From Innerchange Magazine via Treehugger comes this article by Will Hooke, a permaculture designer and professor of landscape design in the Department of Horticultural Science at NC State University in Raleigh, NC.
His home is an urban permacultural system on 1/5 of an acre near downtown Raleigh, NC. Permaculture is permanent agriculture, seeking "to design and maintain systems that have the diversity, stability and resilience of natural ecosystems." It is a gardener's dream with flowers and vegetables, fruit trees, arbors, all working together.
Bill McDonough's Ecological Design Principles
waste equals food
use only available solar income
respect diversity
love all the children
are good permacultural rules of thumb as we approach a zero emissions, zero waste, and zero energy culture.
Maybe Candide was right after all.
Chicken Grapevine
To protect the chickens from predators at night (dogs, raccoons, possums, etc.), we built a lockable, welded wire cage. Because chickens need to be cool in the heat of our summers, we grow our grape vines over this arbor/cage. Japanese Beetles love grape leaves, so they will go to our arbor first before searching for other delectable plants. The defense mechanism for Japanese Beetles is that they simply drop whenever danger lurks, so we shake the arbor first thing in the mornings when we go out to feed and let the chickens out. You are likely guessing and are correct that chickens simply LOVE Japanese Beetles. So, we have a complete system: Security from predators, shade, a protein source for our chickens, control of insect pests, and a protein source for us in the form of eggs. In addition, the chicken coop is located immediately adjacent to our production garden, and once a week, we take the straw bedding and ground covering from the coop and pen and throw it over the fence into a pile in our garden space. This is spread around our plants and becomes the main source of fertilizer for our year-round greens, our veggies, herbs, and our fruit-bearing species of trees, shrubs, vines, and ground covers.
Didn't New Alchemy Institute do a study on the use of chickens as pest control in gardens back in the 1970s or 80s? I know I've read Mother Earth News articles on the subject. I know of at least one person who keeps chickens and maybe even guinea hens in the neighborhood.
Water Footprint
Another example of setting up a system in our home landscape involves water. Raleigh is located in a region that has, with some regularity, periodic droughts between July and late October, often lasting for two months at a time. My wife and I have determined that it takes approximately 300 gallons of water to irrigate our vegetables and fruits, and we typically have to do this twice a week in order to keep the plants healthy in drier times (three times per week allows them to thrive). The City's water rationing policy restricts our use of tap water for irrigation, but we've built a system that allows us to abide by this policy while giving us the necessary water. We do what the majority of the people in the rest of the countries in the world do; we collect the rainwater that falls on our roof. For every 1000 sq. ft. of the footprint of a house, around 600 gallons of water can be collected for every 1" of rainwater that falls. Our house is small (intentionally so because a smaller space uses less resources), being only 1000 sq. ft. Clearly we have to store the water we catch in order to get us through the periods of drought, and eventually, we will have the minimum necessary storage capacity of around 5000 gallons. If this seems like a lot, doing the math on the rainfall, even in last year's drought where we only had 39"+ of rain, it still translates to 23,400 gallons of water that fell on our small roof. In addition, because my family wants to be able to be able to use the water that we capture for emergency situations (like when Hurricane Fran made the City's water supply suspect for a week in 1996), we've converted our asphalt roof to a metal roof to increase the cleanliness of our captured water.
This is another way in which
Solar IS Civil Defense
We should be replicating these models throughout the country. I'd like to see people doing local agricultural and economic networking with demonstrations of renewable technology and techniques at the over 3700 farmers markets that meet every week during growing season throughout the USA. In the Boston, MA area, that's from Memorial Day to Thanksgiving, six months out of the year. Imagine what might happen in a community that was learning community production and preparedness once a week at the farmers market.