Made by Hand

by Mark Frauenfelder

  Over the years, Mollison, Holmgren, and a growing legion of “permies” have continued to develop the process of designing small-scale ecosystems that are beneficial to humans. I became interested in permaculture when my friend Terry Miller, who ran Make’s Web site at the time, told me about a weeklong class on the subject she’d taken in northern California. After hearing about the things she’d done there, I fantasized about turning my house and property into an experimental permaculture lab, with bees, chickens, and a garden, all connected in a way that let nature do the heavy lifting while I harvested the bounty.

  In a permie paradise, “nuisances” like bugs, deadwood, and rotten fruit become valuable resources. Grass clippings become nutrient-rich fodder for the compost pile; fallen leaves can be raked up and turned into mulch, to be spread on top of gardens to conserve water and inhibit weed growth. Terry Miller lays burlap feed sacks under the elevated wire-mesh floor of her chicken coop. After a couple of weeks, she removes a well-fertilized sack and lays it over the soil of one of the potted fruit trees on her deck. That way, when she waters the tree, the chicken droppings dissolve into the soil, providing nitrogen and other minerals.

  David Holmgren, cofounder with Mollison of the permaculture movement, developed a seven-step design process for establishing a permaculture system, encapsulated in the mnemonic O’BREDIM: observation, boundaries, resources, evaluation, design, implementation, and maintenance. The first five steps, which require little or no physical labor, are the most important ones and require at least a year to complete, if done correctly. They require careful observation of your land, watching what happens to it over four seasons. At the observation stage, you’re supposed to study what kinds of plants grow in different locations, where water tends to collect, what the soil conditions are, and how different parts are affected by the sun, wind, shadows, wildlife, and rain.

  After becoming intimate with the land and the way it changes over the course of the seasons, you make a map of it, establishing its boundaries and topography. Next, you take stock of your resources: How much time, money, equipment, and materials do you have? The information gathered from the first three steps—observation, boundaries, resources—is then evaluated before going on to the single most crucial step: design. This is where you create a plan to harness sunlight to create complexity out of chaos, providing you and your family with the things you need to survive. Only after these five steps are complete should you even start making your permaculture system.

  In theory, Holmgren’s plan makes sense. But I had no intention of following it to the letter—I wanted a garden, chickens, and bees as soon as possible. I figured that having lived in the same house (a 1930 farmhouse in the Melody Acres section of Tarzana) for more than three years counted for something as far as steps one through three were concerned. I spent a good couple of hours on step four—evaluating—before moving on to step five—design—which amounted to eyeballing where the raised-bed planters and the beehive would go. I was almost ready to move to the fun part—implementation. But first I had to kill my lawn.

  In August 2008, after having read a few books like Edible Estates and Food Not Lawns—which were about converting front lawns into vegetable gardens—I decided to get rid of my own front lawn. My entire yard was about a half acre, and my front yard constituted roughly a quarter of that. That was sufficient to provide the blank slate on which to build my own permaculture system. As I learned from these books, lawns were invented centuries ago by moneyed Europeans as a way to show off the fact that they didn’t need to use their land for farming—similar to the way a peacock’s tail feathers advertise to potential mates that he can survive despite such a cumbersome fashion statement. Eventually, lawns caught on among the less well-off, including homeowners in the United States, who today spend billions watering, mowing, fertilizing, and resodding ground they don’t actually use.

  In early August I took a one-day course called “Killing Your Lawn.” Steve Gerischer, a landscape designer with a trim mustache, taught the course. Standing on the elevated stage of a community center in front of a couple of hundred people in Altadena, California, he began by saying that if you approach gardening as problem solving, “it will rapidly become a bore.” Instead, he advised, look at it as an opportunity to try stuff out. “Ask yourself, ‘What do I get to do?’ not ‘What do I have to do?’ ” Good advice for any DIY pursuit, actually.

  Gerischer said he killed his own lawn years ago, not for any of the “right” environmental reasons but because he loves growing plants and needed enough square footage to grow “one of everything.” In the process, he learned that removing your lawn and replacing it with a garden was good for the planet. “One hour of running a poorly tuned lawnmower equals 340 miles driven in a new car,” he said. “Fifty-four million households get out each weekend to mow, blow, and edge, using 800 million gallons of gas per year, mostly in the spring and summer, when we are the most air-quality challenged.” The audience moaned as Gerischer rattled off these and other facts about the evils of lawns.

  Next, he listed the different ways to kill a lawn. You can rip out the grass with tools, which is hard work but effective if you do it right. You can kill it with chemicals like Roundup, but you run the risk of killing your existing vegetable garden if the herbicide drifts over to it in the breeze. The third option is smothering it by covering it with plastic, or with newspaper and cardboard.

  Death by newspaper appealed to me because it seemed cheaper, easier, and less toxic than the other methods. I’d been saving newspapers since hearing about the method a couple of months earlier. Gerischer said that after laying down the newspapers, you could then cover them with mulch. When it came time to plant, you just poked holes through the newspaper.

  The next day I called a topsoil and mulch supplier in Orange County. Sandy, the woman who answered the phone, was polite and helpful. She told me that mulch prices started at $19 per cubic yard and ran all the way up to $59. The expensive stuff, she said, was a chocolate brown “path mulch” made primarily from tree bark.

  I debated which kind of mulch to buy. It was tempting to buy the cheap stuff, but then I remembered what had happened a week earlier, when I bought a durable black plastic garden cart in anticipation of hauling mulch around. When Carla saw it, she literally groaned at how ugly it was. “Why couldn’t you have bought a metal wheelbarrow with wood handles?” she asked. I explained that I had found the plastic cart on Amazon, liked the reviews, and clicked BUY.

  The plastic cart exemplified Carla’s major complaint about my DIY projects. She was concerned that my amateurish activities would result in more eyesores. As editor in chief of Craft magazine (the sister publication to Make) she had high standards for aesthetic appeal. “If it looks bad,” she warned me more than once, “I’m going to hire someone to rip it out and do it the right way.”

  With the sting of the garden cart still in my mind, I told Sandy to send me the $59-a-yard mulch. She recommended I get enough to cover my lawn two inches deep. That meant I’d need about thirteen cubic yards. I ordered fifteen just to be safe. I also ordered a fifty-pound bag of gypsum, which Gerischer told me to scatter on the grass before I laid down the cardboard and newspaper, as it would accelerate the process. The total price, including delivery, was $971. It seemed like a lot, but I figured it would pay for itself in a couple of years through reduced water bills.

  Two days later a ZZ Top look-alike drove up in a dump truck. I asked him to drop the load on the driveway. Unfortunately, the telephone wires above it were too low and would get snagged on his truck if he drove past our front gate into the yard. “Dump it in front of the house,” I told him. This meant I’d have to wheel cartfuls of mulch through the gate and down the driveway to the front yard, but I didn’t have any other choice. The driver positioned the truck and tilted the bed. As the mulch poured out, a cloud of choking, dark dust rose up and turned my clothes a deep shade of ochre. The mulch was filthy! Before the dust had even settled, the truck h
ad vanished down the road, leaving me standing next to a $1,000 pile of dirty tree bark.

  Carla was concerned that someone would steal the mulch. “It costs a lot of money,” she said. “People are going to take it. The guy should have put it behind our fence. You better spread it on the lawn right away.”

  The next morning, as I drove my kids to day camp, I noticed a sizable dent in the mulch pile. Someone had helped themselves to it overnight.

  That afternoon I was ready to get started, but then I remembered Gerischer had advised pouring full-strength vinegar on the lawn before laying down the newspaper as another good way, along with the gypsum, to jumpstart the lawn-killing process. I drove to Costco and bought four one-gallon jugs of vinegar. I also grabbed as much cardboard from the free bin at Costco as I could fit into my VW Beetle.

  When I returned home, I broke open the bag of gypsum and sprinkled it on the lawn. It turns out that fifty pounds of powder makes for a very light dusting when spread over as much lawn as we had. The vinegar went even faster. I had to dilute it with a lot of water to stretch it out. The entire lawn ended up with a light drizzling of a liquid that was about 25 percent vinegar. (When I went back and reviewed my notes from the class I took, I read that Gerischer had said to drench the grass with about an inch and a half of vinegar, measured in the way that rainfall is determined. That would have been about thirteen gallons.)

  Already I’d learned two things about lawn killing: Don’t order mulch unless you inspect it for cleanliness first (I’ve heard reports of mulch contaminated with broken glass and dog shit), and buy plenty of vinegar. This is the problem with DIY projects. You end up learning a lot when you do something the first time, but unless you want to tear it down and start over, you have to live with the mistakes you make. I guess I could have bought more vinegar, but I thought I should get started before the mulch thief returned for another load.

  I began covering the lawn with layers of newspaper. The slightest breeze would send the sheets flying from where I’d placed them, so I carried a watering can with me to wet down the paper as I worked. After I’d laid down a couple of rows, I’d fill the wheelbarrow with mulch and spread it over the papers.

  During one of my wheelbarrow trips to the mulch pile, a middle-aged woman in a purple sweat suit, thick red hair spilling out from under a cap, introduced herself as the house sitter from next door. Smiling artificially, she told me the owners were selling the house and had moved out; she was watching it for them.

  “Look at all that mulch,” she remarked.

  “Yes, I’m using it to cover my front lawn,” I said.

  “I need some of it for a garden I’m growing,” she said. “I’ll come get it later.”

  “Well,” I muttered, “if it’s just a little.”

  “I’m not sure if there’s a wheelbarrow at the house, though,” she said. “Can I come over later and borrow yours? ”

  “I guess so.”

  She walked away.

  I told Carla about the strange encounter, and she told me to stop what I was doing and spend the rest of the evening moving the pile of mulch behind the gate, where no one could get their hands on it. It took me a couple of hours to transfer the entire pile, one wheelbarrow at a time. I had to wear a painter’s mask so I wouldn’t inhale the dust, which covered my clothes in a dark red-brown layer. (Fortunately, our next-door neighbor never came back. Maybe my unenthusiastic response turned her off.)

  The next day, Carla helped me lay down newspapers and spread mulch. I think she felt sorry for me, having watched me move a mountain of mulch from one place to another. I was happy that she was pitching in. But her mood was skeptical. “I really don’t think this is going to work,” she said.

  “Why not?” I asked her.

  “You don’t know what you’re doing, that’s why.”

  “But I took that class!” I said.

  “We’ll see.”

  But as she worked her attitude improved. The fact that she was helping—and therefore had some skin in the game—made her more hopeful that it would work.

  By the end of the second day, we had succeeded in covering about a third of the lawn with mulch. I was bored. I enjoyed the physical exertion of pitchforking the mulch into the garden cart and dumping it, but the tedium of laying down the newspaper was getting to me. I didn’t like crawling on my hands and knees and constantly pouring water onto the sheets of paper to keep them from blowing away. It took about twenty minutes to do a row. When I estimated that I had about thirty more rows to go, I sighed.

  After a week or so I was about 75 percent done. At this point I had fallen into a routine that wasn’t entirely unpleasant. I’d learned to work in the morning, when it was cooler (110-degree afternoons were the norm for Tarzana in August) and there was less of a breeze (so the papers would stay put). I’d found a way to lay down the newspapers more efficiently and without having to get on my knees, and I was using a hose with a mist nozzle to wet the papers instead of a watering can that needed frequent refilling. When I dumped a cartload of mulch onto the papers, I was able to expertly kick the pile around to get an even layer onto the lawn. I wouldn’t want to spend the rest of my life as a professional mulch spreader, but I now had the skills to make it easier if I wanted to mulch another section of my lawn or to help a friend do it.

  WAR WITH THE RHIZOMES

  Several weeks after I had laid the mulch down, the Bermuda grass underneath it started sprouting through. Carla noticed the patches one morning as she was loading the kids into the car for school.

  “That looks awful,” she said. “We should have used Roundup.”

  “I’ve been pulling up the grass a little every day,” I replied. This was more or less true. Most days, I’d spend a few minutes yanking up the grass whenever I happened to walk by to collect the mail or water the garden. Once in a while, I’d get more ambitious and crawl across the lawn, pulling out clumps at a time.

  “It looks like you’re fighting a losing battle,” she said.

  The Bermuda grass was a challenging opponent. If it had a credo, it might be Matthew’s line from the Bible “He that endures to the end shall be saved.”

  Also known as devil grass, wire grass, and dogtooth grass, Bermuda grass was brought to the United States in the mid-eighteenth century from Africa (although it probably originated in India, where is was fed to sacred cows) and spread quickly through the South and to the rest of the country. This fast-growing, tenacious plant has outwitted hungry animals and punishing climate swings, sinking its fibrous, six-foot-long roots into the ground and evolving segmented blades that break off like a lizard’s tail at the slightest tug, growing back with a vengeance. Bermuda grass flourishes in both acidic and alkaline soil and can even tolerate salty water. During periods of severe drought, it goes into a semidormant state, patiently biding its time until the rain returns. It’s the first plant to grow back when an African savannah burns.

  Steve Gerischer had warned me that Bermuda grass was the lawn killer’s biggest obstacle. Unless you adopt a scorched-earth policy, dousing your lawn with herbicide, Bermuda grass will spring back. The only solution for those who insist on going the organic route is to pull up the grass as soon as it pokes out of the mulch. “If you keep at it, you will eventually exhaust the roots,” Steve said.

  I took the eradication of the Bermuda grass as a challenge. If I couldn’t beat a weed, how would Carla ever consent to my planting an orchard or keeping bees? I just couldn’t allow grass to outwit me.

  Bermuda grass does possess a certain kind of vegetable intelligence that has allowed it to survive in the harshest of conditions. Its long shoots, called rhizomes, creep along horizontally between the ground and the layer of newspapers and mulch, feeling their way for weak spots. When they find one, they make a right-angle turn, shoot up, and start converting sunlight into chemical energy, which they send to the roots. The replenished roots use this energy to send out new rhizomes to find more weak spots in the mulch barrier. I knew th
at I had to stay on top of this problem or else it would quickly grow out of control.

  As the weeks went by the Bermuda grass and I entered a battle of wills. Once, when I slacked off for three days, a bumper crop broke through the mulch, prompting Carla to ask, “Can you work on that grass after dinner? It’s getting really big and bushy out there.” I fantasized about buying a hundred gallons of vinegar and drenching the mulch with it. That would teach the grass not to mess with me. But I resorted to hours of hands-and-knees work, and by fall the Bermuda grass cried uncle. I had conquered the weed.

  3

  GROWING FOOD

  In September, as my battle with the Bermuda grass was winding down, I turned my attention to my vegetables. A few weeks earlier, I’d germinated about forty different kinds of vegetable seeds in a starter kit on the counter of our kitchen’s bay window. Unfortunately, the light from the window was weak, and as a result, the stems grew long and spindly and were pinched in spots like a kinked garden hose. They’d exhausted themselves in a mad search for sunshine. Eventually, all but five plants died. I was left with three Japanese cantaloupes and two Moon and Stars watermelons. Even these survivors had skinny, floppy stems. I didn’t have high hopes for their survival.

  I had four types of tomatoes already growing in the small garden next to the driveway, as well as peppers, cucumbers, and a variety of squash. The Roma tomatoes were ripe and ready to harvest. I picked one from the vine and bit off a big chunk. It was mealy, spongy, thick skinned, and devoid of flavor. I spat it out and threw it onto the compost pile. I tried another, and another. They all tasted like lousy grocery-store tomatoes. I blamed this on Home Depot, where I’d bought the seedlings.