NEWS & UPDATES

Jan 25 2007

INCOME through OUTREACH
Small business opportunities at Mountain Gardens
A NEW ADVANCED APPRENTICE PROGRAM

Here is a list of income-generating projects, some currently operating, others in various stages of development, as indicated. These projects explore the various opportunities which derive from our unique combination of plants, information and tools; they all represent various ways of sharing the abundance of the Paradise Garden.
I try to keep all of these projects moving forward, but even with a full compliment of apprentices (5-6) we cannot come close to developing more than a few of these to anything near their potential. In fact, I think that any one of these projects could yield enough income for a person to live on (since they would already be living in a paradise garden and presumably having therefore less need for money).
So, in the interest of seeing more of these projects realized, and of developing a community / collective of like minds, I am offering all apprentices the opportunity to continue at Mtn Gdns, build your own shelter, and take over and operate one (or more, or similar) of these, with the income generated going primarily to you (with some kickback to the general fund). I'm envisioning that these 'residents' will spend half time (20 hours/week) on Mtn Gdns projects, and the rest of the time on their own space and enterprise. Some arrangement will be devised whereby, if and when residents move on from here, they can take the business with them (or half of it - the business will, like a cell, divide).

· Seed business. Mtn Gdns has one of the most extensive lists of useful species on the web. However, I haven't been doing a good job of keeping it up - the list hasn't been revised in several years, some spp are no longer available, new ones need to be added. Some options I have explored in the past include: retail / wholesale, web marketing, mail order, packets in stores, wildcrafting seed of native botanicals (supplying to growers).
· Plant sales: my major source of income in the spring (retail sales at two 3-day herb events). There are many more possibilities to explore including: promoting retail sales here at Mtn Gdns, other herb events, starts & plugs wholesale and to growers. Currently making terraced beds in woodland to grow quantities of native botanicals / wildflowers for this purpose
· Tinctures: I believe Mtn Gdns has one of the most extensive lists of fresh single herb tinctures, as well as an extensive list of Chinese tonic formulas, which will increasingly incorporate Chinese herbs from our gardens. The plants, information and equipment needed to make small batches of world-class tonics are assembled. Another easy opportunity would involve combining single herb tinctures into functional formulas. I currently make absolutely no effort to market tinctures other than listing them on this website; I sense that there is a large potential market for some of our products.
· Other herb preparations: After several years of teaching an herbal preparations course at Daoist Traditions, I have accumulated processes, recipes & apparatus for a wide variety of preparations such as topical liniments, lotions and salves. Fresh herbal-based cosmetic creams and lotions are another interesting possibility. Our novel contribution is the ability to combine Chinese & native plants, fresh or dried, and use oriental processing methods still little-known in the west.
· Chinese herbs: There is definitely a niche for a business specializing in living, fresh Chinese herbs. Seeds, plants, plugs, cuttings, fresh herbs, preparations made from fresh herbs, information & workshops, photos. In fact we are doing all this, but not nearly to its full potential.
· Oriental Food Specialties: Mtn Gdns plant collection includes some oriental food plants still not widely available fresh in this country, including perennial vegetables like bamboo shoots and fidleheads and trees like szechuan pepper, yam tubers, codonopsis roots, udo shoots. These could be marketed to high-end restaurants and supplied by Fedex. Last year we established a promising relationship with an Asian fusion restaurant in Chapel Hill and hope to increase our offerings to them this year. The idea would be to supply seasonal specialties, and the first fun task would be to develop a calendar of availability.
· Wild Food Specialties: Similar to the above. Ramps (Allium tricoccum, wild leek) are the most obvious example of a wildfood going gourmet. Wild mushrooms are another example. I have been working with several other native wildfoods with gourmet potential: Solomon's seal, cucumber root, smilax shoots, 'indian salad' (Hydrophyllum), toothworts.
· Food Product: Based on food = medicine. E.g. mushroom soup backpack mix with dried shiitake and chinese tonic herbs. Or herbal zoom balls for hikers. Make use of my collection of cookbooks & references on 'Chinese medicated diet'. This is one of the places where the food movement will be going - incorporating rejuvenating / longevity herbs in diet. There is definitely a niche for someone with a culinary background to become the expert on this (recipes, workshops, tv show..) .
· Lectures, Workshops, Tours: Our unique combination of resources makes this the perfect place for teaching a wide variety of subjects around gardening, useful plants, herbal medicine, plant crafts,etc. There is plenty of fascinating material for an hour or an all-day tour. What we do here is, basically, theater; offering a functioning example of a lifestyle based on alternative values, in hopes of affecting lives of some of the audience. We could be doing much more outreach, what's needed is someone to publicize, promote, schedule, leaflet, brochure, webpromotion. We could be offering weekend or longer events with continuing education credits for health care professionals. We could be offering tea ceremony at the foot of the little waterfall above the yurt.
· Wildcrafting: Take advantage of our location & resources, and my knowledge of local flora distribution to take over and expand our small wildcrafting operation, supplying fresh native herbs, or weeds, to buyers worldwide (for example, tincture makers). Very fun work for someone who likes to hike and explore.
· Bamboo trellis & fence, Woodland crafts: Learn a very marketable craft by doing at Mtn Gdns. As always, a nice assemblage of resources is on hand: books, tools, materials. Woodland crafts is a British thing, involving a variety of products made in the woods from small stump sprouts - chairs, baskets, 'hurdles' (moveable woven fence panels), etc. Bentwood and 'rustic' furniture, arbors, gateways…
· Beekeeping: Obviously, huge potential for Mtn Gdns unique medicinal herb honey. Value added products would include syrups, electuaries, meads. Also pollen, propolis and - yes, it can be done - royal jelly. At present I have one active colony and another hive. Now that I've learned we can keep bears off with electric fence, it'll be full speed ahead with increasing the apiary. But I hope someone will come along and take over the project.
· Longevity tonics: A nice little business could be set up building on my collection of books, recipes, herbs, plants, methods and apparatus. At Mtn Gdns we have the possibility to produce the highest quality, 'artisinal' longevity tonics, based on native wild ginseng and organic, fresh Chinese herbs, plus our own honey and alcohol.
· Database, Information, Publications: There are many good databases about useful plants on the web, but all are library jobs. At Mtn Gdns we have the opportunity to create a list - the 1000 most useful plants for this bioregion - which would add to all that information our own first hand observations, data, photos. I have a database program which can absorb all the information one could wish. If we also record location in the garden, we could generate a guidebook, which would greatly enhance the experience of visiting the garden. No doubt there are many other ways in which such a database, as it becomes larger and more unique, could provide a modest income.
· Specialty plants: Several of my specialty plants could provide a significant income. I'd say the sky's the limit for Asian ginseng, wasabi, the purple flowered mustard, Angelica danggui, Codonopsis and perhaps others
· Food & drink events: for example, garden teas (a very typical way for gardens to earn money in England). Serving either garden herb teas or Chinese tonic decoctions, with appropriate selection of snax, pastries, tapas or dim sum. Definitely not open to the public - our facilities are laughably substandard. I'm imagining this as something to do once a week or so, it would serve the local community as another meeting place, place to take guests, etc. Evening pizza & beer events (using bake oven) are another easy possibility.

FEB 20, 2006

If you are reading this, it means I have been successful in posting to the website. Very exciting - I haven't added to the site since shortly after it was designed and published by our talented and generous friend Alphonse (his website is www.thecurio.us ). So, updates will be forthcoming to the apprentice and workshops pages, seed and tincture lists and elsewhere. A few recent photos can be found at www.flickr.com/photos/mountaingardens/ - which I will make into a link as soon as

Quite a lot has happened here over the past two years (since this site was established), and here is a summary: we (myself and apprentices) completed (not that anything much is ever really 'completed' here) the big glass greenhouse visible in front of the pavillion in photos. This has been about a five year project, partly motivated by accumulating, over the years, a lot of free glass, mostly double pane sliding glass door units. I cut these apart (double pane blocks too much light for a lean-to greenhouse in this area) and then had twice as much. It's built into a bank with a retaining back wall of earth filled drums. These I imagined would be for not-quite-hardy perennial plants (E.g. Ashwaganda) or those resenting winter wet (Mandrake), but increasingly I am using them to contain plants too invasive for the garden (some Artemisias, Trichosanthes, sweet grass), and of course they are black and serve as thermal mass. Speaking of which, my next ambition for the greenhouse is a cob 'thermal mass' heater: I envision of big slab of cob, with serpentine flue. The same idea as a masonry stove, actually more like a Chinese kang - the top of the slab could be used for flats of germinating seeds, or racks of drying herbs.

Another big project involved fixing the wall of the pavillion abutting the chimney - there was a lot of rot in the roof and sill from water running down the chimney, so the wall was pretty much rebuilt and improved. Now there is a very solid foundation beside the chimney where another masonry heater / oven / herb drier will go. (We have been making clay (Cinvaram) bricks for it, starting to have quite a pile of them). And - final solution to the runoff problem - a new roof joining the pavillion and kitchen. This roof also covers a thus far unused area adjacent to the kitchen which will be developed as an apothecary (place for making herbal preparations, as opposed to the pharmacy inside, which is for dispensing). Here we can set up the tincture press, herb grinder, new distillation apparatus and all the other paraphernalia and make use of the sink and beautiful cookstove which has recently come to live with us. On that note, I should mention the new rocketstove -five years in the envisioning, one day (less) in the making, works astonishingly well: a handful of twigs will boil water for tea several times faster than any kitchen range. (The plan - it's very simple,basically just an elbow of stovepipe - is from Approvecho, probably available online.) And the adjacent cob bake oven has gotten some use, with the usual round of 'round' parties (full moon, hot tub, firecircle, drums, pizza)..

And the list of refurbishments goes on: the yurt got a paint job and floor refinish, the coop was practically rebuilt - new siding and interior walls, new roof, windows, porch, sink, stove (all salvage material). And now that's all done, this year we get to landscape it! (It's really a charming space). And the old playhouse, which had gotten rather shabby, has been cleaned out, extended and reroofed. It will become a combination visitor reception center and garden shed. The last project of the year was the realization of another long time dream, a solar shower ('breadbox' type: an old water tank inside an insulated, glass fronted box). After much indecision, I impulsively decided to locate it on the slope between the house and garden, the best spot for afternoon sun (when we want a shower), but quite exposed and 'plunked down' looking at the moment (nothing that a little landscaping won't fix).

Recent changes in the garden include several small bogs (kiddie wading pool size, in fact, that's what they're made of): one, filled with sand / peat houses the gruit ale duo of bog myrtle and bog rosemary, among others; the other with regular soil (mud) is for gotu kola, skullcap, cardinal flower, etc. A nice little pool by the hot tub for frogs and wasabi. We'll be running the overflow of the water system to this pool, and then gradually extending a little stream from the pond overflow, using plastic sheet and old carpet (the ground is so rocky (porous) that any water features have to lined or the water just sinks away). Landscaping around the hot tub and stream side is underway - this is shaping up to be one of the nicest parts of the garden. The adjacent stream channel has been formed up into a series of pools and falls and will eventually be lined with wasabi. The giant bamboo planted five years ago is now quite a large colony, sending up bigger canes every year (last year's 3" dia, this year's eagerly anticipated). Elsewhere in the garden, several new stone walls and steps were added near the lawn (an area which has rquired revision as it has gone from sunny to shady over the past 20 years), and very nice steps, rock wall and raised bed along the path from house to pavillion, completing a transition which began about five years ago with ditches on each side of the path which were the recipient of that year's outhouse buckets; and much enjoyed because I walk that path about twenty times a day. New bamboo trellises in the garden were a fun project and hopefully the first of many to come.A lot of our effort last year went to clearing out overgrown areas of the garden (much of it rampant ground covers left over from a former lifetime as a landscaper), as a result of which a lot of space will be available this year for planting out new species more in line with my current interests (herbs and other 'useful plants') Also new: shiitake logs, beehive

I have been doing more teaching every year: workshops at NC Natural Products and Carolina Farm Stewards conferences, regular weekly classes at Mountain Gardens, a six-week series on native plant uses at the local community college, and most significantly, several classes at an innovative new Chinese medical school, Daoist Traditions, where I am also developing a Chinese herb garden with the students. The classes I teach at Daoist, 'Medical Botany' and 'Introduction to Herbal Preparations' have been a great opportunity to consolidate and increase my knowledge in these areas (and, not incidentally, add a lot of great books to the library). They were also very time consuming. In fact, it's surprising to me, in writing up this news report, how much has gotten done, when mostly what I remember about last year is working on the lessons; but now that I have taught each class and have my syllabi, lesson plans and handouts I look forward to refining and improving the classes while not being quite so consumed by them. Among many other discoveries, I'll just mention herb processing, an important aspect of Chinese herbalism but thus far almost unknown in this country. This involves heating herbs with various 'adjuvants' - bran, rice, medicinal clay, brine, vinegar, honey, wine - to alter their energetics, enhance certain actions or diminish side effects, direct the herb to a certain organ, etc. I was fortunate enough to be given access to an unpublished instructional manual, and thus able to learn and teach this to the students and apprentices. I'll be teaching a class in this again this summer at Mountain Gardens

Which leads on to the subject of our involvement in the movement to grow Chinese herbs in America. Last summer I was delighted to host Robert Newman, whom I have been collaborating with for over ten years, but had never actually met, and travel with him and Weiqing to Jean Giblette's High Falls Gardens in NY state for a weekend workshop on the botany of Chinese herbs. It was completely inspiring to see Jean's accomplishments and to visit the biodynamic herb gardens and shop at the nearby Camphill village. Jean's most recent success is landing a large Kellogg Foundation grant to promote the growing of Chinese herbs and the development of a botany curriculum for oriental medicine schools (Daoist Traditions will of course be much involved).

One of Jean's ideas is direct marketing of herbs to practitioners. Mountain Gardens contributed several species to this years 'sample packs' and I hope to offer more in the future. A major problem has always been the difficulty of drying herbs in this humid, off-the grid situation. Last year I helped obtain a grant for a community drier - primarily for shiitake mushrooms, which are being developed as an alternative crop locally, but it will also be available for drying herbs. Or perhaps we'll get that cob heater / drier built in the greenhouse.

Late last year I was honored to be named 'farmer of the year' by the Carolina Farm Stewardship organization, then, two weeks later, 'sustainable farmer of the year' by my county. It's great to know that what I do is recognized and respected, although it brought to mind one of Lieh-tzu's stories:
'I was alarmed by something'
'What was it?'
'I ate at ten inns, and at five they served me first.'
'If that is all, why should you be alarmed?'
'When a man's inner integrity is not firm, something oozes from his body and becomes an aura, which outside him presses on the hearts of others; it makes men honor him more than his elders and betters, and gets him into difficulties...'