Growing Food

Olive Trees along the path


Passion fruit from the farm

So the best part in living on a farm is all the amazing produce. Israel is similar to a Californian climate where you can grow a huge variety of foods. I also must state that Israel is basically where agriculture started thousands of years ago. And those traditions and foods still hold true today.

With permaculture our goal is to grow not just one field or plot of a particular plant. But we create habitats that sustain multiple varieties of plants that naturally grow well together. When working with nature you create cycles of plants that become hardy to the soils and animals in that particular area.

Right now in Israel we are in the month of Adar, which is the beginning of spring. The almond trees have blossomed, it’s the end of the root vegetables and broccoli season and the sage is blooming. We are beginning the spinach and cabbage harvesting now. Israel’s climate affords lots of hardy leafy vegetables throughout the year. So we can grow a variety of lettuces in winter even though the nights are frigid.

At the end of the week Thursday (Shabbat is Friday and Saturday) we decide a weekly schedule of cooking. For each day two people are chosen to prepare breakfast and dinner for our Eco group and another person is chosen for Yom Hava and works with a Shin-shin in preparing lunch for the entire farm, including visitors. So in a typical week I cook once or twice.

Harvesting is a normal part of the maintenance of farm so we are always gathering food. The harvest produce gets divided up between the Israeli’s and the Ecos. This food is substituted with food bought on weekly market trips to Modi’in for staples like peanut butter, rice, beans and flour. But a typical meal includes 65% farm grown food. The farm is vegetarian but we do eat cheese, yogurt, milk, and eggs. All the dairy is goat and is provide to us by a local dairy farmer.

When cooking we try and use what was recently harvested but we are always going out into the plots to add other foods to the meal that are growing nearby. Cooking vegetarian has not been easy for me. As I use a lot of meat/fish and parmesan cheese while cooking. Learning to cook with new spices like Zatar and vegetables that I’m not familiar with has been a challenge but very gratifying. We have a lot of Middle Eastern flavors and Indian spices in our kitchen. The first stir fry I made for my group I mistakenly put a plant in that had an extremely woody stem and it was not so easy to eat. But I’m learning. In fact I made my first challah yesterday and it turned out delicious.

We have a mud oven and cooking in the oven only happens once a week on Friday for Shabbat. Because wood is a scare commodity the oven is lit pretty infrequently. Everything is made from scratch here. And ingredients I’ve always taken for grant it like olive oil and butter are rare. In fact we don’t get butter but on occasion someone will go on a mission and steal it from the kindergartener’s fridge...lol. But overall we eat very well. The food is obviously as fresh as you can get and so tasty. When I leave the farm on the weekends I crave the veggies from here.

My new favorite things to eat in Israel are Zatar spice, tahina, and the meatballs from the Shouk in Jerusalem...yum

My Lessons

I was going to jump straight into food but for my reader’s sake I’ll diverge into my studies after discussing the humanure…lol

So even though this program is specifically oriented to complete a certificate in Permaculture there are many other classes I take. This was one of the specific highlights for me when I was researching this particular program, because I would be completely immersed in a sustainable farm not just sitting in a classroom learning about permaculture. Even though I still have 4 hours a week in Permaculture class there are a lot more classes I am involved in here.

Weekly I have 4 hours of Hebrew lessons (I learned the alphabet last week) and 2 hours of a class called Judaism in the Land, which basically includes everything from learning the Hebrew calendar and growing seasons, Jewish connections to the land, the agriculture laws and rituals relating to the Torah, and Holiday teachings.
To balance out these classroom lessons we also pick two apprenticeships, each one for two months and then we switch. These lessons focus on sustainability in all factors. I chose agriculture as my first one and am thinking mud/stone building as my second. But I’ve got two month to decide on my next one.

There are also sporadic lessons in many different relating fields. We get a lot of visitors that come to stay a few days on the farm. Most of them are highly trained in specific areas and they teach specific workshops and classes to us while here. For example we had someone recently come and teach us about terracing and we created a new terrace outside our big dome. And then there are other sporadic lessons we receive by our instructors or the Shin-shins that live here like Medicinal Herbs, where we learn when and how to harvest plants to make tinctures, dried teas, salves, lotions, and attributes of the plants. Israel is amazing with respect to the amount of wild edible plants. Outside my dome there is everything from nettles, milkthistles, mustard, and mallows growing wild. We take full advantage of their treasures.

And then there are the field trips where we go and observe sustainable practices in other parts of Israel. On Monday we’re leaving on our first field trip to the Negev desert. We will be Kibbutz hopping.


Yigal my Permaculture and Ag Instructor


Seth bringing up some stones


Building a Terrace

The Farm and Living Sustainably

The Big Dome and Kitchen at sunset

At first glance the farm seems very different from an everyday convenient apartment or house. But really it’s very similar. We have bedrooms, a kitchen, bathrooms, and showers. The students in the Eco program, that includes me, share a dome with a roommate. The domes are formed with wooden frames, with a tent like plastic material over them. We have real windows that we can open or replace with screened versions on hot days. Our domes even come with covered stoops at the entry.

Down along the path from our living quarters you come to what we lovingly call the Big Dome. Inside it is much bigger than our personal domes and there are couches, bookshelves, rugs, and a wood-burning stove. This is where we have lots of meetings as well as eating Breakfast and Dinner.

To the right of the Big Dome and up a few stairs is our kitchen and outdoor dish washing sink area. The kitchen is small but bigger than most Manhattan ones. A marble counter top surrounds the stove and sink with lots of shelving underneath for all our food supplies. I think I’ve finally gotten used to the placement of everything in the kitchen to feel really comfortable cooking in there. Opposite the main kitchen entrance there is another door that leads down to our herb garden. It’s not much right now because we are just coming out of winter. But there is mint, oregano, lemongrass, sage, cilantro, and rosemary growing there for the picking and using.

One of the best parts about the farm is that there is food everywhere. Parts of the teachings in permaculture is to stop growing plants in a monoculture environment and have lots of types of plants growing together in one area. So wherever you walk on the farm you will see random plants for the eating. I’m lucky that I already know how to identify most plants so it’s easy for me to grocery shop. But for some of the others students in my program its taking some time. I’ll go more into food/harvesting later, for now I’m going to get back to the farm lay out.

Next to the kitchen are the showers. We have two enclosed showers including a sink and mirror like every typical bathroom. We have hot water too, which is heated by solar panels and stored in a hot water heater near by. Even on cloudy days we can get hot water. Not much…lol..but enough for a quick rinse off. There is also an outdoor shower not to far away. It’s really quite beautiful. The mud sculpting team created an adobe wall and bench that surrounds the shower for privacy but because its located in a grove of trees its really quite secluded. This is definitely my favorite spot. As everyone in my family knows how the beach outdoor showers can be, this is just as fabulous.

And last but not least the toilets. The toilets are on the opposite side of the perimeter from the kitchen and showers because we use the grey water from the showers and kitchen to water the plants in the immediate area. And gravity plays a big part in that system. But really quick I think I should go into what Grey water is. There are two types of wastewater that we create in our everyday usage, Grey water and Black water. Grey water is wastewater but its everything that comes from typical washing activities and Black water is wastewater that is typically from toilets. It is basically sewage. Obviously this cannot be used to water plants. Our Grey water does go through a filtering process before it touches the plants though. That was my chore for this last month was to change out the filters (i.e. straw) to keep the process clean. Also we only use biodegradable soaps on the farm so as not to kill the plants. But back to the toilets and Black water. On the farm there are no sewer lines or septic tanks. The goal of this farm is to be completely sustainable. So we use compost toilets. This thought can sometime make people cringe but I’ve learned in the last few weeks how sanitary and smell-less they can be. We have two restrooms side by side. They are raised up on a platform surrounded by an adobe walls and door. Inside its like most typical toilets with toilet seats, toilet paper, even reading materials. The main difference is that once you are finished instead of flushing you scoop a bowl full of mulch (that is provided inside the bathroom) into the hole below. This stops smells and the whole disgusting liquid effect that port-a-potties get. If it does start to smell that means the pH is out of balance so we burn dried sage and throw some ash down there. Eventually when the hole gets full we have to change it out. Now I know how this sounds, pretty awful, but that too was a part of my chores this month and it wasn’t bad. I was prepared for something totally horrible and disgusting, but it’s not because of this great system they have put together here. Basically the hole you do your business in is really a large round container, it kind of looks like a keg. So when its full we cover what’s inside with a bunch more mulch, stuff some lavender down there (you don’t have to touch any fecal matter), and put the lid on. We roll the container out, unscrew the lid and put some more dried materials over it and let it sit. I haven’t gotten through the entire process but eventually it will be used as some kind of compost. We refer to as Humanure. Now the Health board won’t let it be used on any of the plants we consume. But once the composting as been thoroughly processed (lots of heat, added bacterias, worms, and time) it becomes a completely usable material. They’ve taken the material to labs and had it tested for all kinds of things and there are no traces of sewage materials or harmful bacteria once the process is completely done. I still have qualms about it but once you realize it’s not smelly it makes the process easier to deal with. In an environment and on a land where plant material and compost are so important because the lacks of rain, all resource are used including humanure, which are vitally important to keeping the soil healthy and fertilized.