Our recent SWAP cuts the ribbon on the SOI

Joel FitzGerald, with a capital 'G', came and stayed as the inaugural SWAP (social warming artists and permies) in the Shed of Interrelation.

The SoI is made largely from reclaimed, upcycled materials and is a small garden room built to host friends, peers, poets and artists to come and stay, contribute to our/their food and energy needs by working within our relocalising systems.

Joel brought with him valuable composting knowledge which has been keenly taken on and practiced since. One of his jobs in Sydney is working for councils, fixing methaney composts. Before his stay our composts would cook at a slow 35-40 degrees celsius. Now they're baking at about 60 degrees, fast tracking much needed fertile soil building. He also set a slower compost, collecting a pharmacopeia of barks and wild plants based on a biodynamic recipe. This will be an enhanced compost ready for the spring, he told me, as we set out to forage for the materials to build it.

Collecting bark (above) and plantain (below) for the compost.

We collected mushrooms, stinging nettle, chicken and horse manures to make a tea so as to mist each of the layers as we stacked green and brown materials (nitrogen and carbon) simultaneously. The misting with both the tea and rain water create an even moisture throughout the compost which help generate humidity.

Two important things I learned about composting from Joel was keeping the pile small, so as to concentrate the heat, and the fine misting to help generate the humidity. These two things alone seem to account for the temperature hikes I can now get in my composts.

At the end of the build we bulked up the last layer of straw,

before putting the pile to bed for the winter.

Last weekend Joel returned with his girlfriend, Emma, and the SoI's cherry was well and truly popped.

Last quarter moon phase, beets and Zero

We've just harvested our first beet for the season, grown in the greenhouse over winter. We grated it raw over a fresh weeds salad a few nights ago. Delicious! We know our soils are getting better when our root vegetables start kicking deep.

Speaking of soils, Meg, Zeph and I have been turning over new beds, collecting horse manure and composting throughout this last quarter of the moon cycle – traditionally a good time to attend to the soil, but not to plant. Today marks the new moon first quarter, time to get our corn and potatoes in.

And here is the newest member of the Artist as Family – Zero. Companion and household love-bundle mainly, however we hope to employ him in rabbiting duties to contribute to our feral food supply system when he's older. Catching rabbits is something his parents are extremely good at we're told.

First workshop at Tree-Elbow

My first Eat your Garden workshop went very well. We started in the house showing the systems of waste regeneration and growing we have put in place.

And then braved the cold to talk about soil structure, composting, root and stem pruning, chooks, planting green manures, crop rotation, and so on and so forth.

I was fortunate to have six keen and happy students and Meg made a honey cake for us, which of course was a highlight.

From soil to cellar

I've been obsessing over soil building again and obsessing over building things we need in the garden for little or no cost. Things like a cellar for our preserves and somewhere to keep the tools so we can finish the permie-wwoofer-artist-in-res shed – the Shed of Interrelation.

Every time I get in the car of late I'm accompanied by a highly conscious route and list. I leave rambling and fluffing about for when I'm on my bike; when I'm making my own human generated electricity. This morning I had a small list, which required 4.5 km of driving. I headed first to the local cafe where, for the past two years, they kindly donate us their green scraps. Then I headed to the hardware and picked up two polluting bags of cement to use sparingly. I then drove to the nearby horse school farm and shoveled up 6 chaff bags full of lovely crumbly dry shit. When I returned, together with the woodchips we still have left, I prepared a new compost.

I threw everything into the empty compost bay. The cafe scraps ponged because I haven't collected the bin for over a week. This pong is methane being released. It gets like this because the vegetables and fruit are starved of air. A good soil requires water, air, organic matter and many nutrients and minerals. Composting correctly will stop methane being produced. This is called aerobic composting.

Animal manure, green waste (kitchen scraps) and wood chips make a good recipe for soil production. A small quantity of crushed igneous rock will add iron to the brew.

I dump it all in the compost bay and do a work out with the pitch fork. (You can watch a previous workout here). But if you layer your compost like a lasagna you can save on the heavy, back breaking work.

Once turned through I would normally wet down and wrap it up with a tarpaulin. However, we are expecting rain, so I'll save our water and wrap it up afterwards.

Now I have some more cement I can go back to building the cellar. I'm using gleaned gravel and stone, and making a slip wall by clamping boards to the stumps that hold up our house. The cellar should end up costing about $100, if I'm patient and steady-state about it. We have many apples and nectarines to preserve and store from our neighbour Maria's orchard.

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.

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.

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

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)

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.

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.

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!

Compost area