wondernut.

Has a nice ring to it, no? Even a reasonable person might find it a little bit yummy, quirky and then some. (could have been dreamed by a child?) Maybe just a touch off. Don't think of an accidental bionic cartoon semi-hero: a little bit hapless, but usually falling down on the right side of things, no. Wonder? I wonder. Big wonder: awe. Smaller: uncertainty, but the good kind. I do wonder what a person might think if I use the name wondernut for a farm? A farm in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. A place almost forever seasonally settled. Above the plains of almonds being grown to satisfy the demands of a growing Chinese middle class, but below the unimaginable seas of granite, granite that just this season formed a fortuitous firebreak beyond what man could or should ever construct, and just below the Nevada too. Where gold rush Chinese labor piled rocks and proved inhumanity alone could not afford to extract the sparse lusted resource. Where the grizzly met the black bear. Where John Muir learned his folly and found his fight. I wonder how all those events above and below this valley will play out. I think I've found a nice place to sit and wonder about all kinds of things. This historic ranch and carriage station was called spring gulch (neighbors got that name). A tiny watershed in a huge one. I wonder if my funny little arrangement might cough up a few odd chances to answer that one life question just a little bit differently. I wonder if the whole big mechanism can be tinkered and tweaked and fitted out just right so as to churn out sensitive, beautiful, wholesome, creative tidbits, slathered in biscuits and pear butter / a cacophonous sideshow to a regular conversation. Food. Neighbors. Waste. Community. Love. Nurture. Humanity. Compassion. Unexpected bedfellows. I wonder. Maybe I too could be a wondernut. I do know one thing, everything is just a little bit stinky sometimes.

wondernut farm: ground up, forever off grid but never autonomous: turkeys pigs goats humans methane grass fertility milk soil cheese grit water birth death compost: interdependence: proof of concept, however you slice it: heartfelt: cowboy science: experimental farm: systems thinking: details as big as universes: better illustrated than explained (but no time for that quite yet).

The place I'm building this wonder-nut is smack dab in the historical center of a thousand acre ranch, with a barn to prove it. The accompanying house is across the street with a spring in the basement and lovely and generous neighbors living inside of it. I wonder how long that street's been there. Which came first? Next ranch over is Priest Station, at the top of the Priest grade (no coincidence), where now the harnessed waters of the mighty Tuolumne River plummet for their second round of power generation and then storage in the Don Pedro Reservoir with its house boats and bikinis to be distributed to the aforementioned almond growers and beyond to the city of San Francisco, where it is ultimately consumed as some of the highest quality drinking water of any city in the world. Big Oak Flat, CA. The population sign is misprinted, four digits, should be three. Any guesses? Tie-dye jerky. Commemorative fire t-shirts while they last. Thank every higher power ever to exist that a truck sells $1 tacos in the parking lot of the hardware store. People speed through town for the postcard mountains when fire or snow or government pissing matches don't spoil the day, but wondernut is altogether sleepier.

In the pastures surrounding the barn, the turkeys and sheep and sometimes goats (who might also be enjoying their days in the oak-y woodlands) will roam, not quite free, you see, but in quickly shifting plenty to the best of my ability. We animals sure do like to eat. I'm eager for the collection of the silly turkeys' night droppings, eager to scoop them into a small methane biodigester (which will daily be fed a steady diet of turkey droppings and liquid-y food waste as well as a few gallons precious water). The products of this sometimes temperamental yet cultured farm-beast are methane cooking gas and nutrient dense liquid fertilizer. The cooking gas will be used to cook foods for us or sometimes the piggies (who will be living on the shores of my seasonal pond, hoping with their cloven little toes to plug all the unseen leaks and make the pond a place year round), and the liquid effluent will be used for nutrient solution to grow green fodder for the sheep and goats indoors to supplement their pasture and for pigs to supplement the products of my and their combined scrounge/forage. Any of that warm, viscous, earthy, greenish brown, pathogen free liquid gold that is left will be available to supplement the trees and gardens and when possible, the pasture grasses.

This inter-play will form the heart of the wonder-nut of wondernut farm and the mechanization of the system helps me keep my footprint small while maximizing my limited natural resources. The combination of water scarcity and components of an intact natural ecology playing out on my steep land oblige me to be judicious. The way I see it, if I can keep the bears and lions and coyotes and bobcats and dogs off of everybody, all I'll need to do is figure out the right ratios of people to pigs to turkeys to goats to sheep to dogs to donkeys to llamas to savannah to woodland. Something tells me that things may turn out unexpectedly.

(and who can afford good farmland anyway these days?)