chinampas

During this summer on Orcas Island, I was lucky enough to participate in constructing one of the most interesting forms of vernacular environmental engineering bred on the American continents pre-European occupation: chinampas.

The Bullocks had flooded a previously drained wetland to reestablish wildlife habitat and potential for thriving riparian vegetation, aquaculture resources, and water storage.  They had set out over several years to construct chinampas by essentially pilling cut reeds and mud from the wetlands to create floating islands rich in nutrients.

The community labor proved to be the most enjoyable part, as a transient community coming together during our Permaculture Design Course to build something ancient and innovative that used what the wetland offered, rather than draining it from fear.

The result was a sturdy and fertile substrate for beneficial riparian and aquatic plants to utilize–willows, water chestnuts, etc.  This effort also represents the permaculture mainstay of looking to obscure indigenous agricultural methodologies to develop the most productive and syngergistic utilization of extant conditions.

The Bullock Permaculture Homestead

The Bullock Brothers and their families have made a most impressive set up–particularly in the use of water. All irrigation water for the property is pumped out of the lowland marsh by solar panels into tanks and dams (at a higher elevation than crops) to be gravity fed onto water-ready cultivars.

Rainwater is pumped through solar hot water heaters (photo 1) before passing into several outdoor graywater showers (photo 2), which pass effluents into thirsty bamboo. This ensures immediate recycling and use of the bamboo, which serve an extra function of offering privacy to bathers.

They also maintain a mobile jam station with solar panels and a DC car stereo for working in the garden (photo 3). Solar panels run electricity in a direct current, so it is more efficient to hook up into DC appliances (like those in cars) than run convert into an alternating current (what most household sockets run).

I fell in love with their use of sheet-mulching, which is simply cardboard or layers of paper over existing vegetation covered with woodchips, soil, or compost. It serves to easily convert existing areas to new garden beds without pulling up all the existing plants and fertile topsoil. It can take a few years for the process to finish, but often one can plant crops like squash or melons into the sheet mulch by making a hole in the sheet layer and planting a seedling directly into the ground.

My last all-star trick from the Bullock homestead is their compost bubbler. The process begins by dropping a satchel of compost (analogous to a large tea-bag) into the tub of water, which has an air intake to “bubble” and increase aeration and diffusion, and letting it bubble all night. Then the high potency “compost tea” can applied as a liquid amendment to growing media. This can save time and backs from transporting composting onto existing beds, while maximizing the spatial extend of one’s compost heap.