Just a little note of an off-site project of ours happening in Melbourne this month as part of the 2010 Food and Wine Festival. Westspace's series of rooftop installations entitled 'The High Life' is part of The Edible Garden initiative being spearheaded by the venerable Diggers Club as part of this year's festival.

Kirsten's contribution to this series is a seed ball project entitled The Latent Power of Germination and will be up on the rooftop of the Order of Melbourne from the 16-23 March, and also throughout the city thanks to hundreds of complimentary packets of seed balls. You can read all about it at Westspace's The High Life project page.

So if you live in Melbourne, please come along, sneak a peek, pick up a packet and off you go, a veritable harbringer of bloom.

Drylands greywater kitchen garden at Ampersand Sustainable Learning Center, Arizona

In the course of researching for our upcoming Permaculture Design Course in Alice Springs this April, I've come across quite a few great new resources for food security and regeneration for desert environments.

And it would seem to me, as is usually the case, the main blockage between most modern drylands habitats becoming abundant places to inhabit is the time-worn problem of access to appropriate knowledge.

Fortunately, and somewhat mysteriously, our species has a very long history of living in seemingly inhospitable environments the world over. Traditional techniques that served previous generations with food and housing are not always possible in todays world, and so much knowledge has been lost in the last century with the arrival of industrialised (and colonial) everything.

In Australia, our own red centre is a case in point. Despite being the homeland of the oldest continuing civilisation on the planet (yup, really), many of Australia's indigenous nations have been disenfranchised by industrialised food systems which have brought almost complete dependance on the multi-national supermarket for nutrition. I'll leave the cataclysm of other aspects of indigenous disenfranchisement for you to ponder - I'm sure you have some idea of what has, and continues, to be affecting our indigenous nations. If not, start here.

 Digging a greywater system at Bustan Qaraaqa, Palestine.

Food security is something we should all be deeply passionate and active about. Really truly. By the way, what will you be eating for your very next meal after you read this article? Have a look on your plate. Know where any of it actually came from, in more than a vague i-hope-it's-from-somewhere-nearby sense? Know for a fact that any of it was produced within a truly sustainable framework?

Hmm. See what i mean? This is bigtime.

Designing resilience and security into our communities, in terms of food, livability and durability, is something we all need to attend to, starting today. But that need is perhaps more starkly apparent in environments where water is exquisitely valuable, any topsoil is not to be sniffed at and perceptions of what 'should grow' may be not very accurate.

Dry and brittle environments hold possibilities for both deep disappointment and joy for Permaculture designers. If you design + implement your system right, you get an amazing, resilient oasis. Get it wrong, and everything dies.

Which is why good design principles are so important. Design from pattern to details. Catch and store energy. Value the edge. Slow, small solutions. Observe and interact. Take these principles any way you want, on a micro or macrocosmic scale. Interpret them in terms of species selection, water harvesting, people care, family dynamics, urban planning, you name it. And if you do get it wrong, go back to the principles and re-design with the benefit of hindsight, observing and interacting as you go.

I think our PDC in Alice is going to be very energising and challenging for everyone involved. Challenging for us in terms of teaching (and learning from) students who deal with a desert biosphere and its associated parameters (environmental and social) every day, and energising for those who attend in terms of what possibilities are out there for designing communities for endurance and abundance.

Greywater oasis at Whoville Gardens, New Mexico

Fortunately, we'll be standing on the shoulders of giants in terms of sharing knowledge and skills for better living in drylands - here's a couple of the stellar resources we'll be working with:

• Introduction to induced meandering: Bill Zeedyk is a legend of drylands regeneration. This introductory article merges good design with first-peoples understanding of hydrology to produce super simple and ardently effective solutions for managing and preventing  waterway erosion in drylands and beyond.
• Quivira Coalition: This group is fast emerging in the Americas as a locus for innovative restoration and sustainable agriculture working with larger scale projects. The website seems a bit stuffy, but there's many jewels pointing to further research.
• Bustan Qaraaqa (the Tortoise Garden) is a community Permaculture project, based in the West Bank town of Beit Sahour (Shepherds’ Fields), close to the city of Bethlehem. A really solid Palestinian crew who are going from strength to strength. Also their blog at Green Intifada.
  
• Water Harvesting For Drylands: a book series by Brad Landcaster that I've mentioned before, but I'm mentioning it again because it kicks butt. Any community or council presented with a decent slideshow of the images in these books would then be ready for a full-blown discussion on how to move forward on this stuff.
• Oasis Design: Art Luwdig's extensive work throughout Latin America on building safe greywater gardens and waste systems can't be overstated in terms of relevance and importance given what's going on around the world right now. Tried and tested techniques. Don't let their simplicity fool you - this is design elegance at its most basic and immediately effective level.
• Jordan family house: A little overview of techniques suggested for better living + gardening in Jordan, one of the lowest and driest places on earth, by the infatigable Lawton family.
• Sink and Wall garden: simple yet effective. A small blog post from the Fantons on the road in India.

From a certain world view, the drylands of this planet represent possibilities for the ultimate in economical living, and the exquisite duality which comes with the idea of the oasis (so deeply embedded in all our cultural memories).

Add to that the extensive and far-reaching indigenous knowledge of country, some of which we will have access to during our time in the Alice, and i think the possibilities are endless for future drylands living which fuses many forms of knowledge together to make truly abundant communities possible - both in Australia, and beyond.

Just a wee heads-up that a most encouraging initiative is being launched in Sydney this coming Saturday 6th Feb. Namely CarriageWorks' Kitchen Garden Project. Another nudge in the direction of local food security. Huzzah!

If you're a Sydneysider you're probably already familiar with CarriageWorks' Saturday farmer's market, which has a darn fine range of yummy regional produce and is fast becoming the biggest farmers market in Sydney. With this Kitchen Garden Project, CarriageWorks are pushing the notion of 'creative sustainability' through a series of events and workshops which I hope will result in more kitchen gardens outside (or inside) more local kitchens.

The launch on Saturday includes talks and stalls from 1pm after the farmers' market and will generally be good fun and a chance to talk about important things like how to grow stuff where you live and the finer points of how to make Kale tasty (there is a way!).

The whole Milkwood family will be there with our bicycle-powered seed ball machine, a bunch of great books on Permaculture and urban farming, Permaculture course information, and many little brown paper bags containing stealth salad seed balls, for you to take away and try a bit of guerilla gardening on your home turf.

Come by and say hello!

In the case of our top dam, wet is an understatement. Small babbling brook, gushing forth from beneath the pipe in the dam wall, is more accurate. Hmm. What to do.

Suffice to say an unfortunate combination of road-base like soil (ok not really soil, more just small rocks), bad luck and something called 'dispersive clays' all played a part. Usually when you build a dam, if you find some good clay down the bottom you get all excited. And then the dozer driver carefully spreads that clay over the inside of your dam wall, to make it hold water. And your dam doesn't leak, and you feel very chuffed. Unless your secret valley is, unbeknownst to you, locally famous for having 'dispersive clays' - which, wait for it, disperse in water. Creating the opposite effect from what you would normally expect from a clay-like medium and henceforth, doing less than nothing to seal your dam wall.

 
The leak in our dam wall was also next to the pipe. This pipe sat in the bottom of the dam and delivered water to a tap on the outside of the dam wall, from which we could water plantings via passive water pressure. Carefully constructed, with baffle-plates to stop water passing along the pipe as it went through the dam wall, with removable filters at either end, this was our pipe of dreams. It would be our food forest's lifeline in dry summers, and eventually supply our bathouse with water.

Following some decent rain, the leak in the top dam got worse and produced a rivulet which ran through the food forest planted directly below the dam. This food forest was sited specifically to benefit from the slow plume of water which would emanate from the dam uphill via osmosis. Our carefully selected, hardy, drylands food trees that were in the direct path of this rivulet promptly turned up their toes and died from wet feet.

Following a bunch of research and talking to Permaculture earthworks experts, we were still at a loss. It turned out that all the dams along the valley leaked, regardless of their having a keyway or not, or a pipe or no pipe through their dam wall. We tried attempting to seal the dam with lucerne and bentonite (which was easy to apply as the leak had helpfully emptied the dam entirely), to no effect. We considered various techniques, and in retrospect perhaps should have borrowed some pigs and attempted to seal the dam via a method called glaying - a technique which uses a large number of animals, penned into a dry dam for a short period of time, to seal the dam by smushing their manure into the surface of the inner dam wall so effectively that it seals the deal. Apparently works great with pigs, even on pure shale, according to Joel Salatin.

So unless we wanted to seal the top dam with a very expensive, condom-like, custom-made, non-food grade, emanating who-knows-what plastic lining (we didn't), or just hope the leak would reduce in time (and have no irrigation water in the meantime without constant pumping - no thanks), our options were few.

The one other thing was that the top dam was not quite in the best spot. It was a little close to the building envelope that was slowly developing downhill, and I was having visions of my family tumbled out of their beds by a wall of water when a once-in-a-lifetime earthquake shook the top dam wall to bits. So we made a deal with our earthworks operator (who, as I mentioned above, luckily felt terrible about the leak) and decided to move the top dam south a bit.

Believe it or not, this all worked out quite well. We turned the 'old dam' into a north-facing amphitheater / suntrap which will be great fun as an experimental microclimate. I have hopes for bananas in about 5 years, once the protective ring of bamboo gets up. The 'new dam' we took no chances with, however, and lined it with plastic the minute it was finished. Yes, builder's plastic. I know. Most un-permaculture. But let me tell you something: it worked a treat. And now we've got water.

And so a note on lining dams on the cheap, for the poor wretches among us that suffer from similar disasters:

• First of all we put down a thick layer of lucerne hay, all over the inside wall of the dam. We basically stood large, cylindrical rolls of the stuff on the dam wall and unrolled them down the slope to the bottom of the dam. This was then wetted down with a pump and hose. This will rot down under the plastic in time, and also helped to protect the plastic from punctures from below as we laid topsoil ontop of it. If you can't get lucerne you could use other hay, but lucerne is great because of its high nitrogen content which will help it turn into a more sludgey impermeable layer as it rots down under the plastic.
• Next we unrolled long rolls of black builders plastic down the slope of the inner wall, covering the lucerne hay. We made sure the strips overlapped by a good 40cm on each side, and weighed the whole palava down with rocks. Carefully, so we didnt puncture the plastic.
• Then we got the dozer driver to place loads of topsoil on top of the builders plastic, to a depth of about 30cm, starting at the bottom of the dam wall and working his way up so it didn't slump off. This way he also didnt have to risk puncturing the plastic by driving a great heavy bulldozer over it. The depth of topsoil on the builders plastic means we aren't so concerned about our catchment coming from a giant plastic cup.
• Then, when it was all covered, sealed and looked just like a new dam, we said a little prayer and crossed our fingers.
  

At time of writing, 6 months later, the top dam is full to the brim of water and the most water-tight dam on Milkwood. We ended up using a simple syphon, held a meter below the surface, to provide water to the food forest and other plantings below. We've still got great passive water pressure (about 6m of head) and no babbling brook at the base of the wall. The new dam is on the same contour as the old dam, and so is still fed by the 2km of top swale to the north and south.

We've mulched and planted the dam wall with oats, vetch and clover, and we look forward to a long, loving and hard-won relationship with our passively harvested water supply.