On Permaculture

Cultivate Good Fungus In Your Soil

Part of a healthy soil structure means encouraging the growth of underground fungal structures, called mycelium, through which plants communicate and share nutrients.

The structures analogous to roots in the fungal world are called hyphae, which form a network called mycelium. The interactions between plants and fungi are both expansive and poorly understood, but as ecological and agro-ecological scholarship interrogates these complex life webs, it becomes more and more apparent that cultivating with fungi in mind also benefits plant life.

Studies have shown that trees in a forest ecology use mycelial networks like an Internet to send chemical signals to one another about predation or environmental conditions, as well as to share nutrients. Insects, like bees, sip water from fungal mycelium to upregulate their immune response, giving them extra armour against colony collapse pathogens and pesticides. Around 90 percent of known plant species have some sort of specialised fungal symbiont intertwining with their roots, in an arrangement collectively referred to as a mycorrhizal association.

In the garden, fungal associations can be carefully cultivated with a little bit of knowledge and a lot of experimentation.

Read more on Urban Farm

Impressive Underground Refrigerator That Doesn’t Use Electricity 

Regrowing Bottle Gourds

Y’see, folks were very picky about their bananas - they wanted every banana to taste exactly the same. So the big banana producers all started growing the same cultivar - the Gros Michel - and they deliberately inbred that sucker until every banana they picked was essentially identical to every other.

The upshot is that all commercially cultivated bananas suffered from the same weakened immune system, and when a fungal pathogen that could kill one Gros Michel banana plant evolved, it promptly killed all of them.

And the punchline? The banana producers didn’t learn a blessed thing from all this. Instead of diversifying their banana crops, they switched to a new cultivar, the Cavendish, en masse - and today’s Cavendishes are just as inbred as the Gros Michel was back in the day.

Indeed, a second “banana apocalypse” is brewing as we speak; in 2008, a new strain of the same fungus that wiped out the Gros Michel, one that’s capable of attacking the Cavendish, struck banana crops in Malaysia - and in spite of our best efforts to contain it, it’s spreading. According to some estimates, if banana production isn’t diversified soon, the Cavendish could follow the Gros Michel into commercial extinction in as little as ten years.

It exists purely as a status symbol that says, “I have land but I don’t have to use it for anything productive. I can invest time, money and resources in maintaining an entirely useless crop on land I’m not farming just because it looks pretty.”

(天敵を利用した減農薬への取り組み。から)

本日、天敵を放飼しました。

イチゴの害虫であるハダニを捕食する「チリカブリダニ」と「ミヤコカブリダニ」です。

小豆島いちご部会でも１０年ほど前から全生産者が導入しています。

ただ天敵をハウスの中に入れるだけで害虫を抑えられるかというと

そうではありません。

まず天敵も生き物です。餌がないと生きていけません。

天敵導入までに害虫の数をある程度コントロールしておく必要があります。

そこへ天敵を入れて、害虫が増えすぎないようにコントロールしながら天敵を育て、

増やしていきます。そして最終的に天敵が害虫を抑え込むようにしていきます。

どこかでバランスを崩すと結局害虫の被害が大きくなり収量、品質に大きく影響して

しまいます。

If you obsessively read ingredients lists, you might recognize some of these words. Ingredients, a new book by photographer Dwight Eschliman and writer Steve Ettlinger, seeks to demystify 75 common food additives, from acesulfame potassium to xanthan gum, by providing an easy-to-read encyclopedia of sorts on various food additives, their uses, and their history. 

Learn and see more of what makes up your favorite foods here.

It breaks my heart when I see people give up on herbs too easily.

More and more people are turning to herbs because there is a growing disappointment with using pharmaceuticals for chronic illness.

Many people are getting fed up with taking a pill that never really cures their illness and gives them awful side effects. Maybe they are concerned about acetaminophen giving their young child asthma (1) or they see the growing evidence about the risks associated with statins (2) and they say enough is enough!

From this moment forward they vow to never resort to drugs again and instead try a more natural and holistic approach thus leading them to the world of herbs and herbalism.

But sometimes their love affair with herbalism is stopped short.

They reach for the closest herb book, try a few remedies and then declare that the herbs don’t work! They tried using horehound for coughing with no relief. They tried meadowsweet for their headache to no avail.

They begin to wonder, “Are herbalists a bunch of delusional wood fairies touting the miracles of something that never works?”

As much as I would love to be considered a wood fairy, I’ll have to say no, this is not the case. I’ve seen herbs work hundreds of times. I’ve seen them work for serious infections as well as serious chronic diseases. I’ve seen them work when modern medicine failed.

Yes, herbs work!

I want to share a handful of reasons why herbs might not work in a given situation.

1. Improper dosing (either too little or too much)

When buying over the counter drugs like NyQuil or Tylenol, they come in a package that is clearly marked with the dosage instructions. Generally these are very simple instructions. “Adults take 2 tablets, three times daily.”

Herbs don’t always come with directions. If you buy bulk herbs the dosing instructions are absent entirely. If you buy a tincture or a bottle of capsules the dosage listed on the bottle has most likely been chosen by the FDA’s labeling mandates and not by an herbalist.  

I am not going to lie to you. Dosage in the herbal world is confusing.

In herbalism dosage varies from person to person, from plant to plant and from preparation to preparation.

A 15 minute infusion of a teaspoon of nettle leaf will not extract the same vitamins and minerals as a four-hour infusion of an ounce of nettle leaf in a quart of water.

A few drops of lobelia tincture can promote relaxation. A strong cup of lobelia tea could make you vomit.

One way I commonly see dosages being flubbed in herbalism is people using small amounts of tonic/adaptogen herbs in tincture, versus the traditional use of large amount of tonic/adaptogen herbs as decoctions or powders. (As always go with what works, but if you aren’t getting the results you’d expect after taking 5 drops of ashwanganda tincture twice a day, consider your dose!)

Frequency of dosing can also be an issue. During acute illnesses we generally use slightly smaller amounts but with more frequency. I may take elderberry elixir 1-2 times each hour at the onset of an illness for example. General recommendations are to take herbs 3 times a day, but that won’t cut it for acute illness.

2. Low quality plant material

Herbs often don’t come with an expiration date. Quality can also vary significantly and will suffer greatly if the herbs have been improperly harvested or improperly processed.

Plants decay. They simply go bad. The rate at which they do this varies significantly from plant to plant. If you’ve just pulled a bag of herbs from your back shelf and had to blow off an inch of dust… well, they are probably not at their prime.