Winter At Crenshaw Cru: Chapter 1 - A Permaculture Ecosystem

The Centralas Estate Vineyard - Crenshaw Cru - is a permaculture ecosystem that produces fermentable and edible goodies. We call it a wine garden, but wine is just the highlight. It’s also a home to 5 old hens - named Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, and Willa Cather - 2 cats named Robin of the Hood and Rowan (The Shadow That Cries), and occasionally a hive of wild honey bees, among many other flora and fauna too numerous to mention. Other perennial crops besides grapes include macadamia nuts, Haas avocados, dragon fruit, Eureka lemons, Wonderful pomegranates, prickly pears, Manila mangoes, oranges (Navel and Satsuma Mandarin), apples (Fuji, Anna, Golden Russet), Thai limes (kaffir), artichokes, herbs, papayas (Mexican and Hawaiian) and strawberries. There are vegetable crops in a couple boxes as well as inter-planted in the new backyard vineyard rows - a true polyculture vineyard ecosystem.

Oh, and there are grapes. The front yard vineyard block is going into its fifth leaf this spring. It is 14 Syrah vines, cloned from the Tablas Creek grandmother, which originally came from Chateau de Beaucastel in Chateauneuf-du-Pape, France.

We just planted the back yard vineyard block to 23 vines of Nero D’Avola, in addition to 3 vines of Sangiovese on the cusp of their third leaf, and 2 vines of Pinot Nero (2A) that are mostly decorative, trained over our patio pergola.

Today I spaded into a random spot in the front yard vineyard and found a thick tangle of roots. The soil is rich and dark and alive. The entire front yard block must be one large network of communication and exchange below the soil.

Here’s the farming we employ to make this happen:

We do not till the soil.

It’s what we don’t do that makes this rich ecosystem possible.

We do some things too. Here’s what we do:

We plant and encourage cover crops of many species to grow in the block. From Nasturtium and California Poppy, to Daikon, oats, and peas. This winter we scattered the seeds of about 20 species. Cover crops do many amazing things for an ecosystem, like pull carbon and nitrogen from the air and deliver it underground, providing health for the soil and the air and the things that grow in them (like us).

We also add fertility by shoveling compost around the vines at this time of year.

Here’s how we make compost:

Starting in the fall, we throw stuff (like all of our garden scraps and food scraps, plant and chicken litter) in a pile and wait.

That’s pretty much it.

Since that pile of stuff lies on the ground, worms (red wrigglers) find it and turn it into a dark, nitrogen-rich humus. By late spring the worm population in our compost is at peak levels and they churn a gallon or more of food scraps into compost in under a week. It’s amazing. What the worms don’t eat gets broken down by fungi and bacteria, and the compost becomes a microbial super organism by the fall, as we’ve continually fed it for several months. We stop feeding it in late summer, and start a new pile (inoculated with a shovelful of worm-rich compost from the old pile), so that the worms and microbes and fungi can finish their work completely in the old pile.

Then we use this mature compost to brew compost teas, in which we drench the vines and soil.

Here’s how we make compost tea:

We stir a handful or two of compost & a tablespoon or two of unsulfured molasses into a five gallon bucket of water. (We use tap water, but let it sit in the bucket for about a week before adding the compost to allow it to off-gas the chlorine). Then we drop a bubble stone, or air stone, into the bucket and let it bubble for 24-36 hours. When there’s a frothy foam on the water, the tea is ready.

The main bane of our viticultural efforts in South Los Angeles is Powdery Mildew. PM is Public Enemy #1, and here at the bottom of the LA basin the conditions are perfect for it almost year round.

But while powdery mildew flourishes in the phyllosphere (the above ground part of a plant’s microbiome), it flounders in the rhizosphere (the below ground part of a plant’s microbiome) where it is out-competed by other fungi and bacteria. When we douse the vines (leaves, shoots, trunk) multiple times in compost tea, we are bringing some of the rhizosphere up into the phyllosphere. It adds fertility to the soil, but also acts as a winter-time fungicide against powdery mildew.

Then, after we’ve made numerous batches of compost teas, and doused all the vines multiple times, we use the remaining compost (which is most of it) to activate biochar.

Here’s how we activate biochar:

We stir the mature compost into the crushed biochar and wait.

Here’s how we make biochar:

Build a pile of all the large, woody prunings from vines, trees, brush, etc. around Crenshaw Cru. Light the pile on fire near the top, not at the bottom, and let it burn down. Put out the fire with a hose, a little at a time, as the wood turns to black charcoal and before it turns to white ash. That charcoal is basic biochar.

The tiny crushed pieces of biochar are like empty cities, waiting for trillions of microbes to move in. Mixing them with compost introduces the microbes to their lovely new homes. Biochar and compost build soil carbon, fertility, microbial life, and water holding capacity, as well as buffer soil pH, and balance soil chemistry. This combo has been shown to increase soil productivity significantly.

The winter rains take care of the rest.

The rains soak the biochar-filled compost over the cover crop seeds. Rich nutrients and microbes from the compost trickle down into the soil with the rain, reaching the root zone where the networking and exchanging begins with the vines. The soaked cover crop seeds sprout up through the compost, and begin using sun energy to capture nitrogen and carbon from the air which they use to build roots down into the soil to break up our heavy clay and enrich it with sky minerals.

Our vines love this. They communicate with the other plants in the soil, getting messages about and treats from the environment that is out of their reach. They may get warnings about environmental threats or pests before those threats or pests reach them, giving them time to prepare a defense strategy, or they may be able to exchange some of their carbon for a micronutrient that they need that is not within their immediate grasp.

This system creates health and vitality for the whole community of plants and micro flora and fauna within it, which creates health and vitality in the products of this system.

What are the products of this system? Air, shelter, food, water… and wine. That’s all. Just the stuff we need to live.

The vineyard at its best is not a vineyard, it’s an ecosystem.