How to Make an Earthen Floor for Your Sustainable Home

Why Build an Earthen Floor?

This Earthen Floor adds a wonderful warmth to the Ceiba Lounge

Earthen floors add a great earthy touch to your sustainable home; whether that’s in your cob house or conventional stick frame home. They have more give than concrete or tile, meaning they are more comfortable and easy on your feet. Earthen floors can be durable and last a long time, but are not the best material for all spaces in your home. They will break down faster when there is a lot of moisture on them or heavy items dropped on them. So places like your kitchen and bathroom are not ideal locations for an earthen floor. Earthen floors work great for bedrooms and living rooms.

Mixing by hand gives you a great feel for the mixture

Here at the Ranch we have been practicing and perfecting our earthen floors for more than 15 years. We strive to create sustainable homes from natural, local materials. Natural building is one of the ways we practice green living. We have seen what works and what doesn’t in many different structures and spaces throughout our community. After having an earthen floor in our kitchen, a space that produces three meals a day for an average of 30 people, and after repairing patches again and again, we realized this space is too heavily used for an earthen floor. Spaces like our guest cabins are perfect for earthen floors. Of course with hundreds of people going through these spaces they wear down over time. If you correctly lay an earthen floor in your home, and take care of it, they should last you for a long time. 

Wooden guides can be used to help keep the correct thickness

How We Build Our Earthen Floors

Base and final coat in a sample, always make tests!

Here in our tropical environment, with the materials locally available to us, we have finally figured out a bomber earthen floor. Here is a simple step by step guide on how we lay an earthen floor.

An earthen floor is comprised of 4 different layers

·       Water proof membrane

·       Tamped gravel (optional to increase total depth)

·       Compacted road base (mixture of sand, clay and gravel)

·       Two layers of final floor (mixture of sand, clay and chopped straw)

Make sure your samples are large enough to be representative!

Before you begin make samples! Always make samples for anything you plan on building; whether that is for your cob house, outdoor pizza oven, or natural plasters. We recommend making at least 3 samples with different ratios of clay, sand, and straw. These should be at least 1 meter by 1 meter to get an accurate example of the final product. 

Steps once you find the correct ratios

1)     Lay down a waterproof membrane, wrapping it up the inside of the stem wall.

2)     If you need to increase the depth of your floor height you can add tamped gravel.

3)     Compact your road base. Minimum depth is 4 inches.  

4)     Lay down your first layer of final floor. We do ¾ inch thick. Let completely dry. 

5)     Lay down your final layer of floor. We do ¼ inch thick. This can be troweled smooth to close any holes. Let completely dry. 

6)     Paint multiple layers of linseed oil/thinners combo at 3:1 ratio. This provides a protective coat that will increase the longevity of your floor.

Want to Learn More?

Perfecting an earthen floor takes time and practice. If you are trying to create a sustainable home consider using earth for your floor and throughout your home.

If you would like to get some hands on experience in natural building join us for one of our upcoming courses check out our workshops page for our latest offerings.

References:

Earthen Floors - A modern Approach to An Ancient Practice By Sukita Reay Crimmel & James Thomson

Ranch Reading Recommendations: 8 Great Books I Read This Fall That Relate To Our Work

Ranch Reading Recommendations: 8 Great Books I Read This Fall That Relate To Our Work

By Tim O’Hara, Ranch Core Team

During my annual visits to see family in the United States, I oftentimes have the opportunity to catch up on some reading that regularly alludes me during the busy seasons here in Mastatal.  More than any year in recent memory, I felt as if I hit the jackpot with the titles that I was recommended, came across, and picked up this fall.  Here’s a quick glance at them, all of which I’d suggest to anyone looking to add a good volume or two to their personal or professional library.  I think that all of these titles are relevant to our work at the Ranch and the greater work that so many of you that read our blog are interested in.  

The Story of the Human Body:  Evolution, Health and Disease by Dr. Daniel Lieberman

An informative and thought-provoking book for readers interested in human and cultural evolution and how they have come together to impact our specie’s health in modern times.  

The Wizard and the Prophet:  Two Remarkable Scientists and their Conflicting Visions of the Future of the Planet by Charles Mann

A dissertation about two philosophies on how to tackle current problems of feeding a growing global population and dealing with climate change.  One view contemplates technological and engineering solutions while the other espouses resolutions with a softer touch on our environment.

Neither Wolf Nor Dog:  On Forgotten Roads with an Indian Elder by Kent Nerbern

Nerbern documents the thoughts, beliefs and stories of a Lakota Sioux elder in this eye-opening, sometimes heartbreaking, and other times hopeful look at how humans might change the way they live to find common ground in addressing past atrocities and future challenges.  It had been quite a few years since I read a book focusing on Native American challenges.  I couldn’t put this book down once I started.  Some other titles related to Native American history that I’ve read in the past and also recommend include Peter Matthiesson’s In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, John Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks, and Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues.   

Lost Connections:  Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression and the Unexpected Solutions by Johann Hari

An eye-opening book about the nature of anxiety and depression and some surprising strategies to deal with these increasingly challenging and difficult social issues.  I read another of Hari’s books last fall entitled Chasing the Scream:  The Opposite of Addiction is Connection.  I raced through both books.  Hari’s writing style is accessible, absorbing and compelling.  

How to Change Your Mind:  What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us about Consciousness , Dying, Addiction, Depression and Transcendence by Michael Pollen

A fascinating read about the history of psychedelics and their potential use to address social problems such as addiction, depression and terminal illness.  Pollen strays from writing about food for the first that I know about in many years.  I think that this is a courageous attempt to shed light on an oftentimes contentious, misunderstood and polemic subject that deserves another look by researchers, academia, medical professionals and society as a whole.  

Bringing it to the Table:  On Farming and Food by Wendell Berry

A nice compilation of essays about food and farming.  Over the last decade or more I have repeatedly returned to Berry when I feel the need to reground.  His essays are a refreshing look into the darkness of what has become of conventional agriculture in the United States and elsewhere.  

The Gift of Good Land by Wendell Berry

A great collection of short essays by one of my favorite authors.  Berry’s compositions never fail to get me thinking deeply about the topics that are most relevant to my future.

I’ll also add another book even though I haven’t finished it yet as it is offering a fascinating perspective about humans and our current predicaments.  

Sapiens:  A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

The book goes deeper into some topics populated by Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel and Charles Mann’s 1492.  It’s a fascinating read that includes new research and theory as to how we have become the planet’s dominant species with insight as to why that argument is changing so quickly and alarmingly as humans impact the natural planetary systems that sustain them.  

I found all of the books on this list riveting, well-written and provocative.  They all had me at one time or another thinking about what I could be doing better as a father, business owner and global citizen.  The information that I ingested was at times difficult to read, inspiring, despairing, hopeful and motivational.  As I always appreciate personal recommendations for new books, I wanted to share with others the topics that have most recently been on the forefront of my evolving brain.  

Mastatal’s Local Library

The Basic Pantry Analysis: Design, Food, Sourcing

By Laura Killingbeck, Porvenir Design's Food System Designer

The Human Diet as An Ecological System
Cuisine is diet that's unique to a physical place and a human cultural group. We can taste the patterns of modern cuisine in the melding of characteristic ingredients into characteristic forms. Wheat noodles with tomato sauce points us in the direction of Italy. Fermented spiced cabbage leads us to Korean kimchi. Even amid tremendous variation, and even as these cultural foods are exported, appropriated, and evolve in different ways in different places, we are still able in many cases to recognize a cultural and geographical narrative embedded within relational patterns of flavors and forms.

Across the span of human agricultural history, cuisine sprung from ecological relationships—people ate what grew well in their area, and they grew what nourished them. Humans shaped the morphology of plant, animal, and microbial species by selective breeding; in turn, these foods changed the physiology of the human body. Cultural groups vary widely in their tolerance and desire for certain foods—these are genetic adaptations to their peoples' long history of evolution with specific cuisine. The co-transformation of people and food species was exquisitely mediated by the opportunities and limitations of the ecological niche of the place where they lived. Growth was balanced and calibrated within an ecological feedback loop of regenerating resources.
But in recent human history, globalization expanded our access to place and people, while simultaneously breaking this ecological feedback loop. We travel, and food travels; neither is linked, necessarily, in place. People are still connected with the world, but now we are connected differently. This shift is transforming the evolution of cuisine in unprecedented ways.
 

If you imagine the path of human ecology as a train traveling down a railroad track, globalization is the conductor turning the train onto a new track. Human relationships with food are now evolving in a different direction than they did before. The foundation for cuisine is no longer an ecological relationship between people and place; it is an economic relationship between people and business. Businesses grow or produce food and ship it around the world, where chains of distributors buy it and warehouse it in grocery stores. Surely this is not the only way that food works, and local food cultures still thrive in many areas. But it is a style of human-food interaction that is growing and replacing such local cultures. As we become increasingly separate from our direct relationship with the ecological patterns that once mediated food and diet, we become more deeply fused with a new, abstract, relationship with global commerce. The foods we like to eat often have less to do with healthy ecology, and more to do with macroeconomics and marketing.

We know there are a lot of problems with this. The Western Diet (aka, global cuisine) is correlated to chronic disease and poor health. Mass agriculture depletes soil and species diversity. Industrial pesticides and fertilizers damage ecosystems. There is a lot more to say but I don't have to say it—on some level we know, all the time, that this is bad. And even as we know, we still eat global-industrial foods, because we're hungry, its what we know, and its what's there.

Post-Harvest Permaculture Design
Permaculture design is essentially applied ecology for human development. It studies and teaches how life relates to place, with the object of sustaining that life and that place. A lot of the literature within Permaculture Design centers on the infrastructure development of building, landscape, and agricultural systems. It most often highlights the agricultural side, with ideas and methods of learning how to integrate human agricultural systems with the larger ecology of life on earth.

But interestingly, the focus on agricultural systems within Permaculture Design methodologies often only lightly brushes post-harvest food handling and cuisine development. The general thinking is that once people understand food production as a functional part of ecological systems, they will be able to grow more food. This has been very successful for many people, with one caveat—growing plants, animals, or microbial species that are edible does not mean you are growing food that is ready to eat. A a plot of wheat and a chicken pecking bugs can be wonderful parts of an agricultural ecosystem, but if you want a chicken sandwich there is still a lot of work to do.

Over the last nine years I've worked with two farms and education centers who dedicated themselves to the process of farm-to-table food production—one in temperate Massachusetts, and the other in tropical Costa Rica. This allowed me to study and practice food preservation and processing across climates, and see the similarities and differences that unfolded.

At Rancho Mastatal in Costa Rica, even very common foods, like malanga, tiquisque, cuadrados, pejibaye, and chaya were all new to us. And what do you do with a sudden hundred pounds of ripe bananas? At Round the Bend Farm in Massachusetts, we needed to preserve large quantities of food seasonally to last the winter, in a way that was totally different than in the tropics. We also transitioned from a home-scale cooking facility to one which could serve hundreds, and had to scale our systems up to meet new demands. At both organizations, it took us a lot of time, and a lot of trial and error, to acquire the skills, tools, and labor to do these things. And to do these things efficiently, it took structured seasonal planning. The teaspoon of ginger you need now in your recipe had to be grown a year ago, then harvested, dried, powdered, and stored. We had to learn how to organize ourselves in relation to local food, in ways that were intrinsically different from how we used to organize ourselves in relation to globalized foods.

The human element of how we interacted with food based on our personal and cultural backgrounds was another huge piece of the puzzle for local eating, especially in Costa Rica. We craved western-style bread products; people didn't always like Costa Rican cuisine; some people were afraid of new foods like fermented bananas. Eating locally meant coming to terms with the cultural references for desirability of foods we had brought with us, in relation to the ecological and cultural backdrop of a new country and climate. We had to adapt ourselves to new styles of cuisine, and adapt that cuisine to ourselves as newcomers.

Most of my work in Costa Rica and Massachusetts was to create, systematize, and implement post-harvest food processing and preservation strategies based on farm foods. I also worked with numerous farm owners, communities, and homesteaders who were and are in the process of divesting from their dependence on global-market food supplies. It is through these relationships and experiences that I began to notice consistent patterns in the challenges people faced in transforming their farms into food. I started comparing patterns of limitations and successes that people were reporting, with those of the organizations I was working with. I used permaculture design to organize these patterns into a systematic format that I could use to consult with people about how to achieve more efficient and accelerated farm-to-table food system success.

I call this consultation service the Basic Pantry Analysis. The title and process drew inspiration from many collaborators in the fields of permaculture design and farm-to-table cuisine; in particular the work of Costa Rican ethnobotonist Rafael Ocampo, as well as that of the Sat Yoga Institute. A similar process focused on family nutrition has also been promoted by the Instituto de Nutrición de Centroamérica y Panamá (INCAP). My version of this process is based on my experience working with farms and communities, and is an adaptation of a wonderful wealth of collaboration among many individuals and organizations.

The Basic Pantry Analysis
The Basic Pantry Analysis matches the ecological needs of your land, with your cultural and personal frames of reference, your dietary needs and desires, and your resource capacity, to form a “basic pantry” of ingredients, whole and value added, that you will use to develop your own dynamic cuisine—that is, the meals you eat every day to sustain yourself in the place you live. This process is useful for anyone who wants to accelerate their ability to grow, process, and eat local foods.

Your Basic Pantry will be designed through a combination of personal decisions and desires, which inform a multitude of what are often very simple tasks. Those big ideas and those little tasks are what build the complex whole. The consultation service is divided into four primary parts: Vision, Layout, Basic Pantry, and Adaptation. The scope of service varies depending on the client's needs and desires.

Sample Outline of Basic Pantry Service
Please note this varies based on client needs.

Vision
This is the overall concept of your cuisine. Exploration of goals and values, and how those relate to your capacity. Make decisions about priorities for ecological, cultural, dietary, financial, factors.

What the client receives:

    •    A one paragraph vision statement for your cuisine.
    •    A one page analysis of the factors and values that contribute to that vision.
    •    A sample set of meals you could expect to eat over the course of the year.

Layout
This is the architectural layout of your plan—it shows clearly how different food elements and tasks fit into your cuisine over time.

What the client receives:

    •    Daily, weekly, monthly, and/or annual list of post-harvest food tasks for your mature food system.
    •    Analysis of tools and infrastructure.
    •    Analysis of skills and labor needed.
    •    Basic five year analysis of how your food system transitions through time.
  
Basic Pantry
You need lots of ingredients to make meals—this is the list of those ingredients, whole and value-added. I work closely with the agricultural team to make recommendations about food species.

What the client receives:

    •    Sourcing and Growing list
    •    Processed and Preserved foods list

Adaptation
Your Basic Pantry Analysis is a starting point, not an end. It will grow and shift and evolve as you and your land do. This section is a structured feedback loop to help you grow and shift your cuisine based on your priorities.

What the client receives:

    •    Design concept follow up questions
    •    Blank harvest, processing, and/or other charts for feedback
    •    Supporting appendix—contains client-specific documents on further skills and strategies, and/or other supplementary documentation as needed.

For more information on costs and deliverables of this service please write our team at info@porvenirdesign.com.

For information on food related workshops at Rancho Mastatal please see go to our Workshops page.  
 

Flexitarianism: Living and Sharing Solutions to Climate Change

by Matthew Livingston
Matt is currently one of the Ranch's year-long apprentices.

DISCLAIMER: These are my thoughts and experiences on what can be a deeply cultural, charged and personal topic: diet. There is a lot we don’t know, especially when it comes to what a sustainable diet is. For one, most studies have been centred in high-income Western countries (Jones et al., 2016); it’s also still largely unclear exactly what a “healthy diet” should consist of, nevertheless what a truly sustainable society would look like. Integrating all of these concepts is an enormous challenge.

“Defining what represents a macro-nutritionally balanced diet remains an open question and a high priority in nutrition research.” (Song et al., 2016)

Before coming to the Ranch, I had been vegetarian for about a year and a half, predominantly for environmental reasons. Currently, I would probably classify as a “flexitarian” or “ethical omnivore”, as are most of the denizens here, with the majority of the diet being plant-based. Ideally ~95% of our calories would come from plants, due to extensive research on the health, longevity and environmental benefits of eating a predominantly plant-based diet (1, 2, 3). A 95:5 plant to meat ratio is manifest in all of the Blue Zones (4), examples being Okinawa & Sardinia, where people live the longest and most healthful lives in the world. Allow me to explain how I came to this decision and why I’m sticking with it for now…

My original swap to vegetarianism was influenced by my desire to live “more sustainably”, and healthily, as it is for many people now. I saw the documentary film “Cowspiracy” (bear with me) and this initiated my research into food and agriculture, which carried over into my environmental sustainability degree. It was also enough to shift one of my fundamental behavioural patterns – my diet. It was a little tough going at first,  but I soon found that I didn’t miss eating meat much at all. I felt a bit better about myself, “knowing” that I wasn’t contributing as much to global warming, as my research indicated that changing one’s diet can be one of the most impactful ways of reducing your carbon footprint (Aleksandrowicz et al., 2016)…

Fast forward to May 2017, when I travelled to Ridgedale Permaculture farm in Sweden for my Permaculture Design Course with Richard Perkins. Richard is a proud meat-eater, being particularly fond of freshly line-caught fish, properly cured bacon & sausages, and a nice, juicy steak from locally reared, regeneratively farmed livestock, as viewers of his Youtube channel will know. He was keen to point out that there are in fact “no ecosystems on this planet that exist without animals driving the nutrient cycling” (Perkins, 2016). Ecosystems depend on the cycling of nutrients (and minerals) in order to function, and these nutrients can be accumulated, dispersed and concentrated by animals in such a way as to benefit the whole.

One beautiful example of this is the salmon of British Columbia, that feed the bears, eagles, forests and pretty much everything else that lives there with nitrogen and other accumulated minerals from the ocean when they return to their spawning grounds. Another was the Great Plains of North America, where tens of millions of bison roamed. These prairie lands were extraordinarily diverse habitats for a multitude of co-evolved flora & fauna, micro and macroscopic. Now they have predominantly been turned into endless fields of corn, wheat and soybeans, using fossil-fuel powered machinery and chemicals to maximise profit whilst depleting soil of not only its nutrients, contributing to erosion and nitrogen runoff, but its life too.

Regenerative Agriculture aims to work differently. The challenge is to maintain healthy yields and livelihoods whilst simultaneously enriching soil, biodiversity and ecosystems and improving the system’s ability to regenerate itself. Through various mechanisms, we can actually draw down carbon from the atmosphere and store it in soils and vegetation. What’s more, animals can help achieve this goal. Grazing animals such as bison co-evolved with grasses (which are extremely efficient sunlight accumulators, astronomically more so than our photovoltaic panels), such that massive herds would graze through perennial grasses whilst defecating and trampling the remnants down to create a mulch that left the soil covered, before moving on. The grasses would get a natural fertiliser boost but wouldn’t be eaten down completely, which meant that they could grow back and not have to deplete their soil nutrient reserves. Over time, this kind of rotational grazing, especially when well-managed, can build significant amounts of soil. At Ridgedale, they have employed it, along with other techniques such as Keyline Design, to build over 6 inches of soil in just four seasons. There is even a project called Pleistocene Park in northern Siberia that hopes to repopulate the Mammoth Steppe, which historically supported one of the largest densities of herbivores in history and could function as a massive carbon sink. Surely we need animals as a part of our (agri)culture, then?

Well, you might point out that ruminant animals like cows and sheep that we are now cultivating in extremely large numbers produce methane as a part of their digestion, a greenhouse gas with ~30 times more “global warming potential” than CO2. Greenhouse gas accountancy is a complex topic and there is still significant debate as to whether the sequestered carbon pays off the methane produced during the lifecycle of the animal (see Garnett et al., 2017 & P.P.S.); that said, it’s also possible that the earth historically supported much larger numbers of herbivores, many of which were likely driven extinct by humans thus contributing to ecosystem disruption, as discussed in Sapiens and elsewhere (7, 8).

Another common argument is that eating animals is calorically inefficient when we could eat what we feed them. I would say this is a partially valid point in that animals, especially cattle, often need more land and water to produce than their plant-based counterparts, but it’s less valid when discussing purely grass-fed animals whose rumens are evolutionarily designed to digest grass, which most of us humans obviously don’t do very well; this suggests that if you want to obtain food from a parcel of land that wants to be grassland, you could force it to be not grassland, or you could manage and eat animals that are designed to live in and perpetuate that ecosystem. The Sustainable Food Trust goes so far as to say “the only sustainable way to obtain food from grassland is to graze it with ruminants”, which does sound a bit extreme especially considering that rabbits and geese are just two examples of non-ruminants that can be grass-fed. Livestock especially are getting a lot of bad rap due to the significant environmental damages of deforestation for pasture (an example of forcing an ecosystem to be something it doesn’t want to be) and their methane and nitrous oxide emissions (Steinfield, 2006; Stoll-Kleemann, 2015; many others).

Whilst not negligible, I’m concerned that many of the livestock systems under scrutiny aren’t representative of best-practice regenerative methods and that there is definitely the problem of reducing a living creature to the efficiency metric of its greenhouse gas emissions per kg of meat without considering all of its other beneficial functions and services; this metric has led people to the conclusion that “landless systems” or feedlots are better for the environment (Garnett et al., 2017), despite animal welfare being known to be abysmal and where wastes are concentrated and rarely dealt with properly. These factors go against the principles of regenerative agriculture and thus wouldn’t be allowed to continue; yes, grass-fed cows and other ruminants require more land, but we could limit the amount of land devoted to raising them and thereby reduce the total stock and consumption. In this manner, by allowing animals and ecosystems to express their true functions and behaviours according to the co-evolutionary properties of the animals and their environments, it might be possible for humans to yield ethically sound animal-derived food that positively contributes to the whole-earth system.

There are also a few points I would like to discuss with regards to plant-based (especially vegan) diets. Vegetables and whole grains, which form the staples of most healthful plant-based diets, as well as fruits and nuts, obviously take some amount of energy to produce, thus we need to consider where this energy or fertility comes from. We also need to consider where the dietary fat, protein and vitamin B12 will come from (amongst other nutrients/minerals) when meat is abstained from completely; I believe it is possible to meet your protein needs on a plant-based diet (Ranganathan et al., 2016), but doing so in the dead of winter in a temperature climate in a sustainable manner might be more difficult (are the Inuits an unsustainable people?)

Even the “most sustainable”farming methods I am aware of (which may or may not be organic certified) acknowledge that the inputs to grow food ultimately have to come from biological nitrogen fixation, conversion via animals, or inorganic elements (chemicals). For example, compost is vital to almost all organic, traditional and regenerative farms, and often incorporates animal manure, which adds additional nitrogen and biology to the soil and ultimately to the plants. The only exceptions I can think of to this would be Jean-Pain compost (which uses only wood chips and water) and Masanobu Fukuoka style rice and winter wheat cultivation, where the straw from the previous crop was left on the field as mulch and nutrients. Even the ancient and incredibly successful Meso-american Chinampas systems, as well as the rice cultivating nations of China, South Korea and Japan, have utilised ferti-irrigation techniques comprised predominantly of the wastes of fish as nutrients. Thus, since no sustainable farming methods can use inorganic chemicals derived from fossil fuels, most consumers that eat a purely plant-based diet are still deriving their nutrients from (the functioning and inclusion of) animals… Perhaps the question then becomes can, should and how would we integrate animals into our farming systems without eating them?

I’m still considering the implications of these questions and my position on the frequency and type of my animal consumption. We’ve had four “Pig Parties” in the four months I’ve been here at the Ranch, and chicken about once a week on average, all of which was reared and slaughtered locally in Mastatal. This corresponds pretty well to a 95:5 plant:meat ratio (see P.P.P.S.). For the first of the two pigs I visited the farm where it lived, died and bore witness to how it was processed; for the second we had an intro on how to properly butcher a pig. I think this is a crucial missing link for the majority of meat consumers and we need to continue building awareness of the realities of industrial slaughterhouses. Both of the animals I visited lived outdoors in tropical home gardens, feeding on bananas and other food scraps, although I’ve now been told it’s likely they were fed some concentrated feed. Pigs will eat just about anything, including chickens – they are probably the ultimate organic material recycling animal. Feeding farm animals to other farm animals is illegal in many parts of the world, but we need to always be searching for ways to turn “waste” into food, and pigs are one effective way of doing so. They in turn provide manure to feed back into the ecosystem and, when the time is right, are themselves converted into protein, fat and flavour for dozens of people for multiple meals. They can also provide piglets so that the system can continue, perhaps indefinitely. Without pigs in this system, you would have to replace the dietary protein and fat, which in our climate would likely come from more annual beans and palm oil from cleared forest land, as well as find another method of recycling the food scraps (vermi-compost is great, but doesn’t provide food in return).

Based on this discussion, I would like to present my initial take on a scale to classify diets based on their ability to be sustained, from best to worst:

1. Local regenerative

2. Local organic certified

3. Non-local regenerative

4. Non-local organic certified (many vegetarians/vegans in cities)

5. Local conventional

6. Non-local conventional (most consumers)

Where locality is on a scale from hyper-local (within 5km), to local (within 50km), to regional (within 250km), to non-local (further than 250km). Another important variable that goes hand-in-hand with locality is seasonality. Thus a checklist for regenerative dietary choices might be something like:

1. Is it local? (as the crow flies to place of origin): <=5km — <=50km — <=250km — >250km — Don’t know

   1. Does it come from your garden, your nearest farmer, your nearest market, or another country?

2. Is it in season?: Yes — No — Don’t know

   1. Are you regularly eating avocado, chocolate or coffee in winter in a temperate climate? What can you eat and drink locally and seasonally to replace imported goods you habitually desire?

   2. Are you consuming fermented foods and beverages? The Japanese have one of the strongest food cultures (called Washoku 和食) and longest lived people in the world, and 5/6 of their staple food ingredients are fermented foods. Fermentation is not only extremely beneficial for your health, but ties in beautifully with preserving the abundance of the harvest.

3. Was it produced regeneratively?

   1. Did it build soil and/or sequester carbon?: Yes — No — Don’t know

   2. Did its production support local farmer(s)/community? Yes — No — Don’t know

   3. Did it use no chemicals and no or very little fossil-fuel powered machinery in its production? Yes — No — Don’t know

It is my guess that many consumers would tick No or Don’t Know for every field, whilst falling into the worst category (non-local conventional). We need to shift first from ignorance to awareness before we can shift to understanding and action – behavioural change is flipping hard! All I can say right now is the link between diet and planetary health is crucial in navigating our transition towards a sustainable prosperity.

Let me be clear: plant-based diets are absolutely a big part of the solution, and there are many cases (including the average Western diet) where meat consumption should be reduced, but nevertheless animals aren’t the enemy. Vegans, vegetarians and ethical omnivores have a common enemy, and that is industrial agriculture (especially feedlots, which are completely awful). Meat in moderation, i.e. Meat Mondays as opposed to Meatless Mondays, may be a way forward for many people, rather than jumping straight to 100% plant-based diets based on quinoa and avocados shipped in from someplace slightly more exotic. I think this better follows the Transition Ethic that Rob Hopkins thoroughly emphasises via the Transition Network, by meeting people where they’re at – there is an irrepressible demand for meat due to complex sociocultural factors that will take time to shift away from, but if we can make ethical compromises that simultaneously shift mindsets, we will be well on our way to a more symbiotic relationship between humans and Nature.

May The Triforce (Plants, Animals and Fungi!) Be With You!

P.S. Follow the debate here, and here.

P.P.S. For the adventurous you can read my Regenerative Agriculture Brief and explore the references there too!

P.P.P.S. Three meals a day with chicken for 52 meals and pork for 12 meals in a year = (365*3-(52+12))/(365*3)*100 = 94.2%.

References, a.k.a. some of the things I’ve read:

• Aleksandrowicz, L. et al., 2016. The Impacts of Dietary Change on Greenhouse Gas Emissions , Land Use , Water Use , and Health : A Systematic Review.

• Badgley, C. et al., 2017. Organic agriculture and the global food supply.

• Beuttner, D. & Skemp, S., 2016. Blue Zones: Lessons From the World’s Longest Lived. American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, vol. 10 • no. 5.

• Davis, K.F. et al., 2016. Meeting future food demand with current agricultural resources.

• Garnett, T. et al., 2017. Grazed and Confused? Ruminating on cattle, grazing systems, methane, nitrous oxide, the soil carbon sequestration question – and what it all means for greenhouse gas emissions. FCRN, University of Oxford.

• Gephart, J.A. et al., 2016. The environmental cost of subsistence : Optimizing diets to minimize footprints.

• Hathaway, M.D., 2016. Agroecology and permaculture : addressing key ecological problems by rethinking and redesigning agricultural systems.

• Jones et al., 2016. A Systematic Review of the Measurement of Sustainable Diets.

• Perignon, M., et al., 2017. Improving diet sustainability through evolution of food choices: review of epidemiological studies on the environmental impact of diets.

• Perkins, R., 2016. Making Small Farms Work: A Pragmatic Whole Systems Approach to Profitable Regenerative Agriculture.

• Ranganathan, J. et al., 2016. Shifting Diets for a Sustainable Future. World Resources Institute.

• Reay, D.S. et al., 2012. Global agriculture and nitrous oxide emissions. Nature Climate Change, 2(6), pp.410–416.

• Smith, P.S. et al., 2014. AR5, WG3, Ch 11, Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use (AFOLU). Ar5, Wg3, pp.811–922.

• Song, M., et al., 2016. Association of Animal and Plant Protein Intake With All-Cause and Cause-Specific Mortality.

• Steinfield, H.G., 2006. Livestock’s role in climate change and air pollution. Livestock’s Long Shadow. Environmental Issues and Options, pp.79–123. Available at: http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e/a0701e00.HTM.

• Stoll-Kleemann, S. & O’Riordan, T., 2015. The Sustainability Challenges of Our Meat and Dairy Diets.

• Weber, C.L. & Matthews, H.S., 2008. Food-miles and the relative climate impacts of food choices in the United States. Environmental Science and Technology, 42(10), pp.3508–3513.

• West el al., 2015. Leverage points for improving global
  food security and the environment.

Contemplating an Uncertain Future: The Ranch and Climate Change

by Tim O'Hara

Climate change, after decades of lulling at the bottom of the news cycle, has belatedly made it into the headlines as increasing numbers of people become aware, convinced and concerned about the environmental and social impacts of the Earth’s evolving atmospheric conditions.  I frequently think about disrupted weather patterns and what my role in this unfolding story should be.  

Many climate experts argue that we have surpassed the carrying capacity of our planet and that our natural resource base cannot support our modern lifestyles at our current population numbers.  I find this argument believable given the observable degradation of our natural systems everywhere I go.  Modern technology might for a time delay the worst impacts of our behavior, but soon we will stare more squarely in the face the consequences of the environmental alterations that we’ve set in motion.  Indications of a more brittle world are clear to me. 

Humans are descending to systematically destruct our limited natural resource base and in turn one another.  I am discouraged thinking about the future that my daughter is inheriting and struggle to decide how to divide my time between work, personal care and engagement in efforts that help mitigate some of our biggest societal challenges, especially climate change.  I’m not optimistic, but I cherish life, my family and my friends and strive to do my part in figuring out how we can usher in a more just world.        

I was recently asked how Rancho Mastatal is responding to climate change and whether we feel as if we are helping to create an alternative future for those becoming heir to the approaching changes.  In large part Robin and I started the Ranch to address and answer this question.  Widespread social and environmental injustice partly inspired us to leave the United States and a more common life path to set up an “alternative” project that we hoped would contribute to a brighter future.  We are dedicated to learning and teaching more environmentally appropriate ways to grow food in poor soils, build structures that are kinder on Mother Earth, and implement practices that allow us to meet our basic needs without destroying the elements that make it possible for the soil and atmosphere to sustain us.  We are helping to teach future generations that there is indeed a better way to live; a way that is not dominated by an addiction to consumer purchases and modern conveniences or reliant on oppressive economic systems.  We are experimenting with community structures that rely on cooperation and regeneration and have made efforts to conserve a relatively large and intact tract of rainforest.  

A loss of corporate and governmental confidence in dealing with our warming climate has prompted us to start to execute strategies that make us less reliant on traditional businesses and executive bodies.  We’re working towards attaining personal and communal well-being with our everyday activities and are compelled to look for ways to avoid our compromised medical care systems by looking at food as medicine.  We’re looking for ways to engage in the process of designing and building our own homes with the help of friends and learning techniques to grow food for our family and community as global food supplies become more susceptible to unsteady financial systems and weather patterns.  Communities are being torn apart by pollution, sickness, flagging economies and racism.  To address this we want to learn and practice other forms of governance and community structure that we believe can serve us and the world more equitably.  

Our modest efforts won’t be enough to stem the suffering for everyone.  In fact the sad truth is that it might not even prevent future hardships for myself and family.  Nevertheless, we’ve chosen to focus on this work with the hope that profound change might come from the accumulation of millions of small acts, projects and movements that when influential enough will begin to shift the human perspective to a more caring one.  It’s also a way for us to prepare for changes ahead.  

Future challenges will in part be most successfully met by strong networks of compassionate people dedicating their lives to the local problems that most impact them.  As our daughter gets older we’ll encourage her to explore avenues that will simultaneously challenge her intellectually while leading to improvements in our world.  Some of the areas that I encourage Ranch students to explore include energy conservation and renewable energy, education, responsible food production, social and environmental activism, politics, medicine, and counseling.  A warming climate will require bold and courageous engineers, teachers, farmers, activists, health care professionals, mentors, and politicians.  I encourage each of you today to take one small step to become a more engaged steward of our planet.  If not now, then when?

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Check out our updated workshop schedule to see how you can start building relevant skills to make a difference.  

Read this interesting article about how agroforestry can help to sequester carbon, Can Dirt Save the Earth? 

How Mentorship will Help our Permaculture Community Grow

This article was originally published by the NuMundo Transformational Times blog. Please go to their website to read the entire article.

by Scott Gallant

Mentorship may be one of the biggest opportunities for growth in our fledgling permaculture movement. There is interest in professional careers as permaculture designers, but the field lacks quality mentoring opportunities. By these I mean mentoring in a specific field, by a professional who has years of experience, with the goal of developing a specific skill set and livelihood.

Earlier this year I formalized my permaculture design consulting business as Porvenir Design. I’ve been doing design work for the last four years, but part time, informally, not running it as a genuine business. It was a side hustle that is now becoming a primary livelihood.

Never have I craved mentorship like I have during this process.

To finish reading this article please go to the NuMundo Transformational Times blog.

Interested in learning more? Consider joining the Porvenir Design team for their upcoming Permaculture Design Certification at Rancho Mastatal Sustainability Education Center! This intensive two week course is designed to give students hands on experience in a real world site design scenario.

Where to Buy Your Trees and Seeds in Costa Rica?

By Nic, Core Team

Costa Rica has always been a challenging place to source your materials, as more places are getting online though, it is getting easier and easier to find things that were once impossible.

We are delighted to be able to share with you some of our favorite places to buy grafted fruit trees, seeds and so much more

Gary Zill is one of the leading produces of tropical grafted trees in Costa Rica and the tropics. A must visit in Orotina area. Check his website out for more info

Peter Kring runs a fantastic botanical gardens in Puerto Viejo and has many rare and difficult to find grafted fruit trees. Check out his Facebook, he also sells fruits at the puerto viejo farmers market every week.

The La Garita area in Alajuela just off the pan american highway near the airport is a place with many many nurseries, it is probably one of the best areas to purchase your more commonly available fruit trees like mango and citrus, but they are unlikely to have any more niche trees like Durian or Salak. El Punto is one we have used in the past.

CATIE in Turrialba area has a large seedbank of cover crops, native trees, timber species and some fruit trees. you can contact them through their website for upto date info about what they currently have.

ICE, Costa Rica’s electricity company usually has stock of native trees and nitrogen fixers available for free for reforestation projects. They can be phoned for free on 800-VIVEROS (800-8483-767) for more info.

For local annual vegetable seeds, our friends at Semillas Plantae have a fantastic selection of organic seeds available in country that can even be delivered to your house!

At the Ranch we also have a small nursery with a variety of Nitrogen Fixing Species, grafted fruit trees etc.. Please contact us if you would like to know what we currently have in stock.

The Earth University also maintains an extensive nursery, David Guido can be contacted on +506- 8639-9928

Join us for our annual Permaculture Design Course to learn more about designing, implementing, and maintaining your own farm and project.

Permaculture Education: Virtual Reality and Keeping it Real

By Laura Killingbeck

This article was first published in the Permaculture Design Magazine.  

Nearly a decade ago I moved to where I live now-- a tiny, isolated, town in rural Latin America. Its charms include lush towers of tropical rain forest, rainbows of succulent fruits, and a nightly chorus of a thousand frogs. A single disheveled bus leaves in the morning and returns at night, except on Sundays, or when the road washes out. The place is home to farmers, families, and a spattering of eclectic foreigners. The town's namesake, the Mastate, is a tree that bears a thick white sap which people sometimes drink in coffee, like milk.

Our house at Rancho Mastatal. My partner Scott Gallant and I designed the yard to grow food, medicine, and market crops. (Photo Credit Laura Killingbeck; Mastatal, Costa Rica)

I live in a two-room cabin made of wood, earth, and bamboo, and teach food and fermentation classes at a sustainability education center. Each morning I commute six minutes to work—by foot, of course--on a trail through the orchard. I do not have WiFi. And until very recently, I did not have a cell phone, a car, or grid electricity either. My life has been, and largely still is, made up entirely of the world that reaches me directly.

Despite the rural nature of my home and work, I am constantly surrounded by a transitioning cast of characters—short and long term residents of the community, students and instructors from around the world, and international guests and groups. I frequently share breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with 40 or more people. So my isolation really is a relative one: I have constant contact with many people face to face, and very little with anyone more than a quarter mile away.

Rancho Mastatal students and apprentices come from around the world to learn about engaging deeply with place. (Photo Credit Laura Killingbeck; Mastatal, Costa Rica; Instructors from left to right: Bill Steen, Athena Steen, Benito Steen)

Not all of my time is spent here. For part of the year I live on another beautiful and secluded farm in Massachusetts, where I also have no car, no cell phone, and limited internet. Here I also live in community, sharing most meals with at least a half dozen folks, and enjoy a social circle that radiates about five miles, to neighboring farms, the park, and a local brewery.

It is a simple and curious life. Most of the time I am literally surrounded by people, yet I have almost no access to anyone that is not directly in front of me. For most of my life, my participation in an online identity has been “virtually” blank.

This relative isolation has shaped my relationship with the world around me. Until very recently I never looked at something—a beautiful sunset, a fallen leaf, a friend--and thought to take a picture. I did not have a cell phone to take a selfie, or text someone, or make a Facebook post. It was just me, and us, and the moment I was a part of. With no truncated or modified story about what I was doing or why, I had the freedom to choose it and experience it, completely and wholly, of my own accord. In many ways, this “isolation” felt like the ultimate integrity.

Round the Bend Farm Center for Restorative Community in Dartmouth, Massachusetts. (Photo Credit Laura Killingbeck)

But the way people communicate, share, and socialize continues to evolve. A big part of how we understand ourselves and others is sculpted from the stories we tell about our lives. These stories begin from our own perspective, which is then shaped and shifted by the responses of others. How we understand ourselves and our lives is personal, and also social. And as more and more people are “virtually” social, my “virtual” isolation has felt more, well, isolating.

Social media, blogging, Facebook, Instagram, the internet in general, are all “virtual realities” of human engagement. The pictures we post, the hashtags we link to, the words or emoticons we use, form a web of “virtual” identity and relationships. Increasingly, we supplement or even replace our direct experience with other people and the world with the indirect experience mediated by this technology. And increasingly, we shift the way we actually live our real lives, or the stories we tell about our real lives, to accommodate the beast of social media.

Filming the online Fermentation Tutorial. (Photo Credit Spenser Gabin; Mastatal, Costa Rica, of Laura Killingbeck)

Over the years I have seen thousands of people pass through my tiny corner of the world, seeking education, rejuvenation, inspiration. I have watched dozens of instructors across many disciplines—agroforestry, permaculture design, natural building, renewable energy, health and nutrition—repeat over and over again the same mantra—that we must learn how to engage with the world around us to create truly sustainable homes, livelihoods, and communities rooted in place. We have to actually feel the clay to know if its suitable for making clay plaster; to watch the tree to know when its time to prune; to taste the pickles to see if they're fully fermented. We need to focus our energy on the vivid, tangible relationships between the objects of our immediate surroundings. Every aspect of applied permaculture and sustainable design on some level revolves around this single spark of observation and engagement with real reality.

Just as there is an irony to my constant contact with streams of people in a tiny, rural setting, there is an irony that permaculture educators must increasingly tell the story of their direct experience with the world around them via the interface of the internet. We now use social media, online videos, and blogs to teach permaculture theory and skills, and connect with others doing the same. This makes sense--we need to be able to tell the stories of our lives and work in a way that people can access. Our great challenge in this is to translate our real reality into virtual reality, while keeping our lives really real, and keeping our students really involved.

I use Instagram to share simple recipes and special moments about real life. These are two varieties of jackfruit from the farm. (Photo Credit Laura Killingbeck; Mastatal, Costa Rica)

For most of my life I resisted getting a smart phone because I wanted to fully connect with the people and place around me; I finally got one for the same reason. This year I bought my first smart phone and got connected to the web. I entered online participation by starting an Instagram account and filming an online fermentation tutorial (Fermenting in Warm Climates, to be released in November, 2017). The purpose of the tutorial is to enable people to understand the broad theory and methods behind fermentation, in a way they can adapt to the specific foods from the place where they live. As devoted as I am to place-based experiential education, there was a constant irony to filming something designed to be accessible to a global market. But this is exactly the challenge of permaculture education in all its iterations—using a globalized perspective of broad methods to hone in on specific relationships with particular places. For this reason, the tutorial demonstrates patterns and methodologies for fermenting vegetables, dairy, fruits, etc, and provides instruction about how people can adapt these to their own local foods. The “best” fermentation recipes are not the same for everyone, everywhere. The best recipes are intrinsically tied to the fresh foods and cultures (both human and microbial!) of the specific places where people live. By creating an online tutorial I hope to be able to reach more people who find this information useful, while simultaneously leading them to engage directly with their own local foods.

Scott Gallant maps a landscape with a phone app. (Photo Credit Laura Killingbeck; Mastatal, Costa Rica; of Scott Gallant)

Online education, social media, and all other outlets of virtual reality that teach us about permaculture design and applied skills should always draw us to engage more in real reality. Real reality is dynamic, unstandardized, unhomogenized. Information on the internet often defaults to the least common denominator of most common products or ideas. In the case of fermentation, recipes often default to the most widely accessible ingredients, microbial cultures, or plant varieties from mass markets. This funnels more and more people into understanding fermentation and food from a peculiarly standardized perspective. But local food is dynamic, and microbes don't care about business as usual. Filming the online tutorial made me realize how important it is that we hold our ground and address a global audience with a clear emphasis on the dynamic nature of real reality, even if it doesn't fit the current most popular algorithm, hashtag, or SEO. When we go virtual, we need to keep it real.

Quiet moments are important arenas for self reflection. (Photo Credit Laura Killingbeck; Mastatal, Costa Rica)

There is something valuable about crafting our lives without anyone looking. About feeling, and appreciating, a moment without anyone knowing. About making decisions because they represent the core of who we are, nothing more and nothing less. I sometimes fear that the constant contact of social media draws us farther away from this core. I see people poking away at their phones when they could be experiencing a spectacular moment in real life. Or maybe not a spectacular moment—maybe just the mundane. But even these moments, rote, predictable, commonplace, are arenas for our minds to wander, probe, filter. We can find strange things in these moments. Simple or complicated truths. The moments when there is nothing to think about and nothing to do are some of the greatest resources we have for self reflection. To lose these to online shopping, Facebook scrolling, or texting would be devastating.

I learned a lot about tropical starch fermentation online. (Photo Credit Laura Killingbeck; Mastatal, Costa Rica)

But there is also something both valuable and necessary about sharing our lives with others, listening to a wider range of voices, and participating in global conversations. Even in Mastatal, my tiny green town, there is no real escape or seclusion. Here we see changes in climate that affect our crops; changes in tourism that affect our economies; changes in policies that affect our land and homes. You can escape from many things, but not from everything, happening all at once, sweeping you with it.

As a millennial just entering the periphery of online participation, I realize I am on the far end of a spectrum for how I balance my real life with my virtual one. But my position on the sideline has given me the advantage of a unique perspective about how to manage this balance. Most days I turn my phone on twice—once in the morning to check emails and make an Instagram post, and once in the afternoon to follow up on questions or comments. The bulk of the day is internet free, but I am still able to connect virtually to lots of people. I understand that this limited access is not possible or desirable for everyone. Lots of people do amazing and positive work via the internet, which I value to no end. What does apply to all of us though, is the understanding that we often have more power than we think to design a balanced relationship with the internet, and as permaculture educators and practitioners, we can use this to our advantage. We can leverage the global access the internet provides, to funnel people towards local engagement, without losing our real selves in the process.

When I gave my partner Scott the first draft of this article to edit, he read it and said “This is great, Sweetie, but I think this conversation already happened...twenty years ago!”

Students learn about herbal medicine by making it. (Photo Credit Scott Gallant; Mastatal, Costa Rica; of Laura Killingbeck and students)

I thought, “Dang.”

But then I realized that the longevity of this conversation is part of the point here. As time passes, our relationship with technology becomes habit. The fast growth and evolution of the internet means we continually need to navigate our interaction with it. As permaculture designers and educators, I think we need to embrace technology in its myriad forms to regenerate a positive human ecology with the earth. I also hope virtual reality will always remain a compliment to, rather than a replacement for, direct engagement with our real and living world. I think we need to pay attention to this as much now as we ever have, and I hope we do.

Bio: Laura Killingbeck has been working with Rancho Mastatal Sustainability Education Center in Costa Rica since 2009. She oversees the development and management of the Ranch's food education programs, and creates systems and strategies for utilizing whole foods on both a community and home scale. Follow her on Instagram @laurakillingbeck

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Looking for opportunities to expand your horizons?

Join Rancho Mastatal for one of our upcoming 2018 workshops.  Learn more here. 

ViVerde is a developing educational eco-lodge and permaculture farm on a 15-acre property right outside of colonial Granada, Nicaragua.  They are now recruiting for two work-trade positions, one to do fine woodworking and the other to coordinate the community kitchen and farm to table systems.  Go to http://www.viverde-nica.com/recruiting-work-traders for more information. 

Salak Palm: A Guide for Tropical Permaculture

by Scott Gallant

This article was originally published at the Porvenir Design blog.

Salak palm or snake fruit (Salacca edulis or Salacca zalacca) is a high value understory species for tropical agroforestry plantings. Salak palm is native to southeast Asia, where it is commercially cultivated in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Java, in their wet tropical lowland climates. At higher elevations the "Bali" variety can be grown. It produces a delicious fruit, eaten out of hand, with a taste similar to strawberry with an apple-like texture. The fruit transports well and can be stored at room temperature for a week with little degradation in quality. 

This guide has been created based on the experience of growing a small number of plants, 30 palms, at Rancho Mastatal Sustainability Education Center in Costa Rica. It was created with the support of Peter Kring of Finca La Isla, a fruit farm in Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica, that has been growing and selling Salak fruit for over 20 years.

This short guide provides advice on propagation, planting and establishment, pruning and pollination management, and more.

Agroforestry Establishment

Propagation

• Salak palms are individually male or female and you need to have both for fruit production. There is no way to know if a seedling salak will be male or female until it flowers, some 3-4 years after planting.

• Salak palm is easily started from seed. Seeds should be placed sideways and half buried in a well drained potting mix.

• Asexual propagation, usually to increase female plants, is done through sucker removal. Soil should be mounded up around the base of the sucker. This allows the sucker to form its own root system. Then use a saw to partially sever the connection to the mother plant.  This process should be repeated every few weeks over a two month period, until the plants are separated and the sucker has it's own root system. The sucker can be removed and placed in the nursery for further establishment.

Establishment

• Once plants in the nursery have reached at least 40 cm in height they are ready to go in the ground. They should be planted at the beginning of the rainy season. The soil around the palm should be heavily top-dressed with biochar, manure, compost, etc and then mulched. Salak feeder roots will come up into this mulch.

• Salak can be supported by additional species such as Musa sp, Gliricida sepium (and other legumes), and Tithonia diversifolia. All of these fast growing plants provide shade for the young palms and can all be pruned/chopped aggressively for mulch.

Guilding

• These palms are traditional understory species in their native forest habitat of SE Asia. The leaves reach 5 meters into the air, but they are not a dense plant if pruned properly. 

• They are best planted under a canopy of fruit, nut, or timber species which are low maintenance and let through about 50% of the sun's light. This is a similar setting to shade grown coffee and cacao.

• The spikey nature of Salak discourages overstory species whose fruit falls to the ground upon harvest or must be maneuvered around easily for harvest.

Layout and Spacing

• Salak are dioecious, meaning each individual plant either produces female flowers or male flowers, although there are some varieties of Salak which are known to be self fertile. In order to balance pollination and production it is recommended to have 3 female plants for every 1 male plant in an orchard.

• Individual palms should be planted 2.5 meters apart. 

• This 3:1 ratio and 2.5 meter spacing can be achieved in a number of ways. One can plant at 5 meters apart, divide suckers from sexed females and plant these in-between at 2.5 meters. Or one can plant out at the final spacing and thin out males, replacing them with divided female suckers.

• Salak are best planted in the same vicinity because of there pollination needs. 

Management

Pruning

• During years 1 to 3 the palm should be minimally pruned. Only remove outer leaves that are dying. You want to encourage as much photosynthesis as possible while the plant is approaching sexual maturity.

• Once the plants reach full size, 3 plus meters tall, and begin flowering you should remove all outer leaves. Leave 4 to 5 leaves, as part of the original mother plant. Remove any leaves that interfere with walking paths.

• Don't let suckers develop unless you need them for propagation.

• If flowers emerge between an outer leaf and the palm trunk, remove the leaf in order to expose the flower for pollination.

• Cut leaves should be chopped into smaller pieces and placed in a pile that doesn't interfere with access or management.

• The best tools for this job include loppers, a sharp machete and a pruning saw with a long blade or handle.

Pollination

• Salak plants are either female or male and are pollinated by a number of native pollinators, including stingless bees. But these pollinators are inefficient, with only 10 to 15 % of flowers producing fruit. By hand pollinating Salak, you can easily achieve close to 100% pollination.

• Female flowers are coned shaped and covered with a dense fiber sheath. As they develop over many months slowly remove their outer sheath. This will allow you to completely see the flower as it approaches maturity. Once removed from these sheaths the cone takes one to four weeks to open. Once open the flower reveals a deep pink color which is ready to receive the male flower.

• The male flower needs little management. When pollen is available the flower also opens up and reveals a pink interior, although in a much subtler way. Usually the pollen granules are easily visible though and stingless bees are often indicators of a ready flower.

• The male should be removed with clipperss and brought to the female plant, where it is used to "dust" the open female flower. This is best done in dry weather, which allows the pollen to fall out of the male flower with ease. It is wise to check your salak grove for receptive female flowers ever other day.

• Within a few days the flower will harden up if it was successfully pollinated. If not it will become soft and should be removed. All dead flowers, male and female, should be regularly removed to encourage more flowering.

Harvest

• Plants will begin to flower at three to four years of age.

• To determine if the fruit is ready to harvest, try one from a bunch and see if the seed color has turned from white to brown or light brown. See color is the best way to determine if a fruit is ready to pick. It is best to try fruit from the base of the bunch. If the individual fruits fall off of the bunch, they are likely ready.

• Pests, such as aguti, can compete for ripe fruit.

• The fruit does not ripen off of the plant.

Time Commitment

• We budget one minute per plant, 2 to 3 days per week, in order to meet all of our pollination, flower management, and pruning requirements.

• In addition to this, time should be set aside a few times per year to provide mulch, prune support species, and add amendments (limestone, foliar sprays, manure, compost, etc).

Overall salak is a crop that gives back when you give it the attention it needs. If you are consistent about pollination, regularly prune the spare leaves, and give a little fertility, then they will reward you with one of the best tropical fruits you will ever taste.

Need Help Siting Your Salak?

The team at Porvenir Design is ready to come to your site and put stakes in the ground. Write us at info@porvenirdesign.com for more information.

Around the Permaculture World

Core Team member Scott is teaching two workshops in Monteverde at the Valle Escondido Reserve and Monteverde Inn during the month of November. Consider joining him for a 2 day Introduction to Permaculture or a 2 day Introduction to Agroforestry course!

Ranch friends at ViVerde in Grenada, Nicaragua are launching their internship program! They are looking for a Wood Working and Food and Fermentation Intern. Help them spread the word and find some talented folks to join their project!

Abrazos

The Ranch Crew

How to Make a Real Tortilla

by Laura Killingbeck

This article was originally published in the Tico Times. Please follow the link for the original article.

When I was a teenager, I traveled for a few months with a Mexican shoe-shiner I met in Mazatlán. We thumbed rides across the country and were taken in along the way by a dozen or so of his relatives. I often found myself in the kitchen with his aunts, cousins, and nieces, making tamales, sopes, or other dishes that were new to me.

Due to my lack of skill, the family often sent me to the local store to buy tortillas. Everywhere we went, no matter what town we stayed in, there was always some tiny store that sold stacks of them, fresh and hot. For me they came to represent the spirit of family and sharing in Mexican culture, and a deep pleasure in simplicity — there was really nothing better than those fresh tortillas with a slice of homemade cheese.

Most of the tortillas we bought or made were thin, six to eight inches in diameter, and made from corn. They tasted nothing like the giant flour disks from the grocery store that never went bad. They tasted original.

Later, traveling around Latin America, I came to realize that those corn tortillas really were original. In the different countries and communities I later visited, I tasted tortillas in vastly different forms. Some were fatter, some thinner, some made of yellow corn, or white, or blue, some pressed flat, others slapped into shape between two palms.

Most tortillas made by hand in Latin America are made with corn rather than wheat. This is because corn grows well here, whereas wheat in general does not. Some also incorporate pejibaye (fruits from a native palm, Bactris gasipaes) or ojoche (seeds from a a rainforest tree, Brosimum alicastrum). Variations stem from economy, culture, and landscape.

Tortillas do not have the same widespread status of daily consumption in Costa Rica as they do in Mexico or many other Latin American countries. But they do have a rich history here, and are still often eaten in the form of gallos (a tortilla curved in the hand around meat or a savory picadillo) or as an addition to a typical breakfast. There is no better way to impress your Tico and Tica friends than with a gallo made with a homemade tortilla! Where I live now in rural Costa Rica, a homemade tortilla is one made from whole corn that has been nixtamalized and ground into dough, also referred to as masa.

Corn

There are at least 150 different varieties of corn. They can be divided into four major types: sweet corn, popcorn, flint, and dent. Sweet corn is bred for its sugar content, and is eaten before the kernels are mature. Popcorn, which is usually round in size, has a specific protein ratio that makes it ideal for popping. Flint and dent varieties are generally flattish and oval, and are used to make corn flour, dough, and other foods for both humans and other animals. The corn used for making tortillas is usually a flint or dent variety that has been grown to maturity and dried. This is often referred to as field corn.

Many Costa Rican farmers still grow field corn for their families or to sell at market. A number of our neighbors grow corn and make tortillas and other corn dishes, such as tamal asada and chorreadas, at home. You can inquire about purchasing local corn at any major market, or ask your neighbors if you live in a rural area. Most people are usually quite excited to help you source this great product, and if you’re charming enough, someone’s grandma might help you make your first tortilla!

Nixtamalization

Mature dried corn presents a special challenge. Its outer seed coat, or pericarp, is hard and creates a strange texture unless you remove it. It also has a substance that can inhibit the body’s ability to uptake the vitamin niacin. You need to cook the corn in an alkaline substance to dissolve the seed coat and to ensure that niacin is bioavialable.

For populations that eat large quantities of corn, this process is essential to dry corn’s nutritional value. In addition to improving corn’s nutritional qualities, nixtamalization gives the corn structure and pliability, and improves the flavor. Ancient peoples cooked their corn in wood ash, or powders made from bones or shells, to achieve this. Many people around the world still use wood ash or other variations of alkaline substances to cook corn in this way.  The following recipe calls for hydrated lime (calcium hydroxide). In Spanish this is referred to as cal.

There are many different methods to nixtamalize corn. The qualities of corn vary widely based on variety, post-harvest handling, and age of the dried kernel. The boiling time and temperature varies (15-90 minutes) depending on the type of corn you use. The following is a great recipe that works well for us with our local corn.

Nixtamalized Corn Recipe

Ingredients:

15 cups whole dry field corn

3 tablespoons hydrated lime (calcium hydroxide), sifted

Water

Instructions:

DAY 1

1. Rinse the corn thoroughly in water. Remove any particles, floating pieces, dirt, or corn silk.

2. Cover with at least four inches of water and let soak 12-24 hours in a covered pot.

DAY 2

1. Drain the corn, rinse again, and add nine liters of water. Mix in the 3 tablespoons of sifted lime. Stir. The corn should turn bright yellow-orange as you stir in the lime.

2. Put the corn and lime water on the stove and bring to a boil.

3. After the corn reaches a rolling boil, reduce the heat to a strong simmer and cook 30-60 minutes until the corn is tender and skins are separating and dissolving away from the kernels. The corn should be easy to bite into, but still have a bright white point in the center. The kernels should be firm and intact with the germ and tip still present.

4. Take the corn off the heat and let it rest for at least one hour. (We have tried many variations of this resting time, including letting it sit overnight, or not resting at all. Letting the corn rest in the alkaline solution after boiling is thought to further transform the starches and give the tortilla a better structure.)

5. Drain the corn into a sturdy metal colander and rinse with water. Rub the kernels between your hands and/or against the holes in the colander to remove all lime and the clear kernel skins. Use plenty of water. Once the corn is thoroughly rinsed and cleaned, it is called nixtamal.

Uses:

Nixtamal can be used whole in soups, casseroles, salsas, and side dishes; it can be ground for tortillas, corn crusts, or made into polenta, tamales, or atole. The whole nixtamal will keep for several days in the fridge, but once ground should be used within a day.

Tortilla Recipe

The dough used to make tortillas is referred to as masa. To make the masa, grind nixtamalized corn in a corona hand mill or other grinder. You may want to double grind for a finer texture. Mix with salt to taste and just enough warm water to make a dough that is soft and pliable, and adheres to itself but not to your hands. You should be able to roll it into balls that retain their form completely when you hold them in your palm.

The easiest way to make a tortilla is with a tortilla press, but if you don’t have one just substitute two cutting boards.

Grab a small chunk of masa and roll it into a ball. Use two sheets of plastic (zip lock bags work fine) and put the ball between them in the tortilla press. Press down the handle and open it back up. Carefully peel the tortilla from the plastic bag and flip it into a hot cast iron skillet.

Cook for about 40 seconds and then turn it over. If your masa is ground fine, you will see the tortilla puff up. If it is thick it won’t and that’s fine. Tortillas should be cooked through and golden (or another color depending on the color corn you started with).

“Food for Thought” is a Tico Times series from Laura Killingbeck, is the Director of Food Systems and Fermentation at Rancho Mastatal Sustainability Education Center. The Ranch is a community and education center in Mastatal, Costa Rica, that hosts residential workshops in food, permaculture, natural building, and more. Laura co-manages the Ranch facilities and programs, teaches fermentation workshops, and writes about the intersection between food, body, and place. To take a class with Laura or visit the Ranch, please visit www.ranchomastatal.com.

8 Tips for Starting your Tropical Homestead

8 Tips for Starting your Tropical Homestead

by Scott Gallant

Originally published at the Porvenir Design blog.

You’ve just purchased your dream property in tropical Costa Rica. You want to grow your own food. You are anxious to get to work now, have bought some plants from a nursery you randomly drove by, and have a shovel in hand, but...where to start?

Most of our clients fall on either side of a spectrum of project implementation. Either they experience paralysis by analysis, overthinking every step, their confidence slowly eroding, or they dive in head first without any planning. Either way they hire our team at Porvenir Design to bring them to the middle. How can we take our time and plan while simultaneously moving forward with the energy and confidence that is required to see a project to completion? The answer revolves around good goal setting and thoughtful design. So as you look to set your goals and follow the permaculture design process, here are a few tips we’ve picked up over the years for starting your tropical homestead.

Consider Access First

Before you do anything: planting a garden, siting a fruit tree, digging earthworks; make sure you know how you will access that space afterwards. The most common reason for systems to fail is that they are difficult to access. It may be easy to plant those nut trees at the bottom of the steep gully, but walking and slipping and falling down that slope in the middle of the rainy season, year after year, will quickly erode your enthusiasm for those plants’ care.

Paths should be wide, 1.5 meters at least, allow wheelbarrow access if possible, and should only be lined with plants that will not interfere with your movement. Anything that makes walking on a path less desirable means that whatever is at the end of the route will get less care and be less productive.

Consider lining paths with mundo grass for erosion control and delineation. Plant species around the path that you can trim in the rainy season for more sunlight and let grow in the dry season for more shade.

No Bare Soil

Do not underestimate the power of the tropical sun and rain to erode exposed soil. Anytime that you find bare soil on your property, you should instantly be thinking about how you can cover that soil with dead or living mulch. This will lower the soil temperature, increase nutrient cycling, improve water retention and so much more.

A dead mulch is effective and can be anything from grass clippings to pea gravel to chopped banana trunks. A living mulch is even more effective. This is a cover of living plants, also called a ground cover, that perform specific functions. Good tropical ground covers include peanut grass, sweet potato, wandering Jew, Okinawan spinach, and many beautiful ornamentals.

Don’t Overestimate Your Soil Fertility

It is easy to think that with a little compost from the Ag store and some mulch that your garden will be rocking for years to come. Clearly plants thrive in the soil all around your site; the tropics are a prolific place. But that doesn’t mean your soil is high in nutrients, has a balanced pH, or has a healthy microbial population. Most of us buying land in the tropics are working with degraded hill sides that were formerly cattle pasture. This is not prime farm land. Many of the plants we want to grow will struggle in this soil. Don’t be surprised if your first tomatoes and cucumbers struggle.

Fortunately soil is the component of our ecosystem that we can change the fastest. By actively promoting microbial health, planting leguminous trees and shrubs, providing fungal biomass, and reducing erosion we can quickly turn a site’s soil productive. Soil fertility requires consistent maintenance.

Tropical Tubers and Perennial Greens

Speaking of tomatoes and cucumbers, don’t bother growing these outside in your first year. Instead focus on very easy to grow, nutritious local foods adapted to the common soil conditions and heavy rain fall. Our typical western style vegetables can be grown in the tropics but the pest pressure is high here and these crops haven’t been bred with the same defense mechanisms.

Focus on tropical tubers such as yuca, sweet potato, taro, and yam. Plant greens like chaya, Haitian basket vine, and zorillo. Learn how to prepare them for your kitchen and enjoy!

Never Stop Planting and Observing

Don’t be afraid to put plants in the ground. You will plant stuff in poor locations, but that's okay on a home scale. Its better to move forward than not at all. If a year later you don’t like a plant’s location, you can transplant it! Most plants in the tropics transplant well with little shock.

It is only through the act of observing your plants over time that you can learn from them. Through good observation and feedback you knowledge level will zoom ahead. You will begin to see the pollinators in action, understand the rivulets of water moving your mulch around, and become familiar with the seasonality of your tropical climate. If you consistently put time toward putting new plants in the ground, and observing them, you will quickly develop a lush and tropical feel to your site.

Learn to Propagate your Own Plants

Related to the previous tip, learning to propagate your own plants will save you time and money. It will accelerate the biological succession of your homestead. A lot of tropical plants propagate vegetatively from cuttings or root divisions. As you travel around the country carry a pair of garden clippers and a sharp trowel, and when you see a new plant you love, ask if you can take a cutting or division.

Set up a nursery right away on your property to accommodate all of these new plants. It should let about 50% of light through, have easy access to water for irrigation, and be protected from the wind. You can start plants in pots, bags, or simply till a bit of soil and mix in good potting mix materials, such as rice hulls, manure, and biochar, and plant directly into this new bed. This is your transplant bed. Once the rains arrive and the plants are large enough move them to their final location. This allows you to gather new plants before you have had the opportunity to site them.

Buy Grafted Fruit Trees

Don’t plant that seedling avocado or mango! Rather, invest the 10 to 20 USD and purchase a grafted tree. Almost all fruit you buy in the store, temperate or tropical origin, is born on a grafted tree and for very good reasons. A seedling avocado can take well over 10 years to produce fruit, while a grafted avocado will produce in year 4 or 5. A grafted tree is a guarantee of a high quality and consistent fruit.

Try to source these trees from nurseries doing the grafting themselves from root stock that is adapted to your soil and climate. Check the graft well before purchasing. Does it look healthy and secure? Don’t purchase trees with fruit on them in the nursery. This can be a sign of stress. But an investment in grafted trees will pay off.

Hire a Consultant

Consider this an investment. Any land use planner, landscape designer, or permaculture designer should be able to articulate to you how an investment in their services will save you time and money in the long run. What is the expected return on investment?

A simple day consultation should help you gain confidence to implement systems. It should allow you to set your priorities and put unnecessary projects on the back-burner. A larger master planning program should save you money by connecting you with the best experts or local resources, such as tree planting programs, and catching costly mistakes on paper before any shovel hits the ground.

A good designer will help you identify your goals and apply those to the landscape, resulting in a beautiful and productive homestead.

Porvenir Design

Looking for more than tips? Consider bringing in the Porvenir Design team for their expert advice!

Timber Framing in the Tropics

By Tim O'Hara

The rainforests of Central America might not be the first place that you think of when you hear the term “timber frame construction”, but with initiatives in Monteverde and Mastatal, Costa Rica is starting to make a name for itself in the region for this post and beam building technique. We started to build the infrastructure of Rancho Mastatal Sustainability Education Center in the small rural community of Mastatal, Costa Rica in 2001. At that time, we did not seriously contemplate this age-old technique of joining large timbers using mortise and tenon joinery. There were no local, established wood mills in the area in 2001 nor had we ever built anything in this manner. In addition, the portable Alaskan mills used by local sawyers are not up to the task of producing a 6'x6'x12' member straight enough to work using the square rule method that we would eventually be introduced to.

The possibility of building a timber frame structure on the Ranch's campus began to gain traction after our introduction to SKIP DEWHIRST and LIZABETH MONIZ in 2003 when these two Vermont-based builders came to Rancho Mastatal to teach a natural building workshop at our site offered through Yestermorow Design/Build School. After a successful first workshop, they began coming down every year to teach courses, though with a non-timber frame focus. Skip, a seasoned timber framer, eventually started to inquire about the possibility of sourcing long, straight, large timbers so that we could begin to incorporate this type of building into our natural building education programming and our infrastructure. During a conversation in 2006, we decided together to give it a try and started planning a 2007 workshop that would focus on the construction of a 10'x15' cabin on the edge of the rainforest. We would in due course call it La Casucha, meaning little rustic house in Spanish. We set about trying to source the cut list for the design that Skip had come up with. When we finally received the wood delivery for the class, banano was the first term I heard uttered by our talented and local worker ALEX HERNANDEZ. Banano in Spanish, as you can probably figure out, means banana in English and is not an endearing term when referring to a piece of wood to be used for the construction of a rectilinear home. It took us more time to plane the timbers to ready them for laying out the joinery than it did to actually cut the joinery with our chisels and mallets. Banano has since worked its way into our building lexicon and is uttered a bit more frequently than we'd like. But that's life in the rural tropics.

For those of you reading this in the comforts of your first world home, we do not have access to a lumber yard or a box store for our building needs. Nor at that time did we have easy access to a bandsaw mill. Almost all of the wood that we used for building purposes had to be straightened, planed and cut before even thinking about a layout. Fortunately for us and others interested in sourcing local wood, in 2010, a local man named CARLOS SOTO set up a portable bandsaw mill about a ½ mile from our town center. From that point forward we were able to more consistently obtain reasonably straight timbers and our foray into timber framing has not waned since. We now have a combined total of 9 timber frame buildings at the Ranch and in our small community. The practice has revolutionized the infrastructure of our organization and how we look at wood as a building material in our timber-rich ecosystem.

We have access to and have used many different species of wood for our projects and continue to learn about the different qualities that each have. There is much less written about the characteristics of the tropical woods that we use than the commonly used temperate species in North America. Much of our learning has happened through trial and error. Pilon, or bull's blood, is a heavy, resistant hardwood that we expected would be good for pegs until we realized how short-grained it was. Melina, a resistant softwood species originally imported from India, is a decent candidate for frames though the wood can be tricky to work with due to inconsistent grain patterns. Teak, another non-native wood increasingly common in Costa Rica, has a tendency to be knotty from some local suppliers and prone to termite damage if harvested too young, as is commonly done in our area. For most of the species that we've used, sourcing wood from older trees, keeping your chisel razor sharp and making sure that your stock of patience is full are all keys to a successful and strong frame.

Since opening our doors in 2001, natural building has been one of our focuses. Our site is considered by some to be a leader in the relatively small natural building movement in Central America. All of our buildings are small, simple and nice on the eye with a focus on using materials that we can source in our region. To do this requires a lot of work, an abundance of persistence, and the willingness to slow down the building process. As our campus has organically grown, so has our network of people working in and interested in natural building. We've had the honor of working with and befriending a number of leaders in the sector including BILL, BENITO and ATHENA STEEN, RYAN CHIVERS, LIZ JOHNDROW, MATTS MYHRMAN, CHRIS MAGWOOD, SKIP and LIZABETH and others. We've also had the privilege of experimenting with other wonderful natural building resources such as clay, bamboo and lime that are so rich in our region. It's been a wild ride full of successes and failures but increasingly our infrastructure is starting to catch the eyes and fill the hearts of many a natural building lover with timber frame construction the crux of our building world. Even though this building technique has a shorter history in Central American compared to other parts of the world, our experience has shown that it's a relevant choice for our environ. We plan on continuing our experiments with timber frame construction and invite you to come and join us on our ride to discovering the beauty of building in the tropics.  Hope to see you in Mastatal soon!

OPPORTUNITIES AT THE RANCH, IN THE REGION AND BEYOND

Japanese Natural Plastering
Interested in natural plasters?  Join us in March, 2018 for a unique experience learning about Japanese Plastering at Rancho Mastatal.  

Aerie Backcountry Medicine Semester in Wilderness Medicine
Join Aerie for its Semester in Wilderness Medicine at Ranch Mastatal and Montana this winter and spring.  The field portion of this course runs January 31 through April 15th.  The Semester offers 15 upper-division UM credits, EMT, Wilderness EMT, Swiftwater Rescue and Avalanche Rescue certifications, as well as training in LNT, wilderness survival and wilderness navigation.  Students will live for a month at the Ranch, will help organize and run a free health clinic in Zapaton and will complete rotations in the Emergency Room as well as on an advanced life support ambulance.  The cost for UM students, including room, board and all certifications, is approximately the same as in-state tuition at UM, and students can use their AmeriCorps awards as well as their financial aid.  

Japanese Cooking at Rancho Mastatal
Love Japanese Food?  Join us March 20-23 for a fantastic culinary immersion in Japanese cuisine during our Japanese Permaculture Cooking:  An Introduction to Japanese Cooking and Permaculture

We hope to hear from some of you with your updates and stories!  Thanks to all of you out there that make the Ranch community so strong and special.  

Abrazos, 

The Ranch Crew

5 "Grow-Your-Own" Mulch Plants for the Tropics

by Scott Gallant

This post was originally published by the ECHO Community newsletter and was reposted from the Porvenir Design blog.

The tropical forest is constantly self-mulching. After a walk in the woods I usually return with bits of leaves and twigs caught in my hair. Lying in bed at night, my partner and I often hear branches and even whole trees tumbling toward the great soil food web below. This self-mulching is one important piece in the self-renewing fertility cycle of the tropical forest. And of all the functions of the forest that we can seek to mimic, generating and applying our own mulch may be the most important.

Mulch has many familiar functions, like reducing soil temperature and maintaining higher moisture levels.  But all of these means really flow toward one perfect end: feeding and housing the microbial soil community. It is this community that runs the engine which results in a healthy, happy, and abundant permaculture farm.

Grow Your Own Mulch

With this in mind I've spent years seeking out the best means for mulching our food forest. In the early days this involved traveling to neighbors' farms and loading the truck with banana trunks and rice straw. Unfortunately in rural Costa Rica, unlike many parts of the temperate world, there are not huge quantities of organic material lying around as waste, ready to be re-appropriated. Organic material, my future mulch, doesn't sit around waiting for the right farmer to scoop it up--here, the tropical rain and sun break it down rapidly. And local farmers generally re-purpose most waste products before they become, well, waste.  We quickly found we had to find another solution for acquiring mulch.  We decided to grow our own.

We began planting thousands of nitrogen fixing trees (NFTs) that could be chopped and dropped in place for mulch. This has worked great in general, but I've found that other plants not in the legume family actually far out produce most of these trees when it comes to biomass. I've come to believe that there is an over-emphasis on NFTs in the tropical permaculture community, and instead we should focus more on the biomass quantity itself. While I wish all of my mulch was rich in nitrogen, what I'm now seeking is weed suppression and moisture retention. Both of which take a hard stab at eliminating my least favorite activities, weeding and watering; all while moving us closer to the no-work permaculture ideal.

Top 5 Mulch Plants

For our climate, the low land humid tropics, these five plants are what I recommend to clients for growing prodigious amounts of mulch.

Cuadrado/Guineo (Musa sp)

A species sharing the same genus as bananas and plantains, cuadrados are generally considered a less domesticated crop. They grow rapidly, spread aggressively, propagate easily, and produce a delicious fruit that can be used in nearly the same way as plantains. In our corner of the world, they are considered a poor person's food, likely because they produced when nothing else did.

The trunks can be cut back multiple times per year and they will keep sprouting out of the same base. The leaves are slow to decompose, like many plants on this list, and provide excellent weed suppression.

In addition they are a great pioneer species; creating a shady microclimate for your more delicate climax species.

Torch Ginger (Etlingera elatior)

This huge ornamental ginger is a fixture in tropical gardens around the globe for its beautiful flower, huge leaves, and the dense shade they produce. It takes two years for this plant to take off, but once it does you have a steady diet of 4 meter long herbaceous stems and leaves ready for chop and drop mulch.

Torch ginger propagates by root division. One plant can be scaled easily into many more. It works well as a privacy barrier between lots or between public and private spaces. Don't chop it completely to the ground but consistently remove older stems with a clean cut near the base of the plant.

Vetiver (Vetiveria zizaniodes)

Vetiver grass, already in the tropical permaculture lexicon for its use as an erosion control species, is also a great multi-functional mulch plant. It is a bunching grass, with a deep root system. It doesn't produce seeds and thrives in full sun on recently disturbed sites. Where it gets plenty of water and sun, the grass will grow to reach two meters in height.

It can be cut back to 30 cm two to three times per year. The mulch is dense and slow to break down. Use a nice set of hedge shears, a sharp machete, or a weed trimmer with a metal blade attachment for cutting vetiver. Use gloves as the grass can easily cut an exposed hand running along the edge.

It is propagated easily by root division. Keep young plants free of weed competition for two years and they will reward you with prolific growth and biomass.

Mexican Sunflower (Tithonia diversifolia)

This wild sunflower, also known as Boton de Oro, is a woody shrub reaching up to 4 meters in height. It is gaining traction in the tropical agroforestry community for its use in silvopastoral systems and as a green manure. It makes a great cut and carry fodder for cattle and goats throughout the dry season.

The Mexican sunflower easily propagates by cuttings and loves full sun, where it throws out a beautiful flower throughout the dry season that support a host of pollinators. It purportedly, like sunflowers, has the ability to accumulate phosphorous in its leaves and stems. This would be a nice addition to any mulch pile. Hack at the plant with a machete or clippers with little fear or taking too much off. It has a strong coppice response, providing a steady supply of woody mulch.

More research is needed on this support species, as it appears to be an important addition to our agroforestry plant matrix.

Bijagua (Calathea lutea/crotalifera)

This large herb reaches nearly 3 meters tall and has 1 meter long leaves. It loves wet, marshy sites, where it can quickly take over if not managed. It is common along the road side of the lowland tropics throughout Central America.

Bijagua produces a massive quantity of leaves throughout the year, which have a waxy coating that slows their decomposition, making them ideal for weed suppression. Their flowers are great for hummingbirds and other pollinators, and the leaves have historically been used for thatch roofs, to wrap tamales, and of course as quick umbrellas.

They do produce seeds, which are dispersed by birds, but are mostly propagated by root division. You can chop them down to the base completely and they will shoot back new leaves in record time.

Patterns for Mulch Species

There are a number of patterns worth recognizing that nearly all of these plants complete:

• They are propagated easily by division or cutting.

• They have large, slow to decompose leaves that keep the soil covered longer.

• They don't produce seed, so they have a very low invasive potential.

• They grow quickly, acting as pioneer species, and changing the microclimate around them.

• They are easy to chop because they are herbaceous.

• They hold their leaves throughout the dry season which help shade the soil during the hottest months of the year.

As you look for mulch and biomass plants in your own climate, look back at these patterns as guides. They might lead you to the next ah-ha moment and jump start the success on your site.

Around the Permaculture Universe

The Ranch has a wonderfully full workshop schedule ready for you in 2018. First time Japanese Plastering and Japanese Fermentation workshops mark an exciting addition to our normal staple workshops on Permaculture Design, Fermentation, Wilderness Medicine, and Renewable Energy.

Ranch Core Team member Scott will be speaking this labor day weekend at the Cincinnati Regional Permaculture Convergence. If any Ranch friends and family are in the area, we highly recommend you come for a visit.

Former Ranch PDC student Antu Vilches-Cabrera is opening a permaculture center in the Dominican Republic and crowd funding to help with the establishment. Please check out his excellent work and consider supporting!

Abrazos

The Ranch Crew

Rancho Mastatal Voices

Rancho Mastatal Voices

The Ranch Core Team has been featured on a number of blogs, podcasts, and news-sites over the last few months. So for everyone absent from the Ranch here are a few different ways to hear our voices.

Abundant Edge Podcast

Timo talks with Oliver Goshley about founding the Ranch and the work over the years in the local community.

Scott talks with Oliver about managing the Ranch agroecosystem and helping others design their farms and homesteads.

Tico Times

Laura has been writing for Costa Rica's largest English language newspaper the Tico Times. You can read about her recent articles on Ginger Beer and Costa Rica food cultures here.

USDA Inside Agroforestry Blog

Scott was recently featured in the USDA's Inside Agroforestry blog on New and Beginning Farmers. You can read the whole blog here.

2018 Workshop Calendar

Our team has been busy putting together another year of life changing workshops and short courses for our community. From Japanese Cooking to Bamboo Construction, from Permaculture Design to Medicinal Plants, 2018 is going to be a good year to skill up at the Ranch. Please help us spread the word!

Abrazos

The Ranch Crew

Our Natural Building World

by Ali Ostergard

In the natural building world at Rancho Mastatal there is no lack of projects to be done. I think as a team we have collected a list that will take us past 2020. And we already have been building our infrastructure for the past 16 years. One could say we are natural building addicts!

But as Rancho Mastatal grows as a community, education center, and business our building list keeps getting bigger to accommodate our many needs. Although the upfront cost of building infrastructures is high in the long run the benefits should pay back plenty.

Taking stock of the different building projects that started and finished in the last year amazed me. Up until then I hadn’t thought about all that was accomplished. It is good to step back and look at the full picture, to feel satisfaction for what you have achieved. Especially in those times when you have been working on the same project for what seems like decades.

Here is a brief rundown of what was started or finished in the natural building world at Rancho Mastatal in the past year. With the help and hard work of our core team, apprentice crew, and our local staff we are proud to have accomplished so much!

We began our season with building and completing a timber framed compost toilet for our dorm room. We realized that it was finally time to have two toilets to a house that fits 20! This has definitely paid off!

Then we gave the two bedrooms at the Casucha a face lift. After removing the old plaster, we brightened the place up with a natural lime plaster finish inside and outside. Then we installed a beautiful hardwood floor.

We were honored to have Benito Steen, an amazing natural builder and plasterer, come down to live and work with us for six weeks. In that time, he taught us many new methods for building and plastering. Including a new, lighter earthen mixture for wattle and daub that has revolutionized our wall building; recipes and methods for Japanese clay, lime, tamped earthen floors; a bomber clay, lime, straw plaster; and just his overall skills in the entire building world! Along with all that, Benito helped us finish the floors and walls at the Honey Hut shower.

After a year of construction, in which nearly every group that came through our doors contributed to building the walls; we were delighted to finish the food processing kitchen wattle and daub walls and apply a beautiful burnished lime plaster. The entire food processing kitchen is coming together nicely and providing an area to productively accommodate the many needs surrounding food for our community.

Even with all the building we still seem to have a lack of space. With the hope to have 6-7 apprentices each year, and our current apprentice house only fitting 5, we decided to renovate our old goat barn into apprentice quarters. This structure was started in the Natural Building Course, and will be finished by our current year long apprentices. In the course, students learn to build various different walls systems including: wattle and daub, adobe brick, and cob. We are imagining this as a good cabina for a couple or two single apprentices.

While this was all happening, we also started the foundations and timber frame for our new 800 sq. foot guest cabin called Bernie’s Bungalow. By mid-season we raised the timber frame structure and began to frame the walls for the wattle and daub. We started the wattle and daub walls with our apprentices and then pushed them forward with a Natural Building Practicum which proved very successful. We are excited to finally be done with the walls for our guest cabin and beginning the process of plastering, making the earthen floors, furniture, and everything else to make this a cozy tropical space.

Finally, somewhere in the mix of all this natural building being done throughout the Ranch. We ran a ten-day Timber Framing Course with our good friends Skip and Lizbeth. In this course, we cut and rose the frame for Nic and Ali’s house. We are running a seven-day Natural Building Practicum from May 24th-30th. In this practicum, we hope to be able to start and finish all the wattle and daub walls for this house. It will be a big task, but we think we can make it happen! Participants pay a nominal fee that covers the cost of their food and we spend a focused week long period working on the walls. This allows much faster progress not just because of the focused time but because you can see the walls going up so fast it keeps you motivated, excited and learning. This is a great opportunity for anyone who would like to get some experience of building with earth, work with skilled professionals and come and visit the Ranch for a very affordable “working holiday” or break.

There it is; a recap of our past year's natural building season. Not too shabby of a list. In the process, we have learned a lot, discovered new methods, and bad methods, and everything in between. Even after all these years of natural building at the Ranch there is always something new to learn. We are thankful for all those natural builders that have and will come through Rancho Mastatal.

Cheers to muddy feet!

Across the Permaculture Universe

We still have space in a few upcoming workshops:

• The Art and Practice of Live Culture Fermentation
• Plants as Medicine: Reclaiming the Art of the Home Apothecary
• Agroforestry Skills Inspired by the Forest

Help us spread the word and fill them up!

We are also starting to interview and accept 2018 apprentices. If you know anyone who is seeking a life-changing experience please send them our way.

Abrazos

The Ranch Crew

Orienting Oneself to Mastatal

by Connor Harron

This post was first published at the blog Fed by Connor. Connor is one of our year long apprentices.

We are now interviewing applicants for our 2018 apprenticeship program. Help us spread the word by sharing this blog post!

If you’re anything like me, then you will find Rancho Mastatal to be a place of incredible beauty, endless inspiration, and powerful community. Even if we have very little in common, you will certainly find it to be unique. Among ecovillages and permaculture communities, over the years Rancho Mastatal has developed a reputation for its intricate systems, well organized educational programs, and gorgeous natural buildings that sprinkle the 300 + acre Ranch.

Mastatal is a small rural community in central Costa Rica near the Pacific Coast, roughly a three hour drive from the capital, San Jose. In Mastatal things come in singles: there is one dirt road lined by the local bar, one restaurant, a school, community center, convenience store, and a soccer pitch. Although the community center technically provides wifi, it usually doesn’t work, which can add to a sense of isolation that can feel simultaneously liberating and stifling. Despite its size, the Ranch sits in the heart of the community. From the main house you are a stones throw away from the bar, and you can often hear music echoing across the valley as the locals unwind in the evening over one of the two Costa Rican brews.

To orient oneself in Mastatal, especially coming from an urban hub like Los Angeles, requires a letting go of one's typical expectations. Many of the core team describe this experience as “losing oneself in a humble task,” or to be more accurate, a series of humble tasks. Fortunately, at the Ranch this is easy. Days here are filled from dawn until well past dusk, leaving precious little time to contemplate how or why someone has arrived in this space. Although often simple, each task requires focus and care in order to do well and avoid personal injury.

As an apprentice, our mornings begin at 6:00 am with “life skills.” These individual pre-breakfast chores make up the basic activities that are necessary to keep the farm running. These include managing the firewood, bio-digester (more on that later), and chickens; harvesting salad greens, caring for the main house/kitchen, nursery, zone 1 gardens, and orchards. To ensure that we gain experience in each system on the farm, the apprenticeship program is designed for us to rotate among the life skills on a monthly basis.

These tasks need to be completed by 8:00 am when we have a group breakfast, which depending on the number of visitors at the farm can range from 12 to 50 people. Cooking and cleaning shifts are also traded on a rotating schedule. After breakfast, all the apprentices chip in on a “work party” to help complete the larger projects around the Ranch. This can include trail building in the orchards, weeding and prepping new beds in the gardens, harvesting jackfruit or bananas, processing food for the kitchen, or even helping to build a new structure on the property.

At 1 pm everyone breaks for lunch. Nearly every meal served on the Ranch includes rice, beans, and a fresh garden salad prepared each morning. To add a little variety to the meals, each dish also includes something a little special. Whether it’s emplatanados con queso, fresh hand pressed tortillas or homemade dosas, each meal comes with a treat to avoid the monotony that is risked when eating arroz con frijoles three times each day. On the side, fresh salsa and a kefir dressing made from local cows milk and fresh herbs make each dish a true delight. To drink, there is fresh coffee from local shade grown beans, water kefir soda filled with pro-biotics to improve digestion, and a house-made rehydration drink (think homemade Gatorade) that is packed with electrolytes to prevent dehydration during long days working under the sun. In the evenings, there is even country wine or “hooch” as it is called here, that is fermented using yeast, water, local unprocessed sugar, and whatever fruit happens to be in season (jackfruit and passion fruit are two of the local favorites).

Afternoons at el Rancho are more varied. Three days a week this time is reserved for Personal and Practice Time. On the Ranch, one quickly realizes that these are extremely valuable chunks of time and can be used for many things, although jerking off in the apprentice house while a tour goes by (as the orientation packet mentions) is not one of them. It is however a great time for writing, taking a nap, swimming at the local waterfall, calling family, or sharpening one's tools; just to name a few examples. During the rest of the week, the afternoons are reserved for additional work parties, community check-ins, or cooking depending on the day.

Dinner is served every day (except Sunday) at 6:30 and begins with “circle time,” one of the oldest traditions on the Ranch. This time is nothing more, and nothing less than an opportunity each day for the entire community to come together, hold hands, and offer thanks (if one is so inclined) for anything/everything they are currently feeling grateful for. It is a brief yet powerful ritual that allows everyone to slow down, take a deep breath, and appreciate the wonderful space and community everyone here is privileged enough to enjoy. Afterwards dinner is served! The only rule is, be kind and respect those behind. This usually means there is more than enough for everyone, although specialty items (like guacamole) can mysteriously disappear rather quickly. The last person through the line rings the bell, meaning seconds are up for anyone still craving more.

After dinner and clean up, if you’re not ready for bed at 7:30, which is often the case, there are always a plethora of interesting people to chat with over a beer or glass of hooch, and any number of board games to be played until late into the evening (and by late I mean 9:30, because by then you will DEFINITELY be ready for bed). After lying down and becoming one with your mattress, dawn will come suddenly and this routine will repeat itself seemingly on end. At the time of writing this however I have now been here for two weeks. I can already tell that one day soon I will look up, only to realize it’s already December, time to pack my bags and head back to the “real” world. One lesson this experience has already taught me, however, is that for the individuals who make up this community, Mastatal is the real world, not just a temporary excursion. For those who choose to step outside the typical expectations of industrialized society and reconnect with the roots of human civilization, this is an obtainable lifestyle. Whether you want this world or the chaos of our modern cities to be more real, is up to you to decide.

Across the Permaculture Universe

We have a few spots left in our upcoming Fermentation Workshop! Learn the art and science of making microbes your allies.

Many of our core team members are starting to show off their work through some great photos on instagram. Check out Ali, Rachel, Laura, and Scott!

Our friends at ECHO have a new Central American and Caribbean forum, including development notes dedicated to this region. We are hoping to start sharing our work through their publication in the months ahead.

Abrazos

The Ranch Crew

Getting Inspired About Natural Building

by Ali Ostergard
 

Over the years of natural building at Rancho Mastatal my feelings on the process have gone through many stages. From the initial excitement of- wow, how cool you can build a house from the materials on your land, and all it takes is time, practice, and anyone can do this! To over time, after building many walls, an understanding of how long it takes to build a natural home and all the work that it entails.

The style we use at the Ranch for many buildings is a timber framed structure with wattle and daub walls. This is a faster and more effective method of building a natural home than say a pure cob house, which requires much more materials and time. Although, wattle and daub is a faster method, it still takes a fair amount of time and labor. Over the years my excitement for building wattle and daub walls has decreased as I’ve experienced the long, slow, drawn out process of it. Until this year when my hope for natural building was born again!

In the past years, we have purposefully left building projects for our educational groups, in order to give them the experience of natural building. Last year it was the walls for the Food Smithery, the year before that was the walls for the Honey Hut shower, the list goes on and on. This year we decided to try a different method in order to move our new guest cabin, Bernie’s Bungalow, forward faster.

Every year we host a Natural Building Course. This course is 10-14 days long and is an intensive break down of many different styles and methods of natural building. This course is more expensive because we bring down well known natural builders from around the world, the students get a diverse exposure to different topics, and hands on experiences with natural building. In these courses the students work on different structures and move projects forward around the Ranch, but finishing a project isn’t the goal for this course because of the wide range of topics covered. So, we decided to trial a Natural Building Practicum. A week-long program that was affordable, but more labor intensive. With the goal of finishing as many wattle and daub walls in the guest cabin as possible.

In December we received eleven sign ups, from people from all over the world that wanted to have a hands-on experience with natural building and an affordable way to visit the Ranch. Our first Practicum was under way!

The experience was amazing for myself and I believe the group. We watched every day our progress get better and better and the walls get higher and higher. We worked every day from 9am-5pm for a week. We developed a good system for rotating through the different stages: sifting clay, hauling sand, making mix, and applying to the walls. There were no lectures, power points, or hand outs to this practicum, but there was a general overview of wattle and daub, lots of teachable moments, and many questions from the students as we worked. It was a long and exhausting week, but with that many hands it made the walls fly up!

This made a world of difference to my opinion on natural building. Instead of slowly watching a building get put together over a years’ time, and never really feeling like you accomplished a good amount of wall building in a session. This practicum made it feel like natural building didn’t have to be such a long burden. It gave me satisfaction to see what many hands, working hard for a short period of time can accomplish. I don’t want to sound like natural building is a huge burden and that no one should take on a project, and of course buildings can be built over time with just a few people. But when you have as many buildings on the list as we do it really makes a difference to the moral if they can get pushed forward at a reasonable speed.

We will be offering another Natural Building Practicum from May 24th-30th, 2017 (cost $120 for 7 days). The structure that we will be working on will be much smaller than the guest cabin and we hope to be able to start and finish the entire wall system with the group! So if you’re interested in coming down to stay at the Ranch at a very affordable rate, get a little dirty in the mud, and probably sweat a lot then sign on up and we will see you in May!

Across the Permaculture Universe

Our friends at Black Sheep are promoting a new model of regenerative resource management in Costa Rica. For the last few years they have been finding vulnerable properties in the Puriscal region and bringing together investors to purchase the land and plant timber trees and cash crops. They have once again hired Scott and Rachel to complete the permaculture master plan of a 300 acre property. We are excited to partner up with so many great local change-agents on another great project.

Speaking of permaculture master planning, we want to give a shout out to our friend Zach Weiss of Elemental Ecosystem. Zach is Sepp Holzer's protege and a young permaculture designer you should be paying attention to, especially if you are interested in water management!

And for anyone feeling generous, long time Ranch friend Eileen Richardson is part of the Rocky Mountain Land Library which is on the last leg of a Kickstarter campaign. They are hoping to transform an old cattle ranch into a home for writers and artist.  Please support!

Abrazos

The Ranch Crew

Meet our 2017 Apprentices!

Our newest apprentice team has arrived and settled into the Ranch life. They hail from across the United States and Latin America. They come from a diverse set of backgrounds and will undoubtedly shape the Ranch and our community deeply in the year ahead. 

Our team is looking forward to working, playing, and feasting with this group for the next many months.

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Léon

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Peter

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Juan

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Kelley

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Marissa

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Connor

We are now accepting applications for our 2018 program and will begin interviewing in the months ahead. Check out the page here for more information.

Is one year too long? Then consider our Sustainability Primer program, which runs this fall for three months.

Abrazos

The Ranch Crew

Invisible Infrastructure: How We Build Our Lives Together

by former core team member Scott Gallant

Developing the physical infrastructure of our campus gets me up every morning. I don't need coffee nor an alarm clock; I'm just excited to keep building. Building the orchards and earthworks, furniture for my home, a better feeder for our chickens; these are the projects that rev my permaculture engine. They are concrete, you can see the results of your physical labor immediately, and they are often the first projects of burgeoning permaculture sites. It requires little effort to dedicate the time, space, resources and money to these projects. Yet their impact on the success of a project, despite all this dedication, pales in comparison to another type of infrastructure; the invisible infrastructure.

Although much harder to apply, invisible infrastructures are the most crucial aspects of successful design. They are intangible elements which determine:

• how we exchange goods and services.

• how we transmit knowledge and information.

• how we make decisions in groups.

• how we take care of ourselves.

They are our economic, legal, and interpersonal arrangements and dynamics. For many of us drawn towards living and working with others in community, it is the invisible social arrangements or infrastructure that we must strive to understand.

Structural Conflict

When working in community, the social structures become our guiding influence. They are the structured relationships which hold us together. They can be deliberately designed into the system--or they can be ignored.

Not choosing a decision making protocol, for example, does not mean there is an absence of decision making. Rather it means a pattern is generated spontaneously through a combination of each individual's personality and position in the group, as well as cultural and social standards. This un-designed protocol may work for the group, but more often than not it defaults to a cultural status quo of how power is carried by different types of people, and eventually becomes what we call a structural conflict.

Just as you can eloquently or poorly design a garden, the same can be done with our social structures. When there is a lack of good design, structural conflict occurs, and usually arises from two major themes of group dynamics: purpose and power.

Purpose

Purpose begets our vision and mission statements: why we are here and what are we doing together to accomplish this vision? Conflict around purpose can be recognized when ordinary issues become unresolvable and when decision making stalemates occur.

A classic example of this structural conflict occurred a few years ago at the Ranch. Our goats had begun to cause discord and stress amongst our team. One side valued their products (milk and cheese) and the opportunity they provided for visitors to experience milking animals for the first time, while the other side was frustrated by the amount of effort needed to generate these products and the goat system's larger lack of replicability and sustainability. Both sides understood each other, but it took many years and lots of conversations before a genuine agreement could be made about whether to keep the goats or not.

This agreement was only possible once our team stepped back to better determine our greater purpose (mission) and how the goats fit into this. We finally asked, as an education center, what type of education did we want to provide? Inspirational? The goats certainly accomplished this, it was often the highlight of short term groups and guests' visits. Or was it a practical skill based education we wanted to provide? At times the goats accomplished this, but it was not the sustainable animal husbandry program that we dreamed of and at times marketed.

While our team all valued the inspirational side of the goats, in the end we decided we wanted to be teaching hard, practical skills, that were transferable outside our gate, and the goats too often failed to align with this purpose. We also realized that we could achieve the goal of inspiration in other areas that were simultaneously more productive.

The stress that this structural conflict caused often felt like a personality clash, but in reality the clash was between the perceived difference of our purpose. This is an important point: structural conflicts often appear to be personal conflicts, but they are rooted in the way our invisible infrastructure is designed.

Power

Power, the other main structural conflict, can be defined as the ability to influence. When there exists an unequal distribution of this influence amongst the group, conflict occurs. Most commonly this is experienced through decision making.

This unmistakable conflict occurred back when our kitchen garden had too many cooks in the kitchen. It was unclear who was in charge and often the loudest voice won out. One long term volunteer in particular, felt very strongly about how the garden was supposed to be managed. If the moon cycle didn't call for weeding then we were told not to weed, despite an abundance of eager labor. Someone would plant something and someone else would pull it up a week later. Volunteers were making important decisions that affected a valuable space, and as they transitioned out our core team was left with the remnants.

Two core team members, Rachel Jackson and Laura Killingbeck, recognized the need for consistency and efficiency. But the situation was complicated because so many people felt strongly about what the space was supposed to be. In order to do their jobs, Rachel and Laura both needed to be able to make decisions in the area, but knew that if they didn't meet everyone's needs the space would ultimately not succeed. The two of them teamed up to lead the rest of the group to set goals for the area. Once they gathered everyone's input, they collated the goals and used them to design different options for the garden. They presented these options to the group, edited them based on group input, divided up the installation work, and carried it out.

Today it is this plan, created by two designers and based on the needs of the entire group, which holds the power over that space. Decision making still occurs with regard to the details, but the primary conflict--who gets to decide-- has evaporated.

Decision Making at the Ranch

There are many different forms of decision making; majority, concentrated power, consensus, and consensus minus one are common examples. At the Ranch, for the past year, we have been practicing consent decision making, adapted from the sociocracy governance framework. Consent is different from consensus.

Consensus decision making requires an affirmative from all group members to pass a proposal, and a single person in that group can also block that proposal. As many have experienced, this often leaves too much power with a single divergent viewpoint, which can stalemate any and all conversations.

Consent, on the other hand, also requires an affirmative from all group members to pass a proposal, but a single person can only block a proposal if they have a reasoned and paramount objection. A paramount objection is one of overriding importance, and means that something about the proposal will inhibit the individual from doing her or his job or from being well.

The philosophy of consent decision making is that the group functions as a single organism with shared goals. Each individual is a part of the organism. Therefore, the group actively asks members to reflect on proposals and express paramount objections when they arise, based on the idea that what is good for the individual will also be good for the group, and vice versa.

Creating Our Lives Together

Perhaps the best book on this topic, originally recommended to us by our friend Nate Sanders, is Creating A Life Together by Diana Leafe Christian. Leafe Christian researched intentional communities and ecovillages around the United States to determine why so many fail and what patterns emerged from the successful examples.

The most prominent lesson from this research is that so many seeking community also find it difficult to work out their invisible infrastructure. Whether it stems from a belief, common in spiritual communities, that one's group is mature beyond the need for these arrangements, or that those of us driven toward community have done so to remove ourselves from the legal and economic bureaucracy; it is apparent that many communities forget the power of these arrangements. They have the power to help us succeed or cause our demise.

For anyone seeking community, hoping to build their own ecovillage or permaculture cooperative farm, the following are the key invisible infrastructure that all successful community examples have in place.

1. Purpose and vision: Discussed above; are you on the same page about what you are trying to accomplish and how you will do so?

2. Decision making: Also discussed above as it relates to power. Agree upon a protocol and hold each other accountable.

3. Ownership structures: Be very clear about who owns what, power often resides here; and be very clear about how you would like to change this in the future.

4. Entry and exit strategies: How do new members join your groups and how do members leave, all without engendering resentment toward past time/money put in so that everyone is on an even playing field.

5. Finances: Get your house in order and be clear as day to how money can be spent, earned, and distributed.

6. Conflict resolution: Have a clear protocol for dealing with conflict. This doesn't have to involve deep, new-age personal reflection but it does need to make everyone feel safe.

7. Communication: When, why, and how do you meet? Separate meetings for big picture, planning conversations from those of the day-to-day work.

We seek community because we want to live with other people. We want to cultivate deeper relationships. We might believe those relationships are bomb-proof, that the above organizational structures are unnecessary, but above all they do one thing really well; they protect our friendships. And this is why the eloquent design of these structures into our lives is the most important part of permaculture design.

Resources

• We the People: Consenting to a Deeper Democracy, A Guide to Sociocratic Principles and Methods by John Buck and Sharon Villines

• Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities by Diana Leafe Christian

Permaculture Design Certification Course

Are you interested in learning more about designing invisible infrastructure into your community? Join our community at Rancho Mastatal this April and May 2017 for our annual Permaculture Design Certification course. The course is taught by a diverse team of instructors and is ideal for anyone who wants to:

• Experience an established permaculture site in action.

• Devote two weeks to an intensive learning process.

• Learn from instructors who practice professional design and install work.

• Explore rural Costa Rica, swim in breathtaking waterfalls, eat delicious tropical food, drink homemade hooch, play lots of futbol and frisbee, and make lifelong friends!

Abrazos

The Ranch Crew

Top Ten Tips for the New Apprentices

by Dorothy Farrell

This post is part of a series of reflections we are asking past apprentices to contribute to our blog. If you would like to share where you stand now and how your time at the Ranch effected your place in the world please write to scott@ranchomastatal.com.

"Everyone is looking at my feet," I say to my dad.

"No they're not," he scoffs back. Sure enough, he glances sideways at a group of teenage girls eying my dirty toes clad in Chacos. 

We are not in the jungle any more. It's December in New York City, I am traveling on the subway with a large backpack, and five layers of sweatshirts, never having worn more than one at a time in the tropics. Fresh off the airplane, here I am with my exposed feet and disheveled appearance-- "Is she homeless?" the girls snicker. 

I come home and sit under my first hot shower in a year and scrub the dirt from my feet. Goodbye Rancho Mastatal, I'll be seeing you one day. In the meantime, I have a new life to create. Sometimes reverse culture shock can be more cunning than culture shock. 

In case you are one of the seven new apprentices and worried about the ensuing change, this article serves as advice come January 2017. Are you ready? To be ready, you must clear your mind. You'll never be ready. Those who don't know speak of it. Those who do know don't speak of it. To stay afloat in the presence that is Rancho Mastatal means just this. This will all make sense soon. Now for ten more pieces of advice in preparation for your apprenticeship. 

My fellow apprentice crew enthusiastically chimed in for this article to not bring any white clothing. It is very likely to get stained by any number of hands on tasks. Even if you're not performing physical labor, even if you're just eating lunch, there's a good chance that anything white you wear will be found by a stain. The turmeric in the pickle is a renown dye, as is the achiote in the rice. Whole food diets, with their richly colorful displays, are your wardrobes' worst enemy. Even if your white blouse is hanging on a line miles from the orchards, the wood shop, the kitchen-- virtually every danger zone-- black mold will STILL find it, stain it, and make you regret bringing it. Tip #1: Don't bring white clothes.

Tip #2: If you are prone to stains but want to maintain your public decency, patterned clothing compensates (credit tip to Rachel Jackson). 

Stains and patterns aside, there is another debate on the type of clothing appropriate for the tropics. Expect the climate to be humid and hot. Cotton is not your friend. It takes a long time to dry and harbors all sorts of odorous microorganisms. Tip #3: Bring clothing made from synthetic materials that are comfortable to wear.

There are times, however, when you'll want to look sharp. Welcome to the campo of Costa Rica. Ticos take public appearances seriously, so pack accordingly. I recommend bringing something that is clean and modest, not something too out there. This is a small village, after all, and it's more valuable to blend in. A brief study of Costa Rican fashion will reveal that it's not too different from most mainstream, Western cultures. Tip #4: Keep an outfit clean reserved for community celebrations and appearances.

On that note, Tip #5: In Costa Rican culture, if you do not smell good, you smell bad. A good soap and light perfume are recommended for community occasions. The jungle offers delectable scents that can be sourced from plant materials on the Ranch. Tip #6: If you want to dabble in the ancient and romantic art of perfume making, bring a little bit of Everclear, coconut oil, and a spritzer bottle. Creative inspiration soon to follow, but I've had great success with vetiver root, galangal, orange peel, and lemongrass.

This brings us to the toiletry topic. Some people bring a lot of toiletries. In my experience, I learned the unnecessary reality of many of the things that can be purchased from the drug store. With a clean diet, acne can fade, and pesty bugs can be deterred. The humidity keeps your skin moist, and most lotions just sweat off. You may even want to try to go "no poo" (that is, shampoo) method this year. 

Tip #7: Abandon shampoo and conditioners. I had personally been avoiding chemical hair soaps for one year before the Ranch, but for other people, this may be a great time to go "no poo". It's usually within the first two months that hair builds up an excess of grease, then soon after, this balances out. Shampoo strips your hair of its natural oils, and conditioner replaces it with a synthetic luster. If you want to keep your hair clean with minimal input, try the baking soda and vinegar method. Use one tablespoon of vinegar for one cup of water. Shake in a bottle with a dispenser cap, pour overhead, and massage deeply into your hair. Rinse with water. Vinegar can also be applied to help balance the pH. Any type of vinegar will work just fine, and the smell dissipates quickly. After the initial grease sweat, your locks will evolve into tropical lusciousness. 

You may be concerned about sunscreen. Despite my pale complexion, the sun was never an issue for me. This is because most of the time outside is spent in the shade. Cheers to the benefits of an agroforestry canopy! If you're working in the sun, you'll probably be sweating any sun protection off. Tip #8: Favor sun hats and long, light sleeves for sun protection. Despite covering your skin, you'll actually stay a lot cooler, too.

Bugs can be another nuisance. Mosquito populations are typically non-problematic until the rains hit in April. That's when populations skyrocket. Maybe you don't mind the cloud of deet, or natural sprays that are also available, but the reapplication of sprays can be resource and time intensive. Tip #9: Either you suck it up and evolve some better antibodies, or just cover up with long pants and sleeves, and CERTAINLY bring a bug net for your bed. I've laid on my bed in October, the wettest month of the season, and counted literally dozens of mosquitoes trying to pass the unbreakable seal. Fortunately none of the sensationalized diseases that mosquitoes carry made an epidemic in Mastatal, so don't stress about vaccinations or antibiotics.

If mosquitoes aren't the type to sweeten your inner naturalist's cup of tea, think about the things that do. Maybe it's plants, maybe it's birds. Whatever it is, make a point to recognize those things at home before you leave, because when you come to the jungle, it's all going to change. Tip #10: Recognize the fauna and flora in your new home to develop a sense of place. A sense of awareness and appreciation for your home's native creatures will make rooting a lot easier. The dormilonas, which bow down when you tap or pee on them, and the carpet like moss that grows in the tree nursery, or the sprawling herb with small white flowers with purple stripes inside that attract the black bees with yellow bottoms-- those were some of my favorite Ranch weeds. You'll see patterns, and you'll appreciate the subtle natural life, too. 

Bonus Tip #11: Appreciate the foods that are locally sourced. Rice and beans are the vehicles of countless cultural traditions and can be transformed in one million ways, but they're delicious served simply too. The Ranch agroforestry system offers biriba, jackfruit, coconuts, bananas, cuadrados, and plantains all year round. Be prepared for the grandeur of seasonality. Lemondrop mangosteens will be one of your first tree harvests in January. Then the acerola, aka Barbados cherries, will ripen. These ferment into an excellent, complexly flavored wine. The Victoriana and arasa will ripen shortly after: Sour, yet delicious, when sweetened for jams. Mango season starts in April and lasts for the month. Pickle as many green mangoes as you can stand, they make the best kimchi, especially when finely shredded.  The pejibayes start turning color at the beginning of the rainy season, too, followed by the mamonchinos. The mamonchino tree with the best flavor lies at the bottom of the Banana Bowl, but you have to climb it, then sit in the branches with a huge pole with a basket on the end.  This is farm fitness, but the collection process is worth it. Nature really did perfect the art of candy. Come December, the oranges will begin ripening, and you can race Scott in a juice pressing contest. You will experience the cycle of a year as it truly happens, as an ecosystem partitioned it; for each part to be appreciated.

Maybe you're the type to meditate, maybe not. When I left the Ranch, and the data came back to my cellphone, and the advertisements jumped off the walls of the streets, and the drama of the world flooded in like a leaky pipe, that's when I knew what it meant to be able to meditate. I once thought about running away to a monastery, but I found Rancho Mastatal instead. There's no preacher, there's no text, there's just you and your purpose for coming. You come, you work hard, you play hard, and you learn. It might not feel like you're meditating, but, if you allow the experience to envelop you, if you allow yourself to tread lightly on this planet, you too can be a great apprentice. You may not become an expert wood crafter or beekeeper, or even learn how to count, but there you have it: ten pieces of advice from a gal who now walks barefoot in the city.

News and Notes from Around the Permaculture Community

Laura has been busy the last few weeks filming an online fermentation workshop series. She is partnering with Ranch friend Spenser Gabin in the creation of this course.  You can see more of Spenser's work at his website here.  

We were fortunate enough to host Erle and Suset from Wa Samaki Ecosystems on Trinidad during our Natural Building Practicum. It is always inspiring to meet fellow permaculture teachers, doers, and designers, and now we have the itch to visit their site which has been operating for nearly 20 years!

Our Central American Scholarship Program fundraiser is underway! We've already had over 20 applicants for the few spots in our annual PDC. If the fundraiser is successful though, we hope to have a record number of Ticos in our course. Please give if you are able and share the word!

Abrazos

The Ranch Crew