Tag: FoodGrowing

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Abundance!

Close your laptop. Postpone your meetings!

For something amazing is happening in the hedgerows in the south of Britain. You may have noticed that they are laden with fruit. Crab apples like little red lanterns. The surprise of the yellows, purples and greens of so many mirabels, damsons and plums. Blackberries about to burst on the scene, like the negatives of 10,000 fairly lights. And the fattening of soon-to-be-ripe apples.

Of course, bearing fruit is usually an annual fixture. But in my part of England this year’s harvest in parks, hedgerows and allotments is particularly heavy. Even the tree at the end of my garden which hasn’t fruited for seven years is laden ripening damsons.

Why is this? It could be that the combination of wet and dry that we had in the spring means this is a particularly good year for fruit. This could also be a mast year, one in which trees produce extra fruit in order to ensure the animals that eat them leave some behind to turn into seeds.

Whatever the reason, the fruit is there for the picking, eating, pickling, bottling, jamming and, importantly, the sharing.

That’s the thing with abundance. It often comes on its own timetable. There can be plenty for everyone but we don’t get to control it. Instead we need to swim with the peak and prepare our community for the trough that inevitably follows.

Save your meeting for the dip! Consign report writing for leaner times! 

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The Seven Levels of a Forest Garden

The following I learnt from Steve Watts, permaculture expert, during a talk he gave about Forest Gardens at the wonderful Coedfest, which he co-leads.


In a forest garden, plants and trees are layered over one another to create a growing system that is far more productive and diverse than farming a single crop on an area of land.

By stacking layers of complementary plants and trees over one another, you increase the amount of carbon that is being locked in, you increase the leaf litter that falls and so you increase the richness of the soil.

As Steve describes we can think of a forest garden has having seven layers:

  • High trees,
  • Lower trees,
  • Tall shrubs,
  • Small shrubs,
  • Ground cover,
  • Plants in which we harvest the roots, and

  • Climbers.

Each of these layers can produce food at different times of the year, and each of these layers provides a complementary role to the others. It is a beautiful model for a stacked system that is creating life. And it is a reminder that when we bring different systems together in complementary ways we can create much greater richness and diversity than we keep things separate.

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Compound aggregating regenerative food extrusion device — for 25 pence.

The device comes in a tiny package, no more than 1cm long and less than that wide — a hundredth of its final size. No buttons. No charging ports. No Bluetooth connections. It can wait on standby for months or even years, waiting patiently to be activated.

Activation is simple. You dig a borehole with your little finger in some humus medium, place the package at the bottom, backfill, and irrigate. 

Nothing seems to happen for about a week, the start-up sequences has begun, powered by an internal chemical battery. The first job is put up a tiny solar panel that can fuel the next stage in development. 

Above ground, you see the pilot solar panels pop up, a tiny pair of wings that capture radiation from the sun, and use it to convert an ambient gas and the liquid irrigation into a powerful internal fuel. 

This process fuels the next stage. Below ground the device constructs a network of feelers that seek out more moisture and also trace compounds needed to build its more substantial substructure and superstructure along with its food-generating apparatus. 

With its supply chain capacity upgraded, it sends up two more substantial solar panels — these ones a hundred times the size of the first. The device is now really increasing its chemical energy generating capacity and this flow of energy, combined with its increased underground compound aggregating ability enables the device to build its edible output module.

The code for food generation is preloaded into the device’s ROM. However not every device is the same and some have different sets of code. Not being connected to the internet, it has developed an ingenious method for peer-to-peer firmware exchange.

The device produces colourful landing and refuelling stations which attract tiny drones, which circulate from device to device, trading code for fuel. This symbiotic relationship enables tiny the device to assimilate tiny snippets of code and test alternative combinations. 

The code received, the device closes the landing pad and devotes its compound-aggregating overground underground regenerative capacity to producing edible extrusions. Not only do these long, green, cylinders make tasty food for us humans, they also contain dozens more devices that can be used to start the process again. 

Forward-thinking consumers will eat 90% of the crop of tasty tube extrusions, remembering to hold back 10% or so to harvest new devices for the year ahead. 

The production phase ended, the entire system is dismantled by even smaller devices — too small to see and fully understand — and the component compounds are returned to the site that they were drawn from ready for another production cycle. 

For someone starting from scratch these devices come in packets of 10 for £2.50 — an astonishing 25p each. But once you have started, you will have a constant supply of new devices.

You can find these packets in most supermarkets. Just look in the seed section for Compound-aggregating Overground Underground ReGenerative Edible Tasty Tube Extrusion Systems, often more easily referred to by their acronym: C.O.U.R.G.E.T.T.E.S