New Earth Energy Images site

I've not been doing much on the eco blog so far this year because I've been busy with my new photo site, Earth Energy Images. Friends have given me lots of encouragement with my stuff and its spurred me on to get get a much better website going. I've just had my first exhibition too. Many thanks to everyone for their support.

Earth Energy Images links up with this eco-blog and with my therapy work. One of my main themes is to make these eco/creativity/healing connections, it's all part of my hope for the future. More below on that.

the continuing saga of the World's Slowest Yurt

At last I've got my yurt frame finished...

Our friend Jamie gave me some crucial help with block foundations and joists for the floor and with putting up the walls and first few roof poles.

Thanks Jamie! I think you've found a new niche there...

The frame was much easier to put up on this 18mm spruce ply floor, it is easier to get it laid out in a circle and the whole thing is just much more solid.

A big moment - Jamie and I get the crown and first 4 roof poles up and it stays there.

And there it is sitting in the garden. No need to cut the grass now...well there isn't any left...

First mug of tea in the yurt. Next job is making the canvas cover - steep learning curve coming up again as I've never used a sewing machine before.

DOOM GLOOM AND HOPE

We're sitting on a time bomb and nothing much is really being done about it!
How long do we have before the effects of climate change, peak oil and loss of resources really start to hit us? My guess is that we are going to see some events in the next ten or twenty years that will really shake us and make all this financial stuff look completely trivial.

At least it's all a bit more mainstream these days, here's the Met Office on climate change:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechange/guide/effects/security.html
Note their chilling line, "Climate change may already be a contributory factor in conflicts in Africa".

HOPE
In the therapy world we talk about the development of human consciousness a lot. Debi and I work with an amazing guy, Gary Mannion, who does Psychic Surgery. He works with energies from a different realm or dimension and my hope is that we will similarly develop new ways of working with materials, plants and with each other that will help Mankind to survive. Far fetched? Well maybe, but I think it's actually the best hope we have.

CULDEES ECOVILLAGE

Happy pigs!

The extraordinary vision of Maryse Anand for her farm on Loch Tay includes an eco-village, a Scottish Centre for Alternative Technology, a healing centre and a space for children to develop in the spirit of the Anastasia writings. This is all while Maryse continues to run her Bunkhouse accommodation business, keeps busy giving distant healing treatments and has just recently become a host for the Academy of Agricultural Philosophy from Japan.

I share all of Maryse's enthusiasm and vision for the work and believe it's vital we start building a sustainable, resilient world now. Why can't we swing a couple of billion Maryse's way instead of shoring up the crumbling towers of fear and greed? I think she'd achieve a bloomin' sight more than certain politicians I can think of. As it is, much of the work at Culdees is done by volunteers like myself. While I was there, there were also visitors from France, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, the US and the UK as well as two monks from Japan.

(And in that vein look at the hassle the Lammas ecovillage project in Wales is being given by the planning authorities - these people need support not endless stupid obstacles ... rant rant rant ...)

My contribution: the raised beds in the polytunnel were getting very wobbley so I used a bit of acoustic guitar making technology in the form of X-bracing to firm them up. (Plus I was able to help a bit with a translation of the Academy of Agricultural Philosophy's manifesto - very interesting in itself, all to do with reviving natural systems of agriculture which respect the Earth. More soon about that I hope, there is even a plan to start growing rice at Culdees.)

Good luck Maryse! Thanks for all the delicious food, fascinating talks and hope to see you again very soon.

Duck delivery service

Here are four ducks en route from a breeder in Kent to a home in the highlands with Sue and Tober at Tombreck. These are Super Ducks, sorry, I've forgotten the name of the breed, which lay an egg a day as well as chomping up slugs and other pests without destroying plants. Chickens tend to scratch up plants but, having webbed feet, ducks don't.

The journey took two days - it must be a long time to be kept inside a cardboard box.

Handing the ducks over to Sue...

...and here are the ducks a week later safely in their new home inside Sue and Tober's poly-tunnel, complete with mini pond and all the duck food you could ask for. They were still very shy, the journey seemed to have been a bit traumatic for them. Maybe they take a while to adjust to being 500 miles further North as much as anything else; if anyone knows any tips towards happy duck transportation please let me know. Hopefully they will be up to full duck power before too long.

Website and book to check out ...

This book is ace! I've never felt that evolution, genetics and all that stuff was the complete story, "A New Science of Life" explores the idea that our development may be influenced by "Morphic Fields" existing outside the conventional understanding of space and time. It just all makes tremendous sense to me. Also, it seems to tie in with some of the stranger ideas of quantum mechanics and string theory, for example, the idea that the reality we perceive is just a shallow projection from a realm with many more dimensions. Rupert Sheldrake has ruffled a few feathers amongst the scientific establishment - oh dear what a pity he he! One editor has even suggested that this book should be burned! Well I think that alone is a good reason to read it...

Check out Rupert Sheldrake's website too: http://www.sheldrake.org/homepage.html.

Janet and Clive's Olive Harvest - A Colheita 2008

It was very satisfying to see these photos of olives harvested from trees I helped to prune and renovate almost a year ago. Here is Janet and Clive's own description:

"The traditional hand-picking method requires a ripador, a small hand-held rake to comb the olives from the branches of the tree onto a net spread on the ground. After I returned from a visit to England in mid-November, we sought one each. None were available at the market, one shop had sold out, a second was out of stock, a third hadn’t had any for ages and as they were hand-made by oldsters they didn’t have a source. We abandoned the search and looked instead into pneumatic palmetas, mechanical clappers to shake the olives (drupes) from the twigs. We bought a good-sized net (Ecocampo recommended eight metres by eight) to spread under the tree, for catching the olives, and crates to carry them in. A week later we were “mooching” in the old town and found two little shops which merit the appellation of Emporium or Aladdin’s Cave; we bought some sacks and when we asked about ripadores, they had them! The first time we opened out the net it was obviously far too big, so we swapped it for a 6x6m (20ft square), which was manageable for two of us.

"Although it was cold in the morning, the sun always came out and warmed the day to a comfortable 13°-20°C. We were in the olival just after 9am, stripping the drupes then lifting the net to pour them into a crate. At the end of the day we put the olives through a winnowing machine to clean the leaves from the fruit - when we bought the quinta we paid an extra €500 for farm equipment; the only piece that was of any use or value turns out to be the winnowing machine. The Portuguese have no word for this important machine; to them all machines are “maquina”, which covers anything with moving parts. A hand drill, electric drill, pneumatic drill, cement sprayer, car engine, JCB digger, all are “maquina”. To name each, you have to say what the maquina is for.

"Now, once the olives are cleaned and bagged, you take them to a lagar to be pressed for the oil. Our nearest mill, Orca, is closed again this year, and JJ the digger man suggested one in Vale de Prazeres (Valley of Pleasures). We visited, and found a grim-looking old warehouse mounded six feet deep in tons of bagged olives, lying sullen and forlorn in a thin river of black juice which trickled into the ground outside. No sound of action. A bored bloke shuffled out to “greet” us, fag in mouth and wearing a beret and boiler suit, waiting for us to speak first. Disheartened, it wasn’t worth the effort so we hardly bothered, deciding that any other lagar would probably be better.

"We were told that 200kg is the minimum acceptable weight for pressing, so we needed to gather more olives and weigh them. Back to Ecocampo for more sacks and crates. They had sold out of our size and the rest would not stack on ours – typical. However, they did have a weighing machine on sale, so we bought that. And in a typical serendipitous conversation we met Julio the olive farmer, who suggested a lagar called Loca, beyond Fundão, 40mins drive from the quinta.

"Two days later, on the way back to our villa, we went to find Loca. There was a queue of fifteen trucks and tractors with trailers right along the access road and onto the main road. Good news though, we stopped to look around the place and met Julio again, a mutual pleasure. Working most of each day, we harvested 201kg in one week. We took our olives to lagar Loca where we were sixth in line, and only had to wait two hours for our turn – we felt sorry for the farmers who were in the long queue a few days ago!

"There we emptied them through what looked like a cattle grid in the floor. They were washed, weighed as 201kg (yeah!), and pressed; we were looking forward to having our own oil but discovered that we were in fact adding to the stocks of “Português” oil and would get one tenth of the weight of our olives as communal oil, fresh from the pump! Twenty litres of our very own oil – we were SO proud, taking it home. After a few days back at the villa to wash us and our clothes, at the beginning of December we returned to pick a second harvest. Five days and a further 106kg in crates we returned to Loca, and took eleven litres more of freshly-pressed olive oil home. Delicious! But the weather was turning cold and the better drupes were falling to the ground, so we decided the end of the harvest had arrived for this year. Now we have met the second of our targets; we are now genuine producteurs, with our own registered number at the lagar. Our oil sells for €4 a litre wholesale. Next year when the trees I pruned in January 2008 come into full production, we should be able to get nearer to 600kilos, if we can cope with so much picking. Ah well, a farmer’s life . . . !"

Fantastic you two - hope to see you out there again one day...

*** COURSES *** COURSES *** COURSES ***

Lots of good courses coming up at Brighton Permaculture Trust including:
Permaculture Design (Intro and Full courses)
Pruning Old Fruit Trees
Forest Gardening
Green Architecture
and much more
I've done several of courses with the Trust and they've all been really good. The Pruning Old Fruit Trees course turned out to be brilliant experience that helped Clive and me to get to grips with all those olives in Portugal. Great bunch of people at the Trust too - check out dates etc. here: Brighton Permaculture Trust Courses.

And in Wales:

I'm planning to do the longer Permaculture course, 16th - 30th May, with Steve Jones at the Llanfyllin Workhouse project down in Wales, partly because a two week residential course suits me better than a 12 weekend day format and also because Steve is ace! He's very inspiring, motivating, lots of fun and has an excellent team working with him including Chris Dixon with whom I spent a very wet few days last year. See you there I hope, full details here:

Steve's Permaculture Course - 16th to 30th May 2009 - Llanfyllin

More about the extraordinary Workhouse project at: Llanfyllin Workhouse. and more about Steve's work at Sector39 and on his Channel 4 blog.

Interesting Film - Zeitgeist Addendum

Here's an interesting film for you on youtube:
Zeitgeist Addendum
It looks at money amongst other things and the way that banks can magically turn a 1,000,000 into 10,000,000 or more...
Fascinating: the film also talks about a case from 1968 involving a certain Mr Jerome Daly (the Defendant) who was an attorney whose house was being foreclosed upon because he stopped paying his mortgage of 14,000 dollars. The Plaintiff, the First National Bank of Montgomery, brought him to court for the foreclosure process. Daly decided to defend himself since he was a lawyer. Daly’s argument was that he owed the bank nothing because the "money" that they put up to purchase the house was not actually money because the bank had created it out of thin air. He won the case.
Very interesting and well worth a look - more about the case at foreclosurefish and jail4udges with documents from the trial at lawlibrary.

Try some WWOOFing in 2009...

No it's nothing to do with dogs or low frequency speakers... WWOOF stands for Willing Workers On Organic Farms and its a brilliant organisation which puts you in touch with farms all over the world that need a helping hand. The deal is usually that you work a number of hours a week in return for board and lodging. Check out their site: WWOOF

Diggers and Dreamers
I made contact with Chickenshack and Monimail through another interesting organisation, Diggers and Dreamers. It's focus is more on alternative communities. Their site: Diggers and Dreamers. The link should go conveniently to the Findhorn page.

Volunteering through either channel will give you a glimpse of the practical process of moving towards a sustainable future and the hosts are always very glad of a bit of extra help. Why not have an eco holiday this year? I've visited some beautiful places in 2008 and met some of the most interesting, thoughtful, fun and healthiest people you could hope to meet.

TOMBRECK - Winter in the Highlands

Extra-special thanks to Sue and Tober for all their highland hospitality during my stay at Tombreck, the rundown hill farm they are bringing back to life. They make a great partnership; Sue is an eco-architect and has done the designs for the building work, including a straw bale house, while Tober has lots of different farming experience from fish farming to crofting. They both have a deep respect for the land and all things living on it and are rejuventing the farm using their hearts as well as their heads. More about their work at: Tombreck.
It was a bit chilly though...minus 7 degrees registering on the car thermometer there...

...but how good to have a bit of real winter for a change. Fellow WWOOFer Richard shared his caravan with me and we got it nice and cosy thanks to the wood-burning stove.

The arrow in the picture above shows where the cosy caravan nestles beneath mighty Ben Lawers.

Sue and Tober lost their ducks earlier this year, no doubt to foxes. I helped the duck project along by building this palatial duck shed - fox proof and no doubt earthquake proof too.

What next? My plan now is to move up to Scotland and start getting involved for the long term with projects like Tombreck and others in the area. The wild parts of Scotland and Wales must be amongst the best parts of the world to start building the resilient communities that will give us and our children the best possible future in the face of the problems that are stacking up for us: climate change, peak oil, loss of food and material resources, water shortages...not to mention the collapse of the financial castles of sand. The communities that survive into the future will have to live on the resources that they live amongst and manage them for the future, the core of these being water and trees. There's plenty of water up there! Loch Tay is about 15 miles long and up to 500ft deep. There's beautiful trees galore and Sue and Tober planted another 3000 this year to keep them company with plenty more on the way.

I'm really drawn to moving back to Scotland and to the Loch Tay area: it's beautiful, it's near my daughters, Amanda and Laura and there are great projects and people working there already. It will mean a bit of travelling up and down to be with Debi and the boys but it will be the best place to build the things we dream about. One day we'll have our eco home in the highlands and carry on developing our healing work as part of a resilient community.

Here's a few more photos from around Loch Tay...

...looking west to Ben More from Tombreck...

...looking north east down the loch...

...and looking west up the loch towards ben More again.

And a few more wintry shots from around Perthshire thrown in for good measure:

While I was in Scotland I had a walk up Ben Vrackie with my chum Brian, its the 46th time he's been up the speckled hill this year...

..and he's been up all the corbetts once and the munroes twice - is their a Hill Addicts Annonymous he can join?

Stunning views from the top of Vrackie:

And finally, a familiar view from the road north to Aberfeldy, Schiehallion, "The Fairy Mountain".

More soon and Happy Christmas and New Year to all blogees!

The Continuing Saga of Ian's Yurt

Extra big thanks to Matt of Future Roots (and Yurtopia) for an amazing few days at Stanmer Park learning more about yurt making - and a whole lot of other stuff too. It felt like being in an Icelandic saga with tools and equipment from the Middle Ages everywhere (and also because my own yurt seems to be taking such a long time to make...)


Matt's yurt nestling in the glade.


Matt's woodland workshop MK II - sadly MK I was vandalised in July this year and burned to the ground.


I would have laughed at the idea of using one of these medieval shaving horses a few days ago but not anymore - they are so useful! They hold awkwardly shaped wood really tight and its quick and easy to turn your workpiece about. They are ideal for doing any shaping on the greenwood poles that Matt uses for his yurts and for loads of other jobs as well.


A selection of drawknives, they can be used to take off big chunks of wood or for fine shaving, simple and versatile.

This is a FROE, something I've never even heard of before, a sort of cross between an axe and a chisel. Again, these simple tools are all really versatile. We talked a lot about a general decline in skill with hand tools - maybe one day when power is not so cheap these things will come into their own again. Matt told a nice story about some yurt makers who had been brought over from Mongolia by one of the English manufactures. They needed a large fret saw so they just made one out of an old bicycle wheel. I guess they don't just pop down to B&Q when they need something in Ulan Bator. I love all that ingenuity and adaptability.

Once more, nice and simple, a forked tree holds a roof pole while it is de-knotted and de-barked. If you see one of Matt's yurts you will notice he gets a lovely finish on these wiggley poles; it's a different look altogether to my sawn timber style.

This is the jungle version of my suburban steamer, an old beer keg...

... sitting over a roaring fire inside an oil drum.

The steam goes from there into a section of gas mains pipe - lovely!

Once they have been thoroughly steamed, Matt bends the roof poles over a gas cylinder sitting in an old staircase...


...while the wall poles are bent between some scaffolding poles. It's all great, simple, ingenious stuff and making what you need out of what you have at hand.


This is my own wheel, third attempt now, built up from two half-inch layers of oak and glued up on a metal former. Next, we drilled it with holes for the roof poles.

But the roof poles have a square end ... time for the best bit of ingenuity of all, the sawn-off pick-axe head.

It gets heated red hot in the barbeque...

...then simply burns the round holes into squares ... Brilliant!

And here is my latest wheel homeward bound.

COMING SOON: the next volume of the Saga of Ian's Yurt, The Erection of the Frame, Part Two.

Thanks again Matt, it was great meeting you and having all those sorting-out-life-and-everything-else conversations. I found out lots about Yurt Making but also a whole lot I wasn't expecting about a simpler way of working with wood and working with greenwood too. Good luck with all your enterprises!