Waxing 2-D

It seems that humanity is a bit like every other species. We cycle through time, corkscrewing through space and time, emulating phases of the moon. We seem to come into the light of awareness and retreat to dark ages and ignorance, sometimes for centuries at a time. I spent a little time this week digging around a bit to find information about a type of textile whose origins are well-documented although the process to make it was never written down. Humanity lost this luxurious type of muslin to the mists of time. The fabric is called Dhaka muslin for the city in which it was made and was so light weight that the wearer felt nude. Clothing made from it left virtually nothing to the imagination but today, not one person on the planet remebers how it was made. Simlilarly, the rediscovery of how to make biochar or terra preta, the soil enhancing material that ancient people used to double their crop production and hold nutrients for long periods of time was lost as well. Researchers noticed a single ingredient amongst those that were required to make it work and then nearly fifty years went by before someone rediscovered the findings and began their own experiments designed to learn more about this ancient black gold. It has taken decades more to find out what made this substance useful. You see, the carbon that is the substrate upon which biochar is based is the only form of carbon that is pure enough to be stable. Once vitrified, it lasts for extremely long periods in the soil, unlike most carbon that we know and understand from our daily lives, the organic kind that represents a component part of all living things. All that carbon is not elemental, stable or pure, it is the underlying catalyst for life, part of an amalgam of chemicals and can be nearly infinitely transformed into tissues of plants, food for soil microbes, birds, bees, bats, humans or trees. We have explored organic (carbon-containing) chemistry to the point of inventing about 400 new chemicals from it each and every year based primarily on the carbon atom. We have gone full bore into the unknown, often releasing these compounds into the air, water and our bodies, before they have been adequately health and safety tested and/or studied to any extent at all. It can take twenty years of research to understand a chemical and it would not be possible to test 400 such compounds every year. If one of the 400 works for our desired purpose or economic benefit, it is deemed a viable option, until, sometimes many years later, the legacy of another txoic, carcinogenic or mutagenic compound has already been released into mass production, the environment and our bodies. When we delve into the complexities of any discipline, we can be lost in a forest by ignoring the trees. In real ways, our understanding of the texture of the world, it's lumps and bumps, the vagaries of what is possible can frequently negate our understanding about whether it makes sense to even try changing things or inventing perviously unknown systems or materials. When we weigh heavily the idea of making life easier (which has been known to be a myth for over a century) or advancing the species in one specific way, say healthier for instance, by definition we sacrifice our attention to other factors. That is why so many drugs have unavoidable side effects. We have valued the outcome more highly than how we will get there. Just as when we travel, picking whether to go by foot, bicycle, train, car or plane, once the choice is made, there is no attending to the possibility of any of the other options. So too our decisions to look to future luxury and forego whatever it takes to get there cuts us off from other possible options or experiences. When choosing the title of this post, we were looking at art that was sculptural, but then, if you added energy, it would transform into something fragile and frail, until the energy stopped going in. Then, it would become a soild sculptural form again. So too, our mind has this quality, as does the collective mind of our community. We frequently charge ahead, putting energy in to whatever our persuits are and pay little attention to the wake we leave behind. Many people have been lulled into the false belief that none of that matters. A very two-dimensional view of reality. In fact, the propensity of modern thinkers to believe in duality is a good place to see 2-D thinking on display. You can't get more two-dimensional than, "Two sides to every story". It validates the experience of bullies and fools, criminals and charlatans. If every story has two sides, does that make life easier to understand? As we continue waxing into two dimensional thought, perhaps someone should be ringing alarm bells for us to wake back up!

One Year Ago

Today is the one year anniversary of our first walk through at our new property. At first look, the work required was daunting, to say the least. There were unhealthy smells coming from around two hideous bathrooms, the floors throughout were nasty and most needed total replacement. First floor windows were functionable and good for 1951, but had voids and to be best, would have needed total reglazing, paint and some new panes of glass just to get them up to 71 year old specs. The plumbing was a little sketch to say the least and it looked like it had been through at least a couple decades of not being cleaned. Our financial "resource base" was a little over 50K to invest, and the work looked like we could "afford" it if all the sweat equity was provided by our Directors and Volunteers. By the time April Fourth rolls around, the date we signed the mortgage, the home repairs should be complete and we can switch our focus to the greenhouses! ECO-Tours of Wisconsin Inc. now has a site at which we will continue to teach classes, plant and restore the land, build healthy soil. Continuing to provide the same program we were going to do in th eremote Northwoods of Wisconsin, right on th eScenic Shortcut that millions take to Door County. Tourism is up 13% over pre pandemic levels and shows little sign of levelling off.
Our initial plan was to buy a large acreage, where nearly half was lowlying natural buffer to development. The parcel we found best suited to our goals (after two years of searching mind you) was taken off the market before we could complete an offer to purchase. In fact, we had not even gotten to walk the land, although from photographs and Google Earth, we could see how a physical plant could organically develop on the high ground, far from th ebeaten path. It was expensive for what we would have gotten but that also would present an unforseen negative, long travel times for our guests to get to the site! The site we have secured can do all of the things we needed for approximately the same amount of money. We are actually able to start out several years ahead of where we would be having bought blank land and building from scratch and because we spent frugally, getting a large amount of the physical plant pre-built, we don't have to do constant fund-raising! We are ready to host our first biochar class now, we just need to plan for a time that the most people can come.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/1111+Clark+St,+Algoma,+WI+54201/@44.6076943,-87.4478729,3a,75y,347.5h,90t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s0xA4GafyFFcwp3oBrtk5DQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656!4m5!3m4!1s0x881d36ba58830fd1:0xd518aea10fdbec2!8m2!3d44.6080375!4d-87.4479921 Intead of having to cast a broad net over the landscape to get within reach of a million people, it would have required drives of three to five hours for many of our guests. Where we settled, we are less than an hour drive from over a million people and many millions more go by on their way to vacation!The carbon footprint of our guests will be virtually non-existent compared to what it would have been being so far out in the boonies and we can also offer fishing tour recommendations for fishing expeditions on Lake Michigan for our guests. If guests forgot anything, stores are a short walk away and the roads here may never be impassable. Up in the woods, we would have had to drive for miles on a sand road, or traverse the fields a half mile from the closest paved road just to get in or out. Settling on an existing place in the City of Algoma will serve everyone who comes and the planet far better than developing another place in the woods. We went from being virtually inassessible for many without transportation options to available to a million people within a one-day bike ride.

Ides of December

We had our preliminary winter rain with a dash of snow at the end. If it had snowed, just ten days before Solstice, and we got all that rain as snow, it would have been impressive. Instead, we got torrential rain that eventually turned into a sleety ice mix, and in the overnight, it finally got near 32F (0C) and some snow fell. The ground, not yet being frozen was soaking up as much as it could, but eventually, the ground was saturated and the slush started building up on top. Late in the day, much had melted into the grass and more than half the lawns were clear. The cold is supposed to come this week, but for now, the ground is wet and thawed, at least on top. Six weeks and ten days from now, temperatures should begin warming, but for now, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, this will begin story time and long winter's nights by the fire. So much has been written and researched regarding soil carbon and so little is being done to heal the soil and re-establish a viable water cycle in our agricultural lands that time is running out to adapt and change our behavior before we turn the great "bread baskets" of the world to desert.
In these times, we must rebuild our soils. Many recent advances have led to multi-species cover cropping and interplantings that build soil rather than deplete it. We have the skills needed to increase carbon in soil, increase biological activity and reduce the effects of both drought and flood and those who know how to do it are anxious to teach others. The biochar classes we teach at ECO-Tours of Wisconsin are designed specifically for you, your soils, your resources, your intended use of the land, all of these things dictate the type of biochar that best suits your desired use. Someone wanting chicken odor reduction as their primary use for biochar would get a very different product than someone who wanted to add it to asparagus beds, for instance.
The primary thing to remember is that once char has been heated to a glow, but kept from air, it is transformed, like fired pottery, the sherds can last virtually forever. Research into the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the only one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World modern archaeology has not yet "found", leads some to believe that ultralight soils may have been biochar-based and fed from newly discovered canals/aqueducts near and leading to Nineveh, near Mosul, Iraq. Ancient ancestors from over 4,000 years ago had worked out the details of using fire to turn clay to stone and it seems a tiny step for them to also realize that the black ash made in virtually every fire, was transformed in a similar fashion, and has benefits for soil building and drought resistance.

Our current lack of understanding regarding soils leads many to not even understand the difference between soil and dirt. So much of our agricultural landscape has been assaulted, de-carbonized, tilled to death and saturated with chemicals that finding intact soils with well-developed structure are getting harder and harder to find. Our biochar classes are designed to convey knowledge, skills and attitudes that lead to healthier soils, healthier plants and doubling of crop production without the use of harsh or persistent chemicals and to facilitate the establishment of a viable soil microbial communjity. This in turn leads to an increase in marcro-organisms and beneficial insects that also store carbon and cycle water, nutrients and carbon, allowing it to stay in soils longer and to provide resources for other trophic levels in the soil. The current system of agriculture needs to be revised for so many reasons, our classes teach literally from the ground up, why change is necessary, how to create positive change in the soil and all the specifics regarding the six steps required to make top quality biochar that will transform the soil for thousands of years. If you are interested in taking our classes, we can do them in-person or online. We have also had a few opportunities to consult with people using the phone, so whatever your needs are, don't hesitate to ask. This information is too important to not share. Just remember, we have bills, overhead and taxes to pay. Spending a reasonable amount for the information is crucial to allow us to continue to exist and it helps you value the years of effort we have put in to help re-discover this ancient blend of art and science. The only thing more expensive than education is ignorance.
As another year slowly fades into history, it is well to remeber that we are the drivers of change. The greedy, self-serving, ignorant and rediculous people who have all the money don't care about us and do not understand that they need us far more than we need them. We don't need to close ranks around them, dehumanize or demoralize them, but to step away, teach by example and invite reciprocation. According to abundance theory, when everyone does better, everyone does better.
Contact us by mail at: ECO-Tours of Wisconsin, Inc. 1111 Clark street Algoma, WI 54201,
e-mail: biocharmaster "at" gmail.com or call/txt: nine twenty, double eight four-triple two four.

Turning the Page

When we first sold our homes, which were across the street from one another, one had been meant to be a long term rental and morphed into an air bnb which was finally able to turn a small profit. We looked at the "sweat equity" of twenty years of home ownership and it was less than five dollars per hour that we had spent doing much needed repairs over the course of all those years we had owned them. More than that, we had to say goodbye to more than thirty six edible perennial plants that we had cultivated and nurtured on those properties which were providing great joy to us, food, beauty and wildlife habitat as well. During most of covid we lived in a spare bedroom at my sister-in-law's house which did not allow for much gardening or yard work, but now we have taken up residence in our new home which sits on 1.8 acres. We will continue to use our home as the base for ECO-Tours of Wisconsin Inc.That is not going to change.
The house is seventy-one years old and has been lived in pretty hard. In additon to replacing and/or renewing all the floors, we have added properly grounded outlets, a few newer and more efficient light fixtures, GFCI protection where needed and new supply lines for our water. Some drains have also been replaced correctly and the cleaning, painting and investment has not yet come to an end. So far, we have only attempted to work on the interior, so that we will have a comfortable space to live through the coming cold weather. We have already invested more than what my first home cost! We will have all new windows by next Spring and we are working to make the garage situation more efficient as well, putting it on the side of the house closest to the street so that we minimize the costs of clearing snow in winter and the fuel required to drive across our property every time we come or go.

Leaving behind the city by the bay, my wife's hometown, the location that held on to us and that we invested in for more than twenty years as a couple was much easier than one might have thought it would be. We are just ove half an hour away, so friends and family can reach us easily but the smog, hustle and traffic of the bigger city won't be missed. The cost of quiet is planning trips to town like a farmer might, making sure to combine activities and planning our route to not have to double back, ever, assures that when we go to town to make money, we also get as many small errands done as possible. Driving a half hour for one or two items would blow their cost through the roof, so even if we can't get something here in our new town, it is easier to learn to live without it than to make a special trip to find it. We also don't mind paying more for an item we really do require because that could save us a long drive and our time is precious. As with most things, while you are in the moment or performing the task, attention is required that also obscures other aspects of the picture. Moving on is an activity unique to itself. Interestingly, I have made more new friends in the town I had lived in since the Eighties, in just the past six months than I had made over the past six years! Again, proving the permacultural maxim that by perfecting the give away, or the give back, life becomes more rich, more diverse and more resilient. We continue to welcome those who wish to learn about biochar, sustainability and permaculture. We have opportunities for people to learn about so many simple living skills, but you need to contact us prior to arrival and let us know what you want to learn about. In the coming years, we see ourselves becoming like the Foxfire living history museum, teaching by doing all the things our ancestors did to make a living. Gardening, putting up food for the cold months, harvesting what nature brings forth at the appropriate times and crafting the things we need from what resources abound locally. We also have many lifetimes worth of experience, because we learned from our elders how to manage the plants and animals around us so that we can have healthy food and to reciprocate the love that Mother Earth shows us in providing for our need. To this end, we want to share, again the best ways to reach us. e-mail:biocharmaster(at)gmail.com or check in by txt msg: (nine-twenty) double eight four-triple two four.

New Digs

At first, we see what we know, with repeated exposure and/or more intimate exploration, we find a more true nature of that which we see. When I walked in the room, I saw these lampshades as gourds. When I came close I was not sure, because all the gourds I know of have fairly thin skin. These are, in fact Earthenware, thown as a pear shape and then cut into this amazing lattice. ECO-Tours of Wisconsin, Inc. is moving to a new location. We will be near the shore of Lake Michigan, just a half-dozen miles from the premier tourist area known as Door County. Our first concern is to make the home on site liveable and to add two bedrooms for travelers and guests who come for classes and tours. After that, we will begin documenting the natural ecotones on site and putting effort into a large classroom space so in the event of inclement weather, we can still teach our biochar classes. By the coming Spring, we will be actively reforesting and adding to permaculture management strategies, getting the fruit trees and vines back to their prolific state and infusing the land with many, many more perennial food and medicinal crops.
For our supporters and friends, it may seem odd that we have drastically pared back the size of our new center, but in light of rapidly escalating prices for everything, not just energy, we want to place our home base in a more central area, so that we can serve a greater number of people at drastically lower cost. Instead of asking our guests to treck many hours into the Northwoods of Wisconsin, we are locating just a day's bicycle ride from over a million potential guests. The air quality is much better than where we were located and the night skies are much more full of stars. Although it may not be the remote backwoods experience that "Up North" has to offer, we are within about an hour drive of one of the state's dark skies parks and can arrange transport and camping expeditions to that location for stargazers and those who have not yet seen the Milky Way or Northern Lights. Kayaking opportunities abound and as we are located about a day's walk from the Eastern Terminus of the Ice Age Trail, those who want to hike have ample chance to find peace and quiet there as well.
UPDATE: We have been at our new location for about a month. We remain focused on the inside, it took months of Nancy and I working every spare minute to get it back to move in ready, but we are a little flexible in what that means. When we go to town, we still bring a load or two of laundry, our chest freezer is still at the old pod. We have planted about a half dozen things, like rhubarb and elderberries which had been in pots, some given to us, some purchased with gracious donations from supporters. As we do begin making holes in the ground, it seems that this will be an excellent property on which to showcase biochar and the effects of re-generation. Carbon sequestration will be meticulously documented and the results will be obvious. Each time we get a read on soil quality in different areas, we gain understanding of where we are, our place is based on the soil and in this spot, there are places with precious little of that. We will practice our own version of ecological triage, deciding what will remain impacted and what can be easily recovered, focusing resources on places that our intervention makes the greatest difference. I work hard to bring salient messages to this blog and for many reasons I have sought to keep it free and available. If you appreciate that, my paypal account number is the same as my e-mail. t (as in Tony) n (as in Nancy) saladino42 at (because We're old school) hotmail dot com.

What is the Nature of Soil?

One of the most fundamental ways of looking at soil is to determine what the main ingredients are. Some soil contains rocks and gravels and it has been determined that anything bigger than 2mm is just a contaminant in soil. Rocks, stones and gravel are considered by soil scientists to be too large to be considered. So, first we have to screen soils through a 2mm mesh to see what portion of the ground beneath our feet is really soil and how much is just a contaminant. I have tried growing a garden on gravelly ground and the plant that did best there is purslane. Sadly, at the time, I didn't know it as a nutrient dense food crop, but I did know that it composted easily and turned it into compost for years, until I could build enough soil to grow other plants for food. Like most living things in soil, which I will discuss later, I have the tenacity to not give up, not give in to pressure, but to hold out long enough for conditions to improve. I put forth as the primary nature of soil to contain and express the deepest level of tenacity our human brains can fathom. Let's not get ahead of ourselves... The most important information to get about soil is what on earth is making up the mass? Luckily, the simplest and most profound question can be answered with a simple and profound test. Take a handful or two of soil, put it in a clear container that is taller than it is wide, fill the container with water, put a lid on it and shake. let it sit overnight or up to several days or weeks until the water has cleared and you will see three separate and distinct layers in the vessel. At the bottom will be sand. These are the largest soil particles, so they fall out of suspension first. The middle section will be silt which ranges from as small as two thousandths of a centimteter all the way up to five hundreths of a cm. Finally the topmost layer will be clay, particles smaller than two thousandths of a cm. I recently heard an interesting way to think about these relative sizes. tiny numbers really don't tell the story, especially when you get down to sizes we can't even see. Think of it this way, if the smallest particles were the size of BBs or marbles, the middle sized particles would be the size of basketballs or beach balls and the large particles would be the size of a chair. Typically, these three ingredients make up over 95% of the soil.
Of course with any hard and fast rule, there are major exceptions. Organic material in the soil, which is often seen as bubbles on the surface of the water used in the previous test, can become a large percentage of the soil, but then it is either called peat or muck. Peat being derived from mosses and growing organic sources and muck being from lake sediments, or detritus (like the waste bin of nature)Across most of the developed world, many soils have been tilled so agressively that no organic material is left in them, less than one percent organic material is frequently seen but it is an extremely dangerous condition for soil. At that point it is more accurately called dirt. It will easily erode with either wind or rain, without a thick mulch layer or some growth and living roots to hold the material together and protect it from rain and sun. Each component of soil is good for some things and terrible for others, so having a good mix is best. If you have a single material dominant it raises management issues but any soil can be worked with. My own personal preference is clay, but the management of that type of soil is just as quirky as would be a predominantly silt or sand soil.The difference is that I have learned to respect the limitations of my clay soil. Sand drains like crazy, which is normally very good, but it presents a problem in that it drains so easily that it is hard to keep soil misture even enough to get plants to grow well.sand also very seriously flirts with contaminating surface and ground water because any nutrients applied to the soil can be washed away because the matrial drains so freely. It can also be a challenge because many organisms will find it difficult to stick around when the soil routinely goest through extreme wet and dry cycles. This also can mean huge variations in surface temperature as well, especially if mulch cover in not maintained.
Silt provides much more surface area which can be available for the soil microbiome to flourish upon and although it drains more slowly and provides more opportunity for life to thive than sand can, it can also be threatened by tilling or not enough nutrients. Most people hate clay because mor ethan likely they inherited poorly managed clay, as I did. It had been seriously compacted through consistently poor management and in large areas it was just lifeless. Although clay can provide the most habitat for soil microbes of all the soils, any land manager who has to deal woith them needs to understand their limitations as well. Most often the limiting factors are the ability to get air and water down into the soil. If water can't even penetrate the soil, it can only run off and it will take some clay particles and nutrients with it as well. The best thing in all three cases mentioned above is to add either compost (or other organic material) for organic carbon or mineral carbon with microbes in the form of biochar. I make the distinction betewwn the two because material that was once living releases most of its carbon over the course of about four years, ninety percent leaves the soil. Mineral carbon is not a food source for any soil organism, nor will it break down if eaten and excreted by soil dwelling creatures. It remains unchanged for hundreds of centuries, continuing to provide habitat for soil organisms. This small but vital part of soil, organic and inorganic carbon are what allows soil to be healthy, well-drained and able to withstand drought. The living and dead roots, provide some large structures that increase porosity, but it is the living organisms and th edead organic meterial they eat, as well as what they excrete that make soil vital and healthy. In soil the tiny percentage of living organic material does most of the work feeding the plant roots and providing smaller structures that allow air and wate rto be available enough under the soil surface to create a rich habitable zone within which millions of other life ofrms co-exist. The most true nature of soil is to be the ultimate team player, providing opportunity and the synergy that comes from diversity and abiding by terms of the give back or give away. When soil is treated badly enough, it often just goes away.

Shameless Plea

We are getting ready to preserve nearly two acres and transform it, like we did our last two properties, into a permacultural wonderland of native, edible and medicinal perennials, pollenator gardens and habitat for a variety of creatures. On our second walk-through at the property, we frightened a muskrat who looked fat and happy but for the fact that he was awakened and had to run a long way for cover. We would definitely improve that critter's habitat! Our earlier goal of saving 80 acres remains our ultimate goal, but this property has an established caretakers home and two greenhouses. We would have to raise four times as much money to build in all those improvements on 80 acres. Not to mention the infrastructure needed to even set up such a facility. As an added bonus, instead of being 3-5 hours from major population centers, there will be a million people within bicycling distance! Talk about offsetting carbon footprints!Even more interestingly, we will be just of fth eIce Age Trail and will be able to offer no trace camping to through hikers!
Trouble is, I'm not going to sugar coat it, money. Due to covid-19, it has been two full years of less than half my normal professional gig that allows me to fund the work that ECO-Tours has done. We are adept at soil restoration and teaching about how to make and use biochar. Spreading seed and re-establishing native cover. There have been many events where contributions have covered gas or lunch, but often not both. We can afford to operate on exremely small budgets, whether we are tree planting, seed collecting and dispersing, teaching classes or doing intrerpretive programs because our labor and management have always been 100% volunteer. It took us our first ten years to do, but we planted 60,000 tree seedlings across Northeast Wisconsin and we raised less than six thousand dollars a year during those years.
We were able to do it because we got creative. One of us would wait around, until after pick-up hours at the annual Department of Natural Resources tree seedling distribution event, many years hundreds of trees came home with us that otherwise would have been thrown into the compost. In fact, the year before the first year we put in our order, I had been walking past the greenhouses at the County Extension Offices. Out back I found over 2,000 tree seedlings in their compost. We took them home. potted them up and it took a while, but we got nearly all of them set out into permanent and appropriate places, their forever homes, within that first spring and fall. After I found that treasure, I went and asked why they had thrown them out and they said that every year, when they did the DNR tree seedling sale, some live plants would not get picked up and they didn't have any way to store them or hold them for later pick up, so they just put them in the compost pile.
I made sure after that to always show up at the beginning of the day to help set up, then to fill my order as late in the day as possible, so I could help after they shut down. After two or three days of getting people paired with their orders for pick up, everyone woul dbe pretty tired and the idea of taking a hundred or a thousand trees home ot plant is too much for anyone to think about, unless you are someone with friends who will help pot them up and eventuqally come help plant them out on another day, which we did. Inevitably there would be at least a few dozen left over seedlings. Most times there were many hundreds and once or twice over a thousand free trees to help keep our costs down. The real value was in all the loving hands that helped pot them all up and those loving hands that came later and lovingly placed them in the ground. Indeed, the loving hands of those who pulled competing weeds were also necessary to have the thousands of sucessful trees, spread across many hundreds of acres that would have never grown without the participation of many hundreds of people who care.
The reason that I mention this is to point out that rather than contributions being eaten up by administrative or fund-raising costs, our dollars flow with power and immediacy to what needs funding, not advertizing and gala events for megadonors. Give what you can. If you would like to stay in the loop about our events, which are mostly centered around Wisconsin let us know at: biocharmaster@gmail.com or if you would lik eot purchase a class, We can teach you everything you need to know to make top quality biochar in just a few hours by phone or online through zoom or fblive. Any contribution of fifty or more gets you a class if you would like to start sequestering carbon forever. If you are having trouble with our paypal link, you can go there directly and use our account number, tnsaladino42@hotmail.com or, you can go to our gofundme page and contribute to "Save 80 acres of Wisconsin for outdoor school".

These trees were some of the first we planted and this image is from ten years ago. The last time I was past the farm, they were taller than the house! They are also large enough now to shade the west side of the house from summer sun and winter wind. The energy savings alone is like offsetting carbon use that is now unnecessary. In very real ways, we continue to prove that the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago, the second best time is today!
Again, please contribute what you can.