Who are the people in your neighborhood?

Networks. In permaculture good holistic design deals in networks. The members of a community, any community (though my favorite is still plants) interact with one another in a number of ways, the most productive being those which have closed loop systems, where the needs and yields of one organism are met or used by others in the system.

This past weekend was another class weekend with Larry Santoyo, as our guest teacher. He spoke mostly about the human applications of permaculture design, or rather how we can use our systems thinking to design human systems that work. We created business guilds instead of plant guilds and thought in terms of meeting the needs of our community with our own yields and skills.

These concepts bring up the question, who is in your network? Where do you fit in your network? Is it the same place you think you fit or would the members of your community place you somewhere else? How big is your network? Can you meet the needs of your community simply with already existing persons or do you need to branch out?

I can readily identify a few different networks I am a part of, outside of facebook and g+ of course. Here in Denver there is an online parenting community that I am a part of. To become a member you must live within a two zipcode zone. This community is a bit too large to be a functional network for our purposes, however within the larger network there are many subgroups, this breaks the community down into more manageable pieces and allows us to develop closer relationships based on more than location, common interest.

I have been able to buy clothes for my kid, sell art, raise money to take my PDC, get my partner a job, get a bike, make great friends, create group crafts and connect with former students, all through using my subgroup networks. Many of the subgroups I belong to have the same people as members so we interact with each other often and have the ability to develop close relationships which creates a stronger network overall. It also allows me to see what needs we have as a whole that are not being met, as I see it, ours needs a better relationship to our food source. There are very few gardens (and gardeners) around here, not enough to support or encourage food stability in our community.

Lucky for me that I love to garden, not only that I love to cook, share food and teach others about growing their own, looks like I may finally have found the place we fit in the pattern. The next step for this network member is developing an NSA, utilizing my skills and other members yards we can fill a gap in our network, making us all more stable.

Can you identify the members of your own networks? How about the ones closest to you? Where is the need that must be met? Those unmet needs are opportunity. As Larry Santoyo said, "It's about byproducts, not buying products." Whose byproducts do you need and where are yours going?

Winter gardening

So I've already started working out in the yard. A few weeks ago I started planning the garden in my handy new garden journal. I have been meaning to get organized for some time, especially since most of my gardening/planting is very spur of the moment and if I don't write down what I did, I forget, which makes things very difficult when I want to replicate what I did or check on germination times later on.

We are also getting ready to place our seed order for this year, a task I do not hate. I think I've spent at least 25 hours going over different catalogs, online and paper, to find the varieties I'm looking for. We are incorporating more perennials into our vegetable garden this year, as well as around the rest of the yard. Perennials can work wonders in an annual garden bed, stabilizing the soil, providing a permanent home for all kinds of wildlife and micro-organisms while using their taproots to bring up deep nutrients and ground water. Plus I was able to find a bunch of cool perennial vegetable seeds here and here that I will be ordering very soon.

Which leads to why I've already started working outside. Here in Denver the winter is a bit sporadic. Yes, it can get pretty cold, 10-15*F, and stay there for awhile, but then we'll get a week long streak of 40-50* or even 60*, which really kicks my brain into full gear.

Since we live in a rental we really don't want to invest too much money into this property but as we also feel a duty to assist in regenerative living, we are making a few minor adjustments. On the NW corner of our house there is a tree stump that sent up shoots all last year, I'm guessing it was cut down about 4 or 5 years ago and the person who did so figured the stump would just rot away on it's own. Then they placed a lovely wire fence and simply bent the ends to go over the top of the stump, which left sharp rusty metal poking out in the corner of the garden.

Instead of the mostly waste of space that this fiasco causes I decided to create a little height and growing space in the garden with a hugelkultur. I just used what I had on hand, some kitchen waste, a bag of compost, some branches that fell in a storm a few weeks ago, a few bags of leaf mulch and some dirt from my yard. Oh ya, and since I needed the speed up the decomposing process on the stump I dumped some old juice concentrate on top of the stump after making a few chops to make sure the bacteria could get in there and start decomposing.

I started by laying the excess wood pieces around the stump, trying to pile them up as much as possible, then I just filled in with the other stuff I had, kitchen waste, compost and mulch, and layers of dirt as well. I tried to water as much as I could, if it's not wet enough we should be getting snow here pretty soon so that should help take care of it. Plus since it's right next to the downspout on that side of the house any moisture coming off the roof will go directly to it.

My last layer, as of now, was just a loose sprinkling of some bagged compost mixed in with leaves. I didn't have enough topsoil to finish it off, but I should be getting some soon, and when I do I will be able to put a good few inches on top of the entire mound. Then I'll just sit and plan what to plant on it while it cures and gets ready for spring, maybe some of my winter sown perennials? hmmmm

I'll be making another hugelkultur  on the opposite side of the yard in the next few weeks using some wood from an evergreen we trimmed in the front yard. I'm curious to see what happens with the two slightly different plantings this year. At least this year I'll be able to keep track of what I've done.