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How to help Oklahoma become more resilient

The daily pounding of sun, drought, and record-setting heat on the Great Plains is a searing reminder of nature’s cycles and of a changing climate. In western Oklahoma grasslands and pastures give way to sand, farm ponds and creeks are dry or going dry, water wells are low, and ranchers -- no longer able to feed cattle on pasture -- are selling them off at auctions that go long into the night. As the drought monitor above shows, in central Oklahoma things are literally only a shade better and all of Oklahoma is now in some level of drought.

Oklahoma has always been a place with weather extremes. Climatologists tell us that not only can we expect this to continue but that we will see even more variability and extremes as the climate continues to change.

This raises questions: Are there ways to better manage increasingly precious resources such as water, to retain soil moisture, to retrofit and redesign human communities that are resilient and perhaps even abundant in the face of all kinds of weather, and to do all these things so that we manage, maintain and preserve the natural systems that give us life in a sustainable way?

Permaculture design offers an approach to designing human settlements modeled on the relationships found in nature. Central to permaculture are three ethics: care for the earth, care for people and fair share. These three ethics, along with 12 principles, form the foundation for permaculture design and are also found in most traditional societies. Many ecologists, scientists and environmental advocates see permaculture as offering one of the most comprehensive and holistic means for addressing the critical state of our planet and its species.

For Oklahomans, learning about permaculture has, up until now, required travelling out of state, and paying hefty tuition fees in addition to traveling and lodging expenses since permaculture courses are not yet routinely offered here. That’s changed this summer with the advent of Oklahoma’s first full-scale, certificate-level Permaculture Design Course organized by Transition OKC and taught by internationally renowned permaculturist, Scott Pittman of the Permaculture Institute, Santa Fe, N.M. The course starts in less than two weeks on August 4, and I admit to being terribly excited about it.

Two of my Oklahoma City colleagues and friends have taken the Permaculture Design Course and are much more articulate than I am about describing permaculture’s promise for Oklahoma and the talents of Pittman as a teacher. Randy Marks, principal, Groundwork: Applied Design says this:

“Scott Pittman is one of the most gifted teachers I have encountered. He has a long history of putting permaculture into practice and he knows how to convey what he has learned. Additionally, he is a great storyteller and has tales of his worldwide travels as a teacher and practitioner. He has a huge heart and is altogether a wonderful human being.

I took the design course with Scott when I was trying to figure out a new direction for my career and life. The course was fun, provocative and challenging. In itself, it didn't change my life, but it gave me a framework to begin changing my life and my understanding of nature and culture. I have thought of that course and what I learned there virtually every day since, and believe now more than ever that permaculture can help us forge a human culture in tune with the natural world.”

Oklahoma’s own practicing permaculturist, Bob Waldrop, founder of the Oklahoma Food Cooperative and Prairie Rose Permaculture, and one of the teachers for the upcoming Oklahoma PDC, sees permaculture as an essential investment in an age of uncertainty.

“Permaculture, with its focus on caring for people, caring for the planet, and having a care for the future, has helped me design adaptations to my house that make it possible for us to be comfortable, at low cost, even as the weather seems to be becoming more extreme – heat and drought in the summer, cold and ice in the winter. The money I am spending on those renovations is certainly the best financial investment I have ever made, since it has reduced my monthly energy bills. 

Like many in the baby boom generation, I am concerned about retirement in an age of great economic uncertainty. A significant component of my retirement plan is a debt-free house with very low operating costs. By spending money now on these permaculture design renovations, while I have a job and income, I am reducing my cost of living, not only in the present, but also later on, when I retire and my income is much lower. Every dollar I don’t have to spend during retirement is probably a hundred dollars I don’t have to save, so the advantages of permaculture design for anyone approaching retirement are very clear and compelling.”

Deadline for enrolling in the course is Tues., Aug. 2. Full details on registering for the course, payment, dates, times, location, syllabus and other pertinent details can be found online here.

Technorati Tags: agriculture,awareness,climate change,ecology,green living,hope,inspiration,nature,permaculture,resilience,social justice,sustainability

Full-scale Permaculture course comes to Oklahoma

I’ve been working with Transition OKC (TOKC) as a volunteer co-chair and co-founder for going on three years now. The Transition model is deeply rooted in the Permaculture design system, and although I am still very much a beginner when it comes to understanding Permaculture’s beautiful principles and how to implement them, no matter how often I read about them, and see them in action, I never fail to be inspired.

So it is with great excitement I write about this Permaculture Course TOKC, which is a program of Sustainable OKC, has organized. And full disclosure – I’m selfishly really looking forward to taking the course myself!

A full-scale Permaculture Design Course, all 72-hours of it, is now open for enrollment, and will take place in Oklahoma City and at Turtle Rock Farm near Red Rock this fall. The course will be taught by Scott Pittman, of the Permaculture Institute of Santa Fe, with guest teaching by Oklahoma City permaculturist, Bob Waldrop.

The course will take place from Aug.–Nov. 2011 and is designed around two long weekends (Thurs.-Sun.) and two weekend-only sessions (Sat.-Sun.), for a full 12 days of instruction. This means working people will miss only four work days total (calculated on a regular work week being M-F). Classes are generally 9 a.m.–5 p.m. This is a certificate-level class.

A $300 deposit is required to reserve a spot in the class and a short questionnaire/essay is also required, to be submitted at the time of deposit payment. The Permaculture Institute is handling registration via their website – dates of the classes, registration, course syllabus, essay outline and other details are available.

Permaculture design offers an array of solutions for growing and designing resilient, healthy and sustainable communities, and compliments fields such as biomimicry which emulate natural models. Or as Bob put it in a recent article about Permaculture in the Oklahoma Gazette,

“It [permaculture] is the art and science of designing sustainable human habitations and systems that care for people, care for the planet and have a care for the future.”

Some long-range planners, analysts, designers, sustainability advocates and environmentalists believe Permaculture has the potential to guide humanity through many of the challenges we face, such as economic instability, volatile energy supplies and prices, peak oil, climate change, environmental degradation and biodiversity loss. As an affirmation of this concept, last year the U.S. Army sent several members of Oklahoma's National Guard through a specially designed Permaculture Course at the Permaculture Institute in Santa Fe prior to deployment to Afghanistan. You can read more about that inspiring effort here.

Transition OKC received a grant from the City of Oklahoma City Office of Sustainability which lowers the full fee for the class to $750 (a very nice discount from the usual $900 or $1,000) so we’re very blessed. Big shout out to Transition OKC team member Randy Marks for obtaining the grant. Lodging and meals are not included in the tuition and are the responsibility of course participants.

The first session will take place at Turtle Rock Farm Retreat near Billings, Okla., about an hour and half north of OKC. This is a working farm, Platinum certified with Oklahoma Tourism’s ECO program, and part of the Oklahoma Agritourism program as well. They serve as a center for sustainability, spirituality and healing, and are located on the beautiful, rolling Oklahoma prairie. Grounds include a labyrinth, a recently completed straw-bale hermitage and lake. The farm has alpacas, honey bees, gardens, chickens, wheat and cattle.

• Meals – Bring your own lunch.
• Lodging. Participants are responsible for their own lodging.
• Turtle Rock offers a limited number of accommodations on a first come, first serve basis. Accommodations include a 100-year-old farmhouse overlooking the prairie and a brick rambler overlooking a lake. Some rooms include double beds so if you’re willing to share a bed with someone, more spaces are available. If you stay at Turtle Rock, a continental breakfast is provided. More details on Turtle Rock’s website or contact them directly if you have questions. You’re also welcome to camp out on the farm and utilize their bathroom facilities. They may also have a teepee available for camping. Please bear in mind it will be Aug. – likely very hot.
• Perry and Ponca City are about 20-25 minutes away (Perry is south of the farm, Ponca City is north) and both offer lodging and eateries, with Ponca City being the larger town. Both offer the usual hotel/motel chain lodging as well as locally owned B&Bs and inns. TravelOK.com offers great information on lodging and dining for both towns. Just go to the website and enter the town/city name in the search line, you’ll get info on the offerings in both categories – just click through to see what appeals to you.

Please feel free to share this info with others.

Here’s to happy Oklahoma permaculturing!

Technorati Tags: biomimicry,change,community,design,ecology,environment,future,hope,green living,gardening,inspiration,nature,species,sustainability,resilience,permaculture

A gardening tool that could grow on you

I love sitting in my garden watching butterflies, bees and dragonflies swirl and dive, discovering toads, preying mantis and shy lady bugs hiding in the shade. I love eating fat, juicy, just harvested tomatoes, roasted okra and eggplant, fresh green beans steamed and lightly salted, crisp chard and spinach sautéed in olive oil with a sprinkle of feta. But despite all this garden big love, I’m also a pretty lazy gardener and always looking for new ways to make this earthy obsession of mine less time consuming.

Yesterday a tool from Mother Earth News showed up in my email inbox that may help further this quest for lazy gardening nirvana. It’s an online Vegetable Garden Planner – granted not a very sexy name -- and using only the word “vegetable” in the title is kind of misleading because fruits are included in this little gizmo (Mother Earth might wanna address that in the future). But other than that all the standard fruit and vegetable garden plants are here, and then some, and if you wanna get even more diverse, you can add plants and varieties and include info on when to plant, spacing and so on. For an info, data and organization hound – and I am one -- I found this feature not only fun, but educational and even inspiring – I learned a few things about plants I’ve never tried growing before and now will consider adding to my garden (if I can find room). And how nice to have all this info all in one place ready to be accessed over and over again.

The tool also provides help with garden design, plant placement, planting times, crop rotations. And you can try it free for 30 days. After that it’s an annual subscription of $25 a year or $40 for two years.

One of the most useful features allows you to save your plan for each season with notes, so you have an archive of what you’ve planted where and when. If you prefer a paper record, there’s an option to print. And then when you begin the next season, it uses information from your previous season’s plan to help with rotation information. Now that’s quite cool. Up until now I’ve been doing this on graph paper with lots of messy notes, which is fine too, this just gets it all into a digital format. Pros and cons to that too. Like Captain Picard on “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” I have an affinity for real paper and real books and am not so sure digitizing every last aspect of our life is a good idea. I would hate to store up years of garden plans and then lose them when the servers fry. Then again it may be more likely that my paper plans will get lost or torn or thrown away. Like I said, pros and cons.

The planner also helps out with a plant list mode (see image below) and by sending reminders about when to plant, frost dates and so on and with my way too busy life I can use that, but I also found that in design mode the program can be a little buggy at times.

That’s not so cool. However since another obsession of mine is maps, drawing maps, looking at maps, and I love playing at that, despite the program’s occasional buggy-ness, laying out my garden turned out to be really fun. All in all I like the design functionality and I found the info on all the plants, spacing, etc. very useful, and I put together a design of my current garden in no time at all, but I’m reserving judgment for now on whether this tool is worth an annual subscription fee. Happy there’s a trial period to check it all out.

So I’m in wait-and-see mode for now. Maybe this little tool will grow on me.

Garden architecture

How a small winter garden is saving us about $236

Officially spring is a mere three days away yet the weather folks are saying winter may yet have another another blast at us on Saturday. While we're all so weary of cold and gray, maybe this winter is Mother Nature's way of reminding us that even on our best days human beings really are not in charge.

Having no control over the weather, rather than grumbling about it, which I often do, I'm trying to focus instead on the blessings of winter -- and one of those is winter greens. A couple of years ago I learned of a book, "Four Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Long," by Eliot Coleman and Barbara Damrosch that dramatically altered my perspective on gardening and winter.

Coleman and Damrosch are small farmers in Harborside, Maine, where they own and operate Four Season Farm, which produces vegetables year round. It's become a nationally recognized model of small-scale, sustainable agriculture. They produce crops, even in winter, in customized unheated, or in some cases minimally heated, movable, plastic greenhouses. Coleman's techniques are easily implemented and scalable to the smallest backyard or even patio gardener.

To grow winter crops, the concept is embodied in a few key points:

• Select cold weather crops. Coleman provides a long list. We started with a couple of small plots a couple of years ago and focus on winter greens such as lettuce, kale, chard, arugula.
• Plant them in the late summer or early fall when the ground is still warm and insulate the soil via cold frames and deep mulch. We find deep straw and leaf mulch work very well.
• Cold frames can be easily constructed with minimal cost a variety of ways -- using straw bales, or with planters or raised beds you may already have in place -- just remember the goal is to provide insulation for the soil to keep it from freezing.
• Then cover the cold frames with heavy plastic or old storm doors or windows. We've used both methods -- they work!
  

Coleman writes about shoveling aside three feet of snow in Maine to harvest salad greens from a cold frame. Although we didn't have three feet of snow here in Oklahoma, we did have a lot more snow and ice this winter, and yet our greens grew all winter long. Growth does slow to snail's pace in the winter so it's best to have robust growth going by winter's onset or you won't have much to harvest during deep winter. Once the weather begins to warm a bit though -- in Oklahoma that's around mid- February, early March -- the growth takes off again. We're cutting our greens now every few days and eating salads that wow the taste buds.

This year we spent about $4 on seeds for our winter greens cold frame and we used cut-and-come again varieties, meaning we can harvest from the plant again and again, and they are all totally organic. Everything else -- wooden stakes to elevate the plastic, leaf mulch, straw and straw bales and so on -- we already had on hand. Due to space and time constraints, we do supplement our harvests with greens from the farmers market, Oklahoma Food Cooperative and in deep winter, the grocery store, but in the future we hope to increase the amount of winter produce we grow ourselves, which in turn increases our household food security and resiliency. We may eventually be able totally eliminate grocery store greens since under our current food system, most travel from very long distances and are hence not only nutritionally inferior but dependent on fossil fuels for shipping.

A five-ounce container of organic salad greens at the grocery store can cost anywhere from $4 to $6 depending on the store and season -- enough for maybe two salads in our family. I've lost track of the number of salads we've harvested and eaten from our winter garden, but before it bolts (probably sometime in May or June) I'm estimating we'll have consumed at least 40+ salads at a cost of only about $4. If we'd purchased the greens from the grocery store, we'd have spent about $240. So our little winter garden plot is saving us about $236, and the taste of fresh cut salad greens in the middle of winter -- ladies and gents -- that's just priceless. A table to illustrate all this is below. Any other insights to share on winter gardening?

	Garden	Store bought
Initial investment	about $4 for seeds	about $6 per five ounces (organic)
Est # of salads for family of four	40+	2
Total cost of 40 salads	$4	$240
Estimated savings	$236
Household food security	Increases	Nope!
Taste	Priceless	Bleh!

Note: After I posted this entry, I was contacted by Nathan Lau in Malaysia. He and his wife Annie are self-described foodies and write the popular blog, "House of Annie." From their blog, "Annie is mistress of the kitchen while Nate is the master of the grill and smoker. We cook the homestyle Asian and Hawaiian foods of our younger days while also exploring the wider worlds of Western foods." They also place a strong emphasis on home-grown foods and offer a "Grow Your Own" roundup each month. They invited me to submit my post for possible inclusion in their April roundup, which I did. You can read more about this great opportunity here and enter a post in the roundup as well if you're blogging about raising, eating and using home-grown foods in recipes, etc.