of local grapes

Trying a new grape in the back. It’s called Roger’s Red. It’s a hybrid between California wild grape (Vitis californica) and our everyday grape of commerce (Vitis vinifera).

I have already planted the wonderful Mojave wild grape (Vitis girdiana). It has lovely woolly gray-green leaves and the fruit is a small black grape. Any plant with wooly leaves like this is well-adapted to conserving moisture.

desert wild grape

Foliage of the Roger’s Red is supposed to turn red in the fall. Also may not be the best eating grape since the skin is supposedly bitter.

Still, I imagine the ground squirrels and birds should love it…

And I will find something to do with the fruit.

Roger’s red grape.

I have begun to see RSF as an experiential station as much as an educational center. The workshops are for drylands growing and for all kinds of re-skilling presentations. It’s all practical work.

The experimental stuff is my passion. Talking and writing about it brings me some joy.

I have experimented in the garden since I was nine years old in Ohio.

It’s in my blood.

High desert gardening has become more challenging over the years.

Is it because I’m getting older? Maybe, but I don’t think that’s all of it.

I’ve blogged a lot about climate change. I think that’s what’s happening. Remember the wind.  I talk about the wind a lot. It’s a big factor out here.

One thing the wind does is dry out the plants.  And in the high desert, drier plants are not happier plants.

I used to count the plants and fruiting trees that died from our unpredictable hard freezes. I still have to do that. And now I have to count the wind-desiccated plants as well.

I’ve lost two young manzanitas this last year from either/or wind and cold. I’ve had to replace a fig due to the cold. A few other fruit trees in the orchard have been replaced.

I tried propagating trees from branches. You cut a smallish branch and peel back the bark. Then you coat it in rooting hormone and stick it into a pot with soil and vermiculite or peat moss. After several weeks little rootlets should begin to grow. Eventually you can plant these very young saplings in your orchard. I planned to give mine a good start and keep them in that structure I lovingly call a greenhouse (it’s not but that doesn’t stop me from calling it that).

This. Is. My. Greenhouse.

Sadly the wind tore my plastic cover to ribbons over the winter and early spring. That can be fixed.

Sadder yet, ground squirrels ate every single one of my tree starts. See them happily poking up in the background before they were devoured? Apples and apricots and peaches.

One of my friends is a local rancher. She said her success rate with tree starts was about 50%. I felt happy to have a 60% rate of sprouting. Ground squirrels took me down a notch. I’ll do it again in a month or so. Meanwhile I’m trying it with manzanita right now.

I’d like to try using our local desert wild almond, Prunus fasciculata as a rootstock for cultivated Prunus species, saving water in this dry climate.

local desert wild almond

Apricots at RSF

Can you see these grafted?

I’ve heard there’s a wild plum in the Sierras that might work as a rootstock also. Maybe someday, that.

Meanwhile these desert and California grapes. If they flourish, I will incorporate them into a living windbreak for the patio.  Even if they appear to be doing marginally, I will plant some in to my patio windbreak. It’s a different microclimate and the soil is somewhat different. It will be worth a try.

Here’s the plan.

On the south and southeast sides, I want a cover/arbor with grapes and wisteria. I have plenty of commercial grapes and now the local grapes. I have multiple wisteria vines and they transplant very well.

One idea:  4X4s sunk into cement with lattice.

The other idea: use what’s on hand: t-posts woven with creosote branches to support grape and wisteria vines. This I could begin immediately and it would cost less.

Designing and building it will be very therapeutic…Not sure what I want do with the top but I’ll think of something.

This whole production could be turned into an art installation with plants.

Right here. This is the start of the green windbreak.

What’s been growing in your world?

leaning toward permaculture ideals

Modern permaculture was inspired by Chinese-derived wet-rice and tree-crop systems employed in Southeast Asia, which remain reasonable models of sustainability. Southern China, on the whole, has done less ecological damage in 8,000 years of agricultural history than Western practices have done in the last 200 years to the Great Plains of North America and in California’s central valley.

 

Stereoagriculture in Wuhua County, Guangdong Province. (Photo from Luo Shiming, South China Agricultural University, Guangzhou, 1991) from http://southchinaenvir.com/degraded-lands-south-chinas-untapped-resource/

The Chinese were aware early on that people drawing sustenance from the natural world must be proactive in employing protective management of natural resources. They valued groves nearby their villages and temples. The necessity of maintaining clean water, of not over-fishing and over-hunting, of not over-using the land in planting, all of these principles have been traditionally woven into the patterns of life in south China. Their traditional views of environmental management may have helped bring them to the current day with less ecological damage than the region would have sustained otherwise. Contemporary China has ended up with a less ideal situation, however. Development projects including large scale damming of big rivers, over-fishing, soil erosion, and deforestation have contributed to China’s ecological breakdown. Perhaps it would have been worse without their early cultural warnings against abuse of the natural world.

Ploughing with a buffalo, Hubei from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_China#mediaviewer/File:Xianning-fields-9731.jpg by Vmenkov

There are regions in northern Europe where the land has not been ruined as quickly as the prime agricultural regions of north America. It may also be that some of these regions stretching from eastern Europe to Ireland, including farming villages in the Alps, leaned toward small scale and localized food production until the steamroller of modern industrialized agriculture passed over their lands. Wendell Berry talks personally and in detail about the benefits of small scale traditional sorts of agriculture in Ireland. He compares some of the practices to his own small scale farming practices in Kentucky.

The Great Plains are eroded, denuded of helpful native vegetation, and the soil is in terrible condition.

Wes Jackson’s call for a new farming approach and agricultural economy is based on revitalizing the Great Plains and the prairie lands of the heartlands of North America. He starts with an ideal of biomimicry of the prairie ecosystem and place-based, sustainable agricultural practices.

He’s asking for nothing less than a massive salvage operation. We could use that kind of action in California too.

So we have industrialized agriculture with erosion; salinization (much worse in regions that require irrigation); petrochemicals made into pesticides, herbicides, fungicides; immense agricultural machines running across the land; pollution of water resources by land erosion and by agricultural chemical runoff; pesticides and herbicides that are killing farmworkers and destroying our pollinators; devastating loss of aquifers and over-consumption of all precious water resources. And that’s only the beginning.

California’s central valley is succumbing to desertification and the water shortages in the region are deeply affecting current farming. Water shortages and current unsustainable land-use practices will have a serious impact on future growing in California’s historical 400-mile long bread basket. Over the last century, this agricultural valley has been producing one-quarter of the fruits, vegetables, nuts, rice, and soy products eaten in the United States. Whether the central valley should have ever become an agricultural monolith is another question.

Dust Bowl. California. Now.

 

Agricultural practices that ignore the landscape and the ecology of their region, trying to force human will upon the landscape, will never succeed over the long haul.

Cultures with sustainable land practices and social ethics have tended to be the ones that survive the longest.

As far as I can see, agriculture must be done in the context of community, with an ecological paradigm, on a small, human-sized scale. That’s all. That’s if we all want to keep eating food and not Cargill’s (or some other huge food supplier’s) food-from-a-vat. I’m serious.

I often wonder if I should pack it in and move myself out of this high desert valley. We have accumulated too many people in the region to ever create anything vaguely resembling a sustainable food system. Maybe the best thing I can do for this endangered ecosystem is to leave it. I could make the same argument for leaving California. And then what? The planet?

So for now, I’m here. And I’m dealing.

I may leave the high desert but not until I know that I need to be somewhere else.

And, yes, a job somewhere else that could support me would be an indicator that my time to leave had come. While I’m concerned with how we are destroying the land, I need to survive too. More on that later.

So.

I said permaculture, way up at the top of this post.

I agree with generally stated permaculture values, ethics, and practices. I have never been able to afford to take any kind of certified permaculture course but these are modern practices most closely allied to what I do.

With regard to a parcel of land like RSF, one of my biggest revelations has been the use of edges and the “value of the marginal” (Holmgren, 2002).

Observing and valuing the marginal has been simultaneously one of my greatest difficulties and one of the biggest benefits of growing food here.

The edge effect in ecology shows that when two plant communities collide, there is likely to be more biotic diversity in that intersection than there is in either plant community alone. If one of these plant communities is a sustainable agroecosystem, emergent diversity helps produce more abundance than expected from a marginal situation.

Here at RSF I’ve learned about edge effects from volunteer plants, those that come up unexpectedly in places where they hadn’t been planted. I’ve seen corn, tomatoes, barley and a variety of herbs spring up from wind-blown or bird-dropped seeds.

volunteers (sunflower, yarrow, mint, oregano) in front of irises.

Here at Rainshadow, it is possible to make use of the edge effect through shrub, tree, and crop selection. Raspberries and blackberries do not thrive in the desert but along the outside edges of the orchard area, they do and they spread.

Between the main orchard and the wilder desert zone that surrounds the farm, we’ve seen marked increase in wildlife since we moved on this land in 2006.

quail family by Erin Ward

For maximizing biodiversity and agrobiodiversity, I’ll be looking to the edges in coming seasons.

On a micro-farm like RSF, the edges are numerous. Edges here blend into what some gardeners call micro-climates. And microclimates make use of every part of a garden/small farm. For instance the ecological concept of “nurse plants” can help conserve water as well as promote growth in a layered, natural pattern. I plant herbs and some vegetables under the shade of my orchard trees (see Nabhan, 2013, for ideas in arid lands).

I also plant flowers for beauty. It’s good to put them where water already goes.

 

This year all the fruit tree basins had flowers, herbs, and/or vegetables. Some survived and some were eaten by desert critters.

 

The daffodils and chives are supposed to repel invading ground squirrels. I think our adopted barn cat may do a better job of that.

Sheltering overstories of plants (like the orchard trees to the herbs and vegetables) allow some plants to grow outside of typical, expected ranges.

Twelve permaculture design principles:

Observe and interact; catch and store energy; obtain a yield; apply self-regulation and accept feedback; use and value renewable resources and services; produce no wastes; design from patterns to details; integrate rather than segregate; use small and slow solutions; use and value diversity; use edges and value the marginal; creatively use and respond to change.

These might be applied to any sustainable food-growing situation. Maybe I’ll do a blog post about each at Rainshadow Farm.

These principles seem particularly useful in a situation where conditions are normally thought of as unproductive, difficult, and marginal.

Hmm. That sounds like my life as well as my farm.

Sounds like a writing prompt and a way to think about how to approach making  life in general more sustainable.

Coming soon.
You might want to read:

Anderson, E.N. (2010). The pursuit of Ecotopia: Lessons from indigenous and traditional societies for the human ecology of our modern world. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger.
(Dr. Anderson is one of my mentors and a friend. This book studies the complex relationships between ideologies, resource management, and cultural representations of the environment.)

Berry, Wendell. (1982). The gift of good land: Further essays cultural and agricultural. New York: North Point Press.

Holmgren, David. (2002). Permaculture: Principles and pathways beyond sustainability. Hepburn, Australia: Holmgren Design Services.

Jackson, Wes. (1996). Becoming native to this place. New York: Counterpoint.

Nabhan, Gary Paul. (2013). Growing food in a hotter, drier land: Lessons from desert farmers on adapting to climate uncertainty. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing.

Peña, Devon. (2005). Mexican Americans and the environment. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
(He tells the true story of the human cost of industrialized agriculture)

figs and other warm weather plants in the high desert

I realized recently that I’m finally thinking like a desert gardener/farmer.

Maybe I should say thinking more like one.

You can’t grow any kind of garden out here without altering your thinking about gardens somewhat and rapidly.

I began to look to the land on my first high desert farm. I responded to what I observed. Still, I used so many conventional practices back in the day, chief among them “just apply water.”

Of course we have to find ways to get water to cultivated plants in arid and semi-arid landscapes. And we want to use it carefully, conservatively. That goes without saying.

Also, I did learn the value of microclimates on the old farm: olive trees were able to thrive and bear fruit in a warm and sheltered enclosure between my kitchen and garage. Places where water pooled (but didn’t stagnate) were helpful for some plants. Shady places helped other plants.

That was only the beginning.

Rainshadow Farm has required me to sit with the land more than I ever have before. I’ve learned from the land more than I ever thought possible. And I’ve done a few things more unconventionally than I had ever expected when I began this arid lands journey over 25 years ago.

Last week I saw this video of someone growing figs in a pretty unconventional way.

This technique is sometimes called ground layering. I do it with the lilacs I grow because I need to have lilac plants around my house, even if I don’t live in Ohio any more. A farmer friend told me I should try it with the grapevines that grow along my fence line.

Lilacs at RSF

Beechey ground squirrel by Erin Ward.

When I watched the video, I thought about our figs. I planted four young fig trees. One did not last through a high desert winter, three did.

Of the three that remained, there was some die-back. Two of the trees lost some branches. In fact they lost the “central leader” branch. By late spring and early summer of the following year, I realized I had one tree beyond recovery and three young fig trees that winter had pruned into fig bushes. If I wanted to sound more professional, I could say my figs are pruned into an extremely modified central leader pattern.

But that’s not entirely true unless I were to add “Nature did it.”

I suppose if you live in the low desert, you’ll have other problems with your figs, but winter die-back is not likely to be a problem.

Figs prefer well-drained soil where it is sunny, hot, and arid. They don’t mind sandy, rocky soil. They like a lot of sun.

Ours are on a slight rise with coarse sandy soil. They are located where they get plenty of high desert sun. The  fig that died completely in the high desert winter was exposed to a week or so of sub-zero temperatures.  Mulching it heavily at the base did not help it to survive.  The other figs were tougher and did survive.

Here’s how we handle the winter now.

People say figs don’t like it below 10 degrees F. We get at least a week of that and even colder temperatures each winter.

Here’s What I do: I place a poultry wire cage (the kind I use to deter ground squirrels) around the young tree and fill it up with straw. That’s all. After I started doing that, my remaining fig trees managed to survive.

If I wanted to offer more protection, which I will very likely do when I plant more young figs, I will prune (if needed), then wrap the tree with burlap. I’ll leave the top of the burlap open , so that excess moisture and heat doesn’t affect the tree. After that, I’ll install the poultry wire cage and fill it with straw mulch.

Finally, if I want some serious extra protection, I’ll wrap a cylinder of bubble wrap or some heavy duty gardening plastic around the  cage.  In extremely cold weather I might cover the top for the most extreme cold, but that may not be necessary.

I used a bubble wrap bubble to protect a yerba mansa ( Anemopsis californica) plant that I installed near the patio since a friend told me that it might die at temperatures below 20 degrees F.

The yerba mansa is in the very front here and right now it looks pretty much the same. Well, bigger. It’s in the ground. It’s spreading. Spring growth is happening. It’s in a moist micro-zone.

Why yerba mansa? I found some growing once along the Mojave River when I did an archaeological survey and it fascinated me.  Just look at it!

Yerba Mansa by Calibas (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Calibas)

Daniel Moerman  (1998, see below) says that Native Americans across California and the Desert Southwest had an abundance of uses for yerba mansa, mostly medicinal but also as food.  It’s a pretty powerful medicine from the looks of the ethnobotanical list. I don’t know if I’ll use it, but it’s very cool to have it growing here.

Back to the figs.

Figs at RSF

The young trees not only need some winter protection, they need some extra water in the heat of the desert. Wilted leaves are a good indicator they are thirsty. At the end of summer if they dry out a bit it seems to be okay. People say this makes the fruit sweeter.  We like them; the birds like them for sure.

Check this out:

Native American Ethnobotany by Daniel E. Moerman

storm watch

It rained here twice in the last three weeks. That’s good news, at least for the time being.

runoff

California is experiencing a serious drought. Our reservoirs are appallingly low. Our population is high. We are certainly overpopulated for the amount of water we have available, even at the best of times.

Here are side-by-side photos of Folsom Lake, a northern California reservoir that is near Sacramento. At least 500,000 people get their water from this reservoir. The picture all across California is not too different from this. California is in a “drought emergency.”

Folsom Lake, California Department of Water Resources.

What is this – a drought emergency? Let’s start with damage to the California farming economy. We’re facing higher food prices, less food choice, and significant job losses. Since so much of California’s economy is tied into agriculture and California agriculture is tied into irrigation, this is a serious situation, indeed.

Farm fields will go unplanted. Some predict farmers will pull back and idle crops like cotton, wheat and corn. Maybe they will divert irrigation to orchards. If fruit and nut trees aren’t watered in California, they die. It can take up to seven years to replace their crops. California tomatoes, garlic, onions, lettuce, and melons will eventually increase in cost all across the nation. So will fruit. So will everything, eventually.

Seedling in the desert.

Ranchers will be hurt. Larger-scale California ranching is a fairly water-intensive operation. If grass/pasture doesn’t grow, ranchers rely on alfalfa, a thirsty crop.

Bless our sustainable ranchers.

Rural northern California is hurting already. Nearly twenty communities there face severe water shortages in the next two to three months. The state of California said last Friday that, for the first time since 1960 (that’s 54 years), it will not be releasing water from reservoirs to 29 water agencies serving something like 25 million people. That’s half the people in the state, at least.

What about the Southland? The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD) is a water wholesaler for various cities and municipal water districts, serving 19 million people. Southern California has stockpiled water from diverse sources (snowpack from the Sierra Nevada and local mountains, Colorado River water, regular precipitation, and groundwater). Still, the district has asked users for voluntary 20% cuts.

Governor Brown has asked all Californians to voluntarily reduce water use by 20%. Mandatory residential or business cuts of 20% to 50% are in place for some communities, mostly in the north from what I’ve heard.

I want to talk about groundwater in southern California later. It’s not a pretty picture. None of this is, really.

Back to mega-drought. Governor Jerry Brown has very recently advised us that this upcoming year could bring a “mega-drought.”

We’re hearing that term “mega-drought” tossed around. It sounds like one of those D-grade films on the SyFy Channel that I sometimes can’t stop watching.

You know, though, it’s not hyperbole.

Folsom Lake, above, is at 17% of its total capacity. Two and a half years ago it was at 97% of its total capacity. Last year brought California 7.48 inches of rain. That’s the lowest amount in 119 years of record keeping. In fact, that’s less annual precipitation than my region of the southern Mojave is “supposed” to receive, as an average.

Marc Reisner once said that California had a “desert heart.”

Many have pointed out that much of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County are located in harm’s way.

Housing tracts have been placed on floodplains and in wildfire zones. Large industrial districts, entertainment complexes and vast tracts of housing, not to mention city centers, are constructed on and near filled-in wetlands and liquefaction zones (bad news in earthquakes: sands and silts give way, causing roads and buildings to collapse).

The potential for earthquake tragedy has not been fully fathomed. Mike Davis has quoted seismologist Kerry Sieh maintain (after the 1994 Northridge earthquake), “Until this last year I was never truly scared. Now, I am.”

FEMA photograph of Northridge earthquake taken January 17, 1994, by Robert A. Eplett.

Every year, now sometimes twice a year, Californians turn on their TVs to watch nearby wildfires eat up acres of land and often homes and businesses.

My desert’s on fire.

And now we are hearing about some kind of frightening mega-drought. I have lived in southern California since 1974. The real consequences of building one of the world’s economies in a region with a “desert heart” and building it with a flourish are rarely considered.

The news of the day is full of talk about “not enough water,” “I will not be able to wash my car,” “how will I take a 10-minute shower,” and potential effects on local lawns. We really need to start talking seriously about what it means to be overpopulated in an environment that cannot carry all of us.

In the Middle Ages, California experienced two serious droughts, droughts that some of my students might refer to as “epic.” And epic they would be since they lasted 140 years and 220 years.

These days we talk about long-lasting droughts of a decade, or close to a decade. The medieval mega-droughts have been carefully measured and dated in northern California, in the eastern watershed of the Sierra Nevada and they encompass a time scale unlike any we’ve been experiencing or even speculating about . There is also research in paleoclimatology that shows while the water in the eastern Sierra was drying up, the salinity of San Francisco Bay was climbing precipitously, indicating a serious lack of fresh water flowing into the bay.

SF Bay

SF Bay and city.

Here in the south, things were not much better. In Santa Barbara, Orange County, and coastal Los Angeles, the huge droughts of the Middle Ages had an effect as well. What is now coastal Los Angeles County with its Mediterranean sort of ecosystem was a semi-arid zone backing up to the Pacific Ocean.

There is global paleoclimate evidence that the great Medieval droughts of the California region were part of a global pattern of climate anomalies.

Those droughts of the middle ages were natural occurrences, global interactions of ocean and atmosphere and polar ice, that flipped a climate switch and created a worldwide series of changes, including massive and prolonged drought in many parts of the world.

To keep things interesting, climate studies show that the normal temperature and precipitation amounts recorded in California over the last 150 years or so are at odds with any real, long-term conditions. California Gold, our mild and beautifully Mediterranean climate, has been documented over about 150 years of West Coast modernity. What we’ve documented is an anomaly. We live in a climate anomaly. We have been recording one of the wettest, yet, mildest periods of California history.

Marc Reisner was correct, in a deeply perceptive, maybe almost prophetic, way.

First, we are living with false norms as far temperature and precipitation go. Second, the reports of the UNIPCC indicate that California will suffer decreased rainfall, seasonal shifts, increased fire dangers, and potential for alternating severe drought and floods. Increased anthropogenic climate change is not going to ameliorate the potential for disaster here in the Golden State.

The upshot is that climate change along with our current drought could increase many risks of living in California.

What would happen if we were to be plunged into a drought like either of the very severe Medieval droughts? What would happen to our cities, our farmland, all of our infrastructure? Throw in a major earthquake, something the geologists have been predicting for several decades, particularly on the southern portion of the San Andreas Fault, and then what?

Dust Bowl. California. Now.

Good grief, I’m not an apocalyptic person. If a woman like I am, one searching out the calm ponds in life, can acknowledge this is happening, in fact can KNOW this is happening, friends, it’s time to take a long look at the disaster-prone region we have chosen to inhabit. There are no extra scraps on the table in Sacramento, sadly, to mitigate this.

Any chance we might look to Boulder, Colorado with its slow-growth ordinances intended to limit residential growth? Could we develop an interest in zoning regulations that take ecological factors into consideration in new ways? I honestly don’t see this happening. People want to build and live in the chaparral, profound fire danger be damned. Before I lived in this desert, I resided in a mountain village here in southern California that had the San Andreas fault running directly through it. In addition, the forest land surrounding the village was/is filled with pine trees riddled with bark beetles, producing a huge fire hazard each dry season. Now, it’s all dry season. We were blithe about the fire danger. We somehow considered the bedrock of our mountain a protector against shaking on the fault line. Human nature? I don’t know. At least when I grew up in Tornado Country, we all had basements and storm cellars. There was some sort of tentative respect for the elements.

So, southern California.

Are we going to stop building in ecosystems where the native plants are adapted to fire in order to germinate? Those ecosystems would be our beautiful hillsides, everywhere up and down the Golden State. Are we even going to insist upon more stability and soundness in our built environment, for everyone?

Finally, are we going to insist that our children and young people be provided with an education that not only (possibly) includes but clearly forefronts regional environmental education so that they can make intelligent and socioecologically sound, reasonable, and just decisions as the years unroll?

If we decide that’s a good idea, where will we get the money to do it? Even an old unschooler like me, even I cannot continue to run a learning center like this on a shoestring forever. Or can I?

Maybe this is exactly what learning toward a safe and sustainable way of life will look like – a series of learning centers running up and down the state, each one connected to the next in a patchwork.

Rural, exurban, suburban, urban. Maybe we will have to begin to implement environmental solutions on producing farms, in backyards, on hardscrabble country farms, in small-scale household gardens, in city yards, on donated city land.

farm-based learning.

Weeding the orchard. It’s almost her birthday here!

Books to look at:
Davis, Mike. (1998). Ecology of fear: Los Angeles and the imagination of disaster. New York: Vintage Books.
Reisner, Marc. (1986). Cadillac Desert: The American West and its disappearing water. New York: Penguin.

pedagogy…

Last night someone whose opinion I trust indicated to me that using the term “pedagogy” was really not going to fly for me. I think he was laughing at me for using that word to explain something to him.

Heck, I decided the same thing years ago. I don’t really believe in something called pedagogy. I think there is something called teaching and something called learning. We teach sometimes and we learn sometimes.

All of those years homeschooling/unschooling a houseful of kids and working with co-ops pretty much eliminated for me the whole idea of pedagogy as a viable process. Maybe it’s a convenience word for educators to use when talking to one another.

In a supportive environment, people learn if they are engaged with their work, if it makes sense to them, if they feel it is relevant to their lives, and if they feel they can actually do it. Right?

Illich talked about the “educational church,” a dogmatic, transmissive mode of teaching and learning that so many of us sought to eliminate in our home environments.

We wanted to revise the architecture of pedagogy itself: creating a learning environment in homes, in learning centers that do not necessarily resemble modern Western schools. We wanted to develop a variety of enriching environments around any given community. I know I did. And I wanted to be within the natural world.

In sustainability education, I suspect most facilitators want to foreground direct experience of the natural world. Nature becomes teacher in theory and practice.

I have liked thinking about teaching and learning as an ecology for a long time, when my kids were all at home, before my grad school adventure. That’s one reason I liked calling the workshops at RSF “learning ecologies.”

With a working agroecosystem at the center, I like to think we’re building a regenerative, enriching community environment.

Interactions that occur between human beings, their built environment, and nature on a small farm can help avoid splitting ecologies into “the human” and “the natural.” I think this is healthy for the humans and for the other-than-human world. We’re all in the matrix. We all are the matrix.

In “pedagogy” we become overly theoretical and our mind-body connection is ignored. We become all mind, no body. I think we learn better when we acknowledge the body as much as the mind in learning and when we become earth-based, even seasonally oriented with an organic punctuation. The mind-body connectivity is experienced.

Well. That’s over.

I am not convinced that it is possible to address education in terms of theory. I prefer to think we are generating recursive learning ecologies. Our work is process, it never actually ends and continually builds upon what came before.

If pressed to define the learning ecologies at Rainshadow Farm in academic terms, they might be called holistic community-based learning workshops that are collaborative, engaged, eco-justice learning situations, all deeply place-based. Okay? Not pedagogy.

In addition, these workshops are dynamic and seasonal. They emerge from the very context of the farm and the specific participants/learners present.

The ever-present hope is that they will become transformative to all concerned.

I was pretty much expected to go against my own grain and use the term pedagogy in my graduate school years. That’s okay because it was what it was.

What do we do at RSF? Community farm pedagogy. What do we really do? We learn together and we teach one another.

We can grow barley!

Weeds and more (much more, in fact, really long)

Erodium cicutarium, usually known as red-stemmed filaree or common stork’s-bill, is native to the Mediterranean region and was introduced to California in the eighteenth century. There is archaeological evidence for the presence of red-stemmed filaree in adobe bricks from the Spanish mission at Jolon in San Luis Obispo County. In the Central Valley of California, pollen from filaree has been identified in layers of mud dating to the 1700s.

There is evidence, in fact, that filaree invaded Alta California from Baja California before the arrival of Spanish livestock in 1769 (Mensing, 2006).

Why do I care?

Here, look.

This is filaree.

What you’re looking at is a herbaceous annual (in some warmer regions it is considered a biennial). I am going to be calling it a perennial here at RSF. I’ll explain.

Filaree is called an invasive weed in the deserts and arid grasslands of the United States. Calflora.org (my serious go-to for native plants) has it listed as invasive, not native in red with caps. That’s some strong indicator of what California botanists think of “invasive weeds.”

Plant migrations are interesting. When a plant has no immediate and appealing food value (even simple culinary value, as in spices) we tend to think of the plants as weeds or even as a nuisance.

I’m guilty.

While J3 and B were out shooting some hoops I was using a Magic shovel to uproot filaree in my front yard. I’ve already cleared most of it from the orchard. I don’t own a tractor. (Honestly, I’d like to own a small one, permaculture values aside. Go ahead, call me a hypocrite. And then try eking some food out of this high desert.)

And, yes, there really is a Magic shovel. They are great in archaeology for getting nice square sides on units. They are also very nice for backfilling. Sorry, I can’t find a link. That’s just sad.

So I’m yanking by hand and shoveling like a maniac. All the while I’m saying, “Any plant that can grow in the midwinter and freaking bloom when the nights are freezing is going to take over the world.”

Every one of my kids, when they were little, would gather handfuls of these little pink to purple flowers and lovingly bring them to me. I have a small collection of colorful little handblown Fenton glass vases from my mother that I used to put these precious flower offerings into. One child so sweetly told me “look how tiny and they’re so beautiful…” Yes, they were, seen through the eyes of a child in which everything is scared. And then I’d feel guilty as I went out to the orchard and tore the plants out by the handful.

Some Fenton glass vases.

Picture a couple dozen or so of these in a vase.

Filaree in flower.

Are they weeds (plants where people don’t want them) or are they food?

Naturalized annuals such as red-stem filaree (Erodium cicutarium), curly dock (Rumex hymenosepalus), wild oat (Avena spp.), various brome grasses(Bromus spp.), and wild mustards (Brassica spp.) became successfully established in California deserts and grasslands with the spread of Spanish livestock in Alta California, maybe before that time (Crosby, 1986; Mensing, 2006). Many early Euro-American explorers, settlers, and ethnobotanists have mentioned these species. Quite often they are mentioned because Native Americans had found uses for these plants and told the newcomers.

Rumex, Curly Dock, Canaigre, Wild Rhubarb

Brome grasses – a fire hazard – around fallen Joshua Tree.

Wild Mustard Flower

Filaree, in particular, was consumed by people. It’s edible, especially when picked young and tastes a bit like parsley. So, right now, I could go out and harvest any number of these and toss them into my salad.

Reportedly, all stems and leaves can be consumed raw or cooked. Animals enjoy eating it. My chickens like it. Medicinally it is a diuretic, astringent, and anti-inflammatory herb. I personally would not want to eat the older, hairy stems of this plant. To me, hair on plants (at least if it doesn’t wash away, like from a garden zucchini) means trouble. On the other hand I can see putting some of the young leaves into my salads or stews and soups.

About botanical terms.

There are technical botanical problems with the term “invasive species” and sociocultural problems with the frequently still used term “invasive alien species.” Take note.

Tamarisk is often described as an introduced species.

As far as terminology, I do prefer the term migrating or migrant species because that’s what plants do. That’s what they’ve always done; they migrate.

The tamarisk or salt cedar, Tamarix , is a particularly difficult case in the United States Southwest and California where it clogs up watercourses and adds to soil salinity.

Thicket of tamarisk and willows at a spring, March.

Here in the southwestern Mojave, we’re watching the Mojave River ecosystem become congested with tamarisk and we call it nonnative/invasive. Problems with it? It eliminates habitat needed by many regional birds and other animals; it out-competes the local cottonwoods, essentially threatening the cottonwood woodlands that have been here for centuries/millennia; it sucks up groundwater like crazy eliminating former marshy areas where indigenous people have harvested rushes for their basketry; it concentrates salt in its leaves and leaves the soil around it salt-laden and not a happy place for many regional plants.

So.

Tamarisk was brought to this desert 100-150 years ago as a windbreak for many homesteads. It’s fast growing and all things not considered, it made decent windbreaks. It just didn’t want to stay put.

Next to the Mojave River bed, many tamarisk, few cottonwoods.

I could plant it here as a windbreak. It would be very happy. I’d have my quick and easy windbreak. All along Highway 18 and 395 older homesteads have tamarisk windbreaks. It is thriving along the Mojave River. But I just cannot bring myself to do it.

In other riparian zones in the North American West there have been tamarisk eradication efforts. People are talking about it now, out here, but nothing much is happening yet.

I suppose that’s the bad of migrating plants. New plants can mess with established ecosystems.

I think we may need to embrace some of these migrant plants. It’s what people have always done. In my battle with filaree, I’m really beginning to understand how new plants get a foothold, how they continue to adapt until they are well-established, and how they overpower our feeble human efforts. Feeble because we can destroy the land and the soil by poisoning the “weeds.” We can spend all of our time uprooting them, to the neglect of our other food plants. Why not investigate what good they may contribute?

For instance, I’ve been seeing multiple articles on the internet touting the medicinal value of the ubiquitous weed of my childhood, plantain. I cannot even tell you the number of these little and tenacious weeds I was enlisted to pull from my mother’s flower beds in northwestern Ohio. As a child I thought they were nasty. Apparently, as an ethnobotanist, I need to reconsider. They are good for us. Had I only known.

Now for more good.

There’s the thought that the ubiquitous Mojave Desert creosote bush traveled north at the end of the Pleistocene. It’s considered native. What does it take to become native? 10-12 thousand years? A couple hundred? 20 years?

Creosote bush has amazing medicinal properties; it also contains some toxic alkaloids. No one I know who is interested native plant communities in the Mojave Desert would want to send it back, necessarily. It has established itself. Did it wreak havoc on the ecosystem that existed in this semi-arid desert as it migrated northward?

We look at the newest riparian invader, tamarisk, and acknowledge that it is currently decreasing native biodiversity. Did creosote, so much a part of our desert experience, do the same thing, initially?

And now on to another happy migrant plant.

California Fan Palms (Washingtonia filifera) is a feature of southern and Baja California oases, springs, and seeps and vast stretches of southern California urban and suburban landscapes. This major food, fiber, and construction resource for indigenous people was pretty likely introduced to southern California from points south. There are ethnohistorical accounts and there is archaeological evidence that fan palms were once moved ever-further north by enterprising indigenous horticulturists.

These palms were a major resource. They are pretty hearty, nice to look at, and now they are a total symbol for southern CA. In parts of southern California, indigenous people still enjoy eating their fruit. Are they native to the southern Mojave Desert? Probably not, but we now consider them to be. They are a piece of the whole fabric now.

California Fan Palms at Oasis of Mara, 29 Palms, CA.

So what to do?

Back to the filaree.

Each little filaree plant can produce between 2,000-10,000 seeds. See their pointy little seeds capsules? They are ejected from the plant at maturity, then dispersed by driving themselves into the ground, burrowing into animal fur or even bird feathers, or being carried away by water. The seeds can survive in harsh environments and remain viable in the soil for many years.

Check out the barbed seeds pods.

Brassica spp., our wild mustards, pop up in abundance in my orchard every year and filaree — everywhere, every year, all year. That’s why I call them perennial. They simply do not die back.

Mediterranean and many Asian plant species from semi-arid regions are generally pre-adapted to much of California’s climate which aids their dispersal throughout the state. These are some very hearty plants because they are obviously ready for the high desert.

Now with global climate change having an impact on California, including the desert regions, I’m seeing some changes in the filaree, at least. Most of the regional plant books I have say filaree begins its season in the high desert as early as February. And most of them say it flowers from then to about May.

In warmer regions of California, the plant may flower through most of the year.

Here, at RSF I’ve noticed that it doesn’t die back anymore until (1) the hottest of summer weeks; (2) the very first hard freezes in the fall/winter. If then. Then immediately, after a die-back, especially after some rainy days, it will begin to grow and flower rapidly. Right now we haven’t had rain for a while, the nights are still reaching freezing often, and we’re awash in filaree.

Even if I began using it regularly as a salad and pot herb, even if I let the chickens out to eat as much as they liked, even then it would be taking over the place.

I still can get into the “yank out the invader” mindset. I did this afternoon. I also thought about getting goats again and hoping they’d enjoy it. I then thought about getting some geese again because I know they’d eat it. But. I’m not really ready for the responsibility of caring for those animals yet. Not yet.

Filaree and wild mustard and other prolific plants don’t know they are “out of place” (permaculturalist David Holmgren calls weeds “plants out of place”). I’ve been researching a few of the more prolific migrant plants that grow here at RSF. Using an agroecological framework, two of these plants may be able to become a useful part of the farm ecosystem. Filaree and wild mustard. Wild mustard concerns me because I really don’t want a part of my land to look like this:

It’s taking over the world.

It could and it might.

Wild mustards are being eradicated in farmers’ fields in California because they are so opportunistic they will take over entire fields of crops. Bear in mind those fields tend to be much larger than the whole of RSF. And I’m not growing here for commercial purposes, not now anyway. RSF is for learning and for experimenting, so I can usually afford to make some mistakes that my friends who are commercial farmers can’t.

Some things I’ve learned about these plants:

RSF filaree harbors ladybugs, a definite plus for any high desert farmers.

Goats like and thrive on the wild mustards.

In the parts of the world the mustard plants come from they have been used as food and medicinals.

Filaree can be (and is) used in the same ways.

Both have flowers that attract bees. The almost year-round flowering of the filaree is a plus for beekeeping in the desert.

I wonder what I might be missing in my knowledge of filaree that the ladybugs know.

And I know that early this spring I will be taking wild mustard that grows in my orchard and tossing it into my salads and maybe into a stir fry like spinach. Rich in vitamins A and C, calcium and iron, right? And free. And right out the back door.

Wild Mustard Leaves

David Holmgren questions what he calls “the nativist orthodoxy” about migrating plant species.

Given my experiences gardening/farming in the Mojave Desert, I think we desert farmers would do well to heed his words.

“… it is incumbent on those with a more balanced and holistic (ecological) perspective to articulate the positive aspects of plant naturalizations. The greatest good than might flow from this articulation is the protection and study of advanced examples of novel ecosystems.”

I have so many questions and no answers about this ecosystem in transition. But I love throwing myself into the mix.

What else is there to do?

Crosby, Alfred W. (1986). Ecological imperialism: The biological expansion of Europe, 900-1900. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Mensing, Scott. (2006). The History of Oak Woodlands in California, Part II: The Native American and Historic Period. The California Geographer. Volume 46.

Suggested reading:

Medicinal Plants of the Mountain West by Michael Moore

Medicinal Plants of the Pacific West

Medicinal Plants of the Desert and Canyon West

This one is short, to the point, and really great:

Los Remedios: Traditional Herbal Remedies of the Southwest

There’s always The Big Book; this got me through my master’s thesis and my dissertation and I have consulted it so many times in technical writing:

Native American Ethnobotany by Daniel E. Moerman

Windbreak trees

We need more of a windbreak.  We need trees planted across the line of the prevailing southwestern winds.  It’s the high desert so the winds, in fact, can come from the four directions on four different days.  The desert growth (Joshua, juniper, and creosote bush) tempers the wind when it come from the east and somewhat from the north.

Harvest moon at Rainshadow Farm.

On the old farm we had windbreak on three sides of the house and the orchard area on the north. That wasn’t my smartest desert farming move, but the trees all flourished in spite of me. The orchard here has a greater variety of trees, though, not just apples and pears. And the winds here are very much consistently stronger.  I don’t know if the stronger and more persistent winds here are a result of climate change in the high desert or our location relative to the Cajon Pass. Most likely, both.

In severe weather like high desert winters (or summers or springs or fall), trees and shrubs as windbreaks can protect food plants (in and outside of plastic covers) in hot and cold weather, can cut utility bills, help control erosion, and provide wildlife habitat.  Additionally, windbreaks add to the beauty of farm land  and contribute to biodiversity.

Here are some of my thoughts about windbreaks in the southern Mojave Desert:

• Dryland pines
• Jujubes  (maybe not dense enough by themselves)
• California junipers (I’ve ordered some from
• Arizona cypresses  ( also native to southern California, I hear)
• Persimmons (have been used in parts of China as windbreaks)
• Leyland cypress

Leyland cypress with creosote bush in the snow.

At the old farm, I used Leyland cypress and they were excellent. They also are a much better habitat for local birds than we tend to think. I had a barn owl (rodent control) living in one for a few years, right before we moved.

I’m currently experimenting with all of the above and they all are doing very well in this ecoregion. The ground squirrels like eating the leaves off the persimmon a little too much, so maybe that’s not the best choice for right now.

I really like the idea of a two-layered windbreak. Whatever I choose for windbreak trees, I’d like to place a second layer of large shrubs inside the perimeter of taller trees.  For the second layer I like the idea of manzanita, Lycium spp., chokecherries, and/or mesquite.  Really, any shrubby fruit tree would be great for the inside layer. Biointensive and tasty.

This summer when I met one of my neighbors down the road for the first time, after about five minutes of conversation, he asked me “Are you one of those tree-hugger eco-freak types?”  Eco-freak, yep. Tree-hugger, absolutely.

Variety of native shrubs and plants ready to go.

Mesquite near the orchard.

Community?

I’ve been thinking about community and what it means to me lately. I have been called a community educator. I’d maybe prefer being called someone who has established a community learning center on her farm.  Does the farm day group constitute a small community?  Maybe. Some of the participants tell me it does. That is encouraging.

I’m not alone in wondering. Many of us in the United States are not sure what a sense of community is. When I was young, back in Ohio, I had some sense of community. The South End. The Church. Neighbors and friends.  Vague for sure.  Inherent in the search for “community” are parochialism, racism, and misogyny, all masquerading as regionalism and as community.

Many people have been scarred by joining totalist spiritual communities and many have experienced brutal politics tearing down their efforts to build community. Personal politics among communities of practice, including within the intentional community movement, have soured some people on the possibility of creation of any strong, supportive, and encouraging sense of community; even the sadness that emanates from deeply dysfunctional family groups leads many people to despair of ever finding any life-affirming sense of community.

Centuries of hyper-individualism have caused many Americans to mistrust or to not know how to touch any true sense of community. Those who may have lifestyles conducive to more interdependence (e.g., farmers, ranchers) sometimes end up settling for a shallow kind of community. There has been a bleak side to the American agrarian ideal which has been not only racist and ethnocentric, but exploitative of minorities, women and children.

Some are able to forge a sense of community that is deeper, more meaningful, and resilient. Indigenous and traditional communities around the world may be beset by similar problems, although, in general, their lifeways may be the world’s best models for people living sustainably with the land and in community.

Maybe people could begin a movement toward community by examining what their local cultural commons are, how to access them, and how to encourage their maintenance. We could begin by investigating racist, sexist, ageist, classist, ethnocentric, or other exclusionary or prejudicial elements that exist in our cultural commons.  For me, that would begin with the farm day events.

More to follow…

An Earth Day gathering

Quick-built adobe oven by farm day community group.

Frame-building together

Ag Refrain Part III

I’ve learned that first of all, that being present in the field (the field in this case being the land around me), becoming aware of what is really happening, being quiet and listening, watching, and engaging all of my senses creates a connection between me and the land. If I do it often enough, it creates relationship. Some people (Scharmer, 2007; Senge, et al., 2008) call this “presencing.” That the first step.  It’s something like having the land about yourself as a partner in a meditation.

Let the ideas come and go and come. Maintain deep respect for the land and the people too. Ideas will emerge. This can be an implicitly empowering way to approach farming/gardening. I’ve made many mistakes, so the process is also implicitly pedagogical. I learn from the land. I also can learn from other people who live on this land or on land like it. Sometimes I call Rainshadow Farm an “experimental station.” Sometimes it feels that this is what it will always be: an experimental agricultural station with a learning center and many projects going on. In a sense most ecological drylands farms are precisely this. Experimental stations.

Beechey ground squirrel by Erin Ward.

Hummingbird in late winter by Erin Ward.

Discovery. Sisters.

 

Scharmer, C. Otto. (2007). Theory U: Leading from the future as it emerges, the social technology of presencing. Cambridge, MA: Society for Organizational Learning.

Senge, Peter, Scharmer, C. Otto, Jaworski, Joseph, & Flowers, Betty Sue. (2004). Presence: An exploration of profound change in people, organizations, and society. New York: Currency/Doubleday.

Ag Refrain Part II

Back to the bedrock of my own thinking about growing food in drylands.

 

• Beginning small is okay.
• Sit with and begin to really know (be in relationship with) the land.
• LISTEN TO the land you are on.
• Listen to the people around you. Really listen deeply.
• Let relationships (with land and people) grow organically.
• Let things grow incrementally.
• Stay the course — let things take root!
• Allow for change and dynamic movement.