7 friends built restoration ecovillage. Outcome 50 years on

yeah just go right through the big beautiful quinoas yeah i think the the quinoa are incredible and then the amaranth i mean look at all these colors of amaranth so when you rough up a seed amaranth it's going to just drop so many seeds and then you can blow those little flowers away and have just a handful of beautiful amaranth seed that appears to have all your amino acids except for lysine and so as far as part of a nutritional profile again really honoring those indigenous cultures from mesoamerica and south america who since time immemorial have been in relationship with amaranth with quinoas and that collaboration and honoring of beauty whether it's the the amaranths the quinoas the corns the sunflowers these crops that come from the so-called americas take those sunflowers on here these gardens are the sixth oldest certified organic farm in california at this point and going on geez almost 50 years of organic farming hand tilled never mechanically tilled biodiverse seed saving this plant seed amaranth grain amaranths although when they're young and small as a little baby plant like that comes up as a seedling so if you let your plants that are edible go to seed your seed bank and your soil becomes loaded with edible plants and we get incredible flushes of these edible amaranth so you can pop them like that and then eat them raw or stir fry them when they're a little bit bigger or we'll let these plants that they selected they're going to go all the way to seed and then you get the seed and you get all the wonderful things out of amaranth seeds so these are amazing amaranth greens and they come up on their own we're just creating conditions conducive for amaranth to be self-seeding and it's an annual plant in any one year but it's a perennial expression in our gardens so annuals and perennials right so the life cycle of the plant is annual from seed to seed but its presence in the system is perennial which is different than a full woody perennial like a fruit tree or an oak tree this is my favorite fruit right now this little guy is called a chapova and it's a hybrid a french hybrid between a mountain ash a sorbus and a pear a papyrus it's a sorbo pyrus hybrid called chapova oh forget about it seriously people that is the sweetest thing i'm part of the community that owns this 80 acre property there was seven of us who bought it back in 1994. it's the community kitchen dining room everybody eats meals together here all the time worm bins composting facilities pears from the planted in the 1890s and it's a consensus-based residential collective of folks who all live on site and have raised families on site and kids and what's up adam how you doing this property thankfully we inherited and are standing on the shoulders of obviously the big shoulders we're standing on is that we are in the traditional homeland of the southern pomo and the coast miwok people and we work with those tribes and then in the 70s a group called the fairlawns institute had a rural center here and one of the things we inherited from the farallons is small structures and so the primary residence is here all in the 700 to 900 square foot range again this place was the farallons institute in the 70s and a the state architect of california at the time was a man named sim vanderan and he was one of the co-founders of this place there was an office of appropriate technology and so the state funded the construction of a series of passive solar heated and cooled tiny houses they were 300 square feet apiece back in 76 77 they had different techniques and strategies to heat and cool them with different strategies of ponds on roofs and little flat plate collectors and little greenhouse structures and rock basins underneath foundations and all this kind of stuff and so this little cluster of homes here of five with these rounded roofs were originally what was called solar suburbia so the idea of the rounded roof was that their sense that that curvature would facilitate this idea of air movement of hot air rising cooling and sinking basically like a convection current and in this case there is a little passive solar upstairs little unit like a baseball cap it has a little brim on it so it keeps the face shaded in the sun when it's high but it lets the sun onto the face of the building in the winter were these successful you said as an experiment you know in passive solar what did it work i think what they really learned is you sight the building south you optimize that east-west length and then you figure out how much glazing you have on the front to let sunlight and energy thermal energy in or out based on the height of the wall and the length of the eave and then what kind of thermal mass of the floor or inside the building is there to absorb that radiant heat probably the rounded roof thing when all was said and done didn't so add to the performance of the building that other issues around how to roof those things but it looks cool and it may not be not good but you don't have to do that i don't think these homes have all been subsequently remodeled and expanded and it's one of the primary areas where the residential community lives and then it's planted in a matrix here primarily of a perennial polyculture so pineapple guavas figs oranges plums pears apples citrus carob olives crabapples yep i'm gonna get a nice crop of figs or these thornless prickly pears these pads that don't have thorns so this is another hybrid of a long traditional crop so you can eat the nopales or you can get the fruit called tunas when they're ripe these aren't ripe yet it's a classic food forest here's a denizen of the land what's up david these station pairs are up oh amazing i love this too and bill mollison the founder of permaculture used to come here quite a lot all through the 70s and 80s so the property has a long history over nearly 50 years now being involved in the sustainable alternative appropriate technology organic gardening bio-intensive quote now permaculture how's it going good intentional community i don't know who's coming for dinner so we're trying to get this together yeah that's fine let me know people might refer to us now as an eco village that lingo wasn't back in 94 wasn't really in vogue like it is now you seem to have a good yields here it's not only conceptually attractive but you you have a result here it's not it works it works because the folks from the early 70s on up now really dedicated themselves to what what what what is grown here year after year what is most perennial here is soil soil is what's being grown here so this garden apparently back in the 70s was completely compacted and denuded and the top soil was eroded away because of animal impact and they started in with hand tillage deep cultivation the addition of organic matter of life of plants and continuing to build soil so that the soil fertility the structure the tilth of the soil the water holding capacity the organic matter it's a living system soil is a living ecosystem it's not dead dirt biointensive is a gardening technique and it's most known for a soil building methodology called double digging that allows you to very rapidly with a lot of input and energy so it's a lot of work but if you really need to take soil that's dead now and you're going to willing to put the energy in to get it going and loft it up and loosen it up and add organic matter because you need to grow food now it's a pretty incredible technique the gardens here are not double dug anymore they haven't been since the late 70s but they get single dug or tilt they're managed differently depending on the crops the idea that industrial agriculture believes that it should guarantee that soil becomes dead dirt by spraying it with methyl bromide killing everything and then artificially subsidizing your crop with ammonia nitrate which was invented as a material as an explosive in world war one right and to literally kill your soil so that you have a quote high yielding single mono crop of a plant that has been genetically engineered and is patented for a corporation is entirely antithetical to everything we're about that's our 15-minute belt for lunch y'all oh my gosh we're almost done so we're all about life not death [Applause] are these homes so these are our guest houses for when students come for a workshop or a training this plaster is a lime based plaster so instead of a straight stucco where you use the portland cement and the whole process of basically for every pound of portland cement there's three pounds of co2 that has to get cooked out of that calcium that limestone if you're going just to lime then making a plaster out of that is a lower embodied energy on the front end and then to some degree it actually recalcifies by absorbing atmospheric co2 and actually gets more durable over time because it's part way so there's reclaimed redwood and then what's fun is actually all the building doors and if we step inside all of the trim all of the wanescotting all the materials that we build the desks a wonderful japanese farmer in his late 80s in petaluma they made their chicken coops out of old growth redwood back in the day and they are now mostly falling down so he donated his whole chicken coop to us and we spent several weeks with our crew disassembling it and replaning it and cleaning it up so pretty much all the interior trim is from reclaimed chicken coop that was built from the 1920s all of the sink water and the shower water all goes into on-site gray water systems so it's plumbed with a two-way valve that allows us to direct it to the landscape and we do the traditional system where it's a mulch basin system out into our edible food forest and then in this case actually where it says toilet this toilet here is a compost toilet and so it's a bit of a advanced version so it has three ounces of water in this and it's a vacuum flush toilet because where the unit is is in the opposite side of the building and so to convey the material over there and we have a formal permit with the county of sonoma with the county health department and the regional water quality control board and we've had one round of tests so far and they've come actually really clean and so it's we were able to take a combined number ones and twos in a compost system and render it pathogen free and then be able to get out the carbon nitrogen compost again which reutilizing in a forest-based system as a mulch the landscapes around the building we do all native landscaping in this area so these are all california native plants really drought resilient which is important this year in the drought and we move through the natives and eventually go into the garden of things that aren't so native so we were just looking at the front end of the compost toilet and we have what we call our g and g criteria which is we want to please grandma on the front end we want to please government on the back end so down here is where the business end of that toilet is of once you make your contribution so we can study it scientifically it ends up in this model here we're actually studying three different models that are available commercially and this one is called the phoenix the material comes into the top there was some organic matter that's put in here in the beginning and then that material that went through a masticator grinder is deposited on the surface and then the biology in here eventually renders it composts it through a thermophilic biological based aerobic with oxygen-based compost and the finished material when it's done we're able to harvest out at the bottom we have the phoenix system we have a clivis mulchrom system and we have one that's called the eco carousel from sweden in another building so we're doing a comparative test here's actually where the gray water system goes so this is a classic three-way valve and right now it goes to this direction and when someone uses either the shower or the bathroom sink up there we're going to divert that water through this small pipe and we take it out into a mulch basin in the landscape and are able to irrigate it on site in a gravity-based way without electricity obviously there's compost toilets that are just simple someone hand cranks it at home i mean why all this this is a commercial building so it's lots and lots of people coming through so we've got a higher volume system here so when you see this system you're not thinking to yourself well wait a minute that's bigger than what i need for my private family home this is the next level up the fun part is is that the biology works the same there's just different technologies that you can achieve that goal at different scales but we're really trying to prove here is that we actually trust biology and we believe that a system that is based in biology with oxygen can render a toxic waste if you will of human waste into a resource that's right the average american wastes 20 gallons a day courtesy flushing their ones and twos and that's on top of the energy water and chemicals it takes to pump and treat those dumps so they can be safely expelled nature has a poop loop and so we really don't like the word waste a lot in permaculture waste water to us is we're not wasting water it's resource water gray water systems storm water systems recharge roof water systems harvesting or on the solid waste side of things can we instead of making it go away by flushing it away can we actually harvest it clean it up recycle it and reutilize it for the benefit of the of the fecundity and resiliency of the system and actually in this case have a system that increases the life in the soil food web which grows plants which sequester carbon all of the water indoors the quote gray water indoors is going again out to gray water systems to irrigate the landscape and any water that's raining on the roofs and coming off the gutters or the landscape is going into these swale structures so you can see there's a big berm right here that happens to have blueberries on it and there's a basin on the uphill side of that berm and so when sheet flow of storm water comes down or we direct the downspouts we infiltrate that on contour so we slow it spread it sink it store it and share it and we do it in c2 as an irrigation for blueberries or then it overflows to here for thornless blackberries this swale overflows around there to gooseberries or to currents and eventually when we get rain big years it ultimately goes to a habitat pond that is above the garden all of the irrigation for the entire farm comes from that pond the fair lawns folks i keep mentioning excavated out a really large pond that's sealed naturally with the clays that are native and it fills up when a good winter comes with just runoff from a meadow and then we use that and we actually gravity irrigate the whole operation and we fill that water up as a groundwater recharge structure but in our case holds water long enough that it actually breeds our native tree frogs here and those frogs go into our gardens and can eat their weight in insects on a daily basis as our biological pest control and a few snakes could eat a frog and a pot could seed a frog so we're creating complex ecological systems that are probiotic we're pro-life of all species of all generations for all time [Music] we're not antibiotic antibiotics is when you're against life and you live on the only planet in the known universe that has life kind of a party fowl so we're probiotic permias here we're creating conditions conducive for life here including humans yeah so in the gardens here and we passed through kind of our multi-layered stacked perennial polyculture food forests and where we had like the olives and we had apples and pears and peaches and plums and mulberries and figs and and all of those fruits and now we're stepping down into a specific area of high intensity that's primarily an annual uh production garden where we've got raised beds again double dug beds originally back in 1974 no longer again this is a seed saving garden here as well and so some of our beds may have a designated end called a bed end where a specific plant we're growing on behalf of saving seed or for propagation and then further down the bed then we'll be growing production and a lot of times we're not digging beds anymore so sometimes it's no-till here they just weeded the garden and laid the material like a mulch right on top and we're doing sheet composting in situ right on the bed and they'll just open this up and plant into that as a no-till operation some crops need a little bit of lofting and a little bit of slight tillage so that happens there too we're not really wedded to techniques per se we're interested in performance criteria working with cultivars and and plants that are more suited and adapted to the microclimate of your place so that they're healthier which means you don't need to fight pests or do too much extra work or think about having to spray something this is the where the gardeners are within their office space is then the kent whaley memorial seed collection so inside here is a climate controlled seed storage this is the work of doug gosling what's really cool about what dugo does is the diversity of seeds all the jars and bins are labeled in such a way where they're done by the plant family so things in the cucumber tasty the melons the gourds the cucumbers the watermelons you know those things are botanically arranged so then the solanaceae where the tomatoes or the peppers or the eggplants the brassicacs which is the collards the cauliflowers the cabbages the broccolis and then within within any one of those brussels sprouts there may be multiple seeds of different varieties dugo is part of a global community of people who save seeds and trade seeds and share seeds and he has a wonderful nursery so the idea of seed saving is we can't just rely on the commercial stuff that's sold commercially in stores yeah i think people all over the planet over time who have were agrarian place-based peoples were in relationship with the plants that they were cultivating and collaborating with and over time as the food system has become corporatized and industrialized in sort of a green revolution really point past 1950s era the wealth and the diversity of genetics has been whittled down because the gene pool's been narrowed down because of a consolidation in a corporate scenario and then many of those crops were then hybridized and patented and such that you don't have access to the genetics unless you buy it from this corporation and then they put in a terminator technology with a genetic engineering piece so now you're on the hook to them and that's just not a recipe for resiliency and community security and so the global world of seed savers are pushing back against that trend and are saying actually no and really honor these these are living beings these are organisms and we are in relationship with them it's been a bit of a rough year for these pluts as we move through the property there's a lot of what an ecology we call ecotones or edges and so we really work with the edges in the layout of various elements in the system and so as we move through the garden where there's a lot of say production annual beds it steps up into herbaceous borders and then it goes through a threshold of a gate and in this case into say this apple orchard pink pearl one of the great apples of the 40 kinds of apples we have here and then right into native oak woodland and then it'll drop back down and we may end up having more production or there's a building and a landscape and so really creating a mosaic of connectivity in microclimates and diversity is a process that we really think about a lot one of the things we're doing is that as people are paying attention the west right now california is in significant both drought and many years here recently uh significant huge fires and so we do a lot of work in our wildlands around managing the forest in a situation where a hundred years ago plus every tree was cut our forests had been cut three times and now it's a bit of a fuel load mess so we work on forest health and management with a mantra of fewer trees and more forest and we're trying to head back to old growth again through our processes and limb and thin and create a fire resilient substructure but in areas like here where we're close to buildings with steep slopes this is what's called defensible space and in this case what we did is a little bit of thinning and limbing for fire ladders in a native oak and bay forest and then we actually have a little paddock here and we run goats and sheep because we have a small home flock of goats and sheep so this is a grazing paddock so we can feed our goats and sheep that are stacking functions by also reducing fuel load and maintaining a fire break as defensible space within the hundred foot zone of say a building on behalf of the structure protection kind of a deal since the first week that i moved on the property in 1994. i started limbing doug fir trees for fire ladders because i had been doing that work before so we've never not stopped doing land management and fuel load mitigation say we might limb up the dead branches and the green limbs and we might thin so fewer trees more forest and the overstock smaller trees that are not so healthy and more flammable that material again is not a waste that needs to be thrown away and taken away we see it as a resource and so we'll sometimes place it in a scully that's eroding as a brush plug to stuff a gully to mitigate erosion that actually holds more water in the land and improves forest health and takes a problem of fire and turns it into earth and water and the more we thin and limb the forest the better the owls can hunt so we're creating spotted owl habitat through fuel load mitigation while taking the waste product and creating habitat for the food source for the owl all in one fell swoop shall we say so integrated relational solutions is really key that means somebody's not happy and we hope it's not us this addition off the rounded roof there is the first permitted light straw clay building in california so it's got light straw clay walls earthen plasters interior and exterior lime based exterior and that is a fire plane that's the spotter plane which means that siren we heard that means that plane just came from santa rosa and is headed that way to do the prelim on the possibility that there's a fire that's a plane you don't want to see right now what are you chickens doing it's hot you guys are in the shade huh oh hi chickies here i'll get you guys some food this little vine is just kind of a menace i think them some little fauti vine see look at them they love it so much oh they want salad they love their salad all right chickies come on come on come on come on want some salad chickens are part of our composting system so down in the main big kitchen we have different kinds of compost buckets and one of those buckets are fresh greens and things or rinds that either going to go to the chickens or are going to go to the sheep and goats and other compost is going to compost piles and other compost is going to worm bins so there's a whole integrated uh carbon nutrient management system and so the chickens are besides the eggs we get every day obviously there's them in relationship and then we do also have a few little ducks still hanging around folks get caught up in the details and they think they have a recipe that's universally applicable and we don't resonate with that these guys are wonderful some people call them golden berries or ground cherries and it comes in its own organic eco wrapping paper you just pop that open pop that in and toss difficult to plan and take care of no look it's just here we don't even irrigate it it just grows so we designed taking our cues from what is the genius of nature that has been in that place for eons and eons and eons it has evolved and adapted to the conditions here in the gardeners again are showcasing plants that have a long history with peoples of the americas so things like amaranth or the quinoas corns sunflowers tomatoes here the seed saving and the gardens and the collections are doing their darndest to really honor the legacy and relationship of peoples who have their origin story and connection not just had but have it's this idea of a world view that's kin-centric it's really about relations with or as a wonderful man onondaga faith keeper elder orrin lyons would say what you people meaning white settler colonists what you people call resources our people call relatives and so what is that opportunity to be humble enough to be in communion again in a collaborative way with with all of life instead of a domineering manner and honoring that so when we get into our definition of permaculture which is really a design methodology for regenerative human settlements actually the most permacultural thing we do here is intentional community it's about how groups of people get together and figure out how to get along with each other to have a quote permanent or durable culture oh my god this food looks amazing who made it you

Channel: Kirsten Dirksen

Views: 352,757

Keywords: farmstead community, first farmstead community, intentional community, permaculture, organic farm, oldest organic farm, occidental arts and ecology center, sowing circle, farallones institute, solar cabins, passive solar homes, solar suburbia, brock dolman, organic agriculture easement, office of appropriate technology, appropriate technology, fire management, composting toilets, industrial composting toilets, native plants, seed saving, seed bank, oaec

Id: QcbUN_1lvAA

Length: 30min 17sec (1817 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 06 2022