Interdependent Web

Ragweed: Curse or Blessing, the Choice is Yours

Ben Stallings — Fri, 20 Jun 2014 15:04:15 +0000

Ragweed pollen affects millions of allergy sufferers, but only when it blooms in late summer. This International Ragweed Day (tomorrow, June 21), learn how to put it to constructive use in your garden!

Read the full article at Permaculture News!

permaculture ragweed

Sustainability presentation

Ben Stallings — Thu, 17 Apr 2014 03:37:39 +0000

I've been asked to give six 20-minute talks to middle-school students tomorrow on the topic of "Sustainability." I decided not to pull any punches! See the presentation here: http://prezi.com/onnnfjxpltdv/edit/#0_24309637

permaculture classes

warm temperate greenhouse design and placement

Ben Stallings — Tue, 08 Apr 2014 18:13:36 +0000

7a: 0˚Ffull sunclaymoderate

When someone as far south as USDA zone 7 wants a greenhouse, preparing for excess heat is at least as important as catching and storing heat. The 1/4 acre lot in question has been dominated by large shade trees for more than 30 years, so that garden cultivation was limited to the far east side of the property. In the past few years most of the trees have come down, opening up the site for more cultivation and a potential greenhouse.

The client asked where and how to expand the garden; our recommendation is to rest the existing 35-year garden with nitrogen fixing cover crops and perennials, bringing annual crop production closer to the house, being mindful of traffic patterns to and from the back door of the house. The first of the two attached images shows the traffic patterns and proposed garden areas.

As for where to put a greenhouse, our recommendation is against the south-facing wall of the eastern part of the house, where it will be shaded from the west during the hot summer afternoons. Water catchment can be placed against the brick wall of the house for additional thermal mass in winter.

The placement of the greenhouse door is awkward, since if it is on the more convenient east side it takes away from the best growing space in the greenhouse. We therefore recommend placing the door in the west wall, even though it is less convenient, to maximize growing space. Of course if the glazing is plastic, it can be removed from both ends during the summer for increased access as well as ventilation.

asparagus Red raspberry (Rubus idaeus)Apache thornless blackberry (Rubus canadensis 'Apache Thornless')Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum)Zinnia (Zinnia elegans)

Does Comfrey Really Improve Soil?

interdep — Mon, 17 Mar 2014 15:18:35 +0000

Comfrey (Symphytum spp.) has a great reputation as a "dynamic accumulator" of soil nutrients, but there's precious little published evidence of this fact. I decided to do my part to change that, with the help of some before-and-after soil tests.

Read the whole story at Permaculture News.

permaculture comfrey

Picking up the Gauntlet

Ben Stallings — Wed, 19 Feb 2014 17:02:40 +0000

(I originally wrote this article as a submission to PermacultureNews.org, but decided it would be better as a blog.)

I don't know about you, but I was really shaken by Peter Harper's insightful critique of permaculture last summer, “Permaculture: The Big Rock Candy Mountain.” It has caused me to rethink the way I approach my urban farm, at least for the coming year. Let me explain.

I studied permaculture with some of the levelest-headed people I have ever met. They were frequently surrounded by dreamers and idealists, but their own feet were firmly on the ground. I gained a healthy respect for the scientific basis of permaculture, but not having a background in biology I assumed other people were taking care of the actual research. In retrospect I swallowed a lot of ideas just because they were put forward confidently by people I trusted to have their facts straight.

Six years ago when Jessie and I moved to the little town of Emporia, Kansas, just about five miles east of the inhospitable Great Plains and right in the center of the United States, I resolved to turn our 1/10 acre yard into an intensive permaculture garden. More than that, I resolved to be the one to bring permaculture to the frontier. I would teach intro classes, I would make permaculture a household word in Emporia and offer my services as a designer... even if I didn't get any design work, I would at least gather a critical mass of interested people who could carpool to permaculture events in the liberal stronghold of Lawrence, more than 80 miles away.

Six years later, I have yet to find a single interested party within 20 miles to carpool to Lawrence with, and while I can now toss the word permaculture around in conversation, most people are just being polite. I've had design clients, but they haven't followed any of my advice. My wife and I bring crops to market, but our quantities are laughably small (though our fellow farmers are, again, polite), and so are our profits. Last fall I went on a tour of 3-year-old food forest plots in Kansas City (90 miles east, with a more predictable climate and better soil) and found they were all farther along than mine, despite my two year head start... and then there's Eric Toensmeier's envy-inspiring Paradise Lot! After two summers of drought and a promising spring, I was unprepared for the rain we got in 2013, and what should have been a bumper crop was a disappointment yet again. So when Harper pulled the rug of empiricism out from under permaculture and showed it to be full of holes, I lost my footing.

In case you haven't read Harper's article, here's just one of the bombshells he tossed into the conversation: “It is very rarely the case that perennials outperform annuals. The fact that this is still widely believed suggests the PC movement runs on Nice Ideas rather than evidence.” I've invested a lot in perennials over the past six years and now have about 75 species established. Most of the larger, woody ones have yet to bear fruit due (I presume) to our heavy soil and harsh climate, so I've been filling in the gaps with annuals, trusting that any year now the perennials will come into their own and the garden will “pop” as Toby Hemenway says. That ought to be easy enough to test, right? But Harper says, “I have encountered numerous ‘permaculture gardens’ with abysmal levels of productivity that have nevertheless persuaded their creators that they are virtually self-sufficient in food. A few measurements and numbers would quickly dispel this illusion, but Permies just don’t do numbers.” Well, I can do numbers; I keep plenty of records in my other business to keep it profitable; I certainly ought to do the same in my gardening whether or not Harper is correct... and I ought to share my results whether or not they are favorable. I resolved to do that this year.

Harper's list contrasting “smart” permaculture with “cult” permaculture was another wake-up call. While I would like to say the intro classes I've taught were solidly on the “smart” side, I have to admit they were a mix of the two. This called for a step back to re-evaluate the foundations of what I'm doing and promoting. In the divide Harper portrays between David Holmgren and Bill Mollison, I have always fallen on Mollison's side because, frankly, I find Holmgren's writing to be intolerably dull and his outlook too gloomy. I can be gloomy all by myself; I don't need any more inspiration to be pessimistic! The enthusiasm and can-do attitude so characteristic of Mollison's style are what keep me going, and in my opinion Holmgren would do well to separate his realistic and accurate assessment of where we are from his disempowering and discouraging predictions of where we are headed.

But after reading Harper's critique, I found I was seeing the optimistic Mollisonian wing of permaculture with new eyes. Every time an enthusiastic young permie repeats that “comfrey is like a slow-motion fountain of nutrients,” I am now acutely aware that I've never seen a shred of evidence for that. Where are the soil tests before and after growing comfrey? The Wikipedia article is peppered with [citation needed] and has been for years, and the Plants for a Future entry cites a source which it acknowledges to contain “a number of silly mistakes.” My own soil tests do not show improvement after growing comfrey, and I haven't reported them because... well, everybody knows comfrey is a dynamic accumulator, so I must be doing something wrong... right?

Two years ago, before I read Harper's article, I had the opportunity to do some controlled trials of sheet mulch and guilding – my hope was to demonstrate the effectiveness of these techniques in improving tree health. I built a sheet mulch and guild of supportive understory plants (mainly insectories and comfrey), around one small ash (Fraxinus sp.) tree and not the other, one small American filbert (Corylus americana) bush and not the other. In both cases the treated plant was outperformed the following year by its grass-surrounded neighbor. Neither result is significant due to the sample size and short trial, but neither did they demonstrate what I set out to show, and negative results deserve to be reported, if we're being honest.

There is one other factor in my decision to put my urban farm on trial this year, and that is that the past few summers I haven't had the energy to do all the things I wanted to do outdoors, and I can only expect this summer will be the same. A vacation from intensive maintenance in favor of collecting and reporting data will be welcome.

So that is my plan. Mollison predicts that an established system like mine should be able to take care of itself with minimal maintenance while producing useful crops. Harper predicts that low inputs will result in low outputs. I'll be keeping track of my labor and expenses as well as all of my harvests, and I'll report back one way or the other. Stay tuned!

Interview on EcoRadio KC

Ben Stallings — Mon, 10 Feb 2014 16:42:03 +0000

Back in September, I attended a class in Kansas City on Designing Edible Forest Gardens, and while there I was interviewed by Craig Lubow for EcoRadio KC. (The instructors of the class not unavailable to interview.) You can listen to it here -- the interview begins at 38:43 and ends at 58:20.

permaculture

Home Aquaponics

Ben Stallings — Sat, 26 Oct 2013 19:53:40 +0000

Slides from a class given October 26, 2013 at Flint Hills Technical College

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/19jZl6_7-SIYjdNzNu80v6HdtamWDGRUQ...

permaculture gardening classes

There and Back Again: A Pragmatic Guide to Internet Privacy

Ben Stallings — Mon, 16 Sep 2013 23:18:43 +0000

A number of friends and colleagues have asked me recently about what I would recommend doing to regain some Internet privacy, given my background in Web development and technical support. The guide at PRISM-BREAK is authoritative but too technical for most people to follow. In recent weeks I've gone down the proverbial "rabbit hole" to see how secure I could make my Internet experience and then dialed the paranoia way back to a more practical, useful level. Here's what I've found.

There are five main ways you can be spied upon when you're using the Internet. Each of these will be addressed in more detail below.
1. Your computer could have a hardware or software keystroke logger on it.
2. Your Internet service provider (for example, your cable or phone utility) is most likely collecting records of your activities (along with all other customers') and sharing them with the authorities. Verizon got particularly bad press for admitting to this, but it appears Verizon is the tip of the iceberg.
3. A particular site you are visiting may be under surveillance, or may be collecting data for its own internal purposes (notably Google, for targeting advertisements and search results) which it then shares with the authorities.
4. You can be tracked across Web sites by a third party (in addition to your ISP and the sites you are visiting) using tracking cookies attached to ads, images, and other supplemental content on the pages you are visiting.
5. You can mistake a public medium for a private one. For example, email is less secure than a postcard, and most Web sites don't encrypt the blogs, comments, etc. you contribute, even though you may have logged into the site over an encrypted channel to contribute it.
There are three reasons I can think of why people care about this surveillance.
1. They may be doing things online that are at odds with what the authorities think they should be doing, for example trying to overthrow an oppressive government (e.g. in the Arab Spring) or trying to stop the activities of influential corporations.
2. They may object to being watched for philosophical or emotional reasons. For example, U.S. citizens may be under the impression that the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution gives them a right to privacy.
3. They may feel an impulse to act in solidarity with the other two groups on principle, as a form of civil disobedience, even though they are not personally doing anything wrong and don't personally feel their privacy is being violated.
Keystroke loggers come in two varieties, hardware and software. Unless you have reason to think you or the organization you are working for are being specificaly targeted for surveillance, an anti-spyware program on your computer is probably sufficient to eliminate that possibility.
If you think you're being tracked or otherwise spied upon by your cellular phone, turn it off or leave it somewhere you're not.
Be aware that Chrome and Android are essentially spyware for Google, likewise Safari and iOS for Apple and Internet Explorer and Windows for Microsoft, and an anti-spyware program will not detect them because you are using them intentionally. If your distrust extends to these companies, use Firefox instead of the other browsers and don't do anything on your computer or phone that you don't want them to know about. If you have to use a computer that you suspect is compromised, you could consider using a temporary operating system such as Tails, which lets you use the hardware without any of its software, however this might be a good time to also consider the possibility that you might be getting a little too paranoid. A second opinion would be prudent, but on the other hand, it doesn't hurt to have a copy of Tails on hand just in case you ever need it.
Consider keeping an old computer or smartphone around after you've replaced it with a new model. Use it to experiment with the alternative operating systems and other software recommended on PRISM-BREAK (much of which requires "rooting" your phone, a service you may want to hire someone to do for you), and use that when you're feeling paranoid instead of your usual computer or phone. A smartphone with no cellular service is still an iPod Touch, a gadget which people continue to pay good money for, and it's amazing how many cool things it can do, from GPS navigation to Voice Over IP, all without the constant surveillance that you'd get if you used your active phone. Even if it is tracked, it has a different network ID than your usual computer or phone (a kind of protection even Tails can't provide), so so long as you don't identify yourself by logging into a site, you can maintain anonymity.
If you want to prevent your ISP from knowing what sites you're visiting, an anonymizing network such as Tor (with its associated Web browser) is the way to thwart them. However, you should be aware that Tor is very slow. That is, it doesn't matter how fast your Internet connection is, you will feel like you're back in the days of dial-up 56K modems. Videos will not stream reliably, etc. Unless you are really serious about disguising your activities (or civil disobedience), you will probably find Tor is just too inconvenient to use on a regular basis. Also, anonymity only works if you don't log onto any Web sites. As soon as you log into a site, you've just compromised your anonymity for that Tor session, including all the sites you visited in that session before you logged into the site.
If you don't care who knows where you go on the Web but just want to hide what it is you're doing there, get the HTTPS Everywhere plugin for your browser. This will ensure that you're using a secure connection whenever possible, preventing your ISP or another party from listening in on the conversation. However, note that if the site in question is targeted for whatever reason, it will make little difference whether you connected securely or not, because anything you contributed to the site is probably stored in plain text and stamped with identifying information. That's just how most Web 2.0 sites work, including this one.
Similarly, you can try to encrypt your email communications using PGP, even if you use a Webmail service like Gmail, but that will only work if the people you're communicating with also use PGP. A much easier step to take is to check the account settings in your email software (Outlook, Thunderbird, Apple Mail, etc.) to make sure the secure connection feature is turned on, because most of these programs leave it off by default! That will at least keep your email out of the hands of your ISP.
If you think a particular site that you log into is collecting data on you, or if you have reason to believe it's being watched, the only real protection is to not use that site. If the site allows you to set up an account under a pseudonym, you could do that, but unless you always use it over Tor and never log into any other site during the same Tor session, your pseudonym can be easily tracked back to you. If the site doesn't let you use a pseudonym, just be aware that anything you say and do there is public. Don't post a photo on Facebook you wouldn't want an employer to see; don't say anything in your blog (or your Gmail...) that you wouldn't want to turn up in a court of law, etc. The walls are made of glass.
Finally some good news: Third-party tracking cookies are a cinch to thwart. Install a browser plugin like Disconnect and prepare to be amazed by how many such cookies infest sites that you wouldn't expect. I was blown away by how many were here on my own site, so I disconnected it, and now there are none! You may also be surprised by how few tracking cookies are on sites like Google and Facebook -- they love to follow you everywhere else you go on the Web, but on their own sites, they don't let anyone else track you!

So here's where I'm at after my adventure: I have Tor Browser on my computer and Orbot on my cell phone, but I rarely use them because Tor is slow and inconvenient. Instead I use Disconnect and HTTPS Everywhere and Sophos anti-spyware, and I call those precautions good enough. I have a spare smartphone with no phone service, which can do everything my connected smartphone can do when I'm in wifi range, and is still quite useful even when it's offline. But for my day to day activities, I just watch what I say, because to my mind the rewards of being connected outweigh the potential risks. That's an informed judgment that everyone should be free to make for him- or herself.

What do you think? I welcome comments below -- but of course they're stored in plain text with your identifying information!

Internet privacy security

2013 video tours

interdep — Mon, 09 Sep 2013 01:41:26 +0000

Below is a series of videos we recorded originally to try to promote a fundraising campaign to go to Cuba for the International Permaculture Conference and Convergence (IPCC). In the end we did not reach our fundraising goal, but the videos are still here for your enjoyment!

Why isn't this video embedded?

permaculture tours

A critique of permaculture

interdep — Sun, 11 Aug 2013 01:53:15 +0000

I just read an article that is a thought-provoking critique of permaculture, by none other than Peter Harper of the Center for Appropriate Technology. It's called Permaculture: The Big Rock Candy Mountain, and while the title is more than a little condescending, and I think he and I may disagree about what precisely the intent of permaculture is, his basic message is that if permaculture is indeed based on empirical science, permaculturists need to produce data to verify our claims. That seems simple enough. Challenge accepted. I don't have a very big sample size, but I'll do what I can to produce and publish some data! Stay tuned!

permaculture