Observe and Interact

The first principle of permaculture, Observe and Interact, is one I return to again and again. This is how it is meant to be since the principles are not a checklist to work through and be done with but a way of looking at the world that you try to deepen over time.

Bumblebee on Anise Hyssop

Observe and Interact basically tells us to pay attention, engage, and learn. This seems like it should be easy for human beings with our capacity for thinking, reflecting and remembering. At the moment, however, our culture does not seem to encourage critical thinking, seeing reality, or empowered action. It is a complex, convoluted and often overwhelming world of information these days. This is part of why the garden is such a great place to take in these principles. This sort of embodied and direct learning and feedback greatly helps us to grasp and internalize all the principles of permaculture.

So, it follows that the more that we garden and homestead the more we understand the importance of principle number one: Observe and Interact. This year we found ourselves particularly noting the benefits we get and the problems we avoid by paying attention.

It has always been my goal to carefully inspect every part of our three or so acres in use on a regular basis, maybe every other week. While I have not met that goal, I did manage to keep an eye on this land enough to catch and deal with some problems before they got out of hand. Here are some examples.

Dandelions in Spring

I have been working for years to build our soil and encourage vibrant plant growth while being picky about what plants live here. I have a long list of plants I like, including some that other people detest like dandelions, but there also plenty which I do not want taking up residence here, including some that can be very persistent. My experience is that stopping plants from establishing themselves is much easier than trying to remove them later.

This year we had garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata) and Oriental bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus) try to move in. I found the garlic mustard in my front orchard where I spend a lot of time. There were just a few plants when I noticed and identified it and pulled it out. Throughout the season I walked by the area and pulled up the few straggly new ones that tried to come back. I will keep an eye on it next year, but don’t foresee much of a problem. Later in the season, I was visiting the goats when I noticed a vine climbing up the fence. It was about 2 feet tall and when we dug it out the orange root confirmed that, yes, it was Oriental bittersweet. It hasn’t come back yet but we will keep watching. We’ve had this happen before with bittersweet and it does sometimes take a few rounds to get out all of the root.

While most people think of these plants as impossible to get rid of, especially without chemicals, we find any plant we can keep cut back eventually dies. The smaller it is when we start the process the faster it all goes. Again, noticing is the key. Of course, we also have goats if we needed to really keep something knocked back that has gotten established – like poison ivy was when we first got here!

This would be too many peaches!

As you know from my last post, I had a fabulous peach season this year. It would not have been quite as good if I had not been tuned into them long before they were ripe. We pruned in the late winter and thinned after fruit set in the spring. I felt like we did a good job, but another walk through in early summer alerted me to some issues. First, I tend to leave enough fruit on to make up for loss from other animals, but for some reason we had very little theft by squirrels this year. So I needed to do another round of thinning to prevent branches from breaking and to let the remaining fruit grow nice and big. Also, I could see the trees were getting very bushy and full.  Although it is not the recommended time to do a lot of pruning, we have found that a mid summer cut back is useful for our more vigorous trees. Otherwise, they put on so much leaf growth they shade the peaches too much to ripen well. So far, we have not seen a downside to careful summer pruning. Certainly this year we had a spectacular season with lots of delicious fruit, as I reported in August. Stay tuned for my harvest summary update in about a month for the final numbers!

Songbird nestlings need a lot of food

This year many people experienced high animal pest numbers. We had some problems for sure. The chipmunks stole most of my strawberries, and we had many gorgeous songbirds visiting us – and taking most of our berry crop. But our fences generally held, keeping the deer, porcupines, raccoons and groundhogs at bay. In July, however, I noticed something nibbling the winter squash leaves in one of the orchards. Just a few, but still… the next day a few more were gone and a few young squash had been gnawed on. So, we scouted around the area very carefully and, yes, found a den with multiple entrances. We were unsure if he/she scaled a fence or

Young, Vulnerable Winter Squash

tunneled in but we acted fast to refill the holes and remove the critter and managed to save a lot of our produce for the year.

 

 

Grey Tree Frog

Although my observations are particularly tuned in to catch problems, it’s also important to see the beauty, health and productivity all around me. No matter the season or the stressors, there’s always something to appreciate.

 

Life off the homestead is busy, full and important to me, too, especially this year when I have been so busy as a peace activist. Plus, I’m only human. So I miss plenty of things. I do notice, though, that with time and practice it is more natural and easy, just a part of who I am, to be connected to and observing this land that supports and shelters me.

Cleome

 

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A Week in August for a Food Preserver

If you’ve been a regular reader of this blog, you will know how invested I am in food preservation. In any place with such a short growing season the best way to be a year round local food eater is to can, dry, freeze, root cellar and grow long keeping foods. So, starting in July, bringing in and putting up the harvest is one of my main concerns. In fact, I have a goal of preserving something every day.

Here’s what that looked like for me for the week of August 12 2024.

Ripening Peaches

Monday

More peaches are ripening! We brought in 32 pounds mostly from our Redhaven tree. We cut and cooked them but it wasn’t quite enough to justify heating the water to can. There is a big pot of them in the fridge to combine with tomorrow’s harvest.

Canned Peaches

Tuesday

Canning! Another 30 pounds of Redhaven and Starfire peaches came in to cut, cook and water bath process. Three rounds for 21 quarts to store. A peach processing session like this takes up most of my day.

Wednesday

Basil

The basil has been gorgeous and lush. I cut a pound for making pesto. The garlic and salt is also ours – the olive oil is not local! I skip the pine nuts and cheese for my version. Since tomatoes don’t agree with my digestive system, I use pesto instead of red sauce in everything. So it’s important to have enough for a year’s supply. I freeze 3/4 pint jars of it, and this hour long session yielded 5 of those.

Beans Prepped for the Freezer

Thursday

Our string beans were a little slow to get started but now here they are, 5 pounds at a time. Our Blue Lake pole beans are especially prolific at the moment. In a couple of hours, I picked, snapped, blanched, and froze a few pounds for future three bean salads. In the past I used small plastic freezer bags but glass wide mouth pint jars work great and hold the right amount for each round of salad making. I’m always looking for ways to use less plastic.

Our Milk Makers & Kids

Friday

We have 2 gallons of milk in the fridge, about five days worth. I find our raw milk is perfect for about one week so it’s time to move some along, in this case as chevre cheese. One gallon of milk equals about five half pints for the freezer and one to go straight to the fridge. I start the process of making it late at night and the cheese really makes itself overnight. I strain and jar it the next morning. I love this cheese in salads – lettuce based salads in the spring, thinly sliced cucumber salads for the summer and a wonderful beet and kale type nearly year round. I also end up with a 1/2 gallon of whey which the chickens love.

Saturday

More peaches! These are still from my three earliest ripening trees: a Lars Anderson, a Redhaven and a Starfire, all 8 or 9 years old. We’ve gotten better at pruning the trees (as I wrote in my last post) and thinning the fruit, so we have nice, big peaches. I can’t explain why the birds and squirrels have spared us this year, I know some of my local friends lost their crops. I did two more canner loads and now have 48 quarts on my shelves.

Eggplant

Sunday

The eggplant is finally kicking in. I have good years and not so good years with the eggplant. It’s too early to decide for 2024, but we did just bring in five pounds to preserve. I diced, cooked and froze them specifically for making Eggplant-Almond Enchiladas. Next time I will slice them into rounds for eggplant parmesan.

So that was my August 12-19 food preserving week. And I hadn’t even pulled out my dehydrator yet! I hope to have enough harvest and time to keep on like this for a couple of months, filling my freezers and shelves to ensure homegrown food all through the winter.

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Joyful Pruning!

“Nature is not a place to visit, it is home.” — Gary Snyder

To plant a tree is to be connected to a place with depth and longevity. When we were finally settled somewhere, “owners” of a place, it was a thrill to plant trees and bushes and other long lived perennials – anything beyond annual crops. We started with asparagus, rhubarb, berry bushes and trees. Fruit trees especially, plus a few for pollinators and medicine: peaches, pears, mulberries, linden, and unusual permaculture choices like persimmons and pawpaws.

This signified a level of stability and rootedness that I had been working towards for years. During all of that preparation I had studied how to plant and care for trees and other perennials. Now that it was time, though, having to do all of that and do it well was intimidating. I needed to sift through all the information I had garnered to figure out how best to keep them healthy and get a yield (permaculture principle 3).

Getting and preserving a yield

There are many pruning books, videos, and methods. Having read “The One-Straw Revolution” by Masanobu Fukuoka I knew that one could choose to be very hands off. Then again, permaculture orchardist Stefan Sobkowiak has an amazing organic orchard that he prunes and shapes intensively. There are also many variations in between. What should I do?

Feeling unsure of myself, and fearing hurting the trees, I started with minimal pruning. I saw the problems with that quickly with our peaches. We’d been warned that peaches could be difficult to grow in New England, especially organically. While I can confirm that it’s not easy to grow a perfect looking peach, our experience is that they grow fast, flower like crazy and make tons of delicious fruit! We still get hit by polar vortexes or super late frosts and lose a year like everyone else, but usually they thrive.

See the two big cuts we had to make after this overgrown peach broke?

The first peach we planted and barely managed ended up leaning sunwards, overloaded with fruit on long, high branches. Unsurprisingly, a main branch cracked and broke after just a few years. Luckily, it was above the graft so it has come back, but we lost a couple of harvests and I doubt it will live as long as it could have. So, I started pruning harder.

I also began to feel more confident in what I was doing and not second guess every single cut I made. I was able to visualize how the tree would respond to my cuts and what it would look like later on. The constant worry that I was doing it wrong faded. I could even enjoy spending time with the trees in the late winter cold, looking forward to their spring growth and summer fruit.

Pruning the Red Haven Peach in Winter

The Red Haven in Summer

 

 

 

 

 

 

I found a new level of satisfaction in the process when I read “Sprout Lands: Tending the Endless Gift of Trees” by William Bryant Logan a few years ago. In it, the author describes how most people lived in close, reciprocal relationship to the forests around them. They depended on and used their products for survival, intensively managing them with coppice and pollard techniques. Not only did these pruning techniques not

Pollarded Maple

kill the trees, but they made for longer lived individual trees, and healthier, more diverse woodlands. In Sproutlands he visits England, Spain, Japan, California and other places, finding the same story everywhere.

 

 

“I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want.” -Andy Warhol

This is a narrative we recognize in permaculture. Rather than seeing humans and nature as two clashing entities, we recognize that humans are a part of the biosphere that evolved to have good, useful relationships with our fellow beings. That is how every species survives and thrives. So, I shouldn’t be surprised to once again have that reality shown to me, but given our species recent tendency to destroy things we depend on I find it hard sometimes to discern appropriate from destructive behavior.

When I first found permaculture this is part of what spoke to me. I was coming from both a farming and an activist perspective. As a farmer I appreciated permaculture’s practical improvements towards a sustainable, healthy food growing system. As an environmental and peace activist it was refreshing to find a way of looking at the world that did not assume that humans could only be problematic.

“The one who plants trees knowing that he or she will never sit in their shade, has at least started to understand the meaning of life.” – Rabindranath Tagore

This story of connection continues to this day. A 2022 study found that “the world’s healthiest, most biodiverse, and most resilient forests are located on protected Indigenous lands.” Even the World Bank with it’s poor track record of protecting land or people, recognizes that “Indigenous communities safeguard 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity and forests on their land are better maintained, with a higher preserved biodiversity than those on non-Indigenous lands.”

Now that I have gained skills and practice, and a larger understanding of what is possible, interacting and working with the plants brings me great joy. So does the abundant harvest that the trees and our work with them bestow upon us. It is my wish that all people have access to this level of interdependent security and resilience.

Unpruned Grapevines

Pruned Grapevines

Grapes to Harvest

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