Update, September 2014

So many things to update about... I'll try to keep this reasonably brief and readable.

1. I went to visit our land for three days back in May. I hadn't managed to get there since August 2012 - not for lack of desire. I really felt I needed to do some surveying, largely because of the need for establishing some waterworks on the land, partly because of some missing measurements around the house, but also because of the permaculture principle of observe and interact.

Our tree bog, March 2012 and May 2014

It was really an eye-opener. I really did need to get back on the land. I realised that although I'd walked round and round it several times, all the research and thinking I'd done had really changed the way I could see. The first thing I saw was the need for animals - firstly because it's such a big space and there's so much growth we need animals to help us manage it, otherwise we'll be forever scything - and secondly because the soil seems so poor and sandy we'll really need the animal manure to help rebuild it's fertility.

2. I've finished my Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) Course with Geoff Lawton and the Permaculture Research Institute in Australia. This was an amazing experience. I'd already done a PDC in Leeds in 2009, with loads of interactive sessions, creative groupwork, local visits, etc. I was initially a bit sceptical that an online course mainly presented in front of a whiteboard and based on the 25 year old Permaculture: A Designer's Manual could be really so good. Happily my worries proved unfounded, and by the end of the course I felt really well prepared and qualified for starting my more practical permaculture future (and hopefully career).

I'm open to sharing my design project, which is an initial permaculture design for OrchardyHaven, so get in touch if you want to see more, but the key image is this:

It starts with a swale on the longest highest contour, which is then followed by a new access track. There are swales on contour throughout the land, slowing and managing water. There are planned ponds (see my previous post), including one on the bottom right of the image near the high point of the land, fed from a new well with hopefully a wind or solar pump. This will give a water source with 9m of head pressure by the time it reaches our house and kitchen garden. There are loads of young dwarf mountain pine which don't seem very useful on our land except as filling for hugel beds where we'll be doing a lot of growing, especially vegetables and soft fruit but also a lot more hopefully. And it carries on this way down the hill... (I'm sure I'll post more on the other details later.)

3. With this kind of out of the way we've been planning in more detail what we'll be doing when we get there permanently. We won't be able to live on site straight away, but we'll be close. We can quite quickly get water supply sorted out. We have a pump and a well and a power source. We'll install a temporary tank on the wall above the well and plumb in an outdoor sink. We'll build a rocket stove for water heating and we've got loads of good dry fuel for it. Then we'll get to work on the Goat Shed: digging out, insulating and redoing the floor, insulating the roof and walls probably with straw, bringing in water and electricity supplies and building a rocket mass heater. There's enough space there to make it like a small home, and certainly a comfortable base for us and any volunteers to work on site.

By September 2015 we aim to have cleaned out the well properly, probably dug it deeper, capped it properly, and have an underground pipe running from it to the Goat Shed to avoid freezing in winter.

There's lots of work to be done building an outdoor shower and an outdoor kitchen for the hot summer months, getting the workshop into shape, etc. We'll probably aim to get underway on the main house building in the spring of 2016. Can we finish it in a year? It would be nice to think so but I guess it's more realistic to expect two years as we can't afford to pay builders to come in and do the work for us.


Ok, that'll do for now. Hopefully more soon.

Resiliency and Regeneration Principles

I've just written my first review on Amazon. I know I shouldn't really use Amazon, but it is a good resource for checking things out and reading reviews, plus my account with them allows me to earn small referral fees - so if you buy a book after following a link from this site I can get a little closer to my dream (although so far I haven't earned enough in two years for them to bother sending me a cheque!).

Anyway I reviewed The Resilient Farm and Homestead: An Innovative Permaculture and Whole Systems Design Approach by Ben Falk. I mentioned this in my recent post Looking forward to some good eating, and now I've got the book and I'm loving it. I said in my review that there are big chunks that I want to type out and put in this blog - particularly a piece about dwelling on the land and cultivating nut trees with an understorey of plants and animals - and getting massive long term returns on investment.

For now I'm going to list Ben's Resiliency and Regeneration Principles. I really need to get these into my head, and do quite a lot of work and thinking through many of them, and this is the first stage for me. Of course you need to buy the book to read all his extra notes, I'm just going to list the headings.

Resiliency and Regeneration Design

1. Maximum outputs for minimum inputs
2. Transform dead matter into living
3. System establishment vs. system maintenance
4. Biological complexity, technological symplicity
5. Resilience = diversity x redundancy x connectivity x manageability
6. Regeneration metric = biomass and biodiversity
7. Facilitate the vital force
8. Human management = primary limiting factor
9. Stress as stimulus
10. Responsiveness, not habit
11. Human resource x site characteristics = ideal site design
12. All design should be modular
13. Structural diversity begets biological diversity
14. Habits of mind
15. Spread pulses
16. Disperse and extend fertility
17. Land as value distillation tool
18. Multiply functions from single expenditures (always do or get two or more results)
19. Moving things is entropy
20. Value across time
21. Essential functions provided by multiple elements
22. Simplest solution is the best solution
23. Efficiency does not equal resiliency
24. Increase diversity, don't reduce it
25. Quality-quantity relationship
26. Scale and proportions are the most difficult
27. Oil intervention
28. Probability x impact = risk
29. Niches in time
30. Zone 1 site mimic
31. Past is precedent

Resiliency and Regeneration Habits of Mind

32. Good design always empowers
33. Passive vs active observation
34. Observation action chronology
35. Two is one, one is none
36. Character of work over time of work
37. Immerse in abundance
38. Maximise site awareness
39. Embedding skills and practice in daily routine
40. Skills = most durable resource
41. Awareness limits action
42. Environment limits and manifests action
43. Solutions = alignment
44. Figure it out: try stuff
45. Miracles everywhere

Food and Fertility

46. Constant organic matter accumulation
47. Paths as biomass producers
48. Seed often and lightly
49. Passive forage-ability
50. Plant as densely as you can afford to
51. Animals above plants
52. Pee on plants (or next to plants)
53. Swales everywhere

Ecology and Management

54. Disturbance stimulates yield
55. Succession determined by disturbance and its aftermath
56. Fill open niches immediately
57. Systems establishment overshooting management capacity
58. Biology in place of technology
59. Annual-perennial balance in system
60. Modularity and agility
61. Ecosystem partnering, not stewardship
62. Partnering with vigour
63. Sculptable landscape
64. Native to when
65. Cheap tools are too costly
66. Quality of work affects labour and management capacity
67. Apply present resources now
68. Storage always runs out
69. House as water tower
70. House as dehydrator
71. Clarity points and leverage points in time
72. Principles are only useful if actually followed!

There are several things I like about this list. It is fairly familiar and comfortable for me, although it also contains quite a few new ideas, good reminders, and challenges. Some of the headings remind me of the sort of thing Christopher Alexander writes in his book A Pattern Language which I also love (and Ben quotes). And I like the mix of fairly obvious headings with some intriguing ones and others that seem wrong on the face of it until you read the notes.

Now I've typed all of these out I think I'll create a little spreadsheet for myself where I'll go through them and make extra notes that I need to think about for Orchardy Haven. I also need to read through this section of the book again to refresh my memory on some of the points. I'm sure I'll be returning to this book again and again over the coming years for inspiration and guidance.

Planning ponds and water management

Following on from my last post about our water supply I've ended up reading loads of stuff about permaculture again. Really sorting out the water supply issues on the land is one of the first things we need to do. I mentioned at the end of that other post that I wanted to dig a well at the top of the land and maybe supply a pond from that - and I certainly want to do that now!

All the well known permaculture practitioners and teachers seem to have ponds and aquaculture as a key part of their land designs. Water is such an important key for life, for the regeneration of soil, for the transport of nutrients, for the support of biodiversity, for the capture and storage of energy, and much more besides.

I've bought an old engineer's level from Ebay and I plan to survey the land so we can identify good places to create ponds and ways of linking them together, as well as systems of swales or hugelkulture beds. I can't buy detailed contour maps of our land as far as I know and the image quality from Google Earth isn't great, so it's hard to visualise at the moment, but I've dug out a few images that convey some sense of the lie of the land:

View from NE, from neighbour's field.
This gives a good image of the S-N down slope of our meadow.

This is from the N. The seasonally wet foreground isn't ours.

Getting towards the top of our plot, looking NW down over the farm
buildings towards the sloping meadow. There's also a lesser slope down from W-E.

From the same spot as the previous photo, facing SW. The high point
of the land is in the birch plantation, about 200m N of our southern boundary.

The dream at the moment is to have a pond near the top of the land, one or two more near the house, leading down to the meadow where we will hopefully create a series of swales planted with fruit trees and shrubs and nitrogen fixers and perennial vegetables with enough space between the swales to graze animals or cut hay (and more ponds in the meadow too).

Water supply

This is the state of the current water supply (we have made a cover since this photo). It does work, but it's a bit sandy, it's a long way down (maybe 12-15m), and it's about 20m from the house.

Did I mention before that we dropped a pump down it and pumped a lot of water out - and it didn't take long for the water level to be refreshed and for the output to seem pretty clear and fresh (I didn't taste it).

The basic things we need to do are:

1. Repair the well top. Patch the hole in the side and make a cover so things can't fall in (I'm thinking particularly frogs, mice, insects, leaves).
2. Local consensus is that we should dig out the sand at the bottom of the well and make sure it's a good 15m deep. This will also help ensure it's clean and fresh.
3. We can use a bucket for a while, but we need to get a pump in there, or a pipe attached to an above-ground pump. The system I've seen is a pump in the cellar of the house, but since our house is a building site we may have to look at alternatives in the shorter term.
4. For a permanent or semi-permanent setup we need to bury any pipes 1.8m deep in the earth to avoid winter frost damage.

We're wondering about:

• Maybe we should collect rainwater from our roofs and use that instead of the well supply. That involves more capital expenditure on water tanks.
• Could we build a simple wind pump to extract water from the well? This would also require a large storage tank.
• What about the need for filtering the water? We filter our water now, but mainly to remove chemicals from the mains supply. We'd be filtering the well water for different reasons - removing small particles and micro-organisms. 
• Should we dig another well, and where should it be? Kasia's family have two wells, quite close together - one for the house and one in the animal yard. They do run low in the summer and the family is quite careful about their water use. I'd want to do some dowsing and see where the underground water is, aiming to get a back-up supply that was hopefully independent of the first well's groundwater supply. I'd also be thinking of using the second well (maybe with a water pump) to supply a pond system.

"The best toilet ever"

We've been back in Wakefield for a couple of weeks now and we're finally getting everything back under control in the garden and allotment here, and at home... So finally managing to do some updating on the website :-)

This is just a quickie - we have lots more to add soon. We have finally finished our tree bog! Yay!

Here's a photo collage of its construction: (L-R top) starting with stripping some roundwood poles for the legs; then finding a site; bringing in some old deski (waney-edged boards) Kasia's brother gave us; putting the frame together; the floor and the beginning of the walls; (bottom and middle) a closer view; Andrew helping out; as it was when we left at Easter, in bare space beside the barn; me putting the roof on; back and side walls and roof complete; me and Maia, but no steps yet; Maia happy with work so far; Kasia on steps of completed tree bog next to new flower bed :-)

We started this last October, did a couple of days at Easter, then finished in a couple of days this August. Probably 6-7 days work altogether, but as this kind of construction was all new to us and we made life harder by using curved roundwood poles I'm quite happy.

In the end it was a great sheltered cool place to sit - and very satisfying to use too... But don't just take our word for it - our volunteer/visitor Maggi from Venezuela said it was the best toilet she'd ever used!

Oh, I should add some technical information. It's called a tree bog because the trees around it accelerate the composting with their roots, so it should never need to be emptied. The exemplar tree bog has willow planted around it which is coppiced regularly and we did try to plant some willow but we came back to England and there was a long dry spell so the canes never took root. There are plum trees and sycamores and a large willow and a small oak around the back and sides that should do the job ok.

We got the inspiration from Permaculture Magazine and Living Woods Magazine.

What is Orchardy Haven?

This is an important thing that I've been needing to write down for a long time, and Phil and Andrew kept on asking for a concise description. Well here is draft one, and this is about as concise as it can be for now - it may get simpler later. Any comments appreciated.

Orchardy Haven is an experiment in sustainable and eco-friendly living and learning. It is an 8ha neglected old farm in north east Poland, purchased in September 2011. There are several aspects to the project:

1. To convert the dilapidated farm house to an eco-house.
2. To grow food and other useful crops on the surrounding land using the principles of forest gardening and permaculture.
3. To involve friends and volunteers creatively in the whole process.
4. To embody a culture of open learning: we're learning, we're inviting others to learn with us, and we can teach and be taught by the people who come and interact with us.
5. To develop the barns to provide volunteer/visitor accommodation, craft workshop facilities, and to meet the needs of the farm.
6. To create a ceramics workshop and other facilities for traditional crafts.
7. To build on opportunities that come out of these activities and our other skills to provide financial sustainability for the farm and our family.

Obviously the financial sustainability of the whole thing is a big leap, but it is possible and we'll just have to have a go at it. For now we can't even afford to move there, so it's going to be a while before it's all up and running.

One question Andrew asked was whether there was a conflict between inviting volunteers to help us and trying to make a living for ourselves on the farm. We don't think that is a conflict. There are lots of organic farms that have WWOOFers, and we ourselves have been volunteering in various places where our hosts need to make a living. We think being able to volunteer on a project like this is a great opportunity and is all about sharing knowledge and experience and giving people a chance to go out and get a place of their own to farm...

Highlights of our first proper visit

We went to visit in late September for three weeks, partly to introduce Maia to her Polish family, and partly to make a start on our new future home. Here are the highlights of our visit:

1. Walking on to the land for the first time:

From the NE, our land starts with the trees

Another new view from the SE 

We did walk around quite a lot when we first looked at the property last Easter, but it was great to know that we're actually going to make it our home. Also, all through the three weeks it seemed like every time we stopped and looked around we got a new perspective, saw something new and beautiful again...

2. Getting the rubbish cleared:

We spent about five days clearing rubbish. It was quite a sad experience: apparently this house was the grandest in the area when it was first built, but it's last owner didn't manage to live up to this legacy and the rubbish everywhere told a story of things being lost and broken all the time and a family life in some chaos...
Here's one of the trailer loads of rubbish ready to go, and it was a huge relief to be able to walk around and find empty spaces and piles of wood instead of plastic.

3. Planting

This happened quite late, and it was too dry and early to plant trees as we'd hoped, but we did plant some walnuts - eight pairs, here with my nephew Adam doing the honours - and we also planted some calendula seeds and some green manure seeds (sunflowers, flax, peas and clover). Fingers crossed for some growth through all the weeds and the hard winter ahead...


4. Wildlife

We saw this pile of sand and went to investigate. I'm peering down a large hole and thinking about badgers...?

We also have an owl living in one of our barns (behind the trailer full of rubbish above) which is fantastic, except we'll be worrying about disturbing her when we start work properly...

Of course there were deer, buzzards flying overhead, frogs and crickets everywhere, loads of varieties of colourful bugs, woodworm and mice and voles and moles. Not a great many birds, but I think that will change once we start working more on the land and create better environments for them.

5. Flora

It was pretty late for most flowers, despite the Autumn sun still keeping me hot at work. As I walked from the SE though I found huge patches of all sorts of flowers that were resisting the thick grass from the rest of the land. Loads of evening primrose, loads of wild strawberries, lots of signs of cultivated strawberries further on, and lots of patches of other things that I can't identify yet, like this picture.

A friend of a friend does expert reports on the ecological value of land, and we're hoping he can come and have a look next summer. It certainly looked to me as if we had an exceptional habitat worth maintaining and supporting, but maybe that's just because we've been using so many chemicals for so long in the UK, and this could be common in Poland...?

6. Trees and woodwork

I always want to do more green woodwork, but it's hard (or expensive) to get the materials and the space to work them in Wakefield. In our orchardy haven there are so many trees we need to cut some of them down and it seems a shame to simple burn them. It was great stripping the bark and creating a frame for our treebog, although we ran out of time in the end. My first job was to build a saw horse from recycled planks from a barn, which was good. I found that nailing through green sycamore was very hard though!

7. Autumn harvest

8. Farm work

This is an 'arfa' or winnowing machine. Unfortunately my brother in law had an accident at work and cut his hand. Fortunately helping him out meant I had to use this thing which I found fascinating. A very simple machine, the electric motor turns a wheel which turns a fan. There's also a simple lever mechanism on the other side that moves a series of four big sieves from side to side. You pour grain into the top, the chaff get's blown out of the back (right of this picture), grit falls down the funnel at the bottom, and the cleaned grains come down the shoot on the left. More pictures here.

The only little thing was he needed 900kg, in eighteen 50kg sacks. In Poland, like in the UK, you're not supposed to lift more than 25kg at a time. Luckily there's a simple work around - just tell farmers to use two people to move the bigger sacks... Needless to say this doesn't happen in practice, and I changed some fat into muscle. I also got to drive tractors and use a chainsaw and do other things that exercised my health and safety instincts :-)

9. Art work

I was asked to help dig a foundation trench for a new shed, and the first thing was to dig out a large stone. What they didn't realise was that only about 5% of the huge boulder was visible above ground, and that I would take on the task as a kind of Goldsworthy-esque art project and dig a nice neat trench all the way round. Someone then came and blew it up with explosives, and still it was a huge struggle involving borrowing stronger tractors and trailers to get the pieces out, but we did manage to get a few pieces delivered to Sadowo where we may do some granite carving in the future...

10. Forest walk

One Sunday we went for a walk, including venturing together into the huge neighbouring forest. I love forests, and this was almost as magical as when I went in April. No elk this time, but mushrooms and flowers and calm and quiet and dappled light and visions of many more visits in the future as Maia gets older...

11. Star gazing

The skies are really clear and there is hardly any light polution. I saw in Wales a discounted little book of the night sky, and I was able on a couple of nights to learn more about what I was looking at, identify a few more constellations, and find the Pleiades.

In Greek mythology, Maia was the eldest daughter of Atlas and Pleione, immortalised in the Pleiades star cluster, or seven sisters. I was very pleased to be able to find this in the sky too, although we could do with some binoculars to see them more clearly.

It was quite a hard trip in many ways, but there was a lot to celebrate and we're looking forward to the future.

Notes about surveying - house and land

I started the day early today and took the opportunity to do some quick research about surveying this new property. I'm off to see my friend Martin and I'm trying to be prepared for our conversation.

He's already given me some tips: check the foundations mainly, look for damp patches, look for diagonal cracks running from foundations or from window or door lintels, look at the roof, etc. Especially useful - take a long straight piece of wood to check for straight walls... I also found some advice online: for example how to survey old houses for renovation. Finally I hope to take my dad's advice and ask three local builders for their suggestions - with no specifications, what would they do to make it liveable? Could help us identify problems, give ideas, and get a feeling for potential costs. Of course I hope to do a lot of the work myself, and I expect our eco-house will be renovated quite differently from most local properties, but all this should be useful.

Then I got on to land surveying, or more particularly soil analysis. Not so much luck here in my initial searches - I'm surprised that the Soil Association website doesn't have more info. Of course I can do a pH test and hope it comes between 6.5-7, and I can hope for good loamy soil (although I expect it to be more sandy). Happily my conclusion was that my plan so far is ok, and I can dig some pits and do some investigating and all will be good.

Also this morning I came across this old film again of Ruth Stout's garden, which I find quite inspiring. Simple methods, little work, plenty of good food - sounds like a good recipe to me :-)



Then this evening I've ended up watching the documentary Dirt, via the great Permaculture Media Blog (see their Free Documentary Films Archive!) - loads of good stuff on here.

One last unrelated thing before I go to sleep: a friend of a friend apparently found it was so expensive to hire a mini digger for several pieces of work, it was better to buy one second hand for £5000 and sell it a year later for £4500 than pay all the hire charges. No there's a thought, although you need the spare cash...

First work on our land

We've booked tickets to go to Poland in mid September, and although we're thinking about the house and what needs to be done to it, my main thinking is about what we're going to do with the land. We need to build a home that can keep us warm and comfortable in the winter, and hopefully cool and comfortable in the summer, but it is the surrounding land that will play a big part in sustaining us - and take a lot of our time.

Of course we do want to find efficient ways of working the land with minimal effort, and we'll be planning with permaculture principles in mind. The question is now, with three weeks to do some initial work before the winter, what are the priorities? I've made this little plan to help explain our current thinking:

I hope you can see! The house is red, with the brown barns in a square; the existing meadow (blue) and birch plantation (green) and orchard (yellow); I've marked our planned areas for Holzer raised beds in orange, and hedge planting in pink.

We think at the moment that the main priorities are:

1. Improving the soil by planting green manures, especially around the orchards and the areas we're likely to begin to cultivate first.
2. Beginning to establish a hedge/barrier particularly on the NW boundary (pink) made with native trees and shrubs, with an emphasis on thick and thorny and fruiting to begin to discourage the numerous deer and other wild animals from the nearby forest while also offering some forage for them and the local birdlife. The prevailing wind is also from the W (60%) so the hedge will calm that.
3. One of the priorities if we're going to be working on the land for extended periods will be a toilet. No mains sewage, and nobody to complain about the idea of a composting toilet, but which design? I like the one recently built at the Sustainability Centre and described in Living Woods Magazine and Permaculture Magazine. It is raised above a bed of straw bales and surrounded by willow, so no need to separate the urine, you get good willow for weaving, and relatively easy to process compost (if I remember rightly). More on this later I expect...
4. Finally, I need to do some more surveying. In particular I want to take a better look at the soil in different areas on site, try to record more information about the trees and flowers and herbs on site, and find out more about what's growing locally.

As we continue to think about all this, there are questions about whether to continue to mow the meadow regularly, what to do with the birch plantation (needs thinning out, but when) and what to do with the rest of the land on the bottom of this plan - maybe a mixture of forest garden and pig paddocks, with plenty of fruit trees planted in between the existing generally young conifers...

Thinking about the house...

Originally we wanted to build a straw-bale house, but since we have a house and no money it seems like the most effective way to insulate it and make it beautiful would be to clad the outside with straw bales. The idea is to construct a sort of 'shelf' attached to the foundation and as wide as the bales, and then build the bale wall on this. We would still need to reconstruct the windows and the door (but they need to be repaired at the very least anyway), and we'd need to extend the roof so that it overhangs the walls to protect them from the elements.

This leads me to thinking about the existing walls... Here are a few photos: the East aspect; detail of NE corner; detail of NW corner; and South aspect. By the way, the external dimensions are about 13m x 8m.

 You can see the slight slope and the relatively new (uninsulated) metal roof. Pointing is fairly random. The two larger windows on the left are a bedroom, the little window a kind of scullery behind the kitchen, the tiny 'window' is opposite the front door, and the last window is into a kind of workshop.

 This photo (above) is a close-up of the wall and the eaves, and below is another close-up showing a patch of cement filling in the foundation, and on the North wall you can just make out an old door that's been blocked up, and some not very straight lines of block work...

 The South aspect is much tidier (below) but really if we're designing an eco-friendly house we'd want as much south-facing space as possible

Any thoughts? Do I need to carry out any particular investigations? Do I need any other photos? Or will I be fairly safe developing my building plan as it is? Please leave comments below... Thanks!

First steps

We've never lived somewhere we're free to build and dig and adapt so much, so this is a really exciting moment for us and we'd really like to move over there and start work as soon as possible. There are a few things that need to be sorted out first though:

1. We're about to put just a little bit more than all the rest of our savings to secure the property... We've found a run-down property in a beautiful setting, in the right location for us, that we can just afford with the help of our families. We're really happy that we may be mortgage and rent free, but we don't know about the finances of this sort of thing, paid employment in this part of Poland is scarce and not well remunerated and we're going to be reliant on putting our own labour into developing it. We do need to stay in the UK for a while to generate some more working capital (and that's not counting moving costs even).


2. We need insulation, a new roof, a toilet, maybe indoor running water... The roof space looks dry inside, but I could see that because of the light coming through the gaps... We always dreamed of building a straw bale house, and we were a bit confused when we found this place about how to realise our dream. Considering the state of the interior and the roof we thought about demolishing it down to the foundations and re-building with straw bales, but our friends at Old Sleningford Farm pointed out that the walls are sound, and we should more simply build straw-bale insulation around the outside. That makes it easier and more affordable, but there's still lots of work to do inside and out...


3. We need to start growing food... The previous owners didn't even have a vegetable patch - rare in this area. The existing small orchard is tired and old. Much of the land is covered with densely planted young birch trees. Much of the rest is covered with grass, nettles, and other scattered small trees. We want to build the soil quality, do creative things with whatever we find on the land (trees, stones, earth, water), and use permaculture and forest gardening based approaches to be at least self-sufficient, and hopefully make some income from the land.

These are going to be the three themes of this website: getting some money together, planning the building, and getting growing on the land. Most of the posts from now on will hopefully focus on one of these aspects.