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Wynton's Permaculture Adventure Part 3

10/17/2013

The internship at Zaytuna farm is over and I will be travelling north. I hope to make it up to Cairns, but we will see. The internship ended well. We had two more courses: Urban Design and Soils. The Urban Design course was much more about how to start and run a permaculture consultation business than its name might imply. It was taught by Nick Huggins (in blue on the right) who is a high end landscape designer prior to getting into Permaculture. He taught us his strategies and tricks for running a business as well as on how to effectively consult with clients.
We did two mock designs. One was a practice installation. We put in a small garden at a house plot near the farm. The other was a mock consultancy. We went to a 15 acre piece land. It was mostly a steep volcanic slope so we were focusing on the area closer in to the property. I started talking with them about plants and they found me most helpful so they asked me back for a real consultancy! I went back and gave them two days of my time. It went very well and I feel much confidence now and I got to leave the farm with a consultancy under my belt.

Paul putting a bubbler on a ferment.

The soils course was taught by Paul Taylor who has worked with Elaine Ingham and I highly recommend you look him up. His company is called Trust Nature. The course was great. It really re-energized my interest in soil regeneration as well as teaching me in even more detail. Soil life is very important for our survival. If the soil is not healthy, plants will be unhealthy. I have heard many times the soil is responsible for 99% of the plants immune system. This is because the microbes feed and treat the plants in exchange for habitat and energy from the plants. The way our culture treats soil, clearly shows that the majority of us don't understand this relationship. Burning, the use of biocides and conventional fertilizer, over-grazing and over tilling are all destroying soil structure, causing compacted soils and dehydrated landscapes.

Luckily, we have solutions that can make visible differences within a few years. Paul Taylor has developed a soil regeneration method called the Bio-Vital method. It has three main components: Inoculum compost, liquid probiotic and bio-fertilizer. The inoculum compost is a ten week high quality compost. He makes it in a welded mesh wire basket and turns it every week.
The probiotic is derived from the compost which he actively aerates in a large tote. He sprays this on the soil to bring it back to life or decompact it. These microbes are aerobic. If you want healthy soils it must be dominantly aerobic. Anaerobic soils are compacted soils. The third component, bio-fertilizer, is an anaerobic ferment.

However, the culture consists of facultative anaerobes. These little guys can survive in both low and high oxygen conditions. Basically, they out compete the other anaerobes and help the soil transition. Another worthy recipe is phosical, which contains phosphorus, calcium and silica; all of these crucial nutrients are often lacking in soils. This is a very valuable recipe to know because conventional supplements like lime (for calcium) kill most fungal life. Paul adds all these together into what he calls preparation 252 and sprays it on the soil from the back of a truck or injects it into the ground on the back of a keyline plow. In addition to Paul's method, natural farming is a great method that I think could be used in combination with the Bio-Vital for improved results. For more information, feel free to contact me.

Me and Star

For the last week we worked on projects; my project was training the horses. Unfortunately for me though, it was decided to send Shadia, the main horse we were working with, to a trainer. This decision was made to save time. Before that, Zac (the woofer that I was working with) and I had been making good progress with her. We had done quite a lot of de-sensitising and almost had a saddle on her. She also loved being with us and was very responsive.
We were having success with Star, the other horse, as well. Although we couldn't work with her as much due to injuries, we got her to trust us a lot more. Since she came to Zaytuna after a bad experience, rehabilitation was our main goal. At the beginning, she wouldn't let us near her and by the end we could get a saddle on her. We also gave her a bath which was a huge improvement to her coat. I learned a lot from the experience and will be writing an article about it.

Botanical garden

After the internship, I went off with four friends. A couple had a van so we decided to all go camp around the area. We ended up camping mostly around Byron Bay, there are some great beaches there. We then drove to Brisbane. One of my friends and I went to Mt Coot-Tha Botanical Gardens, which was a blast. We spent 3 hours in one corner of the place, writing down all the family and genus names we found. We learned a lot and I can identify plants better than ever. If you’re interested in botany at all, I highly suggest you start with taking a visit to a botanical garden.

Now, my friend Jesse and I are on a 150 acre property west of Brisbane. We made the connection through helpx.com. The people are great and a bit into Permaculture. And they have a bamboo forest!
That’s all I have for now and remember, life finds a way in the most difficult places.
Until next time, Wynton

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"Come, let's play music" .....Gabby Pahinui

10/15/2013

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The fifth annual Gabby Pahinui Slack Key Festival and kanakapila, which took place at Waimanalo Beach Park in August, followed by the fifth annual Seattle Slack Key Festival on November 10th, is one of the many ways in which Cyril Pahinui is carrying on the legacy of his father and slack key music. The complex beauty of Hawaiian slack key music or kiho’alu inspires subtle emotions in the listener, but the music also tells the story of Hawaiian cultural history.
The choral nature of Hawaiian music is derived from its origins in chant, hula and drumming, a calling out for connection to the ancestors and the spirits of the natural world. When ships and people began to arrive on Hawaiian shores, the influences they brought were assimilated into the culture. From the hymns of the missionaries the Hawaiians acquired harmonics and melodies.
  The Portuguese, Mexicans, Spanish brought their guitars and after a long day of labor made music into the night. Island musical traditions also reflect the notion of ‘ohana, working together to create. In Hawaiian music can be heard the stories from the ‘aina, of place and the people connected to those places. In this way, Hawaiian culture is preserved and understood, and so it’s no surprise that Gabby “Pops” Pahinui became an icon for the 1970’s Hawaiian Cultural Renaissance.
Gabby Pahinui grew up in Kaka’ako when it was a close knit village with ethnic clusters of residents,   small stores, schools and parks. He learned to play by listening to and watching musicians playing in backyard kanikapila and for lū`au. As he developed musically he found himself straddling the grass roots world of Hawaiian music and the commercialized entertainment world, but his musical home was always kanikapila. His Waimanalo home, tucked in at the base of the Ko’olaus, hosted a nonstop flow of musicians who jammed into the night, notes twined together, leaping over the Ko'olaus, across the ocean, calling the spirits of the ancestors.

And indeed, the roots of slack key can be found in hula ku’i , a style of hula that joined old and the new together and emerged towards the end of the nineteenth century in the time of David Kalaukau’a. This can be heard clearly in Gabby’s version of Hi’ilawe. When his voice is carrying the melody, the guitar becomes a percussion instrument, Gabby strumming with the driving beat of the ipu, and then the break echoes this with his thumb setting the beat on the base string while his fingers fly, creating an ornamented mele. Gabby’s vocal style also reflects the varying tones of the chanter, at times earthy and at others celestial.

Kanikapila at the Pahinui Waimanalo house.

For Gabby, it was always about the music and while his was a unique talent, he knew that it was not a solo talent, that his music was derived from the aloha of many hands, voices and strings blending to tell the stories. This sense of being connected together by something larger than ourselves is the pure aloha of Hawaii. This is the legacy being perpetuated through the efforts of Gabby's son, Cyril Pahinui and the many musicians of Hawaii through such events as the upcoming Seattle Slack Key Festival, but also through the willingness to share the aloha that is the Hawaiian way.

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Wynton's Permaculture Adventure Part 3

"Come, let's play music" .....Gabby Pahinui

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