PERMACULTURE

(Click on the title for a link to permaculture.org)

Ian
I have seen the advertisement for a Permaculture weekend in Moville on March 25 & 26, Saturday & Sunday in the community college. Could you tell me a bit about it please as it sounds very interesting. Thanks P.G. Moville

A WAY OF LIFE

I like to think that permaculture is a way of life as the ideas touch on most aspects of everyday living. The idea started in the mid 70's when two Australian ecologists, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, started to develop ideas that they hoped could be used to create stable agricultural systems. This was in response to the rapidly growing use of destructive post-war industrial agricultural methods that were poisoning the land and water, reducing biodiversity, and removing billions of tonnes of soil from previously fertile landscapes. The design approach called 'permaculture' was the result, and was first made public with the publication of Permaculture One in 1978. The term is the merging of the words Permanent and Agriculture. Two philosophies of permaculture that are quoted are to “think before you act” and to “practice maximum contemplation, minimum action”, which sounds all right to me! Permaculture is not a set of rules; it is a process of design based around principles found in the natural world, of co-operation and mutually beneficial relationships, and translating these principles into actions.

OBSERVING YOUR SURROUNDINGS

This action can range from choosing what you eat, how you travel, the type of work you do, and where you live, to working with others to create a community food-growing project. It's about making decisions that relate to all your other decisions; so one area of your life is not working against another. For example, if you are planning a journey, consider other tasks that can be completed on the way to your destination (combining a trip to see friends with buying food on the way home, for example). It means thinking about your life or projects as a whole system - working out the most effective way to do things that involves the least effort and the least damage to others, and looking for ways to make relationships more beneficial.

It is important to observe your surroundings before making choices. Taking stock at the beginning of a project (whether it be building a house or planting a window box) of the available resources in terms of time, materials, skills, money, opportunities, land etc, and thinking about how these resources can relate to each other is a useful basis for designing a sustainable and effective system. To take the example of a garden - careful observation over the course of a few months can give information about the sunniest spots, the path of a neighbourhood fox, which areas are sheltered from the wind. Such information is not always immediately available, but can ultimately be very important. A key feature of the design process in permaculture is "zoning". This is about placing things appropriately in relation to each other, and works on the principle that things requiring frequent attention are placed closest to the home. It is about using time, energy and resources wisely, which can be as simple as planting your most used herbs nearest to your kitchen, or as complex as planning a community.

WORKING TOGETHER

Permaculture seeks to foster the skills, confidence and imagination to enable people to become self-reliant, and to seek creative solutions to problems on a global or local scale. While the individual has a part to play, in most places it is not realistic for an individual household to provide for all of their own needs in terms of food, clothing, work etc, and the emphasis is more on self-reliance and increased sufficiency within the community, rather than individual self-sufficiency. In practice, this does not mean each person growing enough food to feed themselves in their back garden; it means that as many as possible of the inputs for a community (food, skills etc) come from within that community - perhaps in the form of community food growing schemes, Local Exchange and Trading Systems (LETS) to exchange skills and produce etc.
Permaculture means different things to different people. One person may interpret it in a practical sense in terms of growing food, perhaps, while another will focus on a more spiritual side. This diversity is important; it helps to keep a sense of balance, and encourages people to share their resources and knowledge with others.

Working together is the key - it takes a lot of strain off the individual. It also is important to be well informed and if you can help others, spread your knowledge in return. Find out more by checking out www.permaculture.org.uk or if you fancy being more sociable check out permaculture workshops.

Environmental, Horticultural

PERMACULTURE BY MARCUS MCCABE

Sheep at Dunree

Permaculture is more than just not digging the soil

Here is a short peics by Marcus McCabe from http://www.sustainable.ie/resources/

Permaculture is the conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems with the stability and resilience of natural ecosystems. It is a design system which connects various components so that the waste of one process becomes the raw material for the next. The elements of design not only include buildings and gardens but also orchards, pasture, coppice woodlands, legal and financial structures as well as appropriate technologies and the connections. The most misunderstood aspect of permaculture design is the importance of a clear plan and an installation process which will work ecologically and financially. For the same cost an infrastructure can be set up to either generate and maintain life systems or destroy them. It is all about designing cyclic systems. Unfortunately most of the investment in land-use in the past has assisted in actually damaging the primary resources bases namely healthy soil, clean water and air.The need to actually come up with sustainable systems is both urgent and real. Farming is in crisis. The system of lakes and rivers are in crisis. There is also a crisis in good affordable housing especially with space. Furthermore the actual food supply is in crisis regarding quality. These are all signs of a system in collapse. In my profession I talk to agriculturalists and engineers who will privately acknowledge that this is the case. We have reached a full stop with the current system of land-use. Squeezing another increment in yield out of any enterprise is just not an option... So.... where do we go from here?

THERE IS A QUESTION OF SCALE.

The aspiring permaculturalist can put a diverse system in place but will need to concentrate on a number of medium scaled systems to generate cash. Taking the hen as an example; 500 hens will generate about £300 per week if well fenced and with supplementary feed in the winter. However 50 hens are almost a nuisance. Place the hen keeper adjacent to a good market gardener, cheese maker or coppicer and suddenly the whole thing becomes more viable. These enterprises while independent will be supporting each other if in proximity. None of the above enterprises would be possible however in a landless situation or for that matter would be too small and intensive (in the work sense) for most farmers to consider. What is needed is a repopulation of the land in low impact primary resource generating activity. Eco-village developments, which use Permaculture design principles as the process pattern, offer this possibility.I see it going something like this. We create revolving land funds. These funds create the land access and install Permaculture systems, wild places, waterways, forests and coppices, and access for house and workshop clusters. Eco-villages which use the principles of permaculture design are likely to be the most affordable and sane alternative for the traffic weary in the future. We have a lot to learn and reinvent but when even the conventional farmers are saying their systems do not work where else do we turn? revilalize,abundant,planet,Permaculture is primarily about connections and solutions. Not only is a beneficial assembly of plants, animal and structures needed but a beneficial assembly of people working bio-regionally to create ecosystems in which the human element is actively integrated in generating primary wealth. This is our direction in moving towards a revitalized and abundant society and planet.

MORE ON PERMACULTURE

Paul and I had our mulching day last week. We probably learned more from the group that attended than they did. It’s amazing what individuals know about gardening! We would like to thank everyone that turned up for the enjoyable day.

One method of gardening we covered was Permaculture. I remember I picked up a book by Bill Mollison, (the Australian who came up with the idea in 1978) a few years ago. Permaculture is a system where people and the land live in harmony together. This can include energy efficient housing, composting toilets, wind power etc. Permaculture uses a no dig policy on the land and no pesticides are used. This idea in gardening isn’t new though I have a book on my shelves called Gardening Without Digging written by A.. Guest which was published in 1947 which covers the same basic ideas (It’s still in print but costs £5 instead of 2 shillings!). I’ve no doubt these ideas go back thousands of years, as most of them are common sense. Anyway, as this is Paul’s last week with us I’ll pass you over to him to explain about the practicalities of permaculture.

Paul’s parting ponderings
How does permaculture work in practice? We have been doing some work on the site at Clonbeg to prepare for next years vegetable plot and incorporating some of the ideas. After all if you like the look of something the next thing to do is try it out for real. The outcomes are not entirely predictable, it’s bit experimental and I think any venture that incorporates the ideas of the perma-culture advocates will always be, as artists say, “a work in progress”. Instant success is good and a spur to further exploration but lessons learnt when the unexpected happens are also very useful and serve to increase our understanding.

First of all we looked at the area to be worked .It is an informal vegetable plot covering about 100 m2 that has become overgrown with couch grass, docks and nettles. The drainage is quite poor but it’s encouraging to see how many worms wriggle for cover when a spadeful of soil is turned. The lushness of the unwanted plant growth shows that the site has obvious potential, being extremely fertile.and sheltered from the prevailing weather. There are no obvious pests and the surrounding area supports a healthy population of small birds. There are frogs living in the near by wet areas.

We decided that the best way to achieve the highest yield for the least effort on the site is to build raised beds. These allow easy access for cultivation, don’t waterlog and enable a “no dig approach to be taken. .We used scrap planks to build three of them rescued from a landfill; a fourth was an old bed frame. The beds were lined with cardboard, newspapers and woolen carpet underlay We filled them with a mixture of yukky stuff that included spent mushroom compost, seaweed, horse manure, leaves, hair, uncomposted kitchen waste, old paperbacked books and some very ancient and tatty but muched loved jeans after all some sacrifices have to be made. We topped them off with the contents of old hanging baskets and mulched them.

To study which mulches would be most successful we tried three different types. One bed is covered with eight inches of oat straw, one is covered in black plastic recovered from old potting compost bags, one is covered with old carpet underlay and one has been planted with winter field beans as a green manure. The beans will fix nitrogen and take up nutrients that would otherwise be washed out of the soil by winter rains. In the spring they will be chopped down and used as a mulch or composted. Decisions will then have to be made about how all the beds will be worked with, and what vegetables will be the most productive.

In an attempt to keep the invasive perennial weeds at bay (if that’s possible!) we have surrounded the beds with old carpets retrieved from landfill, a strip of kitchen floor covering and a mulch of deep straw from some spoiled bails. These serve as paths and when the nettles, docks and couch grasses drive through, they will be covered with more straw or have their heads chopped off and composted. ( That will teach them!) To increase the space we have for growing and use height as well as width we have built a hazel arch between two beds for climbing plants to scramble over. We used thinnings from a coppicing job for this.

Phew! All this has been a great deal of hard work and has taken hundreds of cups of tea to accomplish. Tea bags have played an important role in filling the raised beds. The plot has been transformed and we have managed to put all the hard ware in place using materials that someone else has thought of as rubbish. (One of the interesting books I found in the Buncrana library ecology box calls rubbish “secondary resources”, I like to think of it as anything we have not found a use for …yet!) With luck and a bit of help from the weather next year our planning should pay off and in the autumn we should be able to look back on a bumper harvest grown with the minimum of effort. It is said that the best gardener is the one who is happiest with his or her garden and enjoys it the most. If some of this works we will be very happy and whatever happens we have enjoyed ourselves.

It is also important to encourage helpful wildlife to live around the site so we have fastened an old tin teapot in a tree hoping a robin will build a nest in it in spring. We intend to put up enclosed nesting boxes for blue tits. From hatching to flying a brood of young blue tits scoffs its way through twenty thousand caterpillars (I don’t know who counted) saving the need to use sprays on early plants. They are also very keen on varying their diet with a few greenfly. It would be good if a hedghog decided to join the team. He would hoover up the slugs, which could be a problem in a garden that relies so much on deep organic mulches, protecting and feeding the soil to help the plants grow successfully.

If we have managed to whet your appetite and you want to know any more about what we are working towards Ian is always happy to talk about his project. You also might have lots of advice for him, as there is always something new to learn in gardening. I’m off back to Nottingham on Monday and will be working on a community orchard scheme for a few weeks.

Horticultural.

5 MINUTES WITH - KATHRYN O'CALLAGHAN

Originally from Dublin, Kathryn O’Callaghan has been living on the outskirts of Carndonagh for three years with Seamus (her partner) and her two children. Kathryn got involved with the Inishowen Gospel Choir and it’s sister group, the Specular Choir when it began and their popularity has grown to such an extent that most of her time is spent managing the group. Their highlights this year include a recent appearance at the green Futures Field at Glastonbury and critically acclaimed performances with Duke Special and Foy Vance. They have also travelled to France, Poland and England and just returned from a spot in the Spiegel Tent in Dublin at the Fringe Festival. Kathryn loves delving into the wonderful world of wacky choirs and is looking forward to their next performance in McGrory’s in Culdaff on the 2nd of October. Billed as A Concert For India it also has performances from the Henry Girls and Spirit of Jazz.

BBC Northern Ireland will be at McGrory’s to film the choir for a programme called “Festival Nights” which will be shown on the 20th October. This is to highlight the Queen’s Festival in Belfast on the 25th October, where they will be performing at a concert called Urban Hymns with an array of special guests.


What music do you like?
All sorts, from blues to jazz, trad to classical, the list is endless.

What would you never throw away?
My children – I’m far too attached to them.

What book are you reading?
I don’t have much time for reading anything other than children’s books. My time is taken up with the family and choir. If I do get a minute, it’s usually to flick through a Homes and Garden magazine.

What was your favourite childhood game?
Repeating every word my friends would say until it drove them demented – I found this fiendishly funny.

Have you been to the cinema recently, what did you see and was it any good?
Kung Fu Panda with my two young boys. I found it surprisingly funny. Anything that manages to make a snake doing kung fu look cool is quite an achievement!

What section of the newspaper do you turn to first?
I usually start at the beginning, unless something earth shattering has occurred, most of my reading time is generally spent on the arts and culture section.

What is your idea of a good night out?
Going to see a good gig with friends. I enjoy any live performance. The last one I saw was La Clique Circus, which is like an old Burlesque show from the 1930’s. It has wonderfully endearing characters like the Norwegian Rubber Man, who passes his body through two stringless badminton rackets and an act called the Naked Man and Woman, who just wandered around the audience.

Most embarrassing moment of your life?
I have a couple. As a child I was helping to groom a horse, when my older cousins pulled a prank on me. I was a bit naïve and they sent me up to the neighbour’s house to ask them if I could borrow a jar of elbow grease! The latest was when we did a gig at Glastonbury near a Permaculture café. We thought it would be a good idea to do an impromptu session among the trees near the Permaculture café but due to space restrictions ended up performing in a bush, literally! It was probably the worst and funniest gig we’ve done to date! Thankfully, we had a few proper gigs over there as well to make up for it!

Have you a favourite TV programme?
Not really, I don’t tend to watch a lot of television. If I look at a screen it’s usually for e-mails.

How do you relax?
Listening to music and gardening. I have just planted a mixed hedge, which should give us a bit of shelter from the North winds when it grows.

What job did you want to do when you were a child?
First, to become a vet, then an artist, then a rocket scientist…I’m still dreaming.

Where would you like to go for your holidays?
Cuba for the history, music and culture – although I’ve heard the food’s a bit dodge so may have to bring a few packed lunches with me.

Your idea of heaven?
Being stuck in a lift with Johnny Depp.

Your idea of hell?
Being stuck in a lift with elevator music playing.

What famous people would you invite around for dinner and why?
Nina Simone so she could hopefully teach me how to sing the Blues in 10 easy steps. The Biologist, Richard Dawkins for a good debate, Jonathan Ross so there’d be no gaps in the conversation and Darina Allen so she could cook the dinner.

Favourite animal?
Anything belonging to the cat family (as long as those over 10lbs are sedated)

What couldn't you live without?
My gorgeous family…and my toothbrush (the former relies on the latter!).

Biggest fear?
Not achieving to the best of my ability.

Biggest thrill?
Ahem…lots, but none suitable to print.

The world's most irritating invention?
Foam containers for hot drinks – a menace to the planet, which also require people to risk life and limb opening them.

What is your idea of a good night in?
Having the famous people mentioned above around for dinner.

Do you have a hobby?
Mmm, it’s called my life.

Biggest disappointment?
Finding out the Big Fella didn’t exist when I asked for a horse for Christmas.

Which period in history would you most like to have lived through?
The period of creation, so I could tell my four year old how it all happened, and generally any period excluding the eighties – I’d rather not have been exposed to such fashion faux pas.

World's most useful invention?
Men and dishwashers in equal measures, they’re both useful and inextricably linked.

What do you have for breakfast?
When I’m feeling healthy – fresh fruit, when I’m not – lots of tea and toast with blackberry jam.

What is the best piece of advice you have been given?
“Always try your best”/”Don’t forget to feed the cat”

Personal philosophy?
Try not to get misquoted by the media.