More thoughts on fencing

Here's the coop in the backyard of the home office. It's on a very steep slope. You can see the three strand electric fence and also the T-Posts holding up some bird netting. These combine to make, so far, a safe habitat for the chickens.

Henry the Unexpected and Very Expensive Rooster

Rooster Picket Bug Kill Zone!

We have a few backyard birds. We bought them as chicks from the local Wilco farm store in the Fall, and raised them under lights in the garage--picked a few crusty butts (warm wet rag and patience, be gentle).

We have a Delaware Rooster, a Speckled Sussex Rooster, a Barred Rock Hen and an Americauna Hen. We had a Buff Orpington but she ended up on a Raccoon's dinner plate.

I feel terrible about that. I could have kept her from being eaten alive but I missed closing the coop one night and, well, bahk, bahk, bahk, aaack!

KK and me. I'm not a cowboy, but I like the hats. They give shade and peripheral vision.

There is a lot to raising chickens. I suspect that our eggs will end up costing us about $10 a dozen, in the end. Much of the costs could have been avoided had I known about fencing and what type of coop I wanted right at the beginning.

But my children are learning about where their food comes from, so it's worth the effort. Plus, when the Zombie Apocalypse hits we'll be that much more prepared.

I'm a vegetarian, but only by convenience and the availability of options. That is, if I miss one meal I start thinking about what small creature I can slaughter to satisfy my hunger. I don't figure it will be too long into a systemic collapse before I start whopping heads off roosters, but as long as the economy holds up they are some lucky fowl.

If I had started with an electric fence, one strong enough to have the occasional weed touching it, our little buff Orpington hen would still be with us. 

Rooster Picket Bug Kill Zone under construction.

The pic above shows my Rooster Picket Bug Kill Zone garden concept under construction. The T-post fence to the left surrounds about a third of an acre. I've dedicated that space to market crops, some trees, and perennials. The smaller fencing attached at an angle creates a space inside which my roosters will eventually range. Their space, safe from red-tail hawks, and to be protected on the perimeter by an electric fence, will surround the entire garden area, creating, essentially, a moat a few feet wide surrounding the garden.

This fits with the permaculture concept of multiple functions (though, admittedly, not perfectly), gives the roosters a job, and allows me to keep the promise I made to the chicks when we got them, that they weren't ever going to be on a human dinner plate--even if they were roosters.

I cut 10' pvc in three pieces and wired them to the tops of the T-posts. I then strung three strands of 17 galvanized wire between the pvc posts for a total fence height of eight feet. It has preformed well, keeping the deer at bay. This pic was taken just after a windstorm wreaked havoc on the wires. 

My rooster moat does come at a cost. It is essentially three fences, all 450 feet long, each encircling the next. Total cost is going to come in near a grand and will have taken me, over the course of learning, several days to install.

The inner fence is T-posts, 2" galvanized wire roll fencing, pvc extenders, three strands of galvanized wire, making a total of eight feet--deer proof in our verdant area. If I'd known I was going to do the Rooster Picket Bug Kill Zone and the electric fence, I would not have needed the pvc extenders--deer generally will not jump over two parallel fences.

If I could start again, I'd use the cheap plastic deer fencing that comes in 7x100 foot rolls instead of the 2" galvanized wire fencing. That would have saved hundreds of dollars. Initially I intended to use as few plastics as possible, so I was going with metal where I could, but as expenses add up, ethics take a beating.

Not the best pic, but the home office chicken coop is in the background. This was the set up before I installed a small electric fence, the set up that just looked like a lunch counter to a raccoon.

We can't keep roosters at our home, a few miles away from our farm, so I have to come up with a solution for the two we have. That's what started the whole Rooster Picket Bug Kill Zone construction concept--I can't send the family pets off to certain doom.

What the (hopefully) predator proof area on the land does, though, is allow me to keep another promise. When we got sexed chicks we were told that each chick was a female, with 95% surety.  Of course, that means that most of the chicks who were not thought to be females were destroyed--tough life for boy chickens.

At that time, I promised myself that I would make up those numbers, some day, and raise five cockrels, preferably of a breed known for white eggs but not for meat production (Brown or White Leghorns, for instance).  In other words, I promised myself that I'd raise at least five chickens that would have been, more often than not, run through a grinder minutes after they hatched to make up for my five hens. So, the rooster moat will allow me to keep that promise, some day.

Probably not too many farmers worrying about the cockrels that were destroyed to make room for their pullets, I suppose.

Jack London, Permaculturist

Jack London was arguably the first modern American permaculturist. The word, permaculture, of course, was not yet invented. But London brought ideas he had learned from Asia about soil health and swales, nitrogen fixing crops and green manures. He even tried his hand at coppicing Eucalyptus, which would have been a good idea if Eucalyptus hadn't sucked as timber. Here are some pic's I took at a recent outing to the Jack London State Park in California.

Above is the coppice forest. For various reasons this attempt failed commercially, but you can see that, 100 years later the trees are still thriving. If the park would cut them and use them, as coppice should be maintained, they would do Jack London's memory a favor.

Above, a couple of pic's of some of London's thoughts on the subject. He mentions 40 Centuries of Farmers, so perhaps, probably, he had read King's Farmer's of Forty Centuries before he started his own agro-ecological farming enterprise. 

The two photos above show the extensive work London's laborers did in his fields. Though they're not seen easily in the pics, there are rows and rows of terraces. London's specific aim was to undo decades of soil degradation by terracing his fields, thereby catching the nutrients and water when it rained, rather than let it all run off somewhere else. 

London was clearly ahead of his time. His writings on the early 20th C. oligarchy could be cut and pasted into today's news. I wonder if he wrote about the connection between freedom and independent food production? Clearly, he was on the cutting edge of what we would today call permaculture.

Another early mention of permaculture-ish thoughts is in Shakespeare's The Tempest (Act 2, Scene 1, Page 8): Marooned on a verdant island the trusted Advisor Gonzalo is teased for what he would do if he had control of the island and were to raise a society on it...

	GONZALO If I could colonize this island, my lord—
	ANTONIO He’d sow ’t with nettle seed.	ANTONIO He’d cultivate weeds on it.
	SEBASTIAN      Or docks, or mallows.	SEBASTIAN Or thorn-bushes.
	GONZALO And were the king on ’t, what would I do?	GONZALO And if I were king of it, you know what I’d do?
	SEBASTIAN 'Scape being drunk for want of wine.	SEBASTIAN He wouldn’t get drunk much, since there’s no wine here.
	GONZALO I' th' commonwealth I would by contraries Execute all things. For no kind of traffic Would I admit. No name of magistrate. Letters should not be known. Riches, poverty, And use of service—none. Contract, succession, Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard—none. No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil. No occupation. All men idle, all. And women too, but innocent and pure. No sovereignty—	GONZALO In my kingdom I’d do everything differently from the way it’s usually done. I wouldn’t allow any commerce. There’d be no officials or administrators. There’d be no schooling or literature. There’d be no riches, no poverty, and no servants—none. No contracts or inheritance laws; no division of the land into private farms, no metal-working, agriculture, or vineyards. There’d be no work. Men would have nothing to do, and women also—but they’d be innocent and pure. There’d be no kingship—
	SEBASTIAN     Yet he would be king on ’t.	SEBASTIAN He wants to be king in a place with no kingship.
	ANTONIO The latter end of his commonwealth forgets the beginning.	ANTONIO Yes, he’s getting a bit confused.
	GONZALO All things in common nature should produce Without sweat or endeavor. Treason, felony, Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine, Would I not have. But nature should bring forth Of its own kind all foison, all abundance, To feed my innocent people.	GONZALO Everything would be produced without labor, and would be shared by all. There’d be no treason, crimes, or weapons. Nature would produce its harvests in abundance, to feed my innocent people.

Clearly, Gonzalo would be a permaculturist were he alive today. That Shakespeare writes about it, colors an already colorful character with it, shows that the topic of going back to the land was important in England at the time.

Which makes me think I should write my treatise on how Shakespeare popularized the most noble of human callings, being human, humanist, even, long before anyone else. Sure, John Donne may have been his contemporary, Thomas Aquinas predates him, Descartes comes a few years after, but Shakespeare was bringing jokes about how the devil is in-your-endo to the masses (neatly coupled with arguments for the beauty of universal compassion--I'm thinking Lear's conversion, here) centuries before William Faulkner, let alone Tennessee Williams showed up. But I digress.

Back to the land, growing your own, freedom through independent food production, these ideas are clearly as old as some of the oldest human stories. The Adam and Eve fable is much less about our Fall from the Graces of a thinking, acting, MonoGod, than it is an admonition against eating apples.

Har, right? No, really.

The Adam and Eve story is about whether or not our forest dwelling ancestors were going to be taken in by the fruit of civilization, whether or not they were going to cultivate unnaturally (graft and propogate) or continue in the Garden of Eden munching on wild edibles. Of course, unnatural propagation made deserts of vast swaths of North Africa and is making deserts of pretty much everything it touches now.  So, however old that Adam-Eve-Apple story is, and it long predated Judaea-Christianity, it was a prescient warning.

First Swale

Digging First Swale:

Our project, Marvelous Wonderful Farm, took another step, or tentative toe prod, as I began digging the first swale today. We're in the Pacific Northwest, just north of Portland, Oregon, so we get a lot of rain. Or, more accurately, we get a lot of drizzle. It adds up to about 40 inches a year, but most of that comes in the November to May period, the rest of the time it's pretty dry. So swales are important here as they help control water both when you have it and when it is scarce.

They can't be seen in the photograph, but I also planted a few black locust, redbud and white dogwood trees on the top of the little berm I built. All of the water now in the swale was previously draining straight into the swampy area at the foot of our property. Now we slow it a little. When the other swales are in (and the thousand or so trees) we'll really be slowing the water.

I've been waiting to purchase a track hoe or a tractor with a hoe, even, but our financial reality has finally gotten through my thick head. So the thick head told the hands to dig. And dig I did.

Enjoy the process, that's what I told myself. And, really, this represents only a couple of hours of digging so the process was short. We've got somewhere around 400 trees coming this year, the rest to be planted next winter, so I still have quite a bit of swale-ing to be done. I'd like to dig all of the swales this year while the soil is full of moisture and soft.

How many swales? I dunno, I'm planning as I go. I'm not religious about this permaculture experiment--I'm not 'certified'. I've watched every video I can find and I've read a number of books. So much of permaculture seems to be site specific and intuitive that I just can't see paying for non site specific expertise. I also hesitate because I'm afraid of what all of the earthworks and trees will do to our property value. We will need a loan, eventually, to build our house, and a 20 or 30K hit would hurt. Taking our property from (from the perspective of the typical McMansion Minded American) pristine grassy--view--sunset--open to treed--terraced--wildlands could drop our values pretty dramatically. But I can't wait another year to start, so dig I did.

The Farm Blog Begins

Marvelous Wonderful Farm's 2014 Christmas Photo

It's a bit of stretch to call what I'm doing 'farming', though I have a business license, and I'm losing money. But I do hope that I will begin to show a profit in two to three years, so here goes. 

Marvelous Wonderful Farm is my attempt to prepare my family for climate change, to grow healthy food, and, eventually, to show a modest profit. We have five acres in Ridgefield, Washington, about 20 minutes North of Portland, Oregon. We're on a well traveled road, making a farm stand a future possibility.

I am trying to grow food ethically because it seems like a farmer should be at least as diligent with the soil as a Boy Scout is with a camp-sight and leave it better than he found it. I imagine that occasional future posts will include decrying of the fossil fuel intensive, health destroying, water ruining, life killing heavy equipment work that is currently called farming, but I'll keep this blog more about my trials and errors than about the failures of Big Ag.

Let's learn to grow our own food together. After all, if you're dependent on somebody else for food, you're dependent. Better to be dependent on someone you know and trust who is also dependent on you, which is a long way to say that I believe freedom and 'keeping it local' are meaningless without each other.

Rooster Picket Bug Kill Zone, before electric.

An important caveat, though, for any noob farmer: I have land, not much, but enough for one man to farm. Lack of arable soil is the single biggest impediment to starting farming. There are vertical farms and ingenious coops and front yard farmers who rent lawns, and the like, but nothing can really substitute for a few good, south facing acres; and that's what I've got. I say this only to be fair. I know my advantages.

Chris Rush Dudley

Marvelous Wonderful Farm and Film

chrisrushdudley@yahoo.com