Pit Composting

Compost is about like anything else as an isolated subject.  It can be as simple as a stinky anaerobic mess in a pile, or as complicated and expensive as a mechanical device with aeration holes that spins on a timer.  Personally I've tended towards the former during my career as an aspiring green thumbist.  When I first started gardening in 2007, composting was the first piece of the gardening puzzle I gazed upon with Aspergian hyperfocus.  I read books written about composting and nothing else.  I studied composting...a process that occurs naturally, regardless of the books or the study on my part.  I made large piles of organic nitrogenous materials mixed with the more ubiquitous carbonaceous biomass, at the perfect ratio of 1/30...or 1/20...depending on your source, and I turned those piles with a pitchfork on a regular frequency.  I sprayed the piles with water to keep them at that perfect and mythical "wet as a wrung out sponge" dampness.  I even stuck pvc pipes with holes drilled in them down into the piles to increase oxygenation.  All of this effort was to achieve the perfect black gold to amend my intense garden beds with, and to do so as quickly as possible because that was the challenge.  For a while, I was composting kitchen scraps (and anything else of organic origin) with a sense of pride and achievement.  After I tackled the art of making perfect compost, my gaze was focused elsewhere in the gardening world, and I began my decent back towards anaerobic piles covered up with enough biomass to stunt the stinch. 

After reading Gaia's Garden, I was convinced that the compost pile was a waste of effort for myself.  You have to pile the kitchen scraps up somewhere, at a bare minimum, to create compost.  Then you have to apply that compost somewhere, at least for it to be of some use to you.  Last season I dumped a five gallon bucket full of kitchen scraps into a simple compost bin, and covered it up with straw or mulch or weeds, and repeated all season long.  I probably dumped 20 buckets onto a heap that stayed at about 3 feet in diameter and about 3 feet tall...all year.  The compost was literally being eaten by the soil life, and I imagine it became so rich in that place that nutrients began leaching into the sub soil, into the water table, and away.  While this situation is certainly better than sending all of that biomass to the landfill, it wasn't much of a yield for me.  I ended up with one wheel barrow load of compost that I applied to one bed.  All of that effort just for one garden beds worth of amendments.  Granted, any chance to participate in any kind of garden alchemy, I'm game, but this seemed too...inefficient for my liking.  I've since converted from composting in piles above ground, to pit composting. 

Pit composting is an idea I can get behind.  It's simple, effective, and it minimizes work on my part which frees me up for other things (like telling my son no, and stop that, and put your wiener up).  It certainly isn't a method for everyone.  Dig the hole deep enough, and cover it up, and even dogs will leave the mess alone.  You can literally compost anything you want (pending it's actually compostable in the first place).  You won't have to concern yourself with nitrogen/carbon ratios, moisture, or oxygen content.  No turning of a pile, no checking of temperatures with compost thermometers, no worrying about a pile bursting into flames, no worrying about unwanted volunteers sprouting up, no concern for attracting varmints, and no obnoxious smells to piss the neighbors off. 

Dig a hole

Dump 5 gallon bucket full of kitchen scraps in hole

 

here you can see that I dug the hole on the down hill side of a berm

 

 

Allow local feral fauna to inspect and taste kitchen scrap slop, to determine it's of no interest

 

 

 

Fill hole back in

 

 

Enjoy couch meditation in front of the idiot panel with your children, secure in the knowledge that you are saving kitchen scrap from the landfill, and increasing the fertility of your land by enlisting thousands of different life forms beneath ground to do your work for you.  If you listen closely, you can hear the earth worms thank you.

 

Earth Moving

I've got a lot of opinions about the world.  Opinions about what is real and what is propaganda in service of the Matrix.  Opinions about spiritual matters and meaning, about the best way to raise children, how a hole is best dug and what a good beer should taste like.  Opinions are like assholes in this world full of them.  So, due to my particularly cranky, old jaded man like attitude towards the state of affairs in the world, I've decided to just start being the change as an MO.  So expect more pictures and videos in the future...and probably less opinion about the world.  Less social criticism...more doing as William Hunter Duncan has recently propounded. 

So I dug that swale out and then it rained.

I know I sound like an idiot, but I can assure you that I am no idiot.  When I moved to this property in February of 2012, all that you see in the above two videos, at least in the fenced in section, was nothing more than bermuda grass, dandelions, and wild garlic that was all cut on the lowest setting with a riding lawn mower.  I have grown lots of food, and I have imported loooooots of free biomass.  The system is maturing all around.  I'm growing soil and capturing rain water and sun energy.  It's beautiful.

I'd say, outside of being here everyday for my family, the best part about dropping out of the Matrix is the ability to live my life how it is supposed to be lived.  My wife told me the other day that she had read a blog written by a hospice nurse about the most common regrets that patients on their death beds have.  The most common was regret for not having the courage to live their lives on their own terms, and not due to the worlds social and programmed expectations.  That is what I'm doing.  I'm living my life based on my moral north, my bliss, doing what I'm meant to do.  My wife and I are fulfilling our purposes together, with children, and it's the most beautiful thing I've ever participated in. 

I ask you, dear reader, what is an hour of your life worth in dollar figures?  Not just one hour, but an endless precession of hours, until they end that is, upon your death.  What is that hour, just before you die, worth?  Personally I am incapable of putting a dollar amount on even my last second, much less hour.  This is where you must put meaning into perspective.  I've met the reaper in person, up close and personal.  I know his inevitability, and the hubris created between his inevitability and our pride and selfishness.  The irony is that the most selfless thing you could possibly do is to undergo your own self actualization.  Because it's true that you cannot possibly expect to be loved if you can't even love yourself.

I believe the job that we all must do, for the world, for our children, and for ourselves, is to fulfill our purposes.  Not to blindly follow the programming that tells us that a job is the highest good.  Make your own damn job, and that job is to do what you are called to do, and not what you are paid to do.  The money will come, as if by magic, and you might find that the Stones were right, you'll get what you need.  Do not be afraid to live your life for your highest purpose.  After all, there is a high probability...if you live your life on the terms of others, that you will regret it on your death bed. 

The Birth of Sun Harvesters

The above picture was taken from inside of a swale I just dug out at the Fox Den.  The fox in the picture is my companion fox, and she goes by Bo Beppa.  I was taking the picture when Bo Beppa jumped into the frame unexpectedly, making the image serendipitous. 

I dug this swale, measuring at about 2 feet deep by 2 feet wide, with an accompanying 2 1/2 foot berm, and about 50 feet or so long on contour, in two days by myself. 

I busted through South Carolina clay fit for a pottery wheel, and South Carolina rock that had bands that crumbled like salt.

I dug this swale to capture water and build soil.  During the spring, when we get torrential rain, I hope this swale stays full more often than not, and I hope that an underground lens of water forms.  If that happens, then another hole which I've dug at the lowest point on the property, about 25 yards away from the swale, may fill with water from that lens.  However, that biggest hole, at the bottom of the property, will fill with water because all of the water striking my property has been directed to that spot. 

I used an A Frame Level, which I constructed from scavenged and excavated bits.  I used an old broom stick, a piece of wood that was scrap from a previous project, a piece of trim from a 1969 Airstream International Sovereign land yacht, some cordage, and a rock I dug out of the ground in Asheville NC on a previous paid permaculture dig.  It was a crude instrument that I made simply to last for this one job. 

But an A Frame Level must be used because placing swales on contour is a counter intuitive thing.  You can't see that level of slope and land movement. 

one of the various rocks I dug up in Asheville NC

Today I jumped the chain link fence that separates my property from a trailer park.  And I racked up a shit load of leaves that fell from a massive oak tree and placed them on my side of the fence.  A few roads down I could smell the smoke from yahoos burning the leaves that fell on their property.  I suppose they lack the knowledge, or concern, or brain cells to know that burning leaves is a border line retarded thing to do. Concentrate them on the earth and let the earth worms eat them and shit them out.  Earth Worm poo is as fertile as soil fertility gets.  Building soil is not that complicated.  Concentrate organic matter, or biomass, and if you do nothing else it will eventually become fertile ground for life to grow. 

I placed many of those leaves on the back side of the berm I had just created.  I plan to place a couple inches of mulch on top of those leaves, once I drive back to the county dump to get another truck and trailer load of free mulch.  I have to fork that mulch myself, and I have to pic the trash out of it, but it's free and it's a very diverse mixture of woody plant material.  Lots of people worry about things like herbacides and pesticides accompanying the free mulch.  My argument is that the mostly perennial and ornamental woody plant material I see being trucked into the dump, to be ground into mulch, is not the type of plant usually sprayed by homeowners.  It's just pruned and driven to the dump, where the trash in the back of the pickup truck and trailer gets ground along with it. 

I'm building fertility on this acre of land that I've found myself a husband of.  I'm using the principles of permaculture to guide me.  I'll be starting a business one of these days, but I won't be calling it permaculture because that word is in the process of cooptation.  I won't be co opted, nor will any organization I'm involved with.  I'm doing ecological design.  I'm using my brain along with intuition and spiritual guidance to create a landscape that allows regeneration, fertility, and life all to flourish.

Zen busted open a dried out gourd on the concrete after an impromptu game of "kick the gourd."  It ended up in the future pond, and some type of green growth emerged on the gourd.  You can see four gourd seeds still attached.  It is sitting on top of mulch from the county dump. 

 This is what I spend my time doing these days.  I dig holes, direct water, collect and concentrate biomass, and I sift through the literal waste stream of an empire drunk and glutted on the end of the age of petroleum abundance.  I have dropped out of the Matrix and no longer pay in any attention.  Maybe my actions are futile due to radioactively contaminated Fukushima rain.  Maybe Obama's hench men will show up and cart my ass back off to the solitary cell they've created for my kind.  Mostly resistant to the bullshit destruction for pigmen profit, I carry on with my blissful work of concentrating the raw ingredients of renewal and regeneration.  I'm an earth moving alchemist concerned with the quality and ecology of living soil. 

The view from the top of my truck, before the swale.

The only meaningful action for anyone to take now, to give our children a chance to eat, is to begin concerning yourself with sustainable food production.  As in, we need to begin seeing ourselves as sun harvesters.  We need to design our society with this as our central purpose.  I see a symbiotic dance between the plants and animals on this Earth.  We can orchestrate this dance like conductors, and that should be our place.  To concentrate natural processes in an attempt to create the most life giving fertility possible is the loftiest of goals for our species just now. 

Zen swimming in the first pond I dug out after a good rain

So I've sort of rambled and ranted towards the summary of this particular photoblog.  I've got many more pics up at the SUN Foundation site www.sun4living.com  You can see them here

Hopefully someone with great means will show up and donate a large tract of land for the first Foxstead to materialize.  We are now a 501c3 foundation with a bank account.  Go and visit the SUN site to learn how you can help create a realistic alternative to the end of petroleum abundance.  A realistic strategy for dealing with the transition from a first world empire, to a third world slum.  Or just go back to your ithingy and mindless idiot panel entertainment in service of BAU pay checks and pointless poisonous existence. 

There is too much for us to be doing to be wasting our time in perpetuity for pay checks.  We can sustain our own universal needs if we just believe.  Even with radioactive rain falling from our corrosive chemical sky, we can seek shelter beneath a forest canopy under which we have built culture and food.  Even when it all burns down we can survive, and we can thrive under a new paradigm that honors our sacred connection with the natural world. 

This is what's left of the home I currently have a $744 per month mortgage on.  Hopefully Allstate does what they are supposed to do.  If they don't, my wife and I will default on this loan and my credit will resemble this burnt out shell.  Fortunately we have exited the Matrix and so none of this matters to us.  Yet, I brought my first baby boy home to this house.  I still can't believe it's reality. 

Hugelesquely Inspired

First of all, let me just say that Blogger sucks with uploading pictures.  When I uploaded them Blogger rearranged them all.  I don't know html coding so I can't go in to fix it that way.  That forced me to attempt moving pictures around in the "compose" option.  You can move a picture up one at a time, and it's tedious.  But then half way through the process it stopped allowing me to move pictures...so they are out of order.  Which sucks because I was attempting to show the steps I went through in constructing this last hugelesque bed...I say "esque" cause I'm not sure it qualifies as a hugelkulture bed.  The first four pics were meant to be the last four.

Pepper diggin' in one of my unfinished hugel beds

Carolina Blue

For the ladies...me movin' some mulch around.

Bo Beppa (what I call pepper) diggin' still...you can see a chicken feather.  It got there because I harvested the chicken bedding to add as a layer of fertilizer

This is a load of hay that I acquired via  a local business called "Cowboy Connection."  I buy hay from them every once in a while to place in the coop.  Every couple of months they sweep out the hay room and I pic up the hay for free.  I use it for building soil or as bedding.  Also use it for humanure (although right now the humanure operation is on hold for various reasons).  This load was used for constructing the latest hugel bed. 

This is the southwest bed.  You can see a couple forks of hay at the bottom of this pic.  That is actually a hole that I dug last year to collect water.  This bed had peppers that had been overrun by basil.  I pulled the basil before this pic obviously, and it can be seen laying in the center of this bed.

This is about a week worth of scraps from the kitchen (the black is coffee grounds)

Here you can see the contents of that compost bucket dumped on top of hay at the North end of the bed.

I then covered the compost with more hay

Here I added some wood that I acquired at the county landfill while also acquiring free mulch.  When I get mulch I always walk around and grab whatever logs and sticks escaped the mulch machine.  I bring the wood home for hugel bed construction and for fire wood.

Here you can see more compost spread on top of the hay.  This compost came from a compost pile that is pictured further down. 

This is the South end of the South West bed.  I worked in two sections because I had that hole to fill on the other end.  I left one basil plant in the ground, you can see it on the top right of this picture.

To the right you can barely make out the compost because I dumped all of the mulch to the right.  The compost bin was made from rabbit fencing.  I just make a 3 foot diameter circle with the rabbit fencing and it works great.  This is spring and summer compost.  That five gallon bucket was dumped into that bin and then covered with hay or mulch about 15 times.  It composts down to nothing.  All spring and summer and I ended up with one wheel barrow worth of compost. 

Here I made another tribann with landfill wood.  I've also already spread the above compost across the entire bed.

I stood on the roof of my truck to get this pic

see

There are three beds here that make up the invoking and south facing end of the tribann.  They are hard to see due to changes over the year in plant growth.  It's hard to tell also because I have spread mulch around. 

Here you can see three beds a bit better, although the tribann is loosing it distinctness because of the North West bed (the bed shown at the bottom of this pic).  I made what I'm calling a "keyhole hugel bed".  You can see to the right, that there is a small area not covered with as much mulch.  That is the entrance into the key hold hugel bed.  Lot's of microclimates are going to exist in that bed.  You can also see the gypsy house (two car garage) and the chicken coop just to the left of it.

I finished up by adding a foot of mulch on top of the mess. 

The SUN's Youth Rebellion

On my way to deliver the letter with the magic EIN number on it, I looked at my truck radio display and it read 3:33. My wife, whom was at home, looked at a digital clock at that same moment. The radio station 93.3, that I was listening to had decided to play Metallica's "Sad But True" for the journey. I pulled into the post office and watched that letter go down the post office box memory hole as the last chord from that song rang out. That song from my youth, when I was angry about life. It was cleansing.

 

Days before my 32nd birthday I placed my resignation letter on my supervisor's desk. This was more than just a resignation from the career I had worked for 6 years as a street medic for Piedmont EMS in the Upstate of South Carolina. This was my Resignation from the Matrix, which was picked up by Michael Ruppert and published on collapsenet as a free feature article for several months. It wasn't particularly well written, because I wrote it one night half drunk as a journal entry, and then emailed it to Ruppert. Apparently he read it and liked it. I worked a one month notice because that's what my supervisor asked of me. Her point was that I was going on vacation for two weeks on the next day, and so would I actually "work" a two week notice. Just days before resigning from my career I signed up to take part in a Permaculture class in Asheville NC called "Permaculture In Action." It was a 10 day, hands on, gathering of like minded people spread over five weekends from May to August. We learned permaculture methods while implementing design from paper to the land. We didn't create the designs, the instructors did. This was to be my new career. Permaculture. I resigned from the Matrix so that I could take permaculture seriously and devote all of my free time to it.

Starting in 2007, after reading James Howard Kunstler's, The Long Emergency, and gettin' edumacated to the concept of Peak Oil, I learned that infinite growth on a finite planet results in a particularly sordid predicament, and what was I going to do about it? Our civilization is completely dependent on a shrinking non-renewable resource. Look around you and notice all of the objects in your view. It's a safe bet that every single one of those objects has been in a trailer on the interstate at some point on it's likely over 2000 mile journey to you. It's also another good bet that some part of all of those objects has been on a large container ship from China as well. The power you are using to participate with your computer, the cup of Joe you're enjoying, and the food that keeps you alive, all have fossil fuel energy in common (even nuclear power is not possible without fossil fuel energy...at least as it's currently practiced). We have built our modern day global civilization on a limited resource! There are a LOT of ramifications from this one easily understood fact that's placed on us by the mandates of our physical reality.

Nearly five years after reading Kunstler's eye opening book, I was in front of my supervisor turning in my resignation. Five years of rabidly searching for the answer to the question "what am I going to do about our infinite growth paradigm on a finite planet?" I had become a father, and now the ante was raised by several orders of magnitude. In a label, permaculture was what I found to be the answer. Permaculture actually addresses a future where there is no longer any affordable fossil energy. It realizes the precarious nature our free energy inheritance is leaving us in. Staying alive as a material being requires energy via food. All 8 billion of us stay alive right now because we still have the cheap energy to run the large tractors and combine harvesters, and to manufacture and use the petroleum based pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, and natural gas based fertilizers. Our agricultural land has become a moonscape of dead dirt that does nothing other than act as a chemical sponge. Nothing can live in the dirt except for the genetically modified organisms that we've created to withstand the chemical onslaught. The bulk of the calories that keep us alive, the wheat in our pasta and bread, the rice in our bowl, the soy bean baby formula in our dairy allergic newborns, and the hundreds of corn derived ingredients in the nutrition free high fructose petroleum sugar, and the animal meat that you eat are all possible because of our massive monocroped agriculture which requires petroleum energy to exist. Permaculture recognizes that this is not a sustainable arrangement.

Even the "organic" agriculture in this country is really just the same old "green revolution" shit dressed up in a delusional "we're gonna save the Earth" drag. They spray chemicals just like their Monsanto dependent counterparts. Granted, it's better than conventional agriculture, but it's still not enough. It's not "sustainable." Monoculture agriculture, devoid of the cheap energy, collapses under the weight of it's own gargantuan flesh. Permaculture provides the answers to this mess we're in. I'm always weary of saying such a thing. That this or that provides ALL of the answers, but it's true in this case...this is a too good to be true actually being true. Mark Shepard, the architect of "New Forest Farm" and author of Restoration Agriculture, provides proof to my claim. Perennial forest agriculture is a sustainable practice that is capable of withstanding a changing climate. It can provide us with the calories and nutrition that we need to live. The bulk of the calories in this system come from perennial tree nuts and animal products like milk, eggs, and meat. Petroleum inputs of any kind are not necessary (although they sure do help getting the system up and matured). My point is, Permaculture provides the solutions we need for the post-petroleum world that we're standing on the brink of. I know of no other entity which can make this claim.

Given that you understand the predicament we are in as a global civilization, and given that you want to do something about it rather than nothing, what are you going to do? Permaculture can save us, but it can't save us if we don't practice it and implement it on our landscapes. I have two children now, Ayden Zen whom is 3 and Harper Tribann whom is 5 months. They are collectively the most beautiful thing I have ever done (aside from the Goddess I did to create them). Next to my family the most beauty I have ever created I have done in my backyard using permaculture principles. I have no doubt in my mind that given enough time I'll be able to use this 1.6 acre lot (and hopefully the six acres that surround the Fox Den that are currently owned by in-laws) to keep my family thriving, alive and healthy, and to create a surplus to share with the surrounding community. I'll be doing this using permaculture principles and strategies. Permaculture may not provide my family and I with the money we need to buy the things we buy in this current perpetual growth paradigm, but it will provide us with the food, medicine, raw natural materials, shelter, energy, and community that we need to live a life that is more than worthwhile, but exciting and full of meaning. With any luck it will keep my tribe out of any kind of government line.

I have concluded that there is no better way to spend my time than permaculture. I can practice it every day in the company of my family while creating beauty and regeneration. I believe that is possible. It's already happening. My plan has been a two pronged plan. Practice permaculture and go to school for a nursing license in order to ensure my family will have access to the digibits that are required of us. The problem with this plan is that it lands me in another wealth care career that I will not be able to stomach. I burned out after six years on the meat wagon. But I didn't burn out because of the death, disease, and destruction that comes with knowing the Reaper intimately. I loved that part of the job. I revealed in getting to know what the Grim Reaper actually looks like, and I even got in a few fights with him.  

A quick anecdote from my real past:

 I managed to kick the Grim Reapers ass out of the back of my meat wagon once.  He made himself my business when someones grandma dropped dead while shopping at Walmart. She walked out of the hospital a couple of months later on her own two legs (well, she was wheeled out cause it was hospital policy, but she was able to walk). One time in six years I actually got a "save." I burned out due to the bureaucratically generated bull shit that came from the Bull Shit Black Hole that feeds our wealth care system. We went from being taught that our job began and ended with "patient care" to being told that we were responsible for the happiness of our "customers." That is how our rotten health care system looks at you now. You are no longer a patient to heal, but a customer to keep happy. That's because the lawyers, medical insurance, and big international pharmaceutical companies dictate the nature of our wealth care. It's ALL about making money. End of Subject.

I'm not plugging back into the Matrix. I'm going all rogue Permaculture on the Matrix's ass. And at any rate I destroyed the ports on my physical body that allow me to plug back in, anarchy happened to my Matrix equipment. I'm a permanent inhabitant of what Jason Heppenstall calls Realandia. The place you come to inhabit when you take the red pill. People are too afraid to do anything meaningful about our meaningless perpetual growth paradigm. I'm no longer afraid. I was recently told that I've "got some balls" to do what I'm doing. Giving the Matrix the finger and all. I responded to that claim, "well, they stuck my ass in a solitary cell, and fed me nothing but bread and water, due to my protest about killing thousands of people via bombs from the jets launched off of the US Navy carrier I was splitting atoms on...so I guess I know what I'm up against." Maybe I do have some balls, but I don't frame it that way. I see it as that I am doing what I am supposed to be doing. It is my responsibility to help in this transition that our species is going through. I have the tools and the mindset. I have the training. In truth, I have been bred for this my entire life. I have been searching for something worth my time ever since I can remember. Even EMS failed me, and I was able to find myself in a moral dilemma with being the help?!?! That speaks volumes to me.

This is not my resignation to the Matrix. I turned that in already. This is my "fuck you" to the Matrix. I'm not afraid of you. What I am afraid of is what you're ensuring will happen if I, and many people like me, don't do...something. If we don't resist your stupid dictates than we will get what your incompetence has planned for us all. We will get a climate that won't support human life, we'll get more and more super bugs resistant to our drugs and chemicals, we'll get nuclear contaminated radioactive material blanketing the globe (this has already happened...did you know that 14,000 deaths in America are attributed to the fall out from Fukishima Daiichi), we'll get a completely collapsed fishery as our ocean loses the ability to buffer the carbon levels due to acidification thanks to our dependence on petrochemicals, well get more and more neutered and dysfunctional governments, well get less and less nutrition in our food, and we'll get sicker and sicker as Big Pharma crams more and more frankenchemical fukitol derivatives down our collective throats. The Matrix has no answers for a world on the backside of perpetual growth.

I will not be acquiring a mursing license from the Ministry of Health. From this point forward I will be practicing permaculture principles. I'm now an agent for a non-profit corporation called the SUN Foundation (sustaining universal needs). The foundation is headquartered here, at my current residence in the Palookaville sector of Whoville. I have a gaggle of geniuses on my side over at the Doomstead Diner. Essentially the Diner has become a think tank. We talk about Realandia and what we're going to do and are doing about it. The SUN Foundation is the result of more than a year of this think tank activity. It has fermented into the SUN and I am one of it's agents. I believe that the SUN Foundation is a magnate that is attracting the most brilliant thinkers and doers available. 

We have members in Australia (which is good due to it being in the southern hemisphere, away from the potentially 15,000 times more nuclear radiation than the atom bombs dropped on Japan, ending the second world war, that is damn near fated to happen with one of the next earth quakes, or tsunamis, that are happening at increasing frequencies around Japan), England, and all over the U.S. Our ideas and tactics will go viral and we will make the Matrix obsolete. We're attempting to use the Matrix against itself by playing the game by their stupid rules. If you're interested in learning more about the SUN Foundation (we're still working on the website because we just got incorporated) you can go here and read till your hearts content. We're gonna fix this mess one tree at a time. One durable and inexpensive shelter at a time. One Foxstead at a time.

But my Fox Den is still alive and thriving, and it's beginning to multiply and grow. Like Gremlins, the more bull shit they get on us, the more we will become. The Fox Den is metamorphosing into a Foxstead which will in turn replicate into many Foxsteads. Or I'll fuckin' die trying. They're gonna have to pry my cold dead fingers off of this Fox Den. I've got a Vixen and Kits to keep healthy and happy, and I've got a community to build that can withstand the post-petroleum future they are guaranteed to inherit. What are you gonna do about that? Dear reader!

Ayden's Inaugural Camp

 There are a lot of pictures I should have included in this photoblog.  It's been a while since I've posted one of these.  So these pics are from one memory card from one day of taking pictures from one day in the life of the McCarty clan.  I've been busy outside, dancing with nature lately while fathering my children, and so too busy to write much.  But I trust these pictures say all that needs to be said.  So I'll let them say it (although I do add words as captions...mostly because I can't help myself...I have a guilty love affair with words). 

Ayden picked this flower from the hugel bed, presented it to his mother, and then she saw a heart in it...see the heart?

Hugel bed two still being concocted.  All mulch and wood comes from the county dump by the truck load.  As in, I go to the dump and fork each load into my truck. 

Several days into the moult

Chicken chillin' I suppose

Harper Tribann McCarty

Bo Beppa and me inspecting the Tribann Aji Amerillo plant

This North West facing bed, that completes the Tribann my garden is arranged in, upgraded for fall with a fresh load of mulch

This Habanero plant has two Habaneros on it...it was ripped out of the ground in late spring and transplanted into the NW bed, I reckon that bitch is gonna be hot...and I've learnt that peppers like to be smacked around.

Tribann's foreskin is buried beneath this plant...Aji Amerillo turning orange and picking up strong citrus overtones in the ripening process

A 19th century coal burning stove in the North bed

my attempt to keep the chickens off the bed long enough for some winter rye and hairy vetch to sprout...so far so good

The new south east to north earth hugel bed land bridge

this blueberry plant was transplanted here, in the South East Hugel bed in late spring...it's managed to survive the hugel bed succession which is amazing

 Cayenne almost dried on the plant

Aji Amerillo just about dried on the plant

gourd

"PooPoo Maters" that volunteered themselves in last years humanure pile growing next to polk salate berries (which are poisonous).  I find the juxtaposition of perfect sun warmed tomatoes growing next to a plant which is poisonous to humans to be deeply satisfying on many levels.   

compost alley overrun by nature...I listened, adapted, and moved my compost operation elsewhere

My message to the future...television was here

Floating Zen Head (his name is Gaelic and literally translated into "little fire" from my understanding of the moniker at least

See Ayden Zen?

Zen's first camp in the back garden

I love how the light is competing in this picture.  Nature appears to be winning

And a "good night" from Ayden Zen from his tent, at the end of the universe.  His first tent...I bought it when I was 16 years old and backpacked in it all over the United States until Wendy and I got married and purchased a new backpacking tent.  Now it's Ayden's tent.  Proof that if you buy quality gear and take care of it, it will last for generations.