The squash plant makes several male blossoms before it puts out a female blossom, perhaps to get the local pollinators used to visiting this particular neighborhood.  The farmer's job is going to be outwitting those busy insects. ​

Yesterday, Laura and Mary met with John Harmelling from the Seattle Rose Society. He has been tending roses for 40 years. He also knows the woman who gifted us our rose collection! Nancy came by to let him know about Fred's involvement in the initial acceptance and planting of the roses and to ask if Rose Lee (the woman who gave us the roses) is still around. She is, and is still giving talks at the Rose Society. Perhaps at the height of bloom time we can invite her out for a little appreciation and perhaps even hear her story of the donation. Perhaps a thank you gift of some kind? 

​Intern Blog
12/6/18
Thursday

It started out as a quiet morning and the frost still stuck to anything the sun hadn't touched. I was in motion to meet Helen at 9:30 in the common house. I got there first. We had plans to diversify my intern timesheet and she graciously volunteered to teach. We started out reading some great information about seed saving and started talking about how the annual seed swap meet may or may not be happening this year because of some complications on who would organize everything. She has such a wealth of knowledge on all kinds of different plants and their traits and characteristics. For example, different plants can flower and seed at different time in their maturity; and can even cross pollinate with different crops in the same family and create (beet + chard = bard / cheet?) inedible, mutant vegetables. 
Afterwards, we took a walkabout to the pantry to examine Songaia’s existing seed bank. It consist of several envelopes and folded papers filled with seeds, labeled, dated and stored in big jars; there they remain cool, dark, and safe… waiting. 
Later we decided to stroll through the frosty garden on our way to collect seeds from Helens study. There, in the garden, we examined the small plot of the key hole that I have plans to renovate and implement some different techniques to try and increase production and reduce labor. 
Once collecting the seeds from the study we found ourselves back in the common house sorting beet seeds eating toast and sipping tea. 
What a perfect way to spend a quiet morning in special place.

It’s Spring in the garden, and we are weeding and putting plant starts into the ground. Kale, chard, and thyme have been harvested for lunches, including a notable thyme pesto we enjoyed with pasta and toast. I have been learning a lot about permaculture while watching videos with the other interns, and thought I would share some musings.

Systems are full of cycles, feedback loops, and interconnections with other systems. An ecosystem is a great example of a whole made of many parts, with flows into the system (such as sunlight, water, and wind) and flows out (such as food, oxygen and clean water). A healthy system has buffers to keep its feedback loops stable, but also the ability to alter its cycles to adapt to input changes. An ecosystem is a living thing composed of many other living things, who exist in a complementary pattern. The waste of one being might be the food of another. One organism’s ability to make nutrients available to another (such as by fixing nitrogen from the atmosphere into the soil) is encouraged by the other organism making different nutrients available in return (perhaps by leaking them into the soil through its root system). Or one species may make shade, while another provides vertical structure for a vine species to climb.

The more organisms there are than can provide similar services, the more resilient the ecosystem tends to be. For example, if one producer gets stressed by an unusual weather pattern such as an unseasonal frost, if a less vulnerable producer can perform that service for the ecosystem until the first producer recovers. Redundancy is a benefit - as long as it is not complete competition, in which case the more successful species is likely to replace the one that is less well-adapted.

Complexity is a benefit to many living systems, but humans are challenged by it; we often feel inclined to simplify a system to make it more predictable and under our control. Unfortunately, a policy that makes it easy to use massive machinery to predictably harvest profitable monocrops also means that if an unusual weather event takes place, the whole crop can fail at once. Many famines have been caused by excessive simplification of agricultural systems, which, when they collapsed, had nothing to supplement them. That’s why it’s important to think about the long-term impact of choices that may have great short-term benefits. Scaling up an endeavor into a highly profitable enterprise is tempting, but it’s important not to do so without thinking about the consequences of also scaling up the emissions of a certain kind of waste beyond the ability of the environment to dilute or transform it.

To me, Permaculture is about cultivating a complex, balanced system that has the ability to self-organize (because the many species can adjust their relationships to one another as needed for the benefit of all) and self-heal (because when one part of the system is damaged, another is ready to fill in for that function). Diversity is important, as is the co-evolution of species that work as partners. Systems with powerful emergent properties, such as making a fertile place increasingly more fertile through their activities, take time to develop. The willingness to not force the system, but let it find its own balance while patiently observing what factors adjust themselves and why is a way to help join in the dance. In that way, humans become a useful part of their ecosystem – greater than themselves, greater than the human society, a functioning part of a whole that includes every living thing in and on the land and water where we make our home.

​

April 2018
On Saturday, I went to the volunteer event at 21 Acres and helped build a Rocket Mass Heater with about nine other people. The bricks were already laid, as well as the interior piping; we were there to finish it by filling in all the holes and creating a smooth top surface with cobb. Cobb is made by mixing sand, clay and water, which we did on big plastic sheets laid out on the grass. People mixed the blend with shovels until it had a sticky consistency, and then brought it into the greenhouse in wheelbarrows. Most of the work I did was taking glops of cobb and filling all the holes in the breezeblocks that make up the outer lining of the heater. This heater is going to be used to keep the greenhouse warm in the Winter. It burns small sticks and get up to such a high temperature that it completely consumes the fuel. It doesn’t produce smoke or CO2, just water vapor. Since half of all Washington residents still use a wood stove for heat, this ultra-efficient, low-emission type of heater, could be a good solution. It’s not hard to build, and not dangerous. It works by simply keeping a mass hot (the cobb and bricks), which slowly absorbs and then gradually radiates heat into a surrounding space. The mass remains cool enough to sit on, making it perfect for use in an ordinary room.  Here is an illustration: