I met Steve Whitman a few months ago at D Acres in Dorchester, New Hampshire, where, for the past year, I’ve been filming a documentary. Steve teaches permaculture design at a couple of colleges in NH, as well as at venues like D Acres, an organic farm worked by Josh Trought and a talented team of human beings, oxen, pigs, chickens, bees, worms and countless micro-organisms.

For the past 7 or 8 years Steve has been gradually turning his suburban lot in Plymouth, NH into a mini-farm, experimenting with various permaculture design concepts, and continuously adjusting what he’s doing as he finds what works best. A few years ago he built several small ponds to manage the water that runs across a slope in his yard. Last year he turned one of those ponds into a rice paddy (yes, a rice paddy in NH; I’m not making this up.) And next year he’ll convert the remaining ponds into paddies while he tries out some ten varieties of rice. This year he covered his front lawn with cardboard and woodchips and built up beds with manure, chips and small branches from an ash tree which formerly shaded the lawn. Next spring he’ll plant potatoes in those beds. Last week he was cutting winter greens in his green house as we talked and as nine hens sang about egg-laying in the background.

The neighbors, of course, are curious. They ask questions. And Steve likes that. His vision is a neighborhood of little mini-farms, a marvelous, rich and productive web of local agroecological food production.

Something that may give new meaning to the pejorative “Well, there goes the neighborhood.”

Steve and Josh met back in 1997 at a point when Josh was just beginning to think about how to turn some scrappy north slope forest into land for growing food crops. If you’ve ever walked an acre of this kind of land after the trees have just been cut, you’ll know that any guy who can look at that thin, stony, almost sterile forest floor soil and imagine growing serious food crops instead of moose browse, brambles and tree stump suckers is either in the grip of a serious delusion or in possession of some secret knowledge that none of the rest of us are privy to.

In Josh’s case, it was more of the latter and less of the former. And the knowledge isn’t really secret; it’s just floating our way, still a considerable distance up a tributary that is feeding the Main Stream. But mention permaculture, evergreen agriculture, woodland gardening or agroecology the next time you find yourself in a bar crowded with hard-core food growing types, and somebody will probably buy you a pint of local brew. (If you do find yourself in that bar, please email me the location.)

People like Josh and Steve are not just pushing the boundaries of more conventional organic agriculture with new technologies or clever new ideas. They are working out ways to fundamentally change the way we think about growing food on a relatively small scale. The big idea here is to encourage the growth of a local perennial ecology which is more or less self-sustaining and is specific to the patch where it, hopefully, flourishes.

So agroecology or permaculture is about trying to figure out all the stuff that’s already in place, or going on, where you want to grow food, figuring how the systems (water flow, insect life, soil composition, existing plant growth, human and animal activity, and more) work, and then adjusting things so you eventually get the most food for the least effort and use of inputs.

I had been filming at D Acres for more than half a year before I finally began to get it. Beth was standing in the middle of what she called a “woodland garden”, an eighth of an acre of 20 or more plant varieties, all growing more or less happily together: nut trees, fruit trees, mullen, rhubarb, currants, jerusalem artichokes, berries, echinacea, sea kale and on and on. The D Acres farmers had planted this crowd with considerable care, and have been tending it to be sure that all the plants play well with each other. In mid summer the bumble bees are so loud you have to raise your voice to talk. And throughout the summer and into the fall there’s always some crop coming ready to harvest.

Beth said it very simply: “The most important plants growing here don’t feed us; they feed the bees and feed the soil.”

I’m off to the grocery store to grab a car load of cardboard. There’s still no snow on the ground here, and so I’ve got a few days to put the cardboard on my lawn, manure and wood chips from a local horse ranch on the cardboard, top off this lasagna with a mulch of leaves, plant it with potatoes in the spring and see if I can get the neighbors talking.

There’s a lot I don’t like about IKEA’s tastes in design, not even including about half of their lighting fixtures (what’s with those layers of scales things that look like exploding insect abdomens? Do people actually buy them and put them in their living rooms?)
But if I want to spot a trend in the way people will be outfitting their homes, and in the actual size of those homes, I’m convinced that IKEA is the place to do it.

But I wasn’t prepared for what IKEA thinks is going to happen in 2012. On the third page of their new catalogue, they pitch a living space that is radical even by my terms: six people (we presume they are young) living together in about 400 square feet, warehoused in bunk beds, crowded around a skinny dining room table and storing their clothing in super-efficient little open closet spaces.

The headline is “Welcome to the world’s smallest ideas.”

I quote from the copy: “…we imagined what would happen if six friends decided to live together in 430 square feet. A home like this might seem like a recipe for disaster…”.
You’re tellin’ me!

But, aside from the gorgeous mostly-white 20-something boy and girl models in the IKEA photo, is the company really targeting that huge group of low-wage earners (read “ex-students, young singles, and immigrants, legal or not”) who have been living six or more to a room for quite a while now, ever since rents on living spaces close to decent (medium or low wage) work pushed way beyond the rates a single person or a couple could afford?

And yes, the increasingly public question of how we can live well in smaller spaces is what brought Joan and me last winter winter to a little house on wheels in Petaluma, California built by Stephen Marshall (littlehouseonthetrailer.com).

Stephen comes to the design and building of small spaces (mostly 100 to 400 square feet) from a different direction than Jay Schafer, certainly the most well-known of the tiny house designers (See my earlier blog and video). Schafer is well on his way to becoming a sort of celebrity in the field (Oprah, etc. etc. to the New Yorker Magazine, July 25, 2011). And with good reason. His designs are (yikes!) really tiny, but are near pitch-perfect in their, as he says, “curb appeal.”
And Tim Guiles, a tiny house builder in Vermont, designs from an aesthetic that is as rigorous, if differently expressed, than Jay’s. (See our blog and video).

Stephen Marshall’s vision is about decent, comfortable design and maximum flexibility. He will build anything you want, even matching the architecture of your big house, from a very small single room studio to a fully equipped home, put it on a trailer and roll it over to your land. As he points out, why build an addition on your house for your teenagers, your aged mother-in-law, or your husband’s new part-time photo-gallery business when we all know none of these spaces will be used into eternity. Or even, perhaps, for the next ten years?
Roll in what you need when you need it, and roll it out, (sell it or rent it) when you are finished. Or maybe even, if you are a young single or couple, and we can change the zoning in campgrounds or on little inexpensive lots, roll in your new little house for way, way less than you would pay (and you wouldn’t because you couldn’t) to build a conventional 2,500 square foot house.

Zoning, of course, is the bugbear, particularly for permanent living spaces on wheels, but Marshall is convinced we will see a slow change over the next 10 or 20 years towards zoning that catches up with the reality of how we are living now. As in, Nuclear Family? Wasn’t that some butter-and-popcorn technicolor dream from the 1950s that flourished on federal policies that encouraged everybody and his wife to buy their own home, and then keep trading up until the family was nuked and by the ’90s we encountered the absurd spectacle of divorced people living alone in 5,000 square foot houses, hunkered down till the repo men came to change the locks?

Marshall has street cred for his ideas. He built a couple of collapsable, movable houses for himself when he was in college, (things he could carry in his VW bus). And then went on to become a fine cabinet maker and builder to the Big House people in northern California, but turned away from that trade to design and build what is obviously his passion. Little houses on wheels.
And by the way, he often uses IKEA cabinetry, and IKEA has taken notice of his work.

A wasp freshly emerged from its cocoon on the tomato worm, almost ready to fly, mate and find another green monster to parasitize. (click to enlarge)

You can find lots of horrific pictures of tomato worms catatonic beneath their burden of cocoons, and I was prepared to serve up one of those, knowing full well that it would produce nightmares among my more sensitive readers (I like to imagine that I might actually have some sensitive readers). However, I had been watching this particular worm for a couple of days, and on the fourth day was lucky enough to glance at the worm at the very moment the wasps were chewing off the caps of their cocoons and sliding out.

So it is the wasp, my little quarter-inch-long fiend, who is the real story here, my invisible conspirator in the endless war against the worms in my tomatoes. When the wasps find the worms, they lay eggs under the skin. When I find the worms, I clip off their heads with scissors. The wasps and I have different tastes. I leave some of the worms for them. And in the end, there are more tomatoes for me.

Sweet dreams.

A small pile from my hoard (click to enlarge)

At Inverness, a small town where coal was the principle industry a hundred years ago on the west coast of Cape Breton, there’s a strip of beach that runs about a mile east of the little lobster boat harbor until it rounds a low headland and disappears. On the last quarter-mile of that beach the tidal currents, the conformation of the seabed, the old and nearly forgotten location of the town dump, and who knows what other arcane forces have conspired to mix sea-smoothed shards of glass into the multi-hued stew of pebbles, stones, and quartz and agate, some tumbled so long in the waves that they have become as flat and round as coins.
We rented a little cabin at the edge of the dunes, and walked the beach the afternoon we arrived. From the third or forth gem of beach glass I stooped to collect, I began to suspect that I might be susceptible to a fairly potent compulsion. If you know me as well as I know my self, you understand my alarm. An hour later, still picking beach glass, I know I have a problem. And that night I dream of glass littering the sand and the rhythm of walking, scanning, stooping, plucking and bagging the bits.
After three hours picking glass late in the afternoon on the second day I realize I’ve gone odd in the head. I know that’s so because I’m talking with myself about my concerns. But I’m also talking with myself about my ability to control the compulsion. I tell myself that it still manageable because I can stop at any moment. I can choose which moment to cease collecting. It could be now, at the end of the sentence. It could be after another five minutes. It could be after I’ve found three more pieces of green glass. Or three more pieces of green glass and a particularly beautiful jewel of white glass. Or immediately after I’ve found another bit of blue glass, by far the rarest of all the glasses.
I am reassured because I know I can decide when to stop; and because I’m certain that I can stop, I don’t. As the hours go by, I devise a set of increasingly strict criteria. No chunks that still hold the marks or forms of their origins. No pieces that have edges that are not smooth. (Those I begin throwing back into the waves, saying to myself like a responsible fisherman, “Back into the water with ye who are yet too young and rough”). But as the weight of glass in my collection bag goes from several ounces to several pounds, my critera grow more complex. I am having some trouble remembering whether I had decided to pass over glass that was smaller than a dime, or glass that curves in the third dimension.
In fact, I note with some modest concern, my criteria are drifting, not only as my eye grows more refined, but as the compulsion deepens. I begin picking up the coins of agate and quartz as well as the glass. I comment to myself on that fact, more or less endlessly, and answer each comment with a justification. “I only pick up the agate if I’ve already stooped for the glass.” As long as I follow some sort of criteria, I tell myself, I’m OK. Woe betide those who lose the ability to choose, who drop the essential connection between choice and restraint. An innocent kind of greed becomes the least of their problems.
“Perhaps,” I say to myself, interrupting my own recursive commentary on the ratio of green glass to white (it’s about 1 to 5, although the more I collect, the more accurate that number will become). “Perhaps one of the original purposes of money was to discourage hoarding by giving people some confidence that they might get what they need when they need it, rather than having to grab everything they possibly can when they come upon it.”
But I realize I am beginning to feel that this glass is in fact a sort of currency, and if I don’t pick it up, someone else will. I tell myself I’ll stop after I find one more blue glass piece followed by two browns. Not just any browns, but well-shaped browns.
Around 6:30 p.m., the light changes, and it seems to make every stone and pebble translucent. Everything on top of the sand acquires the luminosity of glass. I am lost. I want it all. I want the whole beach. I want to hire trucks to haul it to some secret cave in a mountain.
The next day at a farmers’ market in Mabou I strike up a conversation with a woman selling baked goods. On her table sits also a huge ceramic bowl of dried beans…probably ten different varieties in a fantastic array of patterns and colors. “Are you selling the beans?” I ask.
“O gracious no,” she says. “I have them for people to look at because they are beautiful. Here, run them through your hands; feel them. Look at them. Here’s an Indian bean from the states that almost went extinct. And this one’s colored like an orca whale.”
She can tell how much I covet her beans. “Say, I can give you some if you’d like to grow them out.” This would not be a problem, I tell myself. A couple dozen beans is not a problem.
While she bags a handful of those beans I make another comment to myself. “Beans are not a hoard. They can rot, they can mold, they can be eaten by bugs. A hoard is a permanent thing.” “Yeah,” I respond. “But it’s a hoard she can eat; a hoard she can plant and increase.” “So what,” I reply, “Glass lasts forever.” I pocket the beans, and head back to the cabin to sort my stash. But now the idea of a hoard you can plant begins to nag at me. A hoard you can plant and eat.

~~ George Packard, Cape Breton, June 20, 2011

Shitakes, asparagus, salsify, and rhubarb. (click to enlarge)

Wouldn’t have traded last night’s dinner for one in the best restaurant in NYC.