Buckleberry — revision 41143

<b>Buckleberry</b> is a 25 acre hilly forested property in Central Frontenac Township, Ontario, Canada. It is a [[dedicated SolSeed property| Dedicated SolSeed Property]] belonging to [[Eric]] and Michelle. It is currently the site of SolSeed's largest Gaia statue, the [[Buckleberry Gaia]]. =History= The property is unceded Anishinaabe land, traditional lands occupied by the Anishinaabe people for thousands of years. Eric purchased the property from a private land owner in the Spring of 2016. In the summer of 2016, a culvert and lane were installed to provide access to and from road 509 which runs along the west side of the property. In the fall of 2016 and spring of 2017, Eric mapped out plans for a home and bed and breakfast on the property. In the summer of 2017, Eric and Patrick errected the Buckleberry Gaia. On the weekend of the fall equinox, 2017, members of SolSeed gathered at Buckleberry to dedicate the property and paint the Buckleberry Gaia ritually. =Plans= ==Ritual Use of the Buckleberry Gaia== The top of Gaia hill at Buckleberry will continue to be used as a place of ritual and gathering with the Buckleberry Gaia being a centerpiece for both. The path from the entrance to the top of Gaia hill will be improved to make walking to the top easier, especially at night. Along the path, additional statues of Gaia and Terra will be set up showing their evolving relationship through the ages, with Terra nurturing the young Gaia and then the young Gaia shaping Terra to her growing needs. At the top of the hill an artificial spring will be installed using water pumped from the upper lower beaver pond. water from the spring will trickle into a natural swimming pond which will overflow into a series of waterfalls leading to the upper beaver pond. A geodesic oak tree will be grown on the plateau nearby. ==Buckleberry Bed and Breakfast== Near the entrance to the property a bed and breakfast will be built. It will be home to those who work on Buckleberry and also accomodate a small number of visitors and guests. It will be a long narrow building winding it's way between existing trees and built on concrete poles. This form of construction will have the least effect on the root systems of the trees allowing the forest to remain in tact. Over the building a separate green-roof structure will be built and planted with local vegetation. The roof structure will be supported on separate poles and curve down toward the ground all of the way around the building so that the building appears to be part of the North West Hill. There will be a 1 to 2 foot gap between the roof and the ground all the way round. This gap will be filled in places with loosely piled stones in order to create the illusion that the roof is continuous with the ground. Water flowing down the hill will easily pass through the gap under the roof and the building ensuring that existing tree roots remain moist. Excess water will continue down the hill out through the gap again. Small animals like bats, mice, racoons, skunks, porcupines and rabbits will be able to set up homes under the roof. This will make it clear that the SolSeed movement is sharing the land with the rest of Gaia in accordance with the [[New Story]]. The building itself will be armoured with aluminum on all sides to prevent the animals from entering the building proper. (There is a limit to sharing). Existing large trees will be left in place and holes will be left in the roof to accomodate them. The roof will be sloped toward the holes in order to ensure that the trees get adequate water. ==Buckleberry [[Unfarm]]== The main economic activity at Buckleberry will be unfarming. Unfarming at Buckleberry will be based on the metabolism of cellulose from tree branches, sustainably gathered from all over the property and from all levels of the forest, from the ground to the top of the canopy. The branches will be used in three ways. They can be used to feed browsing ruminants, or carpenter ants, they can be fermented and preserved to create feed for grazing ruminants or they can be chemically digested to create sugar which can be 'fed' to sterile heterotrophic duck weed cultures. Most easily they will be fed directly to browsing ruminants such as goats, elk or moose. In winter branches may be stood indoors in water under sun lights in order to soften the buds and make them more attractive and sweeter for the ruminants. Unlike normal hydroponic farming, this involves just exposing the already wilderness grown plants to these conditions for a few hours or at most days. The power requirements would be relatively small to ready large amounts of already wilderness-stored energy for the ruminants. Turning the ruminants into food for human customers can then be done through the normal modes of milking and producing milk products and through butchering animals for meat. However, another mode may be explored which is less cruel; we may extract blood samples from the animals at a sustainable rate. This can be done without injuring the animal nor causing undue suffering; blood can be removed with a needle. The blood can then be cooked to create blood pudding which is highly nutritious. The animals can then be allowed to live out their natural lives. In order to support this, a barn will be built that is similar to the bed and breakfast building. However, to prevent local carnivores from attacking the livestock, the roof will be sealed against entrance by competing animals. An outdoor fenced padock will surround the barn and livestock will be able to go out into the padock and return to the building through an automated door. The fenced padock will be fenced on all sides including the top in order to prevent any animals from attacking the livestock. The padock and barn will be large enough to give the livestock significant space to move but not so large that the padock excludes wildlife from the too much of the property. Coarser wood can be fed to a carpenter ant colony. Carpenter ants have been seen on the property so domesticating a colony should be relatively easy. On a regular or continuous basis a portion of the workers will be driven into a dehydrator and dried. The dried ants can then be ground to a powder as an additive for food or sold whole as a delicacy. The colony will be kept in a shipping container along with all of the equipement needed to process them. The shipping container will be modified with an 'airlock' which will prevent the ants from escaping and damaging neighbors' buildings. The shipping container will be covered over with a simple green roof and green walls to blend it into the landscape. It could be possible to support grazing livestock such as sheep or cattle with the wood collected on the property by first fermenting it with ester producing bacteria. This process has been used to make wood into feed for cattle. If this was done these livestock could be kept in the same or a similar barn as the others and food could be extracted from them in the same ways. However fermentation of wood with ester or other producing bacteria will not produce sugars but esters or alcohols. In order to produce sugars from wood, chemical digestion must be used. The sugars must then be chemically purified from the resulting solution. Once this is done, the sugars so produced can be used to feed any organism. One of the most attractive organisms to feed this kind of sugar to would be duckweed. Duckweed is the tiniest plant in the world. It normally grows on the surface of stagnant water. It forms two tiny leaves and a tiny rootlet that hangs in the water absorbing nutrients. It also happens to be a highly nutritious food. The issue with it is that when it grows on stagnant water it gets covered in bacterial plaques. That isn't healthy. But if it is grown in a sterile container, it is highly nutritious. However, when grown using normal hydroponics it only forms a thin layer on the surface of the water because each tiny plant needs sunlight. To grow enough using sunlight, one would need to cover the land in sterile containers with clear covers facing the sun. That would be equivalent to just normal monocrop industrial farming. Use sunlights and layered indoor growing and you may seem to use less land area but you have to get the energy to do that from somewhere. If you use renewable energy sources then the land area used to generate the power is close to the same as the land area needed to just grow the crops in the first place. But duck weed has a special quality. If there is sugar in the sterile solution then the plants no longer just grow on the surface. Instead they use the energy in the sugar heterotrophically to rapidly reproduce and fill the volume of the container with duckweed. So by using chemically digested wood, we could provide sugar to duckweed and thus grow the duckweed heterotrophically. If this can be made to work, then we can provide unfarmed plant material as well as unfarmed animal products. This would create a much more balanced diet for humans. Finally, we can also unfarm by collecting naturally occuring food from the forest. For instance, there a maples at Buckleberry. We can tap them for sap and can the sap in mason jars. Rather than making maple syrop which requires huge amounts of energy to evaporate off the excess water in the sap, we can simply can the sap in jars that can be reused everyyear. Why drive off the water when water is an important resource required by our bodies. Canned sap would simply be a lightly sweetened refreshing drink. Also there is a large swamp at Buckleberry with bullrushes. Bull rush roots can be harvested as a root vegetable. Sustainable harvesting would have to be done carefully so as not to distrupt the diversity in the swamp but on a reasonable scale it could be done.