Joshua Myrvaagnes

so many thumbs up, Thomas!

One Permaculture artisan or many?  Plan or do? Collaborate or be the Lone wolf?

Some rambling thoughts on a subject that’s got a lot of energy for me. Forgive the phonetic spelling, as I dictated this, and the lack of coherence of some of it.

I find myself putting far too much mental energy into tiny decisions, like whether to bring the compost bucket in now from the sun or do it on my next trip, and procrastinating, attempting to crack open the big black book or do a whole new design for my land. Find myself thinking that people who just plant trees in different places and do things intuitively are really missing the boat, people who try to plan every detail and never put up in the ground or out to lunch. No, this is not about anyone else, but my inner critic talking about me, The point being that I find myself in the mirror of the other. I get oriented in relationship and finding relationship. Permaculture is a hard thing to do, at least it has been up till now.

Witness the lonePermaculturist, growing weird plants and ranting to anyone who will listen, which is hardly anyone we’re getting burnt out, unhealthy and having to put their land up for sale to someone who’s going to tear it down and build a man. Surely that there’s got to be a better leverage point for this person to use then brute force.

It would be better in Community, I can try one approach, you can try another, and now we have diversified our approaches. If one crashes and burns, but the other one thrives, that’s not bad. I’ll feel embolden to take bigger risks, as will you, and we can trade surplus of vegetables we’ve gotten sick of.

So now we’re fisted with the new question, what format should we use for our gathering? What will keep it together, instead of having it fizzle out  is so many things have before.? Should we use soy, is there someway that Permaculture principles can get applied to interpersonal relationship? I have this awesome tool that sends me over the moon, but the only people I’ve gotten to do it with me are more seeker types, not people with actual gardens.  You say let’s mastermind, and that’s sounding OK to me, but it is a tool that business people have used, not something specifically tailored to the ever-changing situation that a Permaculturist faces.  

And what’s under my need to connect, alongside the sense of wanting to have more different baskets to put different eggs in collectively, is a frequent sense of loneliness. Or just boredom. Shoveling dirt onto a Hugel culture bed was only entertaining for the first 15 minutes, And many podcasts later I’m actually really craving some actual human interaction.

So here’s my actual new realization, which all of the above was simply a lead-in to.  I don’t need just one perfect format or one perfect group of people, that’s gonna work for all time.  We could try either format, people will either show up or it’ll fizzle before the second meeting.  Either way, something will be learned, it’s not gonna be the end of the world, and we could try either end of the spectrum, really well planned on the one hand were flying by the seat of our pants on the other.  There’s also room for both, maybe I’ll do chores and chat over the phone with someone in the afternoons, and then have a really focused gathering of a group once a month.

I don’t have to find the one Perfect Permaculture artisan, there’s a balance point, using some percentage of one school of thought, and taking a little from others, there’s a balance point between planning and flying.  And there’s a balance point for different formats of collaboration gatherings.

Underlying the whole thing is my fear that they’re just won’t be enough. There won’t be enough time to have plants come to fruit before someone comes to bulldoze my garden. There won’t be enough time before people decide that I’m hard to love, and quietly exit or go to the group, or realize that they’ve got to go to their sisters, baby shower that day, or alphabetize their inbox.  I’m being a little snarky, but human beings will human.  That’s how it can feel to me sometimes, that I’m really swimming upstream, that America just shits on communal efforts constantly.

The other thing that I realizing that we’re in a different time now, and a format for gathering that really flubbed and fizzled five years ago might have reached its time now. Maybe today there’s enough momentum and appetite, and people are ready for it. maybe people are even hungry for , kind of gathering that they weren’t gonna do before, and maybe even willing to be more flexible with the rough edges, with people getting triggered or being loudmouths, with our hunger to be heard finally, with our tendency to get overexcited or suddenly deflated.

We Permaculturists are a lot.   I really like the idea that America is more ready for Permaculture to thrive then it was five years ago or even just one.  looking at things that way takes away a lot of fear and sense of scarcity.

update--I ignored everyone's good advice to start over and to buy a ceramic adhesive, and just using cob got the thing cobbled together again. It works pretty darn well, though it smokes a bit sometimes.  I need to finish the cob all the way to the top up a few more inches, but it often flames so high it's going up the sides of the pot.  It also melted the handle of the instant pot lid when I put that on there with lid to reheat something...which I will put on my long list of Joshua's mistakes

Fascinating.  how do they do it???  

I guess this could be useful for the duff/insulation layer of a living roof for a house.

Ants made a dry landscape in my mulch pile (wood chips). Everywhere else was wet from the rain but one section full of tiny ants.  I don’t know how they did it or what it might be useful for, maybe fruit trees that don’t like wet feet somehow?

I noticed cobs of corn I'd eaten and tossed on the ground had a load of flies on them, and threw them to the muscovies.  At first they didn't pay attention to them, but later they all gathered around it like a buffet at rush hour and chowed down.  (The flies had scattered when I picked it up but I imagine a bunch had started to gather).  

There's a chance of flies carrying botulism, but I would think that's only if there's soured feed around.  You could toss pits of fruit instead and attract fruit flies, I dont' know if they bother with anything that small though.

That makes a lot more sense than the article's title in and of itself.  Thanks for that clarification.

I have bought a lot of fencing...and I don't feel great about it, but on the other hand the pigs weren't going to wait until the living fence grew to size before escaping.  

Jane Mulberry wrote:

Robert Ray wrote:I read this a few weeks ago and wondered where they got their data.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/carbon-footprint-of-homegrown-food-five-times-greater-than-those-grown-conventionally/ar-BB1h5G38

Just making clear - this is a different article from the pro-permaculture one, but it's not making anything like the same comparision. They don't link to the original research, but actually, aspects of the findings do make sense. Much of the carbon footprint from the home grown food in the study was in things like new garden sheds and tools, raised beds built with new lumber and filled with purchased commercial compost, gravelled or paved paths, and so on.

Unfortunately, home veggie gardens can be very, very permie, or they can be an extension of the home decor, prone to gardeners following fashions and changing everything in the garden year to year because someone else did it on Instagram. And other places they looked at like allotments can have a high turnover, so someone does their plot how they want one year, and then the next year, someone else comes and pulls up what the previous tenant built and does something else.

I've seen photos of incredibly beautiful home vegetable gardens touted as being environmentally friendly, where the embodied energy in the hardscaping would need 100 years of highly productive veggie growing to go anywhere near break even, both on financial and environment cost. That's before counting the trucked in compost and the nursery purchased plants.

The article writers' point -- to use recycled materials as much as possible, to maintain rather than replace structures and hardscaping, and to design things that will last in the first place, is very permie.

When they prove what we all saw with our own eyes--

https://phys.org/news/2024-07-permaculture-sustainable-alternative-conventional-agriculture.html

It's a good feeling.  

OK, I'm not sure it's actually proving what I put in the clickbait headline or in the clickbait headline that I got this from, it was sent out on the local permaculture list, but it's an encouraging read.  I didn't read the actual paper.

Joshua Myrvaagnes wrote:Geothermal without radon danger—another project id like to see. I guess earth tubes routed to a solar chimney directly and closed off from what folks breathe. Distribute the radon out the chimney into the air around—hopefully dilute enough to be harmless…this radon thing is a big hang up in the northeast US as far as hampering cooling methods.

Alternatively, cool stuff down with the earth tubes/in the basement and then haul it up to sit on outside the basement?

How about a chimney mass cooler?  Route an earth tube through the mass of your rocket mass heater, and maybe add some black wrapping around the chimney outside?  The hot air pulls up and out while the coolest air is still cool indoors?  Will it be too heavy to draw?  How much does air flow through earth anyway? Do you need another earth tube at a slight angle as an inlet joining the intake tube down below ground?