Permaculture Intensive: Final Week

The final week of out Merritt Permaculture Course went by fast. There were some beautiful people and I want to thank everyone for all they added to the course.
Some week highlights:
Christina Bertea, artist and plumber - also of the Greywater Guerillas - was a very special lecturer and hands on instructor. We partook in a small scale greywater project that redirected the water from a washing machine to the garden outside. In the owner's yard we harvested an old stalk of a banana tree and split it open - you can cook and eat the heart of the tree.
We also took a hike into the oak forest across the street from campus to see what the original hillside looked like before they bulldozed the top of the mountain to make room for the school! Many useful plant sightings - thimbleberry, native hazelnut, elderberry, snowberry, cow parsnip, mugwort and more. Elizabeth, an herbalist in our class, told me her way to harvest useful medicinal plants - ask the plant! I harvested some mugwort, which is a fragrant plant used by the indigenous peoples and others to induce lucid dreaming. You can sleep with it under your pillow. I did have some vivid dreams! There were some incredible scenic moments on our brief hike - the canopy was quite high and many of the trees must have been hundreds of years old.
Thank you Christopher for leading a whirlwind two week urban permaculture experience. There was a lot to cover and I think we all went away feeling a bit more connected to each other and the land.

Permaculture Intensive: End of Week 1

As we get ready to start our final week of the Merritt Permaculture Intensive, I wanted to share some highlights from the last few days. We had some great speakers and ended with a workshop at Christopher Shein's urban permaculture site in Berkeley.
I was very impressed with the work of Chantelise Pells, a local landscape designer who did her Master's research on the sophisticated terracing systems of Peru. She lectured on these farming techniques, the way that the people once worked organically with the mountain watersheds and cultivated plants that were adapted to a variety of altitudes, including countless varieties of potatoes, many of which are now lost. A lot of local landscaping projects involve hillsides, and Chantelise incorporates unique stonework and terracing into her native and edibles gardens here in the Bay Area.
On Friday at Christopher's place, Debbie Collins of Water Assets taught us how to calculate the yearly rainfall on a property and how much could be caught on existing roofs and other surfaces. Very enlightening.
We took a walking tour of Fort Awesome and Fort Radical - a local cooperative housing community. These two houses have 32 people total, an impressive rainwater catchment and a greywater system and a shared backyard that includes mature fruit trees and a lush permaculture garden. They also have a nonprofit, Cooperative Roots, that advises others on how to form low-cost cooperative housing situations.
Below are a few photos from the last few days, including my favorite moment - Christopher showing us his urban humanure system!

Permaculture Intensive: The first 2 days

On Monday I began a two-week Permaculture Intensive at Merritt College, led as always by the amazing Christopher Shein. We got a lot done in our first days and I was pleased to see so many familiar faces. The first day we had a delivery of raw materials to add to the Permaculture garden: compost, manure, mulch and logs. We were able to spend some time weeding the hillside and creating a new compost pile beneath a tree.
We lined the compost bed with logs, as we've done with the raised beds throughout the garden, and then filled it in with mulch, manure and a combination of green and brown clippings. This pile should get quite hot and break down fast - and it's right next to a bunch of fruit trees and beds that will benefit from having a source of nutrients so close by.
Today we began by building a stack of haybales, after a delivery truck dropped by with about 100 or so of them. Soon after we broke up into groups and dispersed throughout the hillside to create small versions of the compost bed we created the day before. We used a different model: we found clear spaces on the hill, in the upper orchard part of the permaculture garden, and dug some shallow trenches to fit the hay bales into. Then the haybales became a barrier behind which to dump horse manure - a sort of retaining wall, or compost bed. You can check out the photos of the finished version. These beds will create a local source of compost for the fruit trees and other edibles on the hills - and are located much closer to these plants than the former compost pile.
Here's some pictures of the last couple of days, including some images of the already established garden bounty . . .