Wealth Exists Not in Having Great Possessions, But in Having Few Wants

Wealth Exists Not in Having Great Possessions, But in Having Few Wants

By 2023 apprentice, Grant Munro

There’s no escaping from the fact that we are in the midst of a social, economic, physical and mental health crisis. We have been waking up to this fact at an increasing pace and the majority of people can see that a change is essential if we don’t want to enter another mass extinction of our own doing. The abundance of information out there can be confusing and can leave us feeling stuck in the mud, unsure of where to direct our efforts. Additionally, the typical modern lifestyle leaves most of us feeling far removed from the essence of what it is to be human. I can imagine that I’m not the only one who has felt overwhelmed, not knowing which way to turn to make an impact. Studying permaculture over the last 3 months at the Ranch has shown me the potential that the principles of permaculture have to help us with these problems.

Having spent the last 14 years of study and practice as a chiropractor, I’ve come to understand and witness that, most times, what makes us healthy or sick comes down to the stories and concepts we hold about our health, the world and our place in it. We could call this our world view, or cosmology. We align our behaviours to what we have been taught by our family traditions, trauma, our now archaic colonial educational institutions and cultural narratives shaped by the media. These behaviours either lead us towards health or towards chronic stress and ultimately disease. An example would be that my Grandad had back pain, my Dad has back pain, I have back pain therefore I must have back pain because it’s genetic. There has never been a gene found for expressing simple low back pain, what’s been passed down is a concept. When we shift the story, we shift the expression. 

The recipe for shifting towards the expression of health looks to be simple and repeatable for those who truly desire to and have a driving reason to get well. In practice I have found we must create a healing image based upon logical truth to move towards health, and not away from disease. For example, we can logically argue that the human being is designed to be healthy, not sick. When we remove interference/irritations, establish new, simple behaviours aligned to human values and commit over time, people start to transition and get well. Irritations include intrusive thoughts, residual traumas and accumulation of toxins. The body naturally expresses health when we address these alongside the addition of gentle exercise, proper breathing, daily time in nature, a strong connection to community and nourishing food and water. However, Big Pharma’s marketing experts will have you believe it’s way more complicated than that, ensuring they rack up huge profits year on year whilst somehow we get sicker and sicker.

It’s easy to see how this draws parallels to climate catastrophe. Big Ag and other Big Industry see Earth as a giant dead rock for sale, extracting resources at an alarming rate in the name of profit and wealth accumulation for the few. Their marketing campaigns, execs and the media do a great job of spinning why we should sacrifice our lives and happiness for their cause. The stories they tell us are woven in to our very way of being and the behaviours we are coerced in to are impacting how we view and impact Earth.

In his book, ‘Change the Story’ Change the Future’ David C. Korten goes in to more detail about our psychology and how we make purpose in our lives. He describes the current paradigm as The Sacred Money and Markets Story; essentially we sacrifice ourselves to serve the Money God who is never happy. We can flip that story to one that is more consistent with living heart-centred and to the traditional values and needs of humans. It’s an easy and thought-provoking read which I assure will create a shift in your confidence in making change.

We have the responsibility to educate ourselves in order to educate our children. If we don’t do it, Big Industry will continue to do so through our educational systems and the current story will continue. We have sleepwalked in to this mess and it is going to take intentionality, commitment and consistency to rewrite the potential of the future. The ethics of permaculture are Earth Care, People Care, Fair Share and Transition.  The act of transitioning is where the movement for change starts to take place.

Transition takes time. No one can expect to go from sick to healthy in a day. And we can’t expect to shift the health of the planet in a day or even a year. But change happens with commitment to small and consistent repeated inputs. Just finding a way to shift our energy balance from extraction to regeneration can be as simple as taking a moment to find out where your coffee comes from and give thanks to the Earth and people who grew it – creating ritual rather than chugging it down. Or it can be as grand as selling everything you own and moving to a countryside and starting a farm/community/education centre.

The truth is that most of us are going to be somewhere in between. Commit to what’s just uncomfortable enough for it to be meaningful. A Permaculture Design Course is a great place to start.

An Interwoven Life

An Interwoven Life

By 2023 apprentice Elya Justina Mech

As you pass through the gates at Rancho Mastatal, you step into another world. A place where perhaps the hands you hold at evening circle are the very ones who built the structure you'll sleep in that night.  Where your salad greens come from the garden you walked through that morning with your coffee, and the cows down the road have not only given the kitchen milk to make dairy kefir, but manure to fuel the bio-digester cooking system.  The connections here are endless; its permaculture life you can see and touch.

As apprentices we are learning the principles of permaculture - not just in the classroom but also in our morning community contribution skills, during meal prep, on our walks through the agroforestry system, and as we assist with the daily function of the Ranch's infrastructure.

Its easy to understand why this way of life makes so much sense.  We can see our regenerative influence on the natural environment, and feel a deep satisfaction from knowing how the components of your day are interwoven.

And at the Ranch it's very clear to see that you are also nature, you belong here, and you can have a healing impact on the earth.

Here are some more examples of ways in which our daily life is interconnected:

• Water Kefir or "Balm" that we enjoy at our meals is a probiotic-rich, fermented drink made from yeast, local raw cane sugar with a base of fruits, spices and herbs from our gardens and orchards.

• Eggs from Dona Flor, a chicken farmer in Mastatal who provides us with a large supply of our daily protein. Our beautiful brunches feature frittata or scrambled eggs.  We also make homemade mayonnaise and use the eggs in baking for special occaisions.

• Composting toilets allow us to drastically reduce our water consumption compared to conventional toilets.  They also create nutrient-rich humanure to be used in our orchard spaces.

Meeting our energetic, nutritional, and social needs in symbiosis with nature brings such a joy and satisfaction to all those who live, work and visit Rancho Mastatal.  Its inspiring to see how we can live in way that is kinder to the Earth and healthier for our bodies and minds.

Thinking back to life before the Ranch, its easy to see how many components of my daily life came from far off places and how my needs were often met by people whom I did not know and came from sources I was unfamiliar with.  Without that integration I felt disconnected and there was a part of my spirit which was searching for more.

When we think about all the aspects of our daily lives - what we eat, how we process our waste, how we spend our time, and the spaces we occupy, we can ask ourselves 'how interconnected are these elements'? 

Part of the magic of the Ranch is how its inspiring others to bring back these values and ideas to wherever they're from and share a new way of living with their family and community.  You don't have to be living in a rural town in the tropical rainforest of Costa Rica to have a life that is interwoven, regenerative, and full of meaning.

Perhaps you can start by growing some herbs or veggies in your own backyard or by finding a farmer's market to visit each week.  How about hosting a monthly dinner with your neighbours and inviting everyone to bring a homemade dish?  Which local businesses in your city can you become a patron of? 

Maybe you are already living on a piece of land you'd like to develop into a community project. There could be a nearby seed saving bank to help you get started on growing heirloom varieties of vegetables or neighbours to borrow tools from and donate building materials.  Often times there are school groups looking for volunteer opportunities and gardening clubs who have years worth of knowledge to share.  The farmers in your area will also be a valuable resource to connect with, having insight into growing seasons and weather patterns.  If you are looking to raise animals, they may be willing to help you get started and even sell animals to you.

Permaculture is all about creating a thriving and regenerative world for us to live in and enjoy. We can use smart and slow solutions right where we are to improve the way we meet our needs and the needs of others.

As I spend another beautiful day at Rancho Mastatal I am filled with gratitude to be able to learn these lessons in the heart of a thriving community.  With each meal, every visit to the garden and orchardsand spending time in structures that have been lovingly made from the land, I realize how this interwoven life has enriched me and changed the way I will live from now on.

What is Syntropic Farming?

What is Syntropic Farming?

By Joshua Wright, apprentice 2022

Syntropy and entropy are two forces at work in this universe. Entropy being the movement of matter and energy towards chaos and simplicity over time. Syntropy being the opposite, of the movements of matter and energy towards higher levels of complexity and order over time. Syntropic farming is tapping into this universal force and leveraging it to produce a product useful to humans, food.

On Earth plants are the drivers of syntropy. Through photosynthesis they accumulate solar energy and make that energy available to other forms of life. Over time this accumulation of energy has led to the ability of our planet to support the order and complexity of life we see today.

To understand how we can use this for food production we need to have an understanding of a natural forest system and how it evolves and accumulates energy.

A forest cycle: 

We define a forest cycle as from clearing to clearing.

Starting with a blank slate, "weeds" and grasses colonized bare ground. Slowly energy accumulates supporting shrubs, small trees and eventually a mature forest. Then an old tree dies and falls creating a new clearing.

This is one cycle. This process can take thousands if not millions of years. Then the next cycle begins anew. However this cycle isn't starting from the same point as the cycle before. The system has millennia of accumulated energy stored as organic matter, topsoil and biodiversity. The time taken in cycle two to reach a mature forest is dramatically reduced compared to cycle one. 

This is syntropy at work!

When we start a syntropic agroforestry system we start by creating a clearing, kick-starting cycle two.

So what do we plant in this clearing?

When selecting our plants we want to make sure to represent all the different layers in a mature forest. The layers are categorized as Emergent, High, Medium and Low.

Mimicking a forest our emergent layer should occupy 20% of the canopy. Below that our high layer will occupy 40%, Medium 60% and low 80%.

Image by Orchard of Flavours

These layers are directly related to how much sunlight a plant needs to thrive. E.g. Papaya is emergent needing full sun. Most of your familiar fruit trees occupy the high layer, cocoa would be in the medium or low layer along with coffee as they tolerate lots of shade.

Another consideration when deciding what to plant is how quickly a plant will grow.

This takes us to a key idea in syntropic farming.

Maximizing solar energy capture

We don't want to have to wait several years for our fruit trees to be mature to have a closed canopy with maximum solar capture. We want to harvest this energy immediately.

To do this we have to design our syntropic farm not only in space but also in time.

A helpful tool is to further categorize our plants by their life cycle. In syntropic farming these categories are labeled: placenta 1, placenta 2, secondary 1, secondary 2 and climax. 

Placenta 1 are fast growing annuals that mature within 6 months. E.g. Radish, arugula (note. these are also part of the emergent layer, not because they are tall trees, obviously, but because of how much sun they need.)

Placenta 2 are slower growing annuals or biannual that are ready to harvest between 6 months and 2 years. E.g. Banana, pineapple, yuca.

Secondary 1 are fast perennials ready between 2-10 years. 

Secondary 2 are slow perennials, 10-15 years. E.g. Most fruit trees.

Climax, this category takes over 15 years to mature. E.g. hardwoods and nut trees.

Now I know this is sounding awfully complicated and it is.  So let's take a step back and see what this looks like when we start putting it all together.

Image by ECHOcommunity

Understanding our layers and succession planting

We have our clearing, the stage is set. 

In a mature forest all the seeds of the different layers are present in the soil together at the same time. When that clearing occurs they all start growing together, some fast, some slow, occupying all the different layers. We will do the same. 

Sowing a variety of annuals, perennials, fast and slow growing plants. With good planning what we get is our annuals popping up, harvesting sunlight, shading the soil and providing us with a crop in the first few months. When we harvest those annuals, light and space is opened up for the next succession of plants to come through. There is always a cover of green, growing leaves on our site, photosynthesizing and shading the soil.

After a few years, after the harvest of placenta 2, our fruit trees will be well established saplings. They have been protected from wind and harsh sun, they have had the soil loosened by the roots of all the plants that came before and they are in the perfect position to thrive!

Your Syntropic orchard awaits

Through observing how natural systems work, partnering with nature, humble stewardship and intentional management, humans have the potential to shepherd and accelerate succession. Regenerating eroded landscapes, reversing desertification and growing plants to eat. Let's make our food production systems part of the solution.

Learn More

Join us for one of our yearly workshops about permaculture, farming, plants and more!

Phytochemicals: The Key to a Longer and Healthier Life

Phytochemicals: The Key to a Longer and Healthier Life

By AJ Nolan, apprentice 2022

“The health of soil, plant, animal, and man is one indivisible whole.”

-Eve Balfour

There is not a doubt in my mind that living at Rancho Mastatal for the one year apprenticeship has contributed to extending and improving my life. I have been lucky enough to enjoy countless thought-provoking discussions, meaningful manual labor, and untethered access to healthy, local food.

In this article, I will focus on one aspect of our healthy lifestyle – food. Our foodshed is quite small and we always have access to seasonal fruits and vegetables. Using a refractometer, we have compared the nutrient density in the produce from our small foodshed to conventional supermarket produce. The Brix readings we get from our local, organically farmed produce are significantly higher than average Brix readings obtained from the supermarket produce. The Brix value indicates the number of soluble solids present in a sample of food. A higher Brix value indicates an increase in plant sugars, which can translate into a higher number of bio-available nutrients. Why does our hyper-local produce have more nutrients than supermarket produce? Phytochemicals.

Phytochemicals are compounds that plants make to help them defend themselves, facilitate growth, and communicate. Every plant on this great green earth makes phytochemicals. Stressors like temperature, drought, harvesting, and toxins cue plants to make phytochemicals. Plants then use these phytochemicals to communicate with their kin, warning them of nearby pests and pathogens. Plants are stuck in the ground and without these phytochemicals, they would be defenseless. They work as preventative medicine when they are a part of our diet. Phytochemicals neutralize toxins, aid in cellular cleanup, and retard the growth of cancerous cells. There are currently no daily dietary requirements for phytochemicals like there are for minerals and nutrients. This is a catastrophic oversight as phytochemicals are essential for optimal health. Phytochemicals lend flavor, color, and taste to every fruit, vegetable, grain, meat, and dairy product you’ve ever eaten.

There are over 50,000 known phytochemicals. The most widely studied group of phytochemicals is called polyphenols. Polyphenols lower the risk of coronary heart disease, improve vascular health, and reduce inflammation through antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects. When combined with a healthy gut microbiome, phytochemicals can perform essential cellular maintenance. Resveratrol is a polyphenol found in blueberries and red wine that promotes the death of tumor cells through its strong antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. Lycopene, found in tomatoes, influences intercellular communication and immune system modulation. Flavonoids are a subgroup of polyphenols that specifically inhibits the activity of enzymes associated with inflammation. Quercetin is a flavonoid pigment that is found in citrus, onions, grapes, and tea that inhibits the activity of enzymes linked to inflammation. It also aids in reversing diabetes as it blocks the uptake of glucose and triggers the destruction of existing fat cells.

Many phytochemicals act as antioxidants, thus reducing the amount of “reactive oxygen species” (ROS) or free radicals. All the cells in our body are constantly using oxygen to burn energy to fuel their activities. This oxidation process creates free radicals. Free radicals can cause tissue damage if they remain in our bodies for too long. This buildup can lead to chronic ailments such as autoimmune disorders and cancer. Antioxidants help in disposing free radicals, halting the acceleration of chronic diseases. What we need in our diets is a steady supply of these phytochemicals that act as antioxidants. Diets that are plentiful in whole grains, legumes, nuts, seeds, and colorful fruits and vegetables contain antioxidant phytochemicals necessary to maintain our long-term health.  

Certain farming practices can influence the number of phytochemicals in plants. Conventional agriculture utilizes excessive amounts of pesticides and chemical fertilizers, inhibiting a plant’s ability to make phytochemicals. A study conducted by the British Journal of Nutrition found that organically grown foods contained 20 to 60 percent more phytochemicals than conventional farmed foods. Degraded soil undermines phytochemical production, leaving crops more vulnerable to pests and diseases. This leads to a greater use of pesticides that end up in our food and negatively impact our health. To increase phytochemical production in plants we need to rethink the way we farm. Regenerative agriculture practices that build soil health are key. These practices include minimal tillage, implementation of cover crops, composting, the utilization of soil amendments, and effective crop rotation without the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

The way we treat the soil directly affects the plants health, which in turn affects our health. How we choose to farm shapes what we become. We are what our food eats.

Sources

“What Your Food Ate” by David Montgomery and Anne Biklé

“Nourishing Traditions” by Sally Fallon

“The Regenerative Grower’s Guide to Garden Amendments” by Nigel Palmer

“On Food and Cooking” by Harold McGee

Read Past Blog Articles

Improving Soils in the Humid Tropics of Costa Rica

Amending Calcium-Deficient Soils – A Tropical Permaculturist’s Approach

Eating Local: Reconnecting to Food

If You Practice Yoga, Practice Permaculture

If You Practice Yoga, Practice Permaculture

By 2022 apprentice Lucas

Yoga.* Permaculture. Two seemingly disparate systems of knowledge and practices. What does a morning vinyasa flow class have to do with a plant guild? What does a contour line have to do with downward facing dog? Sit back, find your beginner’s mind, and read on.

Here are 5 reasons to practice both yoga and permaculture:

#1 Ahimsa and permaculture ethics

Ahimsa is the first yama (observance) of yoga ethics. Ahimsa is non-violence, or translated affirmatively, it is compassionate living and celebrating the inherent sacredness of all life.

The three ethics of permaculture are earth care, people care, and fair share; there’s also arguably a fourth - transition.

Earth and human care are outward expressions of ahimsa. This is what grounds a skillful permaculturist AND a skillful yogi aspirant. An active practice of love is caring for the earth and caring for each other. All of permaculture and yoga is built on this.

#2 Prana and prosperity

Skillful permaculture yields prosperity and abundance of: food, fuel, diversity, resilience, and interconnection. By harnessing natural forces and energy (prana) like rainfall and sunlight, permaculture produces more life-serving outputs like food or wildlife habitat, with less energy invested.

By working with our breath in yoga, we cultivate prana, mastering our life force from within. This yields more steadiness and ease even in challenging physical movements, poses, or expressions. Many yoga sequences are based off of optimally activating the nadis (energy channels) in the body to rebalance and revitalize us. We hold downward dog after opening our hearts in cobra. On a landscape, we plant vegetation on contour to catch and store water and minimize erosion.

With permaculture, we breathe life into a landscape, channeling prana along the nadis, and the result is prosperity.

#3 Observe and interact

Observe and interact is the first principle of the permaculture design methodology.

When observing nature and the land from a permaculture paradigm, I notice how much sunlight a particular area gets, what the microclimate is, the qualities of the soil, and the wildlife present. I devote especially close attention to an orchard slope and make a mental note of which plants need pruning and which need more support. I prune, I apply some nitrogen rich compost, and I come back in a few days to observe again. I learn from my observations and I learn from my actions.

Observation is a cornerstone of yoga. We observe our breath. We observe our body. We bring conscious attention to our thoughts and allow them to pass through our awareness like leaves floating down a river. By observing closely we build our awareness.

We then engage the breath, mind, and body in various exercises and movements. The interactions lead to new observations in perfect interdependent co-arising. We feel greater well-being, samadhi, or connection to the divine.

#4 Sangha and community

Well-being is supported in community (sangha). In spite of a toxic dominant culture that tries its best to separate us and 2+ years of the covid experience, people found ways to connect and continue to create community. Yoga centers offered classes online, outdoors, or utilized other larger community spaces to accommodate mats being farther apart. The act of practicing together creates bonds between all beings present. The possibility of harmony emerges.

Mutual support is an essential aspect of successful permaculture communities and landscapes. From a permaculture perspective, we create the conditions needed for mutual support. We create a greywater system to disperse water to plants that need the water, plants who then filter the water to be clean enough to continue on in the water cycle. We create a salt-water brine to submerge green papaya in order to support the growth of Lactobacillus bacteria, who then ferment our raw papaya into tasty kimchi that improves the fortitude of our gut microbiome. We exist on this earth in a community of life.

Inclusive yoga spaces where people come together to practice creates communities of mutual support just like a plant guild of wild hops (nitrogen fixer and mulch), caña india (contour stabilizer), vetiver (erosion control), and pineapple (food crop). Thich Nhat Hahn said that the next Buddha will be a Sangha, a community. Perhaps that is a yoga community, or the permaculture community, or a synthesis of many communities.

#5 Skill in action

Yoga is skill in action. Permaculture is skill in action. Yoga is reunion. Permaculture is reunion in this 3D material reality.

What does social and environmental justice look like? What does healing look like? What does a healthy community and landscape look like? Drab concrete, hazy air, industrially processed food, and the pounding sound of heavy machinery? Or green spaces, fresh air, abundant fruit hanging off trees, and the song of birds and lively human conversation?

Both permaculture and yoga reckon with cultural appropriation, privilege, and the intersectional systemic injustice of our day. Both are attempting to bring forth ancient wisdom that differs from current societal norms. Both have immense potential to heal: individuals, communities, and the biosphere. Both are vehicles of transformation.

Stale, sterilized yoga practice in commercialized studios of the capitalistic west is not enough. Reunite with the divine AND local water, food, energy, and educational sovereignty. Activate your chakras AND your connection to the community of life. Put your head in the clouds AND your hands in the earth.

If you practice yoga, practice permaculture

All the “reasons” above are really all the same. A personal yoga practice can feed and nourish oneself to devote even greater energy into permaculture practices out in the world. An applied permaculture approach to one’s home and community creates opportunities for healing out in the world. The co-founder of the yoga studio I completed my yoga teacher training at often speaks about how important it is to take our yoga practice with us off of the mat. Bringing yoga into our everyday lives. I don’t know of a better systemized way to do that than through permaculture. If you practice yoga, practice permaculture.

Sources and notes:

1. Bhagavad-Gita

2. Skill in Action (Michelle Cassandra Johnson)

*Yoga means many things to many people. The yoga I’m writing about is the yoga I practice and study. Mostly Hatha-Raja yoga, with lineage through Lindsay and Bart of Global Breath in Durham, NC and their teacher Dharma Mittra in NYC

Want to Learn More About Permaculture?

Join us for one of our yearly Permaculture Design Certifications.

Check Out these past blog articles about permaculture

Why the World Would be a Better Place if Everyone Took a Permaculture Design Certification

Why you Should Take a Permaculture Design Certification course at Rancho Mastatal, Costa Rica

The Problem with Permaculture – Understanding Elements and Functions

Fermented Plant Juice (FPJ) and Its Application

Fermented Plant Juice (FPJ) and Its Application

By Connor Gilmartin, apprentice 2022

Earlier this year, I wrote a short article on preparing a garden amendment called Water Soluble Calcium (WCA). That short essay focused on how to make small batches of WCA in the comfort of your home using discarded eggshells and vinegar. Water Soluble Calcium is one of the five pillars of Korean Natural Farming (KNF). The remaining four recipes KNF methodology encourages us to utilize are Lactic Acid Bacteria (LAB), Fermented Plant Juice (FPJ), Oriental Herbal Nutrient (OHN) and Fish Amino Acid (FAA). Because this article won’t cover the remaining three ferments in-depth, I highly recommend looking into the University of Hawaii’s College of Tropical Agriculture’s papers on this subject. The authors of those articles do a great job at explaining the process of making and applying these homemade amendments. These KNF ferments we’re talking about have a symbiotic relationship with one another. Generally speaking, they serve your garden’s needs best in the presence of each other – especially when they’re used to inoculate biochar or indigenous microorganism (IMO) culture.

It’s worth mentioning the obvious here - everyone’s gardening environment is completely unique, and every soil system has different nutritional requirements. For the sake of brevity, it’s necessary to generalize a bit. If you’re interested in diving deeper into soil science and plant nutrient uptake, I would highly recommend Jeff Lowenfels’s books Teaming with Microbes and Teaming with Nutrients, as well as Steve Solomon’s The Intelligent Gardener. 

I chose to write my first article for Rancho Mastatal on Water Soluble Calcium simply because of the abundance of eggshells we have here, and our robust supply of homemade vinegars. While Calcium is an essential macronutrient in plant growth and fruit development, it is only one piece – albeit a very important piece - of the puzzle of plant nutrient uptake. So, with that being said, lets learn about another pillar of Korean Natural Farming, Fermented Plant Juice (FPJ).

“Growth is controlled not by the total amount of resources available, but by the scarcest resource.”

— Justus Von Liebig

Before we learn about FPJ’s, dynamic accumulators, and the fundamentals of fermentation, I want to ramble about Justus Von Liebig’s Law of the Minimum - a very important concept in regard to plant nutrient uptake. Liebig’s law states, “Growth is controlled not by the total amount of resources available, but by the scarcest resource.” This is particularly relevant when trying to rebalance minerals and macronutrients in your soil. In, Teaming with Nutrients, Jeff Lowenfels discusses the Law of the Minimum and writes, “plant growth is limited by the least abundant mineral, no matter how abundant the other minerals happen to be.” So, with that in mind, we can make more informed decisions when choosing how to fertilize our gardens.

Before we fertilize at all, a soil test is probably in order. The informed gardener understands that N-P-K listings on commercially available fertilizers only account for three of the seventeen elements necessary for plant life. Many of us have been tricked into thinking Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium are the only elements we need to consider when fertilizing our soil. This couldn’t be farther from the case, and has resulted in massive amounts of excess nutrients polluting our watersheds and harming aquatic life essential in maintaining Earth’s homeostasis. I am a firm believer in a balanced approach to gardening, and certainly don’t believe all bagged fertilizers and amendments are the devil’s work. There are amazing, conscious companies that specialize in producing ethically sourced organic fertilizers. I have purchased bulk earthworm castings, mycorrhizal inoculants, crustacean meals, bokashi grain blends, and many more amendments that did not come from my garden. Does this violate Albert Howards’s Law of Return? Certainly. I am importing ingredients from hundreds, maybe thousands of miles away into my garden’s soil. The very nature of gardening for consumption violates the law of return. This is okay – gardening is a dynamic process, yields can be achieved and measured in many ways. As Masanobu Fukuoka writes in One Straw Revolution,

“It doesn’t matter how the harvest will come out. Just sow seeds and care tenderly for the plants and soil… The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.”

— Masanobu Fukuoka

I learn something every season I germinate seeds. I feel an overwhelming sense of satisfaction and joy when I feed my plants a nutrient-rich tea, or spread a cover crop on a resting hugelmound. Maybe these more philosophical “yields” are really what I crave… Who am I kidding – I also want massive, nutrient-dense broccoli, that I can brag about – and share – with my neighbors. Point in case, there are many ways to address fertilization requirements in the garden. I’m not a devotee of any gardening guru, and I’m not advocating for any one specific strategy. I’m interested in holistic plant and soil stewardship that integrates many approaches.

Now, lets get down to business. FPJ’s are made using two simple ingredients. Chopped up biomass and brown sugar. There are a whole lot of plant species that can be used to make FPJ’s. I’ve used the young, vigorously growing tips of mugwort, comfrey, stinging nettle, wormwood, tulsi, and Mexican sunflower to name a few. I’ve also used unripe persimmons, pumpkins, and other fruits and vegetables to make Fermented Fruit Juice (FFJ).  There are a whole lot of individual plant species and combinations that experienced horticulturalists have found to be beneficial in their gardens. It’s been observed that certain plants have a tendency to accumulate one macronutrient more than others. In the Korean Natural Farming and biodynamic gardening community, these plants are generally referred to as, “dynamic accumulators.” The concept of dynamic accumulators is a bit contentious, and some people doubt the idea. To be fully transparent, I do not know enough to say with 100% certainty that certain plant species have an affinity to accumulate one macronutrient over the other. However, I’ve visited many extremely productive, beautiful garden spaces whose caretakers embrace this idea, and it certainly doesn’t seem to be hurting anything. I will leave this entirely up to you to decide for yourself. Horsetail (Lorim ipsum) is known to have a high concentration of silica in its stalky biomass. Bamboo shoot FPJ is known to contain high amounts of nitrogen. FfJ made from young, unripe fruit can contain high amounts of phosphorous. With mindful intervention, we can amplify the nutritional impact these biomasses have on our garden by utilizing the friendly yeasts and other microorganisms drifting about. By feeding the microorganisms that reside on the biomass of these plants organic brown sugar, we catalyze the process of fermentation. The weak alcohol that is produced by the yeast as they nibble on the sugar we’ve so graciously provided them extracts chlorophyl from the biomass and other ethanol-soluble compounds contained in the plants via the process of osmosis. These compounds are called phytochemicals. The following section will cover the materials needed and list the step-by-step process to produce and apply FPJ.

Materials

I’ll begin by listing the materials you’ll need to make a batch of Fermented Plant Juice (FPJ). They are as follows:

1. Glass jar or food-grade plastic container

2. A sharp, clean knife to chop up the biomass

3. Organic brown sugar

4. A breathable cloth to act as a “lid” (cheesecloth or nut milk bags work quite well)

How To Prepare a batch of FPJ

1. Collect plant material

   • It is ideal to harvest the biomass before sunrise. Cut the young, vigorously growing tips of your desired plant and store in a clean container

   • Harvesting before sunrise ensures the plants are in respiration-mode, not photosynthesis-mode

   • Avoid collecting biomass during or after a heavy rain event

2. Cut and weigh the plant material

   • Do not rinse collected plant parts, to conserve surface microorganisms

   • Record weight of biomass

3. Add brown sugar

   • 1:1 (brown sugar to biomass) ratio. If you have one pound of comfrey, put in one pound of brown sugar. Coat as much of the surface area of the plant material as possible to encourage the fermentation process

4. Pack the brown sugar-coated biomass into a fermentation vessel

   • Pack tightly

   • Attach breathable lid using string or a rubber band, depending on the size of the fermentation vessel

   • Store the covered container in a well-ventilated area away from light and extreme heat or cold

5. Check the container after 24 hours and adjust the volume if necessary

   • Your fermentation vessel should be no more than 2/3 full. If the container is too full, the microbes will not have enough air to properly ferment.

6. Let the contents ferment for 4 -7 days

   • You will know that fermentation is occurring when bubbles start to form in the liquid

   • Fermentation is complete when the plant material floats and the liquid settles at the bottom, there is a slightly alcoholic smell due to breakdown of chlorophyll and the liquid tastes sweet, not bitter. It is possible that the plant material doesn’t form a distinct layer in the solution, so these are loose guidelines – everyone’s fermentation environment is different. This process is heavily influenced by the ambient temperature of the environment you live in.

7. Strain the solution

   • Separate the plant material from the liquid

   • The spent biomass can be added to compost or mulched directly into your soil

8. Store the FPJ

   • Transfer FPJ into a clean ball jar or food grade plastic container

   • Cover with a loose lid - the microorganisms in the solution are very much alive and will continue to produce carbon dioxide as they consume leftover sugar. This could cause a jar to explode if the lid is on too tight.

How To apply FPJ

1. Dilute at a ratio of 1:500, 1:800 or 1:1,000. This translates to 4-8ml of FPJ per gallon of water. It’s powerful! You can always add more, you can never add less.

   • The dilution of 1:800 or 1:1,000 should be used if:

     • You’re applying a mixture of different amendments (ex. WCA + FPJ + FAA)

     • You’re applying FPJ in hot weather

2. FPJ can be applied as a soil drench (diluted in a in a watering can or other water dispersal system) or as a foliar spray. Apply the solution once a week or so, no more than once a week. Try and apply FPJ’s that were prepared using biomass that was collected at a similar stage of the plant’s growth cycle to the ones you’re feeding. For example, use a light dilution of young mugwort FPJ for young plants, and use an FFJ of unripe, green fruit when those plants are beginning to enter their reproductive stage of development.

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Korean Natural Farming is a dynamic process that requires familiarization with the unique terroir of your gardening environment. Just like baking sourdough or making kombucha, preparing KNF amendments might require some trial and error. I feel inclined to repeat – “dilution is the solution.” These ferments are highly concentrated. Apply wisely, consciously, and out of direct sunlight. Take your time, enjoy the process, and revel in the beneficial microorganisms you’re stewarding.

Learning how to prepare these ferments will not only add macronutrients to your soil system but will increase the bioavailability of preexisting nutrients in your soil. Gardening really boils down to being a soil steward, which basically means we’re ranching microorganisms. Imagine yourself as a benevolent god, feeding trillions of beneficial soil macro and microbiota for the betterment of the world. Your plants will thank you.

Happy gardening, mulch love.

Connor can be contacted via email with any questions or professional inquires (connorjgilmartin@gmail.com).

“I sometimes think that never blows so red
The rose as where some buried Caesar bled;
That every Hyacinth the garden wears
Dropt in her lap from some once lovely head”

— Omar Khayyam

Read these Past Blog Articles

Amending Calcium-Deficient Soils – A Tropical Permaculturist’s Approach

Nitrogen Fixing Trees (NFTs) at Rancho Mastatal

Using Mountain Microorganism to Create Organic Fertilizer

How to Make Your Own Homemade Soap

How to Make Your Own Homemade Soap

By core team member Ali Ostergard

Story has it that soap was discovered by the women of Mount Sapo, Italy as they were washing in the river and noticed lathery bubbles beginning to form. These bubbles began to form after a volcanic eruption dumped ash into the river that flowed over their ceremonial location where they sacrificed animals to the gods. The combination of ash, animal fats, and water created the lather and bubbles, and what today we know as soap.

Soap, despite what you read on the back of a box of generic soap, is formed by three simple ingredients: sodium hydroxide (lye), fatty acids, and water. So for the town of Mount Sapo the volcanic eruption created ash, which contains sodium hydroxide, which fell into the waters of the river, which then flowed over the ceremonial areas that contained animal fats, the fatty acids, and once these elements all combined they reacted to create a simple soap.

Obviously as time progressed we modified and perfected this soap process and the ingredients. None the less, the process of soap making is still very simple and accessible to every household. If you use soap, which I sure hope you do, there is no reason to not be making it yourself.

WHY MAKE YOUR OWN SOAP

For us here at the Ranch we have three primary reasons for making our own soap, both body and dish.

• Environmental: Creating your own soap allows you to assure it contains only biodegradable ingredients that aren’t harmful for the environment (especially important if you are using your grey-water to irrigate crops). Also, by making your own soap products you can reduce or even eliminate the packaging waste that comes along with store bought products. Think, everyone says, ‘oh I only use one shampoo bottle a year,’ times that by the millions that do, you end up with a lot of plastic bottles in landfills. Where if you make your own, you can reuse that bottle and reduce your waste.

• Personal Health: Did you know that cosmetic companies and products outside the E.U. are not fully regulated by any health department? The rule is the ingredient needs to be proven harmful before it will be taken off the shelf, rather than proven safe before being put on the shelf. What company do you think is going to prove their product harmful…? When you look at the ingredients on the back of any cosmetic product, including soaps, the list is very long and full of words that can barely be pronounced. Our skin is our largest organ, and absorbs what we put on it, so does it seem healthy to be lathering up in something that contains Dimethicone 200/50, Disodium Edta, Stearoxytrimethylsilane, etc… every day? By making your own soap, you can insure the ingredients going into it are safe.

• Be a Producer Not a Consumer: Not only is there immense satisfaction in making your own soap and products, but you are moving away from relying on outside sources for your basic needs. We are big believers in this here at the Ranch, not just with soap, but with building your own home, growing your own food, and if you can’t do it then supporting your neighbor that can. Check out our workshops that will help you begin learning how to do more of these basic skills.

WHAT IS SOAP

Soap as mentioned earlier, is made up of our three simple ingredients (lye, fat, water), that when combined go through a chemical reaction called saponification. There is some basic chemistry that happens here, that I’m not going to go into too much, but basically the process of saponification is the reaction that occurs when our lye water is combined with the fatty acids, and this process creates soap.

A soap molecule is made up of a hydrophobic end (water repelling) and a hydrophilic end (water loving). The hydrophobic end grabs onto the dirt and grime, and the hydrophilic end grabs onto the water and washes that dirt away.

Soap is not naturally antibacterial. It simply works by washing away the dirt, bacteria, etc off the surface. There is a lot of new studies to suggest that antibacterial soaps are causing more harm than good, and are really unnecessary outside a hospital setting. You can do your research on this topic.

MAKING YOUR OWN SOAP

Here at the Ranch we have been making our own body and dish soaps since the beginning. This skill is something we teach to our apprentices, school groups, and in our Permaculture Design Course. We truly believe it is something that everyone can do!

Equipment

• Digital scale (accuracy is important)

• Thermometer

• Stainless steel or glass bowls

• Emersion blender (you can do this by hand, but depending on the oils you use this step could take a while)

• Spatula

• Soap mold

• Eye and hand protection (glasses and gloves)

Ingredients

• Sodium Hydroxide (also known as lye)

• Fatty acids (almost any oil can be used, this is where you can be creative)

• Water

• Additives: salt, exfoliants like oats or coffee grounds, essential oils, milk, honey, clay, pigments, dried flowers, etc…

Fatty Acids or Oils

You can use a variety of different oils to make your soap; the important thing to note is that each oil has a different amount of lye needed for saponification to happen. I’m going to give the recipes we use for our bar and dish soap using the oils we use, but if you are to use different oils, you will need to change the recipe. There are good online recipe calculators; one we use often is thesoapcalculator.com.

A quick note on the oils we use and why, because that also goes into our ethics as an organization and meeting those when making soap.

• Lard: lard makes an excellent soap; it creates a lathery, creamy, and hard soap. But, we mainly use lard because it is produced locally in the next town, we get the second rounds of lard that have already been used in the restaurants, meaning we are using a byproduct that would usually just be thrown out. Some people find this gross, but I find it super amazing! You are taking a product that would be thrown out and making it into something useful again. AMAZING! Food for thought, check out our blog about lard and why we are big fans.

• Palm oil: this very controversial oil is also great in soap making. Why we use it? Again it is produced locally down the road, somewhere that isn’t contributing to new deforestation. Of all the vegetable oils, palm oil is the most productive and yielding. If you are going to deem palm oil bad, I would ask yourself what about coconut oil, sunflower oil, soy oil, or any mono culture crop that is essentially grown and produced in the same way.

• Coconut oil: also produced locally, we get ours from a small family operation. We don’t put this in our dish soap, as it is much more expensive to use on such a large scale (we go through a lot of soap).

We get all these oils in reusable containers that we send back to be refilled, reducing our waste.

The list of oils you can use is large, pretty much anything that is considered a fatty acid can be used. I would encourage you to find a local oil source.

Short list of oils that can be used: avocado, canola, vegetable, olive, cacao butter, shea butter…

Recipes:

Bar Soap

188 grams coconut oil

375 grams lard

188 grams palm oil

188 grams water

108 grams lye

1 tsp. salt

Dish Soap

500 grams lard

500 grams palm oil

300 grams water

137 grams lye

1 tsp. salt

Instructions

1. Measure out all your ingredients into separate containers.

2. Heat your oils to between 110-130 degrees Fahrenheit.

3. Add the salt to the water and then add the lye to the water, stirring constantly to make sure it doesn’t stick on the bottom. Lye is very caustic and will burn if it gets on your skin. Wearing eye protection and gloves is recommended. The lye water solution will heat up quickly and begin off gassing, so keep your head away from directly over the bowl and do this in a ventilated area. You need to cool the lye water solution down to between 110-130 degrees Fahrenheit.

4. You want your oil and lye water to be at the same temperatures. Once they are both within a few degrees of each other (between 110-130 degrees Fahrenheit), pour the lye water into the oil and stir.

5. Using the emersion blender begin slowly blending this solution, being careful not to splatter the mix on your skin or in your eyes.

6. You are now looking to get the solution to a light trace. Meaning when you drizzle some on the surface the lines are visible on the surface.

7. Once you have reached a light trace you can then pour the mix into your molds.

8. Wait 48 hours to pop your soap out of the mold.

9. Place in a ventilated area and let it cure for minimum 3 weeks before using.

This version of soap making is called ‘cold process’, there is also a ‘hot process’ that involves slow cooking the ingredients which speeds up the saponification and curing time. To make liquid soap is another process and uses potassium hydroxide.

You can get super fancy and add fragrances, put in additives, and make pretty designs. I would do a couple simple batches before advancing to these. But in no time you will have perfected the process and be ready to make some gorgeous, sustainable, and luxurious soap.

Soap and permaculture go hand in hand. Making our own soap meets our environmental and sustainable goals, and beginning to do things for ourselves instead of relying on the big companies. Join us for one of our Permaculture Design Courses where we will have a class on soap making along with natural building, fermentation, soil building, and more.

Happy soap making!

The Problem with Permaculture – Understanding Elements and Functions

The Problem with Permaculture – Understanding Elements and Functions

By core team member, Nic Donati

DISCLAIMER. It is important to understand that Rancho Mastatal is by no means perfect. In fact much of what we have learnt has been the hard way, through many failures. I also don’t believe we are alone in making these sometimes questionable decisions. It is mainly for this reason that I feel compelled to try write this article and clarify some of the processes and ideas that are so often misunderstood, misrepresented and incorrectly applied in Permaculture. The goal of this article is not to criticize people for what they are doing, but merely to offer insight into the processes which will (hopefully!) lead to success and to learn from some of our failures (and of course successes!).

How often have you heard someone say “oh yeah we have a permaculture farm or garden because we have a [insert permaculture cliché element]”.  They believe their project is permaculture based because it has some of the elements that are usually used as examples, such as composting or they have chickens, maybe a herb spiral or a rainwater catchment system? 

I hear it all the time – the idea that somehow permaculture is a catalogue of elements and we have to use them in order for it to be permaculture.  Herein lies the problem with permaculture… or as I would say the misunderstanding of what permaculture is.

These systems are all great systems and have proven success when used in the right context. Often they are used as examples in permaculture, as they do function very well in a number of contexts, have broad spectrum applicability and are relatively easy to install.

So why aren’t THEY permaculture, why am I saying that those elements are not permaculture if they work?

Well the simple answer is that permaculture is not a pre assigned group of elements; permaculture is a design methodology that helps you navigate through the myriad of options and select the elements that are going to provide the functions and outputs you desire.

Ok are you lost or confused? Let me break it down into examples of what I mean, I will give real world examples in order to help us understand what I mean by elements, functions, inputs and outputs.

The first thing we need to understand is what our context is and what our goals are.  This will help us establish what functions we want to achieve and will help us understand what elements we might want to use in order to achieve these functions.

Establishing Context

What do I mean by establishing our context? Firstly we need to understand where we are and in order to do this we need to look at four main areas.  We often do a lot of these types of assessment intuitively with or without realizing, but it is helpful to try and articulate your context so that you can refer to them again in the future. For further reading refer to Alan Savory’s work on holistic management.

Social

The first thing to establish is who are we talking about? Is it you on your own, you and a partner, a family, a community of people, etc…? This will be important as it will probably affect a number of the other categories, like legal issues and potentially your resource base.

Ecological

The next part of establishing your context is assessing your geographical location, weather patterns, climate, landform, water access, etc… This is going to affect many things, including what is possible to grow, how long your growing season is, establishing heating and cooling needs for a house, etc…

I will give you this example as it is pretty commonly brought up to me.  Someone has decided that they want a particular element – in this case a cob house.  My first question always is “where do you live?” - this is establishing context. In this scenario they live in a climate where building a cob house is quite literally insane and illegal! Cob is a very poor insulator and in many scenarios will not meet any environmental standards for insulation as defined by many temperate zone building codes. My second question is “why do you want a cob house?” – establishing the goal. Often their response is something to do with wanting a curvy naturally built structure (a goal).  Obviously this person has fallen into the trap of deciding on an element (a cob house) without succinctly establishing their context or goals. 

In this scenario, through asking questions we can begin to get to the core of why someone wants this specific element, what goals do they have and also what the function is (we want our house to be warm and comfortable, a poorly insulated house will not achieve that, at least not easily).  At this point knowing their context and goals there is already a perfectly good, established design solution, it is called strawbale. Stawbale building has excellent insulative properties that meet the most stringent of building codes, it is a natural material and with some additions of clay and straw plasters can be made curvy and round or whatever your heart desires.

Legal

We need to establish our legal context, for instance are we in a rural, urban or suburban setting or somewhere else, this is going to affect what we can do in terms of space and also what we are legally allowed to do. For instance in urban settings there may be prescribed methods of how to deal with sewage, like you have to connect to the municipal sewage system if it available. Whereas if you are in a rural setting you are able to legally decide which type of sewage treatment system you would like to use. Now I’m talking about your legal context here and of course where you are located (not just within a country but in different countries is going to affect the rules).  This also might affect if you will have space to do certain things.  There is no point establishing a goal of producing all of your own dairy if you live in an apartment and only have access to a balcony.  In many urban areas there are rules about animal ownership not to mention the practicalities! Seems obvious right? Well of course I am using examples that have obvious outcomes, it gets more complicated and the practicalities (the inputs) can become either harder to define or more difficult to predict. 

We will also need to consider any other legal ramifications of our endeavor like labor laws for business, or taxes, whether that river that runs through your property is legally available or if you can cut down trees? These are all things which will dictate what you can or can’t do if we want to stick to the confines of the law.

Resource base

What resources we have available (time, money, energy, labor, etc…) is going to massively influence what is achievable.  Like it or not our resource base is a critical factor when establishing our context and being realistic about this is going to be important in the success of any project. 

A common theme I here is that people maybe don’t have the labor resource pool that is needed to achieve a particular goal so they are going to start a volunteer program in order to provide the labor. Again, this is a backward approach, you are setting a goal that is only achievable if a whole new program is designed and implemented.  The inputs involved in managing people is huge and often overlooked, the structures required in order to successfully implement a volunteer program is vast especially if you want them to do what you want them to do as opposed to what they want to do.  Read our article about running a successful internship program here.

Goal Setting

Now that we have more or less outlined out context we want to establish some goals for ourselves. There are many goal setting methods and techniques; the important thing to try and distill down is what is the underlying goal that you are hoping to achieve.

Let’s look at one of the examples that we used already, the desire to build a cob house.  At this stage we should try and distill out the essence of the goal, let’s go through that process so that we can look at the functions and then identify the element.

GOAL: Build a Cob House

Let’s start with build: do we want to build it, do we have the resources to pay someone else to do it? Does it need to be a cob house? Can it be a natural material that also allows artistic freedom? Most importantly we want to have a house that is beautiful and functional, and as we discussed before we need a well-insulated house (if we live in a temperate climate).  So maybe we can redefine our goal as something like this:

GOAL: To have a beautiful, functional and natural home.

Once we have distilled out our goal we can identify the functions that we want. Here is an example:

• Home – somewhere that provides shelter for us primarily but is comfy and cozy

• Beauty – something well designed with art built into the structure through sculpture and curves

• Functional – well insulated and resistant to the climate, low maintenance

• Natural – using materials that are local and have lower amounts of processing or low carbon footprint

Now that we have identified our functions we can begin to research our elements that meet these functions, this is the fun stage. This involves reading, researching online, sketching etc… soon we will settle upon our element that will provide all (or most) of our functions and meet our goal that makes sense within our context.  This is good design; this is the methodology that a permaculturalist will employ.

Students in our Permaculture Design Course presenting their projects

I hope that you can see the difference in the methodology. One is looking at the goal and deciding from there what element we should use, and one is accumulating elements because we think they are a good idea without going through a design process.

We often innately do some of this process.  It is much easier to do this process within the realms of things that we already know well and understand.  As a natural builder it is much easier for me to distill out the goal and the functions within natural building as I am very familiar with a lot of the variables and a lot of the options.  If you are new to this, there are obviously endless options and opportunities.  I would recommend taking a permaculture design certification (read here why should take one at Rancho Mastatal).  This will help contextualize lots of your goals and ideas. A PDC will give you the opportunity to talk about your ideas with other people so you can cross pollinate and create wonderful new schemes and plans.

To summarize the problem with permaculture, it is the misunderstanding of the design process not with the design process itself, although there are many people who are always working to improve the design process too.  Here is a nice little diagram that was created by AppleSeed Permaculture that nicely summarizes the design process.

Hope you enjoyed my theory on this topic.

Join us for one of our two yearly Permaculture Design Courses to learn more about the topic and get inspired!

Why the World Would be a Better Place if Everyone Took a Permaculture Design Certification

Why the World Would be a Better Place if Everyone Took a Permaculture Design Certification

By core team member, Nic Donati

What is Permaculture

Permaculture is a methodology of thinking about, designing and creating environments that are regenerative from an environmental perspective and functional from a human perspective. 

So, what does that actually mean? Let’s look at some specific examples, as often we struggle to take the theoretical to the practical.

Permaculture can be applied in pretty much any context, although historically it has most commonly been used in agriculture.  So let’s start there. 

Permaculture in Agriculture

In agriculture the goal is to grow food and in most cases create an income or profit for farmers. As a permaculturalist we can look at the system of agriculture, look how we can grow food (the goal), and design and create environments that are regenerative for the planet and functional for humans. In the context of agriculture we want to grow food that is going to regenerate our environment as well as create income and food for humans. This is the design problem and now we have to come up with solutions for this.

What is important is that as permaculturalists we put the needs of our environment and the needs of humans on the same level. In the past we have not considered the needs of the planet and that has led to deforestation, desertification, loss of biodiversity etc… this has met our goal (at least in the short term) of providing food and income for humans, but has woefully overlooked creating a model that is at the least sustainable (can continue in perpetuity) and at best regenerative (actually improve the environment e.g. soil quality, water quality, biodiversity etc…).

In permaculture we are interested in creating design solutions that meet both the needs of our environment and our human needs.  Some of the design solutions that have been developed since the inception of permaculture have been to create more regenerative farming practices.  These have often drawn upon and been inspired by traditional methods of agriculture, for example using polycultures (the use of many species in one area as opposed to whole fields of one crop, known as a mono crop), crop rotations that benefit one another, multi-story agroforestry systems (also types of polycultures), syntropic agriculture, green manures & cover crops etc…. These systems are seen as potential design solutions as they have the potential to produce food, profit and regenerate the land.

Going back to the beginning we can see that from a permaculture perspective what we have done is taken something like agriculture and redefined the goals of it, in order to create a different outcome. We have changed the goals of agriculture from simply growing food and creating profit, to growing food, creating profit AND regenerating the land.

Defining Goals in Permaculture Design

This is a really important concept that we will learn more about - clearly defining your goals.  Many of the problems that we see around the world are created by having poorly defined goals or inadequately inclusive goals.  Our first step is to think through what our goals and context are in order to get the outcomes that we want.  At this point it is worth mentioning that within permaculture we already have some defined ethics and principles (you can read more about them here and how we apply them) that can help us guide our goals.  The original three core ethics are:

• Earth Care

• People Care

• Fair Share

Defining our Goals in Agriculture

We have outlined that in the past we prioritized people care (or at least we thought we were) and now we have added in an earth care goal by wanting to regenerate the land too.  Maybe we should also include a fair share element into our goals for agriculture? 

As with any exercise to find design solutions, there are usually many different ways to achieve it.  I am sure if people sit down and think about it we can come up with some good design solutions to implement our fair share goal in our agricultural model. One of the most obvious to me is making sure that farmers are getting paid a fair price for their production and that at the very least surplus from production is distributed to people who need it most through food banks, shelters, etc…  Write in the comments below some of your ideas for creating fair share within agriculture. 

How we can Meet our goals?

We buy all our beans from local farmers. Here is Chepo winnowing his harvest.

Now that we have identified how we want to shift the current agricultural paradigm, we have to implement our design solutions in a real world context… But, how?  This is of course is the hardest part, its one thing to come up with an idea and another to actually go out there and do it.  There are so many people who are working on this and so many different ways that these goals can be achieved.  Our first step should be to research this market. Is anyone already doing this? How have they identified and articulated their goals? What are their solutions? Can we help them, work with them, collaborate or just support them by buying their products?  If we can’t find anyone that is filling this niche then maybe this is an opportunity for us to fill it?  Do we want to get into this market and start a business?

Maybe we identify through our research and based on our skills and context that we would be better off getting involved in the political realm. Classically we have relied upon government and law makers to impose rules and regulations on industry and commerce to shift practices.  Can we advocate for the change we want to see? Can we be the change makers?  One option could be to get into politics or join an advocacy group in order to make political changes that you believe in.

So, without a large career change what can we do? As individuals we have a lot of power even if we decide this is not what we want to throw ourselves into full time or for a living, we can still effect change more subtly.  After all every time we spend money we are supporting one organization vs another. We can be diligent to make sure we know where our food is coming from and if they are producers that are supporting our paradigm shift or not.  We will talk extensively about some of these issues and solutions in our Permaculture Design Certification (PDC).

We have looked at how we can take our definition of permaculture and practically apply it to agriculture and we have even looked at how we might go about implementing these changes that we want to see happen. 

Social Permaculture

As I said before permaculture can be pretty much applied in any context and there is increasingly a body of work within social permaculture.  Social permaculture is using these same basic ethics and principles that we mentioned above, but rather than applying them to the physical environment we are applying them to our social organizations. 

As we talked about before let’s look at the classic business model of a Public Limited Company (PLC) or in the US its known as a Corporation. Essentially the goals of these companies are again centered on profit and distribution of profit to shareholders.  We have seen over history that when the explicit goals of a business are to generate profit and to distribute it to shareholders, that is what they are going to do right, as that is their goal.

In social permaculture we are again interested in looking at business and defining their goals and objectives to include our three core ethics.  We can then redefine the goals of our businesses to generate profit, regenerate the planet and fairly distribute surplus. 

Let’s again use a practical example of how we can use permaculture design to redefine the goals in order to get the outcome we desire.

For example, let’s use a clothing company as a business that we are going to redefine the goals of so that they are using our 3 core ethics. Here are some ways that we might do this:

• People Care – pays a fair living wage to its employees, maybe it’s a co-op? Maybe it uses a sociocratic model of governance.

• Earth care – sources materials that are compostable and/or grown regeneratively, repairs old clothes so they don’t get thrown away, recycles old clothes.

• Fair Share - gives clothes that are no longer in fashion (or the season has changed) to people who need them the most or donates them to charity.  It could also be an employee co-operative that distribute profits to the people who work there too.

There are many ways in which we could imagine these ethics working for a business and many businesses are now starting to employ more of these ideas into their goals and objectives. The two most commonly used terms in business trying to do this work are - social enterprises and B-Corporations.  These sorts of organizations are actively trying to change the way their organizational goals are structured in order to include some of the ethics we have outlined.

We have looked at what permaculture is and how we can apply permaculture in different contexts.  Hopefully you can see that many of our problems that we face in the world are due to having either insufficient or poorly defined goals.  Once we redefine these, we can begin to think about how we can design and create solutions.

How do You Study Permaculture?

Like any other topic you can learn a lot by reading books and studying the literature.  Everyone learns in different ways and learning from text books is not necessarily everyone’s idea of fun!  You could study in a practical way by working somewhere and looking at the designs people have created to solve their challenges. After reading this article I hope that everyone can begin to look at why problems are created and how we can redefine or clearly state our goals in order to try and change to a more desirable outcome.

Students practicing using the A-frame during our PDC

Rancho Mastatal offers two Permaculture Design Certifications (PDC) a year, one in the November/December and one in April. In this course we go through many of the different design challenges we face as individuals and as a larger society and look at methods and techniques that have been identified to tackle these. 

The PDC is very much focused on creating design solutions in a practical way, using the Ranch as a living example we will frequently walk around and see how we have created solutions for design challenges in our context.  As I have done in this article it is often important to not just outline the problems and solutions, but actually see how they have been applied.  Remember though context is key, the design solution for one place may not necessarily be the design solution for another place, so once we have established our goals and context we can begin to research and implement solutions.

The secret to humans’ success has been our ability to learn very quickly from one another. Our social learning abilities far outstrip that of our primate cousins and it is this innate ability to learn from others which is so crucial to our ecological success (which has also caused its own problems!). 

We are big believers in harnessing this innate ability of humans to pass on our knowledge and experiences to you, so that you don’t have to learn it all by yourself, let us help you accelerate your learning. 

You could also volunteer, although you are unlikely to receive the theoretical underpinnings that are important to gain context in different situations. At the Ranch we do offer a short two month internship however, we do not generally include the permaculture theory. You may do lots of activities that are associated with some of the ways we have designed our solutions, but getting the balance in this type of context is going to be difficult and will rely on you doing the leg work and reading in the background.

We offer a one year apprenticeship where all of this is covered. We teach all of the PDC modules to our apprentices and they receive plenty of practical opportunities to practice and apply these ideas. This is undoubtedly the best way to study permaculture, but not everyone can join us for a year and we recognize that.

Is a Permaculture Design Certification Worth it?

As I have said above, it may feel like a large investment for you, but in the context of the experience, we think it is worth the investment.  You can definitely study all of these concepts in a book or online and you will learn a lot, especially if you are the type of person who retains information well after reading it. If you are more of a visual person, maybe watching YouTube videos will be your study tool.

We are big believer in first learning about something and then applying it and/or doing it, which is why there is plenty of opportunity in our course to practice what you have learnt through practical workshops.  There is also time allotted to the design challenge, you will work in small groups to design solutions for the goals and objectives of your clients.  This will reinforce the ideas of identifying goals and context and then designing solutions for them.  You will get feedback on your designs and ideas during the final presentations that will act as the capstone project for the course. 

During the 14 days you will be studying permaculture with a group of people all interested in the same topic, you will also find this incredibly motivating and inspiring, not just the content of the lectures and practicals, but the holistic learning environment. 

What do I mean by a holistic learning environment? We specialize in educational workshops here and over many years have learnt a lot about the best way to teach and inspire people.  We have created a schedule and environment during the PDC that we believe maximizes your experience.  Your time is a balance of practical and theoretical classes, small group work and plenty of time to study in our extensive library of thousands of books. There will be community sharing opportunities, so you can learn from your fellow students. When you are not actively learning there will be time to regenerate your energy by playing sports or doing yoga, trips to the river and waterfall, walks in the jungle or through our small community of Mastatal and be fully immersed in what we believe is a little bit of paradise.

Ultimately everyone has to decide for themselves how and where they want to invest their time and money, but we think the world would be a much better place if everyone took a permaculture design certificate course.

What is Wrong with Permaculture?

Permaculture is a methodology, so often times the things that people criticize permaculture for is not actually the methodology, but it’s the way in which people have used or applied this methodology that is the problem, not the methodology itself.  Read more:

Having said that one of the biggest “problems” with the methodology is the lack of a good decision making tool.  Now plenty of decision making tools have been developed and are frequently used within a permaculture methodology, but there is not an explicit permaculture decision making tool. 

Why is this important? As we have discussed there are usually many different ways to approach and solve a problem and having a handy dandy decision making protocol would help weigh one solution over another.  At the end of the day though decision making is a hard thing to develop tools for as they are based very much on the assumption that you know the different outcomes for each decision, but as the old adage goes - you don’t know what you don’t know. So whilst decision making tools can be helpful they are implicitly biased towards what you know about the solutions.  This is always going to be tricky to overcome as we have said because it’s impossible to predict outcomes if we don’t know that they may happen.  Even if we have researched that topic extensively it is still possible that we will overlook things, or attribute more weight to one thing over another incorrectly.  Ultimately many of these things come down to experience, and being able to revisit the design process, aggregating problems as they occur and revisiting the goals and context and seeing how this may change the design solution.  Confirmation bias can then play a large role here as we tend to favor information that confirms our beliefs even if from an outside (objective) view one can see that this design solution is not working.  We see this sort of bias all the time in current paradigms that have been established although arguably this is less confirmation bias and more self-serving, short term decision making!

can we change the world with permaculture?

We think we can! With a good understanding of the design process and goal setting we think many areas of the world could be improved upon by looking at them through a permaculture lense.

How are you going to begin learning and getting experience in permaculture design?

A good start is keeping up to date with our blog articles that often discuss this theory and practical ways we are implenting designs around here.

And of course, joining us for our Permaculture Design Certification is a great way to get inspired, meet other like minded individuals, and have a beautiful experience.

Read other related articles

Revisión giraldística. Permacultura. Por qué Rancho Mastatal

Applied Permaculture Principles

Why Permaculture?

Why You Should Take a Permaculture Design Certification at Rancho Mastatal, Costa Rica

Why You Should Take a Permaculture Design Certification course at Rancho Mastatal, Costa Rica

By core team member, Nic Donati

The Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) is a 14 day fully immersive, hands on, inspirational workshop.  This course introduces you to all the major areas that we work in at Rancho Mastatal. We provide context for where we live, outline the specific goals and objectives that we are trying to achieve, while displaying excellent examples of different designs and elements. Read more here about Why the World would be a Better Place if Everyone took a PDC.  The PDC is a foundational course that provides you with an overview of the permaculture toolkit, which includes the methodologies, the principles and ethics of permaculture and the ways that one can apply them.

There are not many places in the world that offer such a diverse number of examples of applied permaculture principles and ethics in practice as you will find at Rancho Mastatal. 

Bordering one of Costa Rica’s national parks, La Cangreja, we are surrounded by nature, biodiversity and abundance, providing the perfect learning environment for permaculture. One of the core themes in permaculture is to use natural ecological patterns as a template for the systems you design.  It also provides an inspirational environment to immerse yourself in, as you can swim in the clear waters of our private waterfall, enjoy the natural surroundings and jungle life.

Rancho Mastatal was established in 2001, we have had lots of experience designing, implementing, evaluating and managing systems.  This gives us the perfect platform to pass on this information to you and give you context as to why we have done certain things, why something’s didn’t work and others have been more successful.  We have made plenty of mistakes over the years and we would love to share our experience with you of all of the success and failures so that you can accelerate your learning.

Rancho Mastatal is an established intentional community that manages the land using intelligent ecological design. We have over 200 acres of property that is at the disposal of students to explore during their time here.

We are one of the longest continually operating permaculture education centers in the world and not only do we provide a fantastic educational experience for all of our students we have always operated as a self-sustaining business.  Apart from the initial seed money that was borrowed to purchase the land, all of the developments that have been made on the land have been funded through our own work, we do not rely on donors or wealthy benefactors and having slowly paid back the money borrowed to purchase the land. We are completely debt free and financially independent.  We act as a model of developing a self-sustaining business, that uses permaculture ethics and principles to formulate our goals and objectives (read more about that here). 

This is a really important element to us, through taking our workshops you support all of our work which includes community development, scholarship programs and all of the other ethical practices we employ in order to create a just and equitable system. You can learn a little more about our efforts by exploring our website and during our PDC.

In a practical sense you will also learn about many of the different systems we have implemented over the years and the systems that have proven to be the most resilient are still in use today.  We will look at the design methodologies for deciding on our systems and then we will look at the detail of how these systems work and how you can effectively manage them.

A loaded jackfruit tree

Food Forests

We have a large diverse food forest on our property that incorporates hundreds of species of fruit and nut trees that we use for food, medicine, building materials, natural habitat, soil building, erosion control and so much more.  Our food forest is designed to imitate our natural rainforest environment, using species that have evolved in our climate or similar ones.  The food forest acts as a wonderful learning tool for students to walk through and see how you could create one yourself.  We also have other examples of agroforestry systems, including alley cropping, riparian buffers and a syntropic site.

Organic Gardens

We have a small organic garden near our main house, where we have raised beds and many perennial food crops (read more: Tropical Agriculture Blogs) that we have collected from around the world, that provide an abundance of cooking green, salads and other delicacies.  Our gardens are focused on growing crops appropriate to our harsh tropical climate and we don’t grow very many temperate climate annuals.

A beautiful jar of fermented veggies

Food and Fermentation

Food nourishes us and forms the heart of our community. Understanding where it comes from, how it is grown, and who has grown it helps us value our food in a way that we have lost in the modern era (read more: Eating Local: Reconnecting To Food).  We will spend time talking about how we source our food, how we support local farmers, how we ferment foods for increased storage life and health benefits, and how we focus on developing a culinary experience that is based on local tropical foods rather than imported foods .  We will have a hands on session to create delicious fermented treats that we will get to taste during your time at the Ranch. Read more: Farm to Table Blogs

Intentional community

The Ranch is not only a permanent intentional community for our core team members it also acts as year-long community for our apprentices.  Each year we take on 5-7 apprentices to live with us. They learn about communal living, permaculture design, natural building and so much more, it is like a long Permaculture Design Certification!  We have developed many structures in our community to help it function effectively and we will be sharing some of these strategies with you to help you on your journey.  Things that we use and we will be teaching during the PDC, are Non Violent Communication (NVC), decision making protocols and systems, and our governance structure amongst other things.  We will spend an entire day looking at how we can form communities in a general sense.  These can be applied in many different areas not just intentional communities, but amongst friend groups, families and businesses. Read more: Communal Living Blogs

Water Management

We will look at the different water management strategies that we have in place on our land, to retain water in the landscape. Examples of systems we use are soil building techniques to increase moisture retention, swales to slow, spread and sink water, contour planting and dead barriers to slow the flow of water and prevent erosion amongst others. We will see how these systems work and practice their application.

Transforming “Waste” into Humaure

Waste Management

Our waste management strategies are diverse and numerous and showcase a number of different systems which can be used in any context. We have 11 composting toilets and one biodigestor that produces methane to cook with. These systems manage all of our human waste. We use several different greywater systems to manage shower, sink and laundry water including banana circles and a branched drain system. We compost all of our kitchen waste in a simple to understand composting system and use composting worms to create compost for the front gardens and make vermicompost teas.  We also make our own dish soap and bar soap for use by everyone.  We will do a practical soap making workshop during the class. On top of these systems, we make a concerted effort to reduce or simply not make waste (trash, single use plastics, etc…) by buying food in bulk and without packaging, making our own beverages in reusable bottles, fermenting in reusable vessels and more.  

Soil Building & Fertility strategies

Soil building is essential for plant growth and moisture retention amongst other things (Read more: Improving Soils in the Humid Tropics).  Our primary goal is to hold water in our soil and build the soils fertility. We are not blessed with deep top soils and the role of our soil building activities is crucial. We use many different Nitrogen Fixing Species on the property to help build and protect soil, often in combination with some of our water management strategies. We will look at our Mountain/Indigenous microorganism collection and the brewing and application of this system. We will also look at how we make compost and vermicompost tea and how we use some Korean Natural Farming techniques.

Natural Building

We have without doubt some of the best examples of natural building in the world on display, using bamboo, earth, timber framing, earthen floors, Tadelakt, polished lime and clay plasters, clay carving and sculpting, natural paints and so much more!  We will also talk about design and walk around our extensive campus looking and talking about different techniques and get an opportunity to get our hands and feet dirty.

Appropriate technology

We have always strived to incorporate the “right” type of technologies into our repertoire.  We are trying to develop tools that are genuinely going to improve productivity, rather than technology for the sake of it.  We have wonderful examples of technologies that we think are accessible and simple for others to implement.  Some of our favorites include the efficient wood burning stoves for cooking, solar dehydrators, earthen pizza oven, composting toilets, biodigestors, solar hot water, composting tubes for slow cooking, wonderbags/hayboxes for keeping food warm and many more.  We will have a session about appropriate technologies (read more: Appropriate Technology Blogs) and renewable energy during our PDC.  If there are specific things you are interested in make sure to ask us as we have experimented with many different technologies over the years.

Jorge Salazar - PDC instructor

Community support & inclusion

We have always endeavored to support our community as best we can and over the years we have been involved in many community projects.  We have helped raise money to build a community library, build many additions to the primary school and high school, work on the community center, cemetery, church and football field.  We have run classes in the primary school and high school in art, music and English to supplement the work of the underfunded rural schools.  More recently we have been focusing our work on developing scholarship funds for our workshops and developing Spanish workshops with very accessible prices for the local people of Costa Rica and Central America.  We have also been incredibly lucky that some of the community leaders have also begun to develop business that we can actively support; we work a lot of the Iguana Chocolate, Finca Siempre Verde and KIS botanicals who provide fantastic local guiding, tour and workshop services for guests and workshop participants.  We have endeavored to include these local leaders in our permaculture design course, including family from La Iguana Chocolate and the founders of KIS botanicals to teach several modules in our Permaculture Design Certification.

Why Us?

We believe that we have developed not only a fantastic and inclusive permaculture course, but that it is based on our many years of experience living on the land. The Ranch is unique in its breadth of different permaculture systems that take many years to cultivate. 

By joining us for our Permaculture Design Certification course you will not only be learning about the systems that we have in place and the methodologies of design, but also about how to successfully run a business based on permaculture ethics and about a project firmly embedded in the local community.

We hope to have you join us for one of our two yearly Permaculture Design Courses. Stay tuned to our workshop calendar for dates!

Book Recommendations and Reviews #3

by Tim O’Hara

Due to the unique circumstances of the past two plus years, I never seemed to find the time to write what I hoped would be a yearly blog on the books that I read.  The two times that I’ve done this in the past we were stateside visiting family, with a bit more time to dedicate to catching up on what seems to be an ever growing list of “books to read”.  With travel plans all over the board since COVID became a common part of life, we were only able to make 2 much quicker than normal trips back to see our loved ones in the US.  Nevertheless, I’ve been able to squeeze in some solid educational, inspirational and informative reads that I’d like to quickly review for those of you out there that appreciate personal reading suggestions.  I’ll try to include as many of the books that I’ve read since the last time I shared my recommendations though I may miss a few as it’s been a while.  I’ll also do my best to list them in the order that I read them though my memory doesn’t always serve me as well as it used to.  As always, I love to receive other people’s recommendations and in fact a few on those on the below list came from some of you that responded to my last blog reviewing books.  Without further ado, here we go.  Enjoy.     

All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
I randomly picked this classic off of the Ranch’s library shelf one day looking for a good read.  I don’t often choose fiction these days but this book, written as fictional history, really resonated as I flipped through the pages and got lured in by the in-depth character development and story of corruption, dirty politics, and the reality of how decisions are sometimes made by those in power.  The book is set in the southeastern US in the 1930s.  I was saddened by how little much has seemed to change on the political front this past century.

Killer of the Flower Moon:  The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann
Holy shit.  I wish I was surprised by the story laid out by author David Grann.  This book was recommended to me by our neighbor Jim Veeder.  It’s an unbelievable story of pillage, theft and the rising up of J. Edgar Hoover and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.  Add another chapter to the story of sinister imperialism and Manifest Destiny that left destruction, thievery, and murder in its wake.  The book was gripping.  I burned through it in a few days and found myself at the end ashamed to descend from the race and gender that has done so much damage to this planet and its people.  Highly recommended.      

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson
This book about the “Great Migration” of African Americans from the Southeastern US north and west follows the lives of 3 unrelated people that moved to New York, Los Angeles and Chicago respectively.

This is a good overview of the plight of black Americans in the early and mid-1900s as they continued to work against the repressive forces set in motion by slavery and subsequently Jim Crow.  I also plan on reading Wilkerson’s more recent book entitled Caste.        

Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore by Elizabeth Rush
What will happen as our coastal cities go underwater?  What will happen as our estuaries become part of the sea?  How will we mitigate the ensuing disasters of climate chaos as sea levels rise and begin to swallow up areas inhabited by millions of people?  We are in for a rude awakening and Elizabeth Rush does a nice job of laying out our despondent future in a way that I found accessible and even at times enjoyable.  The book was written fairly recently and is a good selection to bring yourself up to speed on recent developments in the climate disaster conversation.     

There There by Tommy Orange
This read takes a look at indigenous populations in urban settings as it individually follows the lives of a number of indigenous people who are connected in some way and who all come together in the same space in Oakland at the end of this compelling, sad but important and absorbing book.  If you read Overstory, it’s similarly laid out by following and highlighting the lives of the characters and then creatively weaving them together before a final crescendo that leaves you reeling a bit.  I blew through this page-turner and would highly recommend it to anyone interested in the human project.  This is one the first books that I’ve read about American Indians that focuses on the urban story, where most American Indians live today, and their challenges as it relates to life in the city.    

Call of the Reed Warbler: A New Agriculture – A New Earth by Charles Massy
This book was also recommended to me by Jim Veeder, our neighbor who lives up over the mountain in a small community named Tufares.  Jim’s an avid reader that shares my reading preferences and this book really fit the bill with its many examples of regenerative food systems on the continent of Australia.  Inspirational for readers concerned about how humans can responsibly provide for themselves in the future.    

October 1964 by David Halberstam
I needed a break from the serious reads and settled on an account of the 1964 World Series between the St. Louis Cardinals and the New York Yankees.  It was an enjoyable recount of the season leading up to what was one of the most exciting World Series up until that point in history.  I especially enjoyed the read due to the fact that many of the players highlighted in the book were still playing when I started watching baseball in the early 70s.

The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall by Mark W. Moffett
This book impacted me more than any book I’ve read in a long time.  Moffett, a biologist who for much of his career focused on ants, makes a leap into the world of apes as he uncovers why we do what we do.  Fascinating, eye-opening, riveting and refreshing.  It answered so many questions about human nature that I have been carrying around with me for a long time.  Highly recommended for readers interested in human evolution and behavior.

Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard W. Wrangham
I blasted through this easy-to-read book that postulates that we are who we are today due to as much as anything else our coevolution with fire.  The author suggests that we essentially cannot be healthy beings without the act cooking.  I found it to be a captivating book full of new ideas (for me) that seemed almost commonsensical and plausible looking back.  Fire, more than any human “discovery”, influenced who our species is today.  Dedicated raw food enthusiasts will likely push back on much of the content in this excellent read.      

How to be an Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi 
It took me a few chapters to warm up to this New York Time’s bestseller.  I learned a lot from Kendi’s messages and enjoyed the way that he wove his personal story into the bigger message of how to carry ourselves in an ever complex world of stereotypes, racism, sexism, homophobia, classicism and a white supremicist patriarchy.  I’d say an important addition for anyone interested in working to navigate today’s entangled social landscape.

Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
This title was recommended to me twice on the same day by different people and so I decided that I had to give it a whirl.  I found out afterwards that this book has been popular on a number of reading circuits based in part by the accuracy of it’s prophetic message.  The book was written in the early 1990s and set in the mid-2020s and depicts an apocalyptic setting in California that features death, danger and dystopia in a way that makes the story totally believable given the current state of the world.  Octavia Butler seems to continue to get increasingly popular since her recent death.  This black award winning author who died in 2006 is known as a sci-fi writer and has enjoyed a large following for many years.  This book has a sequel entitled Parable of the Talents.

The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth by The Red Nation
This book outlines a bold sociopolitical message to reconcile past atrocities done to the indigenous people of North America.  I’d say that everyone would benefit in some way from this book.  It provides a roadmap for reparations to American Indians and in turn a roadmap to return to civility in American and human society.  I greatly resonate with the content in this book.   

A Flag for Sunrise by Robert Stone
One of only 3 fiction books on this list, I again randomly picked this up in the Ranch library and quickly got engrossed in this historically accurate book about imperial destruction, revolution, greed and power in Central America.

Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm's Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land by Leah Penniman
We had the opportunity many years ago while visiting Robin’s mom outside of Albany, NY to visit Soul Fire Farm near Troy, NY not far from where Robin grew up and where the author and her partner Jonah started an impactful project that focuses on food security and farming with a focus on the underserved black community in the capitol district area of NY.  The book is wonderfully written, clear and powerful and outlines a path for both black and white people to work towards a future of land justice.

Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America by Eyal Press
I’ll start by sharing one of the final passages in this book that struck me, “When people gather to hear veterans talk about moral transgressions they had committed in the course of fighting America’s wars, the most effective way to help them overcome moral injury is to communize it, Jonathan Shay argued in Achilles in Vietnam. When those not doing the fighting can deliver a message to them and to all of the “dirty workers” that they deserved to hear.  “We sent you into harm’s way.  We put you into situations where atrocities were possible.  We share responsibility with you:  for all that you have seen; for that you have done; for all that you failed to do.”.  This book should be read by all Americans and highlights the “dirty work” that helps to drive our economy, put food on our table, and keep us safe.  This heart-wrenching book looks at the modern underclass and their struggles to get by by doing the least desirable work in our economy and its impact on their psyche and society at large.  Essential reading.    

America: The Farewell Tour by Chris Hedges
I’ve really liked Chris Hedges’ journalism over the years.  He seems to have had the sustained courage to speak to power.  I blew through this book.  Sad, compelling, motivating, and provocative.  Hedges delves deep into the addictions of opioids, gambling, sadism, and hate and how they are being fed by a failed corporate state.  If you haven’t given Chris a shot, this would be a good dip into his decades long investigative journalism career.

The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present by David Treuer
As you may remember I enjoy reading about Native American history.  The first part of this book quickly recaps the history of Native Americans in North America up until the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 and then delves deep into American Indian policy post-Wounded Knee with a focus on the miraculous survival of Indians in the United States and the amazing stories of resilience that continue to define this segment of the population.  The book ends on a high note by highlighting all of the incredible work being done on reservations and in urban centers.  American Indians are beginning to thrive and create an example of what our nation can become in the face of climate disaster and out-of-control capitalism that’s pushing our species to the brink of extinction.  It’s a somewhat thick read but a worthwhile one for those interested in issues that revolve around indigenous culture.

Building Community Food Webs by Ken Meter
A good, quick read for anyone looking to go a bit deeper into building local economies that revolve around food.  Ken Meter argues why local food movements matter and why we should support those growing food in our regions. 

Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice by Rupa Marya and Raj Patel
A great book for those interested in making the connections between physical deterioration and the deterioration of our economy and democracy.  Chronic stress makes us sick in ways that we have not understood until recently.  And low-income people of color experience the highest levels of chronic stress.  This has led to generational sickness and a decreasing life expectancy in many demographics.  Yet another call for equitable policies that lead to a brighter future for all.  Thanks to former apprentice Abby Cmiel for this wonderful gift! 

Bitter Grounds by Sandra Benitez
A wonderful read and the last fiction selection on the list.  This book follows 3 generations of poor El Salvadoran women in the middle half of the 1900s who’s lives are intimately connected with an elite El Salvadoran family.  Beautifully written.  Sad, eye-opening, page-turning. 

One Day of Life by Manlio Argueta
This book, also set in El Salvador in the 1970s, follows a family through the struggles of civil war and is told through the eyes of the poor rural women who lead tragic lives in this war-torn country.  The sad and all too often told story of US government involvement leading to the installation of corrupt powerful figures who lead their countries with iron fists that have caused much of the strife that has led to mass migration to the US from this region of the world.  A tragic, well told and easy read for those interested in the politics and strife of Central America.

Happy reading to you all.  I’m always looking for book recommendations so let me know if there’s anything in your library that you think that I would enjoy and/or learn from.  We just got an influx of a few hundred new books so more to come from me next year.  Let me know if you have any questions in the meantime.   

Abrazos,

Tim

Permacultura, ¿Porqué aprender en el Rancho Mastatal?

Permacultura, ¿Porqué aprender en el Rancho Mastatal?

Ari, Estudiante 2022

Imagina que tienes un lienzo en blanco para trazar y te dicen que lo que dibujes se va convertir en tu vida. Quizás, no tienes las herramientas, el conocimiento necesario para poder imaginarte en ese mundo ideal y te surgen preguntas: ¿cómo podré lograrlo?, ¿qué es lo realmente indispensable y necesario?, ¿esto me entusiasma o me agobia?, ¿por dónde empiezo?

Ahora volvamos a la realidad, pensemos en ese lienzo en blanco como las oportunidades de creación que tenemos disponibles todos los días. Conscientes o no, dibujamos diariamente en él con nuestros valores, desarrollo, conocimiento, con nuestras relaciones y decisiones. Siendo humanos, nos compenetramos con otros lienzos para tratar de descubrir; ¿cómo debería de verse el gran lienzo final? 

La Permacultura es una herramienta para diseñar la vida. Sus ámbitos abarcan los grandes aspectos de la vida humana y su entorno: el diseño de un mundo real, social, práctico y sustentable. Así pues, un curso de Permacultura procura que sus estudiantes sean diseñadores y agentes efectivos de cambios en sus hogares y comunidades, procurando relaciones entre los diversos ámbitos de creación, sobre ese gran lienzo de oportunidades.

¿Qué es un PDC (Permaculture Design Course)?

En el año 1984 se definió el Curso de Diseño en Permacultura (PDC por sus siglas en inglés) como un curso estándar de 72 horas a partir de la recopilación de métodos, técnicas y formas de vivir de diversas comunidades de pueblos originarios en diferentes partes del mundo, trabajo que estuvo a cargo de Bill Mollison y David Holmgren. No es un título académico, es una certificación por parte de la comunidad de permacultura que reconoce en quién lo obtiene las bases conceptuales y buenas prácticas para su aplicación.

Este curso es útil en el trazo de relaciones humanas compatibles con los sistemas naturales, desde un cúmulo de principios y éticas en relación con el cuidado de las personas, el cuidado de la tierra y el justo repartir de los excedentes.  En esta línea, las relaciones diseñadas construyen diseños autosuficientes que incluyen a la comunidad para ser efectivos y resilientes, diseños que respetan y entienden los patrones de la vida, la tierra, los microorganismos, los ecosistemas; diseños que contemplan y aprovechan el flujo energético entre todos los componentes incluidos, son regenerativos y permanecen.

¿Por qué cursar el PDC en Rancho Mastatal?

El PDC de Rancho Mastatal no es ni será el único certificado obtenido, pero por el momento sí es el mejor. Acá algunas razones relevantes:

1.     Es el primer centro de conservación y educación para la sustentabilidad que desarrolló de forma completa y en español el Curso de Permacultura en Costa Rica, para ser impartido por profesores ticos previamente certificados. Este hecho influye positivamente en la accesibilidad del curso, abriendo oportunidades a todo Latinoamérica y Suramérica. Debido al uso de castellano, este curso rompe con la barrera del idioma: la gran mayoría de la bibliografía de Permacultura está en inglés.

2.     En Rancho Mastatal respetan, cuidan y valoran el tiempo y recurso de cada integrante. Este curso no es uno que se extiende por 6 meses, tampoco es una experiencia de “retiro y sanación en el bosque” por valores excesivos por encima de los $1500, lo cual no se ajusta a la realidad económica de la mayoría de costarricenses, mesoamericanos e incluso personas latinoamericanas. Por el contrario, toman muy en cuenta el contexto: Si bien partimos de la cultura, el lugar y todas las condiciones externas y climáticas, tanto el Rancho Mastatal como los profesores del curso, entienden, viven y desarrollan su práctica en el mismo entorno en el que se imparte el curso (Costa Rica).

3.     Se parte del punto obvio, pero muchas veces ignorado que la práctica hace al maestro. Es un curso presencial inmersivo de 15 días y Por un accesible costo de $400 con hospedaje y comida incluida (cabe mencionar que es toda una experiencia increíble) existe la posibilidad de vivir en el rancho, convivir, servir a la comunidad, aprender y practicar. 

4.     Todo el contenido y material del curso es invaluable. Partiendo de la estructura del curso (amplia y extensiva), esta experiencia de campo abre las puertas del conocimiento ancestral tradicional que envuelve la permacultura: biología, bio construcción, plantas medicinales, gastronomía, fermentación y conservación, tecnología apropiada, energía, compostaje, manejo de agua, manejo de residuos, manejo del suelo, autosuficiencia desde un código descentralizado, entre otros.

5.     Aquí se vive bajo el principio básico de la vida: Estar presente y consciente. El constante contacto e interacción con la naturaleza y las distintas conexiones y lecciones humanas hacen, de este lugar, un espacio seguro de aprendizaje y de constante agradecimiento y motivación.

6.     Por último, pero jamás menos importante, en Rancho Mastatal predican con el ejemplo. Su vida sencilla, práctica, sustentable, comunitaria y permanente, es un ejemplo claro y vivo de su lucha por la conservación y la educación.

Este curso es para quién se ha percatado de la necesidad de un cambio, sin olvidar que un cambio externo sacude y refleja la necesidad de un cambio interno. Si existe la intuición de hacer algo diferente, si te cuestionas los patrones, estereotipos y condiciones impuestas por la humanidad que nos ciega y dirige hacia la ignorancia,  la separación y la destrucción… este curso puede dar rienda suelta a la transformación de tu lienzo diario  para, finalmente, trazar juntos el gran lienzo final.

The Wizard and The Prophet — A Book Review that Resolves the Duel

The Wizard and The Prophet — A Book Review that Resolves the Duel

By 2022 apprentice Lucas Babinec

Imagine two completely opposed ways of seeing the world and today’s environmental issues. The first represents the Wizards and sees humans as large-scale problem solvers, able to create massive top-down fixes with cutting edge technology and innovations, perhaps outside the bounds of nature. The second features the Prophets and sees humans as needing to consume less, becoming more efficient, less wasteful, adhering to the biological limits all other species live within. These two paradigms became two of the most significant movements within environmentalism over the last 150 years and in The Wizard and The Prophet, Charles Mann dives deep into the lives of the two men who most embodied the two distinct views: William Vogt and Norman Borlaug. Mann also brings a magnifying glass up to their impact on initiatives to modern day dilemmas regarding food, water, energy, and climate change.

The book’s successes

The read was often captivating, really humanizing two prominent people who dedicated their lives to the environmental challenges we face as a species. I feel environmentalism can get quite unapproachable and unrelatable for the typical person. People talking about problems that are far away from one’s own backyard, not only physically, but timescale too (decades in the future). Mann impressively paints the story arc of the lives of these two men, weaving the philosophies and figures that influenced them smoothly into a cohesive narrative. Here’s some essential info about them:

William Vogt ~ aka the Prophet

·       Born in “pre-suburban” Long Island in 1902 and dealt with polio and serious family drama

·       Saw the degradation of the surrounding natural habitat during his early adulthood as a bird watching enthusiast

·       Headed to the guano islands off the coast of Peru in 1939; hired to conduct research about the birds there

·       Published The Road to Survival in 1948

·       National director of Planned Parenthood from 1951 until 1961

Norman Borlaug ~ aka the Wizard

·       Born in rural Iowa in 1914 and watched his family struggle to make ends meet year after year farming the land

·       Had ambitions to get out of his small town and studied forestry at the University of Minnesota

·       Researched wheat rust in Mexico beginning in 1944; new cultivars of disease resistant wheat discovered in the late 1950s

·       Methods applied to wheat in other countries plus rice and other staple crops throughout 1960s, “Green Revolution” coined in 1968

·       Won a Nobel prize in 1970

The way Mann structures the middle portion of the book into sections (food production, freshwater supply, energy usage, and climate change) is intuitive. To see the two different approaches directly applied to real life challenges made the whole premise of the book way more relevant.

Mann skillfully explains the process farmers use to create new breeds of a plant as well as the process of photosynthesis as it relates to attempts to create adaptations in new varieties of food plants. There are a couple of helpful graphics to accompany these detailed explanations too (pp140 & pp195).

In the water section it was fascinating to learn about mega-projects and the pitfalls that come up, like lack of funding, ecosystem degradation, and poor efficiency.

The stories in the energy section about the demise of oil boom towns and the machines of the initial solar power movement like the Pyrheliophoro, were particularly interesting.

In the climate change section Mann nimbly bounces between reforestation of deserts in Burkina Faso, a debris mountain named Fridgelandia in post-Katrina NOLA, the burning Jharia coal field, US senate testimonies about change in carbon dioxide levels, and much much more.

The deluge of information would be overwhelming if it weren’t for Mann’s deft ability to sow the threads in the overarching narrative.

Constructive criticisms

While being quite exhaustive in regard to history, the book’s breadth of scope looking at how the ideologies look in modern day solutions is disappointing. For example, the word ‘permaculture’ is not mentioned a single time in the book. One reason that alternative solutions are marginalized is because best-selling authors such as Charles Mann don’t devote awareness to them. Thousands of readers could have been exposed to key words such as permaculture, holistic management, or regenerative agriculture and are instead left to wonder if big technological fixes are our only way out. To his credit, Mann does say in the prologue that the book is not “a blueprint for tomorrow.” However, this contradicts the text on the cover flap that claims “The Wizard and The Prophet is essential reading on the future of our species.”

Another critique is the subtle sensationalization of opposition in the two views. Though they did have their differences, Vogt and Borlaug shared many similarities, most importantly being english speaking white men who grew up in the United States in the early 20th century. Both were immersed in the cultural soup of the times and it follows that they were subject to the same biases as anyone with close proximity to power. Vogt walked in the footsteps of racist elitist conservationists (pp81-82) and Borlaug was influenced by the heads of the big money groups who funded his projects (pp119-120). The inherited intellectual imperialism seeps out insidiously in both the Wizard and Prophet views portrayed in this book. A caption on a photo captures it perfectly:

 “According to its architect, Ralph Walker, the modernist IRRI [International Rice Research Institute — An institute based in the Philippines funded by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations] campus, constructed entirely of imported materials, symbolized ‘a new type of imperialism’ of ‘specialized knowledge generously given to backwards peoples,’” (190).

The passages that compare the two ideologies are rift with divisive language such as: ‘hostilities’, ‘conflict’, and ‘radically different’. Mann even writes, “indeed, the dispute between Wizards and Prophets has, if anything, become more vehement” (7).

It’s 2022 and there’s enough tribalism and opposition going on, at least in my home country of the US. We don’t need another book that pits two groups against each other. Maybe that is what’s needed for some people to build awareness of our species’ ecological situation.

Personally, I would have been much more interested if Mann also focused a bit on the similarities between the two men and their philosophies and how we can integrate both approaches to find the best, most appropriate solutions.

In the end of the prologue Mann asserts that “I wrote this book to satisfy my own curiosity, and to see if I could learn something about the roads my children could take,” and I hope his curiosity has led him into researching more holistic, healing, and regenerative solutions (such as permaculture) in the next book he publishes.

The Bottom Line

The Wizard and The Prophet is exceptional as a history and at the same time, lacking as a source of knowledge for the future. If you want a detailed account of two major establishment approaches to environmental challenges, this is a book for you. If you are more interested in reading about holistic solutions to our global ecological crisis, seeking a source of inspiration, or want to read about ways of bridging different ways of thinking, I highly recommend these books:

All We Can Save

Braiding Sweetgrass

Climate: A New Story

Permaculture: A Designer’s Handbook

Check out these Past Blog Articles

Book Recommendations

Ranch Reading Recommendations

Permaculture Design & The Importance of Recreation and Team-Oriented Thinking

Permaculture Design & The Importance of Recreation and Team-Oriented Thinking

By 2022 Apprentice AJ Nolan

Playing volleyball down at the local field. All ages welcome!

Permaculture thinking moves us towards finding solutions that can serve multiple functions. This can be known as stacking functions with the goal to develop more “free time”.  Simply put and maybe more traditionally put, “killing two birds with one stone”.  How you spend that free time is something that really gets very little attention in the permaculture community and one that I am particularly interested in.  Once you begin to think about it, the way we spend our “free time” will define the sustainability of the entire system.  If we choose to pack in more projects and more tasks, in the short term we may benefit from our added productivity, but is this sustainable in the long term?  In this article I am going to talk about how we design our lives using permaculture based thinking to create sustainable patterns for not just our farm but for our lives.  Bill Mollinson once asked, “How can we maximize hammock time?”. Whilst I agree with the sentiment, I prefer to run around in my free time!

We aim to create balance between the needs of the farm (which has endless lists of projects that could be done) and the needs of us as individuals to relax, recreate, unwind and decompress.  The benefit of playing team sports together helps build team morale, a sense of togetherness and comradery that is vitally important to the fluid functioning of our community.

Think back to your childhood days. What were you spending most of your time doing? If you said playing video games, I can’t relate, but if you responded with getting dirty and running around outside, I recommend you keep reading.

The first day I arrived at the Ranch for my year-long apprenticeship, everyone was involved in a heated game of volleyball. I joined in and after brief introductions, I shared the field with myriad new faces, and we worked together toward a common goal for the next hour. I couldn’t have asked for a better initiation into Ranch life than that first volleyball game.

As a child, playing outside is instinctive and it’s how we begin to understand the physics of the natural world. In school there are scheduled times to play outside. Where I’m from, it’s called recess. When I was growing up, we were given three different times throughout the day to release our pent-up energy and run rampant through the school yard. As I got older and school years passed, the allotted recess time slowly disappeared and was replaced with longer class times.

Many community members take daily trips to our waterfall

Recreation is an important aspect of life that we begin to lose as we age. It’s the hardest part of life to hold onto because it’s no longer allotted for us. Western society has deemed it unimportant and prioritizes work and time spent at a desk. Here at the Ranch, we have designed in ample opportunities to recreate. Pitching in to clean up brunch, taking a trip to the waterfall, practicing yoga, and reading a good book are all forms of recreation. We have scheduled in plenty of downtime and we have made a conscious decision to start the work day early in order to end our work day earlier to allow more time for afternoon team recreation.  The inspiration for this blog post comes from what I like to call 16:00 Mass (a.k.a sports time).

Here at the Ranch we schedule our free time. That’s how serious we are about it. We are currently in the dry season, so the “cancha” (sports field) gets a lot of use by the Mastatal community this time of year. Every town in Costa Rica is given a church, an elementary school, a community center, and a sports field. Our main forms of team recreation are frisbee and volleyball. Every day I trot down to the field at 15:50, tired from a full workday at the Ranch. I’ve got a frisbee, volleyball, and a bunch of bright orange cones in my hand. As I step out onto the field, I look at everyone’s tired eyes and I smile because I know that it’s all about to change. We split up into teams and the game begins. I begin to move into my body and out of my head. Before I’m aware of my actions, I stop to catch my breath and realize how much energy I have. I sweat not only from running around but from the intensity of the game. Coupled with teamwork, this form of exercise alters my thought pattern and I find myself in a state of euphoria and limitless energy. For the next hour I’m on Cloud 9 and I don’t want the excitement to end. When the game does end, my bare feet thank me for stopping and I find myself in high spirits with an overwhelming feeling of accomplishment and grit. Everyone is talking of food now and my stomach rumbles in anticipation for a Ranch dinner.

I’ve always placed great importance on exercise in my life, but I mainly participated in individual sports like swimming or tennis. Working in teams at the Ranch is paramount to our success here and it’s no different on the field. Playing a team sport changes my mood and puts me in a flow state. No longer am I thinking of the past or the future. I am right there on the field in the present moment. If my mind strays away, my teammates are sure to let me know. I can no longer only think of myself - I must take other people’s needs and wants into account. Playing a team sport necessitates quick thinking and sound decision making. These qualities allow for a dynamic community and encourages the development of well-rounded individuals. Whenever I’m having an off day, I feel a sense of balance and grounding after running around on the field with my peers.

Enjoying the refreshing swims in the river

I am extremely lucky to be living in a community that prioritizes recreation and down-time. The world would be a much happier place if a higher value was placed on these activities. It’s a privilege to have free-time and I encourage others to do the same. Play outside with your kids, join a local soccer league, take a yoga class, or pick up that book you’ve been wanting to read forever. Whatever your preferred form of recreation is, it will dramatically alter your mental state and contribute to your happiness and overall well-being.

One thing that has been learnt over the years at the Ranch though, is that recreation time must be planned in. If we leave it to chance it becomes difficult for us to find space for it with all the other tasks and activities going on.  Although Permaculture Design tends to focus on the design of your land based project, food forest or garden systems, I think it is also very important to place a large emphasis on planning our social lives, activities and recreation times.  Collectively we have found that just like planning a garden and selecting the best place to plant your favourite perennial salad crop, it is vitally important to plan your daily activities and make sure to plan in recreation time.

How you choose to spend your recreation time is up to you but if you need me, I’ll be down at the “cancha”.

Other Community and Permaculture Related Blogs

How to Run a Permaculture Internship

Enriching Community Soil: 5 Simple Strategies that Support Sustainable Relationships

View of the sports field and La Cangreja National Park

Permaculture-Based Alcohol Production as an Energy Source — “The Proof is in your Buzz”

Permaculture-Based Alcohol Production as an Energy Source — “The Proof is in your Buzz”

By 2022 apprentice Lucas Babinec

With a refractometer we determine the brix of various fruits

Bring to mind a world where energy is cheap, plentiful, AND environmentally friendly. What’s powering that world? Wind? Biogas? Hydroelectric? Solar?

Pause.

Take this question seriously.

Our current track record with energy has us in a planetary ecological crisis, not to mention indirectly causing inequity and oppression all over the world. Now, what if we could grow our own fuel, in a way that increases soil fertility, ecosystem health, biodiversity and without any pollution or additional extraction of our planet’s precious resources. In a decentralized, community supporting, and resilient system. Caring for each other (people), the earth, and sharing the abundance fairly. Crazy. Nonsense. Not possible.

Enter Permaculture-Based Alcohol Production as an energy source

Please, if you’re here reading this and are unfamiliar with permaculture, check out these essential blog posts: Why Permaculture and Applied Permaculture Principles. Also, *shameless plug warning* look into taking one of our yearly Permaculture Design Courses.

In my first blog article I reviewed a book, ‘The Wizard and the Prophet’, about two different mindsets when working through our ecological challenges as a species. Permaculture-based alcohol fuel production harmonizes both perspectives, bring the best tech magic from the wizard and the most essential wisdom from the prophet together. At this point you probably are asking the question:

How?

Simple. Regenerative agriculture. Fermentation. Distillation. And then cycling all yields back into the system, aided by stacking functions and honoring the principle of zero-waste. This can be done on a household level or on a community level. Both would work within the design framework of permaculture and both are probably needed to gain true energy sovereignty. Primary fuel crop and overall polyculture selection would be specific to each biosphere and personal/regional culture preference.

A productive banana grey water circle

For example, here in Mastatal that might look like a great diversity of fruit trees: Sapote, pitanga, starfruit, jackfruit, mango, papaya, and many others that offer both food and the chance to ferment whatever can’t be eaten. Then, you’d have your staple fuel crops such as bananas, cassava (yuca), bamboo, and sugar cane. These would all be supported by other plants that fix nutrients in the soil (making them more bio-available), attract pollinators, and provide biomass for mulching. With skillful agroforestry methods in place, such as those implemented at Rancho Mastatal, anyone or any community could grow their own fuel. In a temperate climate like North Carolina, the fruit trees might be pawpaws, apples, and mulberries, with staple crops like potatoes, corn, soy beans, and hemp (grown in a polyculture/plant guilds with regenerative practices; no monocultures, no GMOs, no pesticides and other toxic chemicals).

Okay, now you might be wondering why this isn’t already the case. How come we don’t already have alcohol (aka ethanol) as an abundant, environmentally friendly fuel source?

100 years ago

What was going on in the United States back in 1922? Any guesses? Alright, well, many things actually, but what was a major one relevant to this topic? One word. Begins with a ‘P’.

PROHIBITION.

Our homemade alcohol station

The US Congress passed the 18th amendment in 1919, outlawing all production and distribution of alcohol. This destroyed the alcohol fuel industry and all farmer led cooperative distilleries, which had been booming since Pres. Teddy Roosevelt championed some liberating legislation in 1906. At the time, even Henry Ford preferred alcohol as a fuel source. The Model T was a dual fuel vehicle, able to run on ethanol or gasoline. Then an oil man with a last name beginning with ‘R’ ruined the party. When prohibition was reversed in 1933, gasoline was firmly positioned as America’s favorite fuel. Great for Big Oil. Bad for the people. Bad for the planet.

If this surprises you or leaves you feeling skeptical, I totally understand. Dive in, investigate and decide for yourself.

My curiosity has been sparked. I picked up the book ‘Alcohol Can Be a Gas’ by David Blume and now I want to prove that these possibilities are real. With more than six months left in my apprenticeship at the time of this writing, I reckon some experimentation and hands-on learning is in the cards. I didn’t even get into explaining the whole fermentation and distillation steps in this post or the various co-products that can be harvested from it. There’s a lot more to learn, stay tuned for the next installment of Permaculture-Based Alcohol Production. To be continued…

Read Other Permaculture Related Blogs

La Importancia de la Permacultura

6 Reasons to Use a Biodigester

Endeavors to End Propane: Local Fuel Sources and Efficient Cooking Technologies

Anti-Inflammatory Herbs – Medicinal Plants

Anti-Inflammatory Herbs – Medicinal Plants

By 2022 apprentice Connor Gilmartin

“Watching gardeners label their plants, I vow with all beings to practice the old horticulture, and let the plants identify me” Robert Aitken

This article seeks to bring attention to two plants that possess anti-inflammatory properties, commonly grown in Mastatal, Costa Rica. My goal is to discuss their medicinal properties and suggest simple preparation methods to maximize their efficacy. The plants I will go on to discuss have been shown to bolster your immune system’s response to inflammatory antigens that one is exposed to in urban environments.

Inflammation is a complex physiological and pathological process. It is typically an adaptive response caused by harmful stimuli and conditions to keep the body in homeostasis. When inflammation persists for a long time, “it becomes chronic and can contribute to a variety of chronic diseases, such as obesity, diabetes, arthritis, pancreatitis, cardiovascular, neurodegenerative, metabolic diseases, and some types of cancer” (Peng, et al, 2021). While some diseases are not preventable, many are. We exist in a physiologically, emotionally, and spiritually inflamed world. I firmly believe that we can begin to reduce the effects of this inflammation by utilizing the mosaic of plant medicines revered by our ancestors.

The two plant species I will provide a brief overview of are as follows:

Turmeric (Curcuma longa)

-          (Polyphenol, curcumin, anti-inflammation)

Pau d’arco (Tabebuia rosea)

-          (Immune stimulant, anti-tumor properties, anti-parasitic)

There are a handful of books that are frequently referenced by Rancho Mastatal’s core team. One of these books is Ed Bernhardt’s, “Medicinal Plants of Costa Rica”. If you live in Costa Rica, and you know what’s best for you, you’ll get a copy – and a backup copy – of this amazing, easy to read book.

Freshly harvested turmeric

Bernhardt introduces turmeric as, “An herbaceous perennial plant of the ginger family with a bright orange rhizome”. It is prolific around Rancho Mastatal – walking along the paths of the Ranch will lead you to encounter turmeric everywhere. Turmeric has a long history of being used for both food and medicine. It has been the primary anti-inflammatory herb of ayurvedic medicine for over 6,000 years. Its principle chemical component, curcumin, has anti-cancer effects and is useful for arthritis through its potent antioxidant action. Capsules of dried, ground turmeric powder have been used to relieve stomach problems, liver and gallbladder diseases, arthritis, colds and flus. In Phyllis Balch’s text, “Prescription for Herbal Healing”, she notes, “… Laboratory studies have confirmed that curcumin has anti-inflammatory and anti-arthritic activity… It has been shown to be effective in reducing pain in patients with osteoarthritis… When used at the equivalent of 200mg of curcumin per day, patients with osteoarthritis were able to use 63% less NSAID medications and still obtain relief from pain”. Turmeric is a gorgeous plant with such massive potential. Pulling its fiery orange rhizomes out of the soft jungle soil is a beautiful experience that I consider a privilege.

The branch of a pau d’arco tree ready to be made into a tincture

Another prolific plant species found around Mastatal is the pink trumpet tree – locally referred to as roble de sabana or pau d’arco. During the transition months of March and May, this tree puts on a dazzling display of soft, silken pink flowers that provide a striking contrast against the bright blue skies. When talking botany with elders and herbalists in the community of Mastatal, pau d’arco is never forgotten. It is revered as highly medicinal across Meso and South America. Ed Bernhart writes, “for centuries, people in the neotropics have used the inner bark of pau d’arco to make powerful botanical medicine that restores the immune system”. It has been cited traditionally to treat anemia, arthritis, asthma, bronchitis, boils, cancer, colitis, colds, coughs, diabetes, dysentery, eczema, fevers, liver infections, leukemia, parasites and wounds. There has been a great deal of research on the medicinal properties of the cambium layer of Tabebuia rosea. Researchers have demonstrated that eighteen of the bark’s many organic compounds have medicinal properties. Some of these organic compounds include quinines; compounds that help cleanse the human body of parasites and harmful protozoa. Another well-documented compound contained in the bark of the pau d’arco is lapachol – an organic alcohol that is responsible for the bark’s anti-cancer and tumor-reducing properties. Ed Bernhardt recommends reading, “Pau d’Arco: Immune Power from the Rainforest” by Kenneth Jones to learn more about the complex organic chemistry of the tree’s medicinal compounds. Pau d’Arco’s cambium layer can be prepared as a tea, or as a tincture. Mature branches must be used in the preparation of this medicine. I recommend further reading about the specifics of pau d’arco preparation as it does require some processing prior to drying the bark for tea, or making the tincture.

A student in our PDC with her homemade tincture

Both of these plants can be dried, powdered, and taken as a supplement in capsule form. Their medicinal properties can also be utilized when prepared in a concentrated tea. In my opinion, the most powerful of all preparations is to utilize ethanoyl as a solvent to extract their alcohol-soluble compounds. This concentrated, plant-based liquid is commonly referred to as a tincture. The precursor to distilled ethyl alcohol could be an herbal wine prepared at-home. You can read about how to prepare a simple, tea, sugar and yeast wine (hooch), at this article, written by an apprentice from 2017.

Realizing that plants can serve as medicine fosters a deeper appreciation of our natural environment and increases one’s sense of place. Looking into a forest and seeing it as a nutrient-rich, sentient ecosystem is something that our not-so-distant ancestors did out of necessity. I believe that if more folks started listening to what our plant teachers had to say, we’d live in a healthier, more reverent, less-inflamed world. As Terence McKenna once said, “Avoid gurus, follow plants”.

Holy Basil

Green Hibiscus

Life Everlasting

Gotu Kola

Check out these past related blogs

Jungle Apothecary

Tropical Fruits

Also join us for our yearly Plants as Medicine Workshop

Learn More

Join us for one of our educational workshops. Learn more here.

Salak: A Productive Understory Crop

Salak: A Productive Understory Crop

By 2022 apprentice AJ Nolan

Salak palm is a great option for an understory species for a permaculture tropical agroforestry system. The risks of cultivating this species are beautifully contrasted by the enjoyment and health benefits of the fruit it produces. You truly get what you pay for. The fruit can be eaten right off the palm and makes for a great snack after working in the orchards.

Salak palm is native to Indonesia and is often cultivated in analogous climates. Here at the Ranch, we have around 40 palms both male and female.

A bowl of freshly picked salak

How to Start Growing Salak

Propagation

In order to establish salak in your agroforestry spaces you’ll need to start with propagation. Salak can be started from seed and should be placed sideways and half buried in a well-drained potting mix.

Both males and females are needed for successful fruit production. There is no way to determine the gender of the palm until 3 years after planting, when they begin to flower. Having 3 female plants for every male plant has proved to be optimal for our orchard space of roughly 4000m2. Once the plants reach maturity and begin to flower you can then identify any excess males you may have.  Replace them as needed to reach your ideal ratio (3 female : 1 male)

Planting

• The best time to plant is at the start of the rainy season.

• The soil around the palm should be heavily top-dressed with compost.

• Each plant should be planted 2-3 meters apart and are best planted in the same area for safety reasons and pollination needs (more on pollination below).

Keeping in mind the spiked nature of salak, it is good practice to avoid planting where any fruit or nuts may fall from overstory species. The palm is best planted under a low-maintenance canopy of fruit and nut trees. The individuals that have done the best in our orchard spaces have been ones that receive about 50% shade.

Maintenance 

Using the macana to help remove dead material

Maintenance of the salak palm is where your patience and physical fitness will be put to the test.

Once the plant reaches maturity, it is time to start pruning. Remove any dead material and any leaves that are blocking easy access and visibility to the flowers. It is recommended to remove any hijos that are growing on the mother plant. Hijos are competing with the mother plant for sunlight and nutrients so it is best to use them as mulch seeing as they inhibit fruit production. The mother plant can be identified by following the roots. The roots lead into the mother plant which is curved and looked to be in an upward dog position. Any other segment not attached to the roots, but are instead attached to the mother plant are known as hijos.

After pruning, we make donuts around the palm, using mulch from around the orchard space. Read this blog “5 Grow-Your-Own Mulch Plants for the Tropics”. We have moved away from using the salak prunings to mulch the trees with, as it makes for further maintenance and pollinating challenging. We pile the cuttings and let them decompose in a pile or burn them and add to the trees.

Helpful pruning tools

When it comes to pruning, always have both of your hands occupied so you don’t accidentally reach out and grab the spiky palm. For optimum pruning our tools are: a macana, machete, garrabato, loppers, and a pruning saw with a long blade or handle. Using a macana and a pruning saw is an effective way to pry the hijos off of the mother plant. This takes practice and it is best to have at least two people to pry the hijos away. Then, using a garrabato to move the fronds around, I use my machete to move the cuttings to the pile.

Unlike most tree species, salak’s growth pattern is not one of vertical extension. As salak continues to grow, it will shuffle along the ground (much like a snake) and will begin to hover, the roots acting as it’s foundation on the forest floor.

Pollinate

In addition to the efforts of pruning, you should also pollinate the female flowers with the male flower. The native pollinator can only be found in Indonesia so whilst native pollinators will give very low levels of production, if high yields are desired it is necessary to hand-pollinate (learn more about pollination here).

Female flower

Male flower

Salak flowers all year round, so we have found it very useful to mark the females with red flags for easier management. This is because you only need to check to see if the female plants have any receptive flowers and then go and find a male flower if needed.  The female flowers are cone-shaped and covered with a dense outer layer. The outer layer is shed over the course of a couple of months and the pink flower is revealed. The male flowers should be removed and brought to the female plant to dust the open flower. Within a few days the flower should harden up, which indicates a successful pollination.

Harvesting 

Now comes the best part....harvesting! To determine if the fruit is ripe, take one off towards the base of the clump of fruits, after eating the flesh, see if the seed inside has changed from white to a brown color. If the seed is brownish and the taste is sweet and satisfying, you’ll know the time is right! If the seed is light brown or white and the fruit is astringent then you will know to leave the clump of fruits on the palm to mature further.  Harvest when you can to avoid competition from pests but don’t be too indulgent because the fruit does not ripen off of the plant. After repeated successful harvests you will begin to be able to identify when the clumps are ready for harvest without needing to taste one first.

The different colors of the seeds to determine ripeness

Overview 

Salak is a valuable companion in your agroforestry spaces, able to be planted underneath mature fruit trees. Like anything worth doing it involves work and dedication, but the rewards are well worth the effort and the work will not be in vain. The fruit is delicious and nutritious and maintenance is a great way to truly earn the fruits of your labor.

References :

El Arbol “Al servicio de Agricultor” Vol 2. Guia de Especies

Check Out These Other Blogs About Salak & Permaculture

Salak Pollination

Salak Palm: A Guide for Tropical Permaculture

Ameding Calium-Deficient Soils - A Tropical Permaculturists Approach

LEARN MORE

Join us for one of our educational workshops about permaculture design, natural bulding, fermentation, and more. Check out our yearly workshops here.

Making Compost 101

Making Compost 101

By 2022 apprentice Joshua Wright

Smelly, sticky, messy.

Perhaps these are some words to describe your experience with food waste. But it doesn't have to be! Enter the world of composting!

In permaculture we love composting and would never think about just throwing away our food scraps into the trash, because they aren’t waste, they are resources that will benefit our garden and our planet.

Composting is a great way of dealing with your kitchen scraps, autumn leaf litter and/or lawn trimmings, along with any other organic matter that may be in your garden. Dealing with a “waste” product and turning it into something beneficial. In permaculture we also call this stacking functions.

An apprentice flipping our compost pile

What is compost?

Compost is broken down, decomposed organic matter. It occurs naturally in the environment around us as living things decay. Through human interaction this natural process can be sped up.

Why should you be making compost?

Composting has several great benefits:

• It improves soil health. Adding organic matter into soils allows them to better retain moisture leading to reduced irrigation costs. It lends itself to better aerated soils reducing the need to till and it provides habitat for beneficial fungi and micro-organisms to continue the work of decomposition and nutrient cycling. 

• It provides plants with nutrients essential for their growth. The main elements plants need are Nitrogen (N), Phosphorus (P) and Potassium (K), all of which are present in compost, along with a number of other elements in trace amounts such as Calcium (Ca), Magnesium (Mg), Iron (Fe) and Zinc (Zn).

• Composting diverts waste from ending up in landfills and the incinerator. Both of these require lots of energy and resources to maintain and manage, so by composting you are freeing up time, money, and energy for better utilization elsewhere (building an abundant, regenerative future we can be proud of).

• When in landfills food waste doesn’t have access to oxygen, becoming anaerobic. When decomposing in this airless environment it produces methane and carbon dioxide. When not in balance with natural cycles these gasses contributes to greenhouse gas overload in our atmosphere adding to our global climate crises.

In summary by composting not only are you doing less bad (by producing less pollution) you are actively doing good (building soil which is essential for a healthy planet)! Win, win!

So how do we go about getting started?

Our little wigglers that we use for our vermicompost!

1. First, let’s identify the best location: Ideally you will have a spot in your garden that is out of direct sun and protected from the rain. You will need something to contain the compost in. A wire cage or recycled wood pallet box will both work great. But you can use any containment method that is roughly 1m^3 and allows air to circulate. If you are limited in space or don’t have a yard, there are many great DIY options, such as a plastic bin with holes drilled out. Or check out vermicompost, which uses worms to help you out! Check out this blog article from Mother Jones to learn more about using worms to compost in a small space.

2. Next let’s look at what goes into your compost: We can break this down into two basic categories: "greens" and "browns". "Greens" are materials that contain higher quantities of nitrogen and "browns" contain higher quantities of carbon. Balancing this ratio of greens to browns is what will define the success of your compost operation.

3. This ideal ratio being 25-30 parts carbon to 1 part nitrogen.

   Examples of “greens” are kitchen scraps or fresh lawn clippings. “Browns” can be dried leaves, wood chips, saw dust, etc.

   Remembering that there is carbon in ALL organic material including materials that we classify as “green”, we can achieve our ideal ratio (25-30:1) by adding roughly 2 parts “brown” material to 1 part “green” material.

4. If your compost pile starts to smell, attract flies or is excessively wet add more browns, if it is too dry reduce that amount of brown material you add.

5. Your compost should have the same moisture content as that of a damp sponge. When squeezed firmly no more than a few drops should come out.

Excellent!

Armed with these basics outlined above you are ready to begin your journey into the underworld (soil).

Keep in mind that there is no teacher out there as good as direct experience so get your hands dirty and have fun with it.

One day, we too, shall be compost. And so closes the circle of life.

Emptying out one of our compost toilets

Other Related Blog Articles

Transforming Human Waste into Fertilizer: Compost Toilets

5 “Grow Your Own” Mulch Plants

Learn More

Join us for one of our educational workshops about permaculture design, natural bulding, fermentation, and more. Check out our yearly workshops here.

Beyond Cacao: The Fruit(s) of the Gods

Beyond Cacao: The Fruit(s) of the Gods

By 2021 Apprentice Cameron Conklin

Various forms of theobroma processing

You may have heard the term Theobroma (“theo” meaning “God” and “broma” meaning “fruit”) in reference to the genus of the cacao tree (Theobroma cacao) the incredible fruit that creates what we call chocolate. Here at the Ranch we love our cacao, but we also grow two other members of the Theobroma genus - cupuacu (Theobroma grandiflorum) and pataxte (Theobroma bicolor) who have stolen our hearts this year. Like cacao, these trees produce a fruit filled with delicious pulp and seeds and have proven to be amazing additions to our culinary experiments. These pre-Colombian species are still grown on a relatively small scale and have retained significant genetic diversity. They provide hope for a more diverse tropical forest system and chocolate industry.

A Short Description and History

The Cupuacu (Theobroma grandiflorum)

A cupuacu fruit

The cupuacu tree grows to an average height of 6-10 meters, maturing in 4 years. It has a large, brown, smooth oblong fruit (15-35 cm long), that falls to the ground when it is ready to be harvested. There are about 25 seeds per fruit protected by sweet, tangy pulp. Cupuacu is native to the Brazilian Amazon. Today it is still cultivated primarily in Brazil, but can be grown anywhere from southern Mexico to Peru. Right now, the cupuacu pulp is the most commonly used product from the fruit. The pulp is used for drinks, ice creams, pastries and other sweet treats common across Brazil. There is significantly more pulp in the cupuacu than cacao. To my surprise, the seeds are not as commonly commercialized, but there is a growing market. The seed is high in fat, about 48% (similar to 45% in cacao), which has created a budding market for industrialized cupuacu butter being used in cosmetics for skin care. Cupuacu butter has higher yields per fruit than cacao and its price is attractive for farmers. Processing accessibility seems to be the current limitation in production increase.

Yet the seed also makes for a creamy and delicious cupuacu chocolate or “cupulate” that creates light mocha-colored bars or drinks. From what I can see, there is an untapped market for an alternative chocolate product made from the cupuacu bean. The taste is tantalizing - fruity, earthy, and bright. It also has lower levels of alkaloids, theobromine, and caffeine than cacao but still retains high levels of vitamin C and anti-oxidants. The fat content makes for an extra creamy consistency. However it’s high oleic fat content is also one of its logistical downsides. It has a low melting point of 30 degrees Celsius (compared to 35 degrees for cacao) which can make transport difficult. Yet combining cacao and cupuacu together makes for a winning combination!

Here at the Ranch, we have used cupuacu for everything from making vinegars and wines, to bonbons and coconut cupuacu hot chocolate! It is truly a magical tropical fruit that I could see becoming much more popular across Central America soon.

The Pataxte

A pataxte fruit

The pataxte tree grows to an average height of 8-12 meters, maturing in 5 years. It has a large, yellow, round to oblong fruit with distinct ribs (12-30 cm long). Its pulp is tangy, and can sometimes give off the aroma of gasoline, but generally has a sweet taste. Here at the Ranch, the pataxte pulp flavor is defnintely more polarizing than cacao or cupuacu. There are about 40 seeds per fruit and the pods fall to the ground when ready to be harvested.

Similar to the history of cacao, the pataxte was developed into chocolate during the Aztec period and likely originates from the Amazon. Mesoamerican civilizations used pataxte in beverages similar to cacao. Pataxte is grown from Peru to Mexico, but today it is most commercially available in Mexico. Its seeds are used in combination with cacao to make chocolate bars or fried/roasted for savory dishes. In Oaxaca, there is a traditional beverage called the “popo” made of pataxte. Pataxte is also often used to create buttery foams on the top of traditional cacao and maize beverages in Maya culture.

Pataxte already has a history of being combined with cacao to make chocolate, but this relationship is still underutilized and certainly not pervasive in Costa Rica. Pataxte provides an incredible nutty, buttery, and sweet flavor to cacao. However, its fat content is much lower coming in at around 20%. This gives us the opposite problem of the cupuacu, making it difficult to create a creamy bar with just pataxte.

Sounds like a combination situation just might be the ticket! Here at the Ranch, we have combined pataxte with cacao and cupuacu to make bon bons, chocolate drinks and delicious chocolate sauce!

Seeing Chocolate in a New Light

A small harvest of cacao fruits

A beautiful and important lesson I’ve learned this year is that chocolate is more than just dark, hard and bitter. Experimenting with cupuasu and pataxte has showed me that chocolate can be soft, creamy, nutty, floral, and taste like red wine. Expanding my interpretation of chocolate to encompass these other Theobroma varieties has inspired me to learn more about how to grow cacao, cupuacu, and pataxte in combination. This could create a more ecologically and economically diverse and stable chocolate farm for growers across Central America. It could also create more complex and unique chocolate products for everyone to enjoy!

The Fermentation Process

These Theobromas taste best when the seeds have been fermented, letting the sugars in the pulp seep into the seeds and enhance the flavor of the beans. A typical ferment needs a fairly large number of fruits (30+) to reach the desired temperature to initiate fermentation. Due to the somewhat sporadic and limited harvest of cacao, cupuacu, and pataxte we get from our agroforestry systems, we often find ourselves needing to ferment a small number of fruits at a time (under 10). To tackle this problem, we have done everything from warming jars of seeds in hot water baths to heating them in our compost piles!

The recipe below has wound up being one of our favorite ways to “ferment” the beans. It is a two for one process creating both tasty vinegar and beans with a rich flavor profile. As sometimes happens, we actually never intended to use this recipe to ferment beans, we just decided to give the beans a try after making the vinegar. Lucky for us (and for you!) we loved the way the beans tasted after going through this process.

A mixture of Theobroma seeds that have been fermented and are drying in the sun

Recipe: Theobroma Vinegar Fermentation

Every so often, magic is created from a forgotten experiment. This recipe is just that, an experiment that was left on the back of the shelf only to be found again and turned into something delicious! This process actually produces two unique products, vinegar with notes of chocolate, red wine and nuts along with beans ready to be dried, roasted, and turned into chocolate!

When beginning with fresh pods:

1. Place seeds and pulp of cacao, cupuacu, and pataxte into a bucket. We have used as little as 4 fruits to as many as about 10 fruits for this process.

2. Fill with water, enough to cover all of the seeds and pulp sufficiently. Add more water if you would like to yield more vinegar. This is up to you!

3. Add 1/3 cup tapa dulce (our source of raw sugar) for every fruit in the ferment.

4. Leave open to oxygen but covered for bugs (we use a cheesecloth and string).

5. Stir once a day for 3 days.

6. On the third day, check the flavor of the ferment, adding more sugar if the solution has already lost significant sweetness.

7. Check the vinegar once a week for 3 more weeks, testing the solution to see how well the pulp has soaked off of the beans. Add more sugar if the vinegar flavor is weakening.

8. After about a month, check to taste - If the vinegar is tangy and the beans are relatively free of pulp (the cupuacu and pataxte will have more pulp than the cacao) then the vinegar ferment is ready.

9. Strain the vinegar and bottle, storing in an anaerobic environment for 6 months to age.

10. Wash the beans, removing any extra pulp you can, and lay out to dry in the sun.

These beans can then be used to make homemade chocolate bonbons, ground up and put in smoothies, or in the chocolate sauce recipe below.

recipe: Theobroma Chocolate Sauce

This creation is a delicacy here at the Ranch, made with three different members of the Theobroma family we grow: cacao, cupuacu, and pataxte. This sauce is a great accompaniment to almost anything sweet, but we particularly like it for drizzling over coconut macaroons (stay tuned for our upcoming recipe book). If you only have access to 1 or 2 of these beans, you can follow this same recipe and it will no doubt be delicious. The flavor profile will change as you change the ratios of the beans, so experiment as you have access to different quantities of each!

1/4 cup cacao beans

3/4 cup cupuacu beans

3/4 cup pataxte beans

1/4 cup tapa dulce

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/2 teaspoon sea salt

Water to taste

If beginning with fresh pods:

1. Ferment the beans following the “theobroma vinegar fermentation” recipe above.

2. Sun-dry or dry beans in a dehydrator (the skins should feel dry and no longer sticky).

3. Roast beans in a cast iron skillet on low for 15-20 minutes until flavors are released and shells look easy to peel.

4. Peel shells, separating beans out.

5. Grind beans all together using a heavy duty hand crank in order to release the fats, creating a paste.

6. On low heat, melt 1/4 cup tapa dulce (our local sugarcane), stirring in the paste. Slowly add water to create the consistency you are looking for. You can make this sauce as thick or thin as you’d like!

7. If you already have roasted nibs, you can skip steps 1-4 and continue with the recipe!

A cacao overlooking La Cangreja National Park

These magical and delicious fruits have some serious potential in the chocolate making market. We look forward to getting larger harvests and experimenting more with these incredible fruits.

Check out these past blogs

Farm to Table Chocolate Bonbons

Life of Spice: Farm to Table Cinnamon

How to Design, Plant, Maintain, and Feast from your Food Forest

Amending Calcium-Deficient Soils – A Tropical Permaculturist’s Approach

Amending Calcium-Deficient Soils – A Tropical Permaculturist’s Approach

By 2022 apprentice Connor Gilmartin

A walk through our orchard systems

Wade Davis once wrote that the Kogi people of Columbia believe “The surface of the Earth itself is an immense loom upon which the sun weaves the fabric of existence”. The garden and orchards of Rancho Mastatal are proof of this eloquent observation. While walking through the orchard spaces of the Ranch, your field of vision is overtaken by a mosaic of emerald green foliage, and gem-like, plump tropical fruits. This intentionally designed agroforest is abundant - however, a productive tropical orchard or garden does not come without hard work. Without mindful intervention, these orchards and gardens would not reach their fullest potential. It is our goal to listen to Madre Tierra, and help her achieve her most resilient, healthiest form.

Tropical Soils

While the jungle soils of Mastatal are abundant in in biodiversity, they are lacking in potential hydrogen (pH), which results in acidic soil. This low-pH, high acidity soil presents a bit of a problem for a gardener like myself, who is keen on optimizing a plant’s growing medium, in search of nutrient-dense, boast-worthy fruits and vegetables. Simply put, acidic soil results in low levels of available calcium. It is a known fact that calcium plays a crucial role in plant health and development. So… how can we remedy this issue? I’m glad you wondered.

A tropical permaculturist in this predicament is faced with two options; purchase bulk calcium carbonate in the form of ground limestone to apply as a top dress, OR use all those eggshells sitting on the top of the compost bucket to make Water-Soluble Calcium (WCA). WCA is one of the five inputs developed by Master Han Kyu Cho, the prolific South Korean gardener responsible for what is known globally as Korean Natural Farming (KNF). I’ll note that topdressing with limestone (CaCO3) does play a role in our agroforested zones - foliar feeding 12 acres of orchards would be unrealistic, to say the least. Foliar feeding a quarter acre of raised garden beds is a different story. Preparing WCA is fulfilling and presents a phenomenal opportunity to help close the loop between your garden and kitchen, while also providing your plants a calcium-rich tonic they’ll thank you for. When you see your pepper’s shiny leaves praying towards the morning sun, you’ll see what I mean.

How to Make Water-Soluble Calcium

I’ll begin by listing the materials you’ll need to make a batch of Water-Soluble Calcium (WCA). They are as follows;

1.)    Two clean glass jars (I am personally Ball Brand loyal, but any clean glass jars will do)

2.)    Eggshells (Rinsed after cracking to remove organic matter)

3.)    Brown Rice Vinegar (3% acetic acid is what you’re shooting for if you make your own vinegar like we do here at the Ranch)

4.)    A cast iron skillet

5.)    A breathable cloth to act as a “lid” (cheesecloth or nut milk bags work quite well)

Washed egg shells and homemade bottles of vinegar

One of our alternative wood fired cooking stoves

I chose not to list specific quantities of eggshells and vinegar because the amount of WCA you might want or need is variable, depending on the size of your garden space or application schedule.  By weight, the solution will be prepared using a ratio of 1:10 (eggshells to brown rice vinegar).

To prepare the WCA solution:

1.)    Collect eggshells, gently wash with water after cracking.

2.)    Lightly roast the cleaned, dried eggshells in a cast iron skillet for approximately 30-45 minutes. This removes any potential leftover organic matter stuck to the shell. Shells should be dry and toasted golden but not charred.

3.)    Add toasted shells to a glass jar filled with brown rice vinegar. You will see carbon dioxide being released as the eggshells float up and down the vinegar. This is good. This is a sign the calcium is being dissolved into the solution.

4.)    Cover your jar with a breathable cloth. This prevents pests or large organic matter from entering your prized water-soluble calcium solution.

5.)    Place jar in a cool, dry location for 7 to 10 days.

6.)    After this time has passed, check to see if the solution is still bubbling. If it’s not, that means your solution is saturated and all set for the final step.

7.)    Strain your solution into a clean glass jar to remove eggshells. Cover with airtight lid, label, and store at room temperature out of direct sunlight.

Toasted egg shells

Egg shells sitting in vinegar

Voila! A week has passed and now you have a jar of homemade water-soluble calcium. You must be excited to go give your plants a taste. I’d recommend doing so in the early morning. Greet the sun, sing to your plants, and remember, your mind is a garden, your thoughts are the seeds, you can grow flowers, or you can grow weeds. Happy gardening!

Want to learn More?

We have been applying permaculture principles to our agriculture systems for the past two decades. Join us for our yearly Permaculture Design Certification to learn more about designing and implementing sustainable tropical systems.

Check out these past blogs on Tropical Agriculture

Tips for Working with Tropical Soils

Using Mountain Microorganism to Create Organic Fertilizer

Making Microbes: Fungal vs Bacterial Soil Life

Nitrogen Fixing Plants at Rancho Mastatal