Clear-up #4 - Sunday

Aha, Manisha made it over, finally. We'd almost given up.

Interesting discussions today with Guru Ed and Joe's dad Ray, who came over all the way from Richmond to see how we're getting on, and to offer his advice. Ray's an old hand in the allotment movement (is there an allotment "movement" as such?), and you'll see a few of his thoughts on allotments and many other social issues in his blog, which you can check here. Ray's a bit sceptical about what permaculture actually means, and seems to think it's just a namby-pamby intellectual gloss on what is a fairly obvious thing that any of us can observe if we engage our brain for a few minutes, that as the world's population increases beyond six or seven billion humans, we are all going to have to think a lot harder about where the food we eat comes from, and start making a bit for ourselves. Ray's been putting that into practice for forty years, so fair play to him.  

Ed's more "on it" as far as the permaculture side of things goes. His scepticism, by contrast, is about whether the immediate environment which we're working on in this project will allow us to put permaculture principles fully into practice. Three factors which we need to think about are:

1. How long is Dave going to be in the place? A proper permaculture project takes time to implement.
2. Dave is in the garden flat, which gives access to the whole of the garden. That's fine, but one of the things you need to be able to do in a permaculture garden is to collect rainwater from the roof. To do this, we'll need to talk to the people in the upstairs flat, or possibly to their landlord/landlady. Like that, it starts to look complicated.
3. And, ah, yes, we really do need to clean up Dave's kitchen :~}
   

Ed's wondering, then, if we ought to scale down our ambition for the time being, and just focus on growing a few veggies. It's not as if we won't learn a lot by doing that, in any case. There'll still be plenty to write on this blog. No doubt about that.  

And so, what did we do today then? Joe enjoyed himself up a tree (aah, can someone please remind me what the name of this tree was). What, Green Party members cutting down trees? Well, it depends on the tree, doesn't it? If the tree can produce food for us to eat, that's fine, and nut trees can be a very sustainable and effective alternative to (GM) cereal crops; but the only really "useful" tree which Dave has in the garden is the pear tree near to the back door, and the other trees have only been serving to block out the sunlight which we're going to need if we're going to plant proper fruit and vegetable patches. So, down it went, and we spent pretty much the rest of the day lopping the branches, and separating what we had. The straightest of the branches will get used as stakes when we start planting, the leaves will get composted (although the leaves from this tree will take an awfully long time to decompose), and what we're thinking to do with the smaller branches and twigs is to get hold of a wood chipper which will break the wood down to the point where it can go into the composter. So, if you've got a wood chipper which you can loan us for free or just for a small fee, please get in touch.

It was a beautiful day for it. Here are two of the main carnage culprits enjoying the afternoon sun on a bed of leaves, and contemplating permaculture principles. In its own way, that's a pretty important part of the process, you know.