Shed of Interrelation (part three)

Meg and I insulated and plastered the ceiling of the Shed of Interrelation (SoI) today. You're looking at the small bathroom where a bath and composting toilet will go. The shed is for artists/writers-cum-woofers to take short residencies and rest, make art and work a little in the garden. The shed is a place to encourage transitional thinking in the arts, to encourage permapoesis where art and organic food generation are embedded activities.

In the meantime our winter seeds are rocking. Heirloom elephant leek, garlic, silverbeet fordhook, pak choy, sweet pea, broad beans, broccoli, carrots, black kale, spinach, spring onions, beetroot, baby cos lettuce and cabbage mini. Meg and I were discussing today how many families could potentially be living on this quarter acre in 10-20 years. I think it could feed about 15-18 people in the Summer months and maybe 10-12 in Winter. 

I'm looking down on young banksias and heavily mulched areas with lomandras, poa tussocks, broad beans, almonds, olives, peaches and my chain-sawed eucalyptus balls. The dry stone HaHa wall back-filled with rubble allows for water to pass through it without disturbing the integrity of the wall. You can also see a little of the social warming fence. We persuaded our neighbours not to have a fence that lined the whole boundary, but just enough to have a little more privacy. They also agreed that I could build it as a slatted fence, again for social warming properties. Of course the water tank finishes the picture and finishes an often quoted mantra on this blog spoken by Cuban permaculturalist Roberto Perez at our town hall last year–

Grow your own food, catch your own water, say hello to your neighbour.

Here's a pic of the main house showing flying fox route and solar panels. I'm also showing off my deck building skills here. Split level decks are party decks. You often hear of them collapsing and killing a dozen stomping teenagers, that's why this one is low to the ground. 

I love Zeph's cubby as much as he does. Apart from the obvious – cute, small, red, up-in-the-air – it frost protects our toms. Meg collected another basket full last week. Almost unbelievably the fruit was still ripening despite the plants having died weeks ago. They're not great, but fine for cooking up. You can also see the beginning of the flying fox route and the tail end of the social warming fence. The bed in front of it will be the kick-arse rhubarb patch. Rhubarb is year-round gold for food gardeners. I remember my Dad's awesome patch when I was Zeph's age.

And, finally a place very dear to my heart – the compost area. Underneath the new window of the Shed of Interrelation is a herb bed that's doing OK, but I have decided to dig them out and extend the compost bays to three. We'll also have the humanure from the dry worm composting toilet. Therefore we can have four brews at four different stages. I'm so excited about this. The building of the Shed of Interrelation has already led to so many possibilities, even before the first resident.

From apocalypse to permapoesis

Our culture, in its dominant form, has an unstoppable death urge. Nice thought. Great way to start the week. Yum. Mass death. 

In a relatively straight line over six thousand years our efforts to wipe out every living thing including ourselves only intensify. Six thousand years of canonical philosophy has brought us merely doctrines for superior ecological disembodiment. Here, now, nearby, indigenous grasslands around outer Melbourne are next in line for the chop, to be replaced by a toxic sprawling development the size of Canberra. When it comes to the destruction of natural ecologies, Monsanto fan and state premier John Brumby would have to be the most extreme government we've seen in Victoria to date. As I said the death urge only intensifies, Brumby merely a wealthy (in relative terms) benefactor of its momentum. Be it grasslands, water systems, agriculture or energy consumption he is a major mass murderer of non-human life – life most of us don't even know exists.

Stasis. Death. The end of all life, if the dominant culture has its way. It's where we've been headed from the beginning of this several-thousand year journey. It is the only possible end for a culture of linear – as opposed to cyclical – progress. Beginning, middle, end. Self-extinguishment. The only solace and escape from separation: from ourselves, from each other, from the rest of the planet. Plutonium. DDT. Dioxin. Why else would we poison ourselves? No other explanation makes comprehensive sense. Apocalypse. Derrick Jensen p 227.

Put aside climate change and peak oil for a moment and think about how many other ways we can bring about mass destruction. The elimination of biodiverse systems; the collapse of insect populations causing widespread disease and pestilence to proliferate, in turn triggering a global chemical revolution that our governments will of course endorse. This will hand companies like Monsanto and Dow a license to stage more chemical warfare, causing further mass outbreaks of cancer, respiratory diseases and death to rich microbial life that does so much to keep us and our fellow organisms healthy. Apocalypse. The proliferation of factory farms; the growth of super viruses from live-stock antibiotic mutations and genetically modified grains; GM grains contaminating heirloom seeds that are generally hardier, more robust and more nutritious; dioxins and antibiotic pollutants (from paper mills and industrial farming) in our rivers and oceans killing biodiversity in our waters, triggering mass death of important ecologies which provide us and others health. More and more children raised in disembedded suburbs, completely unaware that their wage-slave parents, their toxic food, their creativity-destroying schooling – all constitute a dominant culture that is an unstoppable monster. Increases in self-harm, violence, anorexia, cancer, obesity, ADHD, mental illness, hatred, ecological ignorance, deafness to indigenous suffering, rape, warhead manufacturing, plutonium production, plastic waste dumping, and on and on it goes, an ever-expanding one-way road to annihilation. Why? Why do we agree to participate in a system so suicidal, so abusive, so destructive?

When you next read about a state or federal government making plans to wipe-out native grasslands, build new coal stations, mine wild mountains, ship soldiers, green-light GM crop trials, green-light businesses contributing to factory slave culture in poorer countries, throw millions at a Grand Prix, build new pulp mills, new airports, super farms, live-exporting, harvest old growth forests, dump toxic waste at sea, ask yourself what whole picture does this make. Is there anything sane about our culture? Do I have to participate? 

Imagine if there were no industrialised agricultures. No ADHD, obesity, cancer, tooth decay, violent mood disorders. Imagine most of us contributed a few days a week, from an early age, to localised food production. We only ate our own community's organic food in season. Children were given age-specific responsibilities within community food production that, in turn, gave them skills, bodily strength and healthy self-esteem. There was little mental illness as everyone had a place, a role. Our schooling was specific to our community's ecology and social wellness, and to online communities we developed as we got older. We rarely travel, import or export because we know that a system based upon transporting resources and human resources is suicidal to our species and to much of non-human life. Because we all share in food production there is much time to pursue creative interests. We have much free-time, and we have little money. We participate in a "free-poor" society where free time is valued as the greatest wealth. The cults of celebrity, anxiety and wishfulness have all died in the arse and are no longer valued because we once again like who we are. Dags are sexy and cool, we're all big cool dags now. There is no obesity nor anorexia but a great diversity of body shapes inbetween. The only mining that takes place is for the production of renewable energy technology. Technologies that fuel our low-energy houses and a few other essentials such as digital networking devices for global connectedness and creative purposes. This technology is given out in greater quantity to communities who actively show they are repairing their local wild ecologies. A federal government merely provides security from global corporate terrorism and oversees mediation for neighbouring communities who are in dispute. They do not interfere with or attempt to trade resources belonging to small local communities, or rather that small local communities belong to. People are encouraged to only breed to the capacity of their local landbase; to their local food and water bowls. All Monsanto, Coke, Halliburton, Walmart and Mcdonalds (a more extensive list will be drawn up in due course) chief executives and board directors will serve a minimum of 10 years in community compost fields, and be taught the proper treatment of humans and non-humans through social-ecology classes. On release they will be monitored and if they abuse again, they will be humanely destroyed and composted. Politicians known to have actively contributed to and were therefore abusers in the old system of pop-fascism, will be also encouraged to work in the compost fields and be monitored by the community in case they attempt to abuse again.

All this is highly possible. It is highly possible to participate in our culture while exorcising the dominant abusive traits – supermarket food, celebrity culture, two-party fraudulence, male-aggression, warring religions (monotheism), aggregate-growth economics. We can start now as individual households and build relations with others who share values based on permapoesis – permanent, cyclical meaning-making – not suicidal, linear apocalypse. It's time to ditch the old school.

Waterless composting toilet

Since we started planning our permaculture garden two years ago we have given most of our energy to water conservation, renewable energy, heirloom food gardening, worm generation, composting, indigenous planting, companion planting and buying less and less items packaged in plastic. But we haven't yet got to black and grey water recycling and composting. So, after talking with a friend yesterday, who has just returned from a NZ permaculture farm where he saw a basic, home-made one in successful operation, I decided it's time to build a composting worm toilet in the guest shed. Any tips or good advice most welcome.
Design from here.

A steady-state crawl to self-sufficiency

It's been a year and a half since we started the garden. We began with a cleared block and one beautiful 30 year old oak tree. The soil we inherited was highly disturbed and compacted clay. Since we started we have brought in about 18 cubic metres of mulch, weekly collected green scraps from a local cafe, regularly gleaned brown biomass from the neighbourhood, occasionally bagged horse shit from the nearby horse farm, paid for mushroom compost, and free-ranged about 12 chickens. They're outside the window as I write. They bring us so much pleasure.

Here's what the garden looked like in November, 2007. The first thing I did was build a garden shed out of reclaimed materials and a dry stone wall to deal with the cut that our neighbours had created for their house site.



Over Summer this year we got up to about 25% self-sufficiency, while our indigenous grasses, banksias, wattles and sedges took root and began to grow. We failed dismally with both our sunflower and potato crops due to the lack of soil quality, but our leeks, corn, lettuce, garlic, tomatoes, broccoli, broad beans, snap peas, cucumber, onions, pumpkin, spinach, carrots, basil, strawberries, chillies, herbs and rhubarb were incredibly generous in what they provided for us.

So, this winter it's soil improvement time again. More raised beds are about to be built and I've just gleaned more top soil from local council works up the road, brought down by a friendly worker in his truck.

Here's what the garden looks like today.



With permaculture one mimics natural ecologies to grow food in healthy environments. In other words one establishes a significant connection between indigenous and exotic plants, microbes, insects, birds and animals. This constitutes a collective health based on diversity and relations of common substance. Hierarchy, or relations of avoidance, are not honoured here. That's why this garden is based on non-capitalist principals. It goes without saying we don't use anything synthetic on our land. We do, however, kill weeds on our drive by pouring boiling water onto them. This process kills microbes in the soil so we don't do it anywhere else in the garden. And there are many other ways we still behave like capitalists competing for dominance, and this is why our garden to date merely represents a steady crawl away from the dominant culture to a socio-ecological embedded life.

Compost – post.com

On death, sex and compost

One of the fantasies my girlfriend and I share in bed is our compost fantasy. It's one where we become part of a whole underground domain; our bed wriggling with a world of re-embodying substances, de-centered egos, legs and limbs akimbo, rolling and turning in a field of damp, warm loving life.

What is so inextricably sexy about taking a heap of gleaned organic biomass, fetid kitchen scraps, sweet smelling forest mulch, and chicken, horse and cow shit, and turning it into dark chocolate compost, rich in microbial life? Well for me, apart from the material goodness it provides for the garden, it also means I don't have to visit supermarkets and other centres of abuse, denial, silencing and avoidance.

It's International Compost Awareness Week this week. So, here at The Garden there'll be a number of compost related posts. But first, a picture of one of mine cooking beneath one of my "prohibition" signs (related to yesterday's post).

6 fine-art steps for building a raised bed

Step 1. Construct a timber coffin-like structure to what ever size you require in what ever manner you like. Remember the timber will flavour your food so don't use timber that has been treated with chemicals. Level off and fix to the ground using stakes or star pickets.



Step 2. Break up and weed existing soil at the base of the bed. If your soil is clay add some river sand and lime, if your soil is sandy add some clay and manure.



Step 3. Using newspaper, cardboard or some twentieth century art, cover the soil in a thin blanket. This barrier will act as a weed mat and help lock in moisture, which also encourages worms. Wet down this layer with water to start the decomposition process and help keep it from blowing away.



Step 4. Add a layer of straw, fallen oak leaves or sugar cane mulch. This organic matter will slowly break down, fixing carbon in the soil. A good soil requires a balance of nutrients, carbon, nitrogen and diverse microbial life, which will mitigate pests. Never use synthetic fertilisers or pesticides, you want your soil to hum loosely, not fear life.



Step 5. Finish the layers with composted soil. I have used part mushroom compost here with my own home-brewed one. Lightly compress or flatten the soil with a board and sow your seeds.



Step 6. Protect your seeds from your free-ranging hens. Now it's time for a well deserved glass of Astrid's dark chocolate stout.

Lucky dip and scratch (or, carbon fixed/carbon smoked)

I've been up a ladder, building walls to pay bills, and I've spent much of the past month finishing essays, films and funding for WorkmanJones' 2010 US tour. We've been invited and funded to make new work and show it at a non-profit gallery in Richmond, Virginia so we'll be looking to do a number of things while we are there.



In the meantime the garden has been neglected and the frost season has begun, which makes looking at the garden a tad depressing. Every day I have been scheming and planning new raised beds, future composts, fruit and nut tree plantings, canopies over raised bed structures in order to mitigate birds and frost damage, mulch and humus for further water and carbon conservation and more indigenous plantings to encourage greater biodiversity.



Surprisingly we've found that these heirloom toms (Riesentraube) are extremely frost hardy, for tomatoes at least. Because we live in a cold climate (though increasingly less so) toms generally come into abundance just as the first frosts start rolling in. Therefore these hardy toms are ideal in this climate. We've had 2 frosts already and the plants keep producing and ripening fruit.



In my absence the chooks have been guarding the compost. Over the Summer and until the first frost the European wasps had colonised the heap, now the chooks have reclaimed it as their very own lucky dip and scratch zone.



Working to pay bills and planning to fly to the US are obvious hypocrisies in light of what we're aiming to achieve in the garden over the next five years: 90% water self-sufficiency, 70% energy self-sufficiency, 70% food self-sufficiency. I suppose by agreeing to go to the US I participate in what I represent: a privileged late-capitalist citizen who still partakes in the short-term fantasy world of oil-based technologies.

As WorkmanJones' practice involves both disembodiment and re-embodiment, displacement and re-placement these ethical dilemmas are just part and parcel of a cold and rainy 2009 Sunday afternoon milieu.

The future of food and social relations

F

Stake and Veg

Shredding, gleaning, piling and heaping

Currently I glean most of the material for my composts. Neighbours recently saved a trip to the tip because I pulled up with my wheelbarrow and asked to take the loads away. I often take my wheelbarrow for a walk scavenging for material. Peter O has been getting into the habit of dropping off shredded paper from school (if only I could get hold of the White House's pile right now). We collect horse poo from the nearby horse riding ranch and, as I've mentioned before, we weekly collect the food scrap bins from a nearby cafe. As we have now started to harvest food, we have increased our green waste which, in a closed-cycle ecology, is not really waste at all. 

As you can see in the below picture our soil is highly disturbed, largely compacted clay. Intensive mulching, to keep moisture in the soil (which attracts worms who break down the clay), together with intensive composting over the next several years should see a dramatic decrease in water usage.

Heap (for Peter Tyndall)

Permapoesis

A well-composted soil fixes carbon in the earth where it’s needed most.

Permaculture bases its design principles on agro-ecology. A permaculturalist understands local ecology and applies this understanding to food production. This changes social, economic and cultural structures. If a poet’s food, which in part provides the material for poesis, is produced with her involvement, and within walking distance of her primary dwelling, her text is altered from one of capitalisation (reliance upon importation of resources) to one of ecology. The poet now participates actively within the environment that supports her, and the form and content of her life and work change accordingly.

The Readings Summer book catalogue arrived today which woke me from my slow text fantasy. I flicked through it in horror before heading back to my soil sifting. As I worked I imagined a publishing industry based on permaculture design and writers and poets stripped bare of their mediated existences; once dislocated, now active participants in the world that supports them.

Hairy soil (for Peter O'Mara)

We had two truck loads of unwanted soil dumped by council workers who were moving earth in our street. Unwanted because of the weed factor. The soil was originally brought in by the council only 6 months ago to top dress the nature strip, it then became overgrown and complaints were made. I thought that it was better the soil stay in the area than be transported away again and asked Paul the truck driver, who used to run the Trentham hardware next door to my old bookshop, if he could bring it down.

Pete turned up and said 'what's with the hairy soil?'

We are beginning to go through it with the pitchfork, separating all the grass and thistle and other organic matter into a separate pile. We will then cook it in a compost to kill the seed. The filtered soil will be used to top dress the property before being mulched to improve the overall humus and grow more food.

A nice little self-serving exercise within this hairy ecology.

The Australian

To the Letters Editor:

I bought your paper today for the first time in years. Reading it was like sneaking into a black tie dinner at a men's only club. Wow! I thought, people still think like this, but of course I was joking, you're just representing what we all think, right?

What I found since my last read (back in your glorious Howard years) was an even greater ramping up of heroic capitalist rhetoric, finer crafted greenwashing, and a border-line sociopathic hyper-mediated psyche, with the subtext embedded dispassionately: 'power invents a mask for powerlessness to wear' (TS). All this, despite the writing on the wall signaling the end, thank fuck, of capitalism.

Knowing a little of the territory marked by your bullish jock journos who champion pop-fascists like Rupert Murdoch – why wouldn't you, he's your boss right? – I should hardly have been surprised, but to witness again the dogmatic clutching on to an economics based upon profit growth and the refusal to advocate for a commerce that mimics ecological systems illustrates your bloody-minded stupidity and out-moded ideology.

Even after the nature crunch (which will make the sinking global-pool-of-money seem like just another family holiday spent at home), your paper (in the unlikely event that it survives) will no doubt once again twist the story of capitalism's failure to one of triumph. But capitalism's real triumph will be our extinction.

Your newspaper, to borrow McKenzie Wark's words, is a shopping guide where news breaks up the commercial page and filters the right stock advice throughout it. Your newspaper preaches the reliance upon the importation of resources when we know this to be our species' death wish. Therefore, your paper is illogical.

Luckily for me, my money is not totally wasted in buying today's, nor the material you print your capitalist propaganda on as it will go nicely in my compost, and feed the worms who enrich the soil to grow the food that is in walking distance to my home.

Compost & Cos

Today I killed Bill. She wasn't getting better with the garlic water and we couldn't justify the expense of a vet, nor the fantasy of industrial pharmaceuticals. I killed her as part of redressing the compost area, which looked like this at about 5pm. 

At 4.30pm I brought the black and white bins, full of kitchen scraps, back from Ben's cafe, laid Billy to rest at the base of the right-hand bay, tore up several cardboard boxes and placed them over her. I then wet down this elegiac layer and heaped on Ben's scraps, straw from the coup and Meg's day's weeding material, before covering up both bays to cook the compost.

The bay on the left (above), that I last turned here for Hamish Morgan – who today sent more reference humus: Katherine Gibson's 'The End of Capitalism' – is almost ready for use on the garden.

I picked our finest cos lettuce (above right) and returned Ben's bins, proudly presenting the first exchange of our casual gift-ecology.

Daniel Spoerri & co. do movement

"I hate immobility. I detest everything that is settled."

&

"keep moving, even in place keep moving."

&

Composting as collective offensive (for Hamish Morgan)

The following flick is an eyepiece for aerobic composting, where the aeration of the body is contiguous with the world. It's a short flick cut to a short track called Fall by the band called The Thing (now Dirtbird). It's a how-to-do-words-with-things film that emits little methane, recalling "All things fall and are built again" (W B Yeats, 1939), together with "Once upon a time the world was round, and you could go on it round and round" (Gertrude Stein, also 1939).

Carbon is fixed in the soil if the compost is damp and aerated. If the compost is too wet and not turned (not aerated), the organic matter rots, giving off methane. Carbon is the gaseous nutrient. It's transformation, into a greenhouse gas, is CO2. But carbon is organic matter in the soil, if treated well there is less gaseous transformation, less reduction of humus and therefore less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

All things fall and are built again in a closed-cycle ecology – NO WASTE – and those that build them again are microbial and joyous. Our economics and our ecology can now come home – Oikos – together. To give up on gaseous transformation – aspiration/celebrity – is to act as a collective offensive, or in mutual self defence.

So take your pitchfork and give some air to your body. The movement exclusive of industrial agriculture – supermarkets, refrigerants and Monsanto – is in full swing!

A Free-dragging Manifesto

Read Astrid Lorange's review in Jacket.