www.energybulletin.net

This appears to be the mother ship of all peak oil web sites.  They cover all the related issues - climate, food & agriculture, transportation, housing, waste etc.  They have a most excellent primer, and news and perspective from all over the world.

Investment advice - sell gold buy lead (acid batteries)

As is, this cottage quickly becomes uninhabitable if the grid goes down. To celebrate Energy Independence Week this July 4, I want to be able to keep the place livable for a week off the grid, even if at a somewhat reduced lifestyle. I propose to do this with a battery-based solar electric and/or wind power system. I'll be dipping into my savings to buy it.

My budget is $5000. I know that the going rate for solar electric is about $10/watt installed, so I can afford about a 500-peak-watt system.

I seem to recall that the sunlight around here is the equivalent of about 5 peak-sun hours per day, so the system would produce at most 2500 watt-hours per day, or 75 kilowatt hours per month.

The average US household usage is ten times that, like 600-1000 kilowatt hours per month. So I have to reduce from that by 90%. People do this all the time for fun, it's called "camping." As camping goes, summer camping at home ought not to be too bad. In the case of this cottage, it helps a tremendous amount that a solar hot water system is already planned and partially completed. I think there's still an even chance Redbeard can get it built by the end of June. If only you can take a hot shower, you can put up with a lot of other stuff.

Energy Independence Week is only a stepping stone to Energy Independence Life. Over time it should be possible to increase efficiency and thereby improve quality of life (to more comfortable camping.) But we won't learn how unless we try.

To see what you can do with your 75 kWh per month, you do load analysis. I eliminated all forms of electric heat before I even started (water heater, dryer, oven, toaster, microwave, coffeepot.) After that, priority goes to any form of pumping, and the fridge. After that, the washer and other toys. Here is what I came up with, listed by energy use, highest first. Thanks to RREAL for the analysis format.

Load	Amps (peak)	Volts	Watts	Hrs/Day	kWH/mo
Fridge	2-6.5	120	184	7.2	40.3
Hydronic Pump	0.75	120	83	8	20.2
Computer	0.27	120	22	12	8.0
Well pump	3.5	220	456	0.5	6.9
Light	0.17	120	20	8	4.9
Internet	0.39	120	32	4	3.9
TV/DVD		120	165	0.6	3.0
Well controller	0.04	120	5	12	1.8
Compost vent fan	0.4	12	5	12	1.8
Toilet pump	9	120	525	0.1	1.6
Washer	4-7	120	145	0.3	1.3
Phone chrg.		120	5	2	0.3
Dryer (air fluff)	3.9	120	175	0.001	0.01
Total					94.1

Yap, I'm over budget, and I've only got 20 watts of LED light and a half hour of TV a day. Notice that the fridge takes half the energy budget just by itself. Now ask yourself, what sense does it make to spend 500 kilowatt hours a year running a fridge in Minnesota, which has frost 200 days a year? I'll bet I could cut that in half by running a pair of air hoses from the inside of the fridge to the outside of the house.

The table above is sort an all-season analysis. In July I shouldn't need quite as much hydronic pumping. For the week I'm basically planning to cook outside on wood or charcoal.

Warning!! Bathroom humor

The final installation of the composting toilet system, a Pigpen-Redbeard joint venture, was marked by much yukking it up betweenst these forty- and fifty- somethings going on eleven- somethings. I wish I could remember the repartee, which seemed pretty funny at the time. Oh well, a lot of it was unprintable anyway. Montalban the carpenter, urbane sophisticate that he is, maintained his dignity throughout.

As I've mentioned before, composting is kind of a slow process, therefore there is a lot of "it" in-process at any given time, which requires a bin about the size of Magic Johnson's jacuzzi. But in this cottage, as in 99.999999% of U.S. homes, the bathroom is not designed to accommodate such a bin. The scheme Pigpen came up with was to put the bin in the attached greenhouse, and to put an upflush toilet in the bathroom, and pump the stuff up and over to the bin.  Let's tour:

Raised platform and drain pipe for toilet.

The completed bathroom setup.  The toilet is a Sealand 510 plus.

The macerator pump is in the utility room on the other side of the wall.  It sits in a homemade "just-in-case" tub of welded plastic.

The pump is a Saniplus.  Pigpen fondly calls it the "Dairy Queen machine". Some of you will get this right away but for my interplanetary readers I should explain: Dairy Queen is the only fast-food restaurant in town. They have a machine which exudes an ice-cream-like food substance, typically coiled into serving cups, where, if you had that kind of a mind, you might say it resembles fecal matter except that it is smoother in texture, delicious to humans as well as dogs, and the peanuts are added afterward instead of beforehand. Fortunately we don't have that kind of mind; we love the Dairy Queen and would never make fun of them.

The pump needs to be vented to the outside.  Here's the guys drilling a hole through the 3-foot thick straw bale wall.  They used a metal pipe with teeth filed onto one end.

Here's the completed utility room work.  The discharge line runs up the left.  It's translucent PEX tubing.  I can't decide whether to backlight it or wrap it with bunting.

April 24 was the inaugural flush.  We fed it water, then toilet paper, then a pear.  Pigpen declared operational readiness.

The compost bin is a Phoenix, out of Whitefish, Montana.  We have high hopes for it.  Pigpen says, "I've killed several composting toilets.  It looks like they've learned all the lessons in this design."  

The Phoenix is normally intended for use with a waterless toilet (direct deposit) or a vacuum-flush toilet.  The macerator combo we are using tends to use more water, and on installation day we soaked the pile with test flushes.  In the first 24 hours I probably flushed six or seven times more, not particularly paying any attention, and filled up the overflow catchbasin.  Since then I've found I can use a lot less water if I'm quick on the flush pedal, and the problem has not recurred.  That is good, because it turns out the floor drains in the greenhouse don't go anywhere.  One at a time these fascinating factoids come to light.


For so-called bulking material we used locally available coarse sawdust (half-rotted).  We filled the lower half of the bin, and threw in some finished compost to inoculate it.  The composting microbes need the right balance of carbonaceous and nitrogenous organic matter in order to do their jobs (live, eat, be fruitful and multiply.)  Pee and poo are too high in nitrogen, sawdust is a high-carbon material.  

The bin is vented with a 5W muffin fan.  So far there is no odor.  The fan needs to run anyway so that the microbes in the pile can breathe.  I threw a bucket of kitchen compost in there yesterday.  

At this point your Correspondent feels compelled to touch again upon the subject of Why Anyone Would Bother With A Composting Toilet. In a word, food. Here on the Hunt Utilities Group campus we are no longer willing to rely entirely on the grocery store, and the industrialized agriculture that supplies it, which is quite dependent on artificial fertilizer made from natural gas, as I explained in a previous post. We want to be able to grow at least some of our own food. Trouble is, our soil is pretty much no good. Any of you living in a suburban development built in the last forty? sixty? years are probably in the same boat - about that time developers took to scraping off most of the topsoil and selling it, leaving only a couple of inches. Therefore, we could use some fertilizer, and we don't want it to come from fossil fuel.  Under the current system, even crucial mineral nutrients that could be recycled are being treated like fossil resources.  Google "peak phosphorous", if you will.

The good news is, the makings of pretty good fertilizer come out of your butt. And uh, whizzer. The bad news is, it "needs some work." When fresh "it" is nummy food for various Microbes, most of which are Good, but some of which are Bad, that is, disease-causing. To fix this problem, it must be fed to Good, Air-Breathing Microbes until there is nothing left in it that any pathogenic microbe might want, then it is (almost) safe and ready for fertilizing plants. Municipal sewage treatment, septic systems, and composting all involve this reduction of "it" by Good Microbes. Only composting keeps the plant nutrients close at hand, in accordance with the permaculture principle of "catch and store". Consult actual experts for details, your Correspondent is an electrical engineer and has only glanced at the jacket notes on the Cartoon History of Biological Oxygen Demand For Dummies Kids.

According to Pigpen, the compost needs to "finish" by sitting outside a couple of months.  (The design of the Phoenix is such that the solid material, mostly the bulking, is stratified but the "liquid" recirculates to keep the pile from drying out.)  Most authorities caution against using it directly on annual food plants, but okay for orchards and cover crops or mulch crops.  

Permaculture Design - Zone 2

And now we come to the design of permaculture zone 2 about the HDT cottage, which is mostly about food production. Let's talk some long term strategy here, and then work backwards to the short term.  

Your correspondent has been mostly reading Jacke & Toensmeier's Edible Forest Gardens and Solomon's Gardening When It Counts. EFG is focused on perennials, and GWIC is about annual vegetables, but these guys are all about the plants, and only the plants, for food.

However, I sense, central Minnesota is near the northern and western limits for productive horticulture. J&T:

"You can most easily grow forest gardens where forest, especially deciduous forest, is the native vegetation. This means a climate with ample rainfall during the growing season and relatively mild winters. This book focuses on the lands now and formerly covered by the eatern deciduous forest between USDA plant hardiness zones 4 and 7...those of you in the north, say, zone 3 and colder, have more limited species options, but you can still play the game."

Marc Reisner's classic book Cadillac Desert begins with assertion that North America west of the 100th meridian is "a semidesert with a desert heart." Solomon considers the rainier part of North America to be east of the 98th meridian. 

We are in zone 3, in a mixed deciduous and evergreen forest, at 96.7 degrees west, and about five counties northwest of the region covered by J&T's book. According to the Minnesota DNR, we get 9-11 inches of rain during the growing season, and the forest here is strongly dominated by jack pine.  Montalban the carpenter tells me that jack pine is the hardiest of trees, the last ones up at the tree line, before the tundra. They sure smell nice in the morning these days.  Anyways: Tricky area for gardening. (On the plus side, one of this region's great cultural strengths is the ability to talk big, Paul Bunyan and whatnot, and that ought to count for something.)

Long before propane, people lived in climates colder even than Minnesota, but as I understand it, not by eating plants. It seems that as the winter gets colder and growing season shorter, there just isn't enough energy for the plants to produce much in the way of a yield that is edible by humans. But ruminant herbivores like bison and reindeer have complex digestive systems and can eat very rough vegetation, so it becomes more practical to let them do so, and then eat them, instead of knocking yourself out trying to garden the tundra. Hence the old-time strategy of herd following. Actually I am not aware of any culture that succeeded by gardening the tundra. As far as I know, all the really far northern people ate creatures from the sea.

I imagine though, that herd following confronts you very directly with sustainability. Your tribe must not out-populate the prey herd, duh. Human fertility must be limited, or you're done for. I further surmise that this was done through social mores/commandments/laws that most of us disco ducks would find draconian. Nobody likes to talk about this. See the book Mother Nature, by Sarah Hrdy, about the history and anthropology of motherhood, for insight. Put yourself in the position of the Leader of the Great Northern Tribe. You might have to set a penalty of banishment for killing the wrong deer.

Vegetarians often point out that meatatarianism is a lot less energy-efficient, for the simple reason that the animals need a lot of the energy in the plant food to live their own lives. It's not so bad if they're eating stuff like grass that you can't eat, but feeding them rich food like corn, which you could just as well eat yourself, to fatten them up faster, is a big waste of energy and of their fancy digestive systems. This is a good point.

But at this point I ask, is that entirely applicable in a cold climate?  Here is a diagram to show what I think is going on:  

In a warm and humid climate, you have a lot of options for growing edible plants, so you get a lot of leverage from doing so.  You can sustainably support a large population of vegetarians, a smaller population of carnivores, or some combination.  In a very cold climate you can't support nearly as many people and might actually be worse off trying to garden.  I suspect Minnesota is in between.  There is still some percentage in gardening and eating a vegetable diet, but not as much as in a warmer, wetter place.  This is a rather academic way of recognizing that there's a reason this area is a big hunting and fishing ground, and is not an entirely agricultural area.  We should take this into account in designing our permaculture food system in this region. 

As we learn in The Omnivore's Dilemma, we humans do not have the specialized digestive tracts of true carnivores, nor the multistage stomachs of specialist herbivores.  As a matter of biology, we can eat both meat, and some kinds of plants.

I wish I knew more about how the Lakota and the Ojibwe ate, around here, back in the day? I assume whatever they were doing was more sustainable than what we are doing, but how many people did that support, ballpark?

Let me say again, in this moment, I am thinking of the long term.  Seven generations from now,  even by optimistic estimates, only small and hard-to-get reserves of fossil fuel will remain.  By and large, the seventh generation from now will probably be a solar-powered civilization, as were ancient Rome and China. I think the tradeoffs shown in the diagram are most likely to be true even if some nuclear energy or biotechnology is available.  Such inputs would shift all three bubbles to a higher sustainable population, but I don't think they would change the general picture unless there was some truly miraculous breakthrough.  

Even a miraculous breakthrough on energy supply might not lead to a world we would wish on our descendants.  As Richard Heinberg points out in Peak Everything, we have already run the free-energy experiment in the oil age, with the discovery and mobilization of vast amounts of energy at 100 to 1 energy profit ratio.  This resulted in huge population increase, and an avalanche of cultural and scientific achievements unprecedented in history.  Motown Records is one of my favorites.  But that high population is now bumping up against limits on other ecosystem services for which we have no replacements.  Heinberg concludes that a vast new energy source would not help at this point, because it would only result in further degradation of the environment on which we vitally depend.  The 1971 novel Half Past Human imagined a future in which nuclear fusion has been mastered.  The world population is in the trillions, but they all live in underground cities so that the entire surface of the earth can be farmed by robots.  It's not an appealing vision.  People eat a lot of gruel, and never get to go skiing.

Therefore I suggest we plan for a future solar-powered civilization.  Something along the lines of Plan 9 from Limits to Growth.  Post-carbon visionaries expect that the impending lack of cheap transportation fuel will throw globalization into reverse - it just won't make any sense to ship chicken feed from Iowa to Japan, as depicted in the recent Cargill TV ad.  A grass-roots movement for relocalization, food security, and anti-consumerism arises, as we speak.

I would bet you a steak dinner that our Brainerd Lakes region here is a net importer of food, even when it's not tourist season.

So, all things considered, what would be the best long-term food strategy for this little cottage in central Minnesota?  As a general matter I would like to follow the forest-gardening route, meaning most of the food comes from perennial trees, shrubs, etc.  Research-wise this will make a nice comparison to the adjacent field which is undergoing soil building in preparation for annual cropping of the organic kind.  Let me turn to J&T:

"In North America, savanna communities form the transition between forests and grasslands at the northern and eastern edges of the Great Plains...savannas have continuous grass and forb cover in the herb layer, scattered shrub clumps in the woody understory, and tree cover between 25 and 40 percent.  ... Some computer models indicate that this vegetation type may expand as our global climate changes in the coming decades. ... Mimicking such an ecosystem should be relatively easy with such useful trees [oak & hickory] as models.  Alley cropping and silvopastoral systems that mix trees with annual crops or pastures are two examples."

Silvopasture or agrosilvopastoralism combines forestry and the grazing of domesticated animals in a mutually beneficial way, as Wikipedia puts it.  Some form of this sounds to me like the right thing to do in this region.  It dovetails with what I discussed above about the usefulness of animals in a cold climate, for processing human-inedible plants into yummy shish-kebab.

Let's talk about the plants first, then the animals, for our long-term situation, or what J&T call the "horizon habitat."  

Your correspondent is exasperated by gardening books which rave about the high percentage of your vegetables you can get from whatever method (not including staple foods.)  Well staples are by definition mainly what you need to live.  Sure the spinach and the carrots have vitamins galore, but if I don't get enough grams of carbohydrate, fat, and protein, I'm going to starve to death, and I was really hoping for died-laughing, mobbed-by-fans, or at least heart-attack-shoveling-snow.

Ahem.  Hence my interest in nut trees, which bear for many years and are good sources of oil and protein.  Good large-tree candidates for this area appear to be:

• Whitebark pine Pinus albicaulis
• Siberian stone pine Pinus cembra var. Sibirica
• Limber pine Pinus flexilis
• Korean nut pine Pinus Koraiensis
• Bur oak Quercus macrocarpa
• Silver maple Acer saccharinum

The Bur Oak and Silver Maple I believe are native.  The Korean nut pine is one of J&T's Top 100 species.

Hazelnuts are native and various berry bushes are also hardy here.  I haven't gotten very far in identifying candidates for understory plants, except for Groundnut (Apios Americana).  Does anybody know where we can get Groundnuts?

Let us now consider the animals for our ultimate agrosilvopasture.

As I understand it, the history of humans-eating-animals has basically followed a path of ever more intensive human management of the animal's life cycle, in pursuit of higher yield. Steps on the scale:

1. Hunting of wild animals who eat wild plants
   
2. Hunting of wild animals who are eating your cultivated plants
   
3. Ranching of fenced-in animals who eat wild plants
   
4. Pasturing of fenced-in animals who eat selected forage plants
   
5. Factory-farming of boxed-in animals who eat prepared chow
   

Your correspondent is aware that the treatment of animals is a value judgment, and therefore political.  I observe that The Pope, and probably everyone to the left of him, is against this factory-farming.

This particular patch of ground under design is probably too small (1 acre) to support any large animals, but campus-wide (70 acres), no problem.  The nice thing about large animals is they can do some work around the 'stead too.  Rabbits might do nicely near the cottage.  

I have mixed feelings about chickens.  On the one hand, they are a well domesticated and understood species.  On the other hand, they are originally tropical forest dwellers, and are therefore kind of high-maintenance in Minnesota.  They need strong protection from the weather, and from dogs.  

It seems to me it might be better to eat the hardier native animals like deer and squirrel.  I'm drawn to something like level 2 on the animal management scale listed above.  I don't know the right word for this but I'm picturing something like beekeeping, where you provide nice habitat and plant forage, but the animals are otherwise free to do their thing, until hunting/harvest season.  When I describe this people usually call it "baiting" like it was a bad thing.  But I think you could also look at it as super-free-range ranching, I mean, there's no fence keeping them in.  This was actually one of the first things I thought about, from the point of view of turning a problem into a resource, since deer are such a plague to gardens.  This varmintkeeping may work better in the intermediate term than long, and is maybe better classified as a zone 4 thing than a zone 2.  

It will take several years for nut trees to get big enough to bear, and at least one year for the smaller perennial plants.  For the short term I envision a fertilized annual vegetable garden focusing on potatoes, along with hunting and fishing.  I think the overstory trees should be planted right away.  I see no reason to delay.  At savanna spacings there won't be a whole lot of them, so it should be possible to coddle each one of them with companion plants, starter fertilizer, and protective cages.

For the very short term I would put in a pantry and a root cellar, and start stocking up at the grocery store.

* * *

So far I have been talking generalities and working backward from the long-term to the short-term.  Let me now lay out specifics for the site, going forward from the present.  This is still somewhat of a laundry list of brainstorming ideas, and no visual aids yet.

Phase 1 (by 30 June 2008)

Soil testing

• Compaction
  
• Mineral
  
• Life
  

Mulch depot on trailer site - L-shaped trellis to block view from drive (E and N)

PV array on trailer site.

Earthworks & irrigation

• Decommission west side parking
  
• Chisel plowing
  
• Mounds and miniponds, clay lining
• Berms and swales?, clay lining

Crater rescue

• Fill/shallow?
  
• Warm microclimate N side
  
• Redirect runoff from driveway
• Terrace?
  
• Pond? (Koi, Firefighting)

Annual and Perennial plantings

• Experiment split plots.  Different mulches, amendments, tillage
  
• Spread out berm?
  
• Plant fruit trees on berm?
  
• Drivable ground cover in forklift exclusion zone - Dandelions, Clover
  
• Mulch garden, over drainfield
  
• Vegetable garden /annual crops, between drainfield and forklift exclusion zone.  Potatoes, corn, field peas, soybeans, flax, buckwheat, oats, squash, amaranth, lambs quarters, sweet alyssum.
  
• Forest Garden, west field (perennials)
  
• Tree layer: Nut pines, Bur oaks, Silver maple
  
• Shrub layer: Hazelnuts, Berries
  
• Herb layer: Prairie stuff, wild strawberry
  
• Ground layer: Groundnuts
  
• Mushroom logs, N side of cottage
  
• Sunflowers bordering driveway, turnaround, mulch depot, skycrapper, pad 3
  
• Perimeter hedge to keep deer out of forest garden - brambliferous berry bushes
  
• Soil building perennials elsewhere, esp. pad 3.
  
• Preliminary garden path design laid out in straw.  Keyhole beds.

Phase 2 (by 23 Sept 2008)

• Implement plantings
  
• Power from existing small wind turbine

Permaculture Design - Zone 1

In Zone 1 here I'm talking about the outside surfaces of the house, and the grounds within about twenty feet or so.  Goals addressed: access, storage for food and tools, water management, beautification, delectrification.  A design constraint this year is that because the cottage is not done done, most of the ground within 15-40 ft of the cottage must remain clear for forklift access.  Sorry no visuals yet.  Though its not needed until the fall, I'd like to highlight the importance of the root cellar.

Phase 1 (by 30 June 2008)

• Cleanup (includes Zone 2)
  
• Outside storage shed, 12x16 ft, N side West
  
• Groundcover planted in forklift exclusion zone.
• PV panels and ground-mount rack - Reuse house trailer anchors on pad 2?
• Minor driveway reroute: end the driveway N of cottage, behind shed. Turnaround extends NW.  This frees up the west field for forest garden.
• Preliminary path design laid out in straw: Cottage beltway; Patio; Extensions to parking, shed, and mulch depot.

Phase 2 (by 23 Sept 2008)

• Root cellar, location TBD.
  
• Roof fascia
  
• Additional solar water heat panels
  
• Finish cob on outside walls
  
• Rainwater catchment for summer irrigation: Gutters; Outside aboveground storage 500 gal N, 100 gal S.
• Outdoor room, N side East
  
• Trellis extending N from NE corner, outside dripline
  
• Flagstone patio
  
• Charcoal grill
  
• N side “ice cube tray” to catch snow slide from roof and freeze into blocks.
  

Phase 3 (by 14 May 2009)

• PV carport N of shed
  
• Annual/herb garden outside S. door
  

Permaculture Design - Zone 0 (The house itself)

The permaculture design is coming along.  I'll present the details here by Zone and Phase, starting from the cottage itself.  This is a draft, sorry not too many visual aids yet, but it might do for the on-campus discussion.  Within each phase the items are listed in order of priority (according to me.)

The elements listed for Zone 0 are mainly addressing the goals for the ARC building, namely that the building is self-heating, produces no sewage effluent, and facilitates growing your own food.  Due to lack of storage in the building I've added food storage and a few other in-house storage improvements.  I've also added elements in support of reducing the cottage's dependence on grid electricity, to where it at least has a "limp mode" that makes it livable with a modest battery backup solar electric system.

Phase 1 (by 30 June 2008)

• Composting toilet hookup.  This is coming along nicely now (see photos below.)
  
• Solar water heat hookup, for the existing panels (progress here too, photos below.)
  
• Domestic hot and cold water tanks upstairs, with solar/hand pumping options.  This is towards my goal of spending one week off the grid by 4th of July.  The idea is to be able to take a hot shower or two without using electricity for either pumping or water heat.
  
• Battery and inverter portion of a small solar electric (PV) system goes inside the house.
• 110v well pump (existing pump is 220 vac).  This is also towards the off-grid goal.  It will be easier to get an inverter to do 110 than 220, I think.
• Greenhouse edibles plant bed.  Plans are vague here but I do have some cilantro seed, and ideas of propagating perennials for the outside forest garden.
• Greenhouse humidity sensor.  I have a dial gauge but we should get a sensor hooked up to the HUGnet datalogging.
• Datalogging of house electricity use.

Phase 2 (by 1st frost (23 Sept 2008))

• Improved air sealing.  The bottom sill, windows and clerestory are suspects, but I still recommend blower door testing before corrective action. I was picturing on doing it the way Energy Star professionals do, that is, they install a blower door which applies a certain amount of suction, and they measure the air flow rate as an indication of how leaky the house is overall. They also go around with a smoke stick to find out in detail where all the leaks are. After corrective action, the test can be repeated so that you know how much improvement was made.
• Greywater system.  The plant beds for this will occupy much of the greenhouse.
  
• Bathroom medicine cabinet.  Right now everything is in a sack hung on the doorknob, and I must poof my pompadour one-handed while holding a camp mirror.  
  
• Small wood-gas cookstove, just a camp-sized thing.  This is to give another nonelectric nonfossil cooking option.
  
• Greenhouse air circulation system (fan & valves).  
  
• Temporary shelving, by E greenhouse wall.
  
• Food pantry under staircase.
• Clothing rack, N wall upstairs East.  

Phase 3 (by last frost (14 May 2009))

• Counter/cupboards/sink, greenhouse E wall.
  
• Built-in shelving, E&W walls upstairs.
  
• Modify staircase to lessen the steepness, and free the upstairs south wall for bookshelves.

* * *

Here's the bin for the composting toilet going in.  It's nice to see Redbeard and Pigpen working so well together.

The bin has hand-crank tines, upper and lower, for aeration.

Progress on the solar water heat:  Here Montalban is building the insulated enclosure for the water tank, the white cylinder at his feet.

Redbeard whapped up a copper coil heat exchanger for the water tank.  In operation it will stand up vertical.  The wooden ledge holding up the tools on the right is actually an air plenum for the tubes which are to exchange heat with the ground under the floor.  There's another one on the left.  It took Montalban a solid week to build these.  They had to be done first before the compost toilet bin could go in.

The insulated closet for the water tank is partly done.

Declare July 4 Energy Independence Week!

During last week's blizzard, the power went out here for about an hour, the first time it had done so since I moved in, in February.   Power outages can be instructive, as it confronts you directly with your energy dependence.  As I suspected, this house, being presently all-electric, was not a fun place.  Without the juice, I have no running water and no way to cook, plus it was a dark and stormy night.  Being superinsulated, the house does not cool off fast, but it does have some air leaks and the wind was howling like mad.  Because the outage occurred at the beginning of a predicted three-day storm, I was worried it might be out for quite a while.

But then the lights came back on and everything was fine.  It is all too easy to sink back into complacency, to talk the preparedness talk without walking the preparedness walk.  

For many reasons it is a good idea to be prepared for a week-long power outage.  I think a good way to drive that preparedness would be to schedule the outage.  My fellow Americans, I invite you to join me in celebrating Energy Independence Week:

This year the 4th of July is on a Friday.  Take the week off.  You have two options for observing Energy Independence Week:

Option 1:

Make it a stay-at-home vacation during which you:

1.  Burn no fossil fuels (grill charcoal okay.)

2.  Use no grid electricity (on site renewable generation okay.)

3.  Do not go to restaurants or grocery stores (stocking up ahead okay.)

Option 2:  Spend the week with some one else doing Option 1.  

If we can pull this off we will have advanced our self-reliance and disaster preparedness in a way that also moves us towards long-term sustainability.  Gasoline-powered generators do not do this.  (My experience of them is that, even in the short term, they are fool's gold, because all the gas station pumps run on electricity, and in many places it is illegal to store more than a few gallons of gasoline in cans due to fire hazard.)

Take some time to look into what it would take.  If you can't even consider doing this, even in the summer, that ought to tell you something - you're going to have to make some big changes at some point.  Option 2 is included to give condo and apartment dwellers a reasonable way to play.  Otherwise you would have to already be living in an ecovillage.  Very few condos have on-site renewable backup power.  Realistically, in an extended outage or rolling blackout situation, many people would have to leave their apartments.  This exercise could prompt you to renew that personal connection, and what better time than a holiday visit?

In my case, it might just be possible.  I have a small and motley set of solar PV panels, about 120 W altogether, but I need racks, batteries, and inverters to make a functional system.  My well pump is 220 volts ac, I can't afford an inverter big enough to do that, but I might be able to change out the pump for 110 v model.  Redbeard & Co should have the solar water heat hooked up by then so I can take a decent shower.   As anyone knows if you've been through a lengthy power outage, the hot shower is one of the things you miss the most, and basically all the equipment for it they've got in the store requires either fossil fuel or electricity.  No good.  I have a solar oven, but not a charcoal grill....

In closing I would say, This will be tough but what you will learn in the attempt will be good for your family and your country!  If I were the President I would say, it's your patriotic duty!

Potato math

I've been considering trying to grow potatoes.  This is to get a yield in the short term (they are not perennial.)  It is said that they can yield very highly in terms of calories per acre, and that they like the moderate soil temperatures of the northern states.

I would want to intercrop them with some beneficial companion plants. "The internet" suggests petunias, amaranth, sweet alyssum, beans, corn, cabbage, marigolds, and horseradish are possibilities.

Here is some potato math:

One serving of potato at 150 grams or 1/3 pound has 110 calories.

So, if I wanted 1000 calories a day from potatoes for a whole winter (250 days) that would require 750 pounds of potatoes.

According to ers.usda.org, potato yield per acre is in the range of 5000 to 40,000 pounds per acre.  At the low end then, I would need 0.15 acres to get 750 pounds, which is 6550 square feet or 81 feet on a side planted solid.  I don't think I dare plant such a large area on the first try.  Even at the high yield end it would still take 28x28 feet to get 750 lbs.  

Mountain valley produce has on online chart of planting spacing.  Basically they put about one seed potato every 3 square feet, so you'd need to plant 300 to 2000 pieces.  

Here is the latest version of my Thai-rish Potato recipe:

Heat 1 tablespoon of oil in a large skillet.  Add a dash of red cayenne pepper, 1/4 cup chopped green onions, 1/2 cup bean sprouts, and stir-fry a minute or two.  Then add one fry-cut potato (sliced lengthwise into 1/2 inch pieces), a golf-ball sized lump of peanut butter, 1/4 cup of dry-roasted peanuts, and 1 cup of local, sustainably-harvested, microbiologically-safe, organic, fair-trade, hormone-drug-antibiotic-and-conflict-free water.  Bring to boil, then reduce to medium heat and simmer, stirring occasionally,  until sauce is no longer watery.  Serves one or two, sprinkle salt to taste.

I've been making this as a breakfast dish, it is pretty hearty and should hold you 'til lunchtime. The simmering down does take some time, like if you were making a pancake breakfast.   You can skip the stir-fry and make it with only regular conflict-free water, potato, peanut butter, and black pepper, but it is not quite as nice and you will probably want to add more salt.

Permaculture Design Part 1 - Goals & Site Assessment

"In every deliberation we must consider the impact on the seventh generation."  

"Practice thoughtful and protracted observation, not thoughtless and protracted labor."  

"Use small and slow solutions."

These patient permaculture principles are difficult to keep in mind as the growing season approaches and the sun shines on bare ground. Timing is crucial in gardening (so the book says.)  The past couple of weeks snowathon has given me a slight reprieve.  I would like to break the cycle of haste, fear, and panic which (my anonymous sources tell me) has often overtaken the HDT cottage project, but I have to admit I'm feeling the suction.

Perhaps you are just joining us?  I was recently asked in an email, "Could you explain to me what permaculture is?"  I replied: "The idea of permaculture is that of an edible ecosystem. Instead of monoculture field cropping, you garden like the forest, that is, you have a diverse ecosystem with many mutually supporting species of plants and animals, so that it produces multiple yields with little maintenance. The idea is to be more knowledge-intensive and less energy-intensive than conventional agriculture. (I think the wikipedia article on it is pretty good.) I could go on. It's trying to address the problem that we are putting more fossil energy into agriculture to make fertilizer than we are getting out again as food, which is clearly unsustainable. The trick is to do it without having to go back to a drudgerous peasant lifestyle, you know, field cropping by hand. As far as I know P/C has not been practiced on a very large scale, and in order to really work well it takes some lead time - about as long as it takes to grow a nut-bearing tree...  Also I might mention that agroforestry, and organic or biointensive gardening are related concepts to permaculture. I think Permaculture is more encompassing as it involves applying ecosystem-inspired design principles to the home- or farm-stead as well."

I recommend Permaculture in a Nutshell, by Patrick Whitefield as an excellent concise introduction.

Heros of Permaculture - and their books

Masanobu Fukuoka - The One-Straw Revolution, The Natural Way of Farming

Bill Mollison - Introduction to Permaculture,  Permaculture:  A Designer's Manual

David Holmgren - Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability

Robert Hart - first temperate-forest-gardener, zone 8

Charlie Headington - zone 8 forest-gardener

Martin Crawford - zone 9 forest-gardener

David Jacke & Eric Toensmeier - Edible Forest Gardens, Vol I & II.

Let's proceed with our Site Assessment and Client Interview:

Size: 43,500 square feet (1 acre, 0.4 hectare)

Location: Pine River, Minnesota

Planted:  not yet

USDA Hardiness Zone: 3b, going on 4a I believe (-35 to -25 F)

Growing season: 111 to 131 days.

Latitude: 46.7 degrees North

Longitude: 94.1 degrees West

Rainfall: 23-27 inches/year, with about 40% occurring in the growing season.  It may be becoming less consistent during growing season.

Figure 1.  Aerial photo, wide shot, North is up.

The area inside the red line was purchased by its present stewards in 2003.  The site under discussion here is near the Happy Dancing Turtle Cottage, which is marked by the small orange rectangle in the lower middle.  The cottage was constructed late 2006 through early 2008.  Roughly speaking, the one-acre L-shaped design area extends from the cottage south and west, across the open ground, to the tree lines.  There is also an attached south-facing greenhouse about 7 feet deep by 45 long.  The greenhouse roof is opaque, as are its small east and west walls.  The cottage is superinsulated and designed to use solar water heat for both domestic hot water and space heating, through an in-floor radiant system, although the plumbing is not yet completed.  Water is supplied by a well pump.

In previous posts I have touched on some issues with Zone Zero, the house itself.  I will return to that, but here I want to start with the broader context and then move toward the house.

Overview and history of the broader site

Note the open ground in the south and east.  Thirty years ago, all of it was corn field, and the road did not bend through it but ran straight east-west along the south edge.  The area in the south, east of the driveway, is now bisected by County Road 2 and has been lying fallow for an unknown number of years.  In the northeast there is an even-aged stand of mostly red pine, about forty-five years old.  In the northwest is a more natural wooded area.  In the southwest there is a sizable pond, probably spring-fed, bordered by a marshy area.  Note how only part of the pond is within the property.  The legal implications as to water rights I do not know as of this writing.

The soil is sandy and believed to be low in organic matter and soil life. Your correspondent dug three small pits south of the cottage; the topsoil thickness varied from two to ten inches. The subsoil is like beach sand, to a depth of fifteen feet or more, we believe. A hardpan layer was discovered at a depth of 7 feet, on the cottage site during the placement of the underground temperature sensors. These were inserted by hydraulic drilling with a garden hose. The eastern fallow field, where the windmill is, on the other side of the main driveway, still contains many identifiable bits of corn stalk. Some pieces have lichen growing on them, but others are just weathering on the surface. For the time being, this fallow field is being left to find its own successional pathway, sort of as a control plot. Right now it seems to mainly support moss, grasses (big bluestem, little bluestem, switchgrass), goldenrod, and young pine trees.

This whole region is prone to deer-tick borne diseases, Lyme's and human anaplasmidosis, or something like that. The local economy is heavily fortified by summer and fall tourism (hunting and fishing). There are large signs displaying the fire danger level, frequently updated year round.  

The ecological classification of the region is Pine Moraines and Outwash Plains, according to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.  The natural native vegetation climax situation for this bioregion is a fire-dependent woodland, class FDc23, which presumably means that the vegetation depends on how long it has been since the last fire.  

The 300 by 500 foot rectangular South Field, where the cottage now stands, was used for an unknown number of years as a sawdust dump.  At the time of purchase, the sawdust was about a foot deep over the whole field.

Recent interventions

Figure 2.  The South Field.  Area pictured about 635 by 475 feet.  The cottage is in green.  The area under design consideration surrounds the cottage and is bounded by the trees to the south, the trees to the west, the crater and driveway to the north, and the septic line on the east.  

Here are the views looking outward from the cottage.  The site is generally quite flat and open.

Looking South:  This area must remain clear of large trees to maintain the solar resource for the cottage.  The berm is 130 feet away, and the septic drainfield is in front of the berm.

Looking Southwest:

Looking west:

There is only a single row of tall trees to the west.  They show wind stress, with leaning trunks and few branches on the upwind side.  The trees are 110 feet away.  This area has been used as a parking lot because the side door is on this side.  I think it would be better to garden here and park elsewhere.  The ground is compacted and is one of three patches that were graveled during construction.  There is a pile of at least thirty large moldy straw bales.  They are 30x32x84 inches, and, if these are the 600 pounders, there are nine tons of flax straw over there.  They were being used to try and insulate the drain line from freezing.  Pigpen spent quite a while driving the Cat around to stack them over there.  I'd like to use them for mulch or turn them into charcoal.

Looking Northwest:

The crater, born as a screwup, is the only thing besides the sawdust berm which makes any variation in the landform and microclimate.  I am kind of starting to like it.  I say not so fast on filling it in.  For a forest garden, "pits and mounds" is a desirable feature and "site too flat" is a problem.

Looking North:

The building in front of the trees is Old Main.  The ground in front of Old Main slopes gently down and away - this is the site of a partially-implemented Permaculture design.

Looking Northeast:

There's the even-aged red pine grove.

Looking East

Looking Southeast:

I took a walk through these trees.  It is mostly jack pines but there are some small oaks, birches, and aspens as well.  There is quite a bit of deadfall, dead standing, and dead leaning on live.


In July 2006 the South Field sawdust was treated with several hundred pounds of urea, and then bulldozed into an east-west berm at the south edge of the field.  Some topsoil went along for the ride.  The idea was to achieve the proper nitrogen-carbon balance so that the sawdust would compost.  This berm is about six feet high, twenty feet wide at the base, and 400 feet long.  I think it is somewhat questionable whether enough oxygen is getting to the microbes doing the composting, even if they did survive the urea shock treatment.  The berm has grown a fine crop of quackgrass, a "vigorous, rhizomatous weed."  This may have a tendency to invade the flat area north of the berm.  It could be a nuisance if it gets beyond the septic drainfield.  It may be possible to use it for mulch or compost.

A three-tank septic system was installed in the middle of the field, with the drain field running about 300 feet east-west just north of the berm.  The flat open area along the west side was at that time planned to be a campground, and in late August 2006 was seeded with a mix of low-mow grass and white clover.  In October, to provide three raised areas for building, and to cover the drain lines from the building sites to the septic tanks, a pit was excavated northwest of the cottage site.  The building site "pads" are broad flat mounds of barren subsoil about two feet high, and the resulting oval-shaped crater is about 60 by 140 feet, and ten feet deep at its lowest point.  The water table is only a few feet lower.  The sides of the crater are barren and currently undergoing mass wasting.  A trench was dug from the driveway to the southeast corner of the crater.  The logic escapes me, as it is eroding into a serious gully.  Lamentably, the drain lines to the septic tanks tend to freeze.  This was a problem for the house trailer, a temporary office which occupied one of the other building sites from Fall 2006 through Spring 2008, and for the cottage also this spring.

The following March (2007), the drain field looked to remain free of disturbance, and needed to remain free of large trees whose roots would clog the lines.  The drain field was therefore seeded with native prairie perennial grass mix, which has not (yet) taken.  In the eastern half of the South Field, a program of broad-scale soil building was begun.  The field was disced and planted, a little late, in sections with 2 or 3 different prairie seed mixes.  Weeds came up instead.  The winter of 2006-2007 was low on snow, and the summer of 2007 was crispy-dry.  In September the field was disced again and 80 yards of composted cow manure was applied, and the area was cover-cropped with fall rye and vetch.  By October this had grown six inches high.  It was then heavily browsed by deer.  A hoof-print could be seen every six inches say, over the whole thing.  The main garden area in front of Old Main however, was not bothered by deer.  Perhaps this is because it's much closer to where Shadow lives.  Shadow is the resident very large German Shepherd.  He is gentle to properly-introduced humans, tough on deer.

On the west side, construction of the cottage continued throughout 2007.  The driveway and utility lines approach the cabin from the northeast.  As a result of the cabin construction, the ground within fifty feet or so is believed to be heavily compacted.  It was also pretty much scraped clean of vegetation.  Add to that the debris piles left over from construction and the place really looks like hell.  Because more roof work needs to be done this season, most of the ground within thirty feet of the cabin will be traveled by heavy equipment, and thus is still not available for gardening. Even plantings for soil building or beautification may be trashed.  

Client profile

Your correspondent is the sole occupant of the dwelling but does not own it, nor the grounds. He will be living here at least one year.   He is an engineering scientist by training.  He has some experience of suburban yardwork, that is to say, lawn care, and the pruning and weeding of ornamental trees and perennial flowerbeds.  He has virtually no experience of gardening, farming, or orchards, and little knowledge of plants, but did recently obtain a certificate in Permaculture.  He is more-or-less able-bodied depending on recent carousing levels.  He has up to about 8 hours per week available for maintaining the property.  The landowners are financially independent and the budget for implementation is potentially large, for a convincing design.

The flagship program on campus is the design/development of an Agricultural Resilient Community, comprising buildings and neighborhoods which heat themselves (in Minnesota), produce no sewage, and are conducive to growing your own food.  About two-thirds of the cottage's greenhouse is slated for heat storage water tanks and plant beds for greywater processing.  A hope for the cottage is that with both a composting toilet and a greywater system, the septic system eventually won't be needed.

I've been given a written list of  Campus-Wide Overall Purposes of Landscaping and Gardening:

• Food production, long term, fruit trees etc - want to see focus here.
  
• Food production, short term, just to eat right away.
  
• Soil building
  
• Water management
  
• Beautification
  
• Experimentation and research - proof of Permaculture or other types of creation of healthy soils
  
• Education
  
• Cut down on dust

I fully support these goals, assuming they are listed in order of importance (as opposed to urgency.)  The only change I would urge is to raise the importance of experimentation and research a notch.  This is because of both need and opportunity:

• The campus is often called a 'research campus'.
• I am a research-oriented individual.
• The need for research on perennial polyculture in this cold climate has been highlighted by at least one experienced regional practitioner and by an international expert.
• The challenges of this (rural) site are typical of suburbia in the region, namely thin sandy topsoil and relentless chomping by deer.  Lessons learned could be broadly useful.
• The site is large and empty enough to try some different things.  For example there appear to be two different approaches to organic food growing - one is organic or biological farming, which uses annual crops, and the other is perennial or forest gardening.  We could compare these, or we could try different site preparations for forest gardening, such as trees first or cover cropping first.  It would be nice if we could think of some permacultural solution to the damn deer tick diseases.

I don't want to get too much into design here yet, but at this point I am quite interested in nuts, tubers, and mushrooms.  Pine nuts and acorns seem like appropriate tree crops for this biome.

The quandary here is that the spirit is willing but the brain cells are weak, or let's say, empty.  I, as a Potential Practitioner of Perennial Polyculture (PPPP) am a beginner and can only work on it part time.  I would love to design an instant succession, but I just don't know enough.  I would love to design a worthwhile experiment, but if one wishes to advance the state of the art, one ought to know about what the state of the art is.  

However, if I am considered part of the design, then my inexperience could also be viewed as typical and as a realistic challenge.  In other words, if the art we are talking about is not just forest gardening, but also the cultivation of forest gardeners, then voila, we are at the state of the art, and the experiment has begun. :)

As I mentioned above, the central idea of permaculture is the edible ecosystem.  It turns out that ecosystems are like, complicated? So, designing one is a complex and subtle business.  As with anything new, there are two basic ways to go about learning it:  book larnin', and hard knocks.  I am struggling to find the right balance here.

Fortunately, a couple of ecologists wrote a book about it.  David Jacke and  Eric Toensmeier, in Edible Forest Gardens, make a serious attempt to write down everything that anyone ever learned about the subject.  This book is a thousand pages long.  As of now I'm about forty percent of the way into it.  The thing about an ecosystem, as I'm understanding so far, is that in addition to Plants and Animals, there are three or four whole other Kingdoms of life in your yard.  Most of the species are microscopic.  All these creatures are trying to make a living any which way they can.  It seems like every strategy of Machiavelli, Napoleon, and Gandhi was already invented by gnats and such a hundred million years ago.  

J&T's book is very organized and systematic, but the sheer weight of information is a bit daunting.  It's like, in order to engage in an intelligent conversation about ecosystem design, you should know:

• The eight levels of permanence in the landscape,
  
• The five elements of forest architecture,
  
• The four major categories of plant nutrients,
  
• The six layers of soil structure,
  
• The three primary life strategies of plants,
  
• The five major kinds of soil life,
  
• The six primary nutrient containers of terrestrial ecosystems,
  
• The four models of vegetation succession,

and in addition, the size, shape, rooting structure, uses and niche requirements of a hundred edible or medicinal plants, or more.  Boy.

At times like these I try to remind myself, anything worth doing is worth doing badly at first.

Flora is the resident permaculture designer on campus.  She is very knowledgeable about plants and gardening.  I had another interesting conversation with her the other day, and she reminded me about the school of hard knocks:

ME:  I'm working my way through this book.  I feel like I could get to where I might be able to design a planting, but I'm not there yet.

F:  Books are only going to get you so far.  You have to engage with the landscape.

ME:  I suppose it's like auto mechanics or anything else, until you get hands-on, you've got no feel, don't know all the tiny little details that matter.

F:  Only with gardening its even more so.

ME:  Because it's...alive?

F: Right, that puts it on a whole other level.  

I walked away thinking, "and life has its own agenda."  So forest gardening is more like...coaching a team, or...raising a family, than it is like architecture or machine design.  People write books about coaching and child-rearing too, but you wouldn't consider yourself any kind of expert just from the books.  

In permaculture class, they taught us to learn both from books and directly from the land, using all our senses as well as instruments.  They also taught that you can do a lot of design and preplanning without encyclopedic knowledge of plants.  It seems to me at this point, that preplanning works the best with the built environment.  

The value of the books is as a bit of a shortcut.  If we are quite patient, need not do anything at all.  If we have a large enough piece of land, and leave it alone, nature should see to it that it yields abundantly, in time.  Trouble is, that might take a thousand years.  To speed up the process, we can observe the land and tinker with interventions, learn all of it the hard way, the work of some generations.  To give ourselves the best chance, we can hit the books and try to climb on the shoulders of giants, avoid some pitfalls, have some idea of what to look for, when we engage with the landscape.

I've digressed a bit into the philosophical, let me wrap that up and put it in the context of site assessment.  We are talking about Zone 1 here, the grounds just outside the cottage.  At this point I see the main challenges for Zone 1 as follows:

• Thin sandy topsoil
• Heavy browsing by deer
• Increasingly droughty weather in the growing season - plant stress and fire danger
• A thicket of startup dilemmas several of which are tied to my limitations:

1. The wisdom of starting small versus the large area of land in need of healing.
2. The time needed for planning, and assessment such as soil testing, versus the seasonal window of opportunity.
3. Book learning versus action and learning from the landscape.
4. The long-term nature of agroforestry versus my short-term contract.
5. Obtaining a yield sooner versus obtaining a yield later.  
6. Beautification versus heavy equipment access.

There is also some short-term need for cleanup about the cottage:

• Wood, wire, roofing & pipe N of drain line, East side
• Dirt pile SE of crater
• Crate, hose, & roofing NW of cottage
• Firebricks NW of cottage
• Band saw SW of cottage
• Outside compost pile and sawdust pile
• Tires and sandpile S of cottage
• Sand and dirt piles by S door
• Pipe and dirt pile SE of cottage
• Propane tank
• Rolloff container

If any of these piles are clay, I want to save a couple buckets to make seedballs.

There are a number of other issues that need to be addressed, such as parking, snow removal, mud-free walkways, and some opportunities to make the place more pleasant.  More later.

Let me conclude this post with a review and update on Zone Zero, the cottage itself.  In rough order of priority, the cottage is in need of:

• A composting toilet (work in progress)
• Completion of the solar water heat system (work in progress)
• Storage (outside shed, medicine cabinet, root cellar.)
• Improved air sealing (I recommend blower door test before corrective action.)
• Greywater processing (work in progress)
• Reduced dependence on grid electricity especially for water pumping and hydronic circulation. (I suggest upstairs indoor water tank, and solar/hand pumping options.)
• Growing edibles or propagating nursery plants in the greenhouse.

Again, there are some other things that popped up on the brainstorming list, but those are the highlights for now.

Bucket lift

Here is an enhancement to Party Pooper sawdust toilet system.  It's a hand-crank elevator for lifting the bucket to the top of the compost bin.  The maiden voyage went pretty well.  No problem on the lifting, but the tipping still required some manhandling.  I might be able to improve with practice...

I can't really explain why I spent so much time on this piece of contraptuary.  It took a day and half to build it and another day and half to prime and paint it.  Even though I hope not to have to use it very long, I couldn't bear to set something out that would just dissolve in the rain.  

Thanks to Butch and Treebeard for design input.  They saw where I was going with it and made suggestions that simplified the pulley system.  If I was going to make another one I would try to add some kind of pivot to facilitate the tipping.

In other news, I joined an organic produce buying club called the Walker Green Scene.  It is like a CSA in that you get a share of whatever they can find, you don't get to choose.  I posted a couple of recipes on their blog.

Here is another recipe I'm working on.  Right now it goes something like this:

Thai-rish Potato

Into a medium frying pan put one fry-cut potato, a quarter cup of dry roasted peanuts, a golf-ball sized lump of peanut butter, a tablespoon of oil, and about 3/4 cup of water.  Bring to boil, reduce to low heat and simmer uncovered until sauce thickens, stirring frequently.  Stir in a dash of cayenne pepper, serves 1 or 2.

I ended up having to add some salt, and it wasn't as peanutty as I was hoping.  Maybe the simmering carried off the flavor.  I don't know how to make peanut sauce, I was just guessing.  I feel like it needs some additional texture; next time I might try adding bean sprouts.