DIY Cider Press and Rocket Stove

In Permaculture we talk a lot about "appropriate technology" vs. technology for technology's sake. My friend Ruthy would always say sometimes technology can be like toasting a bagel with a blowtorch. 

So what can we make that is both low-tech, meaning anyone with basic skills and knowledge can build or fix it, and gives more self-determination. Since so much of our world seems out of our control even the basic necessities of heating your home, growing your food and cooking it. What happens the next time a super storm comes through knocking out power for a week or longer? Appropriate tech can both be used as back up emergency systems, ways of living in rural or remote locations, or even designed to get folks off of the grid.

The following are three systems we modeled and played around with last weekend in our Permaculture FEAST course.

Apple Press

The other day I was walking down the alley behind my house and saw a beautiful apple tree with most of the fruit covering the ground. Even though it was a really bad fruit tree year there is still so many apples in peoples yards, not to mention orchards that have drops and go bad. Pressing apples (and other fruits like pears) is a great way to preserve the harvest and use "ugly" apples that otherwise wouldn't get sold for fresh eating. Historically in New England making cider was very common on most farms. Specific varieties were developed for juicing and many varieties have been lost (more on that in a later post).

Here is what the underside looks like. The garbage disposal mashes and drops the apples into the bucket

Then the apple slop gets poured through a cheese cloth like filter into another bucket with wholes drilled into the side. The "press" is a car jack.

the juice pours out of the bucket and into a bus pail with another whole drilled at the tip and finally flows into another 5 gallon bucket.

Chopping apples and putting them down into the garbage disposal. Plywood top doubles as surface area for cutting boards and 5 gallon bucket catches apple slop. Looks like a giant batch of mashed potatoes!

Heating and mulling the apple cider with a rocket stove. Mulling with reishi mushrooms, cinnamon, cloves and cardamon

Heritage Wheat Harvest at Crabapple Farm

Sash Bruce/ Beet Street Cabana Design Concepts

Here is some images on a project I am consulting on with lead designer/ builder Jesse Cooper. The Cabana shed is a mixed use storage and community "hub" facility located in Washington D.C. Here is what they say on their website: Beet Street Gardens is a nonprofit that builds gardens on the grounds of social service organizations that work with disadvantaged adults, teens and families. They aim to create a space where economic and social divisions do not dictate who has access to nutritious food, outdoor spaces and the enjoyment of gardening.

Beet Street Gardens partners with Sasha Bruce Youthwork to give youth the chance to experience working with the land to yield produce and to build the skills necessary for growing one’s own food. The garden is located at Bruce House and continues to thrive due to the efforts of the Beet Street Gardens team and SBY youth.

Holy Crap

Holy Crap! from Xuan Vu on Vimeo.

Holy Crap! is a film which marvels at the work of SOIL, a non-profit organization working in Haiti to convert human waste into rich, viable fertilizer using dry, composting toilets. www.oursoil.org www.holycrapthefilm.com

Katherine Mallory: Origins of Private Property

With a goal of integrating social and economic justice work with the Permaculture community here is a recent lecture from my UMass Summer PDC course with Katherine Mallory from the Social Thought and Political Economy Department. It is a prelude to our class's design project that is working to integrate private, and shared joined back yards. More Soon!

Planting Brown Rice at Whole Systems Design Research Farm

L/A/N/D "Raising"

Montview Neighborhood Farm, 38 Henry St, Northampton, MA 01060
May 28th all day starting at 9am
Please RSVP and Walk or Bike to the farm if you are physically able

RSVP to montview@pedalpeople.com
www.montviewfarm.org

Artists in Context is working in collaboration with C3 (a creative community collective) and Montview Neighborhood Farm to present L/A/N/D, a series of participatory events and projects centered around creative place-making, food-growing, and story-telling. L/A/N/D takes place at Montview Neighborhood Farm, a human-powered farm, forest garden, and learning site situated on three acres of conservation land at the corner of Monview Ave and Henry St near downtown Northampton.

"Raising" is planned as an interactive building event during which participants construct the temporary structure that will serve as the locus of L/A/N/D programming at the farm. The outdoor classroom, part arbor, part gazebo, will be built largely from salvaged materials and feature on-site construction of a reciprocal roof.

Help C3 and Montview Neighborhood Farm raise the roof and see what else is happening at the farm on "Raising" day.

About the structure:

Permaculture looks to ecology for principles, patterns and examples to help design for healthy, resilient and beautiful human systems. We have named the structure we are creating a "gaz-arbor," part Gazebo, part Arbor. The gaz-arbor takes its inspiration from the pattern of the honey comb. Bees are able to calculate, design, and construct a hexagon structure that provides the most living and storage space for their larvae, honey and pollen utilizing the least resources and energy.

Like the honey comb the gaz-arbor is a public gathering space that feeds the neighborhood and greater community with ideas and inspiration to pollinate a cultural transformation within the landscape from that of scarcity, pollution, and oppression to abundance, health and solidarity.

The gaz-arbor is built with black locust posts (Robinia pseudoacacia) an incredibly rot resistant wood often referred to as natures answer to pressure treated wood. Considered a waste wood by many, the tree is in the Fabaceae (Pea) family and hosts a bacteria on its roots that takes atmospheric nitrogen and transforms it into a form of nitrogen that plants can uptake. Nitrogen (N) is one of the three basic nutrients that all plants need to thrive.

The gaz-arbor roof is reciprocal, also known as a Mandala roof, and has been used since the twelfth century in Chinese and Japanese architecture. Its assembly resembles the pattern of the spiral and consists of mutually supportive rafters.

The neighborhood will come together on May 28th to raise the roof in an event titled 'the raising'. The Montview Neighborhood is a community supported farm and like the rafters in the roof depends on a larger network of neighbors, artists and community members for its support.

The function of the gaz-arbor will be a community gathering space used, among other things, for potlucks, as an outdoor classroom and will feature edible vines to provide shade.

SWARM! Catching my first (two) swarms

Alaska's First Permaculture Design Course

We are on the last day of an intensive 2-week Permaculture Design Course. The students are all about to present their final designs! Fun filled week of eagles, moose, and had my first (and probably last) taste of seal jerky. Here is the blog for the course, more to

Art in the Park this weekend 7/22-7/25

Check out our Natural Building demo and seed ball making! On hand will be a copy of the Feed Northampton Project.

In a town who's prestige was built by artists, during the Northampton Sidewalk Sale's ritual four days of ardent shopping in July, artists will be taking back some of the cultural space that they themselves created. In other words: Pulaski Park is ours (!), to habitate, to perform in, to make/sell work in, to make noise in -- to connect the dots of Northampton's economic development with the exodus of artists, non-profits, and other demographics from the city, or just to get a big fruity piece of the capitalist pie.

Feed Northampton Plan is out

Feed Northampton: First Steps Toward a Local Food System is a food security plan prepared by graduate students at the Conway School of Landscape Design for a transition town community group in Northampton, Massachusetts. The project addresses the potential for food production within Northampton, and analyzes the patterns of open space and development in the city center and how different patterns may be conducive to different kinds of production. The student team determined an approximation of the broader foodshed from which Northampton residents draw their food (and an overview of the general kinds of foods being used) as well as the kinds of social and ecological systems that might be created (or already exist) to effectively support food production in the city.

Meditation Hut From Waste Wood

This is an awesome meditation hut made from the ends of scrap 2x4's. Ready to drop into your garden or even your bedroom. It is at the Yestermorrow Design school in Vermont and is being sold as a fundraiser for the school. I can attest that it is a great place to catch some breaths. Room for one with a hand hammered tin roof and custom door handles. Turning waste to resource.

Permaculture Workshop Details

It looks like we will have a beautiful sunny day. Please dress to be outside for most of the afternoon sun hats, water, cloths you don't mind getting dirty...We will spend the morning at Town Farm's community room learning the "seed" of Permaculture-- its history,definitions, ethics. principles and main techniques.

There will be a vegetarian lunch of a monstrous quinoa salad with salad greens from Red Fire Farm, spinach from our coldframes at Montview Neighborhood Farm, sourdough bread from Hungry Ghost Bakery and homemade hot soup made with the last of our stored carrots, sweet potatoes and garlic. If you have any food allergies please let me know. Hot Coffee and Tea will be available throughout the day. If you cold bring a mug, bowel and spoon that would be great.

After lunch we will take a tour of the farm and spend the majority of our time in design teams doing what the British have coined a "Perma-Blitz", a period of intense collaborative design. We will end our blitz with a series of design concepts for the farm based on the farms goals and an understanding of the ecological and social situation of the site. If you have some of your own design materials (trace, markers, pencils) you can bring them. If not we will provide them. We will end our workshop with ways to plug in to this international movement and happenings in our local area.

Directions:
From the Center of Northampton head south on Pleasant St (towards Holyoke) make a left on Holyoke St. (after Northampton Coffee) and take a right at the T onto Williams. Take your first left onto Montview ave. Town Farm and Montview Neighborhood farm is the long driveway on the Left right before Henry St. Please park by the soccer field. We'll meet at Town Farm's community room head toward the greenhouse and you will see us.

Payment:
You can pay by check to Montview Neighborhood Farm or Cash. I am open to barter. If $ is stopping you from taking this workshop please talk to me.
If you would like to take all 3 Permaculture workshops it will be sliding scale $120-$250

Questions:
Feel Free to call me at 610-955-7168

See you Saturday!

2010 Montview Workshops

Building Resilient Communities

All workshops are $25-$40 sliding scale unless otherwise marked, no one will be
turned away due to lack of funds. Space is limited. Please register one week in advance
by emailing MONTVIEW@PEDALPEOPLE.COM or call 413-825-6795 x306.

PERMACULTURE FUNDAMENTALS, April 3,10-5
Permaculture is a design system that provides for human needs while increasing the health
of the ecosystem. It gives us a lens to obser ve and assess what is happening in the natural
landscape and use those principles to design food, buildings and communities that work
together to use less energy and produce higher yields. Students will walk away with a
framework for understanding the connection between social and ecological health as well
as a process for designing solutions that come from being able to “read” a landscape. Each
fundamentals session is tailored to the par ticular season. Ask about discounts for taking all
three. Sliding scale $60-$100, vegetarian lunch provided. With Lisa DePiano

GARDENING 101, April 18, 10-12
Want to have your own garden but don’t know where to star t? In this workshop we will
cover ever ything you need to know to get going. We will cover soil testing, site preparation,
planting schedules, weed and pest management and more. With Molly Merrett

MUSHROOM LOG INOCULATION, April 24,1-4
Come learn how to grow your own shitake mushrooms. Take home a log of your own.
With Jonathan Bates

PERMACULTURE FUNDAMENTALS, May 8, 10-5 (see above description)

RAINWATER CATCHMENT, May 16,1-4
We can har vest rainwater off of our homes, garages, and even our chicken coops and use
it to water our gardens while keeping it from overfilling our sewer systems and flooding
our basements. Come learn how to calculate how much water we can har vest, learn safe
har vesting methods and build a two barrel system.

MYCOSCAPING: MUSHROOMS IN THE EDIBLE LANDSCAPE, May 29 , 10-4
Even if you’re an avid gardener, if you are only gardening plants, you are missing out! There
is a whole other kingdom to explore - and eat! How can we incorporate delicious,
nutritious fungi in our veggie gardens, food forests, lawns, and landscaping? In this workshop,
we’ll learn some of the options available to us, and even tr y one or two! We’ll learn
how to look at mushroom crops through a holistic, permaculture lens, and find the niche
in the landscape where they can peform useful ecological functions, even as they produce
food and medicine for us. We’ll review common and less-common mushroom crops, and
different cultivation techniques. We’ll also talk about how to be smar t and safe when
dealing the mushroom kingdom. $60-$100 sliding scale. With Rafter T. Sass

SPRING/EARLY SUMMER PLANT WALK, June 6, 1-3
Join us for a stroll around Montview Farm and learn how to identify the local edible and
medicinal herbs, trees and shrubs growing abundantly right here in the Pioneer Valley! We’ll
focus on methods of identification and har vesting, and discuss easy ways to turn these
common “weeds” into powerful medicine!

BACKYARD COMPOSTING AND COMPOST TEA BREW, June 13, 1-3
Ever ything you wanted to know about building, maintaining and using your own backyard
compost pile but were afraid to ask. Topics include bin size and construction methods,
proper ratios of materials, to turn or not to turn, what to add and how, how to rescue a
pile gone astray, when is it finished and the stor y to decomposition. We will end the
workshop by learning how to brew and apply aerated compost tea.

PERMACULTURE FUNDAMENTALS, July 11, 10-5

HERBAL SALVE AND TINCTURE-MAKING, August 29, 12-3
Making your own medicine is fun, empowering and easy! In this workshop all par ticipants
will have the oppor tunity to experience the medicine-making process for salves and
tinctures from star t to finish. We’ll star t with a shor t herb walk around Montview Farm to
decide what we want to har vest. From there we’ll process the herbs and make some
medicine! Par ticipants will all leave with at least one homemade salve and one tincture.

JONATHAN BATES has been thinking and teaching ecologically since 1999. In 2001
Jonathan graduated with a masters degree from the Institute for Social Ecology. Currently
he is an energy advisor for the Center for Ecological Technology. He’s been studying, creating
and working with rural and urban gardens in the Connecticut River Valley for the last
six years, and is a co-designer and inhabitant of an edible forest garden in Holyoke, MA.

LISA DEPIANO is a cer tified Permaculture designer/teacher and co-founder of the
Montview Neighborhood farm, a human-powered farm and edible forest garden in the
Connecticut River Valley. She has a Master’s degree in Regional Planning from the
University of Massachusetts and loves working with people to create the world they
would like to live in. She also enjoys local histor y, community radio, playing contra dance
mandolin and riding with the worker-owned, bicycle-powered hauling ser vice, Pedal People.

JADE ALICANDRO-MACE is a Community Herbalist grounded in the Wise Woman
Tradition of Herbal Medicine. She has completed numerous herbal training programs
at schools throughout the New England Bio-Region, including the Nor theast School of
Botanical Medicine, Blazing Star Herb School, Clearpath School of Herbal Studies, and the
Gaia School of Healing, and holds a B.S. in Plant Biology from the University of Massachusetts,
Amherst. Jade truly believes that herbal medicine is the people’s medicine, and that
this knowledge belongs to ever yone. Teaching the healing proper ties of the plants growing
right here in our own backyards, fields and forests is one of her greatest passions. She
is based in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts and offers herbal consultations,
perennial garden suppor t, and seasonal herb walks and workshops. For more information
contact her at Milk and Honey Herbs.

MOLLY MERRETT is the primar y grower at the Montview Neighborhood Farm and has
been farming for over a decade. She graduated from Hampshire College with a degree in
sustainable agriculture and is a collective owner of Valley Green Feast.

RAFTER T. SASS has been learning, teaching, and practicing Permaculture design since 2003.
His work as consultant, designer, and researcher, covers themes as diverse as ecological
waste and water treatment, homescale mushroom production, whole farm design, and
urban agroforestr y. This work has taken him from the nor theastern US to Texas to Peru.
He is now studying ecological design at the graduate level in Vermont.
All workshops are $25-$40 sliding scale unless otherwise marked, no one will be
turned away due to lack of fun

Food Security Workshop this Weekend at the Youth Media Summit

I will be doing a workshop on Food Security this weekend at Mount Holyoke College at the Youth Media Summit

Growing Local Food Security: we are what we eat
Youth Media Summit
11:15-12:45pm in Reese 301

Through small group discussion and games, we will uncover problems
with the current food system and create solutions that are healthy,
abundant, appropriate and resilient.

Feed Northampton Presentation Thursday, March 11th 7-9 Thornes Market

*Please pass this invitation on*

Gather with other concerned and energetic citizens as we meet to
unveil the Northampton Food Security Initiative, completed by
Northampton Residents and Conway School of Landscape Design!

Thursday, March 11 7-9pm Thornes' Basement (Old Dynamite Records)
-----------------------------------------------------
The Northampton Food Security Survey grew out of our collaboration
with the Conway School of Landscape Design, the Western Mass
Permaculture Guild, the City of Northampton, Grow Food Northampton and
Transition Northampton. It seeks to answer how capable we are in accessing and producing locally grown food.

Do you have a garden? Do you store foods? Do you fish or hunt? Would
you like to eat local produce but can't afford to?

Take the Survey Now (takes 2 minutes!)
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/PXJMKKK

Share what you know in the survey so that we may begin to collect
resources, connect people and re-connect with our food sources! As
food and fuel prices increase, trucking in our food is already for many and may become
too expensive for most of us to afford.

Eating locally benefits our local economy and our quality of life while supporting local
producers and each other! Pass the link along to everyone in
Northampton, because everyone eats and everyone
benefits from a stronger local economy.

You can check results of the survey at
http://growfoodnorthampton.com/

See you soon,

Seth, Lisa, Jenn, Lily and the countless others that have made this possible

-----------------------------------------------------
This is a link to a food security project done in Shelburne Falls
http://issuu.com/conwaydesign/docs/foodsecurity

The Northampton Food Security Initiative, a project of the Conway
School of Landscape Design and concerned Northampton residents, seeks
solution-based responses to the need for a local food system that
provides abundant, reliable, safe, and nutritious food for its
residents in the face of rising fuel costs. The outcome of this
initiative will be a community organizing document that makes
strategic recommendations for Northampton based on an analysis of its
potential ability to produce, process, and distribute food to all of
its residents, regardless of income.

Seeding Perennial Vegetables

Jonathan Bates and I seeded 10 flats of Perennial Vegetables this weekend. Including Sea Kale, Welsh Onion, Turkish Rocket, Perennial Spinach, Beech Pea, Skirret and Good King Henry. To purchase some of these multipurpose plants visit Jonathan's nursery at www.communitysupportedforestry.com

In this video Jonathan tells us more about Skirret, a low maintenance root crop whose roots have the flavor of potato-parsnip. We will be teaching another 5-day forest garden Immersion class at Yestermorrow Design/ Build School in Warren Vermont the last week of April. There are a few spots left visit www.yestermorrow.org for details

Small Home Retrofit: Garage into Cottage

Here is a design I made using a free program called sketch up---

Instead of housing 2-cars the garage is adapted as a primary dwelling for two people. It is nestled in the heart of a walkable downtown neighborhood. The homes south facing walls welcomes the sun filling its spaces with natural light and heat. It is both open and mysteries, with nesting nooks, multi-use spaces, and a simple timeless earthen feel.

Rustic, light, open, warm, raw,inspiring, free, safe, simple, relaxing, breath, fire, reuse, cozy, creative, innovative and smart, built in storage, flowing, inviting, local, curiosity, beauty

Food Security Plan takes off in Northampton

The above is a copy of a food security plan for the town of Shelburne, MA

Proposal. During the January – March 2010 winter term, a team of Conway
graduate students will prepare a food security plan for the 34.5 square mile city of
Northampton. The student team will create a working handbook that could be
used by other communities and groups interested in the transition town
movement. The report would include:
•
The potential for food production within Northampton
•
The patterns of open space (both private and public) and development in
the city center and how different patterns may be conducive to different
kinds of production
•
An approximation of the broader foodshed from which Northampton
residents draw their food (and an overview of the general kinds of foods
being used)
•
The kinds of social and ecological systems that might be created (or
already exist) to effectively support food production in the city
•
Analysis of 4-5 specific agricultural parcels leased by the city to local
farmers
•
The important questions or kinds of more detailed data that should be
explored in future phases of the development of this plan

Montview Neighborhood Farm August 2009