A Mission

         For as long as I can remember, I've cared about the Earth. I would see people litter, use fuel unnecessarily, spraying poisons and I would think to myself, 'How would they like it if someone came in and did all of those things to their home, in their home?' It saddens me that most of the people in this world live only in the now and at certain times, that's not so bad. However when it comes to doing almost irreversible damage to the only home you'll ever have because let's face it, space travel is several lifetimes away, it's completely unfair to our unborn descendants whom of which will have nothing to look forward to in the world to come if something doesn't change. It's as selfish and self-centered as the belief that the universe revolves around the Earth.

          I'm so glad and relieved to have been introduced to Permaculture. I knew recycling plastic and paper products could only do so much. In my short time on this amazing planet and in the even shorter time of my awareness of Permaculture, I've learned what it really means to be eco-friendly. To my knowledge, it means bringing homo sapiens down off their high horse mounted on that pedestal and realizing that we are all apart of this Earth and just as important as the largest blue whale to the smallest amoeba. From the tallest redwood to the algae that grows on the inside of your fish tank. We are all connected and we all belong. To me, no one species is more important than the other. My father asked once, after finding a colony of ants living in the siding on the inside of his back porch, "What is the point of them being on this earth?" And in response I asked, and being a girl of only about 11 or 12, "What's the point of us being on this earth?" If you ask me, the ants have more of a place on this planet than we do. For one thing, they haven't built dangerous nuclear plants, cut down vital forests and burned the remains of creatures from the past so they can look cool in their private jets and sport's cars causing thousands of years of climate damage and warming in about half a century with no regard for the rest of the planet's populations. There has got to be a more sustainable way to attract a mate. So my mission in life is to learn and maybe teach a more sustainable way for human beings to live life. I want to help save our planet, our home, the way a homeowner wants to save his/her house from the fire that's stripping the foundation of their life away piece by piece. In the words of the great Jane Goodall, "The Earth is our home, our ONLY home." Why aren't we treating it as such. People treat their material possessions better than the only place that will one day hold their children and grandchildren. The only place whose stability will be the difference between life and death for not only the delicate animals and plants that surround us, but our entire existence as well.

        I consider myself a pioneer in this world of industrialized culture. A step in the right direction because whether we like it or not, the Earth will continue to go on, with or without us. The Earth does not need us, we however, need the Earth. It is the base of our very existence and we can either be an asset and an ally and thrive for many generations to come, or continue on the failed path we've been taking for thousands of years and perish. Our very existence depends on the outcome of the choices we make right now, in our lifetime. My mission is to spread the Permaculture mindset as far as I can and the person I can thank most of all for this knowledge is my mother, Susan, whose research and growth on this subject has really inspired me. Being the daughter of a hippie, I can't say that my fate or whatever you want to call it, would have gone in any other direction. I feel that I was born to make a difference and this is the path of my choosing to accomplish this mission. It's only just begun but the light at the end is in front of me, and the industrial age will hopefully soon be behind us all. I don't think we have much of a choice in the matter anyway, being that there are only about 15-20 years left before all the oil is gone, with the continued use of it as we have been. I am ready to reforest the Earth, to clean and preserve the water, to respect, equally, every single living thing on this planet and to bring back a sense of community to my fellow Earthlings. I am ready for a change and for 10,000 years of Earth's oppression to come to an end. My mission lies in change and adaptation, in Earth care, animal care and people care. In Permaculture. 

A Journey

Discernable Pattern, March, 2008

I've been thinking a lot about how I got here, and why the permaculture ideas seem so familiar.  I was listening to this podcast between Paul Wheaton and Geoff Lawton.  In it they talked about the counter-culture movement of the 1960s-70s and how that made a difference to them.  It made a difference to me, too.  I was at Texas Christian University from 1968-72, and it was an exciting time.  There was a mix of students as usual, from partiers, to the very serious.  I always think of TCU at that time as being a mix of the offspring of rich cattlemen and oilmen, and the children of ministers or people who had ministerial ambitions who were there on scholarship.  Of course there were others there on scholarships, too.  I was there on scholarship, myself.  I hung out with a bunch of liberal arts students and we were always discussing big ideas, the future of society, societal ills, etc.  It was a time of ferment.

I didn't get a degree from TCU, but I consider that time as my true college years.  I moved from Fort Worth to Miami, Florida, where I got degrees in biology and chemistry and a minor in physics.  Then I moved to St. Louis, Missouri where my family had landed.  I worked briefly in a medical research lab, then worked for the federal government as a programmer/cartographer for 32 years.  I discovered the Open Source Software movement and was entranced.  More counter-culture.

Open Source Software is written by programmers to fulfill their own passions, rather than as an assignment by an employer. One mantra is "information wants to be free".  The open source software movement developed the concept of CopyLeft which prevents the freely available work of programmers (and now others) from being snapped up and put under copyright and made private.

I also discovered fractals in 1985 via a seminal article in Scientific American that a friend handed me.  I wrote software that made fractal images, used fractals as test cases in various image processing and hardware manipulations and got to attend a class on fractals in California.  I developed a deep appreciation for patterns in nature and it is a wonder that I didn't break my neck walking around searching for self-similarity in tree branches and fractal patterns in clouds.  Fractals and chaos theory involve, among other things, phenomena which are determined but not predictable. Determined, but not predictable. As humans, we don't much like that.  I think it makes us feel out of control.  There are deep patterns that we can't easily discern, which are sometimes outside our ability to discern at all, other than in general terms. It's quite humbling.

My work was in a research lab, so we got to work with a lot of new technology like Google Earth and Sketchup. I worked for a mapping agency, so I looked at a lot of landforms and things like contours are very familiar. I wrote a couple of extensions to Sketchup and an Android app. I did a lot of things, actually, which suited my generalist personality.  I love multidisciplinary approaches.  In my opinion, it's the only way to begin to get a grasp on how the world works.  Reductionist science has its place; certainly it illuminates the working of parts of the whole. But it's a mistake that we could ever get to complete understanding by reductionist methods.  Of course, I believe that we can never get to complete understanding, anyway, but we can certainly develop better and better working models.

I tend to have serial obsessions.  From 2002-2008 it was fractal art.  Before and after that it was family history.  Now it is permaculture which seems to me to encompass and build on a lifetime of eclectic interests.  In a way I have always been interested in permaculture, though not under that name.  I spent hours as a child just looking at the natural world. I still can do that.

Planting nuts and berries - and the CEZ

We planted more nuts and berries along various fences and property lines. In the illustration below, the older trees are shown in green, though I planted the river birches on the south and the locusts and redbuds on the east 10-12 years ago.  The newer plantings are shown in red.  The peach, blackberry, goji berry, honeyberry bushes and pawpaw trees were planted last year.  The raspberry was planted this spring and the rest (filbert, jostaberry, elderberries and apples were planted yesterday and today.  Drat.  I forgot to put in the fig, which is in line with the peach tree about a yard from the house.

We planted the filberts and jostaberries in the general part of the backyard which the dogs have access to.  Since they love to carry sticks around and gnaw on them and these new plants bear a distressing resemblance to sticks at the moment, we built a small fenced area to protect them, which I am calling a canine exclusion zone or CEZ.  I was amazed at how easily the post pounder put the posts in the ground.  It gives me hope for the other projects I have in mind involving posts.  Namely a canine containment center (CCC) on the west side of the property.

CEZ (canine exclusion 

Most of the plants growing in front of the CEZ are lambs' quarters.  Future soup material.

Small hugelkultur project

Adding the wood to a trench

Grass clippings added.

Compost and soil from the trench added and mixed.

Planted with herbs.

I wanted easily accessed herbs, mostly culinary in our front yard.  At the lower right side of the photos is a path of round pavers that leads to the back yard.  At the left is the shade of the blue spruce that dominates the front yard and beyond it is the street.  Annie did most of the labor, and I supervised using knowledge from reading and sheer willingness to make decisions.

First we dug a trench and piled the soil up on the path.  Then we added the wood.  Twigs and small branches were put out on the street for a trash pickup by a neighbor.  I wish we had had more, but whatever.

Second we added grass clippings.  I asked the guy who mows the neighbors' lawn to leave them in the side yard for me.

Then we put the dirt back in the trench and added "compost" from our lazy compost pile.  It isn't really completely well rotted, so we mixed it in to finish.

Finally, we planted herbs.

It seems like there was some grass seed in the mix, probably from the grass clippings, so some weeding will be necessary.


Other items:

We also moved a bench from the nether regions.  It is a really pleasant place to sit, though I'd like to put some pavers under the legs to level it and prevent the legs from sinking in.  It also is part of my strategy to make the yard look like it was planned as opposed to just growing up in weeds.  All of the other front yards on the court, indeed in the neighborhood, are deserts of grass, so we need to do some public relations of a sort.

We planted sunflowers and Jerusalem artichokes along the "Nick strip", between our driveway and the edge of our property.  I also planted some horseradish from the grocery store there.  It had tiny plants trying to grow on it.  I debated about planting it in the ground as opposed to a pot.  I know it can be invasive, but it should be contained by the concrete driveway.  It is a dynamic accumulator and growing it in a pot seems to me to be wasting that function.

I have scattered New Zealand white clover seed around along the edges of the swales and places where we have grass or bare ground, especially in the back where the dogs have trampled down almost everything.  I sowed in among the glass gem corn, too.  I understand that while it spreads aggressively, it is not difficult to pull up, which we will do as needed, laying it on the ground in place as a green mulch.

Google Earth update.

This Google Earth image was taken in November 2013.  It updates the image shown below and clearly shows the fences and the garden area to the right.  The small fence from the back of the house to the main fence keeps the dogs out of the garden.  We plan to limit their access to a small area at the left (west) end of the lot up near the front of the house.  They have trampled the vegetation down to nothing and dig.  I suspect they will have to get really old and decrepit before they are allowed free access to the entire yard.  The history of the fence has to do with the dogs, too.  The smaller one, Dodger, was going over the chain link fence.  We got the 6 foot privacy fence in an attempt to contain him.  He went under it.  Now we have unsightly concrete blocks and other ad-hoc items around the entire thing which keeps him contained.  Annie leaned a pallet against the fence when we were building the carbon dump, though, and apparently he climbed it and escaped again.  We think he is part goat.

Swales at work

Annie took this photo of the swales actually doing their job of collecting water after all the rain we had.

Views of our property

I'm beginning by gathering information about the property.  Since I spent my career as a programmer for a mapping agency, I naturally have maps on the mind.I have collected these items over the last year from various public sources.

First I located the survey done in 2000 (Fig. 1) when I bought the house.  I scanned and rotated it to orient it northward.

Fig. 1. 2000 survey of the property.

St. Louis County has some pretty cool documentation on properties in the county. I located the one for our property (Fig. 2). Our property line is marked in blue.  The image must have been taken in winter and is several years old, as the garden does not show and the old chain link fence is in place.  Also, the river birches, red buds and locusts I planted must have been pretty small.

Fig. 2. From county tax information.

Figure 3 shows a view from Google Maps. I'm not sure exactly how I got it, as I haven't been able to duplicate it. It could be that they have changed their software. At any rate, I had saved it as a PDF. I extracted the image using The GIMP. The date of the image is a bit later and must be in summer. The chain link fence is still there and you can see the river birches I planted behind the house and the red bud and golden locusts I planted between our house and the house to the right in the image. You can also see the remnants of the small straw bale garden in that big empty triangular space to the right. That is where our garden is now. It would be interesting to see more current imagery.

Fig. 3. From Google Maps

Figure 4 is taken from the USGS 7.5 minute quad chart available from their site in geo PDF format.  Our property is approximately the small red square.  You can see how it fits into the larger area, being located on a ridge line.

Fig. 4. From USGS quad chart.

Figure 5 is from the same file as Figure 4. I discovered that you can turn on and off various layers in the geo PDF, but that saving a view as a file is not possible, at least with Adobe Acrobat.  So I did a screen shot.  At the very top left corner is the Missouri River. You can see the flood plain where some unfortunate development is happening.  Our property is indicated by a small red arrow.

Fig 5. Also from USGS quad chart,