A Permaculture Micro Orchard in the Heart of Edmonton McCauley Neighbourhood

The McCauley Urban Fruit Orchard Project is a partnership between Operation Fruit Rescue Edmonton and the City of Edmonton.  Since 2012, OFRE has been planning and organizing this ground-breaking project. The area specifically located on 107A Avenue between 95th and 96th Street is being transformed into a micro Orchard – a fruit bearing oasis!

This project was conceived of and designed in partnership with members of the Edmonton Permaculture Guild. The orchard uses permaculture principles to create symbiotic relationships between the elements in the design, including a passive water harvesting and irrigation system.

With grant funding from the City of Edmonton, OFRE has transformed a section of the McCauley School grounds.

The micro Orchard includes plantings to showcase the types and varieties of fruit trees, shrubs, and bushes that can grow in the Edmonton Capital region. Fruit varieties planted include: apples, pears, cherries, saskatoons, raspberries and more!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPJWzItcnSk

As a green addition to McCauley, the micro Orchard is used by OFRE to host educational workshops. People will be able to learn how to press apple cider, and care for their fruit bearing trees and bushes. Its aim is to help feed the citizens of Edmonton, through the installation of the micro Orchard, and to empower people with the skills needed to grow, harvest, and preserve locally grown fruit in their own homes and gardens.

The Edmonton Permaculture Guild is working on a partnership agreement that will allow us to assist Operation Fruit Rescue Edmonton to maintain the site, and in return provide us access for educational events and workshops.

If you’re interested in learning more about the Orchard, or participating to help maintain it, please contact us with the subject line OFRE Fruit Orchard.

Designing for Alberta’s Warmer, Drier Future

A warm, snow free March day near Edmonton feels pleasant, but for designers it signals a serious shift in Alberta’s climate. Projections show hotter summers, less effective rainfall, and parkland giving way to dry mixed grass prairie, which makes water, plant choice, and microclimate design central questions for anyone planning long term systems here.

Spring? Climate Change for Designers

The weather was gorgeous yesterday. I spent the warm sunny afternoon pulling grass roots out of the garden bed next to the south wall of my house. Some always manage to sneak in underneath the mulch and plants during the summer, and the first I see of them is the following spring, when little bunches of busily photosynthesizing leaves appear before anything else in the whole yard is green.

It was wonderful to get my fingers in the soil and do something outside after having a nasty cold for two weeks. I encountered some busy wood bugs, an active earthworm, and a nice shiny black beetle.

Now, I know that the microclimate right next to my house is fantastically warm (also dry, because it’s under the eaves), but this is not a story I should be able to tell in mid March near Edmonton.

I took this picture of my driveway on April 10, 2011. This year, a month earlier, there’s no snow unless it falls overnight, and my garden critters are waking up. I put a nice thick fresh layer of mulch on my freshly weeded bed next to the house, because I’m not ready to plant anything there yet, and if we get the big blizzard that I’m halfway hoping for at Easter the critters will need the blanket. 

This amazing resource was recently shared on the Edmonton Permaculture Facebook group:

Alberta’s Natural Subregions Under a Changing Climate: Past, Present and Future

Sherwood Botsford (of Sherwood’s Forests) summed it up, for those of us in the group not up to reading the entire paper:

“The paper above has some pretty heavy sledding in it, but if you are serious about permaculture, you MUST read this.

A: By 2080 Alberta will be roughly 6 degrees warmer than today in the Business as usual model.

B: Overall we get more precip, but the extra comes in winter, not summer. We average an overall drier climate. (More rain, but even more evaporation.)

C: Lethbridge’s climate extends to Slave Lake. Lethbridge itself will be like drier parts of Wyoming. Much of what is currently Aspen Parkland and Boreal Forest becomes dry mixed grass prairie.

What does this mean for you:
Water becomes critical in a way that to now it wasn’t. Go back to the books and study desert systems. We won’t quite be a desert, but water will be the limiting factor for growing lots of things.

If you need to put in a well, put it in deep.

Look at runoff storage systems. Ponds, dugouts. Make them as deep as your equipment can handle.”

I guess I’d better start re-reading Brad Lancaster’s Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond (short taste here).

Mark Shepard (author of Restoration Agriculture; there’s a nice long YouTube talk by him here) emphasizes looking at existing and past plant communities of your region when choosing plants to incorporate into permaculture systems.

The Alberta government has put together a fantastic series of free pdf documents that essentially catalogue plant communities in the different bioregions of Alberta which you can access here. It’s geared to grazing, but the information is invaluable when trying to get an idea of vegetation types that might be more comfortable here as conditions change.

I’m really proud to be part of a movement where folks don’t throw up their hands in despair, but look for ways to make systems that will continue to support us as our world gets more unpredictable. Please let me know if you come up with more resources to help with the planning, and good luck in all your designs!

Each of us would like to lead a healthy, fulfilling and meaningful life for our own sake as well as that of our family and community; this can often seem overwhelming, especially when we try to balance those goals with environmental and social responsibility.

Welcome to the 2nd Annual Edmonton Resilience Festival April 29th to May 1st at the Boyle Street Plaza.

The Resilience Festival consists of hands-on practical Workshops, guided Conversation Cafés and a Fair showcasing the work of community organizations called the Community Connections Fair that boasts a family and kid friendly space with indoor and outdoor activities.

The Festival includes workshops, conversations and events that contribute to personal, community, and global resilience. It’s our belief that community resilience requires us to not only care for ourselves and to help our neighbours, but to build trust and cooperation between community members. By coming together to celebrate and share skills and ideas through the festival, we will create a stronger, happier community which will increase our capacity to work together and to adapt to coming changes.

A small sampling of the Workshops includes: Basket Weaving, Meditation & Yoga, Cider Making & Fermentation, Tiny homes, Permaculture & Building Healthy Gardens, Bike Repair, Bee Hotel Making, Creative Adventuring, Detox your Home with Essential Oils… and the list goes on. To avoid disappointment, get your tickets now as they are going fast.

The Edmonton Permaculture Guild will have a table located in the Community Connections Fair, Make sure to bring your children down to enjoy all of the fun activities happening at the Children’s Permaculture Table as well!

MISSION

The Edmonton Resilience Festival aims to strengthen community resilience through skill sharing workshops and other events, inspiring participants to help create a sustainable, creative and promising future. The festival will also help to restore a sense of community that is often lost in cities experiencing rapid development and population growth. By bringing together diverse participants and creating opportunities for learning, sharing and connecting, we hope to expand our horizons, our skill sets and our community networks.

WHAT IS RESILIENCE?

Resilience is the quality that makes a community strong, healthy and able to handle unexpected change. Communities that are resilient are closely linked together and can cope well with the effects of disruptions and change to the systems within them.

The Festival includes workshops, conversations and events that contribute to personal, group and global resilience.

How Soil Microbes Build Humus and Store Carbon

Most of us know that soil fauna (arthropods, nematodes, bacteria, fungi, etc.) are vital to soil health. These little critters help break down the dead vegetation matter in and on top of the soil, making the nutrients in this matter available to the living plants. 

Microbes also help the plants fight off parasites and diseases.  But did you know that the living plants actively attract the soil fauna that they need, by putting sugars and starches into the soil around their roots?  It’s very much like a rancher managing a herd of livestock – but on a much smaller scale.  And without the horses, campfires or harmonicas.

Once the dead organic matter is decomposed as much as possible, having been eaten and excreted by fauna several times over, the excess nutrients (i.e. those not immediately needed by the plants) are stored in the soil in the form of humus: extremely complex carbon compounds.

Conventional agriculture’s synthetic fertilizers burn through soil fauna and humus; the carbon sequestered in humus becomes CO2, a greenhouse gas, significantly contributing to climate change.  And without humus to hold it together, topsoil turns to dust, and is lost to wind and rain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Q1VnwcpW7E

Conversely, we can significantly mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, resequestering the carbon, by building soil: adding organic matter through compost top-dressing and mulch; using no-till gardening methods; growing edible perennials rather than just annuals; and using compost teas to make sure the soil is crawling with beneficial microbes.

And if you feel led to go out in the garden with your harmonica and play ‘Home on the Range’, your plants will understand.

For more information about feeding soil by adding organic matter, see Building Garden Beds With Sheet Mulch.

Practical Guidance from Dirt Craft Natural Building

Dirt Craft Natural Building has worked with cob, straw bale, and light clay straw walls in cold Canadian climates, and shares experience based recommendations here. You gain clear criteria for selecting plasters and design details that keep bulk water off your walls while allowing moisture vapour to move safely through the building envelope.

Keeping Your Building Dry

Water is clever. Despite all of our best attempts to keep it out of buildings it seems that it invariably gets in. Conventional builders try to thwart water infiltration by wrapping homes in plastic, inside and out.

Moisture exits a building through windows, or more likely through some mechanical, electricity consuming air exchanger. These buildings are tight, often stuffy and generally unpleasant to live in.

Earthen buildings, be they cob, light clay-straw, or straw bale, take a different approach.

Rather than relying on mechanical means (e.g. an air exchanger), the walls and their coatings are designed to “breathe” or, more appropriately, configured to allow vapour to pass directly through the walls.

For this to work vapour barriers are omitted with these natural wall systems. If they are not and water does get in, you are bound to get compost in your walls!

Water vs. Vapour

For a natural wall system to perform and stay healthy, two things need to happen:

1. Water must stay out of the walls, which generally means water must stay off the walls.

2. Water vapour must be able to travel through the wall, typically moving from inside to out in temperate climates such as we find on the prairies.

Now before we get into more deals about these two points, I think it’s important to have a basic understanding of what earthen homes are generally finished with.

And no, it’s not vinyl siding!

Generally speaking, natural wall systems are finished with one of three things, listed here in order of most environmental and health sensitive to the least:

1. earthen plaster made from sand, clay and straw
2. lime
3. cement stucco

In some cases earth and lime are combined to create what is called a stabilized earthen-plaster, which has the benefit of added durability (this will be covered in a future article).

There are volumes written on the relative benefits and drawbacks of each these materials, so I’m not going to attempt to summarize this grand discussion into several paragraphs. What I’ve done instead is provided a few worthwhile quotes pertaining to each material and their associated benefits and drawbacks.

This way, when it comes time for you to make a decision on how you might finish your walls, you come at it from an informed place.

Earthen Plaster

“I love earth plasters. I want all new straw bale homes to be wearing them. They make the most beautiful walls I have ever seen. The colors are gorgeous and incredibly varied. The walls feel soft and homey. Earth plasters can be rustic and undulate with the bales, or create smooth walls with even curves and a polished finish. The materials are cheap, easy to come by, and healthy for the environment. Earth-plastered walls breathe like living beings, protecting bales from moisture damage by exhaling moisture instead of locking it inside. Mud is a blast to work with, can be extremely durable, and is easy to patch and repair, when necessary. I highly recommend it.”

– Keely Meagan.

Excerpt from Mud: Magic, Fun and Sometimes Quarrelsome, which appeared in the Issue #43 of The Last Straw – The International Journal of Straw Bale and Natural Building.

“Clay will erode, pure and simple. Make no mistake about it. Plasters with higher amounts of straw or carefully graded aggregates will be more resistant. Some stabilizers will give a degree of improvement, however, they are often overrated and not understood in terms of how they may affect vapor permeability and moisture flow. The best strategy for plasters used on the exterior of a building in moderate to severe climates is to simply keep water from hitting the walls. The most common way of doing this is a porch.”

– Bill and Athena Steen.

Excerpt from The Clay Straw-Bale House: Complete Clay Integration, which appeared in the Issue #43 of The Last Straw.

Lime Plaster

“Lime-based renders work very well in cold climates. Except in dry regions, we believe that lime is a superior material to cement, for use over [straw] bales. First of all, lime render is more vapor permeable than cement stucco. It is also less prone to cracking, and has some ability to heal its own cracks. Lime is much easier to work than cement, and is also easier to repair. Its manufacture is less energy intensive. And, because it is very alkaline, lime plaster is quite hygienic. Finally, lime also forms a beautiful finish.”

– Paul Lacinski and Michel Bergeron.

Except from Serious Straw Bale: A Home Construction Guide for All Climates.

“What time of the year [lime plaster] is applied becomes another vital issue. Newly applied lime plasters most likely need at least three to four months to ensure sufficient carbonation to take place before it is allowed to get wet in freezing temperatures. Also of major importance is keeping newly applied plaster damp and not allowing it to dry out too quickly.”

– Bill and Athena Steen.

Excerpt from their Guest Editor’s Notes from Issue #29 of The Last Straw.

Cement Stucco

“Normal cement stucco is capillary-active, and wicks water through to the inside. If a capillary-active material like wood [or straw or earth – ed.] is on the other side, wetting can occur even if no unbound liquid water is available… Steel, glass, and vinyl are also waterproof materials, but roof and walls made of these materials leak all the time – there is in fact a thriving industry that diagnoses and repairs these leaks. So the fact remains that cement stucco walls can only be considered waterproof in the rarest circumstances; in practice they should be considered to be quite “leaky” and the wall designed accordingly.”

– Dr. John Straube.

Excerpt from Choosing A Plaster by Catherine Wanek from Issue #33 of The Last Straw.

With these comments in mind, let’s get back to the original discussion, which was related to keeping walls dry. To reiterate, for a natural wall system to perform and stay healthy, two things need to happen:

1. Water must stay out of the walls, which generally means water must stay off the walls.

2. Water vapour must be able to travel through the wall, typically moving from inside to out in temperate climates such as we find on the prairies.

Designed to Keep Water Out

Concerning the first point, all manner of attempts have been made to keep earthen walls dry, ranging from applying chemical stew-slathered stucco, to impregnating them with vegetable-based oils, to painting them with products like water-glass.

Lime has been used for added durability and “water-proofness” but it too suffers from people having unrealistically high expectations regarding what it can do. Despite the best of attempts, if water has access to walls, it’s bound to create problems for natural materials. The only way to really keep walls from getting wet is to provide: 1) generous roof overhangs, even a wrap-around porch or 2) cover the walls with a rain screen (usually siding suspended away from an underlying plaster to allow for vapour permeability while keeping driving rain and snow off the wall), especially in areas and on exposures that receive wind-driven, almost-horizontal rain or snow.

It’s important to know your site, how weather may affect it, and plan your home accordingly. Site observation and analysis form a core skill taught in any comprehensive permaculture design course, where you learn to read landscape patterns before breaking ground.

Making Friends with Moisture

Moving to our second point, it’s important to understand how water moves in and out of a building. It occurs through several mechanisms – air leakage and vapour diffusion. With air leakage, it comes in two forms –

1. infiltration, whereby air leaks into a building such is the case during the heating season when we feel a draft, and
2. exfiltration, whereby air exits through the fabric of the building.

It is this exfiltrating air that generally produces moisture problems in a building, especially in the winter.

When warm moisture-containing air moves through the fabric of the building it cools and if it drops below the dewpoint, liquid water begins to form. To deal with air leakage, one must pay proper attention to sealing the home such that air doesn’t enter or leave the home unless you want it to (like through a window).

When it comes to vapour diffusion, this is another matter altogether. When you hear that a natural home is “breathable”, this is referring to the ability of the wall to pass moisture in a vapour state.

To understand how this works we need to know that warm air holds more water vapour than cold air, thereby excreting a greater vapour-pressure.

Water vapour (or any gas for that matter) will always move from an area of high concentration to an area of lower concentration. This means that in the winter, warm interior air contains a higher vapour pressure than cold exterior air and is therefore forced toward the outside. The conventional approach to keep this vapour from penetrating the wall is to put plastic up, thereby blocking the moisture.

This doesn’t so much ‘deal’ with the moisture as seal against it. In an earthen home, this vapour is allowed to pass directly through the wall through proper plastering techniques. To facilitate this movement, it is understood that an exterior plaster be at least as vapour permeable as the interior plaster.

With clay being the most vapour permeable and cement being the least, and lime somewhere in between, it follows that it is unacceptable to put cement stucco on an exterior if clay is used on the interior.

It is always best to pair like with like, though an exterior lime plaster may successfully be paired with an interior earthen plaster.

Conclusion: Design Details + Vapour Permeability = A Healthy Building

There’s a lot here to process, I know.

If I can summarize a few key takeaways, it’s that pairing the right design details – overhangs, rain screens, etc. – with the right plaster for the site is vitally important to the health of the building and its occupants.

It’s also extremely important to seal your home properly such that you are not gaining unwanted air or losing hard earned heat.

Finally, ensuring that your exterior plaster is at least as vapour permeable as your interior plaster will go a long way to ensure you’re building is functioning as well as it can. Keep these things in mind and you won’t run into problems down the road, saving you time, money, and frustration.

From Forest Guilds to a Permaculture Community Guild

When I took my permaculture design course several years ago, I learned about creating ‘guilds’ of plants.  The concept may have been explained more thoroughly at the time, but what I took away and remembered was merely the technique of planting clumps of various perennials beneath and around larger trees. 

But it’s only recently that I started to ask myself: Why is this idea important to permaculture?

Among the various definitions of permaculture out there, David Jacke proposes this one: permaculture is the design of human cultural systems that mimic natural ecosystems.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOx06AEJVa0

We take natural ecosystems as our model because they display a plethora of desirable features (stability, resilience, abundant yields, absence of waste, self-maintenance, etc.), and they remind us that human culture and its systems are, after all, part of nature. 

So we permaculturists design gardens that mimic the self-maintenance characteristics (among other things) of a forest ecosystem (hence ‘food forests’ or ‘edible forest gardening’ ). And one key feature of a healthy forest is its biodiversity, with a dozen or so deciduous or coniferous tree species as the canopy, and many more plant species in the understory.  From this consideration alone emerges the design imperative to cram together as many plant species as possible within the available space, hence guilds.

So, if we merely create guilds as random combinations of plant species, the diversity alone will give the resulting system major resilience advantages over a monoculture.  But we can do better than random combinations.  First, the ecosystem will be more stable if the component plants occupy distinct need-based niches, so they aren’t in competition with each other for resources.  For example, if you’ve planted a large fruit tree, you don’t want to plant another large tree right next to it, competing with it for sunlight.   Better a guild that puts together plants that can share the sunlight: under the large trees we plant shade-tolerant shrubs, then herbaceous perennials, and finally ground-cover species.  To a large extent, these differences in plant height are mirrored by differences in root depth, and so guild members chosen according to height will also minimize competition for water in the soil.

So far so good, but guild members so-chosen merely share the space.  The hallmark of a natural ecosystem is the rich symbiotic relationships that exist among the component species.  So we can also choose guild members according to the distinct yield-based niches that they occupy: mulch-makers, nitrogen-fixers, nutrient accumulators, and insect (and other fauna) attractors (these categories taken from a handout by Claudia Bolli). 

But there will often be unforeseen symbiotic relationships that emerge as well. David Jacke gives the example of an indirect symbiosis between grape vines and raspberries. Both plants’ are subject to infestation by the leaf-hopper insect, but raspberries leaf out earlier than grapes, and so populations of parasitic wasps which develop early in the season to attack leaf-hoppers on the raspberries are still around later to protect the grapes. Grapes grown in a monoculture system, by comparison, may be devastated by leaf-hoppers, because it’s too late at that point for the parasitic wasp populations to develop. 

This guild-like relationship between raspberries, grapes, and the insects they attract, can function even though the raspberres and grapes are planted hundreds of feet apart!  Which brings me back to my original point about maximizing biodiversity: the greater the diversity of the guilds we create, the more of these ‘freebie’ symbiotic relationships we can expect to emerge, even though they were not specifically designed into the system at a conscious level.

Good design principles for a garden are often good for human communities as well.  I was not involved in the decision, a few years ago, to rename our ‘Society’ as the ‘Edmonton Permaculture Guild’, but I find the word ‘guild’ entirely fitting, in light of the reflections above, for the kind of permaculture community we’re striving to nurture here in Edmonton.  There’s a niche here for everybody; and the more diversity we can foster among us the better.

I also appreciate the way the term harkens back to the craft guild system of late mediaeval Europe. As the nineteenth century art critic, historian and political philosopher William Morris argued (in, for example, The Revolt of Ghent), these guilds served as effective systems of mutual aid among the artisan class in the burgeoning cities during this period, and they exerted a strong democratic influence on late mediaeval society (contributing, for example, to the disappearance of serfdom). Morris coined the term ‘guild socialism’ to describe his political philosophy, as an alternative to the centralized government-based socialism advocated by Marxists, among others.

Unfortunately, the guild socialism of late mediaeval Europe was crushed by alliances of national monarchies, merchant elites and large feudal landholders that morphed into the capitalist class (see Kevin Carson’s Studies in Mutualist Political Economy chapter 4). 

Perhaps the permaculturists’ resurrection of the guild concept, and its extension to social structures, informed by awareness of economic history, can be the springboard for a profound transformation towards a more free, just and sustainable way of life for all of us.

Why Home Gardens Matter for Carbon Storage

In the ongoing conversation about climate change and carbon, a lot is being said about large-scale “solutions,” because many people seem to think that only large-scale strategies can deal with a problem as large as the one we face. Without devaluing the contributions that could be made by large-scale projects, I’d like to take a decentralized, grass-roots (literally!) look at what we can all do to bring living systems into the mix. Let’s start with some background:

Components of Soil

Soil is made up of the same kinds of components as we are, only put together differently and in different proportions.

• Minerals (particles of material weathered from rock), divided by size into sand, silt and clay, makes up most of the volume of most soils.

The different sizes and shapes create spaces for other soil components, like:

• Water
• Air (underground life needs to breathe, too)
• Organic matter (anything that is or was living)

Soil Organic Matter is CARBON

Most of the soils we use have between 0 and 10% organic matter in the top 10cm or so of depth. Unfortunately, our agricultural soils have lost about half of that.

This is a significant part of the carbon dioxide emissions created by our conventional farming practices. If we can get that carbon back into the soil, and then some, we can sequester a lot of carbon dioxide in the soil.

And even if you’re not a large scale farmer, you can put the same principles to use in your own yard and garden. Here’s how it works:

Tillage and keeping the soil bare removes carbon from the soil through several mechanisms:

• Exposing the soil organic matter to air allows it to oxidize into carbon dioxide (the air in soil pores contains much less oxygen that the air we breathe).
• Killing the soil organisms, physically through tillage or through habitat destruction.
• Erosion by wind and water physically carries the organic matter away. Even tiny raindrops can be incredibly destructive!

Bare soil also loses moisture – this talk explains the links between soil carbon, water management, and climate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zI5PBGuJs7M

The First Step: Cover Your Soil!

Whether your soil is covered by living or dead plant material (aka mulch), covering the soil provides many benefits:

• Temperature and moisture regulation (a nice blanket keeps fluctuations under control, making life easier for plants and soil organisms)
• Protection from erosion
• Reduces weeds (nature hates a vacuum) – no sun on the weed seeds means no germination
• Provides food for microbes throughout the year

These are all wonderful things, but it’s mostly on the surface. The best way to get carbon into the soil in a more stable form is through LIFE.

The Soil Food Web

Your organic material/mulch is part of what provides the base of life in the soil: food for microbes. One teaspoon (1 gram) of rich garden soil can hold up to one billion bacteria, several yards of fungal filaments, several thousand protozoa, and scores of nematodes (The Secret Life of Soil).

Bacteria (which perform uncountable functions with various soil nutrients and processes) and fungi (which excel at decomposing carbon-rich plants – without them we would be kilometers deep in dead trees) will use your mulch as a source of food, water, and home, while liberating nutrients and protecting the health of your plants by outcompeting pests. They also create incredibly important direct relationships with plant roots.

Bacteria from the genus Rhizobium build colonies within special nodes on the roots of legumes (such as clover, peas, beans, alfalfa) which produce nitrogen that the plant can use from nitrogen gas available in the air (in return for sugars from the plant).

Nitrogen, as the Green Revolution showed, is one of the primary limiting factors in plant growth. Fungi called mycorrhizae form relationships with at least 90% of plants (that’s some evolutionary success for you!), providing the plant with minerals and other nutrients that would otherwise not be available to it (again, in return for some sugar). The injection of these sugars (carbohydrates, yet another form of carbon) into the soil is one of many ways that plants can sequester carbon in your soil.

More and more research is showing that these relationships are the norm under the soil surface, rather than the exception, and that our agricultural soils’ poverty of microbes is in large part responsible for the declining nutritional value of our food. (for a more entertaining – and beautiful – version see Symphony of the Soil)

Further Benefits from Perennial Systems

All of these relationships can benefit your garden while putting carbon back into the soil. However, there is a further strategy you can use to add organic material to the soil in perennial systems, or even just a few perennial plants in your annual garden.

All plants like to maintain a certain root:shoot ratio, a balance between the biomass above the ground and below. It only makes sense that they only need a certain amount of root mass to feed the plant above, and vice versa. When you cut the plant above ground, in an effort to maintain its preferred ratio, it will ‘cut off’ enough of its own roots to stay comfortable. This not only adds carbon to the soil, it helps maintain soil structure, because the ‘channel’ the root formed in the soil remains even after the root itself is cycled into the food web. This helps water infiltration, which is critical.

Using the permaculture tactic of “chop and drop,” we can feed the soil from below (jettisoned roots) while feeding the soil from above (using the biomass we just chopped as mulch on the surface). This is especially potent when using leguminous plants (including caraganas ;)), because the abandoned roots contain those nitrogen-rich nodes.

Editors note: Learn the importance of chop and drop in our permaculture design certificate course, held annually.

Geoff Lawton, in his Greening the Desert project, used a ratio of 9:1 (leguminous trees to food producing trees), repeatedly cutting the legumes to provide a steady stream of vital soil resources to the food crops. A word of caution: this is also a mechanism through which you can kill plants.

Without the time to recover, the plant has no resources to replace the lost tissue and set aside the energy it needs to survive winter. Always observe to make sure you’re not overtaxing your plants (unless this is a management tool to get rid of something you don’t want).

Many farmers are beginning to use Holistic Management practices (developed by Allan Savory – here’s his TED talk) to rotate grazing animals in a way that takes advantage of this as well. These systems have the added benefit that what gets “dropped” on the soil is manure, which contains forms of nutrients that are much more readily available to plants. Point of interest: Local farmers using regenerative farming principles.

https://vimeo.com/80518559/335e98eedc

Closing

As permaculture enthusiasts, we do our best to foster living systems that support each other and support us, and it can sometimes be hard to tell whether we’re actually reaching our regenerative goals. Geoff Lawton says in his video Permaculture Soils (and probably elsewhere) that an easy measure of your system’s success is that you’re building soil, rather than depleting it. And, whether you attribute the quote to Bill Mollison or Geoff Lawton, it remains true that “all the world’s problems can be solved in a garden.”

Recommended Resources

Other blog posts: Build Garden Beds by Sheet Mulching and Soil Microbes, Humus and Climate

Teaming with Microbes by Jeff Lowenfels & Wayne Lewis

Symphony of the Soil – documentary

Don’t miss this amazing opportunity to chat, and have good discussions about our Alberta Food System! See and hear what is going on across Alberta, meet and chat with other food systems movers and shakers, make suggestions and offer solutions to help make our Regional Alberta Food System better.

The 20 concurrent sessions, keynote, plenary, opening at Edmonton City Hall and ongoing facilitated Open Space and World Cafe’ discussions will help us dig deeply into the six interrelated regional food system themes: Integrated Food Systems, Production and Processing, Local Enterprises, Collective Buying Power, Citizen Engagement and Social Justice, Wasted Food and the Policy Realm. The 40+ panelists are drawn from across our beautiful province and Dr. Wayne Roberts, notable international Food Policy and local food expert, will provide the Saturday opening Plenary and will stay with us to help guide discussions throughout the week end.

You can’t miss the official public opening and reception with a dynamic Panel at Edmonton City Hall on Friday night Feb 3rd, and the unprecedented Taste and Sound of Alberta hosted at Ernest’s Restaurant and the Culinary Kitchens of NAIT’s School of Hospitality and Culinary Arts on Saturday night Feb 4th.

All this and meals and snacks on Saturday and Sunday are included in the registration fee price. Don’t delay! Register now and get the Early Bird registration fee which is open until January 15th. There are also bursaries available.

To check it all out and to register go to https://cultivatingconnections2017.splashthat.com

Our theme for 2017 is We’re Growing! Come and Join Us

We’re growing because of you, because of your interest and support. Because of your participation. Today’s world calls for fully alive, fully connected, fully expressed individuals. It calls for people with creative ingenuity, a desire to learn and the ability to collaborate and problem solve. It calls for people with an identity that is rooted in relationship to the whole, and who carry the passion and tools needed to respond to the great work before us.

The Edmonton Permaculture Guild supports this emergence. An emergence of a more resilient society, nurtured with holistic health and a renewed vitality of people, communities and ecosystems. In times of great change, the strengthening of our relationships is our response.

Recognizing our interdependence with all life, our community seeks to cultivate leaders, stewards and pioneers to guide us toward a socially just, ecologically harmonious and consciously awakened future.

We lost one of our most nutrient rich souls here on earth this fall. Bill Mollison, the co-founder of Permaculture.

I have to say….when he died, I cried, I cried because I was suddenly afraid, afraid that without him, we could never bring about this great change that must take place here on earth. I woke up the next day to see the outpouring of tributes to Bill and even more profound, the people all over the world reaching out, connecting with one another, sharing ideas, opportunities and projects.

I realized in that moment, that this man had left us a great legacy, one that WILL live on and grow rich in ecology all over the world. I realized that in his death, was life as is the pattern of nature.

Bill asked that in honour of his life’s work that we all plant a fruit tree. This summer, in places all over the city of Edmonton and really, all over the world – legacy trees will be planted and they will serve as a reminder that we are the gardeners, the soil tenders, and what we do today, will enrich all life tomorrow.

Come and grow with us – we have so many exciting things to accomplish together!

Meet our 2017 Board of Directors:

• Michael Moore, President
• Jenny Hawes, Vice President & Special Events Director
• Jennifer Semeniuk, Treasurer
• Jenny Brown, Secretary
• Kaitlyn Schmidek, Marketing and Communications Director
• Chelsea Coghill, Membership & Volunteer Director
• Kea Adachi, Fund Development and Grant Research
• Taylor Will, Orchard Manager
• Colin Ward, Education Director
• Nicole Spring, Research and Development Director
• Mark Napora, Community Outreach and Development

Join the Permaculture Community for a pint and a rousing discussion on creating resilience in our society.

With the upcoming Resilience Festival taking place on Earth Day April 22nd, we thought that we would start the conversation.

What is Resilience? What steps can we take to create a resilient future? And, how do we work within our communities to ensure a resilient society? Is it health, local food, self sufficiency, reskilling, building relationships or all of the above.

Special Guests:

• Kerstyn Lane, Sustainability Engagement and Outreach Advisor, MacEwan University, University of Alberta Augustana Faculty. Member of The Local Good and Coordinator of the ever popular Green Drinks.
• Through The Woods, A Reseach & Development Group – Exploring The foundations built around Voluntarism, Permaculture, Holistic Management, a desire to break the treadmill. An opportunity and desire to feed ourselves and others with food for the stomach and food for the soul.
• Mark Anielski, Author of The Economics of Happiness, Building Genuine Wealth. Mark Anielski is one of those rare economists with an enlightened vision to integrate love and happiness into economics. His vision is about an economy of well-being, a civilization of love, that means a society where the core values of our hearts are aligned with the measures of our well-being; and that these genuine well-being measures are what guides our decisions. ‘Wealth is the harvest of Love’. From Anielski’s point of view our business plan is rather simple: ‘to BE the LOVE that you are and to BE the LIGHT of LOVE to the World. Love built your home, love built your community and our nation, love determines the parameters of right conduct. Love commands the universe because LOVE created the universe.’

We will also be hosting a Silent Auction during the Permies at the Pub Event full of amazing products and services – all to raise money in support of the 3rd Annual Resilience Festival.

All items provided have been donated by local businesses and individuals wishing to contribute to the success of this festival. 

Please contact us at [email protected] if you would like to contribute an item for auction.

Advance Ticket sales: $10 or $15 at the Door

While we will be selling tickets at the door, we have a maximum capacity for the event. We would suggest taking advantage of the advance ticket price and purchase your ticket before the event.