PERMACULTURE TECHNIQUES BY BILL MOLLISON … · IX PERMACULTURE TECHNIQUES BY BILL MOLLISON Pamphlet IX in the Permaculture Design Course Series PUBLISHED BY YANKEE PERMACULTURE Publisher

IX

PERMACULTURE TECHNIQUESBY BILL MOLLISON

Pamphlet IX in the Permaculture Design Course SeriesPUBLISHED BY

YANKEE PERMACULTUREPublisher and Distributor of Permaculture Publications

Barking Frogs Permaculture CenterP.O. Box 52, Sparr FL 32192-0052 USA

[email protected]://barkingfrogspc.tr ipod.com/frames.html

orhttp://www.permaculture.net/~EPTA/Hemenway.htm

Pamphlet IX Permaculture Techniques Page 1.

PLANNING IN ZONE ONE

You are very likely to do more zoneone planning than anything else. Ifyour architects are half way capable,and often they are not, what you haveis a set up something like this.

You have mud room, pantry, kitch-en, living room, bed, bed, bed--orbed, bed, bed upstairs, each with anen suite toilet, of course!

The set-up of the house has to belike this for the functions to followthe zone. You can't depart very muchfrom it. You can play around with insand outs, jog it in, extend it out,screen it, trellis it; but, basically,your set-up is like that. It is the onlyefficient set-up. Yet, you are verylikely to find kitchens on the northside, living rooms on the north side,and beds on the south, where youcan't sleep at night because of theheat.

But let's assume we've had somesay in the layout here, and often wedo.

In that case, the most intensivegarden section is around the gardenentries. In there, place a little herbspiral, and then a great mass of par-sley. You can't have too much parsley.Chives also go here. They are yourtwo critical herbs. Garlic is a cropthat you pull at the end of the sum-mer, and it can go in just everywhere

that nothing else fits. If you have ahole, put in a clove of garlic, andthat's it. Then plot the common herbs--there are only three or four of them.They are tarragon, thyme, rosemaryand sage. That's it. Add a couple ofpots of mint. Dill does well here andthere throughout the garden. If youonly gather the seed, it doesn't haveto be close to the door.

There are three or four sorts ofchives, the Chinese chives, the ordi-nary chives with the little purple top,and the fine-leaf blue ones. They areall worth planting. They have slightlydifferent yields in time.

As for parsley, what I do is start abed of it going, and let that go to seed.I start a bed the following year. ThenI pepper the heads all over the place,so that I get parsley throughouteverything. I just take the heads andshake them out all over the garden. Ithrow it out where I want it to grow.I use it as mulch. So parsley is thick-ish. Once you get parsleythick, you never have toworry about it again. Youalways get parsley thickwhere you had a parsleybed.

Our winter is not as se-vere as yours. What wehave been doing successful-ly is to put out our bell

peppers in pots -- at least six or eightof them. Prune them in the fall andbring them in over the winter, and putthem out again in the spring. You willhave big, strong plants. We have hadthem going five years.

You will have worked out pathwaysout of this system, where you comefrom parking, paths to the barn,wherever you come and go. Take asection of this tract, and start to zoneyour plants along that track. Thenstart putting your beds in. Afterward,this will get messy in the ideal Per-maculture garden. You can start put-ting crops in rows in there, rows oflettuce, rows of cabbage, your pluck-ing herbs, the plants you are continu-ally pulling from, that are long stand-ing. They may include celery, a minorquantity of tomatoes, New Zealandspinach, broccoli, zucchini and patty-pan squash. Typically, you have a pathwith some chives or celery. Put cel-ery here, too. Scatter chard alongthere, because it stands a long time.Peppers and tomatoes go furtheralong. Radishes are a catch crop eve-rywhere. Everything has radishesplanted with it.

I don't think it is worth growinganything but trellising peas and beans.

Now your common root crops gofurther out, except, occasionally,things like beets from which you takesome greens. Then comes the maincrop, which will include the winterkeeping squashes, corn, some car-rots, main crop onions, parsnips, long


term cabbages. I always put a nastur-tium in here and there. The leaves aretasty in salad.

By summer, the Jerusalem arti-choke is really up and out of theground, forming a quick barrier hedge.Within the garden, you will have a fewoddities scattered here and there. Cu-cumbers are part of the trellisingsystem, and probably need to be onthe hot side. There will be otherthings that can go on the cool side,like those scarlet runner beans. Theyare just about the best beans in theworld.

You can establish conditions for aparticular plant, or plants, and youkeep that plant going in this spot yearafter year.

If you are dealing with a reallysmall garden, it will pay you to set upa straw-box of potatoes, which ispermanent. Board up an area some-thing like eight feet by five feet.Throw some straw or seaweed into it.Set your potatoes 9" x 9". Scatter abit of ashes on, then fill up the boxwith straw, and let your client justpick potatoes from the straw. Somewill grow green on top. Just pushthem down underneath. Keep thewhole thing ticking all the time. Nosoil, no bottom. Poles make a verygood frame. The bark rots off andadds nutrient. Never use much saw-dust, unless it is quite scattered. Ittends to cut off all the air. If you putin much leaf material, it mats, andyou get an anaerobic condition. Usethe same straw-box every year foryour potatoes. We have had potatoesgrowing for 12 years in straw boxes.Some of the people I know, for as longas I can remember, have had theirstraw beds of potatoes. It doesn'tmatter if it is on concrete.

Near that, you grow a couple ofcomfrey plants, because for laterplantings you should always include acomfrey leaf. Pick a comfrey leaf, putyour potato in it, wrap it up, put itunder the straw, and that is your pot-ash and nutrients. Another thing yougrow near the potato box is a littlepot of mint to cook with your potato.As you are picking your potato, youpick your mint. Grow it in a pot to

keep it from spreading.The base of your straw box is a

good environment for horseradish,which is a good companion plant forpotatoes. You can make a special placefor your horseradish. Get four oldbroken earthenware pots and sinkthem in the ground, leaving them out alittle bit at the top. Every year, yourefill these with good Earth and stickyour horseradish root in it. Other-wise, you can't dig your horseradish.It grows straight, is easy to break,and very easy to lift.

Now let me tell you about compost-ing as against mulch. Every time youcompost, you decrease the nutrients,sometimes to one 20th of the original.Usually, though, you get about a 12thof the nutrient out of compost thatyou get out of mulch. So what haveyou done by composting? You haveworked hard to decrease the nutrientsbadly. Most of them go into the air.Composting consumes them. We wantto get right out of composting. Wewant to get back into sheet mulching.In composting, you are taking a lot ofmaterial, putting it into a small place,and letting the whole of the decompo-sition activity happen under hot con-ditions which can be appropriate forsome things. When you mulch, you arespreading those materials and lettingthe process occur much more slowlyon the surface of the soil. Any leachloss goes into the soil, and the generallevel of activity spreads across thewhole of it. By the time the mulch hasreduced to compost, most of the ac-tion has finished. If you want to getmaximum value out of what you have,sheet mulch it. If you want to in-crease your nutrient base, do itefficiently.

There are some items that are goodto compost, but you need a very,very small amount of compost, maybea cubic yard, a four cubic foot box.That's for a king size gardener. For anaverage household, they need one ofthose drums. Just strew a little bit ofcompost on the seed bed, a little bit inseed trays, a little bit in your glasshouse. That is all you need. Most com-post that you eventually get comesoff your box of mulch. It incorporates

into the Earth's surface.Nearly everything we measure in

compost is less that what we measurein the soil after sheet mulching. Whatyou tend to have is a hyper-rich areaaround your compost heap, but you donot have that on your garden whenyou apply compost.

The best thing to do with mulch is toput it somewhere dry until you needit. If you are piling up leaves, pilethem up underneath pine trees. Theystay dry there, undecomposed. Imulch up to two-inch thick branches.Just lay them between the peas andthe mulch. I use all the large barksheets off trees. This creates a thickmulched area where you are going toput in plants. You can't put smallseeds in a thick mulch.

Kitchen wastes can go directly tothe garden. Just pick up a handful ofmulch, scatter the garbage around abit and put the mulch back. In winter, Ifreeze kitchen wastes into blocks. Youcan take a lot of tea leaves out and putit on the mulch and go back the nextmorning and they will have disap-peared. It is the same with bananapeels. I just take fat out and pour it onthe ground.

Deal with weeds the same as withkitchen wastes. They lift out easily,even docks. I reverse them so theirroots are in the air. Lift up the strawand drop it back on the top of theweed. I let those weeds grow big, too.They're good.

If you dig this material into yoursoil, you'll rob the soil of nitrogen. Ifyou mulch with it, you will never seenitrogen deficiency. Your mulch ispermeated with 70% nitrogen. Every-thing that wants nitrogen takes itright out of the air. The soils with thisacid rain are getting nitric acids fall-ing on them.

Worm manure, which is the highesttonnage per acre, is the best manure.Again, that's a good reason for notcomposting. Instead of the materialburning down in the composting bin,the worms are eating it all over thesurface, and you have a lot of wormmanure. It takes three days, proba-bly, in most gardens for worm cast tocompletely cover the layer of saw-


dust. You are getting high nitrogen,high potash, high phosphate. Wormcastings test alkaline, which might beof interest to you, so that your mulchstratification after two or threeyears may go from a pH 6 to pH 3, ifyou are using some pine needles. Whatyou have is a stratification of pH. Ifsomebody says, "What pH have yougot?", you say, "Everything." Youwill find plants putting out feederroots at completely different levels,and you will find high alkaline and highacid plants side by side.

You have mussels in your creek. Youcan scatter the shells under yourmulch and slowly they will all disap-pear. It takes three years. They justdisappear on demand. I mulch oystershells, scallop shells, pine needles,seaweed, hay, straw. We mulch sometin cans, particularly around ourcitrus.

Algae, a lot of lawn clippings, a lotof hops- these things get slimy. Don'tapply a thick mulch of anything that iswet. You will get good gley, but it isnot good for your garden. It must haveair. Hay should first be put throughchicken pens; straw you put straighton.

Now what you do is set up proper,permanent, well-designed small sys-tems for each plant you are going togrow. If you are going to grow cu-cumbers, you make these holes, putup a wire mesh cylinder, about fourfeet high, and it's permanent, and youalways grow your cucumbers there.You work all this out. In the generalgarden, you do a sort of spot rotation.Wherever you are manuring, as in cu-cumbers, potatoes, and things likeyour asparagus bed, you never rotate.For tomatoes, rotation is disadvanta-geous. Tomatoes grow better on thesame spot. So you set up a permanenttomato bed. You treat each vegetableas a design problem.

In any community situation, it is avery good idea to give responsibilityto different individuals for differentareas. As an example, I never re-plant leeks. I let a certain number ofthem go to seed, then I take the bulbsoff and set them straight out. I justdid this before I left. Then some well-

intentioned idiot comes into your gar-den and pulls your leeks out becausethey are running to seed. So you aretwo years behind again. They pullyour lettuce out because it is going toseed. Of course, that is why you hadit growing there. They plant some-thing over the top of an area that youhad pre-planted and were waiting forit to come up. So you are a long waybehind. You can be up to four yearsbehind; and if they destroy somethingyou have been working on over a longtime, they can set back 10 years ofwork.

If you can point out what you aredoing, and if you have a very sympa-thetic friend and you work closely to-gether, that's all right too. If youbreak functions up, one person at-tending to the compost, the other do-ing the planting, it is possible to worktogether over the same spot. Howev-er, it should be in different functions,one measuring and supplying, the oth-er doing the actual structuring.

If you are going to mulch, you planta quick-maturing lettuce leaf seed.You seed down an area and just putout seedlings. If you are growingseedlings in trays, just seize the op-portunity to put them in anywhere.

Hay is full of seeds. You don't wantto throw those seeds in your garden.So undo your bales of hay in yourchicken run. The chickens can eat theseed. They also help to shred the hay,and add some manurial coating. Afterthey have kicked it all over the place,you fork it out and put it on as mulch.If you are mulching in this way, may-be you won't need much manure.

In the future, wewill become moresophisticated aboutmulch, and will begrowing certaintrees for theirmulch. I am yet notcertain which ones.We know some ofthem. We know someproduce an alkalinemulch, some acid,and some have highpotash, and some anitrogen leaf litter.

It is the work of a few months studyto determine which ones suit a partic-ular site. In the dessert, we growtamarisk and casuarina for theirmulch. All bark is high in calcium.

If the area where you want to startyour garden has heavy wet clay, youare in a happy situation. You are in forreal trouble where there is siliceoussand. Clay is fantastic for water re-tention. Because you are mulching,your roots are well up in surfacearea, and don't have to encounter theclay. The clay holds enormous quanti-ties of water. Sturdy clay gardensmake the best mulch gardens.

If you wish to start a garden onlawn, just go straight on to it. Athome, we have people who keepmulching across their lawn. Thisyear, you decide that a bit of lawn isgoing to be a garden, so you mulchstraight across it, and in a smallhandful of soil you plant all your littleplants through the mulch. Put yourpotatoes at the base, and go straightinto garden.

If you want to convert a lawn, it's aday's work. You never dig it. Here isone way to do it: You get a number ofold tick mattresses. Take them homeand just flop them on to the lawn. Cutlittle holes in these mattresses anddrop potatoes through them. Put ahandful of hay over them and that's allthere is to it.

You work things out for each plant. There are certain crops that are tra-ditionally planted with corn. Through-out the whole of Yugoslavia and south-ern Europe, and where there is a hotsummer sun, corn goes with cucur-


bits. In the cornfields of southern Eu-rope, manure and compost is shoveledoff oxcarts in random little moundsthree feet in diameter and two feethigh. These little garden compostheaps may run right over a hundredacre area. Corn is planted in rows.But in these mounds they put runnerpumpkins, melons, watermelons, andall sorts of cucurbits. The corn comesup and is harvested and the melonsdrop off. They are sitting all over thefield like a million footballs.

Climbing beans are a second groupof companion plants to corn. Theremay very well be others. In the eventyou are growing sweet corn, and arenot interested in the cobs drying off,you will have to go out and get them.You also have to pick the beans. Howare you going to wade through thatcrop?

Work out a band of corn about fourfeet across, hollow in the middle. Inthere, put your manure pile and plantyour cucurbits. This way, you havealso set up what is basically an edge.Plant your beans around it. Now youcan pick all the corn and beans, andwhen it is time to harvest the pump-kins, your corn is finished up and youcan get to them. That is a rich littlearea there, and you can keep it foryour corn patch. If some of the beansget away, there is your bean seed. Ifsome of your corn gets away, there isyour corn seed.

The tomato won't stand the wind. Itdoesn't like it at all. So it needs a lit-tle shelter around it. It needs to be asouth-facing shelter. Grow Jerusalemartichokes around the outside. Theyare well up before the tomatoes are introuble with the wind. You can stakethe tomatoes, if you want to.

Basil and parsley are good compan-ion plants for tomatoes. So plant someparsley in there and quite a lot of ba-sil in the hot spots. Your basil goes inon the south facing edge. Parsleydoesn't care, it can go on the coldedge.

For white fly, we want nasturtium,which gives the essential root con-tact. There is an all-yellow, bunchingnasturtium that doesn't run; it is asmall plant and a fixed species. You

can put a few in among yourtomatoes.

If you worry about eelworm (nema-todes) in tomato, you will need mari-golds--Tagetes minutia. Gooseber-ries are good for the control ofspecific tomato pests. So if you wantto grow a few gooseberries, do thatjust outside, on the cool side of thetires.

We have our basil on the hot side,parsley on the cool side, marigolds inrandom little clumps, windbreak ofJerusalem artichoke, and cool widewindbreak of gooseberries. That is agood tomato production system.

As we close up in the autumn, wetake some good tomatoes and put themwhole under mulch. You get about 200plants at each spot. This enclosure isthick with seedlings. Every remainingtomato is just remulched annually.

When I started my bed, I justbrought a carpet out, mulched the topof it, and planted tomatoes in littlemounds on top of the total. Plastic su-perphosphate bags, cut in half, slippedover four sticks, made a greenhousefor the newly transplanted tomato.

Never re-buy your tomato seed. Inever bought but one lot of tomatoseed. When you throw your tomatoesunder mulch, there is always thestarting of your main crop tomato.Tomatoes from these seedlings al-ways ripen in time.

If you pinch out the tomato axilshoots and plant them right away, youcan also have a whole succession ofplants going. At the end of the ses-sion, if you have a good tomato plant,take its axil shoots out, plant these inpeat pots and put them in the glasshouse. In the spring, you can plantthem out.

We give our plants their culinaryassociates, which have a secondaryeffect of being weed barriers. Whenyou go for your tomatoes, you getsome basil and parsley right in thesame basket.

If you want to put a couple of com-frey plants out there, do it. A com-frey leaf under the mulch near theroot of your tomato will supplypotash.

Try to deal with each thing in yourannual garden system. Set up a sys-tem for your area, tune it up. Thenwrite up a standard design, which canbe printed and tucked in with everysubsequent report, when it suits. Itwould suit an acre garden; it wouldnot suit a 20-acre garden. You won'thave to keep on telling people how togrow their tomatoes.

I will continue to insist that a pond,probably central, in some of thesenon-eroded areas is worth its place. Alittle pond in the herb spot is worthits place. After just a little bit of re-search, and going on data that is al-ready extracted, we can find a greatmany very high yielding pond plants.These plants are in fairly constantproduction, because they are in a con-stant environment. Some of those be-long in the annual garden. They belongin the high turnover garden. Some ofthe perennial pond plants belong in theannual garden of course.

So put in a couple of small ponds,perhaps four feet across and 18 inch-es deep. Some of them filled withabout 12 inches of soil, and some ofthem filled with about four or fiveinches of soil.

A pond that size will turn out abouttwo hundred or three hundred frogsabout twice a summer. The tadpoleslive in the pond, and the frogs live inthe cabbages, lettuces, and mulch.They return to the pond and you mustmake a place for them to get out. Agood sort of pond is one that is slight-ly higher than the surrounding soillevel, built up and paved with stones.We put sweet alyssum and thyme andgarlic between the stones. The alys-sum trails into the edge of the water,and the little frogs climb out on it.Another thing you can do is to build upa little stone pile in the pond. Frogswill drown if they can't get out ofponds, so let them have a way out.

Mosquito control is accomplished intwo ways. I always put a bit of garlicaround the pond and just squeeze thebulbs out into it. That is the best. Thatkills the larva. Just float off yourgarlic oils. It's about 100% kill. Thegarlic doesn't kill tadpoles. The tad-poles eat some mosquitoes, but they


are not a control measure. The secondmosquito control measure is back-swimmers. They, again, don't affectthe tadpoles. Backswimmers fly in. Ifthey don't, go and get them and putthem in--not the big ones, not assas-sin bugs, but backswimmers. We havemosquito control standard design thatwe have never printed up. It waswritten by a Ph.D. in mosquito con-trol. Garlic is a lot more efficient thanoil, and it leaves other organisms.

Ponds can be constructed from oldstock tanks, an old bath, or, it's whatyou have. You can also make them onsite, brick up the sides, plaster theminside. All sorts of variations arepossible. In some areas where wework, we just dig a pond in the clay,and get a rammer and just ram it in.

Hot exposures around the house aregood trellising situations. Trellis caneffectively contribute to climate con-trol. Use trellis right around to thekitchen windows. It should be decidu-ous trellis, up in summer and gone inwinter: hops, grapes, runner beans.The hop is a noble vine, excellent forlight pillows for children. It puts themoff to sleep without a whimper, and achild can not choke on a hop pillow.

You don't want a cold wind acrossyour house. You can control that withtrellis. We continue our trellis sys-tems, but for different reasons. Nowwe can go to evergreen climbers.

Use aromatic plants around the en-try--honeysuckles, jasmine, lilac. Agarden should smell like a garden. It ispleasant to step out on a quiet eveninginto good smells. Stick some lily ofthe valley among your chives, rightnear the door. The formal entryshould be visually pleasing, but alsowork in some things that need that re-flection off the walls. It may be a goodplace for a few peppers.

There is a whole category of plantsthat will live in shade, but they won'tyield as understory. Nearly all thesmall fruits will do reasonably well inthe shade pattern of a small tree. Theraspberry and strawberry bed will gothere, and black currents, if you arepermitted to grow them. Gooseberriesdo perfectly well in shade, particular-ly the green gooseberry group.

If you are dealing with a retrofit ona brick house, give them ivy on thenorth facing walls. It makes a differ-ence. It is 40% efficient against heatescape, and it cuts that wind dragagainst the wall right out. It also pre-serves the wall marvelously. A brickwall under ivy is in much better con-dition after a hundred years than itwould be without it. This does not ap-ply to wood, just to brick. However,if you want to go to the trouble ofputting up a trellis just out from yourwood walls, you can use ivy on thetrellis. It will still the air flow. Manypeople won't go to that sort of trou-ble, so you can use trellisingsystems.

It is a very good idea, though, justto back up your trellis with somethingpermanent, so that the trellis be-comes a permanent part of the gar-den. If you are going to use stone, usesomething that comes above the stonethat is not stone, because stone caus-es high turbulence. If you are going touse stone walling, pick flat stones andgive it 40% penetrability. Have lotsof holes right through it--not for thelower two feet, but thereafter. It ismuch better to soften a stone wallwith a plant that is higher than thewall and softish; otherwise you getreal turbulence, low pressure zones,quick evaporation--all the things youdon't want.

Trellising can be horizontal as wellas vertical. Often when you retrofityou can use horizontal trellising veryeffectively. You will be trying toprevent excess summer heating. Hor-izontal trellising is the way to goabout that. On the horizontal trellisyou will need summer green crops,winter deciduous crops. It is easy toadjust a trellis to cut out the summersun and let the winter sun right in. Assoon as you get to deserts, you canstart to use the horizontal trellis asyour major trellis. A horizontal trel-lis placed close in against the housegives a place to go when the weathergets bad. There are little animals thatmight come in there: pigeons, quail,rabbits in hutches, doves and pigeonsin lofts; bees. Bees are best put upabove pedestrian traffic, up on a

shelf, so they are flying out aboveyour head.

Then you must think where yourweed barriers, paths, car park, en-try, and mulch dump with go. The ac-cess paths will probably beestablished.

Once you have the garden set up intothose little productive units, thenyour work is routine, easily achieved,almost self-done. The potatoes keepon potatoing, the tomatoes keep on to-matoing; your corn is an establishedsystem that continues to produce.

If our design is for an eighth acrewith a large building on it, we wouldneed to throw out all low yieldingplants, such as globe artichokes,which take up a square meter and givethree teaspoonsful of food. However,if we move out into a quarter acre,we could include a few low-yieldingplants here and there. In limited spacedon't use sunflower, use Jerusalemartichoke. The Jerusalem artichoke isa really high yielding plant comparedto sunflowers.

Into this area of permanent, undis-turbed garden will come your littlehedgerows. Fennel and other perennialumbelliferae ought to be dotted hereand there for their value to wasps.Other things to build in around thereare things that we have previouslydiscussed, the weed barriers, the firebarrier plants, little permanent placeswhere wrens can nest and wasps canwinter over. Put in the sort of fruitsyou would normally be picking fre-quently, some of your raspberries andeverbearing strawberries. Becausethey flower all year, I always put afew fuchsias outside the bedroomwindow. They are nice to look at whenyou first look out in the morning.

You can sit down and take a vegeta-ble list from any good vegetable bookand throw half of them out and put therest of them in here. List the ones youare going to put in here, and exactlywhere you are going to put them. Yourglass house space is reserved andstructured. It can wrap around a bit.We don't put any west windows in theglass house. Those are insulatedwalls. There is absolutely no (net)gain from windows in those walls. We


use them as storage walls, a heatbase.

Look at your house. If you have athousand foot hill on the west, swingthe whole glasshouse to mid-sky; for-get about due south, come to mid-sky.Don't be so silly as to take a house andalign it due south, when from 3 p.m.there is not going to be any sun on it,because your sun time is from eight tothree. So put it in the middle of thesun time.

MOLLISON'S SOLUTIONS TO EN-ERGY PROBLEMS

You build a glass house front as afocusing system. Then you beg, buy orborrow sun reflecting mirror systemsand place them under the eaves so thefocus is about eight feet off theground out front of the house, andthere's your driveway. You run yourcar under there, put a magnet on itand bring it up into focus and it melts.You have a hole in the ground and acopper pipe around the hole. Your carmelts and drips in this hole. That's atthe end of autumn. Then you cover thehole up, and this copper pipe heats allyour house and your hot water, andthat runs all winter because you havemolten metal down there. I reckonthat is the solution to the Americanenergy dilemma. Melt your car.

I do think, though, we could buildhouses that would of themselves beenormous energy collecting surfaces.We accidentally got it in Australiawith an office building five stories

high, which has these blind windows,copper glazed, or gold glazed win-dows. Its focal point is about 15 feetabove the heads of pedestrians. Youhave a column of hot air just con-stantly ascending and the cold air isjust rushing in and going up. Veryrapidly, they didn't like the bottomfloors.

I have other solutions to your ener-gy dilemma. The best one is this. Youhave a stone used by the Indians--soapstone--with a fantastic thermalcapacity. Heat it up, put it inside thehouse structure where we need itmost to cook and to heat the house.We will lead a little tube into it andplug it in. Any sunny day that you arerunning low, we will come along withour pickup truck and we will take outof our pickup truck a big fold-out fo-cusing mirror. We will fire that heatback into your soapstone block. Wehave our meter. We will read theamount of calories we give you, andmake it a little bit cheaper than oil.Now that is practical, easily done.

It seems to me that the technologi-cal society seems to be looking forthe technological solution, whereasthis isn't really a high technology so-lution. It is more like an old Indiantrick. The Indian used to stick a slabof it up top of the communal fire andcart it back somewhere where theywanted to cook, and cook on it. Theycooked on it for a couple of hours,then carried it back on a couple ofgreen branches. I reckon that is anon-polluting system that is eminent-

ly practical, easily applied. Imagine ablock of that in your glass house.

Do you want me to digress for aminute? I will give you another freeinvention, called "Mollison's slidinginfinity parabolic calculator." I wasthe man that made the 35¢-Geigercounter. The sun, infinity, parabolicray--it came to me. I took it down tothe physics professors. They sworeand cursed. There is always a me-chanical solution, always a simple so-lution. Do you want to throw a properbamboo screen up at the right curve? No problem. I will give you a fewmore inventions that are critical Per-maculture inventions.

"Mollison's ultra-sophisticated,cheap, fast, solar heater." This in-vention came to me as I was walkingalong the beach at Molokai in mythongs, looking at the golf course. Ithought I would head up into the bushto look at some date trees. I took offmy thongs and started wanderingacross the sand. My feet started tocook. I was hopping from foot to foot.In agony, I put my thongs back on, andthought: My feet would cook here. Theblack sand was intolerably hot.

So what you do is run water pipesthrough a box of black sand. If yoursand isn't black, you blacken it. Putsome glass on top of it. What you haveis something far more efficient thanthese metal collectors. You have afantastic transmission of heat, end-less hot water, at no cost.

You want another invention?"Mollison's third world endless ni-


trogen fertilizer supply system." Youwill need a sand box, with a trickle-insystem of water, and a couple of sub-surface barriers to make the waterdodge about. Fill the box with whitesand and about a quarter ounce of ti-tanium oxide (a common paint pig-ment). In the presence of sunlight, ti-tanium oxide catalyzes atmosphericnitrogen into ammonia, endlessly. Youdon't use up any sand or titanium ox-ide in this reaction. It is a catalyticreaction. Ammonia is highly watersoluble. You run this ammonia solutionoff and cork the system up again. Youdon't run it continuously, because youdon't want an algae buildup in thesand. You just flush out the systemwith water. Water your garden withit. Endless nitrogen fertilizer. If youhave a situation where you want toplant in sand dunes, use a pound ortwo of titanium oxide. You will quicklyestablish plants in the sand, becausenitrogen is continually produced aftera rain. This solution is carried downinto the sand. If you are going to laydown a clover patch on a sand dune,this is how you do it.

What I am saying is that every-where around us, in the natural condi-tion, these factories are working.That black sand has been cooking anddehydrating materials for ages. Justget a fish, split it, put it between twobanana leaves, put it out there on thebeach. Dehydrated fish. No flies. Youcan cook in it. That's better than your$3,000 metal collectors. Those thingsare applicable everywhere. Good per-

maculture technology.You are asking me

whether people use tita-nium oxide to createthis reaction? No, theydon't. They just haven'tthought of it. In chemi-cal abstracts, around1977, a researchernoted this, and thenwent to a discussion ofthe whole atmosphericcirculation. One of themysteries of the atmos-phere is that it has anexcess of ammonia.They have never ac-

counted for it. When he considered theamount of dunes and deserts in theworld, he said, "This is it!" Where dowe get titanic oxide from? Sands. Sohe calculated it. Three acres of desertunder this system would supply asmuch as a commercial fertilizer plant.

But we are not really interested inthree acres of desert. We are inter-ested in three square feet in somepeasant's garden in Guatemala, orsomewhere else. I obtained a bottle oftitanium oxide for our village. I nevergot any more of it. You can buy it bythe pound if you want to. It is a com-mon filler in white paint, after theygot rid of lead. In the deserts, his ni-trogen evaporates into the atmos-phere. That's why it is there. Rain oc-casionally carries it down. That'swhy deserts grow plants. That's whyyou can start into a system in adesert without necessarily startingoff with nitrogen fixing plants.

But, look! I have no time to try any-thing. I just know that it works. Inever tried that black sand box as awater heater, but I did a dance acrossthe beach and I was persuaded.

My home is a good example of aplace where it is always working. Ithas a basaltic coastline with many lit-tle steam holes in the basalt. Someare quite big. The sea is crashing inhere, and the waves drifting inland,and it is also raining at times. Sowhat really happens is that in theseblack basalt holes, you get seawaterevaporating. What you have in thoseholes is a high saline solution, twice

the amount of sea salt. When it rains,the rain water sits on it. So you getfresh water sitting on salt water. Youcan't dip your hand into that pool. It isa total sky focuser, a lens. The wholesky of light is focusing into this hole.Down there in that hole you have ahigh heat capacity solution that, youwill note, is insulated at the top bywater, which is a good insulator. Soheat gathers in there, and it 's in ba-salt. All this is hot.

If you look in there, it is fascinat-ing. You have a hot saline alga growingin there, violent looking stuff. Youhave different layers of mosquito lar-vae, belonging to different species ofmosquito, but which are quite specificto that stratum. This demonstrateshow common those sites must havebeen, over ages of time, when specieshave adapted just to that particularcondition. It is real interesting.

It I were to make one, I would makeit out of black concrete and I wouldput a straw right around it. Cook yourspuds down in there.

Again, the body is a sensor. If youare playing around with a situationand you find a peculiar condition, youknow, where your finger suddenlygets burned, or your feet get cooked,take note, take note! You think, as youare cooking away at the base, Eureka!

Everywhere, all this is happeningnaturally. A civil engineer on Molokaihas a thermometer stuck in thisbeach, and he is busy with the idea.We could build these black sand heatcollectors on top of people's watertanks. You wouldn't even need a glasstop of it.

Well, well, well, where were we?We were just concluding planning inzone one. Parabolic house--that's howwe got there. Right on the edge ofzone one, you can recommend growingmulti-graft fruit, a mini-orchard.There is some validity in cordonfruit--just single cordons, perhapsfour feet long, each one a differentapple. It's whip graft here. Just a lit-tle cordon fence made up of five sortsof apples. There's a man in Californiathat has set up a cordon system in hisback yard. He gets bushels and bushelsof apples out of a tiny back yard. He


grows 150 varieties. That is an ex-traordinarily high-value quarter acre.Dwarf fruit trees are very good inthis zone, particularly peaches andcitrus. This is the only area where Iwould recommend this. I would go tothe cordon for pear and apple, and tothe dwarfs for most the rest.

THE GREENHOUSEWhile we are still in zone one, we

might look inside the glass house. Thisglass house is adjusted to use the re-flection of the winter snow. It wouldnot have to be the winter snow,though; it could be white quartzite.

As soon as that system is a littlelarger, we put up two or three glasshouses for different reasons. It seemsto me that the glass house is a verysensible thing. However, they are notbeing sensibly used. Often, they areonly used to extend the season withthe same crops you would in any casegrow in your garden and store. Youwant a minimal amount of that sort ofcrop in your glass house. Maybe justone of the glass houses you build willhave that crop. One alone should sup-ply enough winter greens.

Now what other sort of crops wouldbe appropriate? There are really twogroups. There is a set of critical spe-cies, and there is an income set.

One of the reasons that we are aheavy load on other parts of the worldis that we keep turning their peasanteconomies into production economiesfor species out of our climate range,and much of our food is of that sort.Many spices and beverages fall intothat category. Although some of themare beginning to be home grown, theyneed a high labor input. I have a listthat I have extracted for Tasmania,which I thought out very carefully,and which you can think out for yourarea, which isn't so very different.Just look through your grocery listand your shelves. Maybe you use 20fresh ginger roots a year. You put agreen ginger root in a small tub andaway it grows. You have a continuousginger supply. You might--and I woulddoubt it--eat as many as 20 pineap-ples a year. This is another plant thatis very easily grown, not only within

the glass house, but within the house.It was the ordinary sort of indoorplant of the 1850's in England.

The pineapple needs a little tech-nique. It needs ethylene to set fruit.Apples produce ethylene. You have toenclose the pineapple with an apple.Have a few apples ready as the pine-apple flowers. Put them down at thebase of the plant. Another thing youmight do is to plant a single dandelionplant in a pot nearby, because it hasconstant ethylene production.

Vanilla is a fairly hardy orchid. Itwill grow up the rear wall of anygreenhouse, any place that has someheat in it.

Cinnamon is a very easily propagat-ed tree that grows from cuttings, andit coppices. When you cut a cinnamonstick off, you get four more. It is atwo-year cycle crop. In a pot, ittakes up about a square foot in a glasshouse. You can produce cinnamon foreverybody in your area with one pot.Cinnamon is a very common roadsideplant of the near tropics. You can dis-till the leaves for cinnamon oils. Theleaves are a very high value fertiliz-er. It's a useful little plant.

Tea is a small shrub, which is a Ca-mel l ia , a fairly cold-hardy shrub. Inthe tropics, it is a high altitude shrub.It is better as a green tea, but youcan ferment it. Again, one plant givesyou all the Camellia tea you want. Itwill grow in the open up to a latitudeof about 40 degrees. Wherever Ca-mellias grow, you can grow tea.

Coffee is a very shade tolerant in-door shrub that has beautiful flowersand a nice aroma. It will live in offic-es quite well, in just a well-lightedoffice, under fairly artificial lightconditions. It bears heavy crops ofberries. You can eat the berries. Spitout pits and take them home and roastthem. You will get pounds and poundsof coffee berries off a single plant. Itis a kind of weed tree of the shade.

To the extent that we import tea,coffee, cinnamon and ginger, we laywaste to a lot of distant peasanteconomies, cutting into their availableland, using their land to grow thisfood for us, rather than growing food

for themselves. We do that just so wecan have non-food items.

So I think it is time we built someglasshouses to produce these itemsourselves, and take our weight offother people. If somebody igrows fiveor six tea plants in their glasshouse,they will have enough tea to supply 20or 30 households. If you grow cinna-mon, you can grow enough for 100households. These are species that Ithink we are morally obligated togrow in some of our animal heated orsolar heated glasshouses.

In inland Australia, where I put intwo story glasshouses, there is noproblem with growing bananas. Twobanana plants would normally supplyall the bananas that you would use fora family. You can get the necessaryheight in two ways. One is to build asingle story glass house and drop thefloor of it a story to make room for these tall plants. The other way is tobuild a two-story glass house. It isvery effective, however, to drop it astory below ground, providing it isdrained. It is good heat buffer, andyour plants will get up to the lightfast enough. You could grow vanillabeans and bananas in a pit glass housewith just one story at ground level. Grow the dwarf cavendish banana.[There are several other dwarf va-rieties such as Raja Puri, Dwarf Ori-noco, etc. Also, beware of severethermal stratification problems in 2-story greenhouses. One story withdwarfs performs much better. --DH]

Turmeric is equally easy to grow.There are many opportunities at

present for deriving an income fromplants grown in the glass house. Thehighest return is from flowers, bulbs,ferns and indoor plants. But you mightprofitably grow vanilla beans. Thesehave to be hand pollinated. You do itwith a feather. You really have tomake but three trips to the vanillabean, one to cut it and bend it down,one to pollinate it when it flowers,and one to clip the beans. You sweatthe beans in a woolen blanket, andthat's it. One plant gives you hundredsof beans. It is a better commercialcrop than tomatoes. It is up to youringenuity, really.


The alienation of third world landfrom food production is increasing. Soif you can start into these crops, youwill be doing a good job. Most of themare vegetatively reproduced.

The banana sends up four shoots. Give these to your friends. Cut offyour spice plant and stick it in theground, and off it grows. So will thepapaw [papaya]. Anyhow, papaws arereally self-seeding. They will come upall over the place. In cool areas theylast for 30 or 40 years; whereas, inthe real tropics, a papaw only livesfor about four years.

So I would think about this aspectof glass house production. You havean opportunity to provide more thancabbages, you know. You can be sup-plying foods otherwise that you bringfrom a great distance at a great hu-man cost.

I haven't given much thought to theinterior of the glass house. It would begood to do so. I can simply point out toyou that there are strategies. Quailare good inside the glass house. Theykeep cockroaches and whitefly down.Bring them into the house to clean upcockroaches periodically. The idealnesting place for quail is under thecurve of a pineapple plant. They willeat tiny insects; they eat whitefly.

Run a pipe from the outside pond toa small pond inside the glass house.Fish will come in and overwinter inthe glass house.

I had a thought about taro produc-tion. Taro is a very ordinary rootcrop. It grows in water. But it is nouse trying to grow it where it is fro-zen. So we can move our four or fivetaro plants indoors.

One critical plant that must bemoved in is the Azolla, a nitrogen-fixing fern that grows on water. Sowe bring Azolla in, and, grateful plantthat it is, it starts spreading all overwithin a week or two. There are 18species of Azolla. They run right upto the Canadian border and right downto the equator. Sometimes it's red;most species are green.

Everything in the greenhouse iswaste high. Underneath is rubble. Sowhy not put a pond there? One thing

that does well rooted in a pond is sal-able bulbs. Suspend them on meshabove the water.

I'll tell you what my friend does inMelbourne. He rents people's swim-ming pools and grows all of his springbulbs in them before they start usingthe pools for swimming. He growsthem on rafts.

Retrofit a swimming pool for bio-logical production, with blueberryedges and frogs.

I don't feel we have got very excit-ed about glasshouses yet. We have thetechnology. We have the uses right,the construction right, and we havestarted to get some of the cropsright. But I think we have a long wayto go. It should not take us long; butstill, we have a long way to go.

KEEPING THE ANNUALSPERENNIAL

You may be able to get a system go-ing so that there is no reason to buyseed again. Keep little bits of purpleribbon right by the door, and tie apiece of it around the plant you don'twant to pull. Everyone should knowwhat the sign is.

Just keep bringing the seeds in, oreven hanging the plants up to drywithout ever shelling them out. I thinkthis is becoming critically importantto us all.

You have, maybe, eight species ofnon cross-pollinating squash. If youare smart, you settle on a really sat-isfactory long-keeping pumpkin, agood cucumber, and agree with yourfriends that they set seed of one of aslightly different group. There is aperennial squash that just does notcross pollinate; it is quite a differentspecies. There is a wide variety ofspecies of squash--Chinese and Japa-nese. You have a very large selection.You could grow nine sorts of squashthat are not going to worry each oth-er. We have dealt with pinching outthe axillary shoots of tomatoes andpeppers and bringing them in overwinter, either under glass or just asa sill plant.

Leeks should be permanent in thesystem. You should let some go to

seed and plant from bulbs all aroundthe base, then sell the seed to some-one else.

If you don't already know how tocross cut your cabbage stems, startin. Cut your cabbage, cross cut thestem, and you get four good littleheads growing off that. I've gone fur-ther. I have cut right through, let theheads spread out, separate the fourthings and replant them as plants.

Celery is an interesting plant. It is aperennial plant, not an annual. In allTasmanian gardens, they still havethe perennial variety. Just keep pull-ing bunches off the side of it.

The trade has made annuals of manyperennials because they are into seedproduction. I have found a wild lovagein Tasmania that tastes as celery andthat is perennial.

With many plants, I just take theseed heads and shake them all overthe garden in autumn. They fallthrough the mulch. I get celery, par-sley, lettuces, and all that, coming upat random. It is very wasteful ofseed. The same amount of seed wouldsell for $20. I am trying to shortcutthis whole business of buying seed,growing and purchasing seedlings,transplanting them out, cutting off thewhole plant at harvest, and buyingmore seed every year. We are tryingto get plants suited to the site, andreduce the seed packet buying as muchas we can.

In Tasmania, we have found that weget many apple seedlings from applepips that have been tossed out alongroadsides. Every seedling apple wegrow is a good apple, so we neverbother to graft. They are alreadyheavily selected apples, and we growthem from seed. All the deciduoustrees that we have were imported.There are no wild apple species.

We got a frost resistant orangefrom pips. Nectarines are always goodfrom pips. Lemon will take frost. Sowill mandarin oranges. I've been run-ning around New South Wales when allthe mandarins were frosted to theground. Break them off the ground,and their skins would be stuck on theground. These trees don't mind frost-ing up of a night, a few degrees below.


A seed bed should be incorporatedinto the annual garden--a little fivesquare meter place for putting outseedlings. You want them coming allthe time.

We save almost all the seeds of thefruit we eat, the pips. We let themdry, just along the windowsills. Atthe end of summer, when we have ac-cumulated many of them, we packthem in sawdust and put them outsidein a box. The rains fall on them andthe frosts attack them. From then on,we start lifting the sawdust up andlooking at it, and as soon as shootsstart to peep out, we start puttingthem out all over the place. They areon their way. The more fruit you eat,the more fruit you grow. You catch upwith yourself in about seven years.

FORAGE SYSTEMS ANDANIMALS IN ZONE TWO

Never in the history of the worldhas anybody designed and implementedanimal forage systems.

White mulberry as chicken forage isas good as a double crop of grain. It is17% protein. The mulberry crop is avery good chicken food for the periodof bearing in which it occurs, and be-yond it; because the chickens are get-ting seed long after the mulberriesare gone. You can put in quite largemulberry plants from cuttings. Youcan put in four foot cuttings of aboutone and one half inch diameter. In thefirst autumn, take a rooting, and youcan get several trees. You can com-pletely fill the area and be into fullmulberry production next year. In theUnited States, you have one of thevery best black mulberries in theworld. Two or three varieties willextend your harvest season.

The hawthorn group are great win-ter forage. So is the mountain ash.

When we come to the period of sum-mer drought, we look to greens--tocomfrey, cleavers, and any amount ofchard. There are gardeners at homewho grow more chard for their chick-ens than they grow for themselves. Inthis part of your garden you mighthave some throw-overs, like chard,or weeds.

Really, what we should look to car-ry us through a drought would be theSiberian pea tree. They are commonhere; and they are very good nitrogenfixers, producing a lot of seed. Thepeasants of Siberia fed their poultryon this tree alone. This sort of seed isalways there. The chickens will go onand off it. They don't pay it much at-tention when they are chasing mul-berries. And they eat a lot of greensin the summer. But at some periodswhen maybe there is no other seed,they hit it. It is doing handy things forthem, like growing sprouts on itsown.

With an acre of black locust, whichis your best fence post material, youmay look forward to a 10,000 pounddrop, minimal. Just outside this acre,you have a little Fukuoka plot produc-ing another 2,000 pounds of grain, incase we made some wrong guesses inhere.

Wherever there's frost heave, andwe want to stabilize the soil, we dropsome sunflower seed in mud balls sothe birds don't eat them. You havelots of opportunity with frost heave. Sow those little patches to clover orsunflower seed.

Now you can bring tubers in; youcan bring in some Jerusalemartichoke.

Say we have a half acre of this--asa modest estimate, you may have5,000 pounds of chicken forage inthere, much higher in protein valuethan wheat, and a much more variablefood. This would keep 40 chickens ayear.

We have certain advantages here.We will have straw yards where wecan grow lots of grain, by alternatinga couple of yards to chickens. Wehave 5,000 pounds of fodder, atpresent, there. This would keepchickens for seven months a year. Noneed to go threshing and bagging yourgrains. You hang the sheaves up. Thechickens will do all the husking andthe threshing. Now that is withoutconsidering the forages and grasses,and the insects in this situation. Ireckon we might have at least another2,000 or 3,000 pounds of justprotein.

Just before you plant, let the chick-ens and ducks in to dig out the slugsand clean up the ground. They won'tget many of the seeds. Slugs andworms are much more delicious.

If we want to set up a new sort ofchicken farm, we separate the chickenhouses by about 150 feet. If you wantto make it 200 feet, go right ahead.That's as far as a group of chickensrange. You won't get any mixing up ofthe flocks.

Here's another fact for you. If youdon't run any more than 400 chickensto an acre, you still have an entireherb and regrowth, with no bare soil.Four hundred is about the break evenpoint. Three hundred is all right. It isgood not to exceed 80 per flock. Theyare happier with about 50 to 60 perflock. It suits their social conditionsbest. You will need about five roost-ers to the flock, otherwise, the henswander. So on an acre of ground youcan set out four sorts of 60-chickenflocks, running roosters. You can havefour entirely different breeds ofchicken. The heavy breeds lay betterin winter. The light breeds are springand summer layers. For details, con-sult your chicken fancier, not yourpoultryman. You have good fanciers inAmerica. You have a pheasant socie-ty; you have a duck fancier--all thoseecological bandits. They are sort of oilmillionaires. Five acres under wire.They go out and pinch very rare ducksoff everybody, and escape illegally, ifnecessary, in their own yachts. Theyare nuts.

By calculations I have made athome, I have enough food on there for800 chickens now, off the shrubgrowth. That's based on somethingmore than intuition. It's based on anactual plot. Now, I don't want to put800 chickens on there, because I don'twant bare ground.

Your conditions are different, be-cause you have a winter close-downperiod, and you have some of yourfood in store. So grow more sunflow-ers, or whatever, but not all sunflow-ers, because if the chickens get toomuch sunflower seed, their feathersdrop out. That's because there is toomuch oil in their body, and the feath-


ers are very loosely attached in theirsockets.

We wouldn't argue but that we aregoing to get cheaper eggs. We wouldn'targue but that we probably are goingto get healthier chickens. Certainly Iwouldn't argue but that we are goingto get happier chickens, because whatyou have is a chicken out there reallydoing its own thing. We don't seem toget much disease in these chickens.They seem to maintain good health andthey lay until they die. It's not one ofthese three-year systems. They oftendie at roost, having laid the day be-fore. Some of them go six years inthis. So no need to kill the layers. Itis a cheap system. You can bring out acart of eggs every day, and they don'tcost a lot.

Get the system going with verylarge cuttings and pot planted things.Chickens cannot disturb little plants ifyou get them going in wire mesh,mulch or brush piles. Later in the sea-son, when we get it going, we can loadthe area with two hundred chickens. Ina few seasons of tuning and adjusting,we can bring it right up here to wherewe want it.

A pasture with above 400 chickenswill show two effects. The amount ofnitrogen starts to weaken the pas-ture, and the chickens will probablyeat it out.

What we are really setting out is amuch stronger root system than pas-ture, and we are setting up leafmulch. It doesn't all have to be chickenfood in there. Chinese chestnuts andhazelnuts can go in there. You willdouble and quadruple your yield of ha-zelnuts. What we have in there is highnitrogen demand, high commercialvalue crop dotted through the area.Chickens are cutting down the grasscompetition, and they are also eatingthe windfalls from apples and otherfruits. So it is a chicken-orchard:chicken plus orchard, including vinecrop.

A grain-fed animal itself keeps fourchickens on just the grain in manure.Ducks with sheep are excellent. Duckseat two things fatal to sheep: One isshallow water snails that carry fluke,and they also eat the fluke eggs. It

doesn't hurt ducks or infest ducks.Ducks don't compete with the sheep.So in this way, you set up a high hy-gienic situation. The same goes forchickens and grain-eating herbivores.The chickens don't just eat grain.They eat encysted parasite eggs.Anything that has died, an animal thathas been run over on the highway,just hang it up in the chicken run,convert it into larvae. That willsharply reduce the flies in your area,because these larvae will drop intothe chicken pen and be eaten beforethey can hatch flies. Ducks are greatfly catchers, too. If you bait the fliesin, ducks will catch many of them. Wecan bring insects in to them by plant-ing insect attracting plants.

Chickens with plum and cherriessharply reduce crawling, flying pests.All the pests that go into the soil andre-emerge are sharply reduced.

With chickens given the shelter oftrees, the depredation situation ispractically nil.

What we are doing here is playing anew game, which nobody has everplayed. They have played little bits ofthis game here and there. The peopleof Siberia and the tundra have playeda little bit of it. In West Australia youcan identify the old chicken yards bythe fact that they contain the CanaryIsland tree lucerne, which, among theold timers, was the number onechicken seed forage. You can find eve-ry old Tasmanian pig sty, because itwill contain oak trees. The Britishbrought their oaks with their pigs andtheir poultry--sensible people! Nowall that remains of the pig sty is theancient oak trees. The pigs are overthere being fed grain, and the oaksare over here with nobody feeding onthem. Because the grandchildren ofthese people went to the universityand got educated, they found out fromthe agricultural department how togrow pigs. The old systems all wentinto decay. But there remained littlebits of it.

I think it is good to run our chickenswith the other animals. Then we haveanimal heat and the enormous heat ofthe decomposition of manures outthere in the barn. If we build a glass

house around it, we can use the heat;and if we use the methane, and theammonia, and the CO2, then it isstarting to look very good.

You want a few piles of quartzitegravel in range; and you will needbroken shell. The crushed shells offresh water mussels are good forthat.

In North America you have a largecontinent with large marshes. You hada large wildfowl population. Yourcountry has wildfowl-specific forag-es. You had your turkey ranges, yourpigeon ranges, and your duck ranges.Among these enormous forage ranges,there are going to be critical foragespecies, very good ones. Long ago, weshould have started using these sys-tems, and not have been relying on thewheat fields to produce disease-stricken cows and poultry. I simplypoint out your grand opportunitieshere. If you go back and read the ac-counts of your early explorers, youwill find that as they were coming upthe river, they weren't looking at aflock of ducks every half mile; theywere looking at ducks by the thou-sands. They were looking at flocks ofpassenger pigeons that darkened thesky from dawn to evening. There wasa lot more nobility in the environmentthen. Just imagine the transfer ofphosphates across this country.

We can take some of the native ani-mals like the turkey, and start tomanage those forests into turkeyranges, or we can bring in other spe-cies closely allied. In these wildlifeforages we find many of the pioneerplants, the plants that step out intothe grassland, plants that are notfussy, do not require all the mulchingand harrowing and digging. They pre-pare the site for your followingplants. I would pioneer with bird rang-es across the country, and transferinto larger tree species.

If you have existing forest of low-forage species, you can adjust maybefive acres of it one way, five acres ofit another way. You have great oppor-tunities. You have no establishmentproblem. All you have is tuning prob-lems. You worry about what vines toput up those oak trees. Where there


nitrogen going into this forest throughits animal populations, there is a veryrapid break down of litter. It would bereasonable to choose hardy animalsand these pioneer forage species toprepare for the following forest.

Time and gain I have set up a situa-tion, and then discovered that thisecology is working, and I hadn't real-ized it until I designed it. Somebodyhad been in there before, a goodDesigner!

Yet it is not quite the same old gamewe have to play. We have to play anew game. We are not into the game ofshoving the continents together, andpulling them apart, arranging all sortsof new combinations, just to see whathappens.

We have been impoverishing theglobe, and we are into the greatest,most intensive phase of impoverish-ment right now. We know that as a re-sult we are going to wipe out tens ofthousands of plant and animal species.Whole elements are dropping out ofecologies everywhere.

The only way we can begin to makeamends for that is to bring other ele-ments into those ecologies, in an at-tempt to restore their function. Thechestnuts were 80 per cent of theforest cover. They are gone, killed.What do we put back? What amendsare we going to make to every animaldependent on that forest cover? Areyou going to make amends with theChinese chestnuts, or what are wegoing to do? Acid rain will knock outmany of the species in northeastAmerica. We may not be able to getthose species back in that area, butwe have to make amends. We have thepotential to enrich the system. Thechances are more than equal that wecan enrich it.

Some of you keep returning to therationale that there is an inherentdanger involved in introducing plantsnot native to an area. I have a ratio-nale, too. I use only native plants;they are native to the planet Earth. Iam using indigenous plants; they areindigenous to this part of theUniverse.

Speciation is not something that ishappening all the time. I believe that

have is unhealthy plants, becausetheir essential mobile components aremissing. The animals are needed. Ithink when we start to balance thesesystems, you will see it reflected intree health and tree growth. You mayeven see a big tree again one day.

I have seen an English walnut grow-ing in a chicken pen, an old chickenpen, not now active, between one andtwo hundred feet across the crown,and still only 60 feet high, and thattree is only 120 years old. It yieldsbags and bags of walnuts. These treesaround here don't look as if they areever going to be big. They will getsick before they get big.

You have conditions here that aregood for ground birds. There are allsorts of places to start up these ac-tivities, to create the little ecologicalislands. I don't think we need 70 percent of this corn. If we could work outthese little alternative systems,there would be no need for carting inall of this protein.

There is a film that we have seen inAustralia; you may have seen it here.It shows the fishing operation ofChile, which has a desert coast. Offthe coast, there are islands that werevery high nitrate islands and phos-phate. Here the westerly drift comesup, and with it billions of fish. Thosefish are being taken and processedinto fish protein concentrate for U.S.pigs.

Under the conveyor belt that goesfrom the holds of the fishing vesselsup to the fish factories is a God--awful mess; and for a while you can'tfigure out what is happening. All youcan see is arms and wings. It is thepeasant women and the pelicans fight-ing for dropped fish, because both arestarving. The pelicans are invadingtowns 200 miles inland, fighting withpeople for the remaining food thatthere is. That film indicates some-thing is bloody awful.

So I think we must go into foragesystems seriously. These forage for-est situations are fantastic fire con-trol situations. We usually have a highgrowth rate, really good plants, verylittle ground cover, hardly any litteraccumulation. Because there is more

are no forests, our concern is how weare going to get the oak tree up there.

Sixty per cent of the world's grainsare fed to livestock. In the UnitedStates, not only are you doing that,but you are bringing in something like100% of the produce of the SouthAmerican fisheries. You are importingan enormous amount of protein fromoverseas. America does not feed theworld. The peasant farmer of thethird world feeds the world, includingAmerica. All the fish concentrate, theentire crop from the Chilean coast,comes into America as animal feed.That alone makes America a net im-porter of protein. They had put in afish concentrate factory on our eastcoast in Tasmania. Certain whole fishstocks were wiped out this way.

We credit Melaleuca, which growsin most climates, with attractingabout 60 per cent of our inland fishfood. This grows all along our inlandwaterways. It attracts a great varie-ty of honey-loving beetles and moths.So we can bring insects in. We canbias the whole situation toward thedesired product. At the same time, weare not stuck on that product--thefish, the chicken, the duck. We canmove into mulberry jam, apples. Ihave seen hazelnuts growing insideand outside a chicken pen. Inside thechicken pen, the bushes are aboutthree times as big, and they have atleast twice the amount of leaves percubic foot, as compared with the onesoutside the pen. The nut crops easilyquadruple the ones outside the pens.

I suspect that we removed an enor-mous amount of biomass from thislandscape when we took away thechisel plow--the marmots, gophers,moles; when we took away the free-flying pigeons. They were our phos-phate mobilizers. The forest producedthem and sent them out, saying "Feedme." In this way, the forest attractedthe phosphate to itself. The animalsare the mobile part of the forest, anaspect of the trees. Those birds areplanting those trees; they are garden-ing those trees. You cannot take themaway and expect to have a healthyforest. You can't. You can't have ahealthy society, either. What you


You will find this happening like thatall over the place. Geoff Wallace isdoing this deliberately. He has runcompletely out of blackberries, wipedblackberries right off his property.

The main value of blackberry totree is that it prevents grass compe-tition at the roots. Grasses producechemicals hostile to trees. There is afight on between grassland and trees.Fire helps the grasses; brambles helpthe trees. Hence there is a whole con-flict of pioneer species in grasslands.The bramble is really continuallymulching the tree, keeping its rootsystem free of grass. The tree growsmuch better there than in an open sit-uation. A secondary effect is that thebramble growth pre-prunes the treeto a standard, prevents low branch-ing, and the tree crowns out into areally classical old British typecrown--round, with a strong trunk.By the time the bramble is smashed,the bark is coming up from the root ofthe tree. It has all been timed. Wecouldn't have designed it better.

Somebody designed that for us. Ijust keep on this way, discoveringsomething; then I go and have a look.It was there anyhow. After the forestis gone, when we are trying to growthe apple tree away from the forest,without the cattle, without the pigs,without the blackberries, we are go-ing to have a lot of apple trees thatare very unhealthy. In California, alot of iris and fennel grow under appletrees. What you are looking for now isthe tree's garden, the situation inwhich the tree can stand against thegrass and still be very healthy. Nowthese are an interesting group ofplants. Their main characteristic isthat they are not surface fibrous-rooted plants. They do not set up thatmat that intercepts light, rain, andprevents the percolation of water. The nasturtium and any of the rootthistles are very good plants. Theyare tap-rooted, large-leafed. Theyare clumped or have feathery fronds.Those are the sort of plants that dowell under trees. You can design theapple garden, in which the apple willthrive according to its shade and sunrequirements. If you start planting

and they start smelling good and get-ting lost in the blackberries and fer-menting. At that point the cattle can'tstand it. They wade into the blackber-ries up to their chest, picking out ap-ples, and they tread heavy on theblackberries. Then the tree getsbigger, and it drops 30 bushels of ap-ples. It is now partially shading theblackberries out. It also becomes ab-solutely impossible for the cattle tostay out. They smash the blackberriesflat, and you have this gigantic appletree with the big thick trunk, eightfeet clear of branches. One of thosetrees is 70 feet across, and 60 feethigh, yielding 70 bushels of apples.The cattle get about 40 bushels, andyou can pick 30. At just 17 years old,it's a phenomenal tree.

I don't know whether you can ima-gine this farm; but you should see it.It has patches of eucalyptus and wat-tles, and here and there a gigantic figtree, a gigantic apple tree, and anenormous pear tree. Twelve peartrees growing under similar condi-tions yield almost seven tons of fruitper tree. They are big. They are ap-proaching 160 feet high. There is aflood plain with blackberries there,and these pear trees haven't anybrambles at all under them. You canget on your ladder and pick the first20 feet. The rest, from there on up,drop to the sheep and cattle.

I keep seeing this happening all thetime. I thought, Of course! Here is theold European forest, in which livedthe white ox, the old European whiteox. On the edge of that forest, sneak-ing out into the plains, step afterstep, is the bramble. On the edge ofthis forest, the only place where it isdoing any good, is the apple. Its fruitfalls into the brambles. The seedlingscome up and begin fruiting. Thencomes the white ox. He comes andrescues the forest. That is how theforest advanced. Here comes your lit-tle boar out of the forest, rootingaround in the blackberries for apples,and they will change the soil condi-tion. They will make a high manurialsituation, and will stimulate this edgegrowth of plants. Then on the forestwill go, with apples out in front of it.

many of our systems are becomingtime-saturated. I believe that toomuch time can accumulate in this sys-tem. It closes up. A forest that isrich, complex, with many other thingsin it, gradually evolves into a big oldclosed system, dominated by a fewspecies. It is a bit like a free economysociety that has resulted in a few oldsavage people accumulating every-thing. The die-off starts at the bot-tom, and you loose a lot of genetic di-versity. Then it's the time tooverturn it. Any social system thatlasts too long seems to get time pol-luted--chronically ill.

There is a man who had a 14-year-old sow. He fed it a lot of good things,including apples. He had pigs beforeher. About 17 years ago, in the cor-ner of the pig pen there was a black-berry clump. An apple tree startedthere, and up it came. Then the applesstarted to fall, and the pigs got intothe blackberries and moved them out,ripped them all out and left the appletree. This fellow was a man of greatsagacity. He went out and got a lot ofapple trees, waded into the middle ofhis blackberries and planted trees inevery blackberry clump he could find. He also planted peaches and quincesand figs and pears. He had a lot ofblackberry on his farm; he was infairly heavy rainfall foothill country.Blackberries there are not the weakundersized things you see aroundhere. They are violently rampantblackberries. They will fill gullies andbe level across the top of them withthe hills. The water flows down be-low. So he waded in and put in a graft-ed sometimes, but often seedlingtrees.

What happens in this situation isthat the tree grows straight up to thelight. It doesn't make any low branch-es. It grows very fast. It is the fast-est growing situation you can find forfruit trees. The tree doesn't have anybranches for maybe nine feet, andthen it crowns out. When the applesstart to fall, there will not be enoughof them to attract anything exceptthree or four rabbits, and they eatthem. Then, in a couple of seasons,maybe, a lot of apples start to fall,


lychees. During the four years thatthey have been working, those guineapigs are about to make a millionaireout of him. So that is another appliedplant-animal relationship that is agoverning relationship.

Occasionally a python comesthrough. He lowers the guinea pig pop-ulation. But guinea pigs breed up. Well, pythons are harmless, really.

It's that sort of situation that weare trying to set up. We are attempt-ing to beat the grasses against theforest, preferably in a productiveway.

THE BEEI don't know about America, but in

Australia flowering is unpredictable,and forests are being rapidly reducedto islands of plants. The average bee-keeper knocks out well over a thou-sand kilometers a week. Some do1500 a week, just shifting bees andgetting water to them, traveling tothem, and carrying off the honey. Ithas already reached the point where,if beekeepers stayed home and startedplanting forage systems, they wouldbe infinitely better off.

There is a whole set of bee forages. They range from useful crop, such asrape and buckwheat, to marshlandtrees, the water tupelo, and marsh-land plants such as purple loosestrifeand Caltha, the marsh marigold.There are very reliable honey trees,such as basswood, Tilia americana. There are many basswoods, not con-fined to America. The Tilia are else-where called lime trees. Purple loo-sestrife is a problem to marshes, butif it is there, it is good bee fodder. Ifyou have it around you here, youmight as well be using it as bee fod-der. The Tasmanian leatherwood mightgrow in this climate. It has a super-high-quality honey. It has the inter-esting characteristic that the cherrylaurel has. It produces nectar from itsleaves, and from its flowers. Leath-erwood has very active leaf nectar-ies. Just before the end of the season,empty the hives out and carry theminto the leatherwood, and they willput out 100 pounds of honey every

for wildlife or domesticated stock. Wewant a whole set of these gardens,isolated from one another.

Another good thing under trees is aproportion of slab stone. I don't knowhow much of the surface should becovered with slab. It may be the stoneslab is doing the pruning. Stone slab isideal watering--instant run-off. It isnot going to absorb and of the rainfall.It is high worm cast--all the charac-teristics that we want.

Now for the fig, the rock pile is theperfect condition. I feel that by addingor removing more stone, we couldprune those trees, because that is avery manageable proportion of theground cover. If we want to lengthenthe shoots, put stone on.

There are biological books that willgive you the perching characteristicsof birds. Most all open country birdsrequire perches. All insectivores areperchers. Put a bird perch by that little tree and you will find instantmobilization of the insects around thatpoint, and a substantial fall of phos-phate there. It will make a difference.We have done it, and those treeswhere we have done it are healthy;and the trees where we have not doneit are not. Those birds are eatingseeds and insects and providing phos-phorus for the tree. We throw theseperches away after the tree is up andproviding its own perching situation.

In a tropical location, there is aperson who has done a beautiful thing.His trees are lychee trees, andgrasses are really hostile to lycheetrees. Those trees in grass will die.He put at the base of each tree a littlefive gallon can with a hole in it, and ineach can he put four guinea pigs. Guin-ea pigs run around under the grass fora very good reason: There are a lot ofowls. Those guinea pigs would leaveone stick in a hundred of grass. Theybuild up a high and low litter. Theymanure the tree. They cut most of thegrass off, allowing free water pene-tration. All his trees with guinea pigsare doing very well. Now here is acheap cultivation method. He has anarmy of guinea pigs there working forhim, and it costs him very little. Yethe gets a very high growth rate in his

this garden with your apples, you gethealthy, fast growing, non-cultivatedtrees.

We are building up a set of plantsfrom which we can derive character-istics that will enable us to add plantswith specific traits. These are verygood grass barrier plants with a veryfast rotting leaf crop, quick turnoverplants. You can start to garden yourorchard over with these species. Athome, daffodils often grow under ap-ple trees. You may want to sell daffo-dils and apples; or you may want tosell fennel and apples.

Go and take a look at where the mul-berry, the fig, the pear, the apple andthe quince have survived the ebb andflow of human settlement. Work outthe characteristics of the understory.You are seeking a tree with about anine to 12 inch incremental growthannually, continuously self-pruning atthe crown, so that branches are notoverlaying and smashing, and the fruitwill not be small and crowded. In theblackberry patch, the tree is protect-ed until it starts to bear. When theblackberries are removed, growthslows .

Another remarkable sight is avoca-dos about 60 to 80 feet high, bearingthree to four tons per tree. They havea lot of cattle manure under them, be-cause cattle love avocados.

You are looking under the tree thatyou are scoring, and you are settingas an ideal that the tree makes theamount of increment a year that itwould make if we are actively prun-ing. But you wouldn't be pruning. In-stead, you might put a wedge of grassunder it, and let that prune it back.You would disfavor growth just a bit.

At Tagari, we've been only twoyears on site, and I don't spend muchtime at home. When I am there, I'mout stacking Russell lupines, comfrey,thistles, and bamboo in under my or-chard. I'm trying to bring in morenasturtium. We are not inviting cattleinto our orchard. We are doing thegardening there.

Some of these situations are appro-priate for chickens for forages; someare appropriate for garden productiv-ity; and some may also be appropriate


americana. We would wait four yearsbefore we can get a blossom on it. So,we start with rape, buckwheat, sun-flowers, and all the other good things.There is a manifold system we canplay with.

It is easy to choose your mid-season and late-flow plants. The flow-ering periods are generally known.Your beekeeper certainly knows them.The whole thing we are trying to do isto bring the food to the animals.

CATTLE FORAGEIt is very impressive to look at an

ancient pasture, of which there arenot many in the world. It is like goingout and looking at the unplowed prai-rie. There are a few in Yugoslavia,and in other southern European coun-tries where it hasn't been their habitto plow all the land. I took a picture ofabout two square meters of pastureon which I can count 18 floweringplants; but there are many not inflower. Some of those pastures wouldhave some 30 or 40 species of plantsper square meter. It is a pleasant daywatching a cow going through thosepastures. It is totally different fromthe grab and eat, grab and eat thing.The cow seeks her way through thiscomplex. Inevitably, as she eats agood clover, she gets a mouthful, orhalf her mouth full of a bad tastingthing. So you have an interesting ef-fect. Cattle are unlikely to browsethat pasture severely, because manyplants are protecting others, andmany semi-dangerous, or semi-poisonous plants are in with the pre-ferred plants. Newman Turner, whosebooks have recently been reprinted,points out in Fertility Pastures thatwhether she likes it or not, the cowtakes her medicines all the time. Thecows in those pastures are shiny andglossy and have nice washed nosesand luminous eyes. The herdsmen gowith them. They just sit with them.It's a pleasant occupation.

Most of the people who handle theirown cattle never use dogs or horsesor chase the cattle. Whenever theywant to change 3,000 head, they yell"Comeon cow!" and all the cows put

profitably go into apiary work. Con-ventional hives are built to shift beesaround. Now we could re-think bee-hiving altogether, given that we don'thave to lift hives around. I imaginewhat we might build is the bee barn,in which we pay far less attention tothe weatherproofing and insulating in-dividual hives. We would insulate thewhole structure and have a whole set of exits for bees. We would work in-side it and have a high light escape towhich we can switch off. We unload,store, and process inside. So thewhole operation becomes a sedentaryoperation with a sliding in and out ofour bee clothes. You always put in abee processing shed that steps down.Because honey is heavy stuff, yourextractor has to be no more thanwaist level, and your storage drumsbelow. Honey is a flow-down thing.That shed is always a step-down sys-tem--three levels.

You say that in Czechoslovakia theyare using this sort of system! I didn'tknow it already existed! I had to rein-vent it! Great!

We must pay attention to the fittingout of pollen traps in the beehives.There are periods when they can beused, and periods when they are notused. Bee pollen is the best tree-grown flour for protein we can get.So we are right out of grain growing.The plants are already growing thatgrain, and it's hull-less. It has manygood minerals, and is high in protein.You get as much pollen as you do hon-ey. If you get 60 pounds of honey, youget 60 pounds of pollen. So it looks asif we might just shift right out of ourgrain growing situation. From a hun-dred hives, you will get pollen waybeyond our individual needs.

Now we can figure that about 60hives is a family's living. Moreover,those bees and the apiarist and hisfamily are advantageous to any othersystem. They increase the apple crop;they increase the buckwheat; they in-crease the seed set in our gardens.

Again, we are into an interestingthing. We can go from crop and annu-als into perennials in a staged sys-tem, which keeps our flow constant.We don't have to start with Ti l ia

three days. Leatherwood will grow upwith the forest and flower in it atcrown, or flower as an interface. It isan indigenous species in Tasmania. This plant is a really fine tree in it-self. It is good wood, a fine forest, abeautiful tree, and an incredible beeplant. In a two mile range it is custo-mary to put in about 150 to 200hives. Within this range, every one ofthese hives puts out 100 pounds ofhoney every three days, and all thetime. Here, you would probably belucky to hit 60 pounds in a season, un-less you have a lot of Tilia. Leather-wood is an evergreen that grows inwet, snowy forests. It flowers thelast of the season, mid-January withus. So it is going to be mid-July here.

What happens to a tree when it ismoved from Australia to North Amer-ica? It keeps its wits about it. It oper-ates on day lengths as usual. We haveshipped everything down, and it allgrows. You send us autumn fruitsfrom these oaks; we put them in andthey don't drop till autumn. If it isspringtime, we just plant them rightaway. Often we just give them a chillfactor and plant them.

If you are planting for bees, thereare a few rules. You plant a lot of theforage together. Clump your forages. It is not good to dot these things aboutthe landscape. If you are going to putin leatherwoods, put 30 of them to-gether in 10 different places. Putthem in full sunlight, or on the sunnyside of the situation. Don't put themnear the hive. Keep them at least 100yards or more from the hives. If youput them closer, the bees won't workthem. I don't know why this is, butthey don't. It is impossible to have toomuch low hedgerow between yourhive sites and your forage sites. Imean as low as four feet. This enablesthe bees to work in unfavorable condi-tions. In very bad weather, the beesfly along the very low hedgerows thatlead to the forage systems. Thesehedgerows are windbreaks, so theymight as well be productive. Start outwith thyme, rosemary, or whatever,and go on to low forage.

Wetland plants are excellent beeplants. People with wetlands might


their heads down and follow himthrough into the next field.

Another friend of mine owns 700acres. He is an organic gardener and arenowned pasturist. He hasn't usedsuper-phosphate for 17 years. Thehealth of his cattle's has improved outof sight.

Now you get all sorts of problemswith over-fertilization of grasslands.You get infertility; you get a ratherpulpy kidney; you get many diseasesas a result of locking up certain ele-ments. The cattle look peaked. Theychew on barns. They eat trees. Theyobviously suffer from lack ofelements.

New Zealand, much more than Aus-tralia, is looking very much to treecrops for cattle pasturage--to wil-lows and poplars, and some eucalyp-tus. Cattle love the bark of thesetrees. It is quite possible to have en-closures of maybe five acres of treeleaves, which is much better thanhaving a barn full of hay.

If you want fat cows, you plant ryegrass and clover, but you will still getcows with worms and cows with defi-ciency symptoms. Newman Turnerrecommends a whole lot of perennialherbs that should be put along hedge-rows. We know, for instance, thatwhen cows can just browse along ha-zel tips and buds, the butterfat con-tent in milk increases, and the cowsare healthier. Cows will always eatsome comfrey, though it is not a pre-ferred plant.

You can go nutty about somethinglike comfrey or dandelions. But as acomponent in food, these things aregood. Some people were urging oneverybody to feed their children,chickens, horses and cows on com-frey, until another gentleman said,"Look, be careful!"

Once a nut starts urging nutrition onsomeone, they are going to do it. Theyget their blenders down and startdrinking green glue. It's stupid! Ofcourse it is possible, under certainconditions, to damage the liver. Sothere has been a note of cautionsounded. Nobody has found that com-frey will kill you; we are alreadycertain it won't. Everybody I know

eats comfrey and a few borageleaves, and we put borage leaves inour drinks. The main thing is, don't goto your garden and eat comfrey asyour main food, like a lot of thosepeople were doing. It is not the com-plete food; nothing is. Everything youdo like that is stupid. The next thingyou know, somebody will start thegreat cucumber scandal--the cucum-ber diet. If you eat a hundred things,you are not very likely to die of it;and you will get everything you everneed. What you don't need, you spitout. The point is, in a varied diet youadd a component where that compo-nent was short. Chicory is a marve-lous plant for cattle.

A friend of mine in rural Tasmaniahas 8,000 acres. He plants about 500acres a year. He doesn't buy cloverand grass seed. He buys the weedseed. He gets the dandelion and thethistles. He got a pasture chicoryfrom France. His pastures are re-markable pastures. There is grass andclover, but at a very low rate. Hesows clover at about one and a halfpounds per acre, and some of thegasses. But the main part is herbalpasture. He gets his herb seed formother people's weeds. His cattle lookfantastic. These are very successfulpastures. He has never cultivatedmore than one and a half inches deep,just scratches the soil and dribblesthe seed along. He doesn't own anymachinery. He contracts a man inwith a soil scratcher and a seeder,and does the rest on foot. You turn thecattle in on it; they can bite down andsmash it about. Turn them out, and itall comes out again.

Let's have a look at the actual cycleof pastures in a climate which goesthrough the year, even though it doeshave a hard winter. Let's look at anannual grass. It carries on to midsum-mer, falls away, has a blip in autumnand falls away, and comes up in thespring. It is mid-spring before theherbs start. Their peak is summer. The perennials to some extent dupli-cate this. They hang on much later inthe summer. They collapse a bit, andthey have a better winter fodder val-ue. The perennial grasses are better

grasses for winter. If we are going toraise the whole carrying capacity, westore the spring and summer excess,using haymaking as a strategy. How-ever, these perennial pastures, whichare of more value for that than theannual pastures, are quite critical asto the time when their food value isgood. The dry stalks off the grasseswhen the seed is gone are really poorfeed, just cellulose. The only way aruminant can deal with cellulose is byadditional input of two things: ureaand molasses (sugar and a high nitro-gen). Farmers in the dry marginalarea float a half-full 40 gallon drum ina trough made from a from a 55 gallondrum cut in half lengthwise. In thetrough made from the larger drum,there is a mixture of molasses andurea. The cattle lick this from thefloating drum that turns within themixture. It tastes horrible. They ac-tually detest it. However, that sup-plies them with the basics that thebacteria in the ruminant require tobreak down cellulose.

If you put that out, you can feedyour cattle on sawdust, newspapers,and cardboard. People do. They oftenbring loads of sawdust or any kind ofcellulose they can get. Feedlots in theAmerican West feed newspaper andurea. That's the American beef. Youare eating your own newspapers, anda lot of bad news, too! They get theurea from chicken manure--6% chick-en manure with molasses. It is themolasses that gets the bacteriaactive.

The sugar pod group, the mesquites,the honey locusts, carobs, and thesugary tips of such trees as stripedmaple, will help cattle take advantageof the dry perennial grasses. In a win-ter climate, the demand is really forcarbohydrate fuels. So you designoaks and chestnuts. What you thenfind, to your surprise, is that this isthe way it works. You don't have todesign it in. God did that. Cattle grewup to take advantage of what was ac-tually seasonal.

There are plants like Tagasaste andCoprosma--evergreen and highly nu-tritious plants that go all year. Eventhough you let the cattle browse


time, get packaged in manure, and areusually placed in a little hole that isstamped out near water. That's thebest place to get your honey locustseed from--right from the back of thecow. Those seeds have 90% to 100%germination. So the way to plant yourrange is to feed the animals going onto the range with those pods. Theyplant the range. In the Hawaiian Is-lands, in Australia, and in Argentina,cattle mainly propagate their ownrange plants.

When you look closely, you will seethat each animal, whether it is a tur-key or a bluejay, extends its owngarden. Bluejays, being slightly shortof connections in the brain, often put50 to 60 acorns in somewhere, andforget where they put them. Theyplant acorns quite well. Squirrels ac-cumulate nuts in places they oftendon't remember. By stuffing a fewacorns down into a rotting log, theykick the oak forest along quite well.Nearly every animal is at work plant-ing its own garden, shifting its ownmaterials about in a forgetful andsloppy manner. Humans plant melons,apples, tomatoes--all sorts of things.

There is no point in trying to pushcattle beyond their range. The sensi-ble thing is to swap over into mooseor reindeer, and as soon as you get tobelow 18 inches rainfall, go to blackbuffalo, antelope, or gazelles. Ante-lope range is on those dry savannas.In America, you had a higher stockingrate with your natural animals. Therewere the buffalo, and add white taildeer, the ground hogs, and prairiedogs. You had single colonies of prai-rie dogs a hundred miles in diameter.These were your chisel plows, and amighty chisel plow. The high plains inKenya, with scattered bunch grassand acacias, had maybe 20 commonherds, all of which were perfectlygood beef. Now people get the chainsaw out and whack all the trees down,fence it all off, plow it, sow it downto high yielding pasture or perennialrye and white clover, and put up a lotof buildings. They bring in highly se-lected Hereford or King Ranch crossesand start running them. What theyhave is one-60th of the yield that

goats, you have to go into self-defended plants. That is where youuse mesquite and honey locust insteadof carob or apple. Apple is a good sug-ar plant. The plum is a good sugarplant. Plums are good summerbrowse. However, you can't let goatsinto plum or apple.

The British orchards used to havemassive trees, not a branch up toeight or 10 feet, and then a bigcrown. Cattle and horses could runaround underneath them, quietly fer-menting their own alcohol in theirstomachs.

There are the root crops, too. Ifyou can't grow oats, grow turnips andfodder beets. So you have swap-offs.Unless you are in severe conditions,in which winter comes crashing downon you, there is absolutely no need togo into hay pressing and baling.

The dreaded pampas grass is idealshading grass. Instead of shearing thesheep and turning them out into a bar-ren landscape, you put them in threeacres of pampas, and the survivalrates are about the same as if you putthem in insulated sheds. You needplaces for animals to shelter at criti-cal periods. So you must plant denseshelter. The losses of milk or meatproducts can reach 20% in unshel-tered environments. Cattle and sheepare simply unthrifty where they can'tget shelter. You all have a mental im-age of cattle and horses standing backto the cold winds and just shiveringaway. They will lose eight or 10pounds in a bad day. They look so mis-erable. They are miserable. So designa dense shading or shelter block, and Idon't mean just a hedgerow. It mustbe a big clump of dense trees, or tallgrasses. Many forage plants, oncethey mature, protect themselves. An-other thing, cattle plant all thoseplants, particularly sugar pod plants.If you read your propagation manuals,you will see: "Treat this seed withsulfuric acid, hot water, chip it, orgrind it." When cattle eat honey lo-cust pods, they chip and grind theseeds. They can't break them, be-cause they are too tough for theirteeth. These seeds immerse in an acidbath in the cow's stomach, heat for a

them, while they don't respond as fastover winter as they do in other sea-sons, they still regrow again. So youhave three strategies, then, withthese cattle and deer and goats andsheep. One is, instead of just relyingon annual pastures, have areas ofpermanent, high-mineral mobilizationherbs throughout all your pastures--dandelion, chicory, comfrey. Haveevergreens, standing, high-nutritiontree crop within forage range that thecattle will coppice. Have high-sugarsummer pods that will carry cattlethrough the semi-arid seasons. Thisgroup is critically important to rangecapacity. Also, you must have a win-ter high carbohydrate source--largenuts and acorns.

These are the truly perennial com-ponents--the fruit of trees that standin pasture.

In Sholro Douglas' book on forestfarming, he describes an experimentin which he took part in East Africa,growing carob trees in big baskets,planting them out on an East Africancattle range. The carrying capacity ofthe range went from one cow to 12acres to 12 cows to an acre.

Let's face it, what happens is, youadd correct components at the righttime of the year. If animals are eatingcarob pods, they can then eat drygrass and utilize it.

One of the people in west Australiahas milking goats. He feeds each goatthree carob pods per day. He has onecarob tree and it maintains eight goatsfor the year. It is not a particularlyhigh yielding carob tree; it is 17years old. What's more, he doesn'tpick up all the pods; he just picks upenough pods to give his goats three aday, they can go out and chomp onvery rough forage--and the forage isvery rough indeed where he is, for heis on a laterite cap. These goats milkwell and do very well.

So it is obvious that if you have afood, which is a concentrate, and ofwhich a small amount will allow thesheep or cattle to satisfactorily pro-cess range plants, then you lift therange capacity very abruptly.

The willows and poplars are goodcattle-forage. If you are dealing with


of fishing is never throw a small fishback. Always throw it over yourshoulder to your chickens. Alwaysreturn the large breeding fish, and eatthe medium sized fish. Don't everthrow little fish back into the water;throw them up the bank.

We have trout in Tasmania in heavi-ly fished waters, where the legal lim-it for trout is seven and one half inch-es. These trout breed and die at sevenand one quarter inches. You have deerpopulation in the United States, whereyou are allowed to shoot antlereddeer, and the only kind of deer youhave left are antlerless. We haveheavily fished lobster populations thatoriginally had reasonably slenderforeparts and a rostrum. The legalmeasure was four and one quarterinches, point to point. It must havebeen a rostral fish. Now, nearly allour crayfish do not have rostrums,and those that do are still undersized.

This is like putting an electric wireacross the street, set at five feet,two inches. If you are more than fivefeet, two inches, it cuts you off. Itisn't long before everybody is fivefeet, one and a half inches, or elsevery tall people who are walking dou-bled over.

What we really need to do with anysedentary population of animals is toleave the large, fast-growers. Wedon't need a minimum size; what weneed is a maximum size. We need toleave the very large, successful,healthy, fast-growing animals. Eatthe young and half-grown animals. Ifpeople started eating cows and bullsand leaving the calves, they would bein a ridiculous position. The thing todo with crayfish is to make pots thatonly catch small crayfish and thenyou will always have tons ofcrayfish.

If you want to fill this pond up withfish, put in your bluegill or whatever,and there will be a million little fish,and the pond goes out of fishing. Put ascreen across the pond, and put acouple of brown trout or a pike or twoin there. They will keep those littlefish out of the system, because thesmall fish can swim through to thepike. That is sort of reverse escape-

they had before they went to thattrouble.

That's exactly what's happened herein America. If you do your sums onyour passenger pigeons and your mar-mots and your prairie dogs and yourwhite tail deer, you will have 10 to20 times the yield that you presentlyhave in a stable situation, and yourstanding crop was enormously great-er. We are not very intelligent. Youhad a situation in which you had a fullon herd of swan, duck, deer, quail,turkey. Now if you had started tomanage this situation, to maintain it,you would have been well below foodceilings.

What you have to do now is to en-courage the smaller animals, becauseyou now have property cut up byfences. Buffalo can't move with theirseasons; therefore they can't main-tain the bunch grasses. Their habitwas to act to maintain their pasture.Cattle have a place. Cattle are forestanimals. They are not pasture ani-mals. You have to chase them out onto pastures. Really, cattle belong incool forest swamplands. They love it.In summer, they spend all their timeup to their bellies out in swamps, eat-ing the swamp grasses. In winter theywill come back into the forest edges. That is where we got them from.That was their habit--the white ox ofthe forests of northern Europe. Weare talking here of beef cattle. Dairycattle are much more highly evolvedthan most beef cattle. I think, though,that we consume too much milk anddairy products for too long. It has aplace for a while.

If you let an animal go into a rangewhere there is highly preferred food,it eats the highly preferred food andleaves less and less of it. This is par-ticularly true if you stock a rangeheavily.

If we have a pond in which we put afish that breeds up--say a large-mouthed bass--and that pond has acertain capacity, as the fish breed up,you can get 100 one-pound fish, 200half-pound fish, 400 quarter-poundfish At one-quarter pound, they arehardly pan fish. At this point, yourpond is heavily overstocked. One rule

ment. You can't let those pike into thatpond, but we can let the little fish into the pike, and you will always havepan fish in the pond. When they get toobig to get through to the pike, theyare right for us. You set that limit byputting in a two and one-quarter ortwo and tree-quarter inch mesh. Any-thing that can't go through a two andone-quarter inch mesh is good enoughfor you.

Now we have a chicken range. Hawks like chickens. If we are goingto breed chickens, put a very thorny,brambly patch in each range in whichwe permit hens to raise chicks. Wewill get a high proportion of chickensfrom that. At home, we have a bushcalled the African boxthorn. It reach-es the ground; it has millions ofspines, and they go straight throughyour boots. Even cats can't preywithin boxthorn. Dogs have no hope;they can't get within the crown.

Cats, if they get in there, want tomove real slow. Chickens just slipthrough it fast, because they have lit-tle hard scaly legs. So escapementgoverns populations there; it pro-tects breeders. You must give thesame protection to highly selectedfoods. You have to put them in pro-tected positions. Cut limbs with slash-hooks, and throw a patch of them onthe ground in an animal's range, andput in a tree. Your food plant gets upand growing before the animal can getat it. That's exactly what Geoff Wal-lace did with his apple trees.

Some plants grow their own thorns,have their own protection; but manydon't, so we must give it to them. Sowherever we are dealing with range,and range management, we alwayshave to think of this as a factor. Wehave to give our preferred animalssome chance of not reducing theirrange, and a place to escape frompredators.

I want to talk briefly about animalsthat are not normally considered insystems. I will just give you a fewexamples, so that you can get an ideaof the range.

On the Hawaiian Islands, and only onthe Hawaiian Islands, there is a seamollusk that comes crawling up into


brown trout.But if we go from leaf to phreato-

cide to brown trout, we only need 100pounds of leaf to produce a pound ofbrown trout. So we get a hundredtimes more brown trout by way of thephreatocide food chain. Every timeyou go up a trophic step, the conver-sion consumes nine parts of every 10of your food. Therefore, what weshould be actively seeking out is theseshort-cuts, and particularly thelarge, low-level decomposers,chomping on leaf and algae anddiatoms.

The role of the mussels is in phos-phate fixation, and in calcium fixation.Now in your area, you should not eatthose. It is better than you get thatphosphate and calcium stopped beforeit goes to the sea, because it is phos-phate and calcium that you are low onaround here.

The phreatocide is really too valua-ble to eat because it may be the onlything we can use to get those leavesmobile again. It would be like eating allthe worms out of your field.

I am pointing out that if you don'tstart maintaining these systems, youare in real trouble, and many of thesethings will be wiped out. Let us notpussy-foot around. There are enor-mous processes of destruction. As faras we know now, in the Adirondacksthere is no more cycling of nutrient.You better get busy and find an aciddecomposer, and quickly. What's goneis gone. What we are trying to do isaccommodate millions of people inplaces where a degraded and degrad-ing environment can support but thou-sands. We must make pretty smartmoves. Other than that, we can con-tinue pussy-footing around until thewhole system falls on your head.

What I am saying is that we shouldlook far more closely at the functionsof animals that are not normally con-sidered as integral parts of con-structed or even agricultural oraquatic systems, and see what partic-ular value, what particular niche theymight occupy to increase the numberof useful nets in the energy flux. Thephreatocide is a fine example. Wehave many, many species of them,

on their knees, cutting the grass withlittle knives. Turtles are easily con-trolled. Fencing is minimal.

Tasmania has perhaps 60 species ofa strange little thing called a phrea-tocid, a pedestrian amphipod. It has acircular body section, and it walksslowly just below the mud and leafsurfaces. They are primarily decom-posers in cold waters. They will beactive all the time. Under the ice,they will be chomping up leaves. They don't occur anywhere else in theworld except right down on the tip ofSouth America. They are an Antarcticedge species; they follow the ice capsup and down. The only place they cando that is in Tasmania and a little bitof South America. They have alsoadapted. Some of them have comedown the mountains a bit. In the Devo-nian ice age, you had them over here.You find them as fossil.

Where they exist, they are a majorfood of the introduced trout. Trout eatfar more insect here in America. InTasmania, they may eat 20% insectand 80% phreatocide to trout, skip-ping a whole lot of intermediate steps.

Again, in Tasmania, because it is anoceanic island, because it is the rem-nant of an old continent, we have ex-traordinarily large fresh water lim-pets. These occur only in one lake,and they are the only ones of theirsort. They are cold water limpetsand, again, a major food of fish in thewaters where they occur, wherethere are rocky bottoms on the lakes.They are algae browsers, and wherethey occur, there is a very fast con-version to fish protein.

Now if we, at least on paper, figuresome of the possible short cutsthrough the trophic pyramid, we al-ways look for our primary decompos-er, the algae browser groups, the di-atom eaters. That's why grey mulletis such a fantastically important fish.It browses diatoms and it weighs 15pounds. For brown trout, we beginwith leaf algae, go to zooplankton, di-atom, shrimp, and then up to anotherwhole group of cold water fishes, thegalaxid fish, then the trout. We willgive it a 10 factor. It takes 10,000pounds of leaf to make a pound of

the fast streams. It is real good eat-ing. There is no other mollusk that Iknow of anywhere else in the worldthat lives in hot streams, crawlingover rocks, browsing on algae andconverting it into good food. It existsonly on a few islands. But it is obvi-ously transferable to that particularsort of niche, and could be a foodsource.

The coconut crab does all thatshredding work and provides a lot ofinsect control.

The slender blue-tongue lizard eatsslugs--nothing else, just slugs.

The whole group of tiliqua in Aus-tralia are snail eaters. There aredesert snail eaters, sub-tropical snaileaters, and cool to cold temperatesnail eating lizards.

Then the geckos as a group are verygood little pest controllers for glasshouses.

We have mentioned the frogs andsome of their characteristics that arebeneficial in the control of quite spe-cific pests that are otherwise chemi-cally controlled.

Get the woodpecker on the bark, andthe bantams under the trees, and thecoddling moth incidence drops down toits usual about 1%.

A specific orchard pig, the Glou-cester, is bred as an orchard forager.That's its place. The little wallaby,which are short browsers and live indark thickets, maintain fantastic lawnsystems. They are very soft in thesystem. They don't worry plants over24 inches high. Geese are very simi-lar, but a little harder than the walla-bies when it comes to doing sward un-der nut trees. Geese-and-walnuts isan ancient combination.

The ideal farm: Sit there looking atyour geese, and looking at your wal-nuts. Once a year you clip both ofthem (the geese, twice a year).

Some of the large land tortoises insub-tropical or semi-tropical areasare short browsers and fast growers.They put on about 40 pounds in two orthree years. They roll your lawnswhile they crop them. A herd of landtortoises would be much better forthe grand Taj Mahal than 34 widows


other plant associates under it, manyof which are specifically chosen to bethe host species for wasps, whichhelp the garden situation.

Now we go into zone two. Here youwould not even bother to prune peach-es, except to cut out dead wood, be-cause the least pruning you give thewhole group of peaches, cherries, andapricots, the better. The only reasonyou prune is to cut out dead wood anddie-back, and to start branchesaround them. In zone two, continue toprune the pear and apple groups, and

very vigorous, tallgrowing trees.

This is how youdo it. Let the stemgrow to two orthree feet high.Then you selectfour buds at rightangles to each oth-er, and you tiethem down to thestem, using a thingcalled a twigger.Looking down thestem, you are go-ing to have four

branches set out at right angles toeach other, spread out to maybe fif-teen inches. Tie these down. Then letthe stem grow on two feet clear, rub-bing out any branches that come, anddo it again. In 18 months to twoyears, you usually have a couple ofthose done. About the time you havedone it four times, you won't haveany main trunk left. You have takenthe tree right out. What you have now is a tree verythick at the butt, tapering very sud-denly, a very strong thing. We aretalking here about powerful trees thatnormally grow strongly and whichwould otherwise get very high on you. We stop them from getting high; wesuddenly pinch them off.

It is almost impossible to breakthose branches with fruit load. Theyare very powerful. Once you have itlike that, you never bother with itagain. Just cut off any water shoots. It is an immensely strong and durabletree that will last many years. Youtake out the branches after the first

all, on your three separate sections.Then next year, the section that waspreviously lightly pruned gets heavilypruned. The unpruned section gets alight pruning, and the heavily prunedgets no pruning at all. You will findthen that you don't have a biennialbearing tree any more, and can fairlycompetently predict the amount offruit per annum that you will get.What you will get is a fair number ofsmall fruit on the unpruned portion, asmall number of large fruit on theheavily pruned portion, a small num-

ber of large fruit on the heavilypruned portion, and the most fruit, ofmedium size, on your lightly prunedportion. This cuts the pruning down,as you can see, to less than half thecuts you used to make. Moreover, itmakes your crop far more predicta-ble, so that you can govern the mar-ket much better, or even light do-mestic demand. In total, you getslightly more fruit than as if you letthe thing run biennially. So you don'tlose any fruit. But you get a varietyof sizes.

If you are going to make this thecentral tree in beds, you can also fol-low in the beds a rotation around it,so that you are treating your bed sec-tions on thirds as well; and you gar-den from high demand, to medium de-mand, to root crop, to high demand.You mulch on thirds: heavy mulch,light mulch, no mulch. You sort ofmake for yourself a little wheel thatyou keep spinning. There is no reasonnot to have that tree in the center ofa garden plot, with its rosemary and

because in the Devonian there werebillions of phreatocides of variedsorts. Their pH range, too, is enor-mous. They did not come towards highalkali. They go towards high acid. Thenormal data reading in some of ourrivers is pH 3.5. It is too acid formollusks.

Consider your guard animals, too--animals that give adequate alarms toother animals--guinea fowl for exam-ple. They are great for spotting prac-tically any danger, and their alarmswork for your other domestic poultry.

PRUN INGPRUN ING

SYSTEMSSYSTEMS

You only prunevery close to hous-es, or on very smallproperties. You allknow of ordinarycut pruning: A verylow tree; keep thething going out as alow open situation.It is a good form ofpruning for light,for easy picking,for easy handling of pest control, andso on. It would be a fairly normalthing to do. It is the form of pruningthat most nurserymen can show you.It varies from place to place, andfrom species to species. But as a gen-eral method, it is perfectly adequate.Props between these branches keepthem spread. You just pull a branchout when it is young and prop it intoposition to keep it spread. The mainthing is to decrease the number ofjoints that are sharp, and to increasethose in the main stem that come outfairly broad. These are the strongestones. The idea is to force that branchout from the tree like that when it isyoung. It will be much stronger.

One additional thing, looking down onthat tree as a system, we are apt tofind that apples, pears, and mostthings are biennial bearing, so thatyou have heavy on, heavy off years.Now what you do is this: Think of thetree crown as divided into three sec-tions. Start to prune around the tree,pruning heavily, lightly, and not at


season's growth but sometimes youneed to adjust them for part of thenext season. What you have is 16leaders; for each of these sidebranches is also a leader. So the treeis quite happy. It doesn't attempt toget away from the pattern. It getsfatter, produces more buds, but itdoesn't break out of that pattern.Eventually, all these leaders turn intovery large systems. Broadly speak-ing, there is very little pruning to thistree. It is a little-cared-for tree. Justuse this method on large pears, ap-ples, and plums that are very vigor-ous. It is cheaper to buy from thenurseryman a whip-graft tree thefirst year and start doing what youwant.

The zone three form of tree is evensimpler. There is only one thing to do.You see this all over Britain: Drive avery strong large stake and tie it upfor eight feet, or plant it in the backof the bush and keep the trunk com-pletely free of branches for eightfeet. It takes four or five years. Thenlet it go, and it matures very rapidlyinto a very dome. You never prunethat; you never even look at it. It willstand animals browsing around it andunder it and through it, quite heavyanimals.

So what you really have is threesorts of trees, all the same species.One needs a fair bit of attention, giv-ing very predictable yields; the sec-ond one needs very little attention,yielding biennially. The last one givesa huge amount of apples or pears of amuch smaller size, but it takes nowork at all.

Now another thing I would tend to doin the outer zones is to go from

grafted to seedling trees. It's too farto get to in the summer, and particu-larly in spring. Drive down the road-sides and mark all the apple seedlingsthis winter. Go back in spring and findout from the flower what varietythey are. In mid-winter, go and liftthem out of the roadside hedgerows.They would eventually only be gradedout or smashed down by the roadcrew. We plant those trees out,sometimes by the hundreds. Peoplekeep throwing apples out of cars andrenewing the stock. Good plums, too.You root prune and top prune, and ifyou are going to put it in near thedwelling, you graft. If you are goingto put it farther out, just plant it outthere, put a stake in it, take fivebranches off, and up grows its leader.

Anything we have grown from seedgives us a very good fruit. We onlywant a whole lot of fruit, good fruit.

In summary, around our fruit trees,we put in crops that will give secon-dary yields, maybe commercialyields. That ranges from flowers toedible products. Put in crops that willsupport the foraging animals, reducepests, and increase manure. Bring inthe right animals. Put in structureslike the little ponds and rock piles thatwill invite the right animals. Put inflat rock to decrease grass competi-tion, and to stop soil compaction. And,finally, put in the plant's culinaryassociates.

Notes from the EditorI'd like to elaborate on some of the top-

ics Bill addresses here and in a few plac-es disagree. One of the topics that I'dmost like to comment on is the use ofpoultry in permaculture systems.

¥ Bill's designs for poultry escapementwill not work in most of the WesternHemisphere because we have a predatorthat is unreasonably competent, the ra-coon. Moreover, unlike most wild animalspecies, the racoon will slaughter asmany chickens as possible, just for fun.

Racoons swim very well. Islands will notprotect poultry. Waterfowl are amongtheir favorite victims. They can climb fenc-es, dig under them, or simply unlatchgates and walk in. They can turn doorknobs, un-hook hook-and-eye catches andslide barrel bolts, though they need a wayto reach these devices. If deep water ispresent, racoons will drown dogs 10 to20 times their size.

In this environment, poultry must be se-cure at night, when racoons are active.Fortunately, racoons are good to eat.Never trap a racoon and release it, how-ever, as it will never be fooled by that typetrap again and will be an intractable prob-lem for you and/or others. Racoons arelazy and will walk into box traps to gethusked corn, even if there is a cornfieldnearby. In fact, they will go for the huskedcorn right in the cornfield itself. Barreltraps are reputed to work, but I've neverencountered a racoon stupid enough togo into one. If you want to try, put a cullhen at the bottom of an open 55 gal.drum. Place a plank leading from aground up to the open top of the drum.Supposedly, the racoon will go up theplank and jump in to get at the chicken. Itcan't get out.

If you hear a racoon struggle in a trap,do not wait until morning to deal with it.Other racoons will work to help it escapeand often they succeed, particularly in livetraps which otherwise minimize sufferingof the animals.

¥ In addition to the seed, chickens eatleaves. The same is true for

honey locust leaves, and probably hose ofother useful tree crop forage plants. Ifthey are set out in the chicken run, besure to protect them thoroughly. Other-wise, they can be planted a foot or moreoutside the fence. When the plants arelarge enough to tolerate loss of leaves upto two or three feet from the ground, youcan move the fence back to include themin the range. Or just let the chickens out.

Geese, though they eat mainly grass,are death to seedling and sapling trees.They will ring the bark from them and killthem. Probably they are protecting theirown forage. Once trees and shrubs aretoo tough for this damage, geese effec-tively suppress grass competition.


For more detailed information on poul-try forage, see

(TIPSY) ,which features a special poultry foragesection. The same issue also has a beeforage section, with lists and ratings ofbee forage plants.

If you are interested in inparticular, TIPSY #1 carries a very goodarticle on that genus by Thelma Snell.Thelma's piece is probably the best thathas been written in English. (Most materi-al on is in Russian.)

Vol. I, No. 3 of (TIPS)

contains a extensive survey of methodsfor managing soil in permaculture sys-tems. Readers of this pamphlet may beespecially interested in my comments onusing chickens in conjunction with mulch. In temperate climates, chickens are letinto the mulch before and after annualcrops are grown. In tropical situations,they are rotated. I have observed thatchickens get most of their food from theinvertebrates that live in mulch. I suspectthat chickens also eat raw compost.

An ideal plant for poultry forages is theblack raspberry ( ), atleast in regions where raspberries arenative. (Brambles can be rampant andshould not be introduced as exotics.) Thetip-layering black raspberries provide ex-cellent cover for brooding hens, and theyescape the depredations of racoons andskunks while nesting. Once chicks arehatched, steps must be taken to protectthe family at night. Where tip-layeringblackberries grow, these may be evenmore effective. does very well inconjunction with chickens.

Black raspberries spontaneously asso-ciated with umbrella-shaped fruit treessuch as apples, growing at the drip linewhere they are very productive. As Billnotes regarding blackberries, they benefitthe tree. Of course, there is more to itthan he goes into, having to do with theability of the blackberries to suppressgrass, mobilize trace elements, and at-tract various kinds of animal life, from soildwellers to birds. Raspberries do thesame, though not as robustly. Chickens fitthese systems well. They take the lowerberries, about eight inches above theirheight (they jump), but leave the ones eas-iest for people to pick. They get some ber-ries, but you get more than if they werenot there. A happy chicken is a wonderfulasset.

¥ Watch out for Bill's admonition tomulch clay. It is easily overdone. The inter-face can be too moist, causing an anaero-bic souring of soil and mulch that pro-motes diseases that, for example, killtomato plants. Sandy soil greatly benefitsfrom mulch because far less moisture islost to evaporation. Sandy soil does not

hold nutrients well, so the propensity ofplants to feed at the mulch/soil boun-dary enables crops to take nutrient as itis released, before it leaches out ofreach. Plan crop densities to fully utilizethis release. It will take some experimen-tation with specific conditions, includingmulch type.

Seaweed is a particularly valuablemulch for sandy and coarse soils be-cause it forms a gel that holds moisturebetween soil particles. Grass clippings,which could not be used on other soils be-cause they form a gley, suit sandy soils al-most as well.

¥ Note that there is one major draw-back to mulch. In fall, mulch holds heat inthe soil. On clear nights, particularly whenthere is a sudden temperature drop,even hardy plants such as broccoli will re-ceive frost damage because the soil heatis unavailable to them. Annual plantsmust be mulched completely over theirtops during cold snaps, to mitigate this ef-fect. (Old bedspreads are easier to re-move in the daytime than ordinarymulch.)

The effect is mainly with lower annuals.Trees reach past the effective benefit ofsoil radiation. They benefit from havingsoil temperatures more stable due to theinsulating effects of mulch. Roots growlonger into the season and chance offrost heave is much less.

¥ With Jerusalem artichokes, be awarethat they are allelopathic--they poisonsome other plants as do all other typesor sunflowers. They can also be difficultto exterminate from a place, unless youhave access to pigs. Pigs love them, cansmell them underground, and, releasedin an unwanted patch after tubers haveformed, they eliminate these plantsentirely.

¥ Pigs control grubs, slugs, and evenpoison snakes when let to forage in a gar-den after harvest. They are easily con-tained by electric fence, just inside a light-weight temporary woven wire fence. (Thetemporary fence slows them, and theelectric repels them.)

By the way, you can also keep racoonsfrom an area by putting a strand of elec-tric fence about four inches above thetop strand of woven wire. They climb thewire fence, which is perfectly grounded,and then reach for the top, electricstrand. Zowie! They aren't seriously hurtphysically, but they may never return. Thisis very effective.

Back to the pigs, they can be let in clos-er gardens as the cool weather closesthem down. Cool weather means fewersmells. Pigs smell only when overcrowd-ed or fed kinds of garbage they won't eat.(Its the garbage that smells.) They com-pletely eliminate witch (quack) grass andother rampant grass weeds. They root

out and eat the stolons, undergroundstems by which the grasses spread. Pigforaging is an excellent rotation in thepermaculture garden.

Of course, they also do good things inthe orchard/tree crops situation. As Billpoints out, they will brave those bramblesthat have been doing other jobs for us,and get the fallen fruit from them. Thisprevents pests from overwintering in thefruit, and of course feeds the pigs. Pigscan fatten on fruit as well as on corn, butthey need a lot more fruit. Bill has writtena special paper on pig forage, available asYankee Permaculture Paper #19,

¥ If you are following Bills advice onhow to prune your tomatoes, make surethat they are indeterminate varieties, notdeterminate varieties. The first just keepon growing until something kills them. Thedeterminate types (sometimes calledbush varieties) have only so many shoots.If you remove shoots, you cut yield. Don'tprune determinate tomatoes. They aregood for dense plantings and have a highyield per unit area. Indeterminate toma-toes lend to trellising in various systemsand have more design and companionplanting potential.

¥ Use alyssum around your plants toattract the "beneficial" insects that re-quire pollen and nectar in their adult stag-es. It is perfect, and blossoms over avery long period.

¥ Bill says, don't feed sunflowers tochickens because they make the feathersfall out easily. Thelma Snell, reading thisafter initiation into the joys of chickenplucking, suggested that we should saveour sunflower seed to feed to those chick-ens we are about to slaughter. It willmake the feather removal operationmuch easier! That's permaculture think-ing folks. Just stand limitations on theirheads to create opportunities.

¥ Other Yankee Permaculture publi-cations related to permaculture tech-niques discussed here include:

YPC 5. Useful Climbing Plants.Mollison.

YPC 16. Gardening Articles, by DanHemenway, reprints.

YPC 20. Circle Garden Patterns,Webb & Hemenway.

YPC 30. Articles about soil by DanHemenway, reprints.

YPC 31. Plants for Use In Permacul-ture in the Tropics, Frank Martin.

YPC 36. Patiofarming in the Tropicsand Subtropics by Frank Martin.

And all Yankee Permaculture journalissues, which are packed full of practi-cal information that will make permacul-ture techniques work better.

Yankee Permaculture's address is onthe cover of this pamphlet.

Documents

PERMACULTURE TECHNIQUES BY BILL MOLLISON … · IX PERMACULTURE TECHNIQUES BY BILL MOLLISON Pamphlet IX in the Permaculture Design Course Series PUBLISHED BY YANKEE PERMACULTURE Publisher