Forest Garden Windbreak, Part 1

Thanks to the Cowlitz County Sheriff's Office Department of Emergency Management for this visual metaphor

Yet another one to be filed in the cluttered “we learn from our mistakes” tray. We observed, we measured, we surveyed and we drew a lovely plan with coloured circles representing the mature canopies of just the right amount of fruit, nut and nitrogen-fixing trees. We thought that the first thing to plant in a forest garden was the tree layer, especially when one considers how long it takes trees to grow and to grow to an age when they’ll start fruiting. We now realise that the first thing to plant in a forest garden is the windbreak.

A little snowbell tree, Halesia carolina, never made it through its first winter and it was only after its demise that I turned to The RHS A-Z Encyclopaedia of Garden Plants and found that, although it’s hardy, it should be sheltered from cold winds. The field being planted up is exposed to the north (cold, dry winds) and the west (winds from the south west and west, often wet).

Oft-repeated permaculture wisdom is to observe for a year, seeing your land through four seasons before making planning decisions. It seems strange but it’s only this winter that I’ve become aware of just how exposed this site is and just how windy it gets. Perhaps it’s that we sometimes only see what we want to see and are otherwise oblivious to something staring—maybe that should be blowing—us in the face. I notice it now. In fact, I automatically note what’s happening wind-wise each time I visit the field … and it’s often impressive. So, we need some sort of windbreak.

Our two reference books are Patrick Whitefield’s How to Make a Forest Garden and Martin Crawford’s Creating a Forest Garden, both are useful but the latter has more specific detail on windbreaks.

Martin talks about a “quiet zone of protection” just behind the windbreak, followed by a turbulent area. There is a calculation: the quiet zone “extends for seven or eight times the height of the windbreak.” Our forest garden is 33 metres wide (E/W) and 50m tall (N/S). That suggests our northern windbreak should be 6½m tall and the western edge 4½m tall. We’ll use that as a guide but taper the western windbreak towards the southern end so we don’t shade out the afternoon sun or affect the wonderful view too much.

Martin also suggests planting trees and shrubs that grow to the size required and therefore don’t require onward maintenance. Nice idea, but we think that particularly difficult to manage as trees will grow to different heights dependant on their soil and situation, in our case being closely planted with other shrubs and trees. We decided on a line of trees with a line of bushy shrubs in front, 1.2m between plants and 1m between the lines, the second line offset from the first by half, so that the shrubs block up the holes at the base of the trees.

We thought the list of plants suggested by both books were a bit limited, so in the next blog, I’ll explain how we chose our plants and what they are.

Barn renovation update : April ’13

After a long working day, we take a beer to the field, sit down and hang out with the sheep

It seems that the last time I posted something on our barn being renovated into further holiday accommodation was last July; I have carried on working, just not got round to blogging about it.

I’ve been asked, on several occasions by well-meaning and supportive friends, “haven’t you finished the barn yet?” The tax authorities used to send me a letter each year, reminding me of my responsibility to tell them once it was completed (so they can start taxing us) but they seem to have given up. The thing is, it’s mainly just me, I’m forever venturing into unknown territory (much time-delaying research and head-scratching) and doing things like reusing old beams and other reclaimed material, which take longer than buying new, and we’ve got a busy smallholding and a gite business to run.

We’ve recently re-roofed the existing gite, reducing the cost by me working with the couvreur Jacques, so that was the best part of two weeks taken out of the year. I had three weeks of enforced downtime following a hernia operation and have also spent at least three weeks in our woodland felling this year’s firewood and creating an ash under oak coppice system. There are only 52 weeks in a year.

I find that when other work intervenes, I lose mental engagement with the barn project until I awake in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, staring at the bedroom ceiling with my mind racing and black clouds of doubt threatening. I resolve to get back to it the following day and hope sleep returns.

It’d be wrong to have you believe this is a solitary battle because, from time to time, we get some very generous, enthusiastic and technically adept help from friends, volunteers and, like Andrew, volunteers who’ve become friends. So, in a sequence of short blogs, I’ll endeavour to bring you up to date.

The building is made of two foot (60cm) wide cob on a short stem wall of stone. The only proper way to finish this is either a lime render on the outside or earth plaster on the inside. I’ve worked with a few different people on a few earth plastering jobs in France and there are as many different recipes and ideas as there are enthusiasts.

I asked Samuel to help me on the entrance hall and the photo shows a before and during. Following blogs will bring you completely up to date.

Guest blog from volunteers Anne and Fiaz

Anne sows seeds

Stuart and Gabrielle’s smallholding was the first stop on our three-month journey through France, Spain and Portugal in search of ‘the good life’. A few months ago, we quit our office jobs in pursuit of a more fulfilling and sustainable way of life. We agreed that the best way to find out what this might look like would be to visit and learn from like-minded people, who have already set up a similar lifestyle to what we are interested in.

Fiaz building a nestbox

When we arrived in Brittany, we already had a vague idea of what our ‘ideal smallholding’ might look like: it should be in a remote location with no neighbours too close and we wanted to be as self-sufficient as possible.

After a week with Stuart and Gabrielle, who were very generous with their time, thoughts and information, we realised that being isolated from other people possibly isn’t that desirable after all, in fact it is very important to be part of the local community. We really liked their approach of creating mutually beneficial relationships with the people around them for trading skills, swapping products and sharing information and tools, without involving money.

They have also influenced our thinking about self-sufficiency, pointing out that if you produce everything yourself you may put other local people out of business, for example, they make a point of buying their bread at the village baker. Also some things just aren’t feasible on a small scale and it’s therefore better to focus on the things you like doing and can do well instead of trying to do everything yourself.

working as a team in their woods

Working with Stuart and Gabrielle in their woodland and on the smallholding, seeing how they do and approach things has helped us to progress in our thinking and see some things differently. Besides lots of food for thought, we were also fed incredibly well, we certainly didn’t expect to get 3-course meals and home-made cheesecake on our volunteering adventure, the bar for the next stop is set high!

Just a week into the journey, it’s already proved to be a worthwhile undertaking – many thanks to both of you.

Anne and Fiaz’ next stop will be a forest garden in the Limousin area and a certified organic pig farm in the South West of France. You can follow their travels at www.simplelifetravels.wordpress.com

Busy, busy, busy ...

Not for the first time, I'm apologising for a hiatus in my blogging due to being too busy: running around like a bunch on newly born lambs, as busy as bees impatient to get spring started and go out collecting food. 

We've had back-to-back volunteers and so got a lot of work done on the barn conversion and in our woodland. We're taking a proper day off (minus a couple of small but essential jobs) before holidaymakers arrive in our gite (with it's new roof) tomorrow and we return, once again, to the 'list of things to do'.

Upcoming blogs will include how we got all three hives safely through a long winter, our attempt as this year's permaculture 'must have': a hugelkultur bed, work in the barn, with hemp & lime and earth plastering, new doors and walls and ceilings going up, forest garden windbreak and making willow baskets and traps against the Asian hornet.

 

No dig gardening

“To dig or not to dig, that is the permaculture question:
Whether ’tis nobler for the mud to suffer
The spades and forks of energetic gardeners
Or to leave alone this sea of microbes …”

William Shakespeare, 17^th century gardener.

When trying to explain to someone what perm(anent agri)culture is, one subject that will quickly come up is that of ‘no dig’. Soil is degraded by continued turning: organic matter lost to oxidisation and beneficial microbes and fungus disturbed, even killed. There are, however, very good reasons to dig, such as to decompact the soil and remove perennial weeds.

One aspect trumpeted by enthusiastic practitioners is that permaculture implies reduced effort and so land intended to be bought into cultivation is sheet mulched (with cardboard and straw) and the planting done through holes cut through the mulch. By the end of the season, the grass and weeds are dead, the mulch has decomposed and you have a crop of veggies. That doesn’t deal with compacted soil though and some perennial weeds, such as couch grass, are particularly resistant to this tactic, weaving pale strings of stolons in between the cardboard searching for an opportunity to germinate. 

Our own policy is to double dig first, getting up close and personal with our soil, removing what we don’t like the look of and giving the soil a loosen to at least two spits (length of a spade head) deep. After that, we might dig it again the following winter to remove of any persistent weeds that we didn’t get the first time and then go to no dig thereafter.

We wanted to plant up a little corner at the junction of two fields with three witch hazels of different colours, an edible hazel, a manuka and a load of bulbs to give us some colour at the grey end of winter as it turns to spring. I put my fork in the ground and found it a touch stony. And it was a touch stony to the left, to the right, in fact just about everywhere.

A look at some old photos given to us by the previous owners when they took over this land from retiring farmers shows this area to have been used as a tractor turning area (= compaction) and another neighbour remembered that Roger used to tip a trailer load of gravel each year over this area to stop his tractors getting mired in the mud.

 

Rather than just digging planting holes for the shrubs and thinking that burying bulbs wouldn’t be easy, we decided to double dig the whole area. All of the gravel you see in the pile came from that small triangle of field; that’s a lot of riddling! I reckon that there’s the best part of a ton there and it will avoid a trip to the sablière the next time I need to mix some concrete. We added home-made compost, raked it level and planted up, then mulched with deciduous woodchip. With the grass-suppressing bulbs and the mulch, we hope that this pretty corner will be very low maintenance from now on.

Not waving but drowning

Gabrielle normally announces my blog posts on our Facebook page for extra cross-media publicity mojo but declined with my last but one. Having just posted pictures of cherry plum (myrobalan) blossom against a blue sky and pictures of a local lake on a sunny day; she didn’t want to draw potential holidaymakers attention to my cold, soggy tale, “Mud, glorious mud”. 

To redress the balance, I bring you a cockle-warming cliché of spring: newborn lambs out on green grass under a blue sky.But wait, what have we here? 

Heavy grey skies bringing us 47mm of rain in 24 hours, then a dip in temperature and strong winds blowing in flocons of neige. The single large white ewe installed herself and her charges in the only field shelter and stood guard. Our seven pint-sized Ouessant ewes, all heavily pregnant, stood forlornly outside. Our sheep seem to cope with the cold and the snow but don’t like the rain.

We ran them over into another field where, unsurprisingly, they made a beeline for the shelter. I’m undecided whether to leave them there, when the weather cheers up, or regroup them. I’m minded to just bring mum and newborn across as each one gives birth, separating the maternity unit from the kindergarten. 

I keep braving the cold to check to see if any of the other ewes are showing signs and notice that the big ewe is often out in the field with her youngsters. They seem quite happy to run around in the snow and even to sit down while mum grazes. These four-day-old creatures are obviously enjoying the superior R-value  of sheep’s wool insulation. 

 

Lucky us !

We’ve had a throw of the dice! In a winter noted for its wetness (see my previous damp posting) we discovered that we needed to re-roof our holiday rental cottage. Ideally, we needed to do this during the quiet season, i.e., the winter, which has been notably wet. Roofing is a task that strongly benefits from dry days.

We started a fortnight ago today, stripping the front of the roof in a day, then wrapping it up with tarpaulins, “au cas où” (just in case). Work progressed well with any rain barely a splash and always overnight. I was busy on two fronts, with Andrew back for another volunteering session in our barn renovation. When Jacques the roofer didn’t need me, I joined Andrew in the barn. Jacques has an annoying habit of wanting to work until 7pm and, as part of the deal to keep the costs down was that I helped, my days were very long.

Working with the willing Andrew on Saturday, the weekend seemed too short before Jacques returned on Monday (as Andrew headed home) and we attacked the simpler rear roof. We had three dry days and were sweeping up and loading Jacques lorry on Wednesday evening when a few spots of rain fell. It could do with a wash, he said, smiling.

Going, going ...

Well, it’s had one today, with 47mm of rain falling before it turned to snow. We can be quick to moan when things don’t always go as wanted, so it’s right to appreciate when one benefits from a stroke of luck. The holidaymakers that arrived yesterday confirmed that the inside of the gite is not only cosy but absolutely dry.

I took these last two photos locally, which show how valuable, fertile topsoil is eroded from ploughed fields with little ground cover. 

Gone !

Mud, glorious mud

The weather today will be mainly rain, interspersed with frequent showers, downpours and general all-round humidity. It was wet yesterday, it’s wet today and it’s going to be wet tomorrow. In fact, it’s wetter than a very wet thing that’s been soaked in a bucket of water and left under a running tap.

The ground is like a sponge to walk on. Cultivating such soil is a no-no and there's a danger that the soil can be compressed and damaged when in this state. Curiously, our sheep walk in set tracks in the field when moving about but spread out to graze and, as they're half the size of a ‘normal’ sheep, I’m not too worried about their pasture; the pig paddock is another thing.

We normally don’t keep pigs over the winter but due to special circumstances we were looking after four pigs for a local farmer until up to slaughter weight, which meant keeping them over the heart of a very wet winter. Pigs are heavy, disturb the ground with their snouts and, at this time of year, there’s nothing but roots to interest them, even the acorns long having finished. They’ve turned their paddock into some sort of homage to the Battle of the Somme.  

Much is made of pigs’ delight in rolling around in mud but that's mud that is cooling and protecting in summer: an organic sun tan lotion. However, this is a different thing and I felt a little sorry for these barn-raised pigs sploshing around in this cold exterior and we spread plenty of straw around several times to try and improve the situation. This is a one off for us, never to be repeated but must be a real issue for farmers who are rearing free-range pigs through all four seasons. Free-ranging pigs is good for the pigs but can be really bad for the land. Some people have remarked to us how adding all this organic matter (straw) must be good for the soil but I’ve been mixing cob for our barn renovation and, to a clay soil, one adds water and straw and mixes it on a tarp by marching vigorously all over it, which is just about exactly what the pigs have been doing. I fear that when it dries out, we’ll have ourselves one hell of a slab of ‘organic concrete’. That might be the time to ask one of our neighbours to plough it.

Now the French word for mud is ‘boue’ or, and I think this is slang, ‘gadoue’. Do you remember the 1984 pop party record Agadoo, by Black Lace? It went, “Agadoo doo doo push pineapple shake the tree …” I’ve rewritten it:

If you’ve nothing else to do, watch the original on YouTube and sing along with my new lyrics … I did!

     La gadoue, boue, boue, mucky piggies fondue, 

     La gadoue, boue, boue, could do with a canoe

     To the left, to the right, jump up and down and twist about

     Come and dance every day in this sloppy muddy goo

Good health

Latest volunteer Tom at work in Paris                (Photo: ©Cédric Martinelli)

I’ve been up against a deadline to get as much of the urgent heavier jobs done before Thursday, when I went into the local hospital to have a hernia repaired. I’m now walking around rather gingerly, with instructions not to do too much at all physically, for the next three weeks or so. It was heavy sneezing that did it: during a succession of bellowing, snorting “aitchoos” something strangely went “bloop” in my groin. It was quickly obvious what it was and, thankfully, the excellent health service here allowed me to see my doctor, have a scan, see a surgeon and be booked in for repair in double quick time. In fact, I even had to ask to have the op later than I was first offered, so I could host a volunteer for a week, take our three pigs to the abattoir and a couple of other urgent smallholding jobs before my obligatory R ’n’ R.

As Gabrielle headed for the ferry to go and support her mother through her second cataract operation, I drove to the local railway station to collect volunteer Tom, a furniture building,  computer programming Englishman in Paris.

northern windbreak for forest garden

I think we pretty much did something different every day. We attacked a brambly jungle in our woodland, creating a path around the edge of a third-of-an-acre plot where we want to set up a coppicing cycle (more on this in future blogs). Continuing work I’d already started, we mattock-ed off a two metre wide band of turf, prepared holes and planted a double row of trees and shrubs that will serve as a windbreak to our developing forest garden. 

86-yr-old Monsieur Gallée with his 'almost new' tractor

We also spent a day beating an overgrown laurel hedge into submission at the house of our vet. Another of our exchanges, we “pay” for any veterinary treatment to our animals through gardening jobs. We were helped by the jovial, energetic and elderly Francis Gallée. At 86, his appetite for life and work outdoors is undimmed and he took all the brash to the nearby municipal tip, saving the larger trunks for himself for heating wood. Smiling proudly, he told us that he’d bought his tractor new … over thirty years ago.

Tom grinding coffee

Tom introduced me to the pleasures of freshly-ground coffee. He brought with him a Japanese Porlex hand grinder and a packet of beans and we finished each breakfast with a small cup of black coffee, drunk with the care and enthusiasm of a connoisseur. We ate well, grateful that Gabrielle had frozen a store of home-cooked food before she left.

One more job I had lined up was the taking of one of last year’s lamb for the freezer. I put this to Tom, saying that I could easily wait until after his departure as I didn’t want to push him into something that he would feel uncomfortable about. He had a think and said yes. Following a thorough explanation of what I was going to do, the animal was humanely slaughtered (using a captive bolt stunner) skinned and drawn. It was then wrapped in a clean sheet, hung overnight in our workshop and butchered the following morning.

I devilled the kidneys (with a few added mushrooms to bulk it out) for lunch the following day and Tom said, “I felt it was one of the most direct relationships I've ever had to my food.” After a half-day’s work on Sunday, Tom's last day on the smallholding, we treated ourselves to a traditional Sunday roast, with a very fresh leg of lamb, roast potatoes, boiled cabbage (out of the garden) with loads of gravy. As Tom had introduced me to the finer points of coffee appreciation, I felt I ought to return the favour (flavour?) by opening a good bottle of Bordeaux, which we sniffed, swirled and sipped before gulping ... absolutely delicious!

Online Permaculture Design Course

Ragmans Lane Farm

Patrick Whitefield

I did my PDC with Patrick Whitefield at Ragmans Lane Farm  back in 2004. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Ragmans is in a lovely part of the Gloucestershire countryside and makes a great setting to the lessons, the organic, vegetarian food was delicious, accommodation comfortable, I like learning in a group and Patrick and Cathy are great instructors. However, there’s a lot of information to absorb in just under a fortnight and, good value though it is, you’re paying for full board and lodging, so it is quite a chunk of money and taking two weeks off work could be difficult. Patrick’s new online permaculture design course might be just what you’re looking for.

A surveying exercise on my PDC at Ragmans

Gabrielle has wanted to do a PDC for quite a while: she wanted the theoretical grounding to the practical work we’re doing here in Brittany, to be encouraged to delve a little deeper into the elements of permaculture and, lastly, to have the formal recognition of having done the standard 72-hour permaculture course. We investigated various options but kept coming up against the obstacles of having to take a considerable time away from our own smallholding, woodlands and holiday cottage business and the cost. Then we heard that Patrick was putting together an online course, which seemed the perfect solution.

Me learning online

He began by putting his Sustainable Land Use course (now called The Land Course) online and we both signed up for that. It’s allowed us to work through the four modules of Soil, Ecology, Organic Horticulture and Sustainable Forestry in the order of our choosing and at our own pace. Patrick has effectively added in some aspects that would otherwise have been missing in the translation from a real course to a virtual one, for example, monthly Skype conferences have allowed us to have some direct instruction from Patrick, followed by a discussion amongst fellow students. The online forums have allowed us to communicate with each other, asking questions and sharing ideas and, of course, we were always free to email Patrick.

We’ve come to the end of the Land Course, perfect timing as Patrick has only just put the permaculture design course online. You can see the prices here, there are discounts if you take more than one module. Even if you don’t fancy doing the whole Land Course, I recommend that you consider taking the Ecology module as it serves as the perfect foundation course for the PDC, i.e., I think you’d get more out of the PDC having done the Ecology module first. Why? As observing natural ecosystems (to understand how they work and copy them) is central to permaculture, the Ecology module's explanation of observing and interpreting what you see is invaluable: it certainly increased my own observation skills hugely. If you don’t do that, then at least get hold of a copy of Patrick’s latest book, TheLiving Landscape - How To Read It & Understand It.

As I’ve done my PDC, it’ll be Gabrielle that takes this online course but I shall be looking over her shoulder and it should be a useful revision of the elements that make up permaculture; we’re looking forward to it.