentalists who talk blithely of necessary reductions in population in terms of numbers of humans and percentage of decrease. I can only argue passionately that the peoples who have not caused this destruction must not be allowed, as they are presently being allowed, to bear the burden of that decrease. If they are we will have no human teachers from whom to learn how to live. And while Jensen offers us the possibility of learning from animal teachers, from plant teachers, from the land itself, even from the stars—which to me offers incredible hope where many other readers have detected only despair—I think we need our human teachers. We learn how to learn from the humans in our lives. By their example we learn how to relate to the animals, the plants, the land. By their example we learn whether birds, rocks, and trees should be regarded as persons with something to teach us, or resources from which to profit. There is no reason to attempt to listen to a resource.

It’s too easy, and unworthy, to dismiss Jensen as a doomer. What he’s saying is nothing new. The facts are thoroughly substantiated. In this book, he doesn’t even really delve into the realities of peak oil and climate change. He speaks of the extinction of the salmon, but takes it as a given that his readers will realize that their destruction means the destruction of the forests that the salmon have for millions of years fertilized with their bodies, bringing back upstream the nutrients that the rivers continuously wash into the oceans. Our current culture, predicated as it is on the assumption that the living beings on which the fate of the world rests are resources to be traded for cash as quickly as possible, is unsustainable. That’s a long word that means ‘fatal.’ Our culture is fatal. Consumption is a terminal disease. We cannot sustain life based on an exchange of life for dollars. We will run out of life long before we run out of dollars. This is simple truth; it is because it is vitally important to the continuance of our way of life, our culture, that we not understand this truth that it sounds to us like the gloomydoomy prognostications of some deluded cassandra.

What gives hope is the reminder that there are other alternatives. That they are as close to us as our own heartbeat. That they are within our reach, although not without what seems to us now a tremendous sacrifice. It is a terrible leap of faith to trust that might be anything on the other side worth sacrificing for; that it is greater than what we must give up is as true as it is hard to believe.

Jensen’s ultimate message is not about a particular simple solution. It is clearest when he says essentially that if we love enough, we will do what is right not because it is right, or because we are obligated, or because our lives depend on it, but because we cannot do otherwise. That if we listen hard enough to the land—not to humans shouting simple solutions in our ears, not to PETA or the organic feedlot people, not to the biofuels people or the solar people, not to T. Boone Pickens or to Derrick Jensen, but to the land and the animal, plant, and mineral people that make it up—we will know what it is that we must do. But first we must listen, and in order to listen we must love.