December 6, 2015

So, here's the pond yesterday.  It's been raining, mostly drizzling really, off and on since yesterday morning, and the bottom of the pond at least seems to be really holding its water.  Even the deep hole I dug for clay is holding water at the bottom and has been for over a month, since the last rains...   The second pictures shows the biological filter where the grey water enters the bathtub where Pistia stratiodes Thalia dealbata, Eichhornia crassipes and Cyperus papyrus  grow in charcoal, gravel and some clay.

Fully gleyed pond! But will it hold water? Stay tuned....

So the pond gleying process is done, at least for the time being.  I may have to fine tune some things, but the pond seems to be retaining water quite well!   We had rain a couple of weeks ago, and I used this significant puddle to moisten the walls of the pond every 2 or 3 days, and I pounded and massaged this rudimentary adobe to pack it down and smooth any cracks. 

A pitchfork came in handy for slinging heavy, sticky, clayey mud, something I only realized half-way through the job.  Like a dummy I was using shovels and banging off as much of the muck as I could each time.  Very inefficient!   A strong pitchfork is the right tool for this job: everything just slides right off the tines...  I also made a portion of the pond by literally slinging mud: taking fistfuls of wet clay, molding into large balls, aiming, and flinging where I though reinforcement was due.     Then I would tromp that splattered projectile in, either with my foot or my hand or the tamper.

I danced on the bottom and the sides of pond, pretty much any day I was at the site, 3 or 4 times a week, for say....3 1/2 weeks, approximately, during which I added each subsequent layer, tamping it down.    I also used a tamper, which is a hardwood handle with a square metal plate at the base, which you lift and drop down onto the soil to compact it.  I'm not sure if such a tool is really necessary.   Throwing your weight around in a tromping dance seems to be the most effective way of tightening that seal, not to mention the most fun.   After I put down the landscape cloth I also took out a rubber hammer and banged the cloth into the sides of the pond as best I could, to stabilize it.

Summarizing: the layers of the gley consisted of:

1.) dug out and well tamped native clay-soil bottom, with significant amounts of sodium bentonite, which expands when wet.

2.) random cuttings from garden: bamboo leaves, fresh and dried,  the large leaves of some kind of tree tobacco that I have growing here, is weakly invasive and the hummingbirds love, and whatever other plants I thought could be sacrificed for the occasion, if they were broadleafed enough or plentiful enough to make a significant contribution.  Tamp tamp tamp!

3.) Horse manure, mixed with hay, sawdust, wood shavings and the odd eucalyptus leaf.   Tamp tamp tamp!

4.) Maori Flax (Phormium tenax) leaves, of which I had access to many, are broad and sword like.  I layered them the tips pointing at the bottom, radiating around the pond, threw some more on top of that, then loosely weaved with more flax in the other direction, to give the whole thing more integrity and stability when I would throw more stuff on top.  Tamp tamp tamp!

5.) More horsemanure, with lots of sawdust to fill in cracks.  Tamp tamp tamp!

6.) Spent hay, to cover all of the horsemanure.  Tamp tamp tamp!

7.) A primitive adobe fashioned from the native soil, subsoil, clay , some hay and a bit of sodium bentonite left over from 'Plan A'.   This I tamped and danced on more than anything else, which isn't true of course, because all the previous layers were also being tamped and danced on in the process.

8.) Burlap, which I just rolled out in three strips the length of the pond.   I held it down at points at the top with stones and little stakes made from hemp sticks, and put a few stones along the bottom to hold down that part of it, which I assume might float up and be rendered useless.  Perhaps the burlap is useless, I don't know.  I added it because I already possessed it and thought that it would inhibit erosion of the sides when the rain comes falling down on them.   Seems likely to help, at least a little.  Once the pond is full, the burlap may help lifeforms take hold, which otherwise might have been washed away.    Tamp tamp tamp!

I just did a bit of dancing on the pond-sides this morning.  It's lovely to have a nascent pond.   The birds certainly seem to be happy that water has returned to their digs....     

That's it for now, I'm going back to the verdant and gleaming-wet garden.

A+

Gleying a pond

So, last year my siblings, the kids and I tried to create a pond with sodium bentonite, and it just didn't hold water.  Either we didn't mix it in enough with the soil and native clay or else the sides of the pond were too acute, or a combination of the two.  In any case, nice place to catch water, but it wouldn't hold water and remain a pond through the dry months.

So now, plan B is in full effect:   'Gleyification'.I am about 3/4 of the way through the process of creating a 'gley', or at least, I'm almost done with my side of the work, because then it is the bacteria and other microscopic entities which 'go to work', as an aerobic environment is turned anaerobic, i.e. an environment with air turns into an environment without air, thus becoming impermeable to both air and water....  Everything changes for them: all of the little aerobic guys either go elsewhere or they die, and all of the anaerobic guys take over.

In fact this technique is inspired from a natural phenomena:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleysol

Though I don't know if it is exactly the same thing, but in any case it is what I am trying, and we'll see.   In theory, it seems to be quite plausible.   The Russians, I  read on a Permaculture site, have the most literature and experience with gleying.   Permaculturalists like Bill Mollison mentions it once or twice as a technique.   Often pigs or other propertied animals are said to be used to repeatedly tramp the pond bottom, greatly enhancing the speed of such a project.   But we don't have pigs here, so I was the one who jumped up and down and danced on the pond bottom!  That's about 150 lbs jumping up and down, on each layer consecutively.

The layers of my gleyed pond are:

--Native clay bottom, with mixed in sodium bentonite, left over from plan A.
--General garden cuttings and leaves, fresh and dried.
--Horseshit, with straw, woodchips, sawdust and eucalyptus leaves
--Maori Flax, flat wide end down, radiating around pond, then loosely woven horizontally
--More horseshit, with lots of sawdust, to fill holes left between flax leaves
--spent straw
--puddled mud made of local soil, local clay, sodium bentonite and some of the straw
--Jute netting, to stabilize the sides of the ponds when the rain starts falling!

Impossible for me to really tell, but I can guess that there is at least 8 to 10 inches of compressed plant and fecal matter in this gley.  Plus the 2 to 3 inches of rammed adobe on top.  12 inches of potential gleyification?  We shall see!    If this works, I will be very satisfied!

The videos below will explain my process, I hope.

Video 1:  Green cuttings then horseshit

 Video 2: Maori Flax & more horseshit

Video 3: Hay is for gleying...

It won't upload, oh well, I'll post it with the mud-clay layer video, for subsequent post.

It shows that I have added a good layer of spent hay from the local horse club, and shows how I have started making a kind of 'adobe' clay from the local soil, local clay and some sodium bentonite (i.e. clumping kitty litter).  I think I put about 20 big bags of that stuff in last year, and mixed it, more or less with the subsoil that we had exposed by digging out the topsoil.  This should have some helpful effect on the gleyification, if only to constrict air even better around the putrifying vegetable and fecal matter.  I also explain that I am going to mix in some of the straw, to make a kind of building clay that has a bit more integrity due to the plant's fibrous lengths integrated into the working material.

I am exited to get started on this final stage of ponding, where I get to act like a potter and play with mud!  But first in my little pond, separated from the larger one by a little stone and soil walkway, I am mixing up my adobe, adding water and digging a bit deeper into the clay.  This will take some time, I am working at it all day, off and on.    I will be left with a rather deeper hole, I imagine, which I will turn into a gley pond (if the first one works!) eventually, though for now just use it as a place to hold water when it rains and grow a few things perhaps.   Having two, contiguous ponds also allows me to separate filtered greywater from rainwater easily, if I so wish, diverting the greywater to the lower, smaller pond after going through the bathtub filter, which has plants and charcoal.  It also means I can feed the larger pond with the water from the smaller pond and use the smaller one for some water gardening!  Watercress anyone?  Maybe I can grow a small crop of rice?

I'll post more videos when I get there.

Hasta la proxima!

Simpler Thomas

Herbman on the Mount. More Amanita Muscaria rap....

Growing mushrooms in logs...

A little vid I made out in the garden.  What a revelation!  I can walk around with me Mac and film the environs while doing Permacultural stand-up comedy.  I love it.  I'll be doing this again, focusing perhaps on specific design and implementation subjects, seasons, plant, animal and fungal players, etc....

Anyway, in the very local news....

I very happy because big water-sucking lombardy poplar is gone thank you to David and a couple of Mayan guys and now the juicy chunks of its cellulose-flesh is mine to grow mushrooms and also to bury as the foundation for garden mounds or 'Hugel Kultur'.  More on that later.  Or go to this helpful blog for a good idea of what I am talking about: Lasagna gardening.

I have ordered 100 plugs each of oyster mushrooms, turkey tail, shi-itake, maitake and reishi.   All are well-documented medicinal mushrooms with wonderful attributes.   Oyster, Maitake and Shi-itake are delicious and adaptable to many dishes in the kitchen.  Turkey tail and Reishi are both medicinal mushrooms too hard or leathery to eat, but perfect for a life-saving tea.

I get my stuff from Paul Stamets, the mushroom man, and his company "Fungi Perfecti" .   

The oyster and turkey tail and about half of the shi-itake will go into the poplar logs and branches, and the other half of the shi-itake, the Reishi and Maitake will go into a bit of fresh oak which my dear Aunt bequeathed to the house as firewood.  It's still nice and green and should do just fine!  Denser wood, longer flushes.  The denser Oak is favored by Reishi, Maitake and Shi-itake.  Poplar is softer, and will produce Shi-itake, but for a shorter amount of time, as the decomposition process is quicker for softer, less dense, woods.  Oyster will grow on just about anything, including coffee grounds.

We use relatively newly cut trees because the problem with old wood is that it is often already colonized by another fungus.

Of course, apart from what we humans can 'get' directly from medicinal mushrooms, they are important players within all natural systems on terra firma, and exist for their own reasons, which happily intersect with ours, if we are open to it!   Decomposed wood makes good rich humus.... Everyone is happy, including the worms, insects and plants.

Permaculture.

The only thing you have to loose is all the crap you've accumulated

Hello and welcome to Simpling for All. If you're looking for Sampling for Allah, you've hit a few bad key strokes and should pay more attention. Simply stated, simpling is the most natural thing that you have never heard about. It is what generation upon generation of our foremothers and fathers have done to survive long enough to produce ourselves and our children.

Perhaps it is never too soon to say that there is a war going on against Simplers, and this war has always existed and shall no doubt exist in the future. This is quite relevant since a vast majority of the population, all of the 3rd world, practices Simpling. On the other hand, a small minority of very wicked and very powerful international corporate entities have taken it into their heads that it is up to them to 'Shape' and 'Save' the world, which includes removing the 'traditions' which get in the way of their machinations towards a self-anointed pseudo-Messiahship based on the logic of 'colonialism' and 'capitalism'. This logic, which is really based on slavery, insures that after the colonialist father has raped a land and its people for all it is worth, the capitalist son will step in to reconstruct the country in the image suitable to receive the 'blessings' of corporate 'advancement', all of which shall be supplied by himself, his friends, his family. Thus a family or network of families (I do not say 'coven' as I do not want to besmirch the good name of 'witches') effectively seeks to control the image and design of the world. The most noxious element of what can only be termed demonic machinations is the 'philanthropic' one, by which world governmental organizations seek to 'remedy' the 'situation' which their own ancestors, relatives or buddies created in the first place.

Faced with such a situation, many people look for scapegoats. For some it is the Jews. For others it is Europeans. Others choose the Mexicans or Blacks. In essence, Simpling proposes that in hard times, rather than scapegoat the people of the land we 'landscape with goats', and starve out the corporate slave-traders, who are the real devils.

Simpling means exactly what its name implies. Under its umbrella fall all of the usual practical activities of humankind for survival, but most specifically, those activities which involve plants and the fruit of the soil. A simpler may be someone who grows or wild gathers his own medicine and food. It may be someone who finds a simple technology or solution to a widespread problem, like water supply or seed storage. All of simpling arises naturally from the soil and from the traditions of the soil, but because it always is focused on the needs of the simple poor, it is imminently 'progressive', and aligned with the great traditions of the stars, sun and spiritual light.

The philosophy of Simpling proposes that there are simple, natural answers to all of humankind's basic needs, that these answers are multifarious, individual and site specific. No 'culling of herds', no 'killing of birds', no 'stealing of turds' necessary.

Do not follow and do not let yourself be followed! Simpling is not a movement, it is the natural state of awake humanity, it is about sharing useful ideas and making your own way, within a tradition with boundaries as vast as the earth and sky. You are already part of it! Just expand and divest yourself of 'interest'.

That's all the time I have for now. Here are some keywords for individual study:

Permaculture

Fog Catchers

Plants for a future http://www.pfaf.org/index.php

Food Forest