Tricking Mother Nature into Working for You

These snippets of info are a list of tricks I picked up from lectures, writings and videos I encountered in my research:

• Water always seeks it's own level. Use it to stop the rainwater from running off your land. 
  
  Instead of draining water off your land or away from your land, only to pipe water in from town or a well and use it to irrigate your garden, dig swales and ponds, using anything that will catch and/or store water. Bury old bathtubs or hot tubs on your land. Catch water off your roof and every other structure and funnel it into barrels or tubs or even clay pots buried underground (unglazed clay pots can slowly seep water into the soil during dry times). Even create subterranean tunnels channeling water from outdoor ponds to indoor aquaculture (see below) tanks so your fish have a place to winter. While you enjoy their ambiance you can feed them your dinner scraps right off the table, cutting back on having to buy fish food. If your pond fills up, channel the overflow across your property along the contour (the same elevation) then have it drop into a slightly lower pond, and every time a pond fills up, direct it to another. This creates lots of 'edges' and micro-climates necessary for a wide variety of edibles.
• Put a 15ft T-shaped pole in your garden area. It gives birds a place to land, and to check out the area for predators and food. They'll poop there, depositing free fertilizer into your garden. If they're insect eaters, there poop will be very rich in nutrients! Put lots of 3-5ft sticks around the area also. Flycatchers are common in Ohio. They'll perch on a stick, watch for flying insects, fly right out and snatch them out of the air, then fly right back to their stick. Birds make wonderful pest control sentinels - and they'll do it all day - for free, all the while depositing nutrients into your soil.
• Likewise, you can build a bat box right over your compost heap. Bugs are drawn to your compost. Bats are drawn to bugs. Bats will fly around the compost heap, snatching up flying insects, including mosquitoes, then deposit nutrient rich guano into your compost - for free - all night long. They love mosquitos too.
  
  
• Aquaculture: Put fish in a tank of water or a home-made pond. Use a solar pump to move the dirty water (that the fish have been pooping in) out of the tank and into the roots of food producing plants, once every 12 minutes, then move that water (that the plants have now cleaned) back to the fish tanks. This technique enabled one man to produced a million pounds of food in one year, using just 3 acres of land.
• An easy way to keep your garden fertilized is to put an old
  
  bathtub uphill from your garden, toss in some gravel and dirt and create a rain catching surface so it'll fill with water. Build up the sides with bermed dirt and plant lots of plants so it looks like an elevated pond. Plant food that ducks and geese like, so eventually they'll will drop by and nibble on some, and occasionally leave a little fertilizer. The tub's drain can have a pipe attached that bends up to the level you want in the tub to top out at. Every rain some drains out as rainwater enters and the water empties out of the drain to sek it's own level, taking with it the duck poop from visitor ducks. The rain then washes the dirty water down the hill and through the soil, feeding worms, bugs and eventually plants along the way.
• Honey bees aren't the only pollinators. Drill holes in scrap wood and leave it standing or lying around your garden to draw solitary bees into your ecosystem. Many of those pollinate too. Butterfly boxes bring in butterflies. Hummingbird feeders bring hummingbirds. All pollinators. Plant lots of flowers around your property to bring them all in.
• Creating cracks and crags and places for spiders and garter snakes to live will add to your natural pest-control arsenal. There's a wasp that lives in holes in wood that lays its eggs in worms that would otherwise eat your tomatoes. Another reason to leave wood scraps full of drilled holes posted in your garden area. (Maybe plug a few with shiitake mushrooms?)
• In a garden setting, dogs and cats can be full-time sentinels - watching out for deer, coons, rabbits, and other garden-raiders. It might cost you some fencing (unless you can scrounge some free off Craigslist) but you can create chicken wire tunnels surrounding your garden that provide a 'dog and cat' run - a ring around your garden area that allows your pets to run and play and explore, while also keeping them, and veggie-eating critters, out of your garden.
• Bamboo grows fast and strong. Use it to clean up your greywater, and your humanure compost pile, then when it's grown tall and thick enough, cut it back and use it to build with.
• We're vegan but we're still planning to get chickens, ducks and goats. Chickens will eat ticks, slugs and bugs. Building movable coops can help prep your garden, cuz they'll dig up grubs. Ducks are easier on a garden and still eat lots of bugs, and poop in your pond (that can go to your aquaculture tanks). Letting guineas run in your woods will help cut back on the ticks so your kids can play, with less fear of Lyme disease. Goats will eat multiflora roses and other thickets. You can pen them to areas in your woods you'd like to clear and they'll do the work for you. Use them to not only widen your garden area, but fertilize it too. Feed your goats your veggie scraps that are too course for the compost pile, or just to speed up the composting process. Goat poop is good stuff.
• No Till Gardening! There's a lot of productive stuff going on under the cover of that thick thatch of dead vegetation covering your garden. When you till, you disrupt all that work that bugs and critters and bacteria and fungi have been doing all year to make your soil nutrient-rich. Why put in all that physical labor undoing what nature has been doing for you? Your garden takes nutrients from the soil, you only pick the seeds and fruits (and veggies). The rest you don't need. In the fall, let your leftover plants drop where they grew. They'll return a good 80% of the nutrients that they took when they were growing and will compost down again, replenishing your soil while providing protection from the elements and hold in moisture for your new seeds when you plant something new.
• Heat rises. I don't recall ever needing to open a window to warm a place up. Always it's to let cool air in and warm air out. American homes put operable windows at shoulder level and lower. I've always thought that was the dumbest idea. Too low to vent the heat, warm air is trapped at shoulder level. Too high to let in any cool air. This system sounds like it was designed to force you to buy air conditioners. Instead, place operable windows at the ceiling and away from prevailing winds where a negative air flow can siphon hot air right out of the room. Placing a tube under ground leading into your home, or allowing cool air into your basement, this siphoning effect can draw that cool air into the rest of the house as the heat escapes through the higher operable windows. No fan, no AC, no electricity needed.
• Hugelkultur: Crappy soil? Gather up all your old logs and sticks and branches and leaves and pile them up (in that order from the ground up) then cover it with dirt and mulch and plant your garden on it. Mushrooms and other fungi break down the wood as it rots, It also holds in gobs of moisture, while still providing great drainage, and the composting of it all produces some heat, extending your growing season. If you're on a slope, dig your swale on the uphill side of it and you won't need to water as much.
  
  

More to come as I run across it.

Nice Double Herb Spiral

I found this idea here:

http://golemcoop.blogspot.com/2012/02/urban-permaculture-and-garden-design-v1.html

... and I'm totally stealing it!!!

Not on schedule

Though we really never had a solid start date, we had hoped to have broken ground by May. But life tends to roll itself in the way occasionally. Initially we planned to be able to hop into the van right after the kids got on the bus, work a few hours, then get home in time for them to get off the bus, but the oldest grandson started schooling at home, so someone had to be home with him to make sure he was logged in and working on school work. That's the first thing that slowed down progress.

Andrea was continuing her schooling, which won't be finished til August. When her catering job scheduled her 5 nights during the week and days on weekends, 7 days a week, 'on' a few weeks and 'off' a few, having only one vehicle with this kind of schedule makes building a house impossible.

There are good things about this. I've been apprehensive about the kind of roof I wanted to build. Having no carpentry experience, I didn't want to take on something I couldn't handle. Putting a roof on a round house isn't easy, especially doing so without planting a big ugly post in the middle of it. And my goal here is to build a house that anyone can build - with or without building skills. So this delay has given me more time to come up with a roof style I can work with, (to be posted here soon).

Most of our trips to Soulstice have included the kids, which means more time keeping them from hurting themselves in the woods, and less time measuring and observing. One thing we have observed is how windy it is there. This has advantages and disadvantages. We want to plant trees and sunflowers, but the wind can damage them while they're young, so windbreaks will need to be created. But if we can funnel the wind properly we can generate some kick-butt electricity from it, so wind turbines will need to be built to add to our solar panels. Drying clothes on the clothesline will be quicker too.

Another observation was that the soil is almost all clay where we want to build. Great for building, not for gardening. But sand is cheap, and the woods have plenty of material for hugel mounds, so we can compensate. But that soil test was only from the first foot of soil. Next trip I want to dig deeper to see what's under that.

We planted sunflowers and a blueberry bush last trip. I dug a small swale leading to the blueberry to make sure it gets well watered since we won't be there to water often enough. We just bought a peach tree the other day. Next trip down we'll leave the kids home with a babysitter and plant it - as well as do some measuring.

I discovered there's a lot more nice flat land on the west side of the creek. We'd failed to explore that area before. I like how it overlooks the creek. We discovered a lot of pawpaw trees along the west border also. An earlier romp at the beginning of spring revealed ramps also, lots of them. We'd like to cultivate more of those. That trip, we found Trilliums, bloodroot, dutchmans' britches, bigger maples, gobs of wild onion, blackberries and black raspberries.

We read that folks are harvesting sulphurous mushrooms (chicken of the woods) right now, so we may have to check on ours.

More soon.