Holes and greens

Down in the pasture I've been noticing a a carpet of green and a lot of holes in the ground which have both taken over the uncultivated space at the bottom of our hill.

The greens, of course, are natural grasses and shrubs, a.k.a. weeds, which grow enthusiastically on our property with a tenacity and success that I have yet to match with the trees and vines I plant down there. They're not much of a worry to me, except where they are growing around my berry and grape vines and trees. 

Not willing to apply chemical sprays, I've spent the better part of two days hand weeding around the bases of the trees and shrubs, and have the bleeding arms to prove it. Berries are thorny and very well-defended plants, even when you are trying to help them by removing competitive plants around their bases.

The holes are a bit of a mystery to me, except for the largest ones which are from ground squirrels. There are small ones and medium ones, which could host anything from tarantulas to snakes to field mice.

While the greenery is a simple fix -- pull what's competing with the plants for nutrients and leave the rest -- the holes are a dilemma, because if we are going to have livestock, the holes will have to go.  They are just too much of a hazard to sheep, who could injure or even break a leg by stepping into one.

But one of the basic cornerstones of permaculture is leaving a certain amount of your property to nature and her critters, to do with what they please (within reason). And so I'd prefer to leave the bottom of the pasture to the hole-dwellers, if possible.

This will take some creative fence design, but I think having a balance of cultivated property and wild property is worth it.  As for how to do it, I'm not sure yet...but in the hours I will be spending down in the pasture weeding, perhaps that will give me more than enough time to think about it.

Of course with enough holes and enough greens, I guess I could always open a permacultural golf course, and with the general pathetic-ness of my golf game, the hole-dwellers are probably safe.

My disappointment with Fukuoka

I recently finished reading Masanobu Fukuoka's "Sowing Seeds in The Desert," which has become something of a must-read for homesteaders and conservationists recently, as was his older book, "The One-Straw Revolution."

While there are some things I really appreciate about his low-interference approach to growing vegetables and trees, when he steps into the larger arena of reining in the growing desertification of our planet, I think he makes a huge miss, not a hit.

The idea of growing non-native species in areas of land which have become deserts is initially appealing; after all, who doesn't think that stopping good land from becoming a desert is a great idea.  But it's only a good idea on the surface.  By introducing non-native legumes and grass species to a landscape that has never produced them, they have the potential ability to spread and eventually crowd out native plants.  Native plants are designed to feed the native wildlife at an appropriate pace (think about what happened when humans began growing grains in the grasslands of the midwest and the wild rabbit population exploded).  In other words, if you start monkeying around with the wild landscape, you do so at great risk to what native plants and wildlife are left in the surrounding areas.

As far as the destruction that's taken place on our planet due to commercial agriculture, I completely agree with him about its effects, especially when he discusses places that were once rainforests and are now barren fields where commercial crops were briefly grown and then failed, once the soil's nutrients were used up.  But I don't believe, sadly, you can just seed-bomb and grow a new rainforest there.  

But, left alone, some places could indeed revert to something close to what they once were, if allowed to do so.  If you take California's San Joaquin Valley as an example (where I lived for 25 years), it is a great example of a piece of land that's been used for a purpose that, under normal circumstances, Mother Nature would never have allowed. Crops have been grown, soil has been enriched, and large quantities of water have been brought in, diverted from other places.  

Now, if for some reason the world had to leave this area suddenly and not grow there anymore, eventually, with time, the native grasses would once again populate the area.  If you restored the rivers that used to flow there by un-doing the mountain dams, you'd even have some gorgeous, lush greenery in places.  But most of the area would, naturally and as God created it, be a dry grassland with some vernal pools here and there, greener as you got closer to the Sierras.  And while I am sure you could green up the whole place by introducing clovers and other green covers, that's no more natural for that area than rows of crops and orchards are.

Having said all this, I am thinking that perhaps I got started with the wrong Fukuoka book. I am actually looking forward to reading his other titles, which apparently deal with more that the small-scale farmer can do on his or her own land.  Those ideas and suggestions may be more practical for me and therefore, more understandable.  I could certainly see adding some, say, alfalfa and clover to our pastureland to increase its ability to feed our future livestock.  

But as for changing the world, my own opinion is that mankind has done quite enough of that, and that the best thing we can do is leave the truly damaged places (like former rain forests) alone, to recover and to heal -- and either revert to what they once were, or become something completely new and different.

Plant where you can grow

Granny Smiths -- Someday!

We ended up moving our orchard, all the way across the pasture from the west side to the east, from where we originally dug the holes last weekend.  When I went out to begin actually taking the trees out of their wrappings and placing them in the ground, I got a really good look, and feel, of the soil we were planting in and was not happy.  It was silty with a strong dose of clay and a bunch of limestone rocks thrown in for good measure.  Maybe wine grapes can grow in it, but I knew our fruit trees would not be able to get the nutrients they needed from that soil.  Oops.  

Bings and Royal Anne -- also someday!

 Big Ag and I had a discussion about whether or not it would be better to find a part of our pasture, maybe lower on the hill, with better soil (he was initially resistant because, let's face it, no one wants to have to go dig another 10 holes in the ground after you've already dug 10).  But we explored around and sampled what is in the pasture, all the way up and down the hill, and eventually found a large patch that had some lovely soil that was like crumby chocolate cake -- moist, dark and loose -- about mid-point down the hill.  (The new holes only took about a half hour to dig, the soil was so pliant.) Of course, the new spot is a totally inconvenient spot for an orchard from a human standpoint...it's a long walk down and back up the hill, but you need to plant your trees where they have the best shot at growing or it won't matter how convenient the spot is...you'll be taking a short walk to nothing.  A dead orchard won't care that you planted it in a great place for YOU.

So we decided to re-do our plan for where we were going to graze any future animals, place the orchard where the soil was best and work the pastures around that.  As usual, this place is a project list with a fence around it, and the project list can change in a moment's notice, depending on what happens real-time.  Today, it was finding surprisingly crappy soil in a place we thought would be fine.  Tomorrow it'll be something else.  We roll with it.

It's interesting though, to note that the worst soil is where the builders must have dumped soil from where they graded the hill to build the house 8 years ago, and the absolute best soil is down the hill, in a spot that hasn't been tampered with in any way whatsoever.  Mankind always thinks they're not having an impact in places they are, and the best places to grow thing are often the ones that have been pretty much left bloody well alone. 

It's all taking shape now...orchard, vines and pasture. It will all come to pass, but as with anything on this homestead, it probably won't look anything like what was originally imagined for it.   And that's OK.