This is getting exciting. The tides of creativity, faith and collective longing desperately attempting to outpace civilizations not so sublime death wish. Ever been driving and you try to pull over a lane to find that a car got caught in your blind spot? So the guy leans on his horn and you pull back unscathed with only the revelation of the blind spot connecting to every other event that made you realize that you don't have to be stupid to be a knucklehead. We're a distracted bunch of bananas, hanging there wondering if there's gonna be enough rain or sun, or if that nice man is gonna come and trim our leaves and stroke our greenies. Wondering when we'll turn yellow and be loved enough to get eaten. Wondering if that bloody fruit sucking moth will leave us withered and rotting without a chance of getting a shot at life's ultimate adventure, being peeled, chewed, swallowed and riding the wild alimentary canal. Surrounding ourselves with all the trust we can muster, we cope. Tuning in to the signals that resonate true, we maintain hope.  Aware of the noise, we learn to eat it; turn it into modern day mantras, stop the bleating, stabilize the signal. The good part about so much noise is that it becomes hard to miss the signal, once acquired. So the question becomes, are you noise maker or noise eater. There's an easy test to determine which one you are. If, at days end your head swims with what if''s, or how come's or I shoulda's, the noise has won out. If, on the other hand, at days end your breathing is steady and deep, your head is clear and ready to launch, and your day has been one long unbiased observation leading to meaning, you've gobbled yourself some noise. Why is this important? Because signal to noise ratio is Everything. From the tweensiest oscillations of a sperm cell emanate a signal which through some act of magic opens the egg to the possibility of life. From the ancient apprehension of the sounds of planetary rotation was born the pentatonic scale. What if those guys had wives and saber toothed tigers that nagged at them all the time and created enough noise to make them oblivious to the signal. Music might never have come to be. Imagine a life without music. The biochemical signals being sent constantly throughout all organic life forms is the basis of our sanity, health and well being. It is our sense of "connectedness". Our biochemistry has been surrounded by and engulfed in a sea of toxins so comprehensive and for so long,  its small wonder that the ratio of sane to bat shit is growing with a certain exponential rapidity. Its a little like the strategy of modifying a crop to be able to withstand an herbicide capable of killing off not only weeds but itsy bitsy unsuspecting soil organisms, thereby destroying the very soil upon which your life depends and creating a class of superweeds capable of capturing and eating small children and domesticated pets. Somewhere in there, the signal got sidetracked. But polarity is the name of the game when bat shit insane. And the game now is to make noise that sounds just like signal so that the masses will gobgob gobble it up with a grin and proceed to their nearest Walmart,  army recruiting center, favorite fast food chain or 3-d porn mall to take full advantage of the infotainment consumptive paradigm injected constantly into societies psychic playground. Control the signal unt U rUle ze ViRld. The methods of Permaculture tend to keep the signal strong and the noise at a minimum. In a design, the first step is to observe the characteristics of the environment. It's hilly, it's got some timber, it's five acres, there's wildlife, clay loam soils, winds prevail from the north and so on. Simple observations which can then lead to meaning. F'rinstance, you've observed that there are deer trails crossing the property. This opens the door to many possible inquiries into the characteristics of the species, from its origin to its browsing and reproductive habits, to its potential for creating chaos,  its tasty tenderloin and on and on. With that information in hand, the designer can figure out what kind of fencing or plantings will be necessary to protect the property from damage and to create a trap or a blind to harvest deer from time to time, providing food, hide and bone for a variety of uses. One observation, which signals the connections between design strategies and reduces the noise created by a deer "problem". From simple observation comes meaning and from meaning, pathways to solutions manifest. The signal is strengthened and the noise.................what noise? Still battling the onslaught of grasses and vines that overtook our winter here at the Rancho. The feel of dry weather is in the air, but the rain keeps hanging around. Hard to say what "normal" is when it comes to our oscillating weather patterns. Fact is that no matter how much the left brain insists on keeping things orderly and linear like, there's quantum chaos bustin' out everywhere. An amalgam of stable instability and sparse abundance. There's spiders everywhere this spring. Webs spanning the inside dimensions of a segment of chicken wire to spacious poly dimensional crab spider colonies that are to be admired for their tenacity and efficacy and shunned for their intrusiveness, strangely weird looks and web in the face encounters. I'm pretty sure there is some category of fetish minded elite who might enjoy the feeling of them crawling around their skivvies or up their bum, or some gourmand who would drool over the notion of hundreds of them deep fried in krill oil and served over a bed of spicy arugula. Marketing is everything. We got sixty layers in about a month back. Leghorns and Americaunas, 'cause we have too many brown eggs and need to create balance with more white and blue ones. I know, slightly obsessive compulsive. Really has nothing to do with the customers. More like some deep seated need to be in control, to create balance, to wow the Universe with symmetry and attention to detail,  and to help my egg cartons find the peace they so richly deserve. We also got twenty five "broilers". Rock/Cornish crosses which fatten up to five/six pounds in eight weeks. They are breasts that walk, or actually bounce around on thick sapling legs. They have noticeable cleavage and huge feet to support their ungainly plumpness. I actually saw a couple of them lay down to eat, and they're only four and a half weeks old. Word is that they can actually break their legs if they hustle about too much (so no more hacky sack), that they are poor foragers, have a low feed conversion ratio ( two pounds of feed gives you four pounds of bird) and are in danger of having heart attacks later in life if confronted by too much excitement, a mirror or a frying pan. It's looking like raising them ourselves will save us about half to two thirds the cost of buying chicken of that quality and should satisfy our blood lust for some time to come. Nothin' like choppin' heads and pullin' guts to make you feel alive. We're goin' the whole hog and building a plucker. I figured that the old layers are gonna need thinning eventually and if the meat birds work out, we might just add them in to our menu of products. The plucker is basically a tub in a frame that stands about three feet tall, has a rotating plate on the bottom with plucker "fingers" on the bottom plate and sides of the tub. The fingers are about four inches long, tapered and ribbed and fit securely into the holes drilled in the contraption. So what you do is you scald the chicken to loosen the feathers, fire up the motor that spins the rotating "feather" plate and drop the bird on in there. It goes bouncin' around like a busy night at Hooters while you hose the feathers out into a collector beneath. Takes less than a minute and you can do two or three birds at a time. Booya! Let's see, what else? Oh yeah, in the interest of community outreach I thought I'd share on of my favorite techniques for re-acquiring signal when the noise mounts. I have found through some serious investigative protocols that when trauma looms one of my best "go to" therapies is to cup the soundblasters around my ears, place a large chunk of dark chocolate in my mouth, mount the back swing, invert my body fully, let the blood flood my noggin and turn up the volume on Frank Zappa's "Weasels ripped my flesh" while the melting chocolate drips into my throat. This music is so infused with chaotic indifference and dissonant explitives as to make it a purgative, a musical vermifuge removing the parasites that feast on peace of mind. In the pursuit of sustainable agricultural ideals, there is a great deal of satisfaction but not much peace of mind. There is a great deal of feeling Human while strangely out of touch. The constancy of the challenge, the frailty of our grasp; these things compel us onward while holding us back. Its a very humanizing process which at its best brings in a meager living and can as easily grow a crop of heartache as an ear of corn. That's why I'm selling this rock pile and buying into Thailand with a resident visa. Open me a little jazz club a stones throw from the beach and breathe deep the scent of Buddhist mindset mingled with bacon wrapped shrimp and sweet chili sauce. I mean who needs this crap. I'm sixty three fer' chrissake. Just kidding.                                                    Or IS he? The more you show, the more we'll grow. Peace, Jp