Abbott and Co. trying to buck global trends on renewable energy adoption

Posted on August 29, 2014 by lockyervalley

The world as a whole has already exceeded Australia’s Renewable Energy Target of 20% of the country’s electricity coming from renewable energy by 2020. The rest of the world is ahead of us and increasing its proportion of electricity coming from renewables, but Abbott and Co. [Australia’s Prime Minister and his Conservative government] would have us believe that the move toward renewable energy is a bad thing, and are going all out to dump the Renewable Energy Target.

The following is re-blogged from The Guardian. It is part of the article Renewable Energy Capacity Grows at Fastest Rate Ever

Wind, solar and other renewable power capacity grew at its strongest ever pace last year and now produces 22% of the world’s electricity, the International Energy Agency said on Thursday in a new report.

More than $250bn (£150bn) was invested in “green” generating systems in 2013, although the speed of growth is expected to slacken, partly because politicians are becoming nervous about the cost of subsidies.

Maria van der Hoeven, the executive director of the IEA, said governments should hold their nerve: “Renewables are a necessary part of energy security. However, just when they are becoming a cost-competitive option in an increasing number of cases, policy and regulatory uncertainty is rising in some key markets. This stems from concerns about the costs of deploying renewables.”

She added: “Governments must distinguish more clearly between the past, present and future, as costs are falling over time. Many renewables no longer need high incentive levels. Rather, given their capital-intensive nature, renewables require a market context that assures a reasonable and predictable return for investors.”

Hydro and other green technologies could be producing 26% of the world’s electricity by 2020, the IEA said in its third annual Medium-Term Renewable Energy Market Report. They are already used as much as gas for generating electrical power, it points out.

But the total level of investment in renewables is lower now than a peak of $280bn in 2011 and is expected to average only $230bn annually to the end of the decade unless governments make increasing policy commitments to keep spending higher.

The current growth rate for installing new windfarms and solar arrays is impressive but the IEA believes it is not enough to meet climate change targets, triggering calls in Brussels from green power lobby groups for Europe to adopt tougher, binding targets.

You can read the whole article here.

Courses at Northey Street City Farm

Posted on August 29, 2014 by lockyervalley

I’ve just received the list of courses at Northey Street City Farm in Brisbane for the rest of the year.

Two bits of good news:

First, they are offering some of their Permaculture Design Course elements as one-day courses. Apparently people who aren’t enrolled in the full PDC can sign up for individual courses. I haven’t seen this before, so maybe it is a new initiative by Northey Street, but anyway it is very welcome.

You can see the details of the PDC elements here, and you can sign up for individual one-day parts of it here. The courses available as one-day workshops are:

Trees in Permaculture (5th September)
Understanding & improving your Soil (12th September)
Water in Permaculture (26th September)

All are full-day courses, 9.00am to 4.30pm, and cost $85 or $65 for a health care card holder. Better get in soon if you want to attend, they are likely to be very popular.

The second bit of good news is that Tim Heard is going to do a one-day Native Bee Keeping course at Northey Street on 13th December. Price is the same as the PDC workshops.

I attended Tim’s one-day course when he ran it in Ipswich earlier in the year. Here’s what I said in an email to a friend:

“The workshop was fantastic. The best workshop I can remember. Tim Heard is not only very much a theoretical and practical expert on native bees, he’s a gifted teacher. So much information for me to think about and digest, but I know I learned a huge amount.

“Apart from a lot of information on the types and evolution of stingless bees, design and management of hives, he split two hives in front of us, taking time to make sure everyone saw what he was doing and understood why he was doing it, and also used the hives to illustrate all the things to be aware of. He also harvested honey from one hive (with a double honey top) while we watched”

You can book for this course here. You won’t regret it.

Starting a batch of 18-day (more or less) compost

Posted on August 27, 2014 by lockyervalley

I just spent a morning putting together a batch of compost. Four hours of solid work, from getting the green waste that is the basis if this batch to capping it off with a fluffy cap of straw.

The green waste came from a vegetable packing shed, where I had to line up with all the farm utes picking up a load of cattle feed (we’re in a drought, despite the reasonably good rain in the last couple of weeks).

Having heard figures of up to 40% of horticultural production being rejected because it does not meet supermarket specifications for colour, shape, size, etc., I had always imagined that there must be a huge amount of green waste going to landfill from packing sheds. It isn’t true, at least not here in the Lockyer Valley. Some of the big farms that have their own packing sheds also have their own cattle herds, and these get first call on the green waste. The others generally make it available to the public, and from what I’ve seen very little or none goes to landfill. The farmers are eager and grateful to have this source of animal feed.[*see additional note below]

When you think about it, these farm animals are eating better than those of us who shop at supermarkets. Picking of the vegetables commences early in the morning, and the green waste starts coming out of the packing shed around 7.30am. There might be a bit of waste from the previous afternoon in the first few bins, but from then on it is all stuff that has been picked on the same day – and goes straight from there to the farm or, in my case, straight to the composting organisms. If you buy vegetables from the supermarket they have gone from the field to the packing shed, to the market or to the supermarket chain distribution centre, generally on the same day, and from there to the supermarket – you will be getting it two or three days after it was picked if you are lucky.

I have a friend who works in a packing shed who takes pride in the work she does to select, trim and pack the vegetables she works on. When she sees the same vegetables in the local branch of the supermarket her shed supplies her feelings are frequently somewhere between outrage and insult because of the difference in quality she sees compared to when it left her hands.

Anyway, back to the green waste. Lettuce and cauliflower trimmings today, with a bit of broccoli. Two bins are tipped into my trailer by the forklift operator, and I quickly move aside to park and cover my load so others can be served.

Back home, reverse the trailer up to the compost production bins (not easy to do in the tight space between stockpiles of horse manure, poultry manure, chipped tree loppings, chip mulch from our firebreak clearing, and sand/silt from the drains on our two kilometres of access track, as well as the last batch of compost. Set up the water pump and hoses and get out the tools.

Starting the process

The first layer is already in the compost bin: about 20cm of chip mulch from a tree I had to cut out of the firebreak, covered by a layer of the coarse compost materials from the last batch. It’s been lying there under a layer of straw for a week or two, and with the rain we’ve had the composting process in the chip mulch is probably well started. A thick layer of green waste goes on top of that, then a layer of chipped tree loppings that has been stockpiled since last July and is just starting to get fungal strands through the lower parts of the heap.

The mountain of chipped tree loppings from under the power lines. We shared it with one of our neighbours and still got eight trailer loads – a full day’s work to move it all.

I wet that layer thoroughly, before adding more green waste and then a layer of decomposing barley straw from a spoiled bale that I’d put behind the compost bin a while back. That’s wetted down too. More greenwaste and then a layer of months-old broiler droppings. In truth, the broiler droppings were always more wood shavings than manure, with a good dash of spilled feed and water, but now they look decidedly woody.

DSCF4687_compost-trailer-chip heap_small

The growing compost heap, and the chipped tree loppings stockpile in the background

I’m kind of wary of broiler droppings because of the short time the birds are on it, leading to a poor ratio of wood to manure, and not much breaking down of the woody material before I get it. This weathered stuff looks like 80% wood shavings, but I notice that a lot of the woody material is quite soft, and is in a matrix of very fine dark, damp material that might already be compost. Nevertheless, if I was really intent on making 18-day compost I wouldn’t use broiler droppings, weathered or not. But I’m not a great fan of the strict 18-day process. In my experience after 18 days the result can look like compost, but it never smells like it – you know that rich, earthy, good-compost smell? Doesn’t happen for me in 18 days, even when temperatures and moisture content are all perfectly aligned. I wonder how often it happens for others.

What I have seen is that the longer an 18-day compost is left to “mature” the better it gets, with more life in it, and generally after three weeks or so of maturing it suddenly gets that earthy smell like forest litter. From then on it just gets better still, and eventually (if I leave it long enough) has a network of fungal hyphae extending through it. Not that I always leave it to the fungal stage, and at times I start harvesting the finest sieved component before it smells right, if I’m desperate to make some potting mix or a seedling bed.

The last, partly used, batch of compost on the right – covered against the rain over the last few days

Back to today’s compost. From there on it’s just a repetition of the same layers and watering, until the green waste load is used up and the compost bin is full. Then it’s topped off with a thick layer of fluffed up barley straw (to keep it the sun off it while allowing air circulation) and I get out an old tarp to leave beside the bin in case I see heavy rain coming.

Just to make me feel good I measure the dimensions of the heap and take a final photo. Volume of the heap: 2.28 cubic metres. That will drop quickly in the next couple of weeks as the heap settles and water is driven out of the lettuce and cauliflower waste, but it should produce at least 1.5 cubic metres of good compost.

The finished compost heap

Finally I make a note of the date and give the heap a code on the whiteboard in the workshop, where I will record the temperature of the heap from time to time. What I want to see is that it gets into the 50-65 degC range for at least a few days, and that it doesn’t go into the 75+ degC region for more than a short period, otherwise I’ll have to turn the heap at that stage to drop the temperature. Then, once it has done about a week in the 50-65 range I’ll turn it when it’s convenient. After that, once it drops to around 40 degC (not lower) I’ll turn in every few days to a week, making adjustments to water content and the time between turnings to try to keep it above 40 for two or three weeks. After that I’ll make sure the last turning has moved it to a place where it won’t be in the way of the next batch or other work, and just keep an eye on it’s progress and of course, the smell.

By the way, do you see the fork in the last photo? That’s a manure fork, with four tines rather than the three in a pitch (hay) fork. The tines in the manure fork are closer together, and they are fatter as well as having a bend (or a significant curve) so it’s easier to push them under things on the ground. Pitchforks are all very well for throwing sheaves of hay onto haystacks, but I find that they don’t pick up the shorter, looser material like compost ingredients or manure very well. And they’ve (finally) started to become available in Southeast Queensland – at Mitre10 and Trade Tools if you’re looking for one.

* More thoughts on waste in the vegetable production system:

It’s difficult to get a good idea of the level of real wastage in the fruit and vegetable production system. A Bush Telegraph episode on ABC Radio National on 14 July gave a figure of “$10 billion worth of food” wasted annually by “Australians”, but this isn’t broken down beyond “food”. Later in the same article they quote figures of “between 20 and 40 per cent of fruit and vegetables grown” being rejected before they reach the shops “because they don’t meet supermarkets’ high cosmetic standards and specifications”. However I suspect that there are different rates for fruit and vegetables going to landfill. For example, any fruit with large seeds (avocados) would be unsuitable for stock food, for instance, as are whole potatoes, because of the risk of choking. Apart from what is diverted to stock food at the farm or packing shed, some of the “unsuitable” fruit and veg goes to charities for distribution to low income families.

What I’m not sure about is whether fruit and vegetables grown under contract to the big supermarkets is prohibited from being sold as a condition of contract. I’ve heard this said, but haven’t been able to find any evidence one way or the other. It would be interesting to know.

It would also be very interesting to see a detailed breakdown of the different destinations for rejected fruit and veges.

A tour of the vege garden

Posted on August 23, 2014 by lockyervalley

In this post I’m going to give you an overview of the food garden areas, with a few “before & after” progress shots – starting with this shot of our first garden (it’s roughly where the porch is now on the plan below – middle right edge).

First garden, 4 November 2006, in a section of an old tank. Eventually we had three tank sections in a clover-leaf garden. We were living in the shed at the back, which is now our office, TV room, library, etc.

A section of the plan of our infrastructure on Black Cockatoo Ridge

Our current main food growing areas are: the Veg Garden, The Grove, and the Path Garden (left to right on the map above). North is slightly left of up (the house is pretty much E-W), and for a scale, the widest (E-W) dimension of the Veg Garden is 13m and it is 11m N-S.

The area from the house to the Path Garden is more or less flat, but then drops away steeply, so the Path Garden is sort of a terrace.

Looking west toward the outside toilet (in the ugly shadecloth structure)

Sweet Potato crop in western end of Path Garden – early April 2014

Anything we grow in the Path Garden must be either unappetising to the wildlife or secure behind some kind of barrier – hence the collar on the paw paw tree and the net tunnel over the sweet potatoes. The sweet potatoes were growing in an area of around two square metres, though the foliage spreads much further, and yielded 9.5kg despite months of dry weather.

Looking West into The Grove

The Grove is a small area that we never planned to become part of our productive garden. It had a Carob tree, and an unidentifiable citrus tree when we arrived. The citrus didn’t even flower for about 10 years, then when we pruned it one wet year it suddenly burst into flower and yielded 70 pomelo/grapefruit type fruit – absolutely delicious. When I was plumbing in the water tanks for the house I decided to run their overflows into a series of mini-swales that drain into and through The Grove.

Turmeric (early Autumn before they died off in Winter) and a Coffee bush peeking in on the right

Friends gave us a couple of Coffee bushes, so we needed a shady place for them and The Grove seemed just right, and they’ve thrived ever since. Now they’ve been joined by Turmeric and a Mango tree.

No time to go into the details of Fanya Juu terracing now (a later blog post) but here’s the area where they are being developed. This was taken from photo point C in the map above.

Looking West from the outdoor toilet. That’s the Veg Garden on the left

I always regarded this area as too steep to do anything with, even though it has a really good aspect, but when I came across Fanya Juu terracing I decided to give it a go.

First terrace partly constructed

It’s a long way from complete, and doesn’t get very high priority, but whenever I feel like a bit of a work-out I dig some more swale or haul more rocks for the terrace wall. That’s Queensland Arrowroot growing on the terrace – a great potato substitute requiring very little care and attention.

OK, now let’s go into the Veg Garden.

That’s the Veg Garden on the left, behind a tall fence with an electric tape on top to keep the possums out

This area was totally unplanned from the outset. When the house construction started we were suddenly faced with the problem of disposing of the spoil from the foundation excavation, so some of it was dumped here. Then came the problem of what to do with the Lime and Lemon trees that were in the way. No time to think about it, so the back-hoe operator dug them up one at a time and carried them in the bucket to this area, dug a new hole and “planted” them. They thrived! And that gave us the “constraints” for later planning of shadehouse locations.

You can see Shadehouse No.1 in the photo above of the Fanya Juu location – it’s an old temporary carport someone gave us when the cover had perished. Here’s another view from in The Grove.

First shadehouse. The rocky drop beside it gives an idea of the stony nature of the fill that was dumped here

Here’s the location of the next shadehouse as it was in June 2010.

Garden June 2010_P1010212_250610_Location_small

The tank IS vertical – the photographer wasn’t. The First Hugelkultur Shadehouse was constructed about where the sheet of iron is to the right of the tank. That’s our firewood store at the back.

Making an above ground mound of wood and covering it with soil in typical hugelkultur style would result in a very dry bed in our climate, so we dug the base out 300mm deep (about 1 foot), and filled it with old wood, branches, leaves, poultry manure and chip mulch. Then the rocks were sieved out of the soil that had been removed and it was put on top of the base in alternating layers with straw and poultry manure. We did about two metres of the floor of this shadehouse in October 2012 as a trial.

This is what the first crop of Sweet Potato and Thai Basil looked like – with a young Dragon Fruit just peeking over the log trellis.

The plants in this area remained green while others in the garden were drooping from lack of water, so we decided to extend the hugelkultur treatment for the full (5m) length of this shadehouse.

It has been very successful, with continued “drought resistance” and crops of Kale, Gai Laan, Silverbeet, Ginger, Dragon Fruit, Baby Broccoli, Flat-leaf Parsley and Radish. After 18 months the soil level has dropped by up to 200mm in places, presumably as a result of the rotting of the wood underneath (that’s what is supposed to happen), so I’ll be topping it up with fresh soil in the next couple of months.

Our success with this approach inspired us to try it again with Hugelkultur Shadehouse No.2.

Hugelkultur Shadehouse No.2 in early August 2014

This has been even more productive than No.1, if that is possible. In this photo there are: Loose-leaf Lettuce, Aibika, Spring Onions, Bok Choy, Brazillian Spinach, Cassava, Cherry Tomato, Ceylon Spinach, Tat Soi, Sugar Snap Peas, Clumping Leek, Amaranth, Mugwort and Perpetual Coriander.

After the massive effort in digging out two shadehouse bases, each five metres long and two metres wide, I thought it might be time to try some simple raised beds.

The Chili Shadehouse in mid-December 2013

The Chili Shadehouse is “grafted” onto the previous shadehouse because space in the enclosed Veg Garden is now in short supply. Its raised beds are sitting on rocky fill, and the “soil” is all “manufactured” because, as you are probably starting to gather by now, we don’t have much actual soil on top of the ridge. Or anywhere else on the property for that matter. The recipe for the soil is: 9 parts of sand and silt out of the drainage gutters on our access track; 3-4 parts of fine sieved compost; and 3 parts of chipped matured horse manure. It makes a rich, well drained but water absorbent, “fluffy” loam.

Chili Shadehouse in early August this year

This gives some idea of how productive this shadehouse has been. There are Radish (left to go to seed), Silverbeet, Corn Salad, Chili (growing madly, hence the name of the shadehouse), Pak Choy, Curly Parsley, Brazillian Spinach, Greek Basil, Clumping Leek, Mugwort, Cassava and Aibika. A month or so before this photo I’d harvested Turmeric and Kipfler Potatoes from the empty areas you can see on the right of the above photo.

And, finally, these are the beds across the front of the Chili Shadehouse.

End of Chilli Shadehouse

In late May this year these two beds had Bok Choy, Pak Choy, Beetroot, Silverbeet, Radish, Corn Salad and Loose-leaf Lettuce. With the exception of the Silverbeet that has all been harvested and I’m about to start Spring planting in these beds.

I’ve left out the Lemon Tree Fence Beds and the Composting Toilet Beds (I’ll leave the explanation of that name till another time).

I hope you’ve enjoyed the tour.

A refreshingly different approach to food forests

Posted on August 20, 2014 by lockyervalley

I’ve just been reading a post by Tom at Sustainable Veg with the intriguing title: A Forest Garden Without the Forest.

It first caught my eye because of my scepticism about permaculture “food forests” as an efficient use of land for producing our daily meals. I’m not talking about the food forests that surround hamlets and households in Southeast Asia and other parts of the world. I’ve had a lot of contact with these, and in general these food forests are fruit, leaf and herb production areas, often with some poultry, and which also provide shade to cool the area around the house. Their production supplements the range of day-to-day basic foods from more distant wet or dry rice areas or upland gardens.

My scepticism relates to the tendency of many permaculture followers to focus the majority of their production efforts on food forests dominated by fruit trees of one type or another. And there seems to be a common belief that if it doesn’t have a food forest, then it isn’t permaculture. Permies coming into a new garden will frequently ask “where’s your food forest?”. Of course, many people with food forests also have “kitchen gardens”, but even so, there is often a serious over-allocation of area and effort to the food forest, out of all proportion to the negligible volume of “staples” produced there and the generally low productivity per unit area.

As Tom says in another post: “Billions of people need feeding … (w)e can be an alternative, organic movement but we need to produce carbohydrate, protein and vitamin dense food, in large amounts…” (I’m not suggesting here that Tom shares my views on food forests – to be honest, I don’t know).

A view of part of Tom’s garden – click on the image to go to a gallery of photos of the garden

Tom’s describes his back garden (he also has an allotment) as “a productive, organic, kitchen garden with substantial amounts of perennial vegetables, some annual vegetables and five dwarfing fruit trees”. But he also calls it a forest garden, and refers to his techniques as forest gardening, and for good reason.

His reason for classifying his approach as forest gardening is that he is concerned with the ecology of the garden and of the soil, and therefore uses many of the techniques of forest gardening, while stopping short of trying to create either a closed tree canopy or a climax forest situation – not least because he doesn’t have the space to grow more trees without shading out his vegetables. Nevertheless he has adopted an impressive array of permaculture / food forest techniques –

I’ll don’t want to spoil the pleasure of reading his post for yourself, but in summary these are the forest gardening techniques he uses:

Vertical stacking, with three diverse layers of plants, in association with individual fruit trees.
The use of support plants, with half the area of his garden devoted to these, but with the difference that he composts the prunings from the support plants before putting it around the food plants. In this way he can focus on the needs of the support plants in one area and those of the food plants in another. I also suspect, from what he writes and from the photos in his gallery (including the one above), that many of the things growing in his food production area are supporting each other.
Growing a wide range of perennial vegetables.
Adopting a “closed loop fertility” approach whereby he grows all of the ingredients for the compost on his own land. You can see a separate post on it here. I find this an admirable but daunting prospect. I certainly wish I could imagine getting to that stage on our stony dry ridge. At the moment the bulk of our compost ingredients come from off-site (but within 10km).

Please do yourself a favour and read Tom’s article for yourself. What Tom has done is to apply the key food forest approaches without having his productive area dominated by forest. I’m in awe of what he’s doing and the strong ethical approach he takes, and I’ll be adopting some of his approaches as I develop and expand our food production area.

As I finished writing this I noticed that Tom has added a post about compost which gives more insights into his approaches. Enjoy.

Living with and understanding fire risk

Posted on August 14, 2014 by lockyervalley

Why do we live here? What are the risks?

Why do we live here, and how does that relate to the key fire risks and our perception of those risks?

Those of us who live on rural properties face varying degrees of fire risk. Most of us are aware of the risk in a general sort of way, and many of us take active precautions to reduce the risk to some extent. Few of us, however, think about how the reasons for living where we do and the things we value about our surroundings affect both the degree of fire risk we face and, often, the extent to which we act to mitigate risk.

Continually reviewing the values that lead us to live where we do, and the risks we face (whether from fire, flood, or just failures in our food production activities), is a part of ensuring sustainability and resilience in both our lifestyle / habitation the communities in which we live.

The connection between bushfires and our landscape and community values is highlighted in the latest Fire Note (Life on the Edge – Living with Risk) from the Bushfire CRC (Cooperative Research Centre). This Fire Note summarises some outcomes from the Social construct of fuels in the interface project 1 which was conducted by the Bushfire CRC uner one or their activity themes, Understanding Risk.

Part of the research involved working with property owners to understand what they value in their surroundings, how they perceive their fire risks, and whether these are related. It used the technique of “social-ecological place mapping” to assist landowners to understand what it is that they relate to their landscape

The second part of the research applied a model of factors affecting house losses in NSW bushfires (in much milder weather conditions than those leading to Victoria’s Black Saturday losses) to the 65 properties of the residents who did the place mapping, to calculate a relative estimate of their risk of loss to bushfire.

According to the model, the risk of loss increased: with increasing steepness of slope; where houses were closer together (seven metres apart – but this effect was minimal where houses were further (50 metres) apart (and of course this applies to the buildings on your property too); as the distance to the nearest water body (swimming pools, ponds, dams) increased; and when vegetation cover within the garden (within 20 metres of the house) was high.

The mean predicted probability of house loss for the 65 houses was 0.43, indicating a substantial potential risk should a fire occur (there was considerable variation among the levels of risk of the various properties). Community and lifestyle values identified by the participants were found to be possible key factors influencing the relative risk of house loss.

There’s a lot more in the report than I can summarise in this short blog post, and I encourage you to read it and the associated reports which are linked here under the heading Key Resources You Should Know About.

This is the 129th Fire Note that the Bushfire CRC has produced. They make informative and compelling reading. They can be downloaded here, from a list of titles with brief summaries of contents.

And on the home front, it’s time to review and update our fire strategies, and to make sure that they are well documented. I’ll do a separate post on our strategies in a few weeks.

Lee Reich: unusual fruits, soil organisms, compost tea, moon planting and a lot more

Posted on August 11, 2014 by lockyervalley

Just a quick one to alert you to a very interesting new podcast on the Northwest Edible Life blog featuring an interview with Lee Reich.

Lee Reich: soil scientist, horticultural scientist, author [link to leereich.com]

Reich has graduate degrees in soil science and horticulture and has worked in plant and soil research with the USDA and Cornell University, before turning to writing, lecturing, and consulting. He has written at least nine books as well as running an interesting blog. Because of his educational, research and practical experience in two fields which are an important part of the basis of permaculture, a lot of what he says in this interview will be of interest. Erica, the host of the Northwest Edible Life blog, has a lively and easy to listen to interviewing style that keeps the flow of ideas coming throughout the interview.

You can also download the podcast – which leads me to the topic of mp3 player programs. I’ve found a lot of the programs available for Macs to be a bit of a pain in the neck – and I totally refuse to use iTunes because like a lot of Apple’s market oriented software it is just too focussed on data collection. Then I just stumbled on the fact that if I stored an mp3 file in Evernote I could also keep comments about the content of the podcast in the same in the same Note, as well as using Evenote’s very functional mp3 player straight from the note. In fact what I do is to store the file in my General Library folder, along with pdfs etc, then link an Evernote Note to that file.

Evernote is available for Mac Windows phones and tablets. I recommend it as a great place to dump information that will be useful one day, or to keep copies of receipts (e.g. for equipment with a warranty), warranties, manuals, etc. My only problem with it is that it can be difficult to extract files from Evernote once they are saved into a Note, but I get around that by “attaching” files to Notes (and by keeping most of my technical notes in Devonthink Pro Office).

Nicole Foss and a Powerful Owl in the one evening!!

Posted on August 6, 2014 by lockyervalley

Just two quick bits of news.

First, Nicole Foss was on ABC Radio National’s Big Ideas earlier today. I missed it but downloaded the mp3 of her talk – and it seems to be pretty close to the presentation she gave on her Australian tour with David Holmgren in July. I gave my impressions of their Brisbane talks here. It’s long (54 minutes) but the mp3 file downloads quickly, even on satellite broadband, and it’s definitely worth hearing, so set yourself up with a comfortable chair and a mug/glass of your favourite beverage and get ready to be informed by one of the best speakers I’ve heard.

The other news is that as I was coming in from the office tonight, just before 10.00pm, there was a male Powerful Owl calling from somewhere up behind the workshop. You can find good recordings of their calls here. This is the first Powerful Owl I have heard here in about four or five years. In fact they were regulars during the drought, and seemed to move away once we started getting good rain. The first sign we had of their presence was early in the drought, when we kept finding the tails of Sugar Gliders on the ground in the bush. Sugar Gliders seem to be a favourite food of this species and they discard the tail because it isn’t much but bone and fur. We’ve only seen a Powerful Owl here once, when it was sitting calling on a horizontal branch about 15 metres from where the house is now. What a sight!! The first thing that hits you is the size of the bird; these guys are really tall. Then you see the feet, which look rather similar in their size and proportions to a man’s hand. Let’s hope this one stays around. I’ll be listening for it, and for a female call to signify that it has found a mate.

The resident Southern Boobooks (Mopokes) in a stand of Budgeroos just down in the gully kept calling while the Powerful Owl was calling – I’d have expected they might have been a bit intimidated by the sheer volume of the Powerful Owl’s call.

Renewable energy – some places promote it and shout it out!

Posted on August 4, 2014 by lockyervalley

I just had to share this. It is so positive and encouraging. Nice to be reminded that in other parts of the world they encourage the growth of renewable energy.

Here’s a shot of the renewable energy tracking on the website of the following group of companies:

Hawaiian Electric Company, Inc.

The image is updated on the company’s Renewable Watch page, and you can click on the image there to enlarge it.

If only our governments and power companies were so proud of the level of generation of renewable energy in Australia.

I found the link to the graphic in a story on Mother Jones on the way in which electricity demand in the USA is dropping year after year. The total demand in 2013 was two percent below the 2008 level. The reasons for the drop are pretty much the same as in Australia: higher prices pushing people to cut usage; more people and companies generating their own power, mostly via solar PV; and increasing efficiency (of buildings and appliances).

Madeira Vine – a permaculture food plant, or a rampant and destructive invasive?

Posted on August 2, 2014 by lockyervalley

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while you will know that I’m very concerned about the encouragement of the use of invasive or potentially invasive species in permaculture (you can see where I’ve written on the subject here and here).

Now the folks at Milkwood Permaculture have thrown up a curly one – they’ve just posted on how Madeira Vine not only has edible leaves and tubers, but is widely eaten and cultivated in Japan, where it is known as “land seaweed” (okawakame).

Typical effect of unchecked Madeira Vine [from Milkwood Permaculture blog]

As they point out, Madeira Vine is an already “adapted, perennial, zero footprint and highly nutritious food plant” with the following characteristics which are desirable in a food plant:

“It grows without much assistance, is hardy and produces prolifically.
It requires minimal cultivation.
It dominates an area where it is planted (meaning far less weed control is needed)
It is spread only* by humans and by water flows distributing the bubils – an easy factor to contain with good design.”

The Milkwood guys are planning on having it as a food plant in their garden. They recognise that it is a potential problem, and will manage it by eating it and stopping it from spreading.

So, should we incorporate Madeira Vine into our permaculture food production?

My first question would be: Just how weedy/invasive is it really?

Madeira vine grows prolifically at rates of up to 1 m per week in high-light environments. It produces large numbers of subterranean and aerial tubers that not only act as reproductive bodies, but also provide the plant with a carbohydrate source that enables it to survive through difficult times. As a consequence, Madeira vine can tolerate a range of adverse conditions including drought, snow and frost, and it has been found growing in areas as diverse as rainforests, riparian fringes, rocky outcrops and frontal dunes (source). This same ability to tolerate adverse conditions also means that the tubers can survive for very long periods of time in suspended animation, before they experience the right conditions to shoot (source).

The vine reproduces through the proliferation of aerial tubers and also from rhizome (subterranean tuber) fragments that may be broken off (source). The aerial tubers can persist for two to 15 years and rhizomes for five to 10 years, with tuber germination rates of up to 70 per cent (source). Although Madeira Vine is widely believed not to set seed in Australia, up to 5% of dried flowers collected from southeast Queensland were found to contain germinable seed (see #Vivian-Smith et al, below).

Dispersal is believed to occur primarily* via human spread (cultivation for ornamental purposes, disposal of vegetative material and tubers, e.g. in green waste (source), or being spread by machinery and/or gravel during road construction). However it also spreads downslope under the influence of gravity and water movement from ridges and down watershed, and via floods (source).

Saying that it is spread primarily by humans needs to be considered in relation to just how widespread it is, what a significant destroyer of habitats it is once established, and how extremely difficult it is to eradicate once established. Here is how the Environment Australia weeds database summarises the facts about Madeira Vine:

Madeira Vine is a Weed of National Significance (WONS). It is regarded as one of the worst weeds in Australia because of its invasiveness, potential for spread, and economic and environmental impacts.

Madeira Vine has aggressive vegetative growth which competes with and replaces other vegetation, and is difficult to control once established. Its aggressive nature gives it the potential to smother other desirable plants. Its sheer weight is capable of breaking branches off trees, thereby reducing them to poles, potentially causing collapse of the rainforest canopy (ISSG 2006). It restricts light and thereby prevents germination of desirable native species (Harley undated).

Should we then include Madeira Vine in permaculture food production? I think there are two things to take into account before making a decision on this.

First, the permaculture ethics of care for the Earth and care for people. The potential impacts on the Earth from Madeira Vine escapes are obvious (see the sources and photo above) and well documented, as are its impacts on the people whose properties and amenity are impacted.

Second, based on an assessment of invasiveness and impact, Madeira vine was ranked 5th worst of1060 naturalised south-east Queensland plant species (#Batianoff & Butler, below). How are you going to ensure that:

no seed is set, and neither seed nor tuber material is distributed by animals, or other agents of dispersal, including water (i.e. the area where you will grow it will never flood or be exposed to high volumes of water runoff;
everyone who works on your garden or caretakes for you while you are away is as careful as you would be not to allow any dispersal of aerial tubers, (fragments of) rhizomes or seeds;
before you move on, you will have somehow removed all aerial tubers and every last fragment of rhizome before you leave, or failing this, you have some guarantee that the next landholder is going to take the same careful management approach as you?

– – – – – – – –

*I consider the statement that it is spread “only by humans and by water flows distributing the bubils – an easy factor to contain with good design” to be dangerously simplistic for a number of reasons. First, once a Madeira Vine has established itself in a vegetated area it does not sit and wait for humans or water flows to come along and move its tubers or rhizomes. The tubers are spread naturally when they fall from the adult plants where they have climbed up and across the canopy (often a considerable distance) from where they originally grew. Second, anywhere that an established population of Madeira Vine grows over a waterway that even only occasionally flows, this will distribute the plant to any and all areas downstream. Third, saying that it is spread “by humans” without mentioning the many ways in which human activity can spread the plant, or the very long viability period of the tubers, gives a very misleading impression of the ease with which human activity can (even unwittingly) result in spread.

Here is a rather more informative account of how it is spread:

The most common means of reproduction and spread is via asexual tubers formed on the roots and stems. Prolific numbers of aerial tubers are produced throughout the year, which drop to the ground when mature or in response to stress. Research indicates that aerial tubers can persist for two to 15 years and subterranean tubers for five to 10 years, with tuber germination rates of up to 70 per cent. In areas of heavy infestation, soil tuber densities are up to 1500 per m2. Madeira vine is also capable of shooting from sections of severed vine.

Dispersal occurs primarily via human spread such as cultivation for ornamental purposes, disposal in green waste, or spread by machinery during road construction. It can also spread via gravity and water movement from ridges and watersheds or during floods. Mammals and birds may also play a minor role in localised spread.
While seed production is believed to be rare in Australia, research indicates that up to 5 per cent of dried flowers collected from southeast Queensland contain germinable seed. It is speculated that seed set and germination may only occur under ideal environmental and seasonal conditions.

Sources which aren’t linked above:

#Vivian-Smith et al, Alan Fletcher Research Station QLD Unpublished data (cited in this source)

#Batianoff, G.N. and Butler, D.W. (2002). Assessment of invasive naturalized plants in south- east Queensland. Plant Protection Quarterly 17: 27–34.

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