Erin's land journal

I keep trying to write something about how people think nature is a metaphor for goodness and humans are a metaphor for evil, how returning to nature is supposed to be returning to happiness by escaping the evil of humans, how they view nature as ease and human systems as work.

I want to write something that alludes to other human cultures and how work must be put in to other humans to live with them in nature, as well as work being put into nature itself.

I want to allude to the hard physical work of the world.

I want to make a very strong statement about how viewing nature as a metaphor for happiness, for goodness, and for ease erases our connection to actual nature and also diminishes our ability to find the happiness, goodness, and ease we're looking for.

I want to mention that human society follows rules just like nature and is probably more amenable to your changing a small part of it to make it comfortable for you, and use that to flip the reader's perception of nature.

I want to shake people a little, to break through their preoccupation with metaphor and give them a taste of the world itself that they idealize so prettily in their mindgames. I want them to catch a glimpse of something alien and beautiful, the thing I see every day.

But I don't care enough today. I've had my morning in the sunshine. After work I'll go home and eat a salad. People can sort themselves out.

It's looking like blue oyster mushrooms, winecap/king stropharia, nameko, enoki, and shiitake will work here. Probably shaggy manes too, since they grow wild. But here's the thought process:

I have a ton of aspen, which is actually between 3 and 6 clones connected by underground roots so they're very robust. They send suckers up all through my yard and I don't cut the suckers down as fast as I should. They're bad for my septic, for my garden, and for my foundation. When I moved in there was a neat row of aspen on the south side of the property that was below the height of my roofline: pretty good to have deciduous there, I get shade in summer and the sun has access in summer. Since then the trees have grown so they're higher than the roof, and if I were to cut them they'd fall on the powerline.

Right now they're an annoyance. I need to expend effort cutting the suckers out of my lawn because although the birds mow the lawn they do not mow the suckers. I need to either carefully fell the trees without wrecking my house, fence, and powerline or live with increasing numbers of suckers and water competition in my garden and shade increasingly where I don't want it.

When I have an abundance of something, such abundance that it annoys me, that is a system failure on my part. It means I haven't yet seen and incorporated the actual richness of the place I'm working with. So the first place to go is: what needs a lot of the thing I have a lot of?

With aspen, well. Moose eat it some. Aspen leaf miners like it. Geese don't really like it. Pigs like the leaves but not the wood or twigs. I can mill the bigger trunks to make siding for pig houses; that requires some level of chainsaw mill, it requires getting the trees down in the first place, and it produces a pretty useful product. Still there will be slabs that are all wane. Ramial woodchips are, so far as I understand, made from young softwood like aspen suckers and are great for soil building, but they use equipment and I'm not sure I can justify equipment cost for more soil building, since I get so much from the animals. Mushrooms use woodchips and are directly edible.

Directly edible foods are a powerful incentive. I'll do work for them beyond what I'll do "just" to improve soil, partially because my animals contribute so much to my soil-building that I don't feel the need for a lot more going into it (at least until I'm no longer importing feed). And in this case I can put together many uses: if I have a small woodchipper I can keep producing woodchips through yearly grooming of the aspen suckers (even if I cut them all down once a year I won't draw this resource down to nothing, they're very robust), feed it to my mushrooms, then get rich soil out of it. This requires the infrastructure of a chipper and provides incentive to actually do the work of cutting and chipping, because food is a pull (something I want) rather than a push (trying to get rid of something I don't want).

If I get a small chainsaw mill I can mill lumber and use the heavy wane for more woodchips if the chipper will take them. And/or I can cut logs and innoculate with shiitakes, which I believe perennialize better in logs vs woodchips (though this still needs research). If I cut down the adult aspen, I can leave a new set of suckers to grow up in that same area that will be ready perhaps when this round of pig barns needs more siding (or I could cut half now and half in a couple years and have a more complex rotation).

Because there's less leaf area after the trees are cut they should take less water from the soil, and I can plant my burr oak and ginkgo seeds on that south strip. They'll be somewhat sheltered by the small pines and suckers, I'll need to keep them a little watered, but by the time the aspens have grown enough to be taking up a lot of water they should be fairly established. Then, after a couple more rotations of aspens, I can phase the aspen rotations into the back, away from my septic and foundation, and move to cutting every sucker as it appears and not leaving any for rotation by the house. The ginkgo and oak will produce food/nuts and will be less harmful to the house, though the aspen suckers will still always come up from the soil and need to be cut to feed the mushrooms.

(Josh has been finding and harvesting acorns and ginkgo nuts from the city and he'll bring them up; we're hoping some will be hardy here)

While I'm thinking about it, I've been meaning to convert my original garden to a mandala perennialish garden since it's got somewhat shady from the aspens and the house, and it's flat rather than south-sloped. How cool would it be to place the mushrooms in rings of alternating species as deep mulch to perennials and berry shrubs? That would be good multi-use stacking of the kind of shady moist space mushrooms like, it would be aesthetically very satisfying to have planted fairy rings, it's very visible from the house where I'd be able to track when the mushrooms were ready, and it's a great way to feed the perennials by converting my woodchips through mushrooms, where manure might be a little hot for them.

This system also just works better with my brain, where "hey, I want to make mushroom beds" allows me to incidentally cut the aspen suckers in service of something else, whereas "I need to do lawn and septic maintenance by cutting aspen suckers" doesn't enthuse me in any way. It's that pull I mentioned, rather than the push, and so it makes necessary work fun and joyful rather than a chore.

Pull rather than push is a fundamental, vital part of any human system because we participate physically and intellectually in systems that bring us joy and that in turn is self-reinforcing for a working (and improving!) system, whereas if we set ourselves up for work we don't enjoy then it will not get done, no matter how important it is, and neither the property nor our lives will be improved and will probably decay as the property succumbs to neglect and we succumb to guilt and inadequacy. Of course each person's good, fun work will be different and a system needs to be designed as much around individual incentives and skills as around light, water, and heat availability.