Whole Systems Agriculture-Garden Gallery

Photos and Descriptions

NEW! I have built a chicken tractor with 6 x 8 inch mesh livestock panels 16 feet long x 52 inches wide, pictured here with 1/4 inch diameter welded wire. The first job is to cut the panels in half with 24 inch [minimum size] bolt cutters. Roughly one and a half panels are required per 4 x 8 foot tractor, 2 feet high. The panels don't cut exactly in half either way because of the configuration of the mesh, so this is a nominal rather than actual size. Actual dimensions are somewhat less because some wire needs to be discarded where the cuts are made. Materials for one tractor are:
1 - 4 x 8 foot bottom piece
2 - 2 x 4 foot end pieces
1 - 2 x 4 foot center piece
2 - 2 x 8 foot side pieces

These are fitted together with hog rings and/or polypropolyne twine to make a two compartment unit. Poultry netting is cut, fitted and attached with hog rings or twine in the same way. In use, the top is covered with two 2 x 8 foot lengths of plywood held in place with Newtonian fasteners (for example, hunks of concrete block) to keep predators from getting in and winds from blowing the plywood top off. The center piece is necessary to support the plywood and give better structural rigidity to the unit. The bottom piece also adds structural rigidity and the 6 x 8 inch mesh allows the chickens to scratch with reduced risk of digging their way out. The bottom is additional insurance to keep predators out. We weatherize the plywood, as we do all our wooden tool handles (they are never put in a shed), by painting generously with motor oil.

This man, living on the wastes of urban and suburban landscapes, considers himself a detritivore. Here, mulch that will be transferred to his garden beds is forked into a cart, the first step in reorganizing the minerals of life--minerals that will eventually produce flowers and food. These can be used directly or taken to the farmers market and exchanged for the money required to pay taxes. Soil microorganisms will mineralize these wastes and, with the energy contained in the sunlight that falls into his garden, will be reassembled into structures both beautiful and delicious. In time, and in accordance with the Law of Conservation of Matter and Energy, a similar cartful of food can be removed from the garden. And this is over and above what could be produced by his soil's initial fertility. So go the cycles of initiation and completion. (Photo posted November, 2005)

The machine pictured here is a chipper-shredder of a design sold at the big-box stores. Near useless for its intended purpose, this one has been converted to a threshing-winnowing machine by removing the four flails attached to the cutting mechanism inside the unit. If not removed, they will crack the grain as it goes through. Cut grain is fed into the black hopper where it is sucked through the machine. The grain and chaff are discharged into the drum where the kernels accumulate at the bottom and the chaff is blown out. This process is facilitated by stirring, as pictured, and also by pouring the seeds from one drum to another under the air blast. Beans and peas, because they are easily split by impact, need to be threshed by hand (we do it in the box trailer pictured in the background), with the roughest material removed manually. The finer trash and beans are then run through the discharge air blast. Final cleaning is done at cooking time by running water into a pot of air cleaned beans or grain and floating off the remaining trash. As far as we know using a machine like this to thresh and winnow grains is an original Whole Systems Ag innovation. (Photo posted November, 2005)

The cycles of initiation and completion start by planting seeds--almost all of which we sow in flats, germinate indoors and then move to the nursery. Here you see them being placed one to a cell in a kind of flat known in the nursery trade as a “pro tray”. Seeds may also be planted in rows or broadcast over flats half-filled with soil or started in ground beds covered with a hot frame. When seeds are expensive or in short supply, tossing them out into the garden is a poor option. By a quick estimate one day, I calculated that a fully tillered [that is, with many stems sprouting from the base] wheat plant will yield close to a thousand grains for each one planted. In classical agriculture 10% of the crop is saved for seed. In Mark 4:31-20, Jesus mentioned ratios of 30, 60 and up to a hundred to one as being much more than what ordinarily might be expected and, judging by the context, even miraculous. (Photo courtesy Wendy Alexander, Madera Tribune, August, 2004)

These bean plants are ready for setting out in the garden. The great amount of energy stored in the large seeds of beans makes them good candidates for sowing directly in the garden--they can easily push their way up through soil and mulch--but the gardener would have to sacrifice 30 days or so of time until the beds could be harvested. Some crops, beets and turnips for example, only take 60 days to mature, so theoretically anyway, over the growing season the beds could be twice as productive by growing them for the first 30 days in flats. The growth of plants is geometric, that is, growth will double every few days. But in the first 30 days or so this does not amount to much so the plants can just as well grow in flats. When larger plants are transplanted into the beds, the speed with which the canopy closes (that is, foliage covers the whole bed) can be astounding, seemingly closing in a single day after a couple of weeks of growth. If the reader is not familiar with geometric progression, he might start with the number 1, and doubling it 30 times to see what happens.(Photo courtesy Wendy Alexander, Madera Tribune, August, 2004)

This photograph does a good job of showing the beds and alleys as they are constructed here in Madera. The five lines of driptape are one foot apart, covering four feet, with about half-a-foot on each edge before the shoulders start dropping off. The beds and shoulders have recently been covered with grass clippings that have settled down to an inch or more in depth. Notice the somewhat equal spaces devoted to beds and alleys. The alleys make the beds easily accessible for planting, maintenance, harvesting and removal of spent crops from the beds. Crop residue accumulates in the alleys to be used on the beds at a later time, This is an example of letting self-organization go to work by means of design. I suspect that regular organic gardeners spend more time moving crop residues out of the garden, making compost with them and then hauling the material back in than we would spend producing the whole crop. The beans in the foreground were planted a day or two before the photograph was taken. (Photo courtesy Wendy Alexander, Madera Tribune, August, 2004)

These recently planted beans are in depressions that have been called planting pockets. These depressions create a bit of a micro-environment that protect the newly transplanted seedling from winds and they are just about essential if the gardener is seeding directly into the mulch (only seed that is either large and/or cheap should be direct-seeded into the mulch). New plants should be set in soil, not mulch. Capillary water will not move through mulch until it gets very packed or rotted. So, just as it will not support weed growth, neither will it support the growth of new transplants. We use an auger fitted into a cordless drill to make the holes but it is only a little more work to use a dibble. An old tool handle shaved or ground to a dull point serves well. The new plants are squeezed into the soil, not pushed, in order that the sides of the plug will be in firm contact with the surrounding moist soil. The pockets in the mulch catch overhead water and ensure a good initial soaking, countering the tendency of the mulch to shed water, somewhat like a thatched roof. (Photo courtesy Wendy Alexander, Madera Tribune, August, 2004)

Here new transplants are being watered in. In the summer I usually continue hand watering on a daily basis for a week or so, until roots get out into the surrounding soil where water is supplied by the drip irrigation system. Watering is very critical here with high temperatures frequently exceeding 100F. Drip irrigation is run daily at a discharge rate of 2/3 gallon per minute per 100 feet of line--emitters are eight inches apart and discharge about Ľ gallon per hour each at 10 pounds per square inch pressure. The pepper plants in the foreground, under the hoop, are plants that didn’t sell at market and are unusually large--overgrown in fact--but still good because they would otherwise be discarded. Overgrown plants will take more time to establish themselves and may never do as well as plants that have grown unchecked. (Photo courtesy Wendy Alexander, Madera Tribune, August, 2004)

John contemplates a head of the Pacific Bluestem variety of hard white wheat and wonders if it could ever be converted into bread or pasta with any reasonable amount of labor. He concludes that although the whole systems method (as practiced in Madera) may compete favorably with a tractor when planting wheat, a lot of oil will have to pass under the bridge before his method will compete with the combine for harvesting and cleaning. The seed for Pacific Bluestem came to Madera from Ecology Action but it is no longer listed in their catalog. Google indicates no other sources, so we are taking it upon ourselves to keep the variety grown out. The USDA does not classify white wheat as either winter or spring but it is probably more like spring wheat in that it holds up well under drought. We grow a number of grains for their ornamental awns but Pacific Bluestem is just about awnless which may make it a bit easier to clean by hand. (Photo courtesy Wendy Alexander, Madera Tribune, August, 2004)

This boy helping his daddy at The Vineyard Farmers Market in Fresno, California back in the '90s, now wears a size 14 shoe! Over the years, notwithstanding, the economic pressures put on small farmers by mechanization, globalization, big-box food retailing and corporate agribusiness, we are still with it. Our little farm continues to provide half the income for a 7-9 person extended family, and we do this without tillage, tractors, or hired (slave) labor. The Agrarian Dream of finding security on an acre or two still lives on at our little farm.(Photo posted January, 2005)

Agriculture, like all human activity and life itself, is a struggle with entropy, nature’s disorganizing force. Here, True Warner shovels up the beds that give our little farm its structure just as bones and flesh give structure to a human being. With a little maintenance, True’s labor may serve his family for generations. These permanent beds under permanent mulch contrast sharply with conventional tillage agriculture in that the conventional farmer starts each season, literally from scratch. The whole systems principles and practices outlined on this website give the hand-scale farmer a shot at competing in the marketplace with the big boys and girls that use 100 horsepower tractors. We speak on our own authority here because we have been doing this successfully since 1995. The hoops in the background mark the beds into 50 foot sections which enhance the organization of planning, planting and harvesting and provide visual structure to the garden. (Photo posted January, 2005)

Group of Artists Paints Scenes from Madera Flower Garden
Full text in our Articles section.
(Photos courtesy Wendy Alexander, Madera Tribune, September, 2005)

Our Year Round Market Schedule

Wednesdays
3:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.
The Vineyard Farmers Market
NW corner Shaw & Blackstone
Fresno, CA
Saturdays
7:00 a.m. - Noon
The Vineyard Farmers Market
NW corner Shaw & Blackstone
Fresno, CA

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Whole Systems Agriculture ~ Madera, California ~ ©2005
www.wholesystemsag.org
Permission is granted to freely print and distribute copies of this document.


NEW! I have built a chicken tractor with 6 x 8 inch mesh livestock panels 16 feet long x 52 inches wide, pictured here with 1/4 inch diameter welded wire. The first job is to cut the panels in half with 24 inch [minimum size] bolt cutters. Roughly one and a half panels are required per 4 x 8 foot tractor, 2 feet high. The panels don't cut exactly in half either way because of the configuration of the mesh, so this is a nominal rather than actual size. Actual dimensions are somewhat less because some wire needs to be discarded where the cuts are made. Materials for one tractor are: 1 - 4 x 8 foot bottom piece 2 - 2 x 4 foot end pieces 1 - 2 x 4 foot center piece 2 - 2 x 8 foot side pieces	These are fitted together with hog rings and/or polypropolyne twine to make a two compartment unit. Poultry netting is cut, fitted and attached with hog rings or twine in the same way. In use, the top is covered with two 2 x 8 foot lengths of plywood held in place with Newtonian fasteners (for example, hunks of concrete block) to keep predators from getting in and winds from blowing the plywood top off. The center piece is necessary to support the plywood and give better structural rigidity to the unit. The bottom piece also adds structural rigidity and the 6 x 8 inch mesh allows the chickens to scratch with reduced risk of digging their way out. The bottom is additional insurance to keep predators out. We weatherize the plywood, as we do all our wooden tool handles (they are never put in a shed), by painting generously with motor oil.

This man, living on the wastes of urban and suburban landscapes, considers himself a detritivore. Here, mulch that will be transferred to his garden beds is forked into a cart, the first step in reorganizing the minerals of life--minerals that will eventually produce flowers and food. These can be used directly or taken to the farmers market and exchanged for the money required to pay taxes. Soil microorganisms will mineralize these wastes and, with the energy contained in the sunlight that falls into his garden, will be reassembled into structures both beautiful and delicious. In time, and in accordance with the Law of Conservation of Matter and Energy, a similar cartful of food can be removed from the garden. And this is over and above what could be produced by his soil's initial fertility. So go the cycles of initiation and completion. (Photo posted November, 2005)	The machine pictured here is a chipper-shredder of a design sold at the big-box stores. Near useless for its intended purpose, this one has been converted to a threshing-winnowing machine by removing the four flails attached to the cutting mechanism inside the unit. If not removed, they will crack the grain as it goes through. Cut grain is fed into the black hopper where it is sucked through the machine. The grain and chaff are discharged into the drum where the kernels accumulate at the bottom and the chaff is blown out. This process is facilitated by stirring, as pictured, and also by pouring the seeds from one drum to another under the air blast. Beans and peas, because they are easily split by impact, need to be threshed by hand (we do it in the box trailer pictured in the background), with the roughest material removed manually. The finer trash and beans are then run through the discharge air blast. Final cleaning is done at cooking time by running water into a pot of air cleaned beans or grain and floating off the remaining trash. As far as we know using a machine like this to thresh and winnow grains is an original Whole Systems Ag innovation. (Photo posted November, 2005)

The cycles of initiation and completion start by planting seeds--almost all of which we sow in flats, germinate indoors and then move to the nursery. Here you see them being placed one to a cell in a kind of flat known in the nursery trade as a “pro tray”. Seeds may also be planted in rows or broadcast over flats half-filled with soil or started in ground beds covered with a hot frame. When seeds are expensive or in short supply, tossing them out into the garden is a poor option. By a quick estimate one day, I calculated that a fully tillered [that is, with many stems sprouting from the base] wheat plant will yield close to a thousand grains for each one planted. In classical agriculture 10% of the crop is saved for seed. In Mark 4:31-20, Jesus mentioned ratios of 30, 60 and up to a hundred to one as being much more than what ordinarily might be expected and, judging by the context, even miraculous. (Photo courtesy Wendy Alexander, Madera Tribune, August, 2004)	These bean plants are ready for setting out in the garden. The great amount of energy stored in the large seeds of beans makes them good candidates for sowing directly in the garden--they can easily push their way up through soil and mulch--but the gardener would have to sacrifice 30 days or so of time until the beds could be harvested. Some crops, beets and turnips for example, only take 60 days to mature, so theoretically anyway, over the growing season the beds could be twice as productive by growing them for the first 30 days in flats. The growth of plants is geometric, that is, growth will double every few days. But in the first 30 days or so this does not amount to much so the plants can just as well grow in flats. When larger plants are transplanted into the beds, the speed with which the canopy closes (that is, foliage covers the whole bed) can be astounding, seemingly closing in a single day after a couple of weeks of growth. If the reader is not familiar with geometric progression, he might start with the number 1, and doubling it 30 times to see what happens.(Photo courtesy Wendy Alexander, Madera Tribune, August, 2004)

This photograph does a good job of showing the beds and alleys as they are constructed here in Madera. The five lines of driptape are one foot apart, covering four feet, with about half-a-foot on each edge before the shoulders start dropping off. The beds and shoulders have recently been covered with grass clippings that have settled down to an inch or more in depth. Notice the somewhat equal spaces devoted to beds and alleys. The alleys make the beds easily accessible for planting, maintenance, harvesting and removal of spent crops from the beds. Crop residue accumulates in the alleys to be used on the beds at a later time, This is an example of letting self-organization go to work by means of design. I suspect that regular organic gardeners spend more time moving crop residues out of the garden, making compost with them and then hauling the material back in than we would spend producing the whole crop. The beans in the foreground were planted a day or two before the photograph was taken. (Photo courtesy Wendy Alexander, Madera Tribune, August, 2004)	These recently planted beans are in depressions that have been called planting pockets. These depressions create a bit of a micro-environment that protect the newly transplanted seedling from winds and they are just about essential if the gardener is seeding directly into the mulch (only seed that is either large and/or cheap should be direct-seeded into the mulch). New plants should be set in soil, not mulch. Capillary water will not move through mulch until it gets very packed or rotted. So, just as it will not support weed growth, neither will it support the growth of new transplants. We use an auger fitted into a cordless drill to make the holes but it is only a little more work to use a dibble. An old tool handle shaved or ground to a dull point serves well. The new plants are squeezed into the soil, not pushed, in order that the sides of the plug will be in firm contact with the surrounding moist soil. The pockets in the mulch catch overhead water and ensure a good initial soaking, countering the tendency of the mulch to shed water, somewhat like a thatched roof. (Photo courtesy Wendy Alexander, Madera Tribune, August, 2004)

Here new transplants are being watered in. In the summer I usually continue hand watering on a daily basis for a week or so, until roots get out into the surrounding soil where water is supplied by the drip irrigation system. Watering is very critical here with high temperatures frequently exceeding 100F. Drip irrigation is run daily at a discharge rate of 2/3 gallon per minute per 100 feet of line--emitters are eight inches apart and discharge about Ľ gallon per hour each at 10 pounds per square inch pressure. The pepper plants in the foreground, under the hoop, are plants that didn’t sell at market and are unusually large--overgrown in fact--but still good because they would otherwise be discarded. Overgrown plants will take more time to establish themselves and may never do as well as plants that have grown unchecked. (Photo courtesy Wendy Alexander, Madera Tribune, August, 2004)	John contemplates a head of the Pacific Bluestem variety of hard white wheat and wonders if it could ever be converted into bread or pasta with any reasonable amount of labor. He concludes that although the whole systems method (as practiced in Madera) may compete favorably with a tractor when planting wheat, a lot of oil will have to pass under the bridge before his method will compete with the combine for harvesting and cleaning. The seed for Pacific Bluestem came to Madera from Ecology Action but it is no longer listed in their catalog. Google indicates no other sources, so we are taking it upon ourselves to keep the variety grown out. The USDA does not classify white wheat as either winter or spring but it is probably more like spring wheat in that it holds up well under drought. We grow a number of grains for their ornamental awns but Pacific Bluestem is just about awnless which may make it a bit easier to clean by hand. (Photo courtesy Wendy Alexander, Madera Tribune, August, 2004)

This boy helping his daddy at The Vineyard Farmers Market in Fresno, California back in the '90s, now wears a size 14 shoe! Over the years, notwithstanding, the economic pressures put on small farmers by mechanization, globalization, big-box food retailing and corporate agribusiness, we are still with it. Our little farm continues to provide half the income for a 7-9 person extended family, and we do this without tillage, tractors, or hired (slave) labor. The Agrarian Dream of finding security on an acre or two still lives on at our little farm.(Photo posted January, 2005)	Agriculture, like all human activity and life itself, is a struggle with entropy, nature’s disorganizing force. Here, True Warner shovels up the beds that give our little farm its structure just as bones and flesh give structure to a human being. With a little maintenance, True’s labor may serve his family for generations. These permanent beds under permanent mulch contrast sharply with conventional tillage agriculture in that the conventional farmer starts each season, literally from scratch. The whole systems principles and practices outlined on this website give the hand-scale farmer a shot at competing in the marketplace with the big boys and girls that use 100 horsepower tractors. We speak on our own authority here because we have been doing this successfully since 1995. The hoops in the background mark the beds into 50 foot sections which enhance the organization of planning, planting and harvesting and provide visual structure to the garden. (Photo posted January, 2005)


Group of Artists Paints Scenes from Madera Flower Garden Full text in our Articles section. (Photos courtesy Wendy Alexander, Madera Tribune, September, 2005)

Garden Gallery Illustrating the Current Madera Method