Lockdown, Vaccinations, and Permaculture Thoughts

It's time to talk about vaccines.

Many people in permaculture have issues with the government, with corporate medicine, with pharmaceuticals. They feel that any mandates towards masking or vaccinations are railroading them, and they resist any and all control that any large-scale organisation brings to bear.

There's an element of rebellion in permaculture that is intrinsic to the worldview, which is, after all, a rejection of the capitalist economic system and the way it's seeped into our social values.

That said, there can certainly be a point at which rebellion becomes rebelling purely for the sake of rebelling. Basically, rebellion because that's what you do against corruption, and all governments and their works are corrupt. (Think: "I renounce the devil and all his works!")

I actually think this misses the mixed blessings of our society. That we are a society that does need to rely on big government in some things, on large-scale equalisers, because on the individual level a great many people are instinctively selfish. Me, mine, myself. I hold a balanced belief in both the ability of people to do great good, and the evils that lurk in our hearts. Finding a balance on these views is difficult, a delicate navigation, and I work to hold space for people of differing views. (I don't always succeed.)

The truth is that permaculture people are, well, people, with all the kindness and thoughtfulness, and issues and selfishness of the breed. Yes, there is certainly an encouragement to care for people and share fairly in permaculture, but these ideals can also be selfish when wrapped around with 'me, and those who think/act like me'.

On a practical level, the government is best situated to enact large-scale control and maintenance of situations which cannot be managed at the individual level in our modern society. Yes, there are individuals, family units, communities that have opted out of the capitalist economic system and that society, but the hard truth is that not everyone can do that. We have too many people alive and living in the world, many of them too specialised to their time and place and mentality to change on a dime. And in our modern world, many of us are alive and living the lives that we are because of the system that we exist in. We cannot "renounce the devil and all his works", because "the devil and all his works" are in us as well.

This is a hard truth to accept. Our mentality is so accustomed to painting ourselves as the hero, we don't always notice when we might become the villain - even if only in a scene or two. Such is the nature of humanity. One demon is another's angel.

Too deep, perhaps?

Let's s talk about the ethic of Fair Share.

The original framing of the ethic was surrounding the idea that our consumption should have finite limits. That we should - as far as is possible - endeavour to limit our consumption, such that the sharing of the earth and its finite resources is fair - or at least fairer.

On the surface: fairly sharing involves providing vaccines to our neighbouring countries who don't have the same wealth and opportunity to develop and manufacture vaccines as we do. But deeper and more relevant for the permaculturist, it involves being resolved and willing to take measures to ensure that we don't deplete future resources by our decisions today.

It's one of the reasons we have the principles catch and store energy (at the highest possible level) and use and value renewable resources . The memory phrase for produce no waste - "a stitch in time saves nine" - also builds in the concept of enabling better use of resources. If we can save time and energy and resources in prevention, isn't that far better than a cure?

A vaccine is prevention - as much as eating healthily is prevention, as much as a seatbelt is prevention, as much as hardhats on building sites are prevention, as much as designing a house for sustainability is prevention.

Originally, I was going to describe vaccination as 'the stitch in time that saves nine'. But I think that's an incorrect use of the paradigm.

Vaccines are not a cure-all or a fix, and nobody should be saying they are. However, in the overall scheme of our health, vaccination is one more brick in the wall of our defences against sickness, one more obstacle for the virus to get through, one more point on the scoresheet in favour of survival, of life, of opportunity and potential and second chances. They are one more layer in the 'swiss cheese layered defence' against the debilitating sickness that is COVID-19.

For an example of the Swiss Cheese Pandemic Defence, I recommend reading this article from the New York Times.

Vaccination is one more layer in the defence, alongside wearing masks in close quarters, avoiding close quarters where possible, not congregating in large groups, and keeping track of where you've been.

Acknowledging these as useful defences takes nothing away from permaculture ethics and principles, health and wellness, or our need to work at improving our resilience as individuals and as humanity. These things work together with vaccination to give us a better chance against the virus - individually, as people likely to get sick, and as a community, as a carrier and potential location for mutation of the virus into something more infectious and more deadly.

Using every defence we have against the virus is valuing diversity.

Taking the vaccine is also valuing the diversity of our population. Not just those who can grow their own food and afford to eat healthy, who have good immune systems, who can learn about lockdowns and testing and case numbers that are given in English (not even Auslan anymore), and have the transport to easily get to a vaccination hub, but those who can't.

The immunocompromised, the multi-generational ESL family, those with less money or living in a food, transport, or green spaces "desert", those from indigenous backgrounds who have far, far less historical reason and current experience to trust the government and medical experts - we don't see these people up here in the North side of Sydney that often, do we? They are people whose voices and experiences we often don't hear or see face to face, because they live and work and struggle a long way from the leafy suburbs and work-from-home and educated backgrounds that we experience up here.

But if they aren't our local community, they are still our community of Sydneysiders - of Australians.

And when one of them falls sick with COVID, it will put one more small weight onto the stretched health system.

What catching COVID-19 means is one more patient for the hospitals, one more pressure on our strained health system, one more person at risk of what is being called 'long COVID' - a long, debilitating recovery that has lasted for more than a year in some of the early afflicted. Once-healthy people now struggle to stay upright for a couple of hours a day; marathon runners now find themselves breathing heavily just to cross the street. They are likely to end up being unable to function at the capacity they once did, instead struggling along at life.

The vaccine is both one more layer of defence against catching the virus, and one more layer of defence against the debilitating results of getting the virus.

Now, catching COVID-19 is not a moral or ethical failing, and we should disdain to see it as such. But to be vaccinated in light of the consequences of catching COVID, is to act with the ethic of 'fair share' in mind. We are using an available resource in the now to take one step further away from something that will put undue burden on us, on our community, on our society in the future. We are "limiting" ourselves in the present so that we will not be burdening our society excessively in the future.

May I encourage us to make use of one more defence against COVID by getting vaccinated, and, in doing so, to value the diversity of our Australian community, the diversity of preventative measures against getting COVID, and to practice the ethic of Fair Share by reducing the likelihood of us having to take up valuable resources in the future?

chooks and tunnels and tractors, oh my!

My garden was originally designed based off Linda Woodrow's Permaculture Kitchen Garden.

In the Woodrow design, the chooks both sleep and live in the large-size tractor which is moved around the garden. They live their entire life in the tractor, and Woodrow had it reinforced against domesticated animals and wild.

However I wasn't comfortable with the security of the tractor, and since they'd arrived in their own tractor-coop, I was reluctant to switch things around, at least to start with. So I left them in their coop, which was heavy and not very easily moveable, and which didn't make the ground very accessible at all, and set up detachable wire tunnels to get them from the night-coop to the chook tractor.

But the tunnels running across the yard were a pain to climb over. And with the tunnels, it was difficult to access all areas of the yard, particularly sections that were diagonally opposite to the coop, which required going around the cherry and donut peach trees that were planted in the middle.

A better system was needed!

At the time, I was struggling with intruding couch grass and weeds from the neighbour fence. It just kept coming up in spaces I couldn't reach easily, nearly impossible to weed.

It occurred to me: what if, instead of running the tunnels across the middle of the garden...I ran them around the edge of the garden? What if I used the chicken instinct to peck and scratch at every bit of green to keep the neighbour's weeds at bay? It would solve my problem of how to get the chooks from the coop to the tractor, as well as give them a little more area in which to hunker down and dustbathe and even shelter at the sunniest points of the day.

So I took the map I'd drawn of the yard, marked out the trees, and decided on where the annual beds would go. Those would be the chook tractor stations, with a path around them and sometimes in between them, and a tree on each side. Yes, the tree would take up some root zone, but we'd deal with that.

Yes, the tunnels wouldn't be very accessible, but they wouldn't need to be. I could run the chooks over the roots of the trees I'd planted around the edges of the yard, and if things got too bare in the run, I could toss straw and woodchips and leaf matter down to absorb the manure that ended up in the tunnels...

Access into the chook tractor would be from the tunnels This would also allow me to have the chook tractor over each garden bed, giving the chooks the ability to 'free range' across the garden, without rampaging through my carefully planted and tended garden beds.

There were some logistical issues - some of the trees had been planted quite close to the fenceline, which meant there wasn't much space for the tunnel. But there was enough for a chook single-file, so...we'd just have to get small chooks!

The original chicken coop was a simple, triangular tractor that was designed to be moved around the yard every couple of days. It was heavy to move and the wheels weren't great across rough terrain (or anything that wasn't smooth grass, anyway). Basically, okay for starting out, but not for the long-term.

I got hold of an old guinea pig house and adjusted it for the chickens. It would do for the two to four chooks we planned to get, and the corner of the garden where the chook house was situation never gets sun anyway. Sheltered up against the wall, it would be relatively well-insulated from hard winds, even if it got pretty hot in the height of when the sun hit it early in the day and didn't leave it until mid-morning.

Ultimately, though, the idea was to run the tunnels from the coop to the tractor, wherever it was. And then I realised a small but significant issue. There wasn't really enough space to keep the chooks in the backyard all year round. Not if I wanted to grow things during the summer (at least).

Enter the front chookyard! about 20m2 of free-range space with deep-litter for the chooks to scratch around in and generally enjoy. The tunnels could be extended all the way along the side fence and out to a section of the front yard which wasn't being used at all.

The original plans were to have the chookyard all the way up to the front boundary line, but we decided against it in the end. The first chookyard encompassed 20m2 and was built in less than a day, needing only three posts - two for the corners, one for the gatepost.

Eighteen months later, we've added another chookyard to the first, accessible via another gate, mostly for the purposes of slowly integrating new chickens in with the old flock. I wanted separate spaces to be able to allow the chooks to integrate with each other over time, without things getting too fighty.

Advantages of the tunnels includes maintaining the perimeter of the garden, the chooks being able to move themselves from one area to the next, and effective use of a space that I otherwise wouldn't use.

Disadvantages include the lack of space in the tunnels and the propensity of fights to happen in those small spaces. We've had several sets of chickens already (Original Recipe, the New Shanghai, the Banquet, and the Babies) and found that in the setting up of the pecking order, a lot of the pecking actually takes place in the tunnels where there's no room to move and nowhere to run. Not ideal, but nobody being left defeathered and bloody just yet, so it's not the worst timeline.

I've put together a video about my chicken keeping - specifically about the development of the tunnels. It's not the best video, but it's a small start to what will hopefully be a bigger series.

The Tricky Coil of Good Soil

Soil is one of the most ubiquitous and yet most difficult things to manage in the garden.It's that thing in the garden that's almost never seen, but which affects every part of growing food.

Is the acidity of the soil correct? Are there sufficient nutrients to grow vegies? What about trace elements that many plants use to finish off their crop? And where, oh where, can we get good soil in our urban spaces?

Did you know Australian soil is among the least nutrient-rich in the world? Our soils lack many trace elements that are abundant in other soils around the world and so vegetables that prosper easily in other countries don't always grow so well here.

The most important thing in soil is that it should have a lot of organic matter in it as possible, and as few toxic chemicals as possible.

Organic matter is pretty easy - leaves, food scraps, your neighbour's lawn clippings, coffee grounds from the cafe...

Toxic chemicals? Those are much harder to avoid. So many things these days are grown in a chemical haze of poisons that kill off the weeds that aren't wanted in commercial crops, but which can often remain in the soil long after they've been used. And we can be unaware of what's in the crops until there are consequences.

How Wet Can You Get?

In Australia, one of our most precious resources is rainwater. In the last twenty years, we've experienced two 'official' droughts in Sydney. Technically, I think we might still be in one. Certainly, in spite of the periodic rain, other parts of the country are still in drought.

Did you know that if all the water on earth was represented by a single bucket, the volume of drinkable freshwater would amount to only a single drop? And we run that freshwater over our vegies and bodies and driveways to clean them, and let it run off our roofs and into the gutter to flow out to sea, mixing with the undrinkable water - much of which is stained with undrinkable and inseparable pollutants.

Did you know that the best place to hold water is not in a tank...but in the soil itself? How do you hold water in the soil? You add organic matter to it. You keep it from drying out. You slow down the movement of water through it so the soil has time to absorb it. There's some excellent work about this - an Australian, Peter Andrews, does what he calls 'natural sequence farming' and worked out how to store water in drought-ridden farm soils. You can find out a little more about it here: https://www.nsfarming.com/

This property is not yet waterwise. We collect water from the carport, but not from the gutters at present, although the plans are ready to go. This year will be the year.

fruit tree FAQ

I often get asked about my fruit trees and what I do to get my trees to produce so abundantly. Rather than answering all the questions individually, I'm just going to make this post and point people towards it in future!

Quickie (if you want the fast and nasty!)

1. Yes, these fruit rees are grown on my tree in Sydney suburbia.
2. The trees shown here are mostly around four or five years old; some are older, some are younger. However, I didn't get a crop from any of them until I put them in the ground and started tending them.
3. I get my trees from Fruit Salad Trees, Daleys, or Diggers Club.
4. I don't know the varieties, only that they're low-chill stone fruits that they deliberately select and market for the Sydney and north NSW coastal areas.
5. A lot of the trees shown here are on the north side of the property, right next to a concrete slab that absorbs a lot of sunlight during the day. As a result that section of the garden is warmer and tends to produce fruit earlier than other fruit trees of the same type and kind.

The longer, more in-depth FAQ

Whereabouts are you?

I'm in Sydney - northern Sydney, about 11m above sea level, in foothills. It's Mediterranean in summer, but temperate cool in winter. Specifically I live a little east of the Hills District, and this is important because microclimate matters. We're on a ridge that might get a touch of frost from the south at the height of winter (late July to late August), and which isn't at all insulated from the west winds. West is our primary wind direction all year, with the exception of spring which is when it comes from the northeast.

My property aspect is open to the west and the north, with a great slab of concrete on the north side of the property - the driveway - that absorbs a lot of sunlight during the day and means that side of the property is a number of degrees warmer for longer during the winter. As a result, several of the stone fruit trees on that side of the property start to flower earlier than most trees of the same type and variety and I'm harvesting in October and November while most Sydneysiders are still growing their fruit.

I have a very shaded/protected backyard; it's also quite small. As a result, it's an effort and a half keeping the fruit trees there under control. I have 7 of them growing in a space about 50sqm, with a crepe myrtle, and (unfortunately) a silky oak on the other side the boundary line. (I'm in negotiations with the neighbour to get rid of it.)

In the backyard, the fruiting seasons are variable. The nectarine and donut peach on the stone fruit tree are early - done fruiting by December, but the plum on the same tree is late - February or March, and the independent donut peach is also mid-to-late - Jan or Feb.

Where do you get your trees?

A lot of my trees come from Fruit Salad Trees on the mid-north coast of NSW. They offer low-chill varieties for Sydney, but also offer trees tailored to your area's climate. Those that don't come from Fruit Salad Trees would have come from Daleys, or from Diggers Club.

What type of fruit and nut trees do you have?

I have: peaches, nectarines, plums, apricots, a cherry, a lemon, a lime, a macadamia, avocados, a pomegranate, grapevines, a persimmon, a fig, an elderberry, a mango, a guava, a black sapote, bananas, a kiwiberry, raspberries, a mulberry, and apples.

That said, half the time I don't know what variety I have on the tree; it's just "white peach, white nectarine" or "white nectarine, yellow peach". I'm bad at varieties, which is something of a problem, because varieties are the spice of life the determining factor in which fruit will do best in your garden.

Most of the pics of peaches and nectarines that I show are from the Fruit Salad company, the exception is the donut peach tree in the backyard. That was a gift from my mother and which has grown significantly in the last five years.

It's worth noting that the land my house is built on was once a stone fruit orchard. Back 100 years, this bit of Sydney suburbia was farmland, and the area back then was good for growing stone fruit. It's still good for growing stone fruit, as evidenced by the proliferation of my stone fruit trees.

How do you fertilise your trees?

For most of my trees, I run the chickens under them. I'll have an entire post up about this at a later point, but the gist is that I use the chickens to not only scratch up any bugs and pest eggs in the ground, but also to provide manures and aeration for the topsoil. I throw in any grass clippings, leaf mulches, woodchips, and vegetable wastes that I have and they form a mulch over the roots of the trees, fertilising them. This can also be achieved by buying manures from garden centres if that's your option; I have household chickens and so I work with those.

Do you prune and manage your trees?

Yes. Every midwinter I prune the trees to keep them a reasonable size and to encourage them to grow in ways that suit my garden. There are some great pruning videos for all kinds of trees all over the internet, but I go by Margaret Siri's advice (ABC, circa 2010) which I've summarised here for the fruit trees that I have in my garden. I prune to shape the tree and make it neater, as well as allow it productivity.

I try to remember to spray for leaf curl and mildews - I don't always manage it! The trees are big and the work that needs to be done is correspondingly huge, and sometimes this work doesn't get done in the end. That's what happens when you have a large garden and a full time job.

For leaf curl, I use the 'traditional' ones - bordeaux spray, copper spray, lime sulphur. I do it in winter, before budswell so the pollinators have no reason to be out, and I try to make sure that the pollinators have plenty of other, more agreeable places to be - in the perennial basil, for instance!

How do you keep pests off?

I fully net the tree with fruit fly netting. My largest tree is about 4m high, and I need a very large netting to encompass it. I bought the fruit fly netting a few years back from Green Harvest; it was quite pricey, but worth it.

Other pests in the area include: rats, possums, and sulphur-crested cockatoos, all of whom stubbornly refuse to share once they find my crop! They are also kept out with the fruit fly netting, and because it's a really fine netting, then birds and small animals don't get caught in it the way they do with "bird netting" and other larger-gap pest netting.

Is there an easier way to keep pests off?

Before I did the whole tree, I tried

• hanging fruit fly traps
• netting individual fruit clusters and hanging fruit fly traps
• netting branches of the tree and hanging fruit fly traps

And every time, the fruit flies got through and spoiled the entire harvest. There was no "only 50%" unless it was "oh, you can have 50% of this fruit, but the rest of the peach is riddled with fruit fly larvae".

The first year I put a frame up and netted the whole tree? I got a bumper crop.

So, yeah.

People always want to "nickel-and-dime" pest control. Every time I talk about netting trees, people are like "Wow, what a pest nazi she is!" There are people in permaculture and retrosuburbia communities who get very upset about me 'denying nature its share' by netting the whole tree and excluding pests. However, I tried lesser measures for three years and it didn't work; I got next to nothing from the harvest. So now I fully net the trees and I actively advocate for netting the whole tree when people ask what to do.

'Nature' doesn't share. It produces abundance, but that abundance does not necessarily go to whoever tended it unless they take measures to claim it. Netting the tree is my measure to claim what I have worked towards.

One of the principles of permaculture is "Obtain a yield" - gain something from a season, don't work to no purpose. And so, yes, I go full-bore on netting the tree, and I get a harvest that's the envy of people online and offline. I have bounty that I can share with others - including the animals that I'm denying, if I wish - and it encourages others to work towards abundance, too.

Anything else?

You can drop me a comment or send me a mail and I'll try to answer your questions. But these are the things that I do within my parameters, and they work for me. You'll have to work out what you're willing to do in order to gain a yield from your fruit trees.

The thing is, growing fruit in suburbia can be done - and there's no comparing the taste of shop-bought with the taste of homegrown. I promise, once you grow your own, you'll never look back.

Good luck!

resilience in food chains

A slightly broader post, posting about concepts and ideas rather than the practical.
Illustration by Brenna Quinlan.

The full post is here on FB and it's an excellent read

It's a good point that agribusiness is hierarchical and chain-linked, but the social network of a resilient system is connected around people and community-oriented works. The milk doesn't have to be poured out, the pineapples don't have to rot for want of a buyer. The abattoir workers don't have to go to work when they're sick, and we can find other ways of doing things.

It's just not easy or convenient.

But then, neither is our current system.

There's a joke in a book I read, where a cop says something to the effect of: "When God threw Adam and Eve out of the garden, he made Adam become a farmer. Probably because it's a shitty job, hard work, nobody thanks you for it, and because cops hadn't been invented yet."

Farming is one of those jobs where they have to weather the costs - the costs of production and care, the costs of the corporations who buy their produce who take every opportunity to push back. The costs of the consumer who doesn't care where it's from so long as it's cheap and convenient. So much of the expense of our lives is hidden: buried in the ground, transported out of sight and put out of mind, barred off from the public by the plastic curtains into the loading zone, over the dusty, drought-ridden hills and far, far away...

I think this is earth care (so a patch of earth sustains more people resiliently), people care (allowing us to care for the lives and livelihoods of others in our local communities), and fair share (everyone has the chance to benefit).