Purslane Source

This drought resistance succulent is high in Omega 3 Fatty Acids. It grows throughout the Okanagan.

Here’s some purslane growing in the front yard of the house of worship of a religion that began in Palestine…

Purslane, Okanagan Landing Road

And here is one of its sisters, after the church landscape specialist directed his attention to it …

Food for the Poor, Poisoned

Going, going, gone.

 The gravel of this style of landscaping is perfect for purslane: protection for seed, conservation of water, lots of heat and sun, and no competition, as few other plants can survive in such drought conditions. It’s not just gravel…

New Farmland: The Sidewalk Crack

Perfect for purslane, spinach, millet, coriander, lettuce, and a host of other crops.

One thing about this farmland is that it is right in front of your house. Another is that it makes use of large amounts of water that are collected by the sidewalk infrastructure. Another is that it gathers sand and dust and turns it into soil. It makes new earth.

The Ultimate in Zero Tillage

Cultivation: 0. Soil loss: 0. Water usage: 0. Transportation costs: 0. Every couple years, the soil could be mechanically harvested and redistributed on areas in need of it.

There are tens if thousands of row kilometres of this agriculture in the Okanagan. If automobile pollutants are an issue, then let’s grow crops here that will mine them, to keep them out of our water, and then harvest the soil that they make. Oh, and the argument that plants will destroy the concrete infrastructure? Really? I think snow removal equipment does a better job of that…

Sidewalk Snow Plow Damage

Look at those holes. A guy could grow a nice cabbage in there.

In case I appear flippant, do remember that there are still institutional landscaping projects, such as that purslane-free church above, and that all the processes of which I’m speaking here are natural processes. Here, for instance, is a glacial meltwater river stone recently unearthed and dumped down the hill from a real estate development…

A New World

Rock, water, air and sun. Nothing else is needed.

Here’s a similar rock, a few years later…

Mariposa Lily Seed Stalk and Natural Heat Sink

Notice the moss thriving in the cool months and making new soil and nutrients, which support the plants around the rock, as does the rock’s heat in the cool desert nights.

Every rock on the hill could be given a purslane, which it would care for it like a child with a kitten. A silly idea? Really?  And this isn’t?

Productive Hillside Turned into a Dump

This is infrastructure material for the vineyard up above. 25 acres of vineyard. 50 acres of wrecked land to support it.

We could plant kochia on this stuff, and support a herd of cattle, without water, without land cost, with nothing, just the cost of some seed, without interfering in any way with an elementary private property rights. Kochia? You know, Burning Bush? Another Biblical weed. Here…

Kochia Branching Out Source

The British Columbia Government wants us to get rid of this baby. Why, when it grows on waste gravel, is incredibly productive, enriches the soil, and feeds cattle? Could it be because the government wants to save natural grasslands? Admirable. I’m all for it, but here’s two things about that. 1. Below 650 metres, there aren’t many left; what you see is a brand new ecology of weeds; 2. This is what really destroys natural grasslands…

Vineyard Road Tangle and Weed Hell

aka Kochia Heaven

Meanwhile, this is how cattle get fed [well, in theory]…

The Year’s Single Crop of Hay Turning Into a Perch for Magpies and Hunting Ground for Hawks

What a difference four months of mouldering makes.

This is old orchard land, being cropped with hay to keep its farm status and the low taxation rates that go with that. Just like the hillsides, however, that hay is largely weeds and has no agricultural or nutritional value. Kochia would be a better bet than this.  So, welcome to your new farm…

Your New Farm As the Winter Global Warming Rains Begin

]]> http://okanaganokanogan.com/2012/08/16/wild-orchards-and-fenced-orchards/ Thu, 16 Aug 2012 17:17:39 +0000 Harold Rhenisch http://okanaganokanogan.com/2012/08/16/wild-orchards-and-fenced-orchards/ Like a pack of young red-tailed hawks circling over and over above a subdivision full of cats and mice, house finches, California Quail and small dogs, I’ve been worrying an idea: it’s possible to grow fruit without irrigation systems, water loss, or land-clearing. This notion has a twin: the concept of wilderness requires as much alteration of a landscape as does the land-clearing to create an industrial orchard. In fact, here in this west of the west, where the West was the West long after the West became the East pretty much everywhere else, wilderness sprang up out of civilized space only after the people who had lived here were cleared off, either to small local reservations (the Canadian model), or huge centralized, multi-national reservations (the American model). In other words, industrial orcharding and wilderness are the same thing. This, for instance, is currently called wilderness…

Umatillo Rock, Washington (from the shores of Vic Meyer Lake)

This is wilderness. 

It is wilderness, because it is a state park. Also, those russian olives are an invasive species. That’s proof, for sure.

Wilderness is, you see, a weedy proposition. So is this:

Weeds at the Peshastin Pinnacles, Wenatchee Valley

The weeds are not the Wenatchi fruiting orchard in the foreground, formed out of oregon grape, currants, saskatoons, wild cherries, and elders colonizing this heat-and-water absorbing outcropping in the dry hills. They are the pear orchards in the background, which have colonized (with a bit of help) water brought down from the Cascade Mountains in the background.

OK, OK, I’m being sly here, but, hey, if we’re going to live in this space for the long term, we’re going to have work with the landscape, not against it. I say this because we’ve tried the “against-it” thing, and what do we have, hmm? We have water shortage, massive hydroelectric dams, plutonium production reactors (moth-balled), radioactive plumes, poverty, food banks, clearcuts, weeds, roadside ditches, and bulldozed orchards, now all being turned into subdivisions of one form or another (well, not the plutonium plant, whew), because that’s the one thing all this has led to: urban growth. It’s living on borrowed time. Luckily, the evidence remains that the land was, at one point, and not that long ago in even a moderate scheme of things, understood. People worked with it. They moved as it moved. Hawks screeched overhead. The good news is that we can work with it again. One way would be to plant orchards the indigenous way, where the water already is. Capital costs would vanish. Labour costs would increase. This is a good thing. Unemployment, after all, is ridiculously high here east of the mountains. With that in mind, look what I found at Umatillo Rock, in the desert …

The Ruins of a Cider Orchard, Vic Meyers Lake

Whoever said there is no water in a desert was not in the deserts of the Plateau.

Here’s a closer look at those trees, planted to take advantage of natural water, without disrupting its pooling or its flow to where it needs to go …

What Looks like a Sculpture and Tastes Like a Tea Bag and Sings in the Sun, La la la?

A cider pear!

Here are some cider apples nearby …

Cider in Its Wild Form

Now, to me it would be a grander thing to go out and pick these apples rather than sit in an air-conditioned RV in the campground nearby, doing the recreation thing. It would be recreation, right?

Industrial agriculture, and the campground culture it supports, has a different perspective on human habitation and integration with landscape. It’s called control. It’s called subdivision, not only of land but of social space as well. Here, for instance, is where the fruit pickers of the Wenatchee Valley live today:

Transient Workers’ Camp, Wenatchee

Next to it? Why, a RV park for tourists. But tourists (often retired soldiers) and Mexicans (often fleeing the drug wars) meet only through the fruit. One group buys it in the store. One group picks it. In between? Industrial packing lines, trucking companies, and, well fences. A war was once fought to separate their countries. It remains an uneasy truce, complete with demilitarized zones large and small.

Two kinds of tourists in one landscape! Now that the Wenatchee people have all been carted away to the Colville Indian Reservation to the North and East, to make way for this wartime tourism, the fruit pickers of the pinnacles are of a kind more tasty-looking to a hawk. A big hawk.

Orchard Picker Hiding in the Shadows

Man, it ain’t easy being a hawk, either.

Ah, here he is…

Hoary Marmot a the Top of the World, Peshastin Pinnacles State Park

He has his eye on us.

He should.

My suggestion: let’s keep at least one eye on him.

Shale

As the romans knew, it grows great white wine.

Lots of air, lots of water, and it only moves downhill a bit every year. Here are some riesling plants enjoying it…

See What I Mean about the Stuff Wanting to Move Downhill?

The romans dug horizontal trenches in this stuff, and subterranean tunnels, to collect water for their suburban villas down by the river. Drop by drop, the water collected in the shafts, trickled into the main supply, and then into the bath it went. In the town of Mehring, the system still works.

And now?

Scree Slope Planted to Vines

And what do we do in the Okanagan? Put our houses on the rocks and our grapes on flat land.

And you know what the romans might say about that? This?

An Old Riesling Vine Making a Living on the Rock

I think the only fibre in this soil comes from the grape plants themselves. Most of the oxygen in this shallow soil trickles down from the air above. The rest, which the grape roots need in order to breathe, trickles down the steep slopes from the forests above.

No. Nothing. They’re dead. It’s our turn to speak up. It might just be that the real, undiscovered grape areas of the Pacific Northwest are in all the side valleys, in tiny habitats where sun-drenched slopes are fed by forests, higher up, and not in the hot valley cores themselves. The wine might be cool, acidic, sharp, and complex, just like the wines of the Mosel, but surely that’s better than sweet pinot gris that tastes of mango and peaches. If investors are going to insist on hot valleys, then the appropriate habitat might just be at the baseline of scree slopes, or the baseline of alluvial hills, where organic water flows right now and right where hawthorns and wild roses thrive today. Highway ditches are perfect. It might just be that the best land for grapes is cheap or free or public or in people’s back yards. A rule to follow might be: if it needs artificial irrigation, it’s not the right spot for grapes.

1908 Map of Assmanshausen and Rüdesheim am Rhein

Designed for train lovers.

… and some look like this …

Map of the Rüdesheim Vineyard Area

This map is written in flowers. Like the train map above, it shows where people have gone before and where you might follow. In whimsy, someone seeded these flowers once. They remain, perhaps long after that person has passed, still recording that moment of intent, still offering direction.

… and some look like this …

Wildflowers in The Vineyard at the Rise, Bella Vista Hills

The wildflowers here in the Okanagan are at home; in this case, it is the vines that are the weeds. Note as well that water is imported here, while in Rüdesheim it falls from the sky. 

In these two volcanic terroirs, the Okanagan and the Rhine, let’s think of the water as a map for a moment. In the German version, it flows past through the Rhine, on its way from the glaciers of the high Alps, and modulates the climate to allow grapes to thrive. The grapes themselves live off of the rain and snow, as stored by the soil. In the Canadian version, the fossilized glacial water of Okanagan Lake modulates the climate …

Vineyard at the Rise, Looking West South West

The only way to get this view is to follow a deer trail. Trails built for humans are completely hidden from these vines. Why? Is there something here that needs to be hidden? Did someone just not think that half of what they were doing was creating landscape images for public use? The latter, I think.

… while the snow that falls on the hills drains down through a series of plastic pipes into trickle irrigation emitters, which cause shallow rooting of the vines. Indeed, maybe that’s the real map. Instead of going deep into glacial till, as the vines do in Rüdesheim, these Okanagan vines hang around among the roots of the grasses, in the interchange zone near the surface, competing with plants far more able to live in those intertidal areas than they are. The impact of the high soil profile life of grape roots on the gas exchange between root and leaf of the grape vine is enormous.

Water Blooming

Flowers are maps of water. This is what winter snow looks like when it meets the dry air of spring. Grape vines don’t live in this land. They live in the water artificially delivered to their roots.

And so in the face of the lack of treaties of any kind, the great Canadian dichotomy between native and immigrant cultures remains, readable down to the level of the flowers, unresolved, unmediated, and left largely to unconscious, chance processes. Here, for example, is a piece of pure settler culture, down below the vineyard and the wild flowers … Dandelions Making the Most of the European Diaspora

High Density Apple Orchard, complete with all the trimmings, including posts, wires, dutch rootstocks, German pruning techniques, New Zealand apple varieties, Monsanto weed killer to reduce competition for trees with marginal growth, tractor compacted soil limiting root growth, european dandelions, micro jet irrigation to spread out the root zone, grass to keep the apples from scorching in the desert heat … it’s like a plantation in a colony on dusty sun-whipped plains of Mars.

And here is the native version…

Vole Garden in the Spring

Such tiny agricultural plots of newly-tilled soil invite new seedings, which add complexity to surrounding vegetation patterns.

For those of us who remember this place from 50 years ago, it was this wild agriculture, and its products …

Vole Garden a Few Years Down the Road

(and photographer seemingly falling off the world)

…that gave meaning to life on those colonial orchards. Now that the subdivision patterns into which the orchards were placed have been filled in and much of the surrounding land has been turned into human housing as well, the earth has become a social space, with one big flaw: it provides no room for native human cultures other than a reservation or two across the lake or up against the hills, where the men who first farmed the land pushed them, and no room for land within settler cultures, other than European models. The result is that culture is frozen at the time of contact: First Nations cultures carry land sense; settler cultures determine social contexts. This just won’t do. If the only language available for speaking with the land is that of a moment of misunderstanding, then we are indeed poorer than dirt. For some context, let’s go back to Germany for a second. Here we are again, on the pilgrimage road, this time between Paris and the old Roman fort at Mainz …

Maria, Marienborn, Germany

This entire area between Mainz and the French Border is industrially depressed. No wonder the hard-to-care-for devotional symbols of ivy and rose have been replaced with less demanding models from the local flower shop. Poverty rules here, and yet within its language old ways of being are still spoken.

Back in the 1960s, Germany was a country so wealthy that it planted roses in all its freeway medians, mowed around them, and kept the whole country as tidy as an ironed bank note. But just look at it now, as another of its symbols flows on to Holland, chock full of ducks, kayakers, and barges carrying crushed cars, liquefied natural gas, coal, and recycled household garbage on its way to processing by the sea …

The New Germany (and the Old Rhine)

Where there were once pristine paving stones, there are now environments of weeds, in an acknowledgement that without some place for other creatures to live, other creatures cannot live and the language of life, so diminished, will make human society into a prison.

That’s the new nature in Germany: if it grows, be amazed, give it space, and stand back and wonder. Here’s the new nature in the Okanagan Okanogan…

Unused Water Pipe Unknowingly Collecting the Rain for Bunchgrass, The Rise

In this case, it’s the water that’s the weed.

On the one hand, that’s what it’s like to live within social nets that have never learned to speak the language of the flowers around them, or to order their relationships with their land according to the words that the flowers are speaking. In this case, the Okanagan is lagging far, far behind Germany. On the other hand, the potential here is as great, or greater…

Lupines in the Hills

A model for reading the language of flowers, and through it the language of water and air exchange within the soil and between native and settler civilizations.

One of the areas of study here at the Okanagan Academy is going to be this language. The monk’s garden of Jena gave us the university. This wild garden has the same potential.

Wild Red Hawthorn in Bloom at Dusk

Crataegus columbiana. Placing this creature within a scientific taxonomy is not the point, however, because that taxonomy does not speak of water or land or human relationships through them, as they are mediated by this plant.

The forms with which the world is named determine what can be said and the paths that can be followed. With living maps, a living earth comes into view. I love that place.

Tomorrow: Some thoughts on language and its own maps to the earth. That ought to round off this discussion nicely.