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!

This is the time of year when the fruit trees grow legs.

They become spidery beings, some of them. Their branches, burdened with too much fruit to bear, risk breaking unless some human comes along and props them with a forked stake. They look like they’ve taken to walking very slowly with spindly legs across the land. Some, with only one branch bending downward under the weight of their developing fruit, become like human people standing proudly upright with the aid of a cane.

This culture makes us so determined to do more, make more, get more, provide more, produce more, that even the trees we breed don’t know when enough is enough. If human gardeners didn’t come through and thin the fruit, hardly any would ripen. If human gardeners didn’t prop up branches endangered by our love of excess, they would break and be lost, fruit and all. Each tree is expected to return on the orchardist’s investment every year, to produce harvests so great no family could appreciate the abundance. What’s amazing is that so many of them manage it.

Apple and pear trees planted here a hundred years ago still stand, and some still give fruit. In places their forks are cleft, as if the trees were rent apart by the burden of their own selflessly-bearing branches.

Welcome to the first week of summer here at Emerald Earth. We’ve had a much longer rainy season than usual here; we even had some cool rainy days last week. But now it’s 94F and it feels like summer is here in earnest. About time; the solstice is coming. (I’ve always counted summer from Beltane to Lammas, fall from Lammas to Samhain, winter from Samhain to Imbolc, and spring from Imbolc to Beltane. But that’s because I’m a big pagan dork, and this year it feels less appropriate than usual.)

I went to Yosemite with Anthony and we had a wonderful time despite getting rained on a lot and snowed on a little and not getting to go backpacking. For me the highlight was learning about native foods and dogbane cordage from Julia Parker, who teaches at the museum there. I brought back some dogbane to work with, and I’m still working on it, just picking it up now and then.

We have more worktraders here now—It’s me, Erica, Moose, Veronica, Ryan, and most lately Genevieve, a pretty full house. We’re stepping on each others’ toes a little more now, but lying around the pond enough smooths over any difficult moments, I like to think.

In the garden the peas are up, the beans are sprouting, the summer squash are starting to squash, and we have more favas and garlic scapes than we know what to do with. The kids are racing the slugs to the strawberries. There is a trail of little yellow Phlomis blossoms (Jerusalem sage, but Liz insists her daughter learn the Latin name of everything) wherever Esther goes; their nectar is the only sugar she’s allowed.

We’ve acquired two more goats, but we’re drying off Nellie and Bella, since they’re about ready to stop producing milk. Although since the Miracle of St. Bella a couple of weeks ago it seems like she’s had another burst of enthusiasm. Bella the goat was getting suspiciously large and lumpy since her heat when I first arrived. So much so, in fact, that I had a dream one night that a white-tail stag had gotten into their paddock and gotten her pregnant with a little deer-goat baby. There was talk that maybe Thunder wasn’t a wether after all. But a couple weeks ago, Erica saw Bella panting in the paddock, and then the next day Abeja saw her “pee” on the stanchion, and a day after that she was more svelte than Nellie. So, either she gave birth to a little invisible spirit goat kid, or she had a false pregnancy, something that is apparently fairly common in goat does. At any rate, she’s still giving milk, so maybe her body still thinks she was pregnant. Yasmin and Zoey, the two new goats, are getting picked on. Yasmin is a pushover, but Zoey is starting to hold her own. I think they’ll do okay. They’re French Alpines to complement the two Oberhaasli we already had.

There was a pig slaughter here a couple of weeks ago. It was faster than Thunder’s killing, and I didn’t feel adequately prepared for it. I’m not looking forward to the first sheep slaughter. But I do think they have been good lives and good deaths.

I was helping Andrew spread seaweed again today and thinking about where all that seaweed is going—a notable vegan cafe in the city buys up a lot of it, for instance—and how many people eat seaweed as part of a vegan diet, feeling glad that they’re not exploiting animal life. I was watching all the little sea bugs dying on the drying racks. Andrew harvests the seaweed by hand with great respect, but he can’t keep from killing the little critters that make the seaweed their home. I don’t see any difference between seaweed and honey in that regard. Backyard beekeepers try not to kill any bees, but sometimes they get smooshed, or they get mites, or a whole hive dies over the winter. I don’t think there is any way to avoid killing animal people, and I’m beginning to believe that simply owning your blood, being conscious of the harm your life does to others, makes a huge difference in how you live. I can’t avoid taking life, but I can strive to make my life worth it to the world as a whole, and make sure I never take life wantonly and work to dismantle the systems that impair the ability of the planet to support life.

And speaking of honey, yesterday we had a beekeeping workshop. It was lots of fun to watch the bees—this particular strain of Italian honeybee is very calm, so while we took reasonable precautions, no one was really worried about getting stung. We got to take out some frames and look at the different kind of cells on the comb. I think I would like to keep bees one day, when I settle on where I’m going to live. You know, in addition to everything else.

And I’m holding more strongly the vision of making this a permanent change in my life—becoming native to some land, making my home there, growing into community there, and making my livelihood mostly from what it can provide me. I’m realizing that I want to make that a reality for me in my future, and furthermore that it’s okay to want someone in my life who is willing to share that with me. That’s a hard realization—because it means wanting something, and wanting something usually means being dissatisfied, being disappointed, being sad, and suffering. But for right now I feel happy, excited, and hopeful. I hope I can translate this wanting into a skillful desire, one that actually improves my ability to be content.

This is what it’s like right now at Emerald Earth–it’s Friday afternoon, and we should be in the sunny garden turning in some soil amendments to prepare a bed for onions, but the garden manager has told us to knock off for the day so she can spend some time with her kid. We’ll work a half day tomorrow, but for now I can relax. It’s wonderfully quiet here in back of the common house–I can hear the gurgle of the little rill behind me making music, and a bird occasionally crying from the redwoods, and the hum of bees going about their work.
This is what it was like this morning at Emerald Earth–Erica and I bestirring ourselves at 7, remembering morning chick care and goat milking chores, and rolling out of our sleeping bags and cots to chill and fog. We splashed water on our faces, bargained about the chick chores, dressed quickly in clothes that felt rimed with frost, and stumbled down the path through the garden, where we met Liz and asked her when we should meet for milking. Reassured that we had time to care for the chicks and get breakfast (what luxury!) before then, we split up. Erica went to take care of the little downy peepers, and I went to make us breakfast. Tonight I’ll do the chick chores–getting them fresh food and water, cutting grass and weeds for them to eat, cleaning their feeders, spreading grit for them to swallow to help digest their food, and then covering their cage for the night to keep them warm.
Since the rain stopped Wednesday, the nights have begun to be mild, the mornings chilly. We didn’t light a fire last night and probably won’t have to tonight either, but getting out of our warm beds into the cold air is hard. The sun also means our batteries are charging, so I can feel okay about spending some of my unexpected break on the computer. The rainy weather is not fun–water and mud gets absolutely everywhere. But the late rains are good for the land. Hopefully we’ll get even a little more before the dry season sets in in earnest. But it’s good to have a break to charge up the batteries. There is a small microhydro system, but it wouldn’t do much more than charge my laptop. The solar cells do the most to charge the batteries that from which we run all the electricity in the community, from the lights to the power tools, and when it’s too dark out to charge them up we have to cut back electricity and occasionally run a gas generator.
Milking is a delicate operation. Emerald Earthers take really good care of the goats and maintain cleanliness throughout every part of the milking process. As a result we can drink the goat milk unpasteurized. Pasteurizing the milk would take away some of its nutritional value, it’s believed, and would add an extra step at the kitchen and complicate the process. They have only two milk goats and a wether right now. Nellie and Bella, who are total pros, just love to be milked–so Thunder is convinced that milking is way more fun than stripping needles off a douglas fir, and he wants in on the action. There’s a lot to do before and after the actual milking. I try to imagine how much more complicated it would be to milk four, or six, let alone twenty or thirty, and my mind balks at it. Milking itself is so soothing and meditative that I want to get a recording of the rhythm of the milk hitting the metal pail.
There are thirty adult hens and a rooster, and sixty young chicks. This morning the hens were wandering the garden–so far it seems that no one knows why the door to their coop was left open, or if any are missing. The chicks have been fine so far. They’re in the feathered dino stage, gangly and awkward, experimenting with adult chicken noises, still impossible to tell the males from the females. The folks at Emerald Earth buy their chicks straight run, meaning an unsexed mix of males and females. Most humans who raise poultry for eggs only buy hen chicks, which means the hatcheries kill the males en masse and throw their corpses into the compost. Emerald Earthers would rather do their own killing in a respectful and humane way, and get some meat for the freezer into the bargain.
Last night we had a few visitors for dinner–Tom B., a chestnut farmer who is our neighbor to the south, his temporary hand Justin, and Andrew, a seaweed harvester who gathers edible seaweed off the coast to sell. I had the impression they were here at least partly to scope out the work traders as help in their various operations as the season progresses. We also had word that two of our neighbors, an older couple with a small farm I think to the west of us, had gotten into a car accident last week and need some help on their property. There is no shortage of work here if you’re willing to do it in trade for chestnuts, seaweed, or other produce. And if you’ve got a place to live and good food, grown in the place you live, what do you need money for?
After milking this morning we started right in on the garden, and by then it was hot enough that I worked shirtless most of the time. Erica and Liz didn’t seem to mind. We got about halfway done before we came in for lunch, and when Liz said she wanted to do the rest tomorrow, neither of us quarreled, even though it will cut into our Saturday. For me it meant time to take a shower, get a few photos, and write down a bit about what I’ve been doing and thinking since I hied myself here.
I’m still madly in crush with this place. I haven’t met anyone here I wouldn’t want to spend more time with. This land is so amazing that I’m even finding things to like about poison oak (it heals damaged land, warning people away while it does the work of restoring human-impacted clayey soil). The work is hard, but the food is good and i sleep well at night. It always takes me a couple of days to get used to using composting toilets and trees again, but that’s not a huge hardship, especially when the result is plenty of clean water. The redwoods on one side of the property, the oak woodland on the other, divided by a stream, the dozens of species of wildflowers in every meadow, all speak to a clean and healthy place to live. The two kids are great to be around, too.
There’s a lot of land here. Emerald Earth property runs from ridge to ridge, 190 acres. And there’s another 100 acres of land in the back of us that our neighbor doesn’t mind us walking on, which is great for foraging for acorns, black trumpets, and blackberries. But the ten Emerald Earthers mostly live in about ten acres (my estimate), leaving much of the land to be as little impacted as possible by human activity. There are wild animals here–no bears, so far, but deer, rabbits and hares, raccoons, wild turkeys, all kinds of birds, and the odd bobcat wandering through. They’re not totally without impact here–there are power tools in use for building projects, such as the new common house, in which a lot of “green” building techniques are in use to make it up to code–which actually make it a lot less regenerative and sustainable than their usual building methods. Most of the houses people live in are entirely strawbale, cob, and selectively cut timber from the land itself. Roofs are sod with plants growing from them, and floors are packed earth. The houses are sculptural works of aesthetic beauty and very healthy and safe to live in. They’re also small, and not to code. And they tend to cost around $10K to build. The oldest has lasted eleven years and looks like it could easily stand thirty more, with minor maintenance to the earth floor, the plaster, and the chimney.
Residents pay a one-time membership fee to become members, and a moderate monthly rent to pay taxes and upkeep on the land. Most people work part time in town, or have their own small businesses. But the majority of their work goes into the land, the buildings, and the community. Another income stream is the workshops–Emerald Earth teaches natural building, permaculture, sustainability, wilderness skills, and regenerative land management. Mostly, people here need very little. They have incredible food, good company, rewarding work, comfortable clothes, and a beautiful and healthy place to live. That’s wealth here.
This orientation week has been really full. We’ve had session after session of learning about the water system, the animals, the garden, the buildings, the power system, the boundaries of the land, the boundaries of the consensus process, and the kitchen and pantry. We’ve done work and had meetings and discussions, walked on tours with resident members, moved fences, and chopped firewood (or in my case knocked firewood over). We’ve cooked,, cleaned, fed, watered, and milked. And it’ll only get more busy from here.
This is what it will be like at Emerald Earth tonight–I’ll visit with the little feathered dinos in the chick shed, and then after an incredibly delicious, filling, healthy meal, made mostly with food grown and processed here, some people will go down to Philo for a dance jam. I’ll probably stay here and unwind with a book, and if it’s clear I’ll look at the stars and think of my Beloved. I plan to turn in early, and go to sleep listening to the chorus of frogs.

Yesterday, I was working at a desk job in a small non-profit organization in Berkeley. It happens to be a synagogue of the denomination of Judaism I affectionately refer to as “woo-Jew.” The services are uplifting, celebratory, mystical, and sometimes (at least from the perspective of more traditional Jews) sorta silly, and the community is very dear to me. Behind the scenes, though, it operates pretty much like any other understaffed non-profit organization.

When I’m half of the administrative staff, I can’t afford to have my mind elsewhere. But for awhile now I’ve been having trouble focusing. Halfway through an email, I’ll find myself thinking about goats. Registering a new member, I drift off into daydreams about pickling asparagus. Looking over a newsletter for errors, I’m start worrying about climate change and vanishing forests. My heart hasn’t been in the office, and neither has my head, and the automaton at my desk isn’t being the effective worker I was a couple of years ago. I’m overdue for a change, and I need to be doing something I really believe in.

For the past two months I’ve been in an urban permaculture course offered by the SF Permaculture Guild. Two days ago, I got an email accepting me to a work trade program at Emerald Earth. I’ll be departing Berkeley in the second week of April to live in this small earth-centered community in Boonville, California, learning to look after their gardens and livestock, and maybe a bit about natural building. I turn 30 in about a week.

This is Kerrplunk—a blog about what can happen to a comfortable life when it really sinks in that “unsustainable lifestyle” doesn’t mean “carefree” but “slow suicide.” This is where I’ll talk about rolling down the energy descent slope and, hopefully, coming to rest in a patch of green. I’ll talk about resilience, climate change preparedness, understanding peak oil for non-bunker-dwellers, how to design your own total permaculture lifestyle, and what we can learn from practicing “original skills”: those that early humans would have used to survive and thrive. I’ll talk about simple living from a pagan/woo-Jew perspective, and what it’s like for me to be an anti-consumerist, eco-obsessed queer person. I’ll post photos and hopefully video from the land and its many inhabitants, human people as well as other people. And I hope my experiences will offer me a preview of what my life might be like as fossil fuels decline and the global climate weirds.

Welcome.