It's been a month since I updated. Quadra Island has internet access at a few places (the HBI pub, a coffee shop...) but it's incredibly spotty even at those locations. Allegedly there is cell reception out on Rebecca Spit, but I never actually checked.
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Quadra is a fairly large island, sandwiched between big Vancouver Island and the Canadian mainland in Discovery Passage, which I assume is named after the ship belonging to Captain Vancouver.
Of all the Discovery Islands (Quadra, Cortes, West and East Redonda, Read, and some others), Quadra is the closest to being civilization. It has several paved roads, an RCMP office, community center, and schools up to grade 10. There are two towns worth calling such--Q. Cove, where the ferry lands from Vancouver Island, and Heriot Bay, where the ferry takes you to Cortes Island. We're staying in Granite Bay, which I think is the third-largest town on the island for loose definitions of towns. It's logging territory, where the public lands on Quadra have been leased to logging companies. A good number of people I've met have once been tree-planters. Logging companies need to replant trees after logging, and so people set off with a pack full of trees and a shovel and get paid by the tree. Tree-planting camps seem to be overrun by hippies and dogs, because all of the dogs I've met have also come from tree-planting camps.
We were staying with Emily and Sam. Emily runs around doing permaculture landscaping and all sorts of things largely in other peoples' yards. Sam is a carpenter and cabinetmaker who's making an addition onto his shop. Sam makes a great host because he's crazier and friendlier than most other people you'll run into, and Emily does the responsible things to make sure that the farm doesn't collapse, god bless her.
Permaculture! What is it? Uhhhhh... people sort of pause here, but let me just take some examples from the farm and you'll see. Permaculture seems to involve two things to me: (a) making the land and animals work for you instead of having to utilize excessive time, effort, and machinery and (b) making closed systems so that you do not have to bring in outside products such as chemical fertilizers.
Emily and Sam have (did have, when they are carved up into delicious bacon in two days) three pigs that they keep penned in with an electric fence. The electric fence can easily be moved, and the pigs are taken over to garden beds to root through them after the harvest is done in that area. (There are three garden areas for spring, summer, and fall crops.) Instead of having to till up the soil, the pigs do it for them with astounding thoroughness. Pigs also can be used to clear land. When we collected bruised and bug-gnawed apples, we would hurl them into the blackberry patches for the pigs to dig into and trample. Go, pig tractors, go!
You can also have chicken tractors (chickenwire boxes on skids that will allow chickens to nibble bugs and grass below them). Anyone who's seen a crowded chicken coop knows that the ground beneath the chickens turns into a grassless, muddy slop after a while. Sam and Emily don't have this problem because their chicken coop covers an area the size of the average suburban lot, including little bits of different areas--the swampy wetlands, the forest underbrush, and some nice grassy areas around the chicken coop. The only place that the chickens have dug up all the foliage is right next to the gate, where they drop the chicken food.
Permaculture would suggest that you would send a series of animals through your land to make a forest viable farmland. Maybe (I'm speculating here), you'd start with the pigs, who can even knock down trees if you put some tasty food treats into holes around the roots, then put in some goats to take care of most of the remaining foliage, and then the chickens to run clean-up. Each of the animals deposits manure, which fertilizes the soil for better crop-growing later.
After the pigs ran through their summer garden, we went through to make sure it was done. (Domesticated pigs do not really like to eat cooch grass rhizomes, which are Emily's invasive public enemy number one, so we removed a number by hand. She is thinking about getting a wild boar to solve this problem.) We piled the rhizomes into a big compost pile, then put five or six wheelbarrows full of seaweed put on top for the proper nitrogen and carbon ratios. (These ratios are some of the tricky, science-y stuff that Emily had to study at permaculture school.) Then we sowed fall rye onto the ground and spent a few days chasing blue jays off from the seeds. (The dogs know the command "bad birds! go get bad birds!" which makes it a lot easier than running into the field from the house every two minutes. I threw dirt at them all day while digging up potatoes.) The fall rye is an excellent crop because it can live through the British Columbian winter into the spring. At this point, instead of being harvested, the soil is going to be turned over to return the rye to the earth. The rye processes the nitrogen in the soil left behind by the pig manure, adding its own nitrogen content, and prevents the nitrogen from leeching out over the winter. The winter, which is very wet and rainy, would otherwise wash away all the valuable nutrients left by the pigs before the garden is re-planted the following spring.
Another component of permaculture. I am now at the Farmhouse in Vancouver reading The Humanure Handbook, which is the big treatise on composting toilets. Composting toilets are pretty normal to me now, but it'd be nice to know more about them. You can read the book to read about the horrors wrought by modern sewage systems, but composting toilets are a good option because:
1. Properly run, they barely have any smell, unlike a traditional outhouse, which is pretttty unpleasant to get used to.
2. They convert sewage into usable compost over time.
At its simplest, a composting toilet is a five gallon bucket with a toilet seat attached. It can also get a bit fancier, as you can see from these guys. The important thing is layering the fecal matter between layers of another medium to add carbon content, since feces are almost entirely nitrogen. Melissa in Virginia dug humus from the forest floor; Sam on Quadra used wood shavings from his shop's planer; the Farmhouse in Vancouver uses used coffee grounds from one housemate's job as a barista. After a day or so of usage, the bucket is dumped into a designated compost pile outside, which also surprisingly has no noticeable smell. (It's technically illegal to do in the city of Vancouver, but out of all the things that the Farmhouse's neighbors complain about, no one has noticed it yet.) If anyone cares, I'll report back more once I actually finish reading the book instead of just the first twenty pages.
