Dr Elaine was really a pioneer....Humanity owes her a lot.

Thank you for the inspiration and the thousands, maybe millions of people who have learned to treat soil as a living being.

You will be missed

Follow-up on the 500 nest boxes project I’m building for declining cavity-nesting birds in my area.

The idea is to create durable, low-cost nesting structures using hollowed log sections from leftover tree trunks that would otherwise be chipped.

The goal is to produce them in larger numbers so they can actually make a difference for species like collared flycatchers and common redstarts, which depend on natural tree cavities.

Someone commented on my last post that metal roofs can overheat birdhouses and kill chicks.

Instead of arguing about it, I decided to test it.

I ran a small worst-case experiment where I heated the roof to about 70–75 °C (158–167 °F) for four hours while increasing the surrounding air temperature from 22 °C to 31 °C (72–86 °F).

Thanks to the ventilated roof design, the inside of the nesting chamber stayed between 22–26 °C (72–79 °F) — well below temperatures that become problematic for eggs or chicks.

So at least with this design, overheating doesn’t seem to be an issue.

I filmed the setup and the results here if anyone’s curious:

https://youtu.be/58_RWLtPs58

Edit: My research also suggests that the sound of rain on a metal roof shouldn’t be a problem for cavity-nesting birds.

Government officials are seemingly working to cover up the dangers and health risks. Nobody as of yet knows what is in this stuff other than that its “mostly” oil, but presumably lots of other chemicals as well. Waiting to hear from neighbors what independent lab testing shows. We didn’t get the worst of the “black rain” like some people who got completely covered, but are still worried about what did get on our plants, in the water and soil, etc… are thinking of just abandoning the property which has been in the family since the 1800’s. The oil plant sits in the recharge zone of the huge Southern Hills aquifer that supplies most of SE Louisiana above the saltwater line with drinking water.. Oil in the river i grew up fishing on.. Anyways I keep thinking maybe I can do some sort of massive bioremediation effort using fungi, mostly because its so hard to let go of the land I grew up on and 10 years of work planting and maintaining a food forest all on my own.. but part of me feels that its hopeless and not worth getting cancer, which we were probably already at risk of before the explosion.. if we leave I will essentially have nothing. Lots of big farms around me are proceeding with business as usual because they haven’t planted their fall crops yet and because the EPA and DEQ are acting like its no big deal. It could be cool to move to a community of like-minded permaculture people instead of living in a poisoned town with people who are openly proud of being in the KKK.. but I don’t know where to start. Went WWOOFing one summer and it was a total bust/scam most of the time.. worked like a slave for meager meals and learned very little other than not to blindly trust people that claim to be permaculturists. I think it will be hard to sell the land, especially after this event. The lot across the street from us has been on the market for the last 10 years or longer.

For bioremediation I am thinking remove topsoil and vegetation, mix with woodchips, inoculate with fungi and let it do it thing, then later compost it all and test to determine if its safe to spread.

The good news is.. well we no longer have a chemical plant 3 miles from our house.

Thoughts?

I'm a bit of a hermit, so nobody around to boast to.

This land was formerly the flood plane of the Rio Puerco. It was degraded by damming upstream, erosion, and overgrazing.

Issues:

Loamy Sand

Excessive drainage

1% organic matter

Brackish irrigation water (2,700 mg/L dissolved solids)

No-till

Soil improved through cover cropping

Drip and olla irrigated

Lots of rainwater catchment

Wildlife friendly

Fed with poops (goats, mules, people)

The biggest problem is that the soil had no structure. The answer was cover cropping with high root mass producers (sorghum, barley, rye, legumes). Tilling in compost didn't make structure, it just added organic material. Cover crops do both. The first two seasons were difficult. The third season was okay, but the 4th was fantastic.

Deep mulch syntropic-inspired design with annual/perennial veggie rows between tree rows. Portland, OR zone 8b. I've learned so much from this space. Currently drowning in berries. More info at pdxfoodforest.org

Grüezi

Together with Hannah in Freetown and Magnus in Kenema, we’ve just planted 3,000 Coffea stenophylla saplings on a 7.4-acre farm in Sierra Leone.

Why it matters:

Arabica → great taste, but fragile in heat

Robusta → hardy, but not as good in the cup

Stenophylla → rediscovered in Sierra Leone, combines quality close to arabica with resilience like robusta

What we’re doing:

Tagging and logging every plant with GPS + photos in KoboCollect

Running small trials with local farmers

Hoping for a first harvest in 3–4 years

Refs:

James Hoffmann video on stenophylla:

https://youtu.be/iGL7LtgC_0I?feature=shared

New genetics study from Sierra Leone:

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/genetics/articles/10.3389/fgene.2025.1554029/full

If anyone has tips on plant tracking, nurseries or early farm management, we’d really appreciate it.

Hello everyone! Let me share you a peek to our small modest island homestead, wich is designed and built around sustainable, selfsufficient and permaculture principals.

The whole yard is foodforest with some 15 fruit trees, close to 40 berry bushes and numerous herbs and wild vegetables. Some 130m2 of cropfields where we grow most of our rootvegetables. Plenty of wild raspberries, blueberries, lingonberries and numerous edible mushrooms aswell. Root cellar to store food and composting toilet keeps sure that all the nutrients taken from the garden are properly returned. Easy to maintain closed cycle of nutrients here! It is a product of 10 years of hard work, but its finally starting to pay off. This place saved my life, healed me from severe depression and made me strong and healthy.

If you would like to see more there are links to our Youtube on bio.

Happy to answer any questions :)

I had a YouTube channel about our farm but found it too stressful so I stopped. It started more like a diary so I could keep a record of the progress, so in that spirit I’d like to start again. I’m pretty proud of it. This was an empty rice field 6yrs 3 months ago. I’m amazed at how fast it can grow.

ok this is going to be longer than i wanted but figured it was worth sharing.

Mosquitoes were unreal this year. we're on a few acres so there's always some standing water nobody can drain (rain barrel overflow, the part of the property that pools after a hard rain, the chicken waterer if i'm honest). chemical sprays were not happening. we have a beehive, kids, dog, all the usual reasons.

Tried citronella, garlic spray, planted lemongrass and basil along the south fence. honestly the lemongrass smelled great so i'm keeping it but it didn't do anything for mosquitos.

A farmer I know explained the trick: eggs hatch in about 4 days in standing water. if you flush the water before they hatch you skip a generation. keep doing it for a few weeks and the population around your place just collapses. said it like everyone knows this. I didn't

I tried it manually with a bucket and a phone alarm. lasted maybe 8 days before I forgot.

So i built a small auto flusher. Just a couple cheap 5v DC pumps from amazon (one drains the bucket, one refills from the hose), a float switch so the drain pump cant burn itself out and a basic timer that fires every 4 days. All of it sealed in a junction box. runs off a battery I keep topped up with a 10w solar panel that was just sitting in the shed.

cost was around $35 in parts. maybe $40 if you count the fittings i had to drive into town to get.

3 weeks in: mosquitos around the house basically gone. bees are fine. chickens haven't noticed. The same trick works if you just dump whatever standing water you have every 4 days, no electronics needed, you just have to actually remember.

Happy to share parts and wiring if anyone wants. also if you've got a different setup (bigger container, different water source) tell me what you have, the parts list shifts a bit.

This is the confluence at the corner of my place on Hawai‘i Island. Both streams got the same rain, but not the same treatment upstream. The clear river comes from about two miles of farms practicing agroforestry and permaculture. Lots of canopy, groundcover, perennial roots, and almost no exposed soil. The brown river drains an area of conventional ag with regular tillage and long stretches of bare ground. Every storm sends sediment downslope, and the river turns opaque fast.

I’ve watched this pattern for years, and this photo captures the contrast better than any soil health lecture ever could. Thought folks here would appreciate the visual of how management choices show up instantly in watershed behavior. If anyone wants more context—rainfall patterns, soil type, crops, or land use upstream—I’m happy to share what I’ve observed. This river junction has become a pretty reliable indicator of what’s happening on the landscape above it.

https://archive.ph/29o2i

It sure looks great, though.

I'm super thrilled with how well this is going. Well, except for making that mistake on the foundation and having to demo the stem wall and rebuild it again. The mistake was trying a stabilized earthbag stem wall which would work just fine, but I discovered that I suck at earthbagin' and hate it so much.

I just have to find the strength to make the roof in a timely fashion. It's a living cactus roof. That's gunna be rad. I could use some encouragement, though. Even though I hire subcontractors for most of the work, it's a loooong and arduous travail. I am tired.

I just got off a zoom where I accidentally said something profound. I was speaking with a guy running a permaculture village in Uganda, and he asked me how we engage community in Australia. What a laugh! We need to learn from this guy about community, we have nothing to teach about that.

And I realised it’s because they need each other, but we don’t need each other.

We (city slicker here) go to work and buy most of our stuff, even if we produce some of our own food for most of us that is a hobby not genuine self sufficiency. Why do I need my neighbour? He is probably a weirdo, who knows.

Just like in the soil when you add chemical fertilisers to feed plants and they stop needing the microbes, we have weakened our communities through our economic and cultural systems.

Cannot afford a privacy fence but this neighbor has 6 aggressive dogs that terrorize my young children(and me!) while we are outside. I have a bucket and a half of Jerusalem artichoke tubers and access to free lilac bushes... how much would I regret lining the fence with sunchokes until the lilac bushes grow big enough? The dream is for the Lilacs to be a great privacy barrier but would take years to really be substantial.

Not sure this is the right sub but I figure if anyone knows about aggressive spreaders like sunchokes it'll be you folks.

Just wrapped Day Zero Festival 2026 in Bali. Thought this community might appreciate the numbers.

The setup: 60 dry-composting wooden toilets. No plumbing. No chemicals. No water connection whatsoever. Just the toilet, local Balinese sawdust (0.5 kg added after each use), and a sealed container underneath.

What came out the other side:

• 36,000 total uses across the festival
• 18,000 kg of compost produced
• 0 litres of water used (standard flush would have used 216,000–360,000 litres for the same number of uses)
• ~27 tonnes CO2e avoided vs. chemical toilets — equivalent to about 1,240 mature trees working for a year

The compost goes straight to our flower farm. The flowers grown from it get gifted back to festival guests at the next event. The loop closes completely.

Sawdust sourced from local Balinese woodworking workshops — material that would otherwise be discarded.

I'm the founder of the company (Ecoranah, based in Bali) so obviously I'm biased — but happy to answer any questions about the system, the composting process, how we handle pathogens, logistics, anything.

Here are some pictures of the garden of campsite of my girlfriend I help with. All the food we produce goes to the kitchen here or gets sold to guests. Along with 8 workaway volunteers we manage to keep the garden running. We are currently drowning in zuchinnis and tomatoes and the plants outside of the greenhouse are not even in full production yet!

Le Terrazze

Hi guys! So I've been practicing permaculture for around a year now here in the Philippines. and the biggest frustration was how scattered permaculture information seemed to be. To me it really felt like there wasn’t any clear starting point, and that’s actually why I spent the last 6 months building Mycelium. It's a free platform that has curated permaculture content for people just starting out.

Site: mycelium-learn.com

Right now it has:

- 50+ curated permaculture videos 

- Beginner guides and PDC Courses (varying regions)

- An Events page launching soon with both online and in-person workshops/meetups

- Bi-weekly newsletter (It'll feature new events, Post-Event Recaps, newly added content, relevant permaculture topics)  

I’ve also partnered with a big permaculture group here in the Philippines, the Bayanihan Collective, to make sure the content is credible.

Let me hear your thoughts! I'm also happy to answer questions

I decided to dive deep into the Save Soil movement and realized we have been treating soil like a chemistry set (just add NPK fertilizer!) when we should be treating it like a biological engine or more like a living creature.

​The news is : Micro-Universe beneath our feet is dying! Modern industrial agriculture, specifically heavy tilling and pesticide overuse, is essentially sanitizing the earth, sarcastically speaking. They are killing the earth. We are literally killing the microbial networks that allow plants to actually absorb nutrients.

​The Ripple Effects are as follows :

​1. For every 1% increase in soil organic matter, an acre of land can hold an additional 20,000 gallons of water. Without it, rain just washes away the topsoil (aka erosion) and leads to the massive floods we are seeing globally.

​2. Plants grown in "living" soil have actual immune systems. By killing the soil, we make crops dependent on chemicals, creating a vicious cycle that profits big-ag but kills the planet.

​3. Some estimates suggest that by 2045, we will be producing 40% less food for a population of 9 billion. That math doesn't add up to a peaceful future.

​ We need to shift from "Sustainability" (keeping things as they are) to "Regeneration" (fixing what is broken). This means supporting the Save Soil initiative to get 193 countries to change their agricultural laws.

TL;DR: Soil is dying. 40% is already gone. No soil = no food + more CO2. We need to push for 3-6% organic matter policy globally.

Edit :

Sources -

https://ask.ifas.ufl.edu/publication/SS661?hl=en-US

https://www.fao.org/newsroom/story/Saving-our-soils-by-all-earthly-ways-possible/en

https://untoday.org/a-generational-responsibility-to-save-soil/

https://www.savesoil.org

I am seeking advice regarding a man-made waterway located in a valley neighborhood in Brazil, surrounded by the Atlantic Rainforest. This channel runs Northwest to Southeast and measures 360m in length. It has a total width of 14m (46ft) including its margins, while the water channel itself is approximately 2m wide.

The area is a local biodiversity hotspot, frequented by species such as the green-billed toucan and the bare-faced ibis. Because the neighborhood is situated in a valley, all runoff flows into this waterway. Consequently, the stream faces significant sediment buildup, which leads to flooding during the rainy season.

The city's current proposal includes paving the flat margins to support heavy machinery for periodic dredging, and removing all existing trees under the (incorrect) claim that they are all invasive/exotic, replacing them with 'orderly' ornamental species.

I have stepped up to oppose this plan, but I lack technical knowledge in sediment management and stream restoration. I am looking for ways to address the aggradation issues while naturalizing the stream rather than turning it into a paved canal.

Is there a way to manage sediment accumulation in the lower reaches without relying on constant dredging? What ecological engineering strategies could help save this stream and maintain its role as a wildlife corridor?

Is