Integrating with those around us

One of the driving ideas of permaculture is to be aware of your surroundings and to work with them rather than against them. This is usually thought of in terms of biological process, but the idea is certainly not limited to that scale or perspective. Working with our surroundings, both on and off the property, is equally important in urban environments and within social situations. It's just as important to work with your neighbor or community as it is to work with decomposers, wildlife, and rainfall. If you find yourself in direct opposition to any of these forces you not only find yourself with a greatly reduced chance of success, but your life also gets a lot more difficult and frustrating. So it's important to us that our activities here at the ranch don't interfere with the daily lives of the people around us, or decrease the quality of life for the people or other organisms living in the area.

Here are a few pictures to give you an idea of what the ranch is like. I'm still learning the format of this blog, so I apologize about how things are set up right now.


This is the view of Moscow Mountain looking across some of the ranch property that is closest to a nearby park. As you can see the ranch is inside the city limits and surrounded by streets, housing, parks, etc. The view of the mountains is important to most people here in town. So we are trying to be very careful about the types of trees we are going to plant. We are selecting trees that will either remain rather short at maturity and aren't able to grow tall enough to obscure the view of the mountains, or trees that can be coppiced or cut back regularly to prevent them getting too tall.

The coppicing of trees will be especially important in this project, since when the trees are coppiced (or cut back) they will respond by quickly growing a large number of new leaves and shoots. These will then provide a large amount of leaves for the alpacas to eat, and the leaves should be young and tender at that point. Younger growth has more nutrients and is easier to digest than older plant tissue, making these leaves browse for the alpacas. Tree material that was cut down can them be used for compost, green manure, or as a substrate and food source for growing mushrooms.


This picture is taken from the top of the ranch property, and as you can see it looks directly down on a small park, stream, and bike path. The ranch and alpacas are just up the hill from this park and are one of the main views that people have when they come to the park. So it's important to us to make this area beautiful and functional as well as safe. We don't want drainage from the ranch to reach the stream without having been sufficiently filtered first, the view to be filled with garbage or bare ground, or for odors from alpaca manure to drift down into a picnic. At the moment the area next to the park is unglazed grassland and provides visual and biologic buffers between the park and the alpaca pens. The trees mentioned above will also help to make the area more beautiful and visually appealing for park goers.


Here is a view of the same area of the ranch from a road that overlooks both the park and the ranch.