Co-convenors' Report

Hi Folks, 

I hope you enjoy the first enews of 2013. Thanks to Jo for again putting in the time to edit this edition. As you will notice we have changed format to MailChimp to reduce drafting time, and make it easier for others to help and take over coordination when required.

Your new committee got together for its first quarterly meeting since the AGM at City Farm in a comfy, quiet garden setting. Thanks to Katrina Merrels, Peter McMullen, Peter Austin, Brooke 'Sparkles' Murphy, Kristylee Sharp, Harry Wykman, Jason Nicholls and Jo Thierfelder for taking on some essential roles this year and keeping us moving in a positive direction.

Given the understaffed team we will limit our aims and expectations this year as was expected, in these hard-to-make-ends-meet times, peoples surplus's are low, so I do sincerely thank those making the time.

As always there are a huge amount of opportunities out there, so we need to carefully choose our targets. Our plan is to organise, promote and invite everyone to National Permaculture Day to maximise the outreach and promotion of permaculture in WA with our limited energies. We are hoping to hold the National Permaculture Day celebration with Freo Permies this year after two successful years with the Lockridge Team. So pencil in 3rd of May for a morning of skills workshops, social networking and like-minded fun times.

The other event in our sights is Seed Freedom Week/Fortnight in October. The fight to keep food seeds (the source of all food) in people's hands rather than corporate patenting pockets and genetically modified money chests is a real battle. The best thing we can all do is become aware of this effort to control our food supplies, buy open pollinated seeds, grow them and save and share the seeds. Hence our promotion and efforts at this event will be based around teaching these skills to building capacity in seed saving in local groups. 

The main purpose for PermacultureWest this year will be to increase our visibility as the focal point and gathering point of interested people and groups motivated by permaculture, sustainable low impact living, and food production in WA. 

As people come to us we will be encouraging them and directing them to and thus boosting the numbers of local functionally resilient permaculture groups.  The website and enews are two critical elements to keep us finding a new audience. So we will be working hard here also.

But as I keep saying local groups is where it's at. Members have a rewarding and ongoing energy and skill trading system, so they can keep going forever. Peer support and conversations, seed saving, home and yard permaculture design, permablitz's and group tours are all easily and effectively organised in a local group.

For those coming to PermacultureWest to be part of the Permablitz program we highly recommend you join your local group and enjoy more than just their permablitz's. A Perth-wide Permablitz program takes huge amounts of surplus energy and organisation so is not viable or logical at this point.

Given we have this network and focal point let's bring new locals together and support as many new local groups as you can manage out there. So please get in touch if you're keen to help organise a local group and we will see who else is nearby and put you all in touch.

Cheers,

Co-convenors Charles Otway and Peter McMullen and the PermacultureWest Team.

Nutrient Cycling 

By Tod Smith, Terra Perma Design & Education

(This article is a preview of Tod's upcoming course on 10 Feb. See info under 'Courses')

We want to create gardens which function as mini ecosystems with internal recycling of water, organic matter and minerals as much as possible. A major outcome of this approach is profitability, and by that I don’t mean money necessarily. It is profitable environmentally if we can avoid external inputs as much as possible, it’s about keeping all the resources on site, or immediately local. 

Currently the most innovative, productive and successful alternative farming and gardening practitioners on the planet are managing their land to encourage natural ecological nutrient cycling processes to occur; hydrology, mineralisation, solar conversion, biodiversity. The last thing we want to do is continually be propping up a system with expensive inputs of which the real costs are often externalised and unknown.

The earth is a vessel, a closed loop for all biological life, all nutrient, water and minerals. None of these elements ever leave. Energy alone comes and goes, in the form of sunlight (and other cosmic forces) which enters the atmosphere and is absorbed physically as heat and biologically during photosynthesis, and a portion is reflected away. This fact is what allows for theoretically unlimited yield through potentially unlimited stacking strategies for conversion of solar energy.

We know from permaculture training and ecological farming models that our aim is to collect and convert as much solar energy as we can using the widest appropriate range of flora and fauna, both micro and macro, to manufacture the broadest spectrum of complex nutritional food and fodder as possible, not only for ourselves but as fibre and fertiliser for all the life we grow and provide for in our system, including wildlife.

Most of us clearly recognise the need to retain water and make it work for as long as possible within the system, and we readily employ water harvesting, storage and passive distribution where we can. It’s easy to see water, either directly or by perceiving its presence in the landscape. Nutrient content and retention is harder to determine.

So it’s generally less understood how to keep nutrients on site and recycling in tight loops, with well resolved pathways and exchanges, which are obvious and clear. Biodiversity is the key. The more elements and functions that exist, the more interactions between them, and the more nutrient exchange and holding capacity in the system, preventing escape wherever possible from vaporising (oxidation), or leaching.

It isn’t necessary to understand the full complexity and interaction; there is no-one who does! At the risk of using a mechanistic example; you don’t need to be a mechanical engineer to be a skilled driver. A basic knowledge of maintenance and the observation of a vehicle’s condition and performance is enough. With this a good driver can expertly navigate any terrain or situation without overtaxing or underutilising the vehicle. Or they could crash and burn, depending on the observation skills, sensitivity and responsiveness of the driver, and their knowledge of the vehicles capabilities and limitations.

Put in a more holistic way, there is a difference between complexity and complication. Complicated situations and circumstances benefit from simplification. Complex ones do not; they just fall apart and break down. This is a major truth of biology and nature – the more complex a system is, the more resilient; and therefore the more likely to withstand shocks, even management mistakes! Don’t be scared; get your hands dirty and let biodiversity build to the point of mind bending complexity. You don’t have to understand everything, just observe and respond thoughtfully and mindfully.

Industrial age thinking has taught us to understand each part of everything in classical top-down, centralised, compartmentalised, linear, reductionist, Greco-Roman tradition. That won’t be helpful in an ecological garden. This is the part where we have to remember that nature is the teacher, and be a help to her rather than a hindrance. Complexity is an ally.

The purpose of this workshop is to empower you with several known nutrient cycling loops, some of which you may already have, and show you methods for how you can integrate them to maximise nutrient conversion, exchange and conservation......

This was an extract from one of Tod's upcoming workshops; DIY Nutrient Cycling. It will be run on Sunday, 10 February and repeated on Sunday, 15 September 2013.

For more details on this and many other Terra Perma workshops see our new 2013 workshop schedule on our website.

Eating our way across Tasmania

Jenny and I went for a holiday to the Apple Isle over the Christmas break. Of course I couldn’t resist the temptation to catch up with a few people. Sally Wise is a well-known author of several cookbooks as well as a media personality. The first time we met Sally we had a wonderful afternoon tea with freshly made cakes and preserves, and bought two of her books about preservation and easy gluten-free cooking.
 
Sally, husband Robert and dog Della had lived at Eagle-Hawk Neck, in a historic-named Pirates Bay, east of Hobart on the peninsula where the famous Port Arthur convict prison is located. Sally had always wanted to set up a cooking school, which wasn’t possible at the Pirates Bay home. They needed more space and a lot more plant growing space.
 
An ideal property came about near New Norfolk, north-west of Hobart in the Derwent Valley. So they packed up and made the move. We caught up with Sally this time around after she had been there for six months and had just started teaching at the cooking school. Besides the house, the 5-acre property also had a building that was once used as the local child care centre with heaps of raspberry vines, some herbs and vegetables, and fruit trees already established. It was a matter of refurbishing the building with slow combustion and gas stoves, plenty of bench space and stainless steel shelving to hold all the different pots and pans and other implements required for student use.

Prospective students are being directed from the Tasmanian Tourism website as well as her own site and a few links from others. Sally offers half-day courses typically $110 to $150, depending on the type of workshop offered. Currently she offers classes in preserving, sourdough, slow cooking, gluten-free cooking, lunchbox fillers, summer drinks and lots more.

We had another lovely morning tea of freshly-baked tea cake made from homegrown apricots and raspberries, free-range eggs and cinnamon sprinkled on top. Then we had German spice biscuits, a range of rum truffle chocolates and candies, Anzac and cornflake biscuits, washed down with sparkling elderflower cordial. I gorged myself and Jenny said I was going to eat my way across Tasmania.
 
Sally generally only wanted to run two (or three at most) workshops each week, as many required a day of preparation, and getting ready for a class took quite a while to source ingredients and so on. If you ever visit Tasmania make an effort to join a class. You won’t be disappointed. Visit www.sallywise.com.au for more information. Her books are sold at good bookstores across Australia.

 
 

Should we test eggs from backyard chooks?

It is 50 years since Rachael Carson’s Book “The Silent Spring” exposed the insidious side-effects of DDT use and its movement across and bio-accumulation in the entire global food chain. This jolted the industrialised world into the realisation of both the interconnectedness and the fragility of the environment that sustains all life on this planet.  

DDT and other organochlorine (OC) pesticides were widely used across Australia after WWII and their use was only banned in WA in the mid 1990s on human health grounds. OCs were widely and heavily used in the pest control industry and by government for such pests as termites, ants, fruit flies, cockroaches, spiders and even headlice, and included DDT, aldrin, chlordane, heptachlor endrin, lindane and dieldrin. These chemical cocktails were sprayed and dusted, in many places, often annually, or sometimes more frequently, especially around the perimeter and in subfloors of houses and outbuildings, along fence lines and on fruit trees. 

The synthetic OC insecticidal compounds are generally very stable (including in the soil) and can persist for up to several decades after original use. However, they can become mobile due to the way soil and other treated materials disperse and they are also fat-soluble finding their way into such animal tissue as fat, brain and various glands. This means that they bio-accumulate (magnify) over time in successive levels of a food chain – as the body cannot easily get rid of it. Many studies have shown that OCs are detrimental to animal health as relative concentrations in the fatty tissues increase with links to a wide range of human diseases and conditions including endocrine disruption, reproduction and certain cancers. 

Soil invertebrate populations are at the base of the food chain for many animals, including chickens. Through ingesting contaminated soils, such favoured chicken treats as earthworms and other burrowers pick up and hold OCs. Hens eating such soil dwellers will, over time, bio-accumulate OCs in their bodies, which gets passed onto the eggs. 

So think about your backyard. Do you have chickens? Even if you have organically gardened for years, what is the pesticide history? 

As the top of the food chain in your household, to avoid the possibility of eating contaminated eggs consider testing for organochlorines at a NATA certified laboratory. Take an egg from a chook that has been in your backyard the longest. If you are sourcing your eggs from your neighbours ask them whether their eggs have been tested even if it is organically run.