Sunday afternoon Tom and I were finishing the cement so that Karly could lay her mosaic in gate posts 3 and 4.  We had a bit of extra cement so decided to go for it and finish the last two gate posts.

Today I was planting kale in what I finished as the flower of life shape, when Jean came looking for me. We talked to Tom, got the go ahead to do it without him, but when it was explained to Jean she was not convinced and had apprehensions that we should wait until the afternoon to have Toms supervision. 

Patricia came and helped and we did it anyway. We figured out what level looks like. Then cut the new collar, cut out a piece of the other collar so that the circle could be as post could be as centric as possible and the collar could rest on the cement from the compost bin post creating a smooth stream of concrete holding it all together.

I went up to the barn to get screws and later realized I had got nails, so went up and got a different type of nails. Then we drilled two holes for nails to hold the collar together around the post then stuck nails through, I thought we should use three nails because this collar was so tall but Patricia did not think that was necessary. I went a little heavy handed when watering the concrete that Patricia was mixing and it was even runnier than the yesterday I thought it might be okay so we tried it anyway. It was not really okay, as it flowed and kept finding each nook and cranny it could and lift the collars finally all pouring out underneath. We stopped scooped the concrete up and Jean went to get more cement. 

The holes Kimberly, Patricia and I dug last week for these posts, after further consultation over the next days, were in the wrong spot so we had to start the whole process yesterday.

We dug the holes, realized that path and slope made the levelness a bit tricky, but Tom had a solution! We put rebar and a big rock in the lower hole after putting in the gravel and that brought the top of the posts pretty well level with the other side which was also level with the compost bin posts. 

We set up the frame to secure it and keep it level (ingeniously recognizing that the hole was now right next to the other post for one of the compost bins which was cemented in. We could also use that post to attach to the stabilizing frame), then we poured the cement that was already in the wheelbarrow. But it was not enough so I went up to get more and realized that the tire on the cart was blown, so swapped it for a different cart and brought down some cement. We started mixing the cement. 

Jean came by and informed us that she could not put in the mosaic until the next day (Monday) after 11. Tom said that would be okay he might not be around but I have put enough of these posts in to know how to do it and if he is not available I will be Tom for that time... then it started to rain (lightly) and mixed the concrete on the wetter side such that it could be poured from the wheelbarrow into the hole, and trying to shovel it just made a bigger mess. 

This watery cement resulted in running more places than we wanted it to and flowing quicker than planned but it is cement so once it dries the extra can be easily chipped away. By now we were started to be quite wet and luckily were also done so cleaned up and found dry places for the tools that we would need today and took put the rest away. 

We mixed half a bag into the salvaged runny stuff and tried again, this time it was more viscous and did not leak out but did bulge it and explode out the middle (time for that third nail)... for a second time we shoveled all the concrete back into the wheelbarrow and drilled a third hole and stuck in the third nail, then repositioned it before starting again on the concrete. Third time is the charm as they say, and the taller one held! 

We added a little from the second half of the bag then started on the second (much smaller) collar. The imperfection on this one came from the fact that we only had one nail in the collar so the bottom (where it was right up against the compost bin post cement) bulged out a bit and the top might not be as flat as Jean would prefer for her mosaic but it is the best we could do...

The first two weeks at Songaia were relatively fast-paced. Patricia was in charge of showing me around and took me for a tour of the garden, explaining along the way the different tasks we would be working on in the coming days. The food forest is quite impressive, both by its size and by the diversity of plants that are sharing virtually all the space available. Almost every time I walk by it, I discover another plant I hadn’t noticed previously. 

On one occasion, Helen took Max and me in a tour of Picardo Farm, a community garden in Northeast Seattle. The farm is about a hundred thousand square feet, and has been divided into nearly three hundred small plots. People have used ingenious systems to use up the entire space of their lots, with maximum functionality. Some have installed what I refer to as a “potato tower,” in which the potatoes are planted in little towers of soil surrounded by a framework of metal that holds the entire setup together. It is then possible to harvest all the potatoes at once, without having to search for them, eliminating the prospect of losing a few as well. It’s always quite interesting to see what other people have come up with. 

Patricia had told me about the ravages done by the rabbits and the slugs. The potager was therefore fenced off with a makeshift mesh while we are working on erecting a permanent rabbit-proof fence. Tom showed us how to dig postholes, pour concrete, level, and erect the gateposts. I also walked around picking up the innumerable slugs assaulting the beautiful lettuces. One of the nice things about having an organic garden is that you have to improvise quite a lot to get rid of the pests, because you can’t use pesticides and therefore you rely on one or several tricks to do the job. For instance, the other day I browsed the Internet and looked at the plants that naturally repelled slugs. It turns out there are a few, and perhaps that building a “fence” using those plants could help keep the slug population down. One of the key concepts of permaculture is that you have to try and see for yourself. 

When working in the food forest with Katie we noticed that mushrooms were growing in the sawdust used as mulch. There was only one kind of them growing there, and they seem to have colonized the entire food forest, as well as the potato patch where they grow in especially big clusters. However, we didn’t try them for we thought they might be poisonous, because no animal seems to have nibbled at them. They looked great, however, with their brown, crusty color and the little cracks running on the cap, as though they had just been baked. When Max came back from the mushroom orientation he told me that those guys were indeed edible, but quite bitter when raw, hence the possible explanation of why animals don’t seem to be interested in them. 

Order/Wilderness
...it's all about aesthetics...
-whose aesthetics though?
The society of dualities that you admit is destructive,
a culture of order, control, domination.
...a culture of domestication.
A culture that lives off hierarchies
-patriarchy
-white supremecy,
a culture where colonialism is necessary.
Of people.
As well as plants.
Where “weeds” are eradicated arbitrarily in place of imported (domesticated) “food”

Permaculture:
an ethics centered design approach to horticulture,
plant cultivation
NOT
(destructive, colonial)
-field cultivation

can it work?
...liberate us from the mindset of control, and domination,
with its “food forests”
mimicking the edges of forests recreating the biodiversity of “natural” forests
-but with imported (domesticated) “food”...
re-wild the domesticated?
Which comes first?
A new generational aesthetic paradigm
(one where beauty is “chaotic” “wild”...
where the linguistic concept of “wild” is not distinct)
or: the culture that LIVES as if wild were not a word,
 were not the negative side of a dichotomy that the dominant culture is doing everything it can to destroy?

A self perpetuating feedback loop,
how do we break this cycle?
Is there hope?
(“The quintessential human delusion, simultaneously the source of [our] greatest strength, and [our] greatest weakness.”)
a generational shift perhaps
of aesthetics...

My name is Ugo. I'm from Bordeaux, France. I'm currently an intern at Songaia. I arrived at the community in early May after an exhausting, but great, trip across Canada. Initially my goal was only to spend my time in Seattle and San Francisco to do some street photography. 

I've always had an artistic background rather than a green thumb. However, I felt like I should not restrain myself to just photography since both the opportunity and the envy of learning about permaculture was also very much present in my mind from the inception of my trip.

I was introduced to WWOOFing by coworkers in August 2013, during a summer international camp in the French Département of Dordogne. For three weeks a team of about twenty people from all over Europe had been working on renovating (or rather rebuild altogether) an old unmortared washhouse. There, I met several people who had been traveling all over France, hitchhiking their way from farm to farm, learning new skills and perhaps finding their calling. I was told about how much those persons had learned about their experiences, and in turn shared them to teach others in such camps. 

After all, my own experience that summer of learning how to mix mortar had been quite interesting; we had suffered a series of amusing mishaps during the renovation of the washhouse, mostly due to our inexperience, (such as people falling off the top of the wall into the pool or incorrect mixture ratios) but I had nonetheless felt like those mistakes, although seemingly obvious, would never me made again because that practice we'd been having in the past weeks had shown us for good the steps we had done wrong.

Since I had already acquired a piece of land by then, I was interested in getting some hands-on
experience by working with people into permaculture. My experience of the previous summer was a key factor in deciding not to start my permaculture garden right away but instead wait to have enough basic knowledge on where and how to start.

The Pacific Northwest region had always been of interest to me; I had visited Seattle back in 2004 and immediately had the feeling that I would come back someday. Only this time I had a strong desire to also start my permaculture project, so I signed up on the American version of the WWOOFing network and started locating places situated around the Seattle metropolitan area, not too far away from Seattle in order to get there in a short amount of time.

I arrived in Seattle and couch-surfed there for a few days before meeting up with Patricia in Bothell where she picked me up. Before taking the bus to meet her, I was almost certain I would miss the right stop, but it turned out that I amazingly succeeded in reaching Bothell college on time. 

Patricia showed me around and introduced me to some of the residents, before taking me to the little cottage where interns are housed. To be honest, I knew from day one that Songaia was the perfect place to start learning about permaculture, surrounded by people with the know-how to learn a great deal from.

Plants offer great metaphors. The way they grow, our relation to them, the functions and uses they have, and how they spread are all ways they can be metaphorized. 
Some plants as weeds make better metaphors by virtue of being thought of as weeds, hence we have a preconception already of them and there is a stigma or oppression around that plant that makes it particularly powerful symbolically. 

One such weed is dandelion. 
Dandelion leaves are a great source of nutrition as food, and medicine. It has a wide range of other uses as well for medicine and different parts have different uses, such as; tea out of the roots is good for stomach issues as well as boosting the immune system with probiotics, the leaves are full of trace minerals (they are good medicinally for similar reasons they are good edibily). 

Their little daisy like (aster family) flowers that pop up everywhere beautifying the otherwise plain green of everyday lawns. They also have a resiliency and hardiness to be able to come up through even the smallest crack between the sidewalks. These are all qualities that system change/revolutionary campaigns strive for. 

Another such weed is sneaky bindweed, with its rope like, viney roots which travel under ground parallel to the soil surface at 6-10 inches and sneak above the surface where is most frustrating oftentimes intertwined with the roots and stem of plants that we want (ie not weeds!). I have also heard that bindweed is fairly generalized in its needs and how/where it grows, and is one of the first to rehabilitate disturbed soils. Similar to dandelion the prolific bindweed is to be admired symbolically yet is quite frustrating and a nuisance in the garden. The unpredictability of bindweed is also to be admired symbolically, but also frustrating in the futile attempt to have tenuous “control” of the garden. 

In permaculture terms they are a dynamic accumulator, which means that it is able to attract/find vitamins and minerals (mostly) and make them more available to the surrounding plants (similar to why it is so beneficial to humans edibily). 
Dandelion does this function by way of a long tap root that enables it to reach beyond what most other plants with shallower roots can access and tap into other nutrients bringing them up into the topsoil. This long tap root also makes them hard to remove, for people who think of them as a nuisance, which people often do because they are so prolific at spreading themselves. 
The way that their ball of seeds blow away and float wherever the wind takes them makes them very prolific and spread like wildfire, which symbolically could relate to a popular resistance movement and how we would like it to spread in popularity and be “uncontrollable” and hard to remove. 

While on the topic of nuisances in the garden I am going to tangentially recommend a holistic way to deal with a large portion of plants that were intentionally planted but are too good at what they do so and (in the futile attempt to maintain “control”) are ripped out as a weed, as well as furry predators, with a recipe for making use of nuisances: rabbit and mint family stew. 

You will need traps, or Ash cat to catch rabbit(s), a knife for skinning and gutting it(/them), a big pot for cooking stock, then stew, and well water. To start with catch (and kill [preferably cleanly and “humanely”]) rabbit(s) either with traps or Ash cat, then skin and gut it (the same process is used in skinning and gutting any mammal from a “pet” to “wild” animal to local senator). 

Make broth/stock of bones. While that is cooking, extracting the flavor and nutrients from the bones of these creatures who have eaten all our veggies, forage for mints - lemon balm, oregano, thyme, rosemary, spearmint, chocolate mint, peppermint (mint family is distinguished by square stem and alternate leaves, and I am pretty sure all mint is edible although I have never heard of people eating lambs ears...), dandelion, is another tasty “weed”. 

Strawberries are also very prolific and hardy and spread from stolons, as do blackberries.  Mint family plants are prolific herbs that will spread and take over, often hybridizing and diluting the individuality of each mint species as they spread underground and recognize kin, producing blander hybrid offspring. 

Mint family and bamboo and most grasses spread from one or the other, rhizomes or stolons. The prolificness of some of these strategies is most inspiring and hopeful when thinking about networking and organizing resistance and change in society. Especially the ways in which they branch out and then pop up at unexpected locations... 

Put the mint into the pot with the stock, maybe strain out the bones, maybe leave them in a bit longer, but put all the other greens in. Network with someone who can use the coat/fur, and bury (or maybe give as delicacy to omnivorous pets Ash cat, Leo, Spencer?) the guts/internal organs. If they eat our food, why don't we continue the food web and eat them as well (and while discussing holistic food webs, why not change from sewer to humanure and turn waste into soil to close the loop)? It would also provide a local protein source for the flesh eaters in the community. 

Rhizomes are essentially roots that are parallel to the soil surface and can mysteriously sprout new crowns seemingly anywhere. Bindweed, and fungus, are both examples of plants that spread with rhizomes. A stolon is a similar method of spreading but with the strands of reaching out branching be above ground (or closer to the surface if it is underground) then touch down, set roots and crown and keep going, the stolons are generally not quite like other branches but they are also distinct from roots but somewhere in between. 

On Earth Day the Piglets check in question was, “Earth Day: What do you think of? What does it mean to you?”.  Most of us answered about how hopeless we felt at the lack of progress since the day's creation in the '70s. 

A Global Climate Convergence for “people, planet and peace over profit!” called for a global “wave of action” from Earth Day to May Day. Olympia had a jam packed schedule of workshops, food not bombs, guerrilla gardening, film screenings, critical mass, and street theater. On Thursday the 24th I coordinated buses to get to Olympia. I met up there with my friend Will who I know from organizing with Free Mind Media and Food not Bombs in Santa Rosa CA. 

There happened to be not much going on with Earth Day to May Day during the day time on Thursday but that evening there was a workshop by Bill Moyer of the Backbone Campaign about Grand Strategies. We went to that and hung around afterward for a few hours discussing all the rad things that are and could be going on in Olympia. 

The next day was Critical Mass. Critical Mass is a direct action against car culture where people on generally the third Friday of every month in cities internationally take to the streets and (depending on numbers) take over the streets and block traffic, making statements about biking, bike lanes, etc.  But it also has a very festive atmosphere sometimes as more of a celebration and excuse to bike around with friends. I do not ride bikes so walked while others biked and met them at the end. 

May Day
... the holiday of pagans and the holiday of laborers was first celebrated as International Workers Day in 1886 right before the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago. On May Day I got the bus into Seattle to partake in protests for immigration reform, $15/hr minimum (livable) wage, and anti-capitalist/FTP (F**k The Police)/excuse for wingnutty anarchists to take to the streets march(es) and rallies. 

On Saturday May 3rd Songaia celebrated the spiritual aspect of May Day with their Festival of the Earth which is a synthesis of Earth Day and May Day, and offers a culture and tradition building approach to the struggle for the earth. The day started at 1pm with a demonstration of the micro ecosystem of soil. Then singing and welcome. 

I heard from a friend from Occupy Wall Street who has been living in Seattle for the past few years that the protests start with an immigration march at Judkins Park at 3. 
I did not get to Judkins until well past 3 and considered trying to catch up by guessing their route by following the choppers, but it was hot and I am not familiar with the layout of streets in Seattle so decided to get the bus back downtown where I had seen police forces from as far away as Tukwila and some on horseback amassing at Westlake Park.  
So I bused back just in time for the rally of different socialist and union groups spouting rhetoric that called for an end to deportations, $15 minimum wage, and to force the system to give us these concessions by striking, stopping the industries they depend upon (but while they are calling for radical successful action why do they not call also for radical systemic change rather than reformist demands that keeps the same power structure just makes it a little less harsh?). 

With these critiques in mind I headed up to Capitol Hill to meet up with an anti-capitalist march. While marching towards downtown I ran into a friend who I knew from Ohio and her girlfriend who I also knew but from Boulder CO. We marched to downtown wandered around downtown a bit then back up to Capitol Hill to connect with another anti-capitalist march then walk back to down town and continue meandering around down town. As usual (it seems) the march was a few hundred anarchists “escorted” by cops all around... with more cops than protesters... 

Then we started to build the bamboo dome (in the barn because it was raining). We started by making 5 bundles of bamboo poles each bundle 30 feet long and tying them about every 18 inches. While the bundles were being bundled the drummers started drumming in the dinning room with the doors open. The rain was not coming down hard so we continued, and moved the 30 foot bundles to the area that had been recently mowed in anticipation of the dome.

 We formed an equilateral triangle in the middle of three poles, that had side lengths of 6 feet then lashed the bundles together and raised it. Then stakes and hammers were gathered and two stakes at each end of a bundle that is at the ground. (By now it was raining quite hard so we finished lashing the bundles to the stakes then went in.)

 May ribbons were being set up for may dances, in an improvised revised indoor version of the maypole dance. We grouped around the ribbons hanging from the ceiling and paired off. Then Brian gave simple instructions for a weaving pattern. 

The band played and we danced, and the ribbons wove (fairly) beautifully (although they were rather plain “ribbons” so it was not as beautiful as it could have been). We continued to dance at first just in a big circle within the dinning room. Towards the end of the dancing time one of the band members called out a few line dances. 

After dancing we ate a delicious potluck feast. Then cleared the room for watching inspiring documentaries of peoples work to restore the earth.

These 10 days offer a ray of hope that serves as an example of successful resistance (to this dominant destructive culture). They offer a ray of hope because of the holisticness of the actions taken within them; from direct action in Olympia (critical mass as well as the workshop on strategy with Backbone Campaign), to building culture and earth based traditions at Songaia, also networking and brainstorming about how to create self reliant communities in Olympia.