Join Dave Jacke as he graces New York and Ananda Ashram with a spiritual perspective of the building and evolving Permaculture movement. Please RSVP by Monday April 12th.  Additional information on the shuttle to and from Harriman will be provided.

John Jeavons Look this guy up. Along with Alan Chadwick, Jeavons is one of the pioneers of French Biointensive Gardening. (Bio for Biodynamic). His books are amazing. I am planning to go to the conference if anyone is interested.

He will be presenting a one-day GROW BIOINTENSIVE Sustainable Mini-Farming Workshop at Treys Hall on the Douglass Campus at Rutgers University.

The workshop offers an excellent opportunity to acquire a wealth of information on the most efficient gardening method we know. This information has been gathered from over thirty-five years of research, and is currently in use in over 130 countries around the world.

John Jeavons has been the Director of the GROW BIOINTENSIVE Mini-Farming program for Ecology Action since 1972. He is the author of  How to Grow More Vegetables and Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops Than You Ever Thought Possible On Less Land Than You Can Imagine, the primer on sustainable Biointensive Mini-Farming, which is currently available in English, Spanish, German, French, Arabic, Hindi and Russian.

Keynote at NOFA-NJ January 30th

Well, all apologies for yet another post about young Eliot Coleman, but as my good friend Dave G would put it, this stuff is pretty much blowing my domepiece right the hell off:

From Chelsea Green (who hopefully won’t mind me cribbing this great information):

Three Basic Components

The winter harvest, as we practice it at Four Season Farm, has three components: cold-hardy vegetables, succession planting, and protected cultivation.

Cold-hardy vegetables are those that tolerate cold temperatures. They are often cultivated out of doors year-round in areas with mild winter climates. The majority of them have far lower light requirements than the warm-season crops.

The list of cold-hardy vegetables includes the familiar—spinach, chard, carrots, scallions—and the novel—mâche, claytonia, minutina, and arugula. To date there are some thirty different vegetables—arugula, beet greens, broccoli raab, carrots, chard, chicory, claytonia, collards, dandelion, endive, escarole, garlic greens, kale, kohlrabi, leeks, lettuce, mâche, minutina, mizuna, mustard greens, pak choi, parsley, radicchio, radish, scallions, sorrel, spinach, tatsoi, turnips, watercress—which at one time or another we have grown in our winter-harvest greenhouses. (The most promising vegetables, those with which we have the most experience, are discussed individually in chapter 8.) The eating quality of these cold-hardy vegetables is unrivaled during the cooler temperatures of fall, winter, and spring. They reach a higher level of perfection without the heat stress of summer.

Succession planting means sowing vegetables more than once during a season in order to provide for a continual harvest. The choice of sowing dates, from late summer through late fall, and winter into spring, keeps the cornucopia flowing. In midwinter the vigorous regrowth on cut-and-come-again crops provides the harvest while late-fall-and-winter-sown crops slowly reach productive size.

We begin planting the winter-harvest crops on August 1, the start of what we call the “second spring.” We continue planting through the fall. The reality of sowing for winter harvest is that the seasons are reversed from the usual spring-planting experience. Day length is contracting rather than expanding; temperatures are becoming cooler rather than warmer. Success in maintaining a continuity of crops for harvest through the winter is a function of understanding the effect of shorter day length and cooler temperatures on increasing the time from sowing to harvest. Thus the choice of precise sowing dates for fall planting is much more crucial than for spring planting. The dates are also very crop specific, and I’ll explain this in more detail in chapter 4.

We aim for a goal of never leaving a greenhouse bed unplanted, and we come pretty close. Within twenty-four hours after a crop is harvested, we remove the residues, re-prepare the soil, and replant. We keep careful records so as to follow as varied a crop rotation as possible.

Protected cultivation means vegetables under cover. The traditional winter vegetables will often survive outdoors under a blanket of snow. Since gardeners can’t count on snow, the best substitute is shelter of an unheated greenhouse. Many delicious winter vegetables need only that minimal protection.

Our winter-harvest cold houses are standard, plastic-covered, gothic-style hoop houses. The largest of our houses are 30 feet wide and 96 feet long. They are aligned on an east-west axis. For the most part the cold houses need only a single-layer covering of UV-resistant plastic, whereas heated greenhouses benefit from two layers, which are air-inflated to minimize heat loss.

The success of our cold houses seems unlikely in our Zone 5 Maine winters where temperatures can drop to –20˚F (–29˚C). But our growing system works because we have learned to augment the climate-tempering effect of the cold house itself by adding a second layer of protection. We place floating row-cover material over the crops inside the greenhouse to create a twicetempered climate. The soil itself thus becomes our heat-storage medium, as it is in the natural world.

Ridiculously cool. Grab a copy of Eliot’s book The Winter Harvest Handbook here: [amazon.com]

From the always amazing Deconstructing Dinner Podcast:

In January 2009, the Agroinnovations Podcast featured Deconstructing Dinner. Agroinnovations touches many of the subjects covered on Deconstructing Dinner but further offers unique perspectives and subjects worth exploring.

Today’s episode features segments from Agroinnovations featuring well-known figures like Paul Stamets – a mycologist (aka mushroom specialist) from Olympia, Washington, the U.K’s Rob Hopkins who has popularized the Transition Town Movement and Montana journalist and author Richard Manning, who possesses a keen interest in the history and future of the American prairie and agriculture.

Voices:

Paul Stamets, mycologist, Fungi Perfecti (Olympia, WA) – Stamets is on the editorial board of The International Journal of Medicinal Mushrooms, and is an advisor to the Program for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona Medical School. He runs Fungi Perfecti – a family-owned company specializing in using gourmet and medicinal mushrooms to improve the health of the planet and its people. Paul is the author of Mycelium Running.

Rob Hopkins, co-founder, Transition Town Totnes (Totnes, UK) – Rob is the co-founder of Transition Town Totnes and of the Transition Network. He has many years experience in education, teaching permaculture and natural building, and set up the first 2 year full-time permaculture course in the world, at Kinsale Further Education College in Ireland as well as co-ordinating the first eco-village development in Ireland to be granted planning permission. He is author of ‘Woodlands for West Cork!’, ‘Energy Descent Pathways’ and most recently ‘The Transition Handbook: from oil dependence to local resilience’.

Richard Manning, author/journalist, Against the Grain: How Agriculture has Hijacked Civilization (Missoula, MO) – Richard is an award-winning environmental author and journalist, with particular interest in the history and future of the American prairie, agriculture and poverty. He is the author of eight books, and his articles have been published in Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Audubon and The Bloomsbury Review. His 2007 release is titled Against the Grain: How Agriculture has Hijacked Civilization.

Click here to download the MP3.

For those of you who are more visual learners, here’s the first of many video tutorials to come. Below is part 1 of how to take down a tree (think of it as forest weeding)

… footage of the falling tree to come!

Ananda Lesson 1 from Jerri Chou on Vimeo.

Michael Judd and his team seem to be doing some truly incredible work over at Project Bona Fide, and we certainly hope to have him as a guest lecturer this coming year at Ananda. From their website:

Project Bona Fide is a non-profit organization working toward sustaining culture through organic agriculture, community correlated outreach, and re-forestation projects in Nicaragua. Project Bona Fide has been created out of a need to support rural Nicaraguan farming communities so that they may gain self-empowerment and economic stability. In addition to offering farmers financial and technical support toward gaining international organic certification, Project Bona Fide focuses on establishing much needed fair trade export market* opportunities, preserving natural environments, and focusing on local health and nutrition projects.

Michael and his team also teach Permaculture PDC courses in both Nicaragua and New York. Thanks once again to Janaka for pointing all of this out!

Slavoj here tearing up ideology in his usual fashion and speaking about something else slightly more complex.  I watched about half of it yesterday and then fell asleep.  I’m sure the rest is good though.  It always is.

From the Psychedelic Salon Podcast comes another inspiring talk by the late Terence McKenna:

“What is a city but a complete denial of nature? … Urbanization is the first of these impulses where society leaves nature and enters into its own private Idaho.”

“Ideologies set up polarities that are based on discontent, and ideologies are always, always, always based on false premises.”

“We’ve invented a sin for which there is no name. It’s so beyond most people’s ability to conceive. And this sin that we’ve invented is we steal the future from our children.”

Part I [download as MP3]

Part II [download as MP3]

Fascinating piece from The Ascent of Man, in which Jakob Bronowski takes us through the history of agriculture starting with a genetic mutation that led to bread wheat:

A cool interview with Geoff Lawton of the Permaculture Research Institute: