Lucy Zhang translating Permaculture for a new audience

With just over 1.33 Billion people in 2010, China is fast growing into a world super-power.

Although traditional Chinese farmers practiced various forms of Permaculture  for thousands of years, a lot of that culture is fast disappearing as China modernizes its Economy. When it comes to Permaculture taught and practiced in China, there doesn’t seem to be too much in the way of books or videos on the subject.

But that may all soon change.

It was a surprise for us at Ecofilms to get a message from Lucy Zhang who lives in the Guangdong Province of China wishing to volunteer her services to translate Geoff Lawton’s  Introduction to Permaculture Design  DVD for a whole new Chinese audience.

Lucy tells us that, “For the past two years, I have been exploring about natural health/diet, sustainable eco-living, and spiritual growth.”

“Now as a “free-style fruitarian” (if it makes sense), one of my dreams is to build a little food/fruit “Garden of Eden” on Earth following the permaculture ways, and to spread the seeds of green living around as I walk my own path.”

In fact Lucy through her Chinese blog as been busy translating all kinds of things.

“My blog is in Chinese,” she says, “with various articles I’ve written and translated out of my own passions.”

Hopefully Lucy’s passion for spreading Permaculture throughout China may catch on and find a whole new audience. We’ve sent her a copy of the English subtitles and Lucy is determined to have it completed next month right in time for a new release.

“It would be a great honour to be part of your wonderful work” she said, “and a “permie pioneer” in China.”
 

The Urban Permaculture DVD is finally shipping directly from Geoff Lawton’s website www.permaculture.org.au

One of the interesting segments on the DVD deals with a home swimming pool system that was converted to grow over 100 silver perch fingerlings.

The owners insisted that they do not feed the fish anything else rather than the natural algae that was already growing on the surface of the walls and fittings of the pool.
To get the fish up to appear at the surface of the swimming pool – so we could film them, Geoff Lawton threw pieces of bread to attract the fish. Remarkably the fish appeared in excellent health and were growing strongly. You would have thought that were wasn’t enough protein to enable the fish to grow and prosper.

Not only were the fish living off the algae, an excellent source for complex Omega 3 fatty acids, but the fish  were also living off mosquito larvae and other small crustaceans that appeared in the water. Not only small larvae but rare frogs were now also visiting this swimming pool.

What makes it more remarkable is that this back yard, is located under a busy flight path in Sydney Australia, yet the natural system was able to regulate itself and run as normal.

You can read more about it here.

This 55,000 Litre Swimming Pool is converted to a small fish farm using very little energy

Urban Permaculture DVD Front

If you’re a student of Permaculture and want to know how to implement Permaculure Design into your small Urban Garden then you should check out this DVD when it gets released in October.

World Premiere in IPC10 Jordan

Its been finished for some time now but we have held off publishing it until it gets it’s “world premiere” at the 2011 International Permaculture Conference being held right now in Jordan.

Geoff Lawton is keen to show it off as well as getting feedback from experienced permaculture teachers attending the event. At Ecofilms we are always concerned that we give as much solid information to the Permaculture student and that we haven’t left any vital detail out.

Geoff was very keen to show as examples in the DVD, simple solutions to complex problems. Low tech solutions you can do yourself like how to harvest rainwater and feed it to a series of cascading water features that collect your grey water and help feed productive fruit trees and animals.

How their nutrient flows can be directed creatively to feed a small backyard food hedge. Its those Permaculture relationships we were interested in showing.

Those interconnections are not very apparent to many people and in this DVD Geoff spells out those micro-connections that many people just do not understand.

As Geoff likes to say, many people are switched onto their ipods and and internet techno-wizardry. Capable of tweeting and face-booking the latest craze, but are totally out of depth when it comes to understanding the intricate relationship of nature and ecology just outside their bedroom window.

Its into this outdoor space that people need to reconnect and switch on, in order to live sustainably with minimal impact on the world around them. Thats what the Urban Permaculture DVD is all about.

Urban Permaculture DVD Back

The DVD shows you various small Permaculture garden with Geoff explaining how they function and interact with other elements. Then we go on a Permaculture Garden Blitz.  Geoff and a team of students renovate an extablish garden – the permaculture way over a period of three days. The client wants food security and to grow as much at home as possible. Geoff and his team plan the ultimate food growing solution.

You’ll get to see how it all shapes up.

The DVD runs for over 90 minutes and is ideal for the Permaculture student wishing to implement their own design and is looking for creative inspiration. There’s also an extras feature where Geoff plans out on paper the bones of another urban consultancy and the solution that good permaculture design can bring.

Thats the sort of thing we wanted to bring you.

Watching Geoff Lawton enter an unfamiliar environment – away from the classroom and into the natural domain and watching him plan his way to sustainable abundance.

Its like being there.

Urban Permaculture DVD

• PAL Format
• Region Free
• Over 95 minutes of quality information

Price: $39.95

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"Only on edges do we see fertility"

A couple of years ago whilst shooting the Food Forest DVD with Geoff Lawton he remarked how “only on edges do we get fertility” or words to that effect. At the time that phrase didn’t really make much sense to me but when you stop and think for a moment how nature creates soil – those words begin to ring true.

We hear a lot about soil degradation and soil erosion but we hardly hear about simple methods of building soil – the positive solutions we can go about to build fertility  back into landscape.

According to Permaculture teacher Geoff Lawton, the fastest way to create soil is in shallow lakes and ponds through anaerobic activity.

Organic matter is transformed into soil – but its a slow natural process.

A decorative pond in your garden is more than just an ornamental feature or a place for frogs and fish to congregate. It can also be a soil creation mechanism as Geoff explains in this you-tube clip.

Seeing soils being created in the most unlikely places is something not many of us seem to notice but it does go on silently day in and day out usually in damp and dark places where the fertility of carbon and water is captured and held – the edge factor!

Apart from zinc-alum guttering, soil creation goes on in the most unlikely of places. Storm water drains and channels have some of the best soil found along the edges of culverts and overflowing creeks. Anywhere it seems where water can collect and organic matter be allowed to accumulate. It goes on silently drip by drip, leaf by leaf with the odd worm arriving to add his mark in his new home.

Originally we were going to include this clip in the Permaculture Soils DVD but we honestly ran out of space and time and there was plenty of other stuff we wanted to go through. There are faster ways to build soil and Geoff is confident that by harnessing a little moisture, nitrogen in the form of fertilizer and some carbon – you can actively make good quality soil in your garden and grow fresh food as well.

But spare a thought for edges – without them all that top soil would blow out to sea…

They say nine out of ten people that ultimately get ducks into their gardens first started off with chickens. So what are the advantages of keeping ducks?

The popular perception or myth is that ducks need a large expanse of water; they make a lot of mess; destroy your garden and their eggs are large and oily.

But that’s not necessarily the case.

Urban Permaculture: Excess water collected from the duck coop is diverted down a swale channel to feed the garden

Its true domestic ducks do like to spend 10% of their time in water but the duck pond can be replaced with a child’s plastic paddling pool or even an old spa bath found out the local rubbish dump if you limit your ducks to just a few per household. Ducks love to attack snails and slugs and will keep the garden free of most insect pests. They’ll do less damage to your garden than chickens but will enjoy nibbling on young fresh seedlings so limit their activities around the backyard by netting new garden beds or at least fencing the ducks off from sensitive garden areas.

Duck eggs are larger than chicken eggs and the yolks are larger as well. Their eggs are well suited for baking and contain more calories than the average chicken egg.

Recently when filming with Geoff Lawton The Urban Permaculture DVD we came across a number of ducks in a small urban backyard where the owner had used excess rainwater harvested in a tank from the roof of the coop and directed the water to flow into an old recycled spa bath that had now become a duck bath.

Ducks would swim in the tub and naturally muddy and fertilize the water.
Excess water from the duck bath would flow down a small swale system that the owner had cleverly built. The duck nutrient would flow, soak into the mulched beds and feed the fruit trees grown on either side of the channel. With some clever planning and minimal energy use the owner managed to organize her garden into a soak that caught free nutrient flow – all powered by the activities of ducks. Its not rock science at all. But many people can’t make the obvious connections when it comes to harnessing relationships between animal systems and vegetable needs.

Sometimes the more simple the idea – the better it works. The ducks have a small tub to fertilize the water and that runoff with nutrients is diverted to an orchard of fruit trees. Economical and an efficient use of a simple concept is a good example of permaculture design.

Ducks are beneficial to the environment too. There is some evidence that they can reduce the amount of methane gas production in rice paddy fields due to their paddling around, rooting for grubs and stirring up the water!

Of course ducks in the rice paddy are not new concepts.
In his book “The Power of Duck” Takao Furuno writes about his life as a rice farmer in Japan.
He had been struggling with his fight against weeds in his organic fields. Recognizing his problem as an opportunity, he started thinking of the weeds, bugs and snails in his fields as duck food, turning his problems into a solution.

He ended up with a bounty of rice – thanks to the ducks helping to aerate the water with their paddling and their ability to gobble up snails and nibble at the weeds and fertilize his rice plants. Takao got the added benefit of tasty duck meat at the end of his journey.

Sometimes a little creative planning is all thats needed to enable a successful outcome and ducks are just one animal system available to the clever permaculture designer.

Geoff Lawton peels back a clump of reeds in an urban greywater reedbed in suburban Sydney

Permaculture teacher Geoff Lawton scrambles through a clump of reeds perched over a some large boulders and gingerly steps over a pond choked with Duckweed and Salvinia floating on the surface. You can hear the frogs croaking in the background. Birds are singing in the trees. He peels back a clump of papyrus reeds to reveal another  hidden frog pond.

You may think this is a scene taken from a wilderness somewhere in a thriving jungle. But its not. We’re in a suburban Sydney backyard. A yard no bigger than most you’ll find anywhere. But its not a normal backyard. Its a Permaculture garden with its own little wetland.

Building a wetland in your backyard is not something many people would ever consider – except if you’re into Permaculture.

Penny Pyett’s home has a wonderful grey-water reed-bed system that looks complicated at first but is so simple to design into your garden and the benefits are many.

Apart from encouraging native frogs and wetland creatures to return, its a channel for all household grey water waste. No dumping of water back into the storm water drain and out to sea here. Penny is using her waste water for productive ends. When the water is cleaned through a series of gravel reed beds and filtered through a series of frog ponds – it gets fed to her fruit trees.

Penny has got a food forest of productive trees that are also fed by the nutrient waste from ducks. Thats right! Ducks in the City. You need ducks to keep eating those fat little frogs you have growing in your reed bed – right? Thats all part of the Permaculture philosophy after all. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here so lets jump back and get back back on track.

Lets take a closer look Penny’s greywater system and take a look at her design.

All the greywater in the house is dumped into a header tank which is located under the house. In Penny’s case, it happens to be an old bathtub. The bathtub has a 45mm PVC pipe that runs underground to the desired spot for her three gravel reed beds. Course gravel is used to quickly soak any waste water and a series of thick reeds and boulders are used to hold the system in place should a sudden rain event or deluge occur.

Gravel

Any thick gravel is suitable preferably one that doesn’t have any limestone which will alter the pH. Wetland plants are designed to grow in waterlogged soils with very low oxygen levels. Most wetland plants are adapted to “pull oxygen out of the air” and diffuse it down through the roots creating little aerobic zones. This stimulates microbial activity and bacterial growth to occur. The bacteria will break down compounds suspended in the soil and help filter the water as it runs through the various gravel beds and out to the frog ponds. Microorganisms break down about 90% of pollutants and waste breakdowns in the gravel. The plants also act as a carbon source for microbe activity when they break down and decay.

A natural reedbed system

What Reeds are suitable?

Recycled ponds are buried and reused in a greywater system.

Plants able to be grown in permanent water swamps

• Persicaria lapathifolium Knotweed
• Ranunculus inundatus River Buttercup
• Phragmites australis Native Reed
• Restio tetraphyllus Tassel-rush, Tassel Cord-rush
• Triglochin microtuberosum Water Ribbons

Plants that are able to grow in fresh water swamps, creek and dam banks

• Carex appressa Tall Sedge
• Gahnia clarkei Tall Saw-sedge
• Gahnia melanocarpa Leafy Sedge
• Gahnia aspera Tufted Sedge
• Isolepis nodosa Knobby Club-rush
• Juncus kraussii Sea Rush
• Juncus usitatus Common Rush
• Lomandra longifolia Spiny-headed Mat-rush
• Dianella caerulea Blue FlaxLilly
• Crinum pedunculatum Swamp Lilly
• Cladium procerum Leafy Twig Rush

Frog Ponds

The grey water eventually drains into a small frog pond where small fish can also be added to keep the mosquito population under control. Penny Pyett likes to recycle a lot of materials thrown out by people back into her wetland. So discarded plastic children’s play pools and sand pits are collected and recycled by Penny into her wetland garden. Buried in the garden between thick reeds, they look natural and inviting. Water is constantly in play moving through the gravel and dipping from one large pond to another and so on. Eventually the water is returned clean and back into a swale that supports a food forest system. The end result is that you end up irrigating your garden every time you take a shower or wash the dishes. Nothing is wasted as the system takes care of itself.

Penny’s greywater reedbed system will be featured in The Urban Permaculture DVD out later in the year. Check it out.

Murray Hallam speaking at Permaculture Noosa on Aquaponics

Hope to see you there.

Whilst in Sydney we’ll also be filming a few backyard gardens with Geoff Lawton for the Urban Permaculture DVD. Many thanks to Permaculture North’s Penny Pyett for organizing the locations.

We’re also looking forward to seeing Murray’s new Aquaponic banners to be unveiled at the show. These are 6 foot high retractable screens that we created for his display. Murray had found a supplier late last week and eagerly contracted to have the banners printed – only to discover later that the supplier was located in China! Too late – the order had already been processed. We were assured that the banners were on their way and surprisingly enough made their way to Brisbane today. “Just Add Fish!” is my favorite. We know aquaponics is a little more complicated than that – but once you get it going properly perhaps we should have added “Just Add Fish – and pick your vegetables!”

Murray Hallam's colourful banners to adorn his Sydney Aquaponics Show

The idea of growing food in a mulch pit is something we came across whilst filming Geoff Lawton’s Introduction to Permaculture Design DVD. Geoff was climbing over what looked like a mountain of trash. Cardboard boxes, newspaper, old clothes and tree prunings. The mulch pit stretched over 20 to 30 feet and growing in the middle were a bunch of bananas. We decided to do something similar but weren’t too sure if it would work. Being in a sub tropical zone, our banana plant would also be planted in a more manageable backyard mulch pit that would be deep enough to contain many layers of mulch but protected from the wind and shaded by a large pandanus tree. My wife always wanted a Banana circle but given our soil condition it was always a difficult thing to do.
We live on very poor sandy soil so planting bananas directly into low nutrient sand was a no-no. We decided our bananas would be planted in the center of a similar pile of rubbish – a mulch pit. We hammered our 4 star pickets and used some old recycled corrugated skylight roofing to act as our frame to keep all the matter in place.

“Bananas love lots of nutrients and water”

Filling a pit of this size proved to be difficult at first as you will need a lot of carbon to fill a pit of this size. The grass clippings went into the pit. Tree branches. Anything we could find.

We ended up just having enough cardboard, old newspapers, straw and chicken manure to lay out a mulch trench a foot or so deep. This was enough to plant out some potatoes in the first year. The potatoes grew well and so did some cherry tomatoes.

You will need some patience with a mulch pit as things take a while to break down. But break down they will – transforming the layers into a rich mixture of organic matter and thriving micro-organisms.

After a while any mulch you lay will slowly decay and settle down and the height will reduce somewhat.

This was fine because over the months you’ll be surprised how much cardboard stuff you accumulate. It became a bottomless pit.

Christmas wrapping paper, beer cartoons, junk mail and anything that will break down went into this pit. Out garbage bins got lighter. To stop paper blowing away, we ended up throwing the bottom of a large timber pallet into the pit to keep everything in place.

Watering the mulch pit occasionally is a good idea as well. Any moisture captured will help rot down the carbon a lot faster and keep the base cool and damp.

Introducing a banana plant was just a matter of digging a hole into the cardboard layers and burying it with a little compost and watering the whole thing some more. The banana was not planted at ground level and would receive all its nutrients from the surrounding layers of rotting cardboard mulch – well that was the idea!

Now it was just a matter of waiting to see if the banana plant would grow? Over the months this plant seemed to do well as it produced one leaf after another. But would we get any bananas? I was told that bananas require a lot of moisture and love rich nutrients. Lots of nutrients, so keep piling them on. You can’t have enough. Our chicken coop was nearby so their manure also went into the mulch pit. Nothing was turned. It was all left to break down naturally.

“Would this mulch pit deliver the goods?”

We eventually forgot about it until last week. I looked up into the top of the tree and immediately noticed a brace of small green ladyfinger bananas. They looked perfect. I snapped off the photo you see above! How easy is this permaculture stuff I thought!

Its not the most handsome looking thing - but it works

Now a mulch pit is probably not for everybody.

Its best to have it hidden behind a clump of bushes as we have done because – its not the most aesthetically handsome thing you’ll see for a while.

The idea is to eventually remove the pickets and the frame when the mulch breaks down and rebuild the pit somewhere else in the garden.

This way you keep making soil from stuff that would throw away anyway. It would all end up going into landfill.

You also get the bonus of growing your own food.

Although this process is used in a sub-tropical garden, I’m sure it would also work in other cooler zones with other fruiting plants and nut trees. All you are doing is adding high quality nutrients back into the soil and recycling carbon.

Oh, and our banana tree is now suckering a new little plant – so just maybe – we may get that banana circle after all!

The notion of Victory Gardens sounds rather quaint these days and conjures up ideas of thrift and service for the war effort. Used throughout the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and other places, the Victory Garden was a symbol of pride that helped take pressure off the country’s food production effort during times of crisis like World War One and Two.

One idea that was born in that period and mentioned by Geoff Lawton recently whilst we were filming The Urban Permaculture DVD was just how the domestic chicken coop was pressed into action in a slightly unusual way. Visiting a domestic chicken coop Geoff commented how the floor of the yard was bone dry. The chickens have scratched the ground completely of top soil leaving the tree roots exposed. In general, this is not a good idea as there is no place for the chickens to take a dust bath as chickens love to scratch up sand and dirt and get rid of any stray mites that may be hidden in their feathers. The owner of this property had decided to screen off part of the yard from a neighbours boundary and placed large pot plants with trees in the yard. The pot plants had stayed in the yard for quite some time and the chickens decided the soil in the pot plant would make an excellent place for a dust bath. Whilst discussing the virtues of converting this chicken coop into a deep litter system, Geoff mentioned the possibilities of turning this long chicken run into a Double Run Chicken System. He said such a system was employed in England during the war as a Victory Garden.

The Double Run Chicken System

Geoff suggested that this chicken coop which had a generous run could be more productive if the owner would fence off half the yard – effectively splitting it into two chicken runs. Splitting the chicken coop into two runs or yards meant that the chickens could scratch and fertilize one area whilst the other zone was used to grow a main crop of vegetables. The chickens of course would have no access to this area until the produce was harvested and ready to be processed again. Then the chickens would be switched over to the second zone and allowed to dig through and fertilize this side of the coop. Adding any organic matter, tree branches, mulch and weeds helps the chickens build a rich mulch that will eventually break down and be used to build up the soil and replanted with vegetables. Look at it as a two-stroke food production engine. One area remains fallow, having the chickens fertilize it and matter break down and the other area is actively producing food. By rotating the crops and running the chickens from one spot to another – your chickens remain healthy and active.

The old chicken yard would be dug over and a fresh crop of seedlings planted. Because the chickens have fertilized the area and compacted the soil slightly any dirt that is moist in this spot will have a number of earth worms thriving in the ground below it. The chickens can’t get at the worms, but using a spade or a fork we can easily lift the compacted garden bed and aerate the soil. Those heavy ammonia smelling chicken coops you sometimes smell tell you that the soil is anaerobic caused by bacteria that can thrive without oxygen. Aerating the chicken bed speeds up the decomposition of the soil and allows the chickens to scratch for bugs, enjoy an occasional dust bath and if you decide to move the chickens elsewhere, be a perfect spot for a vegetable garden. In such a system because of the added Carbon, you are actively building soil into your garden and working on a solid foundation of sustainability. Its also a great way to maximize your garden space.

Siting your Chicken Coop in your backyard may be no big deal, but to place it at the highest point of your garden – well isn’t that usually reserved for your house as the premier spot?

Not necessarily so if you talk with Permaculture teacher Geoff Lawton.

The Problem

Before and After: Nutrient Flow distributed across garden bed with slotted agriculture pipe

Recently whilst filming the Urban Permaculture DVD we came across a home with already an established garden and a chicken coop on the highest point of the slope.

The chicken coop was positioned higher than the main house. The garden separated the gap between the home and the coop.

The problem for the owner was that when it rained substantially – the water would run through the center of the chicken coop in a torrent and flood the kitchen located in the center of the house.

So how do you solve a problem like this?

For Geoff Lawton, building swales in the Middle East or erecting large scale earth work dams on miles of open space might be easy to achieve, but the challenge now was of the micro scale. A suburban back yard with a problem.

Geoff’s solution proved to be quite easy. Slow down the flow of water running through the chicken coop gate and direct it to where it was needed. The garden bed.

Filming with Geoff Lawton you realize that he has an uncanny ability to notice little details that escape the average punter.

Geoff will point out some odd shaped bit of fungi growing on a log or pick up a leaf and show you that it has a bit of dried bird crap attached to it! Noticing little insignificant details like this is what separates the Permaculturalist from the rest of us.

“Whats the point of knowing all this detail?” I would ask him? Survival. He says he first needed to notice these important little things whilst working in the deserts of the Middle East.

Clues in the sand are hard to find and Geoff says he had to look very hard to find the solutions – the clues to solve every day problems in the barren landscape.

Geoff Lawton showing the Nutrient Flow under the Chicken coop

The Solution

So back to this garden. Whilst we were filming with Geoff he walked around the chicken coop and pointed out for the camera where the rain was forming a channel in the coop. Right under the gate to the chicken coop. Noticing little details like this is important to making the correct decisions. The problem is the solution. So what are we to do to fix this growing problem?

Building massive swales in a domestic garden were out of the question – right? So how to solve this water flow issue and stop the flood in the client’s kitchen every time it rained?

Geoff thought of the answer instantly.

Slotted drainage irrigation pipe. Just go down to your hardware shop and buy a roll.

Duh! There we were looking for a cosmic answer and the solution was pretty basic.

Dig a shallow trench the length of the chicken coop and fill it with irrigation pipe. Add drainage gravel and now every time it rains the water runs down the hill, enters the chicken coop, collects all the nutrient chicken poop runoff and deposits it into the trench and slowly allows the water to equally seep in and distribute the length of the drainage pipe and run down equally into the garden to fertilize all the plants rather than depositing it all in the kitchen. No need for pumps or additional fertilization. Let Nature do it for you with a little Permaculture help.

Small trench with slotted agriculture pipe and drainage gravel

Clever design.

Great idea huh?

Locating a chicken coop above your garden helps nature collect and distribute the poop evenly throughout the garden. Thats a good example of Permaculture design in action.

A simple idea that most people don’t think or act upon.

Solution. Happy Chickens. Happy Garden. Happy Owner.

The Urban Permaculture DVD loaded with great ideas like this one comes out towards the end of the year. Look out for it.