About Lillie House

Lillie House is a 1-acre Permaculture Homestead in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Here, we work to live well, care for the earth, care for people, and respect natural limits.

The old rules and "road maps" for life just weren't working for us, in fact, it felt like they were working against us. I'm not sure they actually work for anyone anymore. We're looking for a better, healthier, more joyful way of living, with more freedom and - most importantly - more peace of mind. 

We're finding it with Permaculture, Forest Gardening, community, and "Restoration." A sense of place. Meaningful work. We don't always get it right, but we've come a long, long way. "Two steps forward and one step back" gets you further than never taking that first step. And if you're stylish and clever you can make those steps into a groovy little dance. Maybe get your own internet meme. 

We want Lillie House to be a "model site" for real people with real problems and real goals. Our path needs to be "replicable" to as many people as possible. Permaculture for people, not "super heroes." 

So we need to build our lives on a real, live human scale and budget. No scammy funding schemes. No money from heaven. No slave labor. No "blue sky budgets" or big savings accounts. We weren't funded by a "Kickstarter" campaign or a grant from the Richy Rich Foundation. You won't see any of the "shiny flashy dazzling" over-sized, over-designed, over-complicated "Permaculture" features that sell books and look impressive on tours, but never pay for themselves in the real world. 

If it doesn't pay for itself, we can't afford it. If it doesn't work, it doesn't last. If it ain't for real, it ain't here. 

And each step has to give us LESS WORK, not more, and MORE FREEDOM, not less. We're no longer willing to work ourselves to death over the "big flashy" stuff - that wouldn't be "people care" and it wouldn't be "Permaculture." 

And it has to be fun. Because (as Bill Mollison used to say) "if you're not having fun, you're not doing it right." 

Our Gardens:

The "Home Garden" or "forest garden" is as old as man, probably older, a basic part of the human experience. Some anthropologists are calling it "the oldest human land use" and we're discovering they were a nearly universal adaptation across continents and cultures. 

Our garden is designed to be a beautiful, restorative place, the ultimate home health-food store, our main source of food, medicine and fuel, as well as an important source of income. It's been planned using tools like One Circle Garden to provide a diverse diet, and give us the security of growing a full-year's supply of nutritional and caloric needs. It's a landscape where we feel secure and cared for, where our needs will be met. 

And it's a boon, not a burden. It's been designed to be maintained by a couple people on just an average of 2-4 hours of work a week, instead of a flock of woofers and under-paid interns toiling long hours.  

To accomplish this goal, we've discovered a few very successful patterns:

Planning for Success: This is first on our list because it's the most important advice we ever learned. We didn't just plant things because we liked them or use our instincts about how many. We didn't just pack in as many "goodies" as we could.

We researched, found current best practices, a variety of perspectives, and historical models. And then did the math to "right size" our gardens. Our "swales" are sized to catch the right amount of water, no more, no less. We calculated the amount of fruit and produce we wanted to have and created a plant list to meet those goals. Same with bed space, we've got exactly what we need, and recognize that any more would be a burden. We respected that the "law of diminishing marginal utility" certainly applies to a garden. 

Food Forest Gardens: Notice how nobody ever has to weed or fertilize a natural forest? Food forests are gardens that work with nature, rather than against, and employ plants and other natural allies to do work like weeding, fertilizing, and mulching, so that you don't have to. They grow a very diverse set of plants in many layers that mimic a natural forest. Food forest gardens can be designed to be extremely low maintenance and yet still very productive.  

The Front Yard Jardin de Cure. This is one of the historic traditional "food forest garden" of France. It combines beauty and "neatness" of formal beds with the ease and productivity of "wild plantings." 

Polycultures: Polyculture is an approach of growing many plants together like an ecosystem, as opposed to one crop all alone. We've been experimenting heavily with polycultures including the famous Ianto Evans Polyculture and "guilds" of companion plants that work together like a team. 

Ecological Modeling: We've studied productive wild plant systems in the area and copied their spacing and species distribution. These systems are highly productive with no human interference. We want our garden to work like that. 

Edible Hedgerows: Another ancient form of "forest garden." Ours are designed like some historic models from Europe. 

Espalier, Edible Fence: Fruit trees can be trained to make an edible fence. The trees are more productive, healthier and grow slower so they require less maintenance. 

No-Dig Gardens: Digging or "tilling" the soil destroys soil diversity, fertility and health. It wastes energy. It's also a bummer. Who wants to work that hard? Most of our gardens have never been dug. Those that have were dug only one time. 

Accessible Design: We use a system of permanent paths and "work places" that are "right sized" to maximize productivity and minimize maintenance. Permanent paths mean we never have to dig our no-dig beds, because we're not compacting the soil.  

Redundant Water Wise Systems: We've planned our garden with a multi-layered strategy for being water wise. We've got swales and passive swales, and natural water-collection reservoirs to catch and store water where our plants can use it. We have a few "Hugelkulture beds," though the "jury's still out" on whether they're worth the work. A better approach is an engineered system of mulching and plant spacings to minimize water use. We're building good soils, which hold water naturally. And we've even got things like rain barrels and soaker hoses, but with the other systems, we usually don't end up even putting them out! If you need those complicated systems, you got the design wrong. 

A Diverse Plant Collection: This is one of the keys of garden utility, ease of maintenance, beauty and health. Diversity has been found to increase the health of ecosystems and individual plants, and it works in gardens as much as wild-lands. We're nearing 300 species of useful, edible, medicinal plants. That also enhances OUR health by providing a very diverse set of nutrients and phytochemical. 

An Emerging "Coppice and Standard" lot: Coppice lots are a traditional land use that provides great wildlife habitat, a variety of harvests and wood for crafts and fuel in a way that is not just carbon-neutral, but carbon negative, sequestering more carbon in the earth than is released through burning.

Winter Gardens: Greenhouses and hoophouses maybe necessary, but for most people they are costly, difficult to maintain, and a pain to irrigate and grow in. We're collecting a variety of "greens" that are available even in Michigan's cold climate winter without any protection other than snow cover. Meanwhile, we'll be converting our attached porches into more permanent and easier-to-maintain winter growing space. 

Simple Composting Systems: Nothing expensive. just worm farms, trench composing, sheet composting, mushroom composting, rabbit litter, "chop and drop" composting in place, and a good old fashioned "hot" pile. There are many ways to turn waste into "black gold." The more you use, the easier things will be. The simpler, the better. 

Water Garden Systems. We're just starting to work on these. Aquatic systems are among the most productive. Water Gardens put that fact to work for us. They're purdy, too. 

Our Home:

Lillie House is an 1840s Victorian house on a "less-than one acre" site in Kalamazoo's urban core. 

We focus on a "restoration" rather than "renovation" approach to maintaining our home, because we appreciate the "embodied energy" and evolved functionality and beauty of old homes. We're not convinced that modern "high energy" disposable materials that were "designed for the dump" are somehow "better" than hand-made materials that are almost endlessly maintainable. 

We work with natural materials when possible and "repair instead of replace" durable assets like our steel gutters, antique windows, antique sinks, heritage floors, plaster walls, and so on. 

(Restored and restabilized natural lime plaster.)

We're "formalizing" an informal "energy action plan" that starts with being conscientious and investing in the Highest Return on Investment items first, to save us money and help us pay for more energy investments. Positive feedback loops are even better than Fruit Loops, which are a delicious part of a balanced breakfast. 

Already Lillie House is pretty consistently in the top 10% most energy efficient homes in the city. 

Our Work:

We're a "community-based business" that focuses on products, tools and programs that grow the health, happiness and freedom of our community members by allowing them to "catch and store" life-enhancing energies through good design, and accumulate real wealth in assets like "food forest gardens," "home health-food gardens," edible hedgerows, and efficient home features. We want to help you turn your home and landscape into a great support system to meet your needs, as well as your own personal "dream vacation" resort. 

We also grow food, valuable plants, medicinal herbs, fiber and fuel. We make a variety of products from what we grow and forage. We share our knowledge and experience with design, Permaculture, wildcrafting, restoration and Forest Gardening. We organize events to build community and share knowledge. We work to restore the "gift economy" when we can, by giving freely from a spirit of abundance. 

(Photo courtesy of PJ Chmiel)

We enjoy connecting with people sharing our work, dreams and goals. The more connections we make, the stronger and more resilient we become.

Free Garden Tour with a focus on Designing Polycultures: Sunday the 19th, 3:00

This Sunday we'll be offering a free garden tour with a focus on designing practical polycultures. I'm making up a nice handout with online resources on Polyculture design and a summary of the techniques and strategies I'll be covering and demonstrating. 

We'll be checking out the garden and tasting some plants while we explore current theory and research on interplanting strategies including:

Basic "Root type" polycultures based on the "carrot, onions, lettuce" model. 

Naturally modelled plantings that mimic locally found plant communities.

Time based "advanced polycultures" such as the "Ianto Evans Polyculture." 

Strategies for mixed Annual/Perennial Polycultures 

"Plant Guild" roles: mulch-makers, nitrogen fixers, dynamic accumulators, pollinator plants, ground-covers, nutrient cyclers, fumigators, and insectory plants. 

And current theories in basic forest garden "architecture." 

In our gardens you can see all of these techniques actually in use, to assess how they'd work for you. 

The garden is looking beautiful and we'll have some interesting plants for sale/trade/gift, so if you're interested in starting your own forest garden or learning about Polycultures, then come on out!

To join us, please call 269-350-3407 to RSVP. 

Permaculture Life Design: "Wealth"

(Monarda in our home food forest garden)

As "a system for designing human habitats to meet our needs," Permaculture can be used to improve the function of ANY "structure" we "inhabit," including invisible structures like economies. 

Its basic method is to emulate the processes in nature that make natural systems accumulate life-enhancing energies such as water, fertlility and energy, rather than constantly declining the way most man-made things do. 

(A "Forest garden" modelled after a natural ecosystem, to grow more fertile over time.)

Those same principles can be used to design our home economies so that our families can grow "wealthier" over time naturally and effortlessly. 

Here, I use the word wealth to mean something more than money, which is a poor measure of "wealth" for most people. I've written about what I would consider to be true wealth here: http://lilliehouse.blogspot.com/2014/11/paths-to-alternative-wealth.html 

"Wealth" might mean different things to different people, but since most of us never define what we're actually after, the pursuit of money often leads us astray, getting in the way of accumulating the things that would truly make us feel wealthy. 

(time spent in our "home office" makes me feel wealthy)

But once we know what we're after, a little thoughtful design can help us achieve it. 

One tool from the early Permaculture movement that has been very helpful to us in designing our own home "microeconomy" is the idea of classifying one's assets into three categories:

Degenerative Assets are those which break down and decline quickly, requiring regular upkeep and maintenance. This could include cars, conventional landscaping, cell-phones or poorly contructed houses. These days, many of our consumer goods are actually designed to break faster in order to stave off economic decline. This is called Planned Obsolescence. There's nothing necessarily wrong with these items, but each one we own extracts an ongoing price from us in order to keep it going. If we have more of these than we can "pay for" with our self-reliant lifestyle, then we will need an outside income to keep them going. And If we have too many of these, that price becomes more than we can afford, putting us in a position of where we have to let some of our possessions convert into "chaos" or waste. 

Generative Assets on the other hand, are "durable assets" that help us become producers instead of consumers. Cider mills, garden tools, sewing machines, carpentry equipment all help us create something useful, saving us time and money, and generating value that can help us grow wealthier. Garden plants and kitchen tools help us generate delicious meals.

Procreative Assets are those that can self-replicate, truly growing "wealth." These are usually natural systems. Fruit trees are a procreative asset that both generates value for us in the form of fruit and generates more fruit trees, creating a positive feedback loop in our life. A "food forest" is a procreative asset that meets a wide variety of our needs while generating the plant material for new food forests. But it's important to note that you can have too much of a good thing. Once you have more fruit than you can harvest and more trees than you can tend, these systems can actually create a burden for you. Energy streams that can't be harvested into productivity convert into chaos in our lives, creating weedy food forests, angry neighbors, many fruit pests, etc. 

(A "procreative asset")

One caveat I add to this idea is that these systems are only TRULY "generative" or "procreative" if they function and can be maintained with a POSITIVE return on investment. Any system or possession that costs us more to maintain than we get out of it is just as big a burden as any degenerative asset. Permaculture co-founder Bill Mollison explained this using Permaculture's ethic of "people care," saying that a "solution" or "purchase" that adds to someone's work load rather than decreasing it is not "caring for people" and hence, not Permaculture. 

And a second caveat is that not everything fits neatly into one category. But even if it isn't a perfect system, considering these three asset classes each time we make a purchase helps us put our home economy in order. And it's an entry point for visualizing the "balance" of our purchases. It helps us understand that if we're not careful, we will not "own" our possessions, but become slaves to them, as Thoreau warned. 

This leads us to buy items that are durable and well-made, understanding that each poorly-made item adds to our burden, our upkeep costs and maintenance time. And if we can find a ballance where we have enough procreative and generative assets that they naturally "pay" for the upkeep on our "degenerative" assets, plus produce a small surplus to reinvest, then we have positioned ourselves to grow wealthy and become independent and self-reliant over time in the way an ecosystem does. 

This same thinking can be used to create wealthy neighborhoods, families, blocks, cities and even wealthy countries....

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Growing a Better Life

This morning I ate handfuls of raspberries, mulberries, strawberries and Nanking cherries on my daily walk around the garden. I also stopped to nibble a few bites of mint, some cilantro flowers, and hyssop.

This ancient culinary herb seems to change flavor significantly through the seasons, something our ancestors would have been familiar with as they used it to flavor their meals. 

Since we use good Permaculture design and strategies like heavy mulching, polycultures and self-organizing plant communities, our garden doesn't require much of us, but it gives back a great deal: beauty, diverse nutritionally dense foods, fuel wood, craft materials, medicines, aromatherapy, and a deeper understanding of nature, human systems, and life itself. 

But a Permaculture garden's gifts go beyond one individual or even a family. A few days ago, a man who used to live a few houses down stopped by to say how great our garden looked, and to take a few pictures on his phone. He said that we inspired him to grow edible landscaping at his new place further down the street. Now he wants to have a yard like ours and teach his grandchildren about gardening. Other neighbors yell compliments to us from the road as they pass by. We take pride in knowing that our garden is giving gifts to others in our community. 

But it doesn't stop there either. We understand that when we can meet our needs directly through nature, sustainably harvesting the excess of natural systems, we lessen the burden we place on ecologies and other people. Every carrot we grow ourselves is a carrot that won't have to be grown with degrading agricultural practices, sprayed with chemicals, picked by under-paid and poorly treated workers, shipped 1,200 miles with fossil fuels--the actual US avereage for carrots, refrigerated for weeks with fossil energy, and transported home for more refrigeration. Each step along the way requires mining, the destruction of rain-forest, exploitation of humans around the world, and contributes to climate change, mass extinctions and ecosystem collapse. If I can use a little bit of my leisure time to grow a large amount of my own food, this probably has the most positive impact on the environment, community health and social justice of any single thing I can do. 

We're also happy to know that, while it isn't a "native garden," a Permaculture garden is the ultimate habitat restoration garden for wildlife. Our garden is filled with a large variety of native plants--one native plant landscaper suggested we likely have a greater variety of native plants than most "native gardens" in the city! But not only does our garden produce excellent habitat on site, but far more importantly, in a Permaculture garden every single foot, even those planted with "native plants," is used for productive space. And every foot of garden space used for production inside or near a human settlement means that a much, much larger space out in "the country" doesn't have to be tilled, burned or clear-cut to meet human needs. A garden where we live gets the benefit of constant, easy human interaction making it both very energy efficient and very productive, and flourish while cooperating and sharing with nature. But a farm out in "the boonies" will have to dominate and exclude nature, take more land for the same production, and have to make up for a lack of human-scale energy with fossil fuels, heavy machinery and chemicals. 

At the same time, human settlements make relatively poor wildlife habitat, since they're disjointed, lack the scale for large animals and are inappropriate for the "shy" species that are often the most endangered. So using our home gardens for production means that large, contiguous tracks of high-quality habitat far from human activity can go "back to nature." Our Permaculture garden puts both places to their "highest and best use." 

Who knew that being good could taste delicious?

Lillie House Forest Garden Tour Saturday at 1:00

This Saturday we'll be giving some free tours of our garden, with a discussion on the basics of Forest Gardening. 

It's a nice time of year to see our young forest garden, as the summer flowers have begun their show and the pollinators are taking full advantage. 

If you have questions about starting a forest garden or where to begin, this weekend would be a good time to chat about it. 

We'll also have a few plants for sale/trade, including valerian, blood-veined sorrel, marshmallow, comfrey, bellflowers, bee balm, anise hysop and a few others. If you don't have the cash or anything to trade, bring some empty pots and there might be something you could pot up and take home. 

A forest garden is a "procreative asset," an investment that replicates itself, growing wealth naturally. We take pride in knowing that our forest garden is helping to create other forest gardens, making our whole community wealthier, healthier, and less reliant on an ailing corporate system that poisons both people and nature. 

Here is a beautiful little shady garden area on the north side of our garage and on an east-facing slope. It's loaded with strawberries, mulberries, black raspberries, sunchokes, mushrooms, herbs for cooking, flowers just because, and greens like kale for daily salads. If I only had a few hundred feet of shady yard to garden and limited time to do it in, it would look a lot like this. 

Just throw in a multi-graft paw paw, a shade tolerant and virtually maintenance free fruit tree, and possibly a few more  berries, and it would be just about perfect. 

(Shingiku, "chop suey greens")

If you live west of Kalamazoo, you can also visit Rustling Knapweed Forest Garden in Lawton. We team up with PJ, who manages that garden, to provide educational opportunities and promote forest gardening. 

For more information, visit: www.vankalpermaculture.org/forest-garden-tours

To RSVP for a tour and get directions, call (269) 350-3407. 

Permaculture Jardin de Cure´

The French "Jardin de Cure´" might just be the original "Permaculture garden" of temperate Europe. I believe we have a lot to learn from these old, evolved gardening systems of traditional cultures, so our front yard at Lillie House was deeply inspired by this style of garden. Let me take you on a tour of our "Permaculture Jardin de Cure´" while I share some garden pictures from this morning.  

The "Curate" or "Cure´" was the head parishioner in the French Presbyterian Church and his garden had to be multi-functional and easy to care for. The curate himself would have planned and maintained his garden, with the help of some volunteers from his congregation. So, not only did it provide an important source of fresh fruits and vegetables for the curate and his family, it also had to help provide for the needs of his congregation, and be easy to maintain in the busy curate's free time.  

As the most learned man in his community, he was often called upon to be a healer of physical ailments as well as spiritual ones. So his garden needed to be a true "physic garden," one of the town's most important sources of herbal medicines, such as the beautiful flowers of wild perennial flax above, which--once cooked--can be used like regular flax seeds. The plant material can also be used for a rustic linen. 

And, of course, the curate had to attend to the spiritual needs of his flock in times of crisis, when they were in need of comfort. Soft colors dominated by shades of blue, lavender and white painted a soothing spiritual backdrop. 

And when it was time for celebration, the curate's garden provided the church with a sorce of beautiful cut flowers, again in soft, spiritual colors. Even today, many french flower and rose cultivars in these soft colors bear the names of saints, a testament to their history in the Jardin de Cure´. In fact, curates and their gadens were important in the history of French plant breeding. The "dames rocket" (above right) would have figured as both a vegetable and a flower in the curate's garden. 

And, since this multi-purpose garden had to be both beautiful and easy to care for in the spare time of the curate and his congregation, a polyculture system of formal beds with informal plantings was used to cut down work and keep things tidy. Hidden inside these geometric beds called "parterres," vegetables, medicinal herbs, fruit trees, flowers, and what many today would call "weeds," grew together in a wild profusion similar to the English Cottage Garden, only surrounded with edging of box, or with useful herbs such as thyme or lavender. At Lillie House, our oregano and lavender hedge imitates the low box edging in the exotic formal gardens that the well-educated curate would have seen at gardens like Versailles. Unlike a boxwood hedge, when we trim our edging, it's time for oregano pesto, or Greek potatoes!

And finally, at the end of the day, this edible, medicinal, flower garden had to be a spiritual retreat and meditation sanctuary for the curate. 

It had to be a meditative space of natural beauty, but also of spiritual importance. Formal beds were typically laid out in the form of a cross, with other symbols and spiritual reminders woven throughout. Our secular Permaculture-inspired version takes the shape of an ankh, an ancient symbol of permanence and a fitting symbol of the goals of Permaculture which are spiritually important to us. 

The garden was enclosed by walls, mixed hedges or espalier trees--or a mix of these--to create the feeling of sanctuary, in the manor of Christendom's oldest spiritual gardens the Hortus Conclusus, which is so often seen depicted in medieval art. 

(wikimedia)

This was thought to symbolize the garden of eden or perhaps to even invoke heaven. 

And--just as in Permaculture--water was a mandatory element in the garden, usually located at the center of the cross, in the form of a simple pond or well. 

Today, there's renewed interest in this very old style of multi-functional garden, but it's not for the first time! Back when our house was built, this form of garden became a brief fad in the US, especially for victorian enterance gardens in the "beautiful" style of architecture. While the English Cottage Garden style would have been recommended for "picturesque" homes like the gothic style, the Jardin de Cure could have been the template for our Italianate home. Who knows, perhaps ours is not the first garden of this style to adorn our front yard.

For home Permaculture gardeners looking to invoke some of the social elements of this traditional garden style, here are some patterns from the Jardin de Cure´ that could be helpful:

1. Formal Beds with Informal Plantings. Oregano or Thyme "edging" can help keep things looking neat, while using "messy" looking polycultures that require less maintenance than "tidy" plantings would. Mix up fruits, veggies and flowers together, as in a "forest garden." 

2. Include water. Humans and wildlife are naturally drawn to water. 

3. Create comfortable places to sit for contemplation, with beautiful views. 

4. Make nice paths for a walk, with interesting things to see along the way.  

5. Use spiritually meaningful symbols, these could be symbols of nature, secular humanism, philosophy or religious meaning--Anything you can connect with personally. This will add a layer of depth to your garden and what it has to offer you. 

6. Rely on cool, calming colors like the blues and whites of the Jardin de Cure´. These provide an overall theme for the garden that can still harmonize well with pops of of other colors, such as the reds of roses or the yellows of brassicas gone to flower. 

7. Include gifts (plants, statues, pots...) from friends and family, and your garden will speak to you on a personal level. 

8. Create a feeling of enclosure and privacy with mixed, hedges of fruit and flowering plants. 

9. Plant many aromatic plants! The multi-functional Permaculture garden should appeal to all the senses. 

A few more recommended resources on the Jardin de Cure´:

https://www.frenchgardening.com/aujardin.html?pid=1180631017121740

http://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jardin_de_curé

Or see our article on Post Wild Edible Gardening for more ideas about beautiful edible landscaping design.