Real Live Permaculture

Last week I had my first experience of volunteering in a permaculture garden in Totnes. I’m staying with friends of mine here for a few weeks so it was great to discover a wwoof host in the town just a few minutes walk away. For those of you who don’t know WWOOF it stands for world wide opportunities on organic farms and provides a service that enables people who want to volunteer to connect with individuals, small holdings, farms and communities who are practicing organic growing and sustainable living and are happy to provide food and accommodation to volunteers in return for their labours.

The garden I was working in has been developed by Cathy Ashley over 18 years and has seen many changes. At the moment the main features of the front garden are annual and perennial beds, fruit trees, fruit canes and a salad bed near the house.  The back garden has a sunny seating area, a pond, a duck bath, a potting shed and a lean to greenhouse using recycled aluminium windows is planned next to a larger shed used as a living space. It was also home to ducks ‘Mocha’ and ‘Tahini’ who do a very good job of eating slugs, providing delicious duck eggs and fertiliser in the form of duck poo. Over the years Cathy has tried and tested many different permaculture, biodynamic and organic growing methods and so has a lot of practical knowledge about what does and doesn’t work. It was a reminder that it’s one thing to read about the theory and another thing completely to put it into action. As E. F Schumcher said in ‘Small is beautiful’

“An ounce of practical experience is worth a ton of theory”

After 18 years Cathy has a ton of practical experience she was generous enough to share with me. It was both inspiring but also a little daunting for someone just starting out on their permaculture journey, however as I wrote in an earlier post ‘a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step’ and it felt great to be getting some hands on experience of ‘real live' permaculture.

 Mocha the duck

Earlier in the week I spent some time sorting and bagging compost and after learning about soil ecology on my permaculture course from soil expert Alex Penn it was interesting to see how long it takes for things like egg shells, avocado skins and stones to break down. Apart from the worms, woodlice and beetles I could see wriggling about in the compost, there are also 1-16 million bacterial species per gram of soil making it an incredibly complex eco-system in it’s own right. Apparently a teaspoon of soil contains more diversity than the entire mammalian kingdom and has more inhabitants than there are human beings on earth- mind-boggling!  The fact that it takes 100-1000 years for 1 inch of top soil to be laid down means it really makes sense to have a compost bin in your garden if you are able as every little helps. Especially when you look at the rate of soil degradation world wide and the evidence that shows if we carry on our present agricultural practices it could all be gone within 200 years – a sobering thought when you consider the projected global population of 9 billion.

Soil health is our health
But rather than spending too much time focusing on the problem, Permaculture provides some practical solutions although the issue of how scaleable they are remains. However no till methods, mulching, composting and re-vegetation (eg: more plants less concrete) provide a way back to knowledge from a time when people didn’t have supermarkets to rely on for their daily sustenance. When you begin to think about supermarkets reliance on non-renewable energy it becomes a little easier to care about things like soil health and helping to create healthy soil by composting your green waste or if that’s not possible finding a community green waste service that can do it for you.


Two out of Three Sisters Guild

As I mentioned earlier the practical application of Permaculture is dependant on many factors and it’s part of the design process to look at whether they are limiting or can be resourcefully turned into a positive. This approach is at the heart of the design process and as someone who has spent much of my life being restricted by self-limiting beliefs is why it appeals to me so much. We decided to have a go at planting a three sisters guild and an apple guild using the resources we had already available in the garden.  Guilds are an excellent example of applying the beneficial connections principle as they mimic the natural co-operation of species in ecosystems based on their mutual interdependence. By grouping plants and animals together we can use their special qualities to benefit humans whilst creating habitat.

We did our own version of the popular Native American ‘Three Sisters’ guild of corns, beans and squash because we were using a pot made of tyres we only had room for two of the sisters namely the corn and the beans as the third sister squash, used to provide a living leaf mulch on the soil to retain moisture and suppress weeds would not fit in the planting space we had available. We also planted some of the apple guild plants around two of the apple tree’s after making raised beds around the trunks using bottles and old tiles. Apart from recycling and looking pretty, the other benefit of the bottles is the air inside them heats up and in turn heats up the soil. We planted peas for nitrogen fixing, comfrey for mulching in place and some daffodils in the outer ring to suppress grass competing with tree roots for nutrients. Cathy will add some plants that attract insects for pollination and act as pest control soon to complete the apple guild. I am really drawn to the idea of guilds as it embodies the idea of individual survival through co-operation that I think is so important for the human species now, rather than purely focusing on the dominant mind-set of competition. Of course in reality there is both co-operation and competition but somehow the competitiveness of species in an ecosystem is contained within the continuing co-operative evolution that has been happening for millions of years. By understanding the relationships within ecosystems there is a lot we can learn about how to improve our own relationships with each other and with nature.

Two of the three sisters, corn and beans are in this guild 

Cathy planting peas in the apple guild

In the Forest Garden
On Thursday Cathy had arranged for us to visit the Agroforestry Research Trust Forest Garden http://www.agroforestry.co.uk/ next to the Schumacher College.  Forest gardens are food production and land management systems based on woodland eco-systems but formed with trees (fruit and nut), bushes, shrubs, herbs and vegetables that provide a high yield of food using ‘low maintenance’ perennial plants.  Unlike monocultures in traditional agriculture, the concept of stacking (ie making use of vertical space) is used to create different layers of plants and increase strength and stability of the system through biodiversity. Although my plant identification skills leave a lot to be desired I was able to recognise current bushes and some herbs in amongst the many plants. One of the herbs I recognised was Lovage, reminiscent of parsley and celery in leaf shape and smell. It was used as herbal remedy for sore throats and upset stomach. The seeds, leaves and stems have a similar flavour to celery with a lemony twist and can be used in soups, salads and rice dishes. I like the look of this chilled pea and lovage soup, could make a nice change from gazpacho for a summer soup maybe?  

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/recipes/chilled-pea-and-lovage-soup-1748109.html

This has set me on a path of researching other perennial herbs no longer in common use so when I find some tasty sounding ones I will share them with you..

Lovely Lovage

On Retreat

I just got back from a six day Buddhist meditation retreat at The Barn near Totnes and I loved it!  Apparently it is quite unusual as retreats go as it is not completely silent, we had one day of silence in the middle of the week and it’s quite a small group, just 10 of us in the community including the 2 co-ordinators responsible for running it. Our daily schedule included morning chores, three 40 minute meditations, working in the gardens and taking turns cooking a vegetarian meal for the whole community. What I really appreciated about it was the opportunity to connect both with yourself during the silence and with other like-minded souls in the intimate but open space that is offered there, all this whilst surrounded by beautiful wild plants and flowers and the hum of bee’s buzzing between them. I found myself reflecting on relationships in nature and how we can learn from them.  

The flower always looks happy, never stressed or anxious but waits patiently and trusts the bee will arrive in it’s own time

Patience and trusting in life are two qualities we seem to have forgotten about or lost faith in during this time of technological rush and instant gratification. The retreat week was the first time in 14 years I didn’t use my mobile or email every day and I realised how much using these has impacted on my perception of life. Having access to so much knowledge and opportunity for anytime, anywhere communication obviously has great advantages but unless we use it in a mindful way there is a danger of becoming over dependent on it and finding it obscures our natural intuitive abilities that allow us to listen to our inner wisdom, so important for us to tune into on a regular basis.  

The Garden of the Mind

The retreat garden had lots of broad beans, peas and runner beans in need of some support structures so my main job was using branches from felled beech saplings to make sticks to support the peas. At first I approached this as a practical task but after a while I felt I was creating a natural sculpture that I named the Pea Forest.

Whilst weeding around the peas I started to think about how mindfulness is a way to become aware of any negative thoughts that might otherwise take root in our minds. If they are not ‘weeded’ regularly depression can take hold, often these ‘weeds’ grow insidiously and we don’t see them creeping up to take over the garden of our mind blocking our natural positivity. Meditation can help keep these thoughts in perspective to maintain a balance in the mind garden. However as any gardener knows it is impossible to completely remove all weeds and a lot of energy can be put into this task that comes from a resistant state of mind. Weeds are only named so because people decided they were undesirable based on existing ideas of how a garden (mind) should look. The plants we call weeds actually have many beneficial properties to both humans and the eco-systems they are part of. For example nettles can be food, medicine and fertilizer for humans, insects and other plants. In the same way if we accept the negative ‘weed’ thoughts as part of a healthy and diverse ecosystem of the mind rather than trying to remove them, we can see they provide fertile ground for inner reflection and deeper insights into life from which new positive growth can emerge.

From the dark soil of my mind grew compassion, self-love and self-acceptance, the most beautiful flowers of the heart.

I recommend a stay at The Barn Retreat to you all…

http://www.sharphamtrust.org/page.php?id=3

The Pea Forest 

Whitehawk community food project

Apples ready for pressing

After I finished the course I started looking for volunteering opportunities and luckily in Brighton there are quite a lot to choose from. I decided to try the Whitehawk community food project because they were using permaculture design along with organic and biodynamic techniques that I wanted to get some hands on experience of.  The first day I went it was beautiful and sunny, once I'd climbed the very steep Whitehawk hill I found a green oasis with a fantastic view of the sea. When I arrived I was immediately offered some freshly pressed apple juice, it tasted delicious and I realised the last time I'd had fresh apple juice was about 5 years ago when i'd bought a juicer whilst on a detox. It struck me as sad that most of the people in the 'supermarket generation' have never tasted really fresh food picked straight from the ground, plant or tree and for all the convenience of year round access to all types of fruit and vegetables we have sacrificed something really fundamental in our relationship with food, taste!

The guys who run the project have been doing it for about 10 years and are all really friendly and happy to share their extensive knowledge with whoever comes to volunteer. You also get a share of whatever produce is available in return for your efforts and for someone brought up on supermarket vegetables and salad there is something really special about picking your food fresh from the ground or plant and taking it home to eat it, it felt quite magical to me.

The chickens in their 'tractor'

Mesmerised by chickens
I was soon introduced to the chickens who play an important role in a permaculture design, often used on courses to illustrate the differences in inputs and yields between intensive farming and permaculture, the former being more energy intensive for yield return than the latter. One of the volunteer days I helped make a chicken tractor, this was a very simple version which was basically a portable fence. Chicken tractors are used to move the chickens around different parts of the plot to get them to scratch over and clear the soil of weeds and pests whilst fertilising it with their droppings and are a great example of beneficial connections, where the needs of one element in the system are met by another. I found the chickens quite mesmerising and spent ages just watching them do their thing all the while feeling aware of just how disconnected I had been from real life during the decade I had spent most days staring into a computer screen whilst designing the virtual world. I decided chickens were much more interesting.

Mutant squashes, the worms are in for a treat!  

Mutant squashes and other delights 
During my time at Whitehawk I tried my hand at many different things like clearing mutant squashes that were the result of an unplanned union between marrow and courgettes, planting green manure, transplanting strawberries, picking snails off brassicas to feed to the chickens, moving compost, helping re-build raised beds, apple pressing and catching chickens to put in the tractor. There is always something new to do and learn under the friendly guidance of the people running the project but one of the best things for me was that everyone is made to feel welcome regardless of situation or circumstance and treated as equals. The only hierarchy you have to contend with is the chickens pecking order, so different from the corporation which ironically treats people like battery hens!

The Tao of Permaculture

There are some interesting connections between the philosophy of permaculture and Tao, the literal meaning of Tao is 'the way' and the central concept of Tao is wu wei meaning 'without action'. The goal of wu wei is to align with Tao revealing the 'soft and invisible power within all things'. The ideal permaculture design process would also begin with wu wei spending a year observing the invisible powers of energy flowing through the place you are designing to ensure you use them efficiently in your design.

Least change for greatest effect
This is also expressed as the 80:20 rule "prolonged and thoughtful observation instead of prolonged and thoughtless labour". Taoist philosophy believes the universe works harmoniously according to it's own ways and that we must place our will in harmony with the natural universe. This mirrors the permaculture philosophy of working with nature rather than against it.

Energy input & yield analysis 
If we all spent some time in a state of 'wu wei' we would be able to observe where we choose to put our life energy and what 'yield' of happiness this brings us. I think this would lead to people who put a lot of their energy into cycle of consumption finally having to connect with the emptiness of consumer existence and the wastefulness of it all, not just in terms of earths material resources but our own energy too.

Ultimately each of us can choose whether we direct the flow of our energy into perpetuating consumption or towards the creation of a life sustaining society that recognises we need to respect our role in maintaining harmony in the natural universe.

Applying permaculture principles to the corporation

During the building sustainable communities course we were asked to apply permaculture design principles to our lives and so I decided to apply them to corporation as a way of generating ideas about how to re-design human organisation within corporations to help them move towards sustainable business practices. I duly made (yet another) powerpoint and tried to set up a meeting with the CSR team (corporate social responsibility) who try and convince everyone how ethical and 'green' corporations are. I managed to show it to one person who was more open than I thought about this very radical (for them) way of thinking but knew it was going nowhere fast and anyway I was so done with trying to change the corporation but I thought I'd share some of the ideas I came up with:


Maximise beneficial relationships
The problem: Corporate silos often lead to internal duplication in effort and products. The culture of competition mean beneficial relationships through collaboration are not encouraged and leads to a lack of strategic systems thinking. 


Organisational idea: Encourage beneficial connections by including collaboration and co-operation in performance assessments rather than having incentives focused purely on individual performance. Working in silo’s mean people don’t understand the role of different teams in relation to their business function and so can’t see how they could combine knowledge to create collaborative solutions for sustainable business practice.

Encourage collaboration and co-operation by including team work in performance assessments

Use or mimic natural succession
The problem: Within a corporation succession happens as individuals ascend the hierarchy and gain greater influence within the organisation. Greater responsibility for day-to-day business operations means less opportunity for keeping up to date with wider societal changes. This top down individualistic control means there is little opportunity for new approaches and ideas coming from new graduates or alternative thinkers to upwardly influence the organisation, leading to a stagnant business that is slow to change.

Organisational idea:
One way to speed up ‘succession’ to a sustainable business culture would be to ‘seed’ different levels of the organisation with sustainability experts who have the necessary training to understand current BAU (business as usual) operations at the level of hierarchy they are working, this would grow ‘eco-literacy’ throughout all levels simultaneously, leading to a high ‘yield’ of eco-literate employees.

'Seed' the hierarchy with experts to speed up 'succession' to a sustainable business culture

Cycling and recycling our resources and energies

The problem: Corporations like other large human systems use a large number of resources (people, materials, energy and money) and creates large amounts of waste in the process where as in natural ecosystems everything is cycled and recycled so there is no waste. If we think of the corporation as an eco-system we can map the flow of resources and waste through the system to discover ways of recycling resources to make the system more sustainable. 

Organisational idea:

Use input/output analysis to map resources and energy to deliver maximum yield from the resources input to the system with the minimum waste for the business. 

Mapping the flow of resources and waste to make the system more sustainable

The problem is in their solution

But this exercise of applying permaculture principles to the corporation really highlighted the root cause of the problem we face, our obsession with consuming products. Anyone born during or after the second world war has been very carefully conditioned to see themselves as consumers, this was done to boost the economy after the first and second world wars. Edward Bernays, one of the pioneers of public relations and propaganda was Freud's nephew who used his uncles psychoanalytical ideas to persuade the masses that consumption was good. 

"If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it? The recent practice of propaganda has proved that it is possible, at least up to a certain point and within certain limits" 

Edward Bernays 

As we know this method has been very successful although more recently there has been a growing awareness that connecting your identity, status and feelings of self worth to material ownership is not the way to happiness. 


Green consumer task force
So when I joined the first meeting of the 'green consumer task force' a team put together to help the corporation be more sustainable, the obvious 'elephant in the room' was the continuing definition of people as 'consumers'. It's just now they would be green consumers and we would carry on making lots of 'green products' and so continue consuming because let's face it that's the foundation the corporation is built on and anything outside that model of business would seriously challenge the core beliefs of everyone involved, which of course is exactly what needs to happen....

The breakdown

Sea of emotions

Falling apart 
I have to be honest, I didn't just leave the corporation I had a breakdown. It had been a long time coming and I can’t even remember what day it was but I was feeling really terrible and was sat on the beach with my friend J who is one of the most intuitive, emotionally intelligent people I know. I believe you meet everyone for a reason and I met her to help me make my escape plan a reality and start the journey of reconnecting with my heart. There is a celtic spiritual tradition of anam cara or soul friend that believes when you deeply connect with another person your souls can flow together and I feel my friendship with J is based on this kind of connection. It feels very special to me.  

I started crying and she said you’re not well, let’s go to the doctors and get you signed off. I resisted at first as it’s not something that I would have ever thought of on my own but she was so right. I was in such a bad state I didn’t realise how ill I was. I walked up to the surgery and said I really need to see a doctor and got an appointment first thing the following day. It felt very awkward and embarrassing to have a meltdown in the doctor’s surgery but she was, as doctors go, pretty sympathetic and she gave me a sick note for a month. I felt a mixture of shock, guilt and shame surely I wasn’t the type of person to get signed off ? I was strong, hardworking and dependable…but I also felt relief as I realised I would finally be able to rest. I suddenly felt the extreme tiredness of someone who’s been running on adrenalin for a very long time.  

The first week after I got signed off I continued trying to keep ‘doing the right thing’, like a clockwork toy I was slowly winding down but still the tyrannical mind nagged me ‘you should be using your time effectively, you should be getting fit, you should be working out how to have a career change ectera. The end came after an ill-conceived trip to the power plate studio, after the session which left my muscles in spasm, I felt about 99 years old and practically had to crawl home. I remember lying spread eagled on the bed feeling utter exhaustion, I had used every last drop of energy and this is the way it had to be for me to finally STOP by reaching the point where I no longer even had the energy to think and that was it, the start of the big sleep...

The big sleep
I spent most of the next month asleep in bed and don’t really remember much about it other than every few days walking down the road to the co-op to buy food. You know you have broken yourself when a five minute walk uphill feels like you’re climbing a mountain.  During my short periods of consciousness I was crying a lot, a seemingly bottomless well of tears that had been building up for a very long time, feelings of sadness and despair that had been bottled up for years were finally being released. Even though I felt extremely weak and vulnerable I didn’t want people around me as I knew the instinct to avoid pain through distraction was not going to help me and what I really needed to do was finally face myself and find a way to be free of the negative patterns of thought that had created a prison in my mind, I wanted to heal myself, I wanted to be free!

Gradually I felt more awake and found myself drawn towards the seafront, looking out at the vast expansiveness of sea and sky always gave me an instant feeling of well-being.  At first I couldn’t understand what this feeling was as I had become so disconnected from myself but slowly I realised it came from deep within and was a brief connection with my inner being shining through the darkness that enveloped me the rest of the time.  It was a relief to have this feeling of well being rising up through the blackness as I knew I wanted more and that it was only me who could bring it back into my life. I wanted my thoughts to be free, joyful, loving and peaceful. I wanted to escape the tyranny of my mind and the self-limiting beliefs that had held me back for so long.

The sea of emotions
The image at the top of this post is from a journal I started to reflect on my inner journey which has been a very healing way of re-connecting with my creative inner being after my breakdown or breakthrough as I choose to think of it now. It's called 'The sea of emotions' and my friend kate said I should write out the words beneath it because you would want to read them so here they are.

"My inner being in a boat of consciousness floating calmly through the sea of emotions, even in stormy weather I can keep my course steady using the lighthouse of my soul to navigate. Most of the time I feel like I exist in a sea of emotions and sometimes they are relatively calm but other times without warning they can well up from somewhere deep inside and overwhelm me. I used to be scared when this happened and feel out of control but now I understand it's part of me and how I sense the world. In addition to the physical world there's the emotional energy field that's invisible but very tangible to me. It's taken me sometime to learn to differentiate between my feelings and other people's emotional energy that my 'emotional radar' picks up" 

Wisdom of your inner child
When I was four years old someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I remember it being the first time an adult had treated me as an equal and not as a child. I answered quickly without any hesitation "an artist". The funny thing is I was clearer then than I have been as an adult about who I am and what I'm here to do. If you are willing to look inward it's actually not difficult to connect with the wisdom of your inner child because they have always been there, it's just they get lost in the world of socially conditioned adult. Try it for yourselves now, connect with that inner voice the 'oughts' and 'shoulds' of society tell us to ignore, have a listen and let me know what it's telling you? 

Building sustainable communities

...and so it came to pass that I discovered permaculture design, for the uninitiated the most basic and simple description of permaculture is understanding how natural ecosystems are working through careful observation and using this knowledge to design human settlements and agricultural systems that mimic the relationships found in natural ecologies, sorry that still sounds a bit of a mouthful...seeking to work in a co-operative way with nature, seeing it as a friend that provides for us rather than an enemy that's out to get us that we must try and shape and control with technology. This belief has permeated every aspect of society and has led to a loss of knowledge about nature we'd had for thousands of years in a few generations.

This knowledge was completely missing from my education as I was being educated or conditioned depending on how you look at it, to enter the industrial workforce. For me the sustainable communities course presented a whole new way of thinking about humans relationship with the natural world, as someone who spent the previous 10 years designing humans interactions with the virtual world, it was great to find a design philosophy that reflected the value of people care I had tried so hard to instil within the technology industry with little success. Earth care and fair shares complete the trio of simple but powerful ethics of permaculture.

In the world I had come from the majority prescribed to the techno-utopian vision that designing more and more tech, quicker, smaller, faster was taking us to a 'better place' with no thought for the ethical and environmental effects of this focus on improving the already high standard of material comfort for western consumers. I found myself on the edge of two very different worlds and as the permaculturists reading this will know the edge of two ecosystems is a very productive place which sparked a lot of new ideas about how permaculture principles could be used to help the corporation think about sustainability in new ways.

I really enjoyed the course, especially the feeling of being part of a like-minded community as it's always inspiring to be working with other people who share your values and the 'pot luck' lunch was always a highlight of the weekend. I even managed to organise my team at the corporation to do a pot luck lunch which they all really enjoyed. It was quite sad when the course was over but I knew I would find ways of continuing on this path...

corporate 'pot luck' lunch