Made by Hand (5 page)

In
The Century of the Self,
Adam Curtis’s 2002 BBC Four documentary about the history of using psychological-control techniques to engineer public consent, Peter Strauss, who worked for Bernays from 1948 to 1952, said,

The financial industry, which was capitalizing factories and department store chains in the 1920s, recognized the value of what Bernays had to offer. Paul Mazur of Lehman Brothers emphasized the need to “shift America from a ‘needs’ to a ‘desires’ culture. People must be trained to desire; to want new things even before the old could be entirely consumed.”

And so it goes today. People buy things because the multibilliondollar advertising industry hires some of the smartest and most creative people on the planet to create irresistible ads that are effective even when people know they are being hoodwinked. Bernays laid the groundwork for today’s advertisers. They have it easier than he did. In Bernays’s time, advertisers had to convince people that homemade clothing was shameful, home-canned food unsanitary, and old cars symbols of failure. Today’s consumers are already conditioned to throw away perfectly good TVs, computers, and MP3 players to make room for the latest model.

It’s not easy to see through the consensual illusion that buying stuff will make you happy. But the people I’ve met through
Make
have succeeded, to one degree or another, in deprogramming themselves of the lifelong consumer brainwashing they’ve received. They’ve learned how to stop depending so much on faceless corporations to provide them with what they need (and desire) and to begin doing some of the things humans have been doing for themselves since the dawn of time. They’re willing to take back some of the control we’ve handed over to institutions. They believe that the sense of control and accomplishment you get from doing something yourself, using your own hands and mind, can’t be achieved in any other way. They make things not because they are born with a special talent for making but because they choose to develop and hone their ability. And yes, some of the things they make are mistakes, but they aren’t afraid of making them, because they’ve rejected the lesson from the Bernays school of brainwashing that says handmade stuff is bad because it isn’t perfect.

The alpha DIYers I have gotten to know over the years have inspired me to make things and make mistakes. Once I discovered how much fun it was to become active in the process of making, maintaining, and modifying the things I use and consume every day, the little flaws, quirks, and imperfections in my handiwork stopped becoming shameful and instead felt like badges of honor.

2

KILLING MY LAWN

“The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small piece of land.”

—ABRAHAM LINCOLN

 

 

 

 

In 1978 a Tasmanian field biologist named Bill Mollison and his student David Holmgren published a self-sufficiency guidebook called
Permaculture One: A Perennial Agriculture for Human Settlements.
The book offers instructions for designing small-scale agricultural systems that are able to use waste products (instead of purchased fertilizers, herbicides, and livestock feed) as raw materials.
Permaculture
meant “permanent agriculture,” but Mollison later said it could also mean “permanent culture,” because this type of agriculture has a lasting ripple effect on many other aspects of the lives of its practitioners.

Mollison was born in 1928 and spent much of his early career studying the different ecosystems of Australia and Tasmania, paying special attention to the mutually beneficial relationships among the things that lived in them. In 1959 he designed a system that defined plants, trees, and marsupials as “components” that interacted with one another in Tasmanian rain forests.

As a result of this work, Mollison had a revelation: Nature’s components could be snapped together like Tinkertoy pieces to create thriving ecosystems that provided fuel for heat, food for people and livestock, and materials that could be used for construction, clothing, furniture, and other needs.

To give an example of how components can be connected in a simple way, consider the “three sisters” companion-planting method for growing beans, squash, and maize. Cornstalks provide natural climbing poles for beans, beans add nitrogen to the soil (an essential ingredient that many plants deplete), and squash’s broad, prickly leaves provide ground cover to prevent the soil from drying out and discourage vermin from raiding the crop. The three-sisters method saves effort (not having to make a beanpole or spread mulch) and money (for insecticide, fertilizer, and water).

Over the years, Mollison, Holmgren, and a growing legion of “permies” have continued to develop the process of designing small-scale ecosystems that are beneficial to humans. I became interested in permaculture when my friend Terry Miller, who ran
Make
’s Web site at the time, told me about a weeklong class on the subject she’d taken in northern California. After hearing about the things she’d done there, I fantasized about turning my house and property into an experimental permaculture lab, with bees, chickens, and a garden, all connected in a way that let nature do the heavy lifting while I harvested the bounty.

In a permie paradise, “nuisances” like bugs, deadwood, and rotten fruit become valuable resources. Grass clippings become nutrient-rich fodder for the compost pile; fallen leaves can be raked up and turned into mulch, to be spread on top of gardens to conserve water and inhibit weed growth. Terry Miller lays burlap feed sacks under the elevated wire-mesh floor of her chicken coop. After a couple of weeks, she removes a well-fertilized sack and lays it over the soil of one of the potted fruit trees on her deck. That way, when she waters the tree, the chicken droppings dissolve into the soil, providing nitrogen and other minerals.

David Holmgren, cofounder with Mollison of the permaculture movement, developed a seven-step design process for establishing a permaculture system, encapsulated in the mnemonic O’BREDIM: observation, boundaries, resources, evaluation, design, implementation, and maintenance. The first five steps, which require little or no physical labor, are the most important ones and require at least a year to complete, if done correctly. They require careful observation of your land, watching what happens to it over four seasons. At the observation stage, you’re supposed to study what kinds of plants grow in different locations, where water tends to collect, what the soil conditions are, and how different parts are affected by the sun, wind, shadows, wildlife, and rain.

After becoming intimate with the land and the way it changes over the course of the seasons, you make a map of it, establishing its boundaries and topography. Next, you take stock of your resources: How much time, money, equipment, and materials do you have? The information gathered from the first three steps—observation, boundaries, resources—is then evaluated before going on to the single most crucial step: design. This is where you create a plan to harness sunlight to create complexity out of chaos, providing you and your family with the things you need to survive. Only after these five steps are complete should you even start making your permaculture system.

In theory, Holmgren’s plan makes sense. But I had no intention of following it to the letter—I wanted a garden, chickens, and bees as soon as possible. I figured that having lived in the same house (a 1930 farmhouse in the Melody Acres section of Tarzana) for more than three years counted for something as far as steps one through three were concerned. I spent a good couple of hours on step four—evaluating—before moving on to step five—design—which amounted to eyeballing where the raised-bed planters and the beehive would go. I was almost ready to move to the fun part—implementation. But first I had to kill my lawn.

In August 2008, after having read a few books like
Edible Estates
and
Food Not Lawns
—which were about converting front lawns into vegetable gardens—I decided to get rid of my own front lawn. My entire yard was about a half acre, and my front yard constituted roughly a quarter of that. That was sufficient to provide the blank slate on which to build my own permaculture system. As I learned from these books, lawns were invented centuries ago by moneyed Europeans as a way to show off the fact that they didn’t
need
to use their land for farming—similar to the way a peacock’s tail feathers advertise to potential mates that he can survive despite such a cumbersome fashion statement. Eventually, lawns caught on among the less well-off, including homeowners in the United States, who today spend billions watering, mowing, fertilizing, and resodding ground they don’t actually use.

In early August I took a one-day course called “Killing Your Lawn.” Steve Gerischer, a landscape designer with a trim mustache, taught the course. Standing on the elevated stage of a community center in front of a couple of hundred people in Altadena, California, he began by saying that if you approach gardening as problem solving, “it will rapidly become a bore.” Instead, he advised, look at it as an opportunity to try stuff out. “Ask yourself, ‘What do I get to do?’ not ‘What do I have to do?’ ” Good advice for any DIY pursuit, actually.

Gerischer said he killed his own lawn years ago, not for any of the “right” environmental reasons but because he loves growing plants and needed enough square footage to grow “one of everything.” In the process, he learned that removing your lawn and replacing it with a garden was good for the planet. “One hour of running a poorly tuned lawnmower equals 340 miles driven in a new car,” he said. “Fifty-four million households get out each weekend to mow, blow, and edge, using 800 million gallons of gas per year, mostly in the spring and summer, when we are the most air-quality challenged.” The audience moaned as Gerischer rattled off these and other facts about the evils of lawns.

Next, he listed the different ways to kill a lawn. You can rip out the grass with tools, which is hard work but effective if you do it right. You can kill it with chemicals like Roundup, but you run the risk of killing your existing vegetable garden if the herbicide drifts over to it in the breeze. The third option is smothering it by covering it with plastic, or with newspaper and cardboard.

Death by newspaper appealed to me because it seemed cheaper, easier, and less toxic than the other methods. I’d been saving newspapers since hearing about the method a couple of months earlier. Gerischer said that after laying down the newspapers, you could then cover them with mulch. When it came time to plant, you just poked holes through the newspaper.

The next day I called a topsoil and mulch supplier in Orange County. Sandy, the woman who answered the phone, was polite and helpful. She told me that mulch prices started at $19 per cubic yard and ran all the way up to $59. The expensive stuff, she said, was a chocolate brown “path mulch” made primarily from tree bark.

I debated which kind of mulch to buy. It was tempting to buy the cheap stuff, but then I remembered what had happened a week earlier, when I bought a durable black plastic garden cart in anticipation of hauling mulch around. When Carla saw it, she literally groaned at how ugly it was. “Why couldn’t you have bought a metal wheelbarrow with wood handles?” she asked. I explained that I had found the plastic cart on Amazon, liked the reviews, and clicked BUY.

The plastic cart exemplified Carla’s major complaint about my DIY projects. She was concerned that my amateurish activities would result in more eyesores. As editor in chief of
Craft
magazine (the sister publication to
Make
) she had high standards for aesthetic appeal. “If it looks bad,” she warned me more than once, “I’m going to hire someone to rip it out and do it the right way.”

With the sting of the garden cart still in my mind, I told Sandy to send me the $59-a-yard mulch. She recommended I get enough to cover my lawn two inches deep. That meant I’d need about thirteen cubic yards. I ordered fifteen just to be safe. I also ordered a fifty-pound bag of gypsum, which Gerischer told me to scatter on the grass before I laid down the cardboard and newspaper, as it would accelerate the process. The total price, including delivery, was $971. It seemed like a lot, but I figured it would pay for itself in a couple of years through reduced water bills.

Two days later a ZZ Top look-alike drove up in a dump truck. I asked him to drop the load on the driveway. Unfortunately, the telephone wires above it were too low and would get snagged on his truck if he drove past our front gate into the yard. “Dump it in front of the house,” I told him. This meant I’d have to wheel cartfuls of mulch through the gate and down the driveway to the front yard, but I didn’t have any other choice. The driver positioned the truck and tilted the bed. As the mulch poured out, a cloud of choking, dark dust rose up and turned my clothes a deep shade of ochre. The mulch was filthy! Before the dust had even settled, the truck had vanished down the road, leaving me standing next to a $1,000 pile of dirty tree bark.

Carla was concerned that someone would steal the mulch. “It costs a lot of money,” she said. “People are going to take it. The guy should have put it behind our fence. You better spread it on the lawn right away.”

The next morning, as I drove my kids to day camp, I noticed a sizable dent in the mulch pile. Someone had helped themselves to it overnight.