Bio Force Multiplying Mulch Camouflaged as Desert Sand TPS-0045

This is a report on a very important observation that I've made over the past few months since the major rain event back in October. I discovered that despite what I had previously thought, despite the the myth that sandy soil just drains water straight through it and dries out...

They are definitely harsh, have limits to fertility. But what has been revealed to me is that there's a surprising amount of moisture retention and fertility in the desert sand. There's almost no organic matter that's visible. It does have gradients of of grit and and dust. It's quite a fine mist powder.

What organic matter is available is in pockets, depressions and landforms above ground. I call it mulch from the sky that just blows in with the sandstorms.

The rocks and the sand land forms are the grinder teeth, when the wind blows, all of the twigs and bits of dead animals and feathers and all kinds of different organic living material, it gets turned into a very nice mulch material.

But I never really see it commingled in the soil itself, in the sand.

It's just in these pockets and little areas where it collects with the wind on the surface. So I was very shocked and surprised after that big rain, after having been here for over a year and a half, having had it rain several times. Never, after any of those rains was there anything but just a slight additional greening of what otherwise had been very much struggling.

Different forms of woody shrubs that barely seem to flower, and many of them look like they were dead or dying or really breathing their last breaths.

What I noticed within a few weeks after that October rain was the emergence of more and more distinct species of herbaceous plants, meaning non woody, non shrub like herbs, green type plants, I was not able to identify by memory, I did not recognize any of them.

I could recognize what they're related to within different taxonomies of botany. But I'm not the most sophisticated botanist plant expert, and I will have to be doing some research to get these identified.

There are a variety of different types, some that are more prostrate and growing latterly across the surface, some that that grow vertically, like spears coming up. There's ones that are more somewhat like succulents.

There have been almost a dozen that I've noticed, and I've been documenting them as I discover them.

There's been wild grass, clumping variety type of grass. They're all now going to seed, flowering, some look like wild radish or mustard type plants.

What matters the most about it is just the discovery that these plants were able not just to establish themselves after that rain, but with only a very few rain events since then, and most of them being insignificant that there was no trace of of the drops within minutes, they would just blow away or evaporate, even without the sun being out, and even in very cold temperatures.

So I wasn't expecting much out of what was coming out of the ground.

I was just excited and thrilled that it was even happening at all.

It was astonishing and uplifting, because I wouldn't have guessed this could happen. I've been here a year and nothing came up.

I also figure that the drought is worsening, and I can expect even what's here now and thriving, the shrubs that are still green, I can expect them to keep dying off and just force myself to adapt accordingly.

But it's been quite a pendulum towards the towards the rainy side over the last several months, off the charts, by some metrics.

Unfortunately, most of those rain events, those atmospheric rivers, actually missed me completely, and I almost got nothing out of it.

So I guess, in some ways, I'm spared, but I'm designing for the ability to capture as much rainwater as possible, and I'm in a location where there's very little.

It would take biblical proportion floods to really endanger or disrupt what I'm doing here and have a negative impact. There could be a lot more rain here. The rain event that happened back in October, it wasn't damaging, it wasn't disruptive.

It just did this magical thing, which was that it deposited, in my short span of experience, an unprecedented amount of moisture under the surface that for months, in all the digging that I do for my pond building and everything else, would always continue to notice that, to my surprise, the sand actually performs in almost exact exactly the same as wood chip mulch would in the sense that you expect the top inch or so to dry out after a rain event and the surface gets the sun again and dries out a bit.

But that it would retain moisture for the majority of the rest of the depth of the organic material going down to where it's gonna hit sub soil or hard pan, and run off at a right angle to contour.

In other words, run off underground down slope from where it was hitting a harder surface.

If you were trying to bootstrap a food force ecosystem, then within reason, the more the merrier of mulch to lay down. Because when it does rain, that water is gonna be sponged up in that material, and it's gonna last a long time and provide, a buffer from the baking sun throughout the seasons.

One rain event can form a sort of suspended lake in that material that will extend the growing season and buffer all the plantings in the driest months.

It's an essential ingredient in permaculture design. It's a whole lifestyle to get into.

It's a way of life for sure, mulching.

I would never consciously acquire sand to do mulching with. But what I have discovered here is that, because the efficiency of this sand to retain water over time, at least during the cooler months, it's very promising.

It means that it's gonna be possible to not rely on the time it takes to grow mulch, living mulch, and chop and drop mulch, or wood chip mulch over time, growing that material on site.

I will obviously be doing that, and have been doing that, and have been collecting everything that I grow as it dies. Collecting the dried, dead stocks and leaves and stems and everything, roots, everything and storing them swales just to be processed into large green mulch material.

I also have imported some of the cleanest mulch that you can buy from the commercial supply lines and have several yards of that stored in pits in the ground.

I use that sparingly for certain applications, but I would have assumed that I would need millions of dump trucks filled with high quality wood chip mulch in order to bootstrap a forest floor here.

But what I discovered is that there is enough power of the properties of mulch at work, after a significant fall rain event, for plants that have seeds already embedded in the soil to establish themselves completely on their own, without any irrigation.

As someone who is moderately botanically literate, I'm able to make the comparison and say I may not know exactly what that plant's name is, the Latin name of that plant, but I can relate it to species of plants that are edible or medicinal, that I would tend to grow and eat or make into an apothecary type of product, an herbal medical product.

Because I see the diversity in the variety of plants that volunteer and establish themselves. The wild natives of this region, so I can plug in analogs that are edible, medicinal or otherwise beneficial to me in my design and know that they will function as well as what's already thriving here under the right circumstances.

I'll know that they have enough nutrients available, and they have enough consistent moisture retained that's available for them to get established and fully go to seed within their life cycle, within a normal annual cycle.

It's the opposite growing season. Whereas in a climate with a killing frost and a and a less extreme summer the growing season would be from throughout spring to summer and then it would decline and go to harvest and die off in later fall, and and go dormant, or be dead over the winter.

Here it's, it's the opposite in the sense that I can grow a lot during the winter, because the freezes are only on a short number of days the out of the year, and freezing temperatures only occur for a narrow span of hours typically before the sun comes up. Even if there's cloud cover, the temperature will rise above freezing.

I haven't seen snow here yet. But after a winter rain, that moisture on the ground and in the atmosphere will suck the temperature out, and we'll keep it very cold for much longer.

The point being, it's a very forgiving winter growing season, and I was able to sustain myself on winter greens and herbs throughout this whole winter nonstop and and with far less water use, for many stretches.

Because I was so inspired by the thriving of these wild plants coming up after that rain, I actually reason that I was spoiled with being on tap back in my previous permaculture projects, back before I was forced to adapt to fully off grid, off tap, meaning no, no water being piped in, only water that I truck in or that I collect from the sky...

Being on a real time solar budget and looking at the constraints that come with that, not wanting to be wasteful with financial resources to go and burn fossil fuel to truck in water.

So that means moderating the use of water, using it very sparingly and wisely, and capturing as much rainwater as possible and always increasing the scaling up of rainwater catchment.

But seeing how well those wild plants have thrived over this fall and winter from one major rain event, I was inspired to shift my habits of watering, probably excessively.

Being in the city and on farms, that was just part of the package. You just had water coming out of the hose, coming out of the tap, and almost without interruption, or with very minor interruptions.

It doesn't force you to have the most austere habits. Obviously, here I'm in a situation where I'm forced to and it's life and death.

I need those phyto-chemicals. I need those mineral nutrients. I need that fresh, raw, living plant energy that I put into my ferments and preserve in cycles, and just continue to rotate through perpetually.

That's what I've been doing, very nutrient dense, very low input as far as the water.

I've got, you know, coco coir, really clean compost and mulch that I imported in bulk, several cubic yards each.

I've got a good mix and I'm generating fertility through pond water, fertigation and other means, compounding the enrichment of the growing mediums that I'm using.

So there they're getting all of this additional nutrient. My plantings in my ponds of the food forest are getting all of these additional nutrients, plus tons of extra water retentive substrate to grow in.

And yet it's actually nature's joke on you that the things you plant in your garden tend to do far less well as just natural, adapted wild weeds.

So if only you could determine which weeds are edible and which ones will kill you, do the wild harvesting, wild crafting, plant identification.

A teacher said to students, you can try anything once, and that was a macabre joke of saying, you can try it, but you may not live.

There's something called the Universal Plant Edibility Test, which I will not go into in detail on, the take away is that stuff knows how to grow here and knows when to grow here.

The sand of all things is loaded with wild flowers, all kinds of different herbaceous plant species, a diverse array of totally different types, and all of them are flourishing.

I'm not saying it looks like a dense prairie grassland wild flower lush environment but the number of successful wild plants coming up that are not succulent and that are plants you would find in any forest ecology, they may have certain adaptations to deal with ph of the sand, or the lack of humus. I'm sure that they are tough as nails in terms of how they've adapted.

But they don't look like hardened. They're not like cacti. They're not like desert hardened. They're very delicate, forest type plants, delicate flowers, delicate stems, delicate leaves.

Stuff that looks like arugula, stuff that looks like dandelions, stuff that I do not expect to see in a desert, but was thrilled to discover and see them flourish.

If I can harmonize with that pattern, and I can save money on bulk mulch, the fuel expenditure of the weight and the cost of the material itself, the time it takes to process it and grow it.

If you're growing yourself, what if all that time and energy can be traded for simply bulk seed purchases and then dancing those seeds into the sand and acknowledging that some percentage of them are going to feed the seed harvester ants and the rodent population.

It would enhance and encourage more life and more diversity but whatever survives the feasting by the critters will have a chance in the event of a major rain, the next major rain event to take hold from one rain and to grow and fully mature at least as annuals.

I doubt that anything that's growing now is a perennial that's going to survive the real summer months when they come back. It looks like everything is flowering, going to seed and knowing that it's got x number of days forward from when it comes up to reproduce before it would be killed, not by the frost, but by the heat of the sun.

So again, reversing of the growing seasons, but that's very promising. That tells me that there is no limit to what I can get established out here.

It will take the patience of waiting for major rain events like that one, and cause I certainly will not be attempting to scatter seeds and irrigate them.

I'm going to concentrate my minimal water supply on minimal irrigation within an enclosed bonsai food forest, a micro designer ecology and really look forward to a future where I'm buying bulk seeds that I know are going to function similar to and be hardened and resilient in the way that the wild plants out here are.

Hopefully I discover that some of what's growing out here does have edible and medicinal uses that I wasn't aware of, and then be able to nurture and cultivate and foster the growth and the extension of some of them.

There are ways to nudge it towards more productivity and to buffer it more to save seeds, to harvest seeds and whatnot.

So that is to me very miraculous. I never guessed that sand was actually a camouflaged form of mulch. This site is my first real, deep immersion into desert dwelling, desert ecology. I've passed through deserts on tours with bands. I've stopped. I've played shows outside in deserts.

It's not like I've never been in a desert, but to go through now over two years at this point of experiencing the full season flows and observe and notice the differences in what's coming up out of the ground...It's a real game changer.

And it makes me, and I've said before, I living here, noticing all of the different, diverse forms of wildlife. Adding to that, this mind blowing diversity of herbaceous plant life coming up, I've decided to call it the arid jungle, because it's definitely not one of those places on Earth that actually get almost no rain at all, period, and that are devoid of any vegetation of whatsoever.

Those places where nothing can survive, not just because of the temperatures, but because they literally get no rain.

Anything could happen with climate change, but I am thrilled and really hope that whatever happens moving forward with climate change, we need a lot of creative solutions to drought and irrigation and hydrating human populations.

In a situation of drought, the energy input to do desalination on a massive scale, is not a high efficiency point. I don't personally look forward to a world where we're so out of balance with fresh water on the land that we have to abuse the oceans in that way.

Even if you could do it in the most energy efficient way, in the greenest way, to me, it seems like a real admission of failure, a real cheat.

I would rather live beautifully and sustainable within a real time rain budget and do the creative stuff. If you're in rainy seasons, when it floods, even if it only rains once a year, even if you only get 1" of rain a year, that's your design challenge to capture as much of that as possible.

So slow, sink and spread as much water as you get, naturally flowing through whatever site you're designing on, and you have the most options and the most potential and the most creative possibility, when really allocating culturally, the time and energy to design and build, to manage and to apply intelligently the gifts of rain that we get.

Whatever the quantity, when it's just pure drought, there's not a lot of options at that point. But if you can buffer the dry season, the dry months, the dry spells, the drought periods, the way that throughout the millennia, since the dawn of horticultural societies, since the dawn of ceramics, they've built underground receptacles.

Throughout the world, there's been all kinds of epic, very organic and sustainable stone and ceramic earthwork type water catchment systems.

At their best, they were able to buffer and even out drought seasons and extend productivity in a way that was sustainable and created a longevity of a culture.

At worst, they would be damaged by seismic events, earthquakes, or that a culture would get so decadent that it would over populate, and what could have been a sweet spot that allowed them to last at a smaller population scale, they abuse that.

They built empires and armies and went to war and just overgrew their own systems to where they couldn't sustain any shock to them.

I like the idea of maintaining a small, nimble, elegant, human population density relative to the lushness of the resources, natural resources.

So if you were at that point, on a smaller scale, you can upscale the rainwater catchment systems and upscale the Earthworks, so that you're creating so much abundance that could create epic paradise, permaculture, food forest systems.

Resist the temptation to militarize and become imperialistic, to be an empire.

Rather be very cyclical, very aware of natural limits to the growth of population.

Avoid the folly of falling into the trap of civilization.

It's not inevitable to surrender that grace, because human ecology at appropriate scale was the norm before civilization.

Probably most of the murders that have happened for all time have been the death of horticultural and hunter gatherer peoples fighting tooth and nail to defend their way of life against colonizing, post agricultural or agrarian, civilized warlord empires.

It's not utopian to practically, very pragmatically, in a very down to earth manner of rebuilding this ecological, social, human ecological fabric, with the ethical limits to growth of all kinds.

Focus on the growth of biodiversity and the soil and compounding the richness of the ecology, so that you're living with a wide buffer range of biodiversity and plenty of extra to rely on when times are tough, when times are are dry, when there are shocks to the system, climate changes.

But the only way to sustain that ratio is to avoid the temptation to build empire.

How much tech do you need? How much royalty and social stratification do you really need to be happy, to be secure, to thrive?

That's gonna determine whether you are my ally or my enemy, on what side of that battle line you find yourself.

Those who are rewilding and reintegrating with nature are gonna be the ones that the empire builders are gonna have to continue to fight and kill.

So I know what side I'm fighting on and fighting for.

I'm on the side of the Earth. I'm on the side of wildness.

I'm on the side of First peoples. I am against all of the forces of imperialism and colonization that would pave and poison and pollute and unsustainably develop and militarize and overpopulate and deforest and desertify the wild.

So I will see you digging trenches to plant trees, I'll see you in the contour swales, and we'll be growing our weapons, growing our our defensible perimeters, and enjoying life and being happy and healthy and free while we do it.