Lately, I've worked with Brent on the vertical bed for the lettuce. After browsing the Internet for a satisfying model, I finally found a design that came with detailed a plan with all the dimensions. We then proceeded to make sure we had all the wood necessary and figure out if we had to get some more.  

The other interesting event of those past two weeks was the tour Patricia had planned for us. We visited four original organic farms where we had the opportunity to meet other Wwoofers. As I toured each of the farms and asked questions, I realized that several different people had come up with numerous solutions to deal with the same problems they encountered, which is very interesting in terms of getting new ideas.  The tour also shed some light on how to manage a food forest. 

Concurrently, I have been checking on the fruits in the garden. I have noticed that the cherries were soon to be good to eat and that the strawberries had already been ripe for a week or so. I have been thinking about growing periods for the fruits I intend to grow back home; the design I have in mind calls for an extended growing season with fruits ripening at different times as to always have something to harvest until winter. I'm not sure yet if I will be using a greenhouse to do so, but it is something I have to make sure of before starting my project.

With almost all the plants in the ground and some bad weather, we spent a lot of the past week doing planning – mapping out new areas of the garden, trying to imagine them as we want them to look in 25 years, researching different species. The property already has a pretty great variety of all the main fruit trees you would expect in the northwest – apples, cherries, European and Asian pears, hazelnuts, walnuts – as well as a few that were more surprising to me: Chinese chestnut, fig, and even walnut. 

One plant that is much more obscure than it should be is pawpaw, the largest fruit native to the US. Native to more or less the whole east coast, the pawpaw’s fruit is supposed to be similar to soursop or cherimoya (I know that probably doesn’t clear things up too much). We are hoping to put two of them in to the south hugelculture.

Another plant I’m wanting to try out in the food forest is camas, a bulb that grows wild in the Willamette Valley, where I’m from. Blue-flowering camas is edible, and was one of the staple foods of the Kalapuyas; white-flowering camas is poisonous, and the two plants can only be distinguished while in bloom. But if we make sure to get the right one, it would be fun to try to introduce native crops to the garden.

But one of the things we’ve been considering in planning is trying to bring in a greater diversity of crops, including a lot of permaculture favorites that are unfamiliar to most of us (Siberian pea shrub? Sea buckthorn?). After all, the number of crops used in conventional agriculture is tiny compared to the number of useful species that exist – I read recently that ethnobotanists have identified 5,000 species used by indigenous people in Mexico alone.

Other plants are familiar, but have uses that I never knew about before. Examples include salal (an evergreen bush that grows wild all over the NW and that I’ve seen my whole life), which produces edible berries, and lambs quarter, a small green that’s apparently more nutritious than spinach.  Not to mention nettles, dandelions, and those mushrooms growing down in the potato beds; a lot of time, expanding our range of useful species is more about educating ourselves than needing a trip to the nursery.  

As I reflect on my first week at Songaia, it’s worth noting that I’ve only really gotten my hands in the garden once.  There are several reasons for this, and thankfully it’s not typical of a week here.  I also appreciate the mental gestation period it has afforded me.  In this time I have adapted to and begun to process my first WWOOF experience, my first glimpse into permaculture, even my first time on the west coast.

My first day of work was more a community work-day/garden day-off, and I spent it helping prepare a supply shed for Journeys, a rite of passage organization that shares Songaia’s property. That evening I joined in a Circle, what I understand as a monthly gathering open to all that serves as an outlet for expressing concerns, visions, or anything to guide and maintain the collective intent of the community.  The underlying focus of this Circle was on facilitating an open dialogue between Songaia and Journeys.

By Sunday I was ready to get into the garden.  Having little experience gardening and none in permaculture, I was pretty lost on the majority of terms and ideas being tossed around, and knew I just needed a little immersion.  In the morning we formed a small bed in the west food-forest using chop-and-drop, a self-explanatory method of preparing a spot for a bed that takes a fraction of the time of pulling, digging or tilling. We then put down cardboard and a base layer of composted horse manure and planted tomatoes, creating individual mounds at the base of each.  When the tomatoes were in I went to help Brian and Brent mulch a brush pile, before returning to the garden to plant pumpkins, watermelons, and cantaloupes. I was familiarized with the irrigation system in the garden, which ideally delivers water directly to each plant (or two) in its own mound.  

 The first factor in all the free time I’ve had was arriving late Tuesday night, the day before the interns’ weekly three days off.  By my third day here I had been oriented, recovered from my jetlag, toured the waterfront in Seattle, and seen views of the Puget Sound and Mt. Rainier from the trails at Discovery Park.  A big factor in where I decided to WWOOF was my desire to see the Pacific Northwest, and the people here at Songaia have been super helpful by offering rides and recommending points of interest.

 The most enriching experience for me thus far has been the Farm-Tour.  Along with hosts and WWOOFers from four other farms in the area, we spent the day driving to each one for tours and the spreading of ideas.  Some of the most functionally impressive and aesthetically pleasing innovations were the thick, terraced, raised-beds along the hills at the Ananda farm.  They were formed by woven, fence-like walls of sticks and arranged so as to create leaf-like, vienate patterns in the paths between them.

The day ended with food cooked over a fire and shared by the whole group at Cama Beach.

Interns at Songaia are asked to choose specific areas or projects that they want to take on, and more or less from the moment I arrived here, I knew that I wanted to work on the food forest. Food forests are one of my favorite permaculture concepts. They appeal to my dislike for unnecessary work, my desire to be part of systems that manage themselves passively and without conflict.

A garden is an ecosystem, of course – everyplace on earth is an ecosystem. And when you maintain a garden of annual vegetables (let alone a lawn), what you are doing is trying to hold that ecosystem artificially at a very early stage in its natural succession. Every year, you have to re-create a disturbance to the ecosystem by entirely clearing the earth, removing organic matter and exposing soil to erosion. Basing your agricultural system on a constant struggle against the natural tendency towards succession is inefficient. It’s expensive in energy inputs – usually fossil fuels – and also negatively impacts soil fertility, meaning that plants’ nutrients end up being applied to the soil in chemical form.

So what’s a food forest? I recently listened to an interview Dave Jacke, author of the textbook on forest gardens, in which he explained in terms I had never thought of before. Think of a landscape after a disaster – living organisms wiped away, down to the soil. The first plants that grow will be grasses, small annuals. Soon, taller brush will move in, followed by fast-growing trees, and eventually a mature forest.

So what is forest gardening?  It’s the idea that, while annuals have their place, and selective disruptions to create space for them can be positive, it is in the long term more efficient and more effective to create a garden that tries to mirror natural systems. In a food forest, a wide canopy of mixed fruit trees is interspersed with fruiting bushes, herbs, and ground covers that are selected not only to provide food, but also to fix nitrogen, attract pollinators and other beneficial insects, and produce mulch on-site. 

Sounds good. Now I just have to read Jacke’s textbook and actually make it happen.

I’m going to introduce myself first, then go on a bit about the garden. In the future, I’ll try to keep things close to the ground. 

But really I should talk about the garden at least a little bit. To give an idea where things are at currently, since my arrival a week ago, we’ve installed a new rabbit-proof fence around the entire vegetable garden; gotten almost all the plants in the ground; built bean and tomato trellises; put in a new trellis archway to make a rose-tunnel. A new weeding regimen is in place, with a directive that weeds are to be “chopped and dropped,” rather than uprooted and thrown in the compost; there has been much discussion of the discomfort we feel at the messy look of the beds. Strawberries and snowpeas are ripe, which is good for snacking. You forget, the rest of the year, how good strawberries can be.

Anyways, I’m Alex, I’m from Oregon. I was an anthro major in college (2 years ago now), studying mostly indigenous, rural Latin America, and am currently thinking about how to continue that studying. After finishing a social service job in the Bronx, I wwoofed a couple places last fall, then was at the Mesoamerican Permaculture Institute for a month earlier this year. I’m at Songaia as much for the co-housing community as I am for the permaculture; the best living experience of my life was in a big co-op house in Minnesota, and since then I’ve lived in various other sorts of communal spaces, and always loved it. So I’m here because I want to pursue permaculture and community, both as objects of study and also as my daily life. 

That’s a basic rundown anyways. That’s the situation, who I am. I should be here for the rest of the summer.

The main thing this week, for me, has been getting to know the garden. And I believe I am on sound permacultural footing in saying this, but starting to learn my way around the community is as central as learning my way around the raspberries and the keyhole beds. Even in this short time, it’s been clear how the garden is tied up in the community – not only in the flow of labor, money, and vegetables, but also in the ways that the garden’s form and direction are shaped by a negotiation of individuals’ ethics and esthetics.

The third week at Songaia was rich in events. With Patricia and Helen we went to Raising Cane Ranch, a Raspberry farm located in Snohomish County. I was proposed to visit the place since my main interest lies in growing berries. Raising Cane is a U-pick farm where people come with their kids and wander through the rows of raspberries and blackberries. The patch we toured was a little over 200’ by 200’, which we learned is an awful amount of work to maintain. Nick, the owner, had alternated the varieties of raspberries along the rows, to see which ones were the most resistant to bugs, since we learned that several infestations had occurred on his exploitation and often had resulted in several plants being irreversibly destroyed. 

The next event worth attending was the conference given by Jenny Pell, in Seattle. The main point her conference was that permaculture was possible everywhere, including in the city. She showed us a slideshow with pictures of how people used small spaces in cities to the fullest. One of the many interesting examples was a vertical bed of lettuces; instead of lining them up in a traditional bed, the idea is to stack several smaller beds on top of each other. Each bed would be set up at a slight incline, with a part of each bed extending under the bed above, so that the water would trickle down through all the beds and excess runoff would drip onto the ground. This system also eliminates the threat of slugs, and therefore as well the frequent labor to walk around the garden to pick them up. 

Up until recently, the art of making compost eluded me. The orientation given by Doug in this topic unveiled the last surrounding mysteries regarding the organisms at work in this complex system. The key, as with everything in this world, is to observe carefully the machinery at work; how all the different parameters interact among themselves, and working on recreating a small-scale version of it. 

As I reflect back on the past two months and try to write this last blog post that will be up after I have left, I think of this past week (when my last post came up), but also the entirety of my time here. I observe the changes and growth that the garden and I have gone through. The alliums that we planted around the almond tree in the west food forest seem to be working to combat fungal pathogens. Some of the onions by the roses are happy. It does not feel like I have learned that much until I stop and think of all the specific tasks that I have done over the past two months and could now lead or at least not need that much guidance. Particular things like setting the gate posts, or broader things like transplanting trees. Also realizing that a very abundant fungus is quite tasty! 

Permaculture is often the realm of new age hippies and one of the reasons I moved away from northern California is because of too many new age hippies so whenever looking at places to WWOOF I want to learn permaculture (because of the revolutionary nature of its ethics based approach), but without the dogma that often comes with new age hippie intentional communities.

There are other ways in which the community authentically creates a culture that honors the earth. With a decent number of the foundering members of Songaia having lived in developing nations and bringing those experiences of living closer to the land and possibly more tribally to the community. The Festival of the Earth, and Nancy's drumming party which felt like one of the most authentic instances of (mostly) white people siting in a room drumming both exemplify that authenticity. 

However the community aspect of the community spaces (garden, kitchen particularly) and lack of obvious “rules” can be a little challenging at times particularly manifesting as lack of communication. Such as knowing (and remembering) to put (extra) soap in dirty dishwashers, communication about where things are in the kitchen. Or knowing where to find tools for the garden which seem to go missing.  They could be somewhere in the garden forgotten to be put away, they could be in the barn, by the (goat?) shed (that is practically as far away from the goats to be while still being on property...?), or in a variety of other creative locations that surely make sense to some creative individual... 

 When looking at Songaia I was a little skeptical that it would not be one of those new age hippie intentional communities that I was trying to avoid. After my first few days here I breathed a sigh of relief feeling that the people here were relatively “normal” (liberal/mainstream).  That provided the hope that I was looking for; that permaculture and community can flourish even amongst “normal” people which tells me that it is a viable solution and provides hope for the future. 
Songaia seems to have a good balance of personal “private” individual space as well as communal/community space and time.    Participation is not mandatory but more of an opt in program. However some people seem at times frustratingly too “normal” being stuck in old paradigms of order, control, violence that makes it hard to apply principles of permaculture (for example) which are so outside the “norm” of the past 10,000 years! 
Which brings up the perennial question of; how to systemically change paradigms? Permaculture talks about living by example and (in theory) people will see actions as fractals and replicate things that work. 
One of my friends who is deeply into the permaculture scene in Sonoma County CA talks about exemplifying the new paradigm in one's actions.  People who interact with them will notice a shift and they will change their actions as well and it will slowly ripple out... 
Does that even work? If it does, does the planet have time for the ripple method of change to work, or do we need to take a systems approach to systemically change the systems that maintain the dominant paradigm of order, control, violence? 

Another great example was when we were making the base to hoop house #3 there was a brassica plant flowering in the corner, that was kind of in the way but I at first was pretty cautious to try to leave it as in tact as possible. Then it was decided arbitrarily that it was too in the way, so we went on with walking on it and pushing it into the bed. Only to realize later that it has a “save for seed” sign next to it...