[Terrapreta] Terrapreta Digest, Vol 4, Issue 178

[Rhisiart Gwilym]

Siwmae pawb!

In reply to the snip below:--

>Message: 2
>Date: Wed, 23 May 2007 15:35:18 -0300
>From: Kevin Chisholm <kchisholm at ca.inter.net>
>Subject: Re: [Terrapreta] This is a very clear, concise, well written
>	article on the basic concepts of Terra preta.
>To: Michael Bailes <michaelangelica at gmail.com>
>Cc: terrapreta <terrapreta at bioenergylists.org>
>Message-ID: <46548966.5070308 at ca.inter.net>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
>Dear Michael
>
>Michael Bailes wrote:
>...del...
>>
>>  We need a Doctor Who !
>>
>>  I am sure it is a part o the formula
>>  It is just that stone-age Amazons were brighter than us !
>>  m
>
>I think it is perhaps wrong to think of them as being smarter than us.
>If we think like that, then we look for complicated solutions and
>reasons. That is usually a mistake, because usually, only simple things
>work for Man.
>
>As far as I know, there is no indication that the TP People were
>educated or trained. Their mode of living suggests that they lived under
>primitive circumstances. I think it would be safe to assume that they
>were intelligent and very observant, but not especially gifted, and that
>their focus was on survival.
>
>This being the case, they would look for the easiest ways to do things.
>They would not do things that did not have a short term pay-off, in
>terms of crop yields, labor requirements, comfort, safety, shelter, etc.
>They would look for simple things that worked.
>
>Imagine if you were transported back in time to the Brazilian Jungles of
>3,000 years ago... what would you do to enable yourself and your Family
>to survive?
>
>If we think along those lines, we may be able to figure out how they did it.
>
>Best wishes,
>
>Kevin

This is what I aim to do in my permaculture garden in the LLanberis 
district in Gwynedd, Cymru Gogledd, Britain.

Certainly, it's all very simple, low-tech, peasant-subsistence style 
work. I use no power tools. The main energy sources are my muscles 
and those of all the other helpful creatures welcomed into the 
garden's lifeweb; plus a very simple stove which I can run to give me 
copious supplies of charcoal every day (though I have a plan on the 
stocks to build an insulated oven-and-retort stove for even higher 
efficiency production and use of excess heat); and - of course - 
there's the photosynthetically-captured sun energy in the garden 
itself, and in the surrounding forest, and along the lake shore, 
where I comb for dead wood and for drift. The lake shore is also an 
excellent source of free mulch material thrown up in the high-water 
tiderows.

Incidentally, regarding silica emendations to soil: Since I'm using 
the sward-gardening method in my vegetable beds, growing everything 
in regularly-clipped herbal leys with a high percentage of white 
clover, there's lots of grass and other silicaceous material 
generated by each clip. Following the legendary Masanobu Fukuoka's 
do-next-to-nothing methods (one of his long-time rules of procedure 
is "What can I NOT do, what unnecessary work can I leave out, whilst 
still maintaining or even improving my yields and the health of my 
land?"), I'm reducing my active compost-making (Fukuoka now makes 
none at all). Instead I leave all clippings where they fall, to be 
taken down by the HUGE population of undisturbed worms (I never till 
either) to be turned into best-quality compost by them, in situ where 
it's needed. They do the same with the mulch materials which I 
scatter on fairly thinly, at all times of year, continually. These 
include raw (sic!) manures, including the allegedly 'fierce, 
plant-burning' poultry manure, unprocessed seaweed straight from the 
nearby seashore, and well-composted humanure from the composting 
toilets here.

For its initial inoculation, the charcoal is turned into the 
well-finished humanure heap, until it comprises about twenty percent 
by volume. This mix is then put into the generously-sized planting 
holes dibbed for seedlings which are ready to go out in the vegetable 
beds, so that the proto-terra-preta is spreading gradually through 
the beds, already well below the surface. I also scatter neat 
charcoal on the surface.

Another source of in-situ nitrogen is, of course, the root-nodules of 
nitrogen-fixing bacteria on the clover roots. Bursts of this are 
released by the root die-back of the clover that happens at each 
clip. Again following Fukuoka, I hand-broadcast white-clover seed 
onto the beds, as and when they need replenishment, immediately after 
a clip, and then rake the clippings about gently, to give the seeds 
sufficient cover.

This is still an early, experimental tryout as I evolve a 
permaculture design tailored to this place, but crop growth and yield 
so far has been pretty good, with proliferating plant and animal 
species beginning to strike a good balance, so that the slugs and 
snails, which are so numerous on this mountain side that they have 
actually caused some gardeners to quit altogether, are now causing 
less damage in my beds, without any artificial or pesticidal control. 
(I stick religiously with the principle that there are no vermin, 
pests, or weeds, only fellow living creatures, my respected and 
necessary kindred, who deserve to live without persecution, just as 
long as they leave my reserved food plants reasonably undamaged) This 
year too, we are getting in Khaki Campbell ducks, because they are 
enthusiastic slug and snail eaters.

The steady stream of visitors to Cae Mabon look at the early stages 
of my gardens sceptically, or shake their heads in mystification. 
Fukuoka's neighbours gave him the same scoffing response, apparently, 
until his yields overtook theirs, got by orthodox industrial farming 
methods, and continued to grow away from them thereafter, as his land 
recovered its natural health. He had is early, learning disasters, of 
course, following an uncharted new/old course. So have I had. But 
things improve steadily.

My aim is to have plenty of foods yielded directly from the garden at 
every time of the year, without gaps, as well as lots of stored 
foods. We look likely to hit that target for the first time this 
year. This is to say nothing of other useful non-food products.

I still have a way to go, though, before I can get into the same 
league as David Blume's phenomenal levels of sustained and 
soil-building productivity on comparably small patches of ground. 
(See his article 'Food and Permaculture' at 
www.permaculture.com/permaculture/About_Permaculture/food.shtml)

Incidentally, Fukuoka considers quarter-acre fields to be perfectly 
adequate for his annual barley and rice growing operations.

Bill Mollison, one of the fathers of permaculture, reckons that we 
can feed everyone in the world, generously, with that great dream of 
the final banishment of all hunger everywhere, even whilst we bring 
the current level of huge overshoot of human population back down to 
a genuinely long-term sustainable level; and we can do this on 
considerably LESS land than we use currently for broadscale 
hyper-commercialised industrial agriculture, and at sustained and 
ecologically-benign levels of fecundity. This will allow us, he says, 
to put a lot of our currently greatly-abused and depleted industrial 
big-agribiz land back to a global mosaic of fully-restored forest or 
prairie wilderness, which the planet needs urgently. (There is the 
small matter of the final defeat of global gangster-capitalism to 
achieve first, though, of course.) David Blume, who clearly knows a 
thing or two about the practical creation of effulgently-fertile, 
ecologically-healthy landscapes, concurs.

Well, it's that or all go down the tubes together, I suppose, as our 
unprecedented levels of global crisis just get completely out of 
hand. Will our species finally find a sufficient level of collective 
wisdom and voluntary restraint, or will we blow it, finally......?

Keep making the terra preta!

Cofion gorau,      Rhisiart Gwilym