Permaculture Certification / Yoga Immersion video

My buddy Hari just finished this video... I think it pretty much speaks for its self. It reminds me how lucky I am to have the opportunity to live and work here:

Raising A Young Food Forest - Dealing With Monster Weeds

Thank god raising a food forest doesn't involve standardized testing, college applications and immunizations. All the tough choices at the moment seem to involve which weeds should we pull and which should we leave? We have some nettles that are higher than the young trees planted beside them... and some lambs quarter that is the same size as the two year old ground cherry starting to fruit beside it. All of that stuff doesn't seem to be too much of an issue actually. The real problems are the grasses popping up (we don't want them around the fruit trees for sure), the dock, the carpet weed, smart weed in the more wet spots (although it is good for identifying which spots are wet when its not raining)... but anyway you get the idea. There are some things in here that are pesky and we want to keep them down until the rest of the plants have a fair shot at growing up. So I've been investigating plants that would be more useful and that will spread without too much work to fill the space between other plants. I figure that if we had a lot of something useful as a high ground cover, we could still have a place for small animals to dwell and something to compete with the weeds that don't serve an immediate relevant purpose or might harm the plants that we are invested in. So the few things that I'm going to try are Soap Wort, St. Johns Wort and Chamomile. Clover was suggested to me but I was thinking about something a bit higher growing and something that we could use for more applications. Soap wort if you don't know anything about it is an interesting plant. Its essentially a weed with beautiful white or purple flowers. When the flower is wet and rubbed, it lathers. Turns out people have been using this as soap for thousands of years. I'm really excited to try growing it here. I don't believe anyone here has tried it before.

There is also a failed herb spiral down by the movable greenhouse (also not very close to the door to the kitchen, I'm not sure why they chose this spot). The chamomile there has gone totally crazy. My goal is to transplant as much of that as I can. My thought is that it will go really crazy in the food forest too, but if we need to cut it down or pull it, we can dry it or make tea out of it. Actually, at the ashram we can be pretty sure that it will actually get used in such large amounts. Now that I think about it, its pretty ridiculous that we ever buy chamomile at all...

The third plant is St. Johns Wort which I'm told spreads very quickly. Also, its very useful as a medicinal herb and has pretty flowers. So thats what I'm trying. If anyone has other ideas about plants that are good for this application in a food forest, please share your thoughts and experiences with us with a comment or email!

Here are a few photos of the food forest I've been working with:

Thanks for reading and come visit us if you're ever in New York! www.sivanandayogaranch.org

Flow Forms Between Five Ponds With Figure Eight Form

This has been a work in progress for about four years now. Bharata and Ramprassad have been working all winter making the flow forms from a mold in the root cellar (to keep a consistant temperature without heating). Charles and Julia and the crew here have been working non stop the past few days to put the finishing touches on the system. Here are some photos (keep in mind, this is a work in progress):

I'll post more photos and video once we've got it completely done (hopefully tomorrow.) Thanks for reading and come visit us at the Sivananda Yoga Ashram in Woodbourne, NY 

( www.sivanandayogaranch.org ) 

Moving the Underwater Movable Greenhouse Above Ground

So I've planted a variety of things in the greenhouse, basically whatever I could find at the moment. There are some peppers, some broccoli, and something else which looks like cabbage that I found from the horticultural gardener on the ashram. We mulched a bit more to try to absorb some of the water and here are some photos of the improvements:

I'm sure the next time that we have a heavy rain, it will go back to its natural swampy microclimate but until then, we have a place to walk without scuba gear. Anyone with ideas for a solution? We'll be brainstorming here... The Yeltons arrive tomorrow, so there will be answers!

Underwater Movable Green House - Taking a Stab at Four Seasons Gardening

We've been trying to keep up with our Permaculture systems here at the Yoga Ranch (www.sivanandayogaranch.org) and something really struck me about this one thing we've been working on. See, last October, we were lucky enough to have Julia and Charles Yelton give a workshop on building movable greenhouses. The greenhouse was built on tracks and gives us an opportunity to extend our growing season quite a bit. Well, the time came to plant this year and we discovered that the area becomes a swamp in the spring (and well, most of the rest of the year too).

You can imagine some of the things that would run through my mind as I went down to plant there in the morning. I was pretty confused as to why this spot was picked to put the greenhouse and I was just feeling generally whiney. But then something great happened. I started to notice things about the soil in there (which was very weird) and things about where the weeds decided to grow and saw SO much insect/worm life in soil that looks relatively dead, truly like sand. I was pretty confused so I kept looking. There seemed to be a lot of pretty extreme microclimates in this one small greenhouse. The soil its self was divided. The top 4 inches or so were very dry, the next 4 inches were a weird blend of sand, clay and potting soil with vermiculite and below that was completely over saturated with water, probably the clay that was there for years before the greenhouse was built. Needless to say, the summer in the Catskill Mountains / Hudson River Valley region of New York State gets quite hot, especially in a greenhouse so it seems ridiculous to be planting in there in June anyway, but its really got me thinking about what kind of plant would really enjoy this situation. Its almost tropical because all of the moisture seems to condensate on the top of the greenhouse and come back down on the plants. Its extremely humid in there. I took some photos of some of the things going on in there including some of the weeds that ended up there (I'm not sure what they are exactly and if anyone wants to let me know what they might be, I'd really appreciate it!) just to show you what I'm working with. I'm going to plant a handful of different things and see what likes it and what doesn't and see if I can get away with some tropical annuals if I can. Thanks for reading! Come visit us in Woodbourne NY!  Email us: permaculture [at] sivananda [dot] org

Permaculture Certification with the Yeltons

Its been quite a while since I last blogged. Since June so much has happened. I took the Permaculture Certification course with Julia and Charles Yelton. (You can visit their website here: www.permaculturedesign.org. This course really helped. Reading the books and getting to know the materials is one thing, but getting the practical hands on experience and getting to ask specific questions really makes the difference. I've been a certified Permaculture designer now for just 6 months and developing a few designs.

Preparing for the 7-legged spiral Food Forest at Aberdeen Farm in Dutchess County, New York.

The beginnings of a food forest as it grows in the following season.

Since November, I've also been living at the Sivananda Yoga Ashram in Woodbourne, NY and working with them in their Permaculture systems. There are some really incredible projects underway including flow forms, a food forest, living structures, swales, a newly built movable greenhouse and we've got a lot of designs/projects underway for this season including terracing (perhaps with keylines), installing more ponds, living structures, outdoor earthen oven, Vermiculture, keyhole garden and an urban Permaculture demonstration site on the remains of a run down basketball court. (I'll be posting pictures as soon as I have the chance!)


I'm also very excited to announce that I will be teaching an Intro to Suburban Permaculture workshop on Sunday, April 20th at the New Light Sanctuary in Sayville, NY. It will be from 1 - 3 pm. And if anyone is curious about some of our projects, please get in touch and come visit at the Sivananda Yoga Ashram. We love to have volunteers come and learn a bit about Permaculture while getting real hands-on experience.

Thanks for reading!

Good friends & Marigolds

I had a great time hanging out with my friend Christina and planting a bit in her home garden. She got a few tomato plants and some marigolds. We planted the marigolds around the tomato plants to protect them from pests. In the photo here you can also see some alliums (which are really great for stopping pests as well as fungus),  fennel (i'm pretty sure) is allelopathic which means it generally doesn't like other plants and releases toxins that prevent them from doing well and in some cases causes them to bolt, and lavender (read some interesting lavender folklore here: History of Lavender.

 

What most people don't realize is that its not just the tomatoes that are edible, the marigolds are too. Here are a handful of recipes: Edible Flowers Recipes

Also, Christina is an amazing musician and recording engineer. You can check out what she does at christinapicciano.com. She's a great drummer, guitarist, songwriter and really fun to work with. I'm hoping to be playing more music with her in the near- future while I'm still living in her neck of the woods.

As a side note, if you can look past the pretty girl (Christina) in the photo, you'll find a giant swarm of mint in the left corner... that wild mint just grows and grows and will swallow everything around it. We've got the same 'problem' on the farm although its really not a huge problem, really. We usually dry as many of the leaves as we can and save them to use for tea or to put into iced tea but I have some thoughts about using them in a Permaculture design with a bunch of other things that you can't keep from taking over like strawberries for example. It would be like a celebrity plant death match. Or Manhattan.  I'll write more thoughts on that later though, gotta get to bed to make my flight tomorrow early. Thanks for reading and thanks Christina, for being awesome =)
-Jen