Report
My first task when I woke up the first Monday in April was to devise an attack plan for the upcoming weeks. Somehow I needed to coordinate the plans for all of these projects in six weeks, the project sites were two hundred miles apart from one another and it was a real challenge. These past two months have shown me a lot about myself, what I can manage in a short amount of time and what I cannot which you the reader will learn soon enough. The first thing I did to kick off the series of projects was to take a little trip to my mom’s house in Quincy. There I spent a few days gathering information. I came back and coordinated some things at home, then went back up (to Quincy) to continue the projects there for a couple weeks. When I got back my computer blew up and I lost everything I had been writing about. I was very angry but I found myself shortly after that somehow given a gift, not only with a new computer but also I felt that it had happened for a reason, as if I was being tested for my endurance, my tenacity. I felt calm and solid, as though everything was fine and everything was going to work out, even though in reality it might be everything but that. This report brings to light the things that happened and why they happened, and what I learned from them. My blog will be the home of all of my media for this output from pictures, maybe a video or two to my interview on air at KQNY and my published article in the paper the Feather River Bulletin. Please read and enjoy!
Going up to my first project site was exciting, I was going up to try and make a difference in peoples lives. This was something I hadn’t consciously done before. This was my project on watershed stewardship, a small creek enhancement project. Keep in mind that although it is a creek enhancement project, one cannot complete a watershed project in two weeks. It takes all year, sometimes many years to see or even benefit from the fruit of your labor. The system must run through its cycle of seasons before it tells you that it will accept or reject your work. What I did was create the environment for which native species are encouraged to grow. I planted various natives to benefit everybody, like planting flowers to benefit pollinators, which in turn benefits us humans in our gardens. The first step was to get the word out that I was doing this project.
During my first couple days in Quincy, I was asked if I wanted to be interviewed on the radio. Aha! This was my opportunity to share with the general public what I was doing and why. This experience was really fun for me. KQNY is a part of the public broadcasting network all around the U.S. My interview was to be a half an hour long, so I started coming up with questions and answers. When the time came, a woman interviewed me by the name of Meredith Marasco, a volunteer for the station who hosted the program “Here Today, Here Tomorrow”, the community sustainability show. When we got started I was so nervous, I didn’t know how many people would be listening or would even care about what I had to say. It turns out that she had totally skipped all of the questions that I had given her. These were questions that I had come up with to really get down to the basics of who I am in short and what I am doing with my life towards sustainability and self-reliance. She also asked me all about Gaia University and what it was and what it meant to me. Here's a link for you to listen to if you’d like, there will also be a link in my evidence section, http://soundcloud.com/search?q%5Bfulltext%5D=bryce+mac+math . Back to the show. Five minutes in to the interview when I realized that she wasn’t planning on reading any of the questions I gave her, I started panicking, but then I calmed down when I realized that as long as I answered all of her questions with honesty and with what I felt inside I knew that it would be okay. It actually ended up being pretty cool. I’m not upset for this unplanned misunderstanding, I’m actually happy that it happened this way, it taught me a really good lesson. Speak your truth.
The interview prompted a few emails and calls with people asking me how they could help. Terry Rust is a consultant with the Department of Forestry of California; she gave me advice and a list of plants that would benefit the project. I also got in contact with a local nursery called Sierra Valley Farms and they offered their collections of native plants, I wanted to support them in turn so I offered to pay for them, and I did. The next help I got was from the natural resource professor at the Feather River College located just miles from the creek site, she offered to give me some of her student volunteers. This was my opportunity to work with the public on the project and to share some knowledge on watershed stewardship. The day of the start of the project came and I was short of volunteers, it turned out that the timing was just too soon and the students couldn’t rally in time to help out. I did however continue the project anyway and my mom helped out a lot, we spent the day planting plants and thinning out vegetation. I think next time I will give more adequate time for the volunteers to rally and it will be more successful. This is a project that will be ongoing throughout the next year and onward and I will be tracking it with my studies with Gaia.
After the creek enhancement project my brother, uncle and I started designing and building an idea of mine that was quite ambitious. Last year I had the idea of turning a room in my mother’s house into a passive solar example, a solarium. First I’ll start by explaining how this project was even possible.
I was born in this area and lived in Quincy until I was two when my parents split up. We kept our house there but moved to Santa Rosa where I live now. For twenty years we kept the house in Quincy, renting it for extra income. When my Mom retired three years ago from the public school system after 35 years, she decided to move back up to Quincy and instead of moving back into our old house, bought the house across the creek, she now owns two large plots about 1 ½ acres in size. We both plan on turning this property into a high altitude permaculture demonstration site, a project I will most likely focus my last year with Gaia on. I digress. The house is small and quaint, and perfect to take full advantage of the sun. The area that the properties rest upon is at the foot of a north facing mountain slope. When the settlers came here they were pressed upon this slope because the native populations wanted the more fertile southern exposed valley floor, so as you can imagine she and her neighbors don’t get a lot of sun. This was the perfect opportunity to demonstrate how to harness the power of the sun passively. The idea was to take her current wood storage room, bolster the frame and knock down parts of the wall to install transparent corrugated panels. This would allow my mom to use the room to heat the rest of her house a little, to start vegetable starts for the garden, and to lounge in when it was cold but sunny. We wanted to stack as many functions into this room as possible and I am sure we will keep adding to its functionality. So I said we bolstered the frame and installed panels, which alone is a big project, but we also had to take another thing into consideration; where she lives there is a greater amount of radon due to the large volumes of granite. Because of this we had to pour a concrete slab, but not just any concrete slab. When the radon gas came up and met the concrete slab we had to guide it up and out from under it, so we perforated a four-inch PVC pipe to ventilate the radon out from under the foundation. The first step was this radon ventilation system, then we surrounded it with washed river rock to disperse the weight of the concrete that was to be poured on top. Then the regular steps of pouring a concrete slab ensued, concrete dobies and rebar to hold it together against seismic activity. We finished the cement with finishing tools. All together this project cost around a thousand dollars, much less than the cost of building a comparable structure from scratch. Throughout this process I learned a lot about creating a foundation, not only a foundation for a building project but also a foundation for projects in the future. This project showed my mom and family that I was very serious about sustainability and what kinds of things I wanted to do within this field. I had so much fun; it really showed me that these types of things were what I liked doing, not only gardening, but construction and infrastructure. This build was not as sustainable as I would have liked it to be, but at this point in my life I need to gain basic skills and then when I am in the profession I can start to pepper in sustainable methods of my own. I had a lot of fun learning these skills in Quincy. I think I set up and created a very good environment for future projects, especially the opportunity to create a fully functioning high altitude permaculture educational center. It will take time but during this solarium project I spoke with my mom about my intent to create the permaculture site, and I am glad to say that she is more than excited to start right away. All photos following the foresaid projects can be found at http://brycemacmath.tumblr.com/
All of the side projects that I created may also be viewed at my blog site. These projects included a large keyhole garden, my first attempt in the front of my mom’s house; it was planted with three varieties of potatoes, fingerlings, Yukon’s and reds. I built the garden to showcase it to the neighborhood that these natural formed gardens offer a pleasant alternative to green lawns and offer something other than esthetic value in return. My second side project was to build my mom a working composting sifter, a foreign concept to her before this project. I have been educating her on the necessary infrastructure on home gardens throughout these projects and this was a very good example. It is a freestanding compost sifter, made 100% out of recycled lumber and hardware; large enough for her needs in the garden but not too large that she couldn’t move it around her self-if need be. It is conveniently built so that the user may park a wheelbarrow underneath it for ease of transportation of compost to the desired location. Now she can compost in glory and share her wealth of compost with the neighborhood. My third side project while I was up there was created to refine my skills with keyhole gardens. I built another keyhole garden in the back of her house to offer another agricultural asset to the property. We planted strawberries, and all of her herbs here. My fourth side project was creating a small vegetable garden for my girlfriend Alysha’s home where she lives with her mom. I figure that the easiest way to start to change the world through agriculture and home gardening is to start with the one’s you know. Throughout this output packet I have been giving vegetable starts to everyone I know in the hopes that they might start a garden their own. With Alysha’s home garden it was a little different in that I could do a little more. I acquired half wine barrels for free from friends and vegetable starts from my greenhouse, the greenhouse I refurbished for OP2, and got soil. We took a couple hours to place and plant a small garden that we can expand upon in the future. Now they have a means to start growing their own food. These side projects were done in the times that I got frustrated or tired of my main projects. Each of these projects were done in less than a day and cost very little, only the cost of the plants for the keyhole gardens and the wire mesh for the compost sifter. The keyhole gardens were made for around twenty dollars, the sifter for around five dollars, and the small home garden for my girlfriend for twenty-five dollars. All four projects for a grand total of fifty dollars, plus the cost of gas for transport, which wasn’t much. All of these projects were made so that the beneficiary doesn’t have to use fossil fuels to get what they want. These projects were a small way of mine to show people that they do have the power to grow their own food without having to rely on imported products.
The projects done for my op4 were very hands on and built physical, social and mental skills for me. My solarium project was a very ambitious endeavor, before I started I was constantly asking myself if I was getting in over my head with the work. With the help of my family and friends I completed this project and many more. This output was full of growth and understanding of my skills and talents and what I could accomplish if I put my mind to the task at hand. Along with the help of those around me I learned that help is just a question away, and those that matter will try very hard to help if they see that what you are doing is for the benefit of the community.