Blog Topic: Woolman Semester Classes
For our sustainability project we have inoculated a variety of mushrooms in a few different types of substrates (substrates being the medium of which the mushrooms are grown on). We inoculated several oak logs that were cut down this past summer with shitake mushrooms, and one pine log with phoenix oyster. To do that our mentor Malaika ordered some plug spawn online (which are one inch dowels that have been colonized with mycelium. We then drilled holes in the logs, and plugged the holes with the dowels. After all the logs were plugged with the spawn, we covered the plugged holes and ends of the logs with beeswax to contain moisture. The logs should start fruiting anywhere between 6-18 months, and will continue to fruit for up to six years.
Since we love mushrooms and wanted to eat the ones we grow, we decided to grow some in bags also. Growing in bags doesn’t take as long to produce mushrooms. We did this by getting used coffee grounds from a café in Grass Valley, and saving the sawdust from when we drilled the oak logs. We inoculated pearl oyster mushrooms in coffee grounds, and shitake mushrooms in a mixture of coffee grounds and the sawdust. Unfortunately the mycelium is taking a while to spread throughout the bags, so we probably wont see them when they’re done growing.
Then, when preparing for the forest garden, a few trees were cut down. We decided to inoculate the stumps so mushrooms could be a part of the permaculture project. We had to girdle the stumps first to kill the tree because they have natural fungicides that can inhibit mushroom growth, and you have to wait until those fungicides go away. Then we drilled holes and inoculated the plug spawn. In the oak stump we inoculated more shitake, in the pine we inoculated turkey tail, in the honey locust we inoculated maitake (hen of the woods).
Having mushrooms grow here at Woolman will contribute to a more sustainable existence. Our kitchen will rely less on outside sources for mushrooms, and everyone here will benefit from their health benefits.
Here are some pictures of the logs, stumps, and bags we inoculated.
Responses:
As a group, we have faced many challenges, predicaments, and changes in our plan for our Sustainability Project. Through the many stages of our project, we have come together as a group and found a project and goal that is both feasible, productive, and sustainable: A new chicken coop that will provide a space that could house enough chickens to sustain the needs of The Woolman Semester. This includes the initial blueprint of the chicken coop design and a list of materials needed and their prices.
One problem we faced was the short lifespan of these creatures, and how a meat-free school could dispose of chickens who no longer lay eggs.
We searched for chickens that are hardy, well-tempered, and used mainly for egg-laying purposes. Our top choice was the Rhode Island Red Chicken. This breed stands out particularly because of its egg-laying abilities. It is also extremely hardy in all seasons, but especially winter.
The basic design for our chicken coop is a small wooden building and an area for the chickens to move about and forage. The outside area is surrounded by chicken wire to protect the chickens from predators. The chicken coop will be locked with a hook at nighttime to keep the chickens safe when there are no humans watching them.
There are two kinds of chicken coop floors we considered: a solid metal floor with metal sides and a floor made of chicken wire with hay regularly put in. Both keep out digging predators such as foxes. A solid metal floor offers more protection and durability than a simple wire floor. However, the wire floor offers more opportunity for the chickens to scavenge and is simpler to acquire and install.
There will also be a chicken wire fence around the area in which the chickens roam during the day to deter predators.
Unfortunately, chickens have many predators living in the Nevada County area. The most common are foxes, raccoons, mountain lions, hawks, and chupacabras. Foxes have been a big obstacle for Woolman chicken owners in the past. Foxes can dig like dogs and climb like cats, so keeping them away from a chicken coop is extremely difficult.
Though we have faced many obstacles, we have completed our design for a chicken coop. We hope that future Woolman students will continue our work and help to build a more sustainable community here at Woolman.
Of all the conclusions to all the lectures delivered by the illustrious and mischievous Jacob Holzberg-Pill in his Environmental Science class at the Woolman Semester, the most memorable was this: “We must map this land to understand it, steward it, and make Woolman truly sustainable.” The subject at hand? Agroforestry and the ways in which indigenous peoples managed the land to make it most productive for humans. Agroforestry is highly complex; the wrong technique can have disastrous effects, the right technique can save an entire species.
At the beginning of the project, I had lofty goals: map ALL of the trails, mark the property boundaries, find the student build “Ithaca,” and make trail markers. However my greatest personal goal was to become more familiar with the seemingly massive woods that lend Woolman much of its beauty and mystique. With these goals, my friend and companion Brylie and I set off on our great adventure. We spent countless hours walking the trails, often mapping them multiple times due to unreliable technology or personal error. Many trials marked our heroic journey. We bushwacked through fields of poison oak, debated the importance of trails outside the Woolman parcel, avoided taciturn neighbors, and tangled with somewhat cumbersome technology. In one extreme instance we bushwacked out to the southeast corner of a large Woolman parcel to mark the boundary and began our return hike in the cover of darkness. Brylie slipped and dropped our tracking device, leaving us with only a compass and our intuition to navigate back to campus. Thankfully our forestry skills were proficient enough for the task, and we managed to return (mostly) unharmed.
To what extent did we accomplish our goals? We managed to map many of the major trails, marked several important corners of the Woolman parcel, and found Ithaca, but we decided that creating trail markers was not the most important part of the project. I believe that the raw data we collected was the greatest accomplishment of the project because it will be so useful to future projects involving the Woolman forest. The rough map produced with the data is only a pre-cursor to future student maps that will be more accurate and detailed thanks to the experience we garnered. Brylie will be able to more efficiently train students interested in the GIS (Geographic Information System) Project, and those students will have fewer initial hurdles to leap. Eventually they will not need to worry about things such as marking the property boundaries, they will be able to focus on things like species succession. The GIS project will become more than just a pipe dream of a few curious Woolmanites, it will become the backbone of agroforestry and sustainability here at the Woolman Semester.
Knowing that our beloved Dorothy, has been wanting a flower bed for a long time, we decided to take it up on ourselves to create it. When we came up with the concept of creating flower beds, we decided we wanted to make our campus even more beautiful and to increase the flow of pollinators for the orchard on our campus.
We started out this project thinking it would just be as easy as planting some flowers, but we realized we had a few hiccups along the way.
We realized that there are a lot of deer that live around the campus. Therefore, we had to research on ways to deter the deer from eating and destroying our plants. In addition, we wanted to make sure our plants would survive the winter so we did some research on mulching and cold frames. Furthermore, another important aspect of planning where to put our flower beds, was taking into consideration of how much light they would receive for their success.
The last problem we encountered was increasing and keeping the population on the campus. We wanted to make sure that they would be visible to the visitors and residents of the Woolman campus. Our original thought was to place them on the south facing side of the admissions office. The area that we planned to put our flower beds was not agreed upon by the head of school. Although we were not able to go with our original plan, we were able to find two additional spaces to put our flower beds. The first place where the flowers are located is surrounding the bird bath. The second place would be in front of the office doors.
Although we had a lot of obstacles we were able to overcome and successfully create beds you see today...
~Special THANKS to: Jacob, Malaika, Grace, Sandy Cumen, and Kristen!!! (thanks for ALL of your help...couldn't have done it without yawl!!!) =)
THIS WAS OUR SECOND TO LAST WORKING DAY! :( CHLOE AND ILANA GETTING IT DONE! HIWOT AND HER PERFECT SMILE! ILANA PLANTING A BULB! ( Ahhh... the sight of progress... ) OUR AWESOME BIRDBATH WITH THE ILLUMINATING SUN! OUR AWESOME COLD FRAME! (YAY! ITS WORKING!!!) THAT WAS OUR FINAL DAY WORKING...FLOWER POWER FOR LIFE YO!!! =)
(This is one of my journal entries from the Mexico trip. We were asked to write a poem reflecting on the borders in our own lives.)
Border of My Own
I live on the border
Between lib and con
Right and wrong
Black and white
Here and there
I live on the border
Of my county
That sits on the border
Of my state
Looking south on “them”
I live on the border
Of seeping death
Slow poison filling
At one small, hot mistake
And screeching alarm
I live on the Border
Feeling alone
Neutral
Stuck in grey
Nowhere
I live in the border
Watching the river
Make us grow and shrink
Watching the south
Ignore and depend on us
I live on the border
Filled with fear
Sitting on
The wrong side
No help arriving
I am the border
Of my views
Comfortable with
My in between
Un-swayed
The land is the border
Not Too Much Information
But too little
Flows through secretive
Closed gates
The power is fluid
Belonging to no-one
As the borders
Cross over another
And join
Responses:
Humans are thought to be violent by nature and not by the society that they are raised in. In my opinion, I do not think that we are violent by nature; I think that humans act violently due to the different environments that they grow up in, the people they are raised by, and the media that our society broadcasts to not only the youth, but the entire world. In my personal experiences I have been raised in a very welcoming home, surrounded by a loving family, but the media has definitely affected some of the ways I have thought about violence, especially when I was younger.
Where a person is raised really affects who they are going to become, and their views on violence based on the experiences that they have in that particular environment. In the article it states, "Many hunter-gatherer societies in particular are entirely peaceful. And the cultures that are "closer to nature" would be expected to be the most war-like if the proclivity for war were really part of that nature. Just the reverse seems to be true."(Human Nature Isn't Inherently Violent; page 16). I found this quote to bring up an interesting point because often when you think of people living out with nature, our minds often associate that with warriors because they are always out hunting for food, when they are actually more peacful than anything else. If a person is raised in the city, or a place where there is gang violence, gun shots, fighting, or even in a family where there is abuse either physical or vebal can really affect the mentality of an individual being raised in this type of environment. If you are raised in a place where all of this violence is present, you may be raised to think that it is just in the genes of humans to be naturally aggressive, or maybe you don't appreciate the violence and want to stop it. I think that more often than not, if you are raised in a culture of violence then your brain is "trained" to think that it is only human for us to act in such an aggressive manner.
Family and friends play a crucial role in our lives, whether they are acting as role models or parents. The people you are raised around really affects the outlook you have on human violence. In the Seville Statement it states, "How we act is shaped by how we have been conditioned and socialized. There is nothing in our neurophysiology that compels us to react violently."(page 2). In this quote it is saying that humans are shaped by the ways they are conditioned when they are raised, and that there is nothing in our head that gives us the urge to act violently. I feel that if you are raised in a very abusive family you may just learn from what you observe from a young age. I think that if you are raised in a loving and open family, that you are given more opportunity to form your own opinions on human violence. In my own experiences I feel that growing up in a very loving home gave me the chance to realize the violence and conflict does happen, but even then I never realized the base of the actions.
Media seems to play the biggest factor in our culture that influences our understanding of human violence. When we are constanty surrounded by thoughts of war, movies about fighting, games and toy that relate to guns, and it ALL a NORM in our society. I think that growing up in this culture where this is all accepted, that us as humans think that violence is OKAY because its what all the other kids are doing.
Humans being thought of as "violent by nature", is in my opinion caused by three factors; the environments that we are raised in, the people we are surrounded by, and the media that our society broadcasts to us starting at such young ages. I feel that all of these points play a huge role in why we thihk that we are violent by nature, when in fact we are not.
We went on the trip with biases from reading articles and talking to people directly related to the border. Of course I feel a sense of urgency to change the border situation, but when I talk to my family or friends the side of the border that we left behind on the trip, the Middle America mindset comes back into play. The opinion that “they’re stealing jobs” and “not paying taxes” seems to pop up in every conversation I have concerning the border. Rhetoric Americans hear from mainstream media creates fear in immigration and only focuses on the negative aspects of the topic, thus creating a culture of hate towards immigration altogether. I think one thing that the mainstream media coverage doesn’t explain is that the border is just a place, just like any other other, and that the issues that are present are not set in stone; the are changeable just like the laws that keep people from crossing legally. I think the bias that most people believe in the US is due to a need for the fear, to keep people feeling unsafe and needing someone to protect them.
Responses:
Home
the land where I grew up
my roots are in the
soil
family and friends take root
some here
others live in the home
I've never known
some day
all of us will live together in
one home
no need to plant roots in solid cages of
the earth
rather
to fly free as birds in the
sky
Dear Mexico
I live in fear each day
I fear for my head
Literally
I fear for my family
The Cartels and their dope
Why oh why must it be I
The one who must bring this shit
To THEM
The ones on the other side
Of the fence,
I HATE YOU!
You make it hard to have
Hope as you sit back and watch
From your towers of corruption
I am targeted
Hated, feard, resented
Because I am seen as you!
We are all seen as you instead
Of the truth
We are part of you.
All because of where we were born.
My sweet mother weeps because of
You!
If only you could be the shining knight
We need.
I have faith you could be that
Light in darkness
But first
Step up
Realize who you can be
Deserve my trust
My alligence
Myself
Dear Mexico
I hate you now
But love you enough to see you change