At Home in Nature

by Rob Wood

  At the back of the garden on the inland side we have a barn which is used for storing firewood, a chicken house, tractor shed, lumber storage and a workshop on the second floor. Behind the barn is a quarter-acre chicken run with a wire fence around and fish net over to keep the chicken hawks, owls, blue jays and ravens out.

  Our old cosmic shack has long since been replaced by a proper house, occupying the same strategic spot on the bluffs overlooking the ocean: larger, more fancy and hopefully more durable. It has its own sewer gravity feeding down to a septic tank buried in the garden and out to a septic drain field in the meadow. We also have a small guest cabin, partially hidden in the trees behind the garden, with its own outhouse.

  A small three-season stream flows out of a nearby swamp and down through our meadow before steeply descending the last forested slope to the sea. We modified the swamp by building a small dam and raising the level of the swamp to accommodate an intake pipe for a micro-hydroelectric Pelton wheel turbine that supplies almost all of our electricity during the eight winter months. For the summer months we have a bank of solar panels in the garden delivering power to our batteries in the house. If and when all else fails we have a small gasoline-fired generator backup. As well as powering our fluorescent lights, this homemade electricity enables us to operate satellite internet communications, telephone and TV.

  A one-inch plastic pipe delivers gravity-fed clean, fresh water 1,800 feet from a surface well higher up on the mountain. We bring in propane in 100-pound tanks from town to supply gas for the kitchen cook stoves, refrigerators and domestic hot water systems.

  Most of these “systems” evolved, step by step, by trial and error over a long period of doing what worked best and was affordable at the time. Now that we are much more conscious of the importance of relationship, we have come to understand how the ambience of the place is generated by the way the parts relate and support each other to form a whole that is more than the sum of the parts. This organic process of relational holism echoes the natural world and literally brings life into our man-made environment. I am always pleased when visitors say, “Your homestead feels really good, the way it all fits together.”

  An example of the way the many parts of the homestead fit together in an interconnected web of smaller parts is the barn. Sawdust from the power tools in the workshop upstairs, above the chicken house, drops down and mixes with the chicken manure to enhance the compost, which enriches the soil in the garden. The health of the chickens and the yellowness and nutritional value of the eggs depend on greenery and grubs that the chickens find on their daily “open range” scratching rounds at the periphery of the meadow. The heat in our house depends on the spring-stacked firewood in the open-sided barn, protected from the rain but dried and ventilated by summer sunshine and warm westerly winds. Machinery, including the tractor and the ATV, their various implements and fuel supplies, also shelter under the wings of the barn close to the rough dirt roadways that ring the homestead and connect to the rest of the property. The covered workspace of the barn is also conveniently close to tools in the workshop above. Also nestled under the eaves of the barn roof are the satellite dishes for the communications and the internet systems in the house. They, in turn, are powered by the homemade electricity from the micro-hydroelectric turbine in the stream and the solar panels carefully positioned at the point of maximum sunshine in the garden. Underground cables deliver power, first to the batteries in the basement of the house and then back out to the barn and all the ancillary buildings. Similarly, all the different parts of the homestead are interconnected by the vital supply of water running from the well partway up the mountain down through branch lines buried in the ground to protect them from frost and wind chill.

  One of our greatest joys and also one of our strongest assets is hospitality. We built our new house and garden bigger than we needed for ourselves because we love sharing our home with others, and the more time goes by and the more energy we invest in the place the more people seem to enjoy it. Also, as the world gets more hectic and artificial, people are starved for the peaceful ambience and silence that we take for granted, not to mention Laurie’s sumptuous gourmet meals with fresh seafood and organic garden produce.

  The ultimate goal is for the homestead to become more sustainable by strengthening both its internal and external relationships. So if, as well as making it more productive, we can entice the world to come and visit us, then so much the better. To this end we benefit considerably from hosting Wwoofers, young people travelling the world who are members of World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms. They stay with us for a while and work in trade for their board and lodgings.

  As the years go by, the aging process, not to mention health crises, increasingly limit our ability to do sustained physical work, so it really helps to have some youthful Wwoofers around to bring in the firewood or dig and weed the garden. The visitors in return have an opportunity to experience life in the bush and learn a few skills while at the same time engaging with the local people and their daily lives, as opposed to being mere spectators as are most tourists. Laurie always spoils them in the food department and we always offer them lots of time off work to hang out or go kayaking or hiking our local trails. We enjoy their youthful enthusiasm and seeing our place afresh through their eyes.

  We once had a Wwoofer who was a Swiss banker on a mid-career sabbatical. He had deliberately chosen to spend time with farmers and get his hands dirty. He was very methodical and thorough, as one might expect, and applied himself well to the tasks we gave him. Of course, he spoke English very well too. For his day off, he announced he would like to kayak around our island. He had not had much experience so this was quite an ambitious challenge involving paddling solo 20 kilometres, through two sets of tidal rapids, in one day. He was fit and generally competent and had a very positive attitude, which we always considered the primary requisite for any outdoor adventure. Rather than discouraging him, we helped with his preparations and emphasized the particular importance of getting his timing exactly right to go through the rapids at slack water, and gave him a hand-held radio for emergency contact. When he was finally ready to leave he asked, very sensibly as usual, “Is there anything else I should know?”

  “Well, only to expect the unexpected,” I replied.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Anything might happen,” I laughed.

  “Like what?” he replied quite nervously.

  “You might have a transformational experience,” I laughed again.

  “What on earth is that?”

  “Don’t worry about it. You’ll find out if and when it happens. Good luck!” I waved goodbye.

  He made it round the island without any significant trouble and back home in time for supper, very pleased with himself. We were suitably impressed and quite relieved. Next day, however, after work, he went paddling the kayak close by our place and came back home for supper in tears.

  “What’s the matter?” we asked, this time concerned ourselves.

  “I saw a baby seal. It came right up to me.” He sobbed breathlessly. “It rubbed itself against my kayak. I reached out and touched it. It had big round eyes that looked right at me. It was so beautiful. It stayed with me a long time. I took lots of photos,” he panted.

  “Aha,” we laughed, “a transformational experience, no less!”

  “How is Laurie’s garden now?”

  LAURIE’S PRIDE AND JOY, THE garden, is the heart of the homestead. Its central position and function generate the pulse of the whole place through a web of arterial connectivity. It too is made up of parts whose relationship with each other creates an organic and synergistic order (life) that generates the cohesive ambience of the whole homestead.

  As well as keeping the deer and chickens out, the cedar fence around the garden provides a strong boundary that accentuates the sense of enclosure and security. It took us three years to build, and we used a cunning trick that combats the rotting of the wooden supp
ort posts where they are dug into the ground. Instead of using chemicals that would be harmful to other microorganisms, we torched the surface of the lower part of the cedar posts in a hot fire. Once we had the posts in place we salvaged cedar logs from the beaches and split them into rails and pickets. As well as being generally resistant to weathering, with a bit of skill and a mulling axe and wedges, cedar splits remarkably easily. A random arrangement of lengths for the pointed pickets confuses and discourages deer from trying to jump the fence.

  The irrigation system is another important part of the garden that while fulfilling its essential function of watering the plants also adds life to the whole garden by relating all the other various parts together in a cohesive arrangement. It too has evolved through years of trial and error and hard-earned experience from its original version of a single pipe lying on the ground coming downhill from a well with a tap on the end to a complex, underground arterial web of branch lines, each with computerized valves that open and close at strategic times. In periods of prolonged drought that we sometimes experience in the late summer and fall, just when the plants are biggest and need most water, we have to ration and monitor the supply very carefully. Self-sufficiency requires that you be there to participate and take care of things, preferably before they go wrong.

  “How much of your own food do you grow?”

  PROBABLY ABOUT 60 PER CENT of our own fruit and vegetables, with a surplus of eggs, garlic and raspberries that we sell, trade or give away at the local market. Plus we eat quite a bit of locally caught fresh cod, salmon, prawns, clams, oysters and venison. We don’t eat a lot of meat because of minimal freezer capacity. Even so, we spend a lot on dairy products and dry foods such as grains and pasta and still seem to have significant grocery bills in town.

  Over the years we have learned which vegetables are best suited to our land, climate and storage capability, concentrating on the ones that give us most value for least effort. Some root crops such as carrots, parsnips, turnips and beets, as well as leeks and kale, so long as they are covered to protect them from wind chill, can best be stored by leaving them in the ground all winter. Onions and garlic are stored in the root cellar, where it is cool but not freezing. Bush and pole beans do very well in season but need to be canned for storage, though we also sell or trade our surplus at the weekly community market.

  In the fall, we plant all the other plots that do not have winter crops, including the cold frames and greenhouse, with fall rye grass which continues to grow through the winter and is dug back over into the soil in the spring. This green manure, together with substantial amounts of compost, adds natural fertilizer to the soil, making it rich and black. Household scraps, grass clippings, sawdust, chicken manure, seaweed and cardboard, mixed in ventilated bins, assist the composting process. Weeding is done entirely by hand without the use of herbicides or pesticides.

  All of the land area that is now the garden and orchard was originally cleared with our own hands and backs over a period of many years, from clearcut logging slash. Visitors have been known to say, “You could have done all that in a week with a machine, you know!”

  “But we had no machine, nor money to pay for it!!” And then, as if trying to convince ourselves, “Besides, it was fun and we did have some help from pigs!”

  For many years we used gasoline-powered rototillers to cultivate the vegetable plots, but the machinery, even when bought new, did not last very long before it was more trouble and cost than it was worth. These days we dig all our plots at least once a year by hand, often with the help of Wwoofers.

  If the garden were just about the economics of producing food a person could be excused for wondering whether the cost of the vast amount of labour that goes in is justified by the benefit coming out. For it to make as much sense as it unquestionably does for us, we have to accredit value to a number of other factors. The process of working the land can be therapeutic and meaningful in itself. Sometimes it’s good to get your hands dirty and grab hold of nature instead of just watching it go by. It’s another readily available way of being in the Zone, engaging ourselves with the energy of the land and nature. This source of happiness and meaning is the essential motivation and reward for our alternative lifestyle. We have known this for a long time, right from the start, and now we take it for granted, but a recent young Wwoofer, after spending a whole day digging over our garden, exclaimed excitedly, “That’s one of the best days in my life! I had no idea that hard work could be so enjoyable!”

  We have also always known the value of fresh organic and unpolluted food that tastes good. Again, visitors are constantly remarking on how good a raw carrot tastes, right out of the ground, or a fresh raspberry picked right off the bush. Plus the lack of herbicides, pesticides and genetic modification and the presence of mineral and vitamins – not to mention all the fresh air and exercise – are all very healthy. What mere numbers can possibly be put on such ethereal value?

  To me the most priceless feature of all, the one that gives me the greatest and increasing pleasure, was expressed by the girlfriend of the above-mentioned Wwoofer, with whom I shared a very special moment, taking a break from working and sitting on a bench under a rose bush, reflecting and absorbing the ambience of our garden:

  “This is like a sanctuary. It is so peaceful and harmonious.”

  “How much of your electricity do you generate yourselves?”

  ABOUT 95 PER CENT OF it. As mentioned earlier, we have a micro-hydroelectric Pelton wheel in the small stream that flows out of a swamp and down through our meadow for eight winter months and solar panels for the summer months. Very occasionally we have to use our gasoline-fired generator as backup.

  We built a dam across the exit stream from the swamp and the laid 200 feet of 2-inch flexible PVC pipe along the ground down to the Pelton wheel turbine to the beach at the bottom of the hill. The pressure in the pipe forces water through a half-inch-diameter jet which squirts against an 8-inch-diameter hard plastic wheel that causes the wheel to spin. The mechanical power of the spinning shaft of this turbine is then converted to 12-volt electricity with a Ford truck alternator mounted on the shaft directly above the wheel. The 12-volt power runs through a control panel into thick wires lying on the ground that deliver it 150 feet up to the house.

  An important component of homemade electricity is having a way of storing the power in a bank of batteries so it is available when you need it. The most common batteries are 12 volt, just like those in cars except bigger. Whereas a typical car battery is 80 amp hours, we bought an 800 amp hour battery. From the batteries the power is “inverted” to regular household 110 volts for distribution in the house circuits. An additional advantage of an inverter is that while it is delivering power from the batteries it can also receive power from an auxiliary gasoline generator and use it to charge the batteries when the Pelton wheel or solar panels are low.

  As far as appliances are concerned the most important principle is that the more of them you have and the longer you have them on, the more power you need. Conversely, and perhaps this has become the greatest issue of our time, the less load (demand) we have, the less power we need (supply) and the less subsequent impact (footprint) on the environment. Perhaps even more succinct for the future is that the less power supply there is available, the less we are going to be able to use. Our small 120-watt turbine going 24 hours a day is enough for the modest load we require, which, though way more than what we had been used to, is still tiny compared to the average North American suburban household’s uses (ten times smaller, in fact).

  Any electric appliance that uses heat elements or moving parts consumes a lot more electricity than, say, lights or electronic equipment. So most of our requirements involve the latter, and the compromise we made was that for the large load appliances, such as washing machine, vacuum cleaner and power tools that are only on for a short time, we use the backup gasoline generator. This has an additional bonus of charging batteries at the same time.

&
nbsp; Another important factor in reducing load requirements is that florescent light bulbs, and now LEDs, though more expensive than regular light bulbs, use one-fifth of the power of regular (incandescent) bulbs. They also last much longer. We purchased a lot of our equipment from an alternate technology outfit in California, and in the introduction to their catalog they claimed, “If the US government gave every household in the states florescent light bulbs, at a fraction of the cost of the first Gulf War (which was happening at the time), America could be an energy exporting country within five years.”

  Part of the advantage of our new system is that it has enabled us to have a reliable telephone, a computer and eventually a colour TV, all of which use relatively little power and provide a huge benefit, not least of which is the increased ability to “relate” with the rest of the world from our remote location.

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  ORGANIC HOUSE

  “What happened to the old cabin in the woods, the cosmic shack?”

  WE TORE IT DOWN. THAT was not difficult. It would have soon fallen apart anyway so we thought we’d save it the trouble. It gave us the next 20 years’ supply of cedar kindling.

  “What sort of a house do you live in now?”

  WHEN GRADE 8 CAME ROUND and it was time for Kiersten to go to high school in town, we tried several different scenarios, the first of which was renting a small house closer to town on the next island for the school year. So we too were forced to leave our beloved homestead on the outer islands for a while even though we came home every weekend and holidays. Fortunately the house we rented on Quadra had a few acres of pasture and some outbuildings so we were able to move Riskie the horse as well as Sheen dog, Tweedy the cat and the chickens.

  This meant I had to take a job as a carpenter building custom houses, which turned out to be fun and enabled me to learn a lot. It also led to a significant improvement in our financial situation. At coffee breaks, on site, I would sit in on discussions about how the next pieces of wood were to go together and I would often do quick sketches with a carpenter’s pencil on a scrap piece of plywood. When one of the builders, called Larry, saw one of these sketches he exclaimed as if surprised,