Chapter 11 - Permaculture

Tracy was studying the satellite photos of the land that he been purchased by Andy. It was in the Shire of Jerramungup where the rainfall was still reasonable. The land came cheap as it was not sought after, the soil was depleted and had erosion problems. This was not what Tracy wanted but Andy had insisted that it be a piece of land that no one was interested in and was surrounded by other pieces of land of no interest. It was salt free, which was something.

“Sometimes, Andy, farmland is abandoned for a good reason.”

“Yeah, I see where you're coming from. But operational farmland has one major disadvantage. It is occupied by farmers, who are very hard at work doing what farmers do best, even better than what distant bureaucrats can do, they farm. Just like anyone doing anything else, they impose on their environment, both natural and unnatural, their way of doing things. They would not take kindly to us planting what they call weeds. If however we are going to establish a human sustaining ecosystem on this land then we can't use their crops, because those plants aren't strong enough. This is why the previous farmer pissed off. We are going to have to use edible weeds, the kind you have been telling me about, but I've been too busy to remember.

I don't know a whole lot about Jerramungup, but I want you to keep the operation low key. No media articles, a token presence at produce swaps, no books to be published about the place. No boastful property tours. This last bit can be tricky but don't come across as being secretive. Sure, invite the neighbours around for a cup of tea, but try and pass yourself off as yet another deluded hobby farmer. “

“Sure, can do. I've been doing some thinking about this. We can plant trees in a fencing maze so that no matter where you are on the farm you can't get a good view of it.

Also since we are planning for not to be dependent on vehicles then we can construct swales which will store and divert water to here, creating a semi marsh-like road block. So while we shall not be so foolish to obstruct an inspector, the land itself will make it just too hard.

We can use gorse in and around the land erosion gullies which will stabilise it and bring up subsoil nutrients. It's also a nitrogen fixer. Rabbits and goats can be fed gorse, which is surprising when you touch the plant since it has very spiny foliage.

We can trial Black Soldier Fly larvae for composting toilets and we have also got a couple of earthworm composting toilets as well. A duckweed pond can be used for diverted urine. They have had great success with them in Vietnam. It can also be used for any other run off we may happen to produce.

The roof of the house has passive solar panels for heating of water. This is controlled by a Raspberry PI computer, you know one of those credit card sized computers, so on cloudy cold days the water gets diverted away from the solar panels to either the back boiler on the stove or the Jean Pain compost heater. The Jean Pain won't be working until we have produce a lot of excess biomass, but its only a matter of time.”

“It all sounds good”, said Andy, “when can you start”

“Well the first thing is to get the dwelling built and test its storage facilities to see if they are water proof. Since you want to store a lot of food there I suggest we get non perishable food packed into furniture removalists cardboard boxes and have them cart the stuff in. That way no one from outside knows we have a lot of food there. We can number the boxes and keep our own separate list of what is in each box. This will all have to be done within the state borders so we don't get caught out in a quarantine inspection.”

“Sure, I can arrange that, get my staff to do it in each of their branches and tell them it's going to Oxfam. The removalists can be told to put it into their storage so that no one at the office is any the wiser. While they are on route I can redirect them to the homestead.

The dwelling is due to start construction in two weeks time. I've arranged for you to be provided with your own portacabin. I want you onsite, not doing a whole lot while the building is going on. I want photo's at the end of each day so I can see how things are progressing. They are a pretty reliable bunch, I've dealt with Sillix Constructions before. All the same I would feel better for you to be there. I've arranged an internet connection, you can fill up your hard disk with movies, grab a SUV for going into town, not that there is a hell of a lot there. Any questions?”

“When will the earth moving equipment be coming. I'll need it to start swale construction.”

“I made a deal with the boys. They will be leaving a couple of backhoes behind for us to use for free. That way they don't have to cart them back to base and from base to the next job. They will get them as needed. Everyone wins.”

“Gotcha, hope there's enough of a delay.”

Tracy felt too excited to sleep, but know she must. She lit some lavender sticks at her Ninhursag alter and drifted off into fitful sleep.

She woke at 5:00 in the morning and decided that she wasn't going to drift off again so she had her last shower before leaving civilisation. She didn't know how good her next one was going to be so she made the most of it, allowing her fantasies to envelope her as she imagined herself a sex slave being passed around a circle of big strong construction men as they took turns at her body, fondling her sweet delicate female flesh with their powerful calloused hands and feeling their hot breath on the back of her neck.

Her alarm went off and she was snapped back to reality. She toweled herself down and dressed in jeans and steel capped boots. It had taken her a while to break the boots in and was only now starting to get used to their weight.

She cooked up a hearty breakfast of egg, bacon and sausages on toast followed by pineapple rings and washed down with filtered coffee. She had loaded up the Toyota Duel Cab SUV the night before. There was plenty of thermal underwear, work style coats, tinned food, packet food, vitamin pills, a solar oven, two tents, cigarette lighters, a magnifying glass, spare mobile phone, both loaded with OSMAND navigation software, PV solar panels on the roof of the SUV and a cylinder of LPG for cooking.

She made sure the house was locked and she was off on her new adventure, heading up the South Coast Highway, past the green fields of rich farming land and kept going as the land slowly but steadily became drier.

Several hours later she was descending into the property which was set in a shallow valley with granite outcroppings. There were sparse stunted shrubs. Fortunately Andy had had the foresight to supply all the toilets needed for the work crew. All their waste would be captured, processed by the earthworms, rendering it safe, and applied to the land.

While this would represent a good start it would in no way be sufficient to restore the land. Enough soil would be generated to begin germinating the tagasaste. This was a nitrogen fixing fodder crop with a deep tap root able to withstand drought and also to bring up nutrients from deep down.

In their early stages the tagasaste would have plastic tree guards to prevent browsing. Once they were over a mans height the guards would be removed and any wildlife would be allowed to breed here. If and when needed this wildlife could be used as a food source.

All these ideas and more were fine for maintaining the land and building it up slowly. However Andy had made it clear to Tracy that he wanted to push the envelope on soil restoration. How he did not know and Tracy was left to come up with the inspiration. There were two ideas, both involved artificial fertilizer, 60 tonnes of it which would give the soil five years of fertility.

The first was to use the fertilizer to grow duckweed in large shallow ponds and spread the duckweed on the land. This would then rot down and enhance soil biology. Alternatively the duckweed could be fed to chickens and pigs and their manure would be spread on the ground.

The second idea was to collect shredded paper from recycling contractors and, use it as bedding and feed for earthworms. The fertilizer would be added in dilute solution which would supply the nitrogen and other minerals for the bacteria to grow, which in turn would allow the earthworms to grow. Once a sizable number of worms have been bred up then holes could be dug in the soil, wet shredded paper added, worms on top and micro-irrigated with dilute fertilizer. That way the breeding beds of the worms will be in the soil itself, thus reducing capital investment and you have the added benefit of the worms interacting with the soil as well. This would improve the soil structure. She recalled her conversation with Andy …

“...Tracy I have done my homework on this land and I can tell you straight that it has been wrecked by artificial fertilizers and now you are trying to tell me that that you want to put another 60 tonnes of the stuff on there. Isn't that going to reinforce the problem rather than ameliorate it.”

“It all comes down to how it was applied Andy. Organic production is wonderful if you have the mineralization to work with. This was taken out of the soil and so it needs to be reintroduced. The crucial difference is that we are mineralizing bacteria and so the bacteria can feed the soil. I know these methods are going to make every organic gardener philosophically puke, but that's the way of it. You can have an organic garden if you get a cut grass donation from the lawnmower man, but how was that grass grown. If you use sheep manure but what is going to replace the minerals in the grass that the sheep ate, which in turn took minerals from the soil.

You can't have honest organic gardening until you close the nutrient loop, that's something you have to work towards and that's why we have the composing toilets. “

“So what sort of numbers are we talking about?”

“Recently Australia as a whole has been using 46.3kg of fertilizer per hectare per year. If you want 5 years of nutrients in the soil and foliage for 263 hectares of land that comes to 60 tonnes of fertilizer. So far the math is pretty straight forward. After that things get tricky. What is the daily rate you apply each day to a duckweed pond. We need to find the optimum growing concentration, test daily and keep it maintained at that level. Similar problem with the earthworms. We don't have the experience. We don't know how long its going to take to get through the fertilizer.

The worms have an advantage over the duckweed. Duckweed ponds are relatively expensive to produce but a earthworm windrow being supplied by a weeping hose delivering diluted fertilizer is far easier. Even better, brace yourself, you can grow F1 hybrid pumpkins along the windrow which is going to tap into the nutrients and spread it over a large area. This is what pumpkins are good at. If the pumpkins are not growing fast enough we up the fertilizer dosage. The worms are going to take up a fair bit of the fertilizer for themselves, which is good. Also as the bacteria multiply they will start to fix nitrogen from the atmosphere.

Once the pumpkins have lived and died they rot down and fertilize the soil organically. We don't have to worry about producing a pumpkin plague because the F1 hybrids produce weak offspring. We need a sowing density for the pumpkins and apply the fertilizer at the standard rate each day. As an added bonus we can harvest the excess pumpkin fruits, botanically they are not vegetables, and disperse them as we see fit afterward.”

Andy carefully considered what he had been told. “That's one shit load of weeping hose, cost that up against micro spray irrigation. Have you thought about what would happen if we can't get this soil up and running in time, say if civilization crashes after one year.”

Tracy was ready for this. “Aside from the non-perishable food we have stored, the duckweed ponds are sufficiently big to feed 10 adults well. Not very palatable, but it is nutritious. While we are eating this we can still be getting on with the job of improving the soil. If we are careful we will have 30 tonnes of fertilizer left when the land is half way there. As a general guideline we shall build up sufficient area of soil close to the house to feed twice the number of people living there. That way we can absorb the shock of a few extra people finding us or a crop failure, whatever.”

“How long is it going to take to breed up the worms. We're going to need quite a few.”

“Given a doubling rate of 60 days, which is realistic enough, you are going to have a 68 fold increase over a year. The council recycling contractors have not been willing to sell worms, which is no great surprise, so I got roughly 10 kilos of worms from local hobby suppliers. I have bred these up in my home in document containers stacked on shelves. I have got about 500kg of them. Good job I'm a single girl. By the way I did a calculation for the hosing, which coincidentally are the same price between weeping and drip, comes to $7037 per hectare. That doesn't include pumps, etc. Say $10,000 per hectare. Realistically there is no way we can do 263 hectares. Ten Hectares is tops and I'll need help from overseas workers. Ten intensive hectares is enough land to feed 7 people. Another 3 can be fed with Tagasaste, etc. It's a ten bedroom dwelling ...”

“Yeah, Ok. I over did it on the land. Lets get the fertilizer in and store it safely, the whole 60 tonnes that is. Over doing it is better than under doing it and it was going for a song. We shall try for 10 hectares, make the first hectare a priority and go for the other nine as resources permit. If someone was working on the land do you think you could keep the use of fertilizer secret.”

“Shouldn't be too hard”, said Tracy ,”there are worms, duckweed and shredded paper everywhere. Loading the fertilizer into the mixer tank isn't that hard. The fertilizer shed can be locked. Yeah I think I could pull that off.”

“Good, we can get WWOOFers in. These are Willing Workers On Organic Farms. They come along, get housed and fed and do work in return. By the way did you look into the oak trees. Nothing like the luxury of truffles.”

“They are good for improving the land. Produce acorns for pigs and enrich the soil with leaf litter. Of course the land is in no shape to take them but I have come up with an idea. You take a pumpkin, dig a round hole so the pumpkin fits in nicely. Get an axe and chop up the top of the pumpkin. This is going to rot over winter, especially if you put some earthworms on top. In spring you can plant the acorns. Worth a try.”

As she approached it occurred to her that the land may not be in such bad condition after all. At least a good portion of it was covered in vegetation of some kind. While certainly not good soil, the reports over stated the case. It had been five years since the previous farmer last cropped and during that time various weeds had pioneered the soil. She would have to have a good look around to be sure.

She drew up along side the portacabins, which were on top of a slight slope to avoid flooding. It didn't rain much in Australia but when it did it usually bucketed it down. Due to the hydrophobic soils, which was endemic in this region, water would just run off until the ground had finally damped down.

First things first. Cabin inspection. Water, food, communications. All the essentials were there. There were tinned beans, dried beans, and a bean sprouter for vitamins. There was also flour, yeast, a bread making machine – which really wasn't necessary since she had practiced hand kneeding of the dough as this did not require an external source of energy.

There was a knock on the door, a strongly built good looking man introduced himself as Colin. Tracy put him in his late forties. “Progress is going well on the homestead. It can be mighty cold in the winter down here.”

“Oh I guess I'll handle it easy enough. I've come too far with this dream to allow a little cold to stop me in my tracks. I've been lucky in the inheritance department and I'm going to build on that by, well, building.”

“Sounds like a good way to go. Whenever you're ready I can show you around.”

“How about tomorrow, after I've had a good breakfast. 7:30 is good for you?”

“Perfect. The first pit stop is getting you kitted up with PPE.”, Colin sensed a drop in enthusiasm, “By law.”

“I've already got me steel caps hard hat and reflective jacket, which you are, of course, welcome to inspect.”

“I really don't have a problem inspecting you any time”, he said with a smile.

“I was referring solely to the Personal Protective Equipment.”

“Of course you were Ma'am.”, not losing composure for a second.

“First thing in the morning then.”, said Tracy waving him off with a smile. She sensed he had a lot going for him but for one fault. He needed vision handed to him as he had none for himself. That was his glass ceiling.