Early to rise, like the birds

Early to rise, like the birds. Sometimes the sun wakes me.
Walking through the garden in the morning mist when I know I'll spend my whole day there, I melt into my existence in that simple assurance.

Latest News: The chicks and duck hatchlings are growing up quick and just got introduced to their new run we built for them. All the times spent holding and playing with them in their first few weeks of life has paid off. If you sit down in the run with them, you can feel accepted and unfeared, despite the enormity you impose to their size.

The old hens are still on rotation scratching away as we move them around the garden to do some weeding and digging for us in their chicken tractor. And you usually win a prize for the work of moving them--a fresh egg. Thank you, hens.

Lookout!
Summer's approachin'
and so are the final days to plant long season crops

Seedlings are multiplying everywhere and at this time of year it's a race to get them all in the ground. We're still continually mixing up our own potting soil, picking and choosing from our seed library and sewing seeds into trays and pots to fill up all the beds we've been preparing. The momentum is picking up as we feel the excitement of the buzzing bees all around the maturing blossoms of poppy, buttercup, borage, lilies, passionflower, milk thistle, and countless others.

This is the zone of the garden I'm responsible for watering in the mornings and sometimes at dusk as well. I'm proud to say the Chinese purple cabbage and onions have just about matured. Sprinkled among them are a healthy round of fresh salad greens we've already been harvesting from. That middle row of light green is the buckwheat cover crop, which we are soon due to "chop and drop", turn it a bit, and plant into it. Cover crops are grown in a bed or field instead of a crop. Often leguminous (nitrogen fixing) plants are grown such as vech, Austrian field peas, fava beans, red clover, strawberry clover. A nitrogen-fixing plant has the most nitrogen nodules when it starts flowering, indicating a good time to chop it down and incorporate it into the soil. When chopped and dropped, cover crops are often mixed with grasses like oats to add carbon or biomass to the soil to build organic matter. This builds soil fertility in garden. Cover crops will also
-->

add phosphorus to our soil, a vital element that's essential for life. Not only is it present in our own DNA, RNA, and ATP, but also in the phospholipids that form all cell membranes in all life forms.

Field Trips and Neighbors

The Sharpening Stone: Primitive Skills Gathering 

Williams, OR

Flint knapping workshop: All these shards of obsidian are scattered and broken off in the making of traditional native arrowheads. Nice flakes are selected to carefully refine into arrowhead points by striking with hammer rocks and hard antler such as moose.

 

 A few of us have already put our new skills to the test back at Apro. Here, Paul and Chip are coal-forging their own knives out of railroad spikes.

.   .   .

Abel's farm

 My teacher Abel lives right down the road, and he's just plowed his garden beds which have been cover-cropped until now. Now it's time to measure out the beds, dig out the paths, and tamp down some fence posts to keep the cows, pigs, and deer out.

 Now we've got to decide what to plant, and what amendments we should make to the soil. A few mason jars and a simple home-kit pH test can tell us a lot about the soil. We know that bacteria like and produce an alkaline soil environment, and fungi like and produce an acidic soil environment. Most commonly grown annual vegetable crops prefer bacterial-dominant soil, while perennials, trees, and shrubs prefer fungal dominant soil. But we also need to know about any mineral or nutrient deficiencies. One way to find this out is to examine what was growing there vigorously on it's own. What does that plant like? But your garden will have varying soil microbiology throughout, so it's deserved to spend time plotting out where those differences occur, and plant accordingly.
The mason jars hold soil samples from different areas of the garden space. They are then filled and shaken up with water and allowed to settle. After a few days, you can observe the natural formation of sediment layers, indicating the ratio of dense nutrient minerals, sands, clay, and silt.

 

 Selecting bean seeds to plant in the new beds

A few weeks later and the potato and beans we've planted are sprouting and the drip tape is down. The drip tape will water the plants on a timer twice a day--early morning and just about dusk. These are the best times to water due to less evaporation and it prevents plants from getting burned from bright water reflections magnified onto them in bright sun.
To save a lot of time weeding we've gone through and scratched the unplanted surfaces of the beds with hoop hoes to prevent weed seedlings from establishing themselves.

Meanwhile back at Apro...

more mulching.

 photo by MujahidAbdallah

Back on home turf, we continue with the ongoing process of tending the perennial beds. We have mulched these beds of food-bearing shrubs and trees with a layer of manure, cardboard, fresh cut comfrey and various other green biomass, another layer of manure, and topped off with straw. Sheet mulching is a technique used to mimic a natural forest's process of decomposition. The cardboard acts as a weed-barrier, but an alternative if cardboard is not available is reed mats, or more layers of biomass, straw, and manure. All this layering will feed the soil and the plants with loads of minerals, nutrients, microbiological action, prevent weeds from taking over and leaching all those amendments, and break down steadily, holding moisture and food for the plants. After a lot of hauling and initial labor, this bed will now be very low-maintenance yet very productive.

With our intermittent brewing of compost tea, we search the gardens for yellowed and ill-looking plants to nurse with the compost tea. It can improve your soil structure and fertility by quickly adding nutrients and fungal or bacterial activity, depending on what brew you make for your plants' needs.
 One of our students taught us this technique to quickly distribute the tea with a partner: two buckets, one with quarter-sized holes in the bottom: the regular bucket is full of compost tea, which gets dumped into the perforated bucket, half at a time, to be quickly walked up and down the bed by your partner, distributing the tea much faster than a watering can.

 

This past week we put together the outdoor processing kitchen. The time has come to harvest some of our birds that have been living happily here at Apro for almost two years. It's a hard reality to come into contact with for the first time for anyone that's eaten flesh in their lifetime without thinking too deeply about the matter of life and death for that being. It's an ultimate sacrifice, and thanks to my teacher Andrea, we went through this process in an honorable demeanor with utmost gratitude for these animals. We decided to killed five male ducks and one rooster to tame some imbalances in the population of the enclosure. While lulling them to sleep before their time came, we thanked the birds and assured them that their blood would be returned to the earth, their souls to the skies, and their flesh would nourish us after we have given them nourishment all this time.

Village Building Convergence

Portland, OR

 

 The VBC is an annual ten-day placemaking festival in the city of Portland. Volunteers, community members, and organizations get together to facilitate placemaking and cross-pollination of knowledge,  creativity, and skills with neighbors and visitors alike. Activities include community activism presentations, urban permaculture, natural building, the making of benches, community kiosks, painted intersections, appropriate technology, gardens, street paintings, tile mosaics, and art projects of all types and scales.

 

At the Moon Cottage, volunteers constructed a backyard yurt with natural materials. When I showed up, the frame had been built and it was time to fill it with light straw insulation. We mixed the dry straw with a thin layer of clay and water, covering it just enough to clump when you squeeze a handful together. We screwed in flat wooden forms onto the inside and outside of the to-be wall of the structure, filled it with the straw-clay mixture small layers at a time, and tamped it down on the edges. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Then I made my way down to the Manifestation Station- a warehouse studio space with a metal shop, jewelry-making studio, band practice space, tattoo studio, kitchen, and various art-making madness strewn about the whole space.

 

 

One of the studio residents built a 3D printer to make specific joint pieces for his custom bike cargo crates. He even printed parts to build another 3D printer!

 

The activity of the day at the Manifestation Station was the construction of a cob oven in the outdoor space. I helped a metalworker design and build a sculptural door piece for the oven.

.   .   .

Cougar Mountain

 

Cougar Mountain is a neighboring land project about 15 miles down the road from Apro. We were invited to a work party to put collars on there orchard trees for protection from voles (meadow mice). While we were there, we got a tour of the large property and learned a bit about how they manage their watershed, cattle, and orchards.

Saturday Market

Eugene, OR

 

This year Apro's outreach faculty has decided to start tabling a booth at Eugene's Saturday market about 25 miles north of Apro. Each week, a group of students come out to set up the booth and talk to curious market-goers about the Apro experience and inform them of our Sunday lectures open to the community on a gift economy basis.

 

photo by Eric Spiegel 

I decided to wake up early and gather some sculpture-making material from the forest and see what I could build for the Apro info booth

 

photo by Anna 

What came of it was this, and for the first few hours of the market, it didn't seem to catch too much attention. But later that afternoon, a young girl crawled into the space from behind and poked her head up from under the table, eyes level with the sculpture. "What's that?" she asked, eyes wide. "...A totem," I supposed. She gave me a precious grin, disappeared under the table and promptly returned with a leaf. "Can I add this?" she asked eagerly. "Yeah! Put it wherever you want." And it grew into a totem. More kids that were playing in a small green space of shrubbery behind us took notice and began bringing more bits, twigs and maple seeds to the totem, and it grew. Eventually it was time to break down the booth and I decided to move the totem to the green space behind us to leave there as a temporary piece of art. The kids swarmed around me and began moving earth, rocks, any natural material they could get their hands on to contribute to the structure. I was amazed at the life all these small hands were pouring into my little matchstick of an idea that didn't get a second glance from the adults.
 In the end, one of the kids smashed the whole thing, but at this I could only laugh. I had so much fun with the kids, watching it all evolve, faeries move in, a big ogre smashes it to bits. It made a story, and it warmed my soul to see their excitement and awe over so simple an intention: totem. I learned how to play with kids and nature together, and it felt so right. Thank you, kids of the market shrubs.