I'm extremely proud to announce that we're running this beautiful program again this year, which we created with our dear friend, student, teacher, and inspiration, Hanna Read of Art of Health Massage. This year, we even have a few new tricks and ideas in store!
When you apply good Permaculture design to the garden, you get a garden that nurtures you back holistically, that's easier, makes sense in your life, and also cares for the world around you.
So what we wanted to find out was: What do you get when you apply that same design process to home herbalism?
The answer: This program, a course of learning adventures to build knowledge, build your own valuable home apothecary, start a collection of medicinal plants that work for your own situation, and establish a real meaningingful practice of things you will actually USE.
Adventures? Each interactive class is organized around a series of of them. Every session, we'll go foraging for the best locally-available herbs, do a tea tastings, learn about seasonal herb-gardening in our diverse herb garden, and create some herbal remedies, which you'll take home.
Swag? Of course! In Permaculture terms, our goal is always to go beyond education to help you invest in "regenerative assets," actual items of value. In this program, you'll take home seeds from many medicinal species (when you need to plant them,) medicinal plants, and remedies including herbal teas, oils, vinegars, salves, bitters, recpies, and even our own herb-infused lotion we're very proud of.
(Well, *cool apothecary cabinet not included)
Each class will contain a component on research-based plant knowledge, foraging, gardening, sourcing, and processing. We'll start with strong basic foundations, break down the material into accessible chunks, and build up over time, with each class building on what we learned the previous session. For example, over the course we'll dry herbs that will go into an oil, that we'll use for a salve, that we'll use to make a lotion, so you'll practice the basic skills that build up to more advanced processing!
Here's a basic schedule of our curriculum, including notes on he processing topics, which leads you through what we consider the most common and important uses:
May: Introduction, Foundations and Spring Cleaning (Tonics, pestos, drying, teas, infusions and decoctions.)
June: "Let food by thy medicine." Cooking with herbs, oils, vinegars, bitters, foraged superfoods.
July: Wounds and Healing: Electuaries, salves, poultices, etc.
August: Skin, hair, beauty. Balms, butters, creams, lotions, etc.
Sept: Winter wellness. Fermenting, more tincturing.
And of course, the whole adventure takes place in our garden, with hundres of species of plants, inspired by the medieval Jardin de Cure, a traditional form of holistic herb garden or physic garden, which we think is a pretty cool place to learn about herbalism.
"The opposite of a bad idea is rarely a good idea, it's usually just another bad idea."
In America's frantic and polarized culture, this axiom is one of my favorite thinking tools. It's an oldie-but-goodie that's being re-popularized by John Michael Greer.
Lately, I've been sharing a lot of negative-sounding research and perspectives on the current "profitable farming" craze, but it's NOT that I want to discourage people.
I want people to succeed gloriously in creating beautiful, rich lives with greater connection to the land - living WITH the land, not OFF it like some beast of burden. And I think that goal is completely attainable.
(And here are some reasons smart folks are turning to the land for a livelihood)
Folks feeling trapped in the out of control dumpster fire of modern American worklife often want to head straight into hardcore homesteading or farming, get some acreage, a managerie of animals, and simultaneously start market farming. I see this all the time. Several popular "farming business models" even promote themselves as ways to learn about farming while making a living do it. (That should be a warning sign in itself.)
Out of the fire and into the fryer. This is NEVER a good idea. Some may survive the heat, but that doesn't mean it was a good idea. Why not just get out of the fire?
If you've looked into farming at all, you've heard the stories and advice of those Regenerative Ag gurus who bought acreage, took on massive debt, invested in thousands of trees with a 90% attrition rate, started experimenting on livestock, lived in hovels with dirt floors and tarp roofs for 20 years until farm insurance speculators drove up their land prices enough that Trulia told them they were suddenly millionaires. Their advice? Just do what they did! Easy! Or perhaps you're more inspired by the intrepid enrepreneur veg-farm start-ups that managed to pull "$150k!!!" (fine print: that's gross, net is minimum wage) after staving off bankruptcy for 3 years by charging super-premium prices in upscale markets with no mortgages and lots of free money and labor. They SURVIVED! So now they cash-flow big money each year selling "profitable farming" workshops!
But just because they survived wandering blindfolded through the field of pit-traps they set for themselves, doesn't mean blindfolds and pit-traps are good investments.
Everyone knows most new businesses fail, and the numbers for farm businesses are absolutely the worst of the worst.
We look to the famous farmers and Permie celebs on magazine covers that "survived" for advice, when - because the biggest problem is high attrition rates for new farms - when we SHOULD be looking at the ones that failed. This is called survivorship bias. Another great thought tool every farm entrepreneur should be familar with:. https://youarenotsosmart.com/2013/05/23/survivorship-bias/
Finally, another great thought tool from the world of poker: if you're at the table and you don't know who the mark is, you're the mark.... (the one who's going to lose.)
So here's the thing everyone's keeping a secret: Farming is the most direct interaction with the market you can have. Sorry, but it always has been, always will be. It's what you'll read in farming briefs from the 1910s or 1890s, all the way back to medieval farming manuals! Or watch the BBC "Historic Farm" series for the cliff-notes version. Permaculture creator Bill Mollison talked about this stuff ALL THE TIME. It's all about supply/demand, market forces and buying low, selling high.
(That's a whole chicken, cleaned, frozen, packed, shipped, prepped, cooked, packaged, and kept heated for $2. You gonna be profitable competing with that in your backyard?)
Right now, land prices are super high. Cattle prices are very high. Hog prices are high. Prices on heirloom poultry are super stupid freaking high. But market prices on beef, milk, pork, eggs and fryers are kept ridiculously, artificially stupid low (see graph for example.) You can literally buy a whole chicken, already cooked and prepared at Walmart for $2. THAT'S LIKE A DOLLAR CHICKEN!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Nursery stock is stupid cheap, but upscale vendors are reselling literally the same stock for a 4000% mark-up to would-be farmers financing with Ag loans. Vegetable prices are just plain silly and meanwhile there's a growing glut of vegetable farmers competing for a customer base that research indicates is currently declining. Local farmers markets are consolidating in most markets into super-large events with tons of competition. New farmers think they can undercut the competition, but in the studies I've seen, the veg farmers making money are ones able to charge 4-10 TIMES above market rates.
(Dead on economic analysis from Revolutionpig.com. A hog has 1/4 the buying power it had in 1960)
Now I cannot fathom sustaining chickens that cost HALF as much as a 16 oz bottle of water forever into the future.... But what IS highly profitable right now is "profitable farming" classes, especially online ones. I call this "new digital farming," and it ain't all bad. (Others have started calling it "Youtube Farming.") Most farmers will need some way to decouple their income from the productivity of their land if they don't want to end up exploiting their land. But given how silly the promises have become ("learn to be a millionaire off an acre!" is a literal quote from one ad going around) and expensive they've become ($1,500 - $4000!) I think even "profitable farming" classes have reached their peak. Given the spending power of your average farmer, I'd say this market looks worse than blood from turnips.
And I don't know any of those gurus who will tell you those most important "secrets" (i.e. 101 level farming basics) I just told you in that paragraph above. Why would they let the air out of their own bubble? In fact, some will be mad that I did. And for FREE even! But if we're not careful, when that profitable farming bubble pops, it's going to blow up a lot of really valuable Permaculture, local food, and sustainability initiatives with it.
Anyway, none of this means you can't actually farm profitably or live with the land. But it does mean you have to be clever. How are you planning to beat the curve? How will your designs support that plan?
If Ag briefs show you can make $30k off a 1,000 hog herd if you can demand top prices, and you're planning on a dozen hogs being your main Ag product for the first 10 years, you're going to end up scrambling to pay off your $100k of "regenerative ag" infrastructure. Look at studies on time requirements for various farm tasks: unless you got some kind of magic system, those hogs are just going to cost you more time to care for than they'll save you in "work," no matter what your guru says....
Careful Permaculture design can help you make war on costs and meet your income goals, but only if you have clear goals and a detailed business plan to begin with. Many new Permie business plans only ever get as far as: "Buy farm, become Sepp Holzer, make BANK on farm tours and classes."
But more importantly, despite what some of the famous gurus are selling, you don't have to farm to "do Permaculture." Although you're literally not allowed to share this radical secret knowledge on the Permies forum, Permaculture has nothing to do with farming. It has to do with designing your landscape and life to better meet your needs.
So why do you really want to homestead or farm? Is it:
To have a simpler but richer lifestyle?
To reconnect with nature and natural rhythms?
Because you love being around and caring for animals?
To find right livelihood?
To make a living OFF the land by exploiting the earth, animals and human laborers?
Or would you rather live WITH the land, in cooperation with your ecosystem and community?
Because you want to raise your family around these things?
Because you want to take control of your family's food and health?
Because you want your children to be reslient, healthy and know how to grow their own food?
Because you want to fight ecological collapse and climate change while helping your community?
Because you want to prepare for the uncertain and dangerous future we appear to be creating for ourselves?
Because you want to save your family farmstead?
Because you want to help feed your community?
Because you want to learn about farming?
Because you have some notions about "self sufficiency?"
Because you want to live some "farming lifestyle" that is probably just a total myth?
You can design your life to accumulate all these things, and have a higher positive social, economic and ecological impact, without farming. In fact, it's highly likely farming would only get in your way and hold you back. Ask: Is it possible that our preconceived notions (or the notions sold to us by digital farmers and University Extension services) about farming and homesteading are just a blindfold?
What do I really want? How can I design my life to accumulate what I really want? Answering these questions and daring to take off the blindfold, that is the "REAL" Permaculture.
You want to LEARN JUST ONE WEIRD TRICK that will have a guaranteed positive effect on a huge range of features including:
Farm and garden productivity and profitability
Reduced irrigation requirements
Reduce cost of fencing and livestock management and feeding
Home and garden security
Improved livability and reduced home heating and cooling costs
Reduced pest and disease pressures
Increased pollinators, native flora and fauna,
Increased soil health and fertility,
Increased water health,
Increased biodiversity and overal ecosystem health
Fight climate change by sequestering a whole lot of carbon
And provide more food for less work than just about any thing else you can do?
Then here's your word for the day: "hedgerows."
(Schematic for a typical hedgerow in Normandy, France.)
Hedgerows, or living fences and boundaries have been planted by humans for at least 6,000 years (Mueller, European Field Boundaries) to cheaply and easily provide a long, long list of services and simplify landscape management.
Across climates, including in the tropics most researchers are stressing the importance of these "anthropogenic" systems to the health of ecosystems, with research domonstrating their value to wildlife, their ability to increase biodiversity, bolster native bird and invertebrate populations, act as a buffer from agricultural pollution, clean water, recharge aquifers, mitigate soil loss and erosion, sequester carbon, and so on.
Across Europe and Asia, in cultures where hedgerows were common landscape feature , they are now being recognized for their value, and cherished for their associated cultural traditions and character within the landscape. In many countries, such as the UK or Japan, they are associated with culinary traditions, are considered an important part of the sense of place, such as the "bocage" landscapes of France, or have long-standing spiritual symbolism or religious and cultural traditions associated with them.
Even in North America, where we culturally lack the deep appreciation for hedgerows, bocage, and "mosaic landscapes," and environmentalism is more influenced by the mythology and assumptions about a wide-open American "wilderness" untouched by humans (despite the large native population), Universities widely reinforce the high value of hedgerows and windbreaks for ecosystem health and agricultural productivity, and decry the loss of these features due to poor economic choices and poor understanding of food safety practices, as a tragedy.
And while some agricultural authorities working under Food Safety and Modernization Act regulations superstitiously eye hedgerows with suspicion (or suggest that removing some hedgerows might be a "balanced approach) research continues to show that hedgerows do NOT pose a risk for contaminating food, and actually reduce risk while removal and "mitigation" efforts such as tilling around hedgerows may actually increase risk.
But many studies have show that the improvements to ecosystem health from restoring hedgerows do carry benefits to humans in farming, gardening, home or other productive landscapes, including reduction in pests, and increase in pollination.
In addition to a positive effect ecosystems, hedgerows can have more direct benefits and yields to humans depending upon their design, including firewood, building materials, reduced irrigation, increase soil fertility, free fertilizer, improved soil carbon, reduced soil loss, garden stakes and trellises, tool handles, better plant growth from shelter, and of course, foods and medicines. In most places where hedgerows exist, they have long been seen as an important source of both.
Designing an Edible Hedgerow or Tapestry Hedge
While one can use similar techniques for broad-scale windbreaks or livestock enclosures by making appropriate adaptations, this article will focuss on the small-scale edible hedgerow or tapestry hedge, based off of European designs and traditions.
It was a couple of our favorite foraging spots which inspired our desire to have an edible fence. One in particular, was a naturally-occuring hedgerow that produced a large variety and quantity of fruits, nuts and vegetables throughout the season, all with little to no annual maintenance from humans.
Compared to our hard work as guest farm laborers, the high rewards and low maintenance of our favorite hedgerow seemed like a great idea, and we decided to "take it home" with us.
But when we began looking into expert recommendations on how to grow an edible hedge in the US, we were surprised to see everyone advocating against the species and spacings that was common to our favorite foraging spots.
Was mother nature growing these natural food forests all wrong, as the experts suggested?
Traditional Spacings: Tight!
However, when we looked into resources on traditional hedge culture, species and techniques in other countries, we found systems that looked very much like what was occuring naturally at our favorite high-productivity, low-maintenance spots. (Mueller, European Field Boundaries Volumes 1 &2, etc.)
While modern US recommendations look very different in terms of species selection, and management, the biggest difference between traditional hedge, hedgerow and windbreak technologies, and modern recommendations (at least in the US) is in spacings. Most common recommendations I can find from US sources recommend planting at spacings where crowns just intermix or touch at maturity (perhaps 7-10' centers for many shrub species, with many suggesting 5' was too tight) whereas traditional forms typically space plants at 1- 2 1/2'.
While these seem very close to a gardener, these spacings approximate what one commonly sees occuring in natural thickets in many biomes, including our favorite foraging locations.
But, despite the expert recommendations, these tight naturalistic plantings found in traditional hedgery, which have proven their effectiveness in experiments over millennia, have become the cutting edge of scientific forestry (as well as many Permaculture circles) throughout the world, since the 1980s when a Japanese forester named Akira Miyawaki took notice of the way Nature grows forests.
It's no coincidence that this evolved technology of hedgerows closely resembles the cutting edge reforestation program referred to as the Miyawaki technique. Miyawaki was a forester interested in regrowing healthy forests in Japan for purpose of maintaining habitat, controlling erosion, sequestering carbon and solving other problems through the ecosystem services, who noticed that the plant spacings and communities used in "conventional" forestry practice looked nothing at all like the types of spacings and communities that would occur during natural reforestation, and that the conventional approach often performed poorly in comparison to the way nature solved this same problem. He hypothesized that the conventional recommendations were tested and developed to optimize commercial yield in various ways, not to optimize fast, easy cost-effective establishment of healthy forest. Basing his approach off of the observation of naturally-occuring rapid reforestation, he developed a system of using seed from locally-adapted, free specimens, with intermixed stages of succession, at very tight plantings, and he found that nature was solving the problem the right way. Across many climates and ecosystem types, Miyawaki's technique has been replicated and found to far out-perform conventional practice, with far less cost and fewer destructive chemical inputs.
Indeed, some US sources appear to criticize Miyawaki's methods as inappropriate to North America's idealized "natural landscapes," because they do not leave enough room for our most important North American "nature area" keystone species: tax dollars, corporate petrochemicals, herbicides, and heavy machinery.
For some, it's counter-intuitive, but research has found that even on spare soils in dry climates with a risk of desertification, the tight plantings of the Miyawaki technique lead to rapid establishment with little after-planting care, even where conventional techniques failed with continued Intervention!
This goes well with current ecological theory and research, which has found that while we previously believed that competition between plants would impair growth and establishment, in such tight, naturalistic plantings cooperation out-weighs competition and gives the individuals an advantage compared to situations with unnaturally wide plant spacings.
(Integrated Hedgerow design by Bill Mollison, for Semi-tropical climate)
Moreover, with rapid, dense growth, we humans can begin to reap the rewards of ecosystem services - windbreak, enhanced microclimates, erosion-prevention, water harvest, buffering, wildlife habitat, biodiversity and food (under tight plantings most species will bare "precociously" at an early age) - in a very short order, rather than struggling with establishment for 15 years for a wind-break to finally serve its purpose. With all this, it's no wonder that cutting-edge Permaculture designers like Geoff Lawton have begun to implement Miyawki's research for such applications as forest gardens, ally cropping and, of course, hedgerows.
As a very rough guideline, my recommendation for a hedge where production is the main goal is to plant into a 10' wide strip of at least 30' of length (to have much room for diversity) with larger woody perennials at 2'-3', and with smaller woody shrubs and herbaceous perennials filling in the gaps to create approximately 1' spacings. I typically don't plant anything direcly between woody perennials, except perhaps for short-term crops like Jerusalem artichokes, which can provide a big yield in early years, ensure a complete hedge effect in the first season, provide ample biomass for mulch, and then die back as woody perennials establish. For best results, very plants by height, and species, planting main species such as hazelnuts at standard spacings, and filling in the gaps with smaller species. For larger hedgerows and windbreaks, I recommend multiple rows of woody perennials, but still at tight plantings. For hedges where security or animal enclosure is the main goal, I recommend 1' spacings, with a high percentage of thorny species such as hawthorn, blackthorn, or sea buckthorn.
Permaculture Design Parameters:
With hedgerows being so useful, it's no wonder that many of Mollison's early designs included hedges, shelterbelts, sun-traps and windbreaks. Permaculture 2 is filled with whole sections on these features.
In addition to siting the hedgerow to provide as many benefits as possible, one should consider mechanisms to insure adequate water and appropriate drainage. Hedgerows are excellent features on swales or micro-swales. Net and pan design can be used to make watering easy and help plantings be self-watering. We used a system of net and pan along with trench composing swales to make sure that water would flow down our hedgerow, providing adequate water to our young trees during establishment while also keeping water from completely filling planting holes on our very compacted soils with extremely poor drainage. This can be seen in some of the establishment shots in our Hedgerow video. Integration with keyhole gardens and "edible border gardens" are an excellent idea, and common in the English and French gardening traditions.
Species selection for Temperate regions
For our main woody perennials, we'll need plants that share a few major charactaristics:
1. They can thrive in tight, wild plantings.
2. They are disease and pest resistant.
3. They take well to coppicing, or hard pruning techniques where they are periodically cut back to the ground.
Traditional hedge management simplifies pruning and maintains health and productivity.
Major species will make up 50-60% of the multi-purpose edible hedge, and include hazelnut, hawthorn, blackthorn or bullaces, sea buckthorn or autumn olive if it is not invasive in your region. Note that European wild plums take to coppicing well, but according to USDA research American species of wild plums do not. Also note that there are some American species of hawthorns that take well to coppicing and are high quality edible fruits, which far surpass the European species. To maximize productivity, these major species should be spaced at essentially orchard spacings, approx 12-15' depending.
Support species should fill in the gaps between, still alternating heights when possible. My recommendations for these include: Asian pears, wild pears, rugosa roses, goumi, elderberry, medlar, currants, and brambles. Note that I do not include apples, European pears, or other common culinary fruits, as they are unlikely to be healthy and productive in such conditions. Occasionally I encounter an instance which excepts this rule, but in most cases, I would not expect them to do well in an edible hedge, and are more appropriate to other growing systems.
Finally, a great deal of additional plants can add to the productivity and biodiversity of the edible hedge, including:
For more information, ideas, and resources on hedgerow culture, visit our previous article on hedgerows
Resources
NOTE: in the following list, care should be taken to ensure that species are not invasive to your region, are appropriate to your specific sites and soils, and appropriate to "coppicing."
"I'm not interested in what you do in your garden. You can read any one of 1,000 books on the topic. What I want to talk about is where you're banking your money, and how you're spending it."
Bill Mollison, the Founder of Permaculture
As a system of design, Permaculture can be applied to almost every aspect of our lives, including how we structure our finances and fund our endeavors. It's worth noting that far less than half of the Permaculture Designer's Manual is about growing food. And for me and Kim, it is the materials on Social Permaculture design, money, assets, investing and funding that have been the most profound and transformational!
Hardly a week goes by that we don't discuss these tools and put them to use. Ironically, it has been these tools for MONEY and FINANCE that have actually had the largest impact on how we garden, farm and grow food! That's right, it's the materials on money which have come to completely define our whole approach to gardening and managing our landscape, by helping us cut right to the core of what gardening activities are TRULY valuable to us, and which are just a waste of our time, energy and money.
Unfortunately, since Permaculture is "revolution disguised as gardening," most people enter through the garden gate, as we often say, and many never learn or engage with these most impactful and transformative applications of Permaculture design.
And from what I've seen, too many aspiring Permaculturists end up discouraged or unhappy with their path, because they've never found a Permaculture which was truly VALUABLE to them, which truly allows them to obtain a yield that funds their dreams.
I think that's why my writing, talks and workshops on Permaculture and Money have consistently had such a spectacular response. When I do this workshop, people tell me it's changed their lives. I'm not surprised, this is the material that really changed OUR lives, too.
So, here it is. Or at least, an introduction. This isn't a normal blog post or article, it's a reduced FREE blog version of my introduction workshop on Money and Permaculture. This is for people who really want to take their Permaculture to the next level, those looking to make their Permaculture business or farm into a real livelihood, or people who are looking for a way to join me in being full-time Permaculture activists BY creating a truly beautiful and rewarding life.
This workshop will probably take a commitment of at least a couple of hours, but it doesn't have to be done all at once. But if you take it seriously, I think this material for applying Permaculture to finance has the chance to transform your life, livelihood and perhaps the way you think about money, work and business. It has had that effect on us, and on our students and community members who've done this same work.
So, if you're ready and interested, let's get started:
Our first step is to dream. To think deeply about what it is that we want. How else will we know how to get it? Take some time to brainstorm, vision and mind map out the conditions and energies you want to have in your life. Some people may find it helpful to start a "Permaculture Vision Board," using a tool like Pintrest.
Our second introduction step is to start thinking about our money as our life energy. This is something you might want to save until after completing the other steps. Then you can come back and go deeper by completing this step, as you review the others. For many, it's extremely helpful to start looking at how we've been spending our life energy and more importantly, whether it's taking us where we want to go. For the purpose of this expercise, it might be helpful just to look over our recent expenditures on our bank and credit card online statements. These days, we have some fantastic tools for keeping track of where we're putting our life energy. For a more in-depth exploration, I recommend the book Your Money or your Life, by Joe Domeniguez and Vicki Robin.
In the next lesson, we'll begin to OBSERVE the basic situation most of us feel trapped into, so that we can formulate an escape plan.
This step is optional, but many find it helpful. Sketch a diagram of your own financial life. What inputs do you have? What are you spending your life energy on the "outputs" side?
For the next step, let's change the way we think about that "input" side of the equation. We're way richer than we think we are. Brainstorm a list of forms of capital available to you.
Now we're to the really powerful material, where we put the creative power of generative assets and natural systems to work for us. Brainstorm a list of regenerative assets that support you in getting where you want to go. Look back at your "vision." What kinds of regenerative assets will get you what you want? Which are in line with your passions, informational and experiential capital? Which give you "windhorse?" This is the most important part of our workshop.
Now, we have a life design that looks much more like a negatropic natural system. Return to your sketch and revise what your personal economy looks like. What forms of capital do you have to invest? What kind of regenerative assets will you catch and store them in? Which will you prioritize?
With that as a start, we can go way deeper into designing our regenerative assets, investments, and catching and storing our various forms of capital into regenerative assets. How do we capture our social capital into regenerative organizations? Which regenerative investments do we start with? Which ones will stack together well? Which investments are more valuable than others? But this at least gives us a framework to begin applying design to these vital support systems.
For more ideas and information, check out our links on Social Permaculture at the top of this page, and look out for our workshops on Permaculture and Money or Life Design. We may soon offer a full workshop online if there's enough interest. And if you want to go even deeper, I'd love to help you design your own regenerative life and livelihood, and choose wise ways to invest your life energy.
"You can solve all the world's problems in a garden."
- Geoff Lawton, The Permaculture Research Institute
RELATED VIDEO: Permaculture ideas for positive direct action!
Hot enough for ya? If not, just wait: According to NASA 2014, 2015, and 2016 were each consecutively the hottest years on record globally, and 2017 was the hottest year on record without an El Nino, coming in second after 2016. Already, 2018 is looking like it will be a contender.
This next couple of paragraphs are the bummer part, so first: LOOK! A BUNNY!
Of course, it would be nice if heat was the only problem. But no, the real problems caused by climate change will be ecosystem collapse, breakdown of the farming and food systems, increased disease and human health impacts, larger storms, more wildfires, potentially increased earthquakes and volcanic activity from ice melts, sea-level rise, refugee migrations caused by famine, drought, and flooding, and a whole host of secondary and tertiary affects that will be felt first and most profoundly by the globally disadvantaged. And, as researchers get a better picture of what our climate future will look like, they're increasingly predicting the most dire scenarios, unless bold dramatic action is taken immediately. Many researchers are now talking seriously of predictions of dire civilization-shaking consequences as early as 2030.
But for those of us who garden, we don't need NASA to tell us climate change is in full swing. In my biome of S.W. Michigan, an unusually brutal winter of temperature fluctuations between hot and cold left plants and ecologies reeling, then record flooding, followed by Spring starting a month late, and then going straight into more 90 degree days here than we typically average in a whole summer - and it's not yet June! Meanwhile, gardening and farming fora are filled with posts about increased pest problems, and scientific journals and extensions are noting climate-related spread of new pests each season. Others are widely reporting plagues of mosquitos and ticks. While it's hard to directly blame the whole of this on climate change, all of this is exactly the sort of thing predicted to result from climate change.
Meanwhile, political solutions don't seem forthcoming. The best chance we have is the Paris accord, which doesn't remotely go far enough to prevent the worst-case scenarios from still occurring, and places what even this environmentalist has to acknowledge are unrealistic and likely impossible burdens on the US.
However, there is good news. We each have the potential to respond in a way that is powerful and life-enhancing.
And there is still hope - if we stop waiting for politicians and start taking direct action.
While many poo poo the possibility of direct action, hoping instead to channel energy into their political candidate or cause, we know a few things for certain:
1. The consumer economy is driving the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.
2. When the consumer economy falters, greenhouse gasses go down.
And 3, as "industry murdering" Millennials have proven time and time again, consumption choices are powerful and can have a direct effect on stunting and crashing corporations and industries.
And to the extent that it is itself sustainable, and it effects our spending and the spending of others, what we do in the garden can be a truly powerful, multi-pronged way to meaningfully address climate change.
As a mode of climate resistance, gardening offers two main benefits:
Resistance & Resilience
First, a garden offers us a meaningful way to act against climate change and the host of other negatives associated with "public/private" fascism. We'll start by talking about the mechanisms, then we'll get into the methods we can each use to make our home gardens, farms and public landscapes more effective tools in fighting climate change!
Resistance
1. Starve the beast. As stated above, the 1 million articles about Millenials killing industries proves that our consumer choices DO have a powerful impact. And Permaculture co-founder David Holmgren dug into the numbers to demonstrate that it is indeed possible to mitigate or even reverse climate change via consumption changes alone. But let's be clear, not every garden is a climate-fighting endeavor. Some gardens are demonstrably worse than driving a Hummer! The change we need to make to be effective is to replace consumption of corporate food and materials with those grown sustainably closer to home.
2. Reduce, reuse recycle. These are still powerful modes of reducing consumption and thus greenhouse gas emissions. Gardens give us a chance to do all three, through growing food, providing recreation at home, repurposing household items into garden-wares, and mulching and composting.
3. Protect wildlife habitat and biodiversity. One of the biggest problems with climate change is that it will further contribute to the ongoing mass extinction event underway. It's extremely powerful for us to use our landscapes to provide a sanctuary for wildlife, insects, and endangered plants. Again, not every garden does this. In fact, many gardens are war zones against biodiversity!
4, Sequestering carbon. A garden can be designed to actually directly fight climate change by sequestering carbon in the soil and in plant tissues.
5. Catching and infiltrating water. Another indirect effect of climate change is that it will contribute to further depleting our aquifers. While many gardens waste water for irrigation and fancy ornamental water features, gardens CAN be designed to catch water and get it back into the aquifer.
6. A garden CAN reduce our burden on the food system, which will be increasingly fragile as climate change continues.
7. Decrease suffering for as many as possible, and increase happiness for as many as possible, for as long as possible. Even if we can't stop climate change, we can use our gardens as a sanctuary habitat for humans and non-humans alike, and model for others how to better thrive in challenging times, because gardens can be important sources of resilience.
Resilience
1. Moderate climate around the home, providing cool in summer, warmth in the winter, and shelter in increasingly harsh storms.
2. Help us withstand shocks to the food and water system.
3. Provide recreation and stress relief during times of stress and disruption.
4. Help us to grow social capital and community cohesiveness.
Tips and Techniques:
But in these regards, not all gardens are created equal. In fact, some may actually achieve quite the opposite effect. So here are some tips and techniques we've used and recommend to make our gardens into powerhouses of climate change resistance and resilience:
1. Grow food. Even in ornamental landscapes. Because our food system is arguably the #1 cause of climate change, and our traditional landscapes (especially lawns) are another major driver, using food plants to reform our landscape strikes to the core of climate change. While any garden that reduces lawn is likely a step in the right direction, and native plant gardens may provide increased biodiversity, a food garden reduces our consumption and reliance on the systems that are the leading cause of climate change. This does not necessarily mean having a traditional "food garden," which may actually deplete soil carbon, waste fertilizer and fossil fuels, and reduce biodiversity, but a well designed garden that integrates food plants can be especially powerful. Perennial edibles and no-till systems are two great ways to improve garden sustainability and performance. Perennial systems like edible hedgerows, edible prairies, coppices, and forest gardens may be the easiest and most climate-positive forms of garden we can grow. Every landscape should include some of these!
2. Grow fertility, healthy soil, and simultaneously sequester carbon. If we want to get serious about sequestering carbon, we need to have a plan to stop importing fertility and start growing it on site. When we import fertilizers, we're depleting non-renewable resources, and when we import compost, we're depleting carbon from someplace else, while adding to greenhouse gas pollution via shipping. Growing our own fertility ensures that we're actually sequestering carbon, reducing our overall greenhouse gas footprint, and our healthy soils will help take better care of our crops. A few key ways to grow fertility include: deep mulch gardening with home-grown mulch-maker plants, perennial fertility strips, edible hedgerows and other agroforestry systems, nitrogen fixing plants, and wetland or water gardens. Everyone should be composting, and some of the easiest methods for home-owners include sheet-composting, and trench composting, which do not require maintaining a pile or carting compost around the yard. Grow Bio-intensive is a method based on growing fertility using annual crops in the garden.
3. Grow some native plants. Native plants may provide better wildlife habitat and protect biodiversity, which research shows will increase the health of your garden and crop plants. This does not mean that your grandpa's daylilies or your aunt Petunia's petunias have to go, or that you've got to ditch the tomatoes. There's no proven benefit to growing ONLY native plants, but there are proven benefits to including them. In fact, because climates and soils have changed, in many regions "native" plants may be more difficult to grow in our modern non-native soils and climates, which may require measures that waste resources, pollute carbon and harm ecosystem biodiversity. Many native-only gardens also leave the human inhabitants reliant on the destructive food system. Meanwhile, some of the best native plants to grow are edible, and some of the best fruits and vegetables are natives! In my region, that includes paw paws, persimmons, currants, jersusalem artichokes, varieties of alliums, and many, many others.
4. Include wildlife habitat like rockeries, wood piles, unmown grasses, and messy garden areas. These will increase biodiversity, protect climate-threated wildlife, and attract beneficial organisms that help keep the garden healthy.
5. Have a design to catch and store the water on your site and use it wisely. Permaculture design is a great resources, since it starts with treating water as a "mainframe element" and teaches that we have an ethical obligation to constructively treat the water that falls on our properties. This also includes a plan for water-wise gardening, so that we can be responsible in how we use water, too. I recommend Toby Hemenway's 5-fold water wise gardening plan, as described in Gaia's Garden.
(Water designs at L.H.)
6. Use recycled materials in the garden whenever possible, instead of buying new.
7. Avoid manufactured concrete, cement, and faux brick landscaping products, as the concrete industry is one of the leading causes of carbon pollution, and shipping further contributes to the footprint. In fact, concrete is so unsustainable, that it needed its own number. Recycled concrete, or "urbanite," can be both aesthetically and ethically beautiful.
8. Avoid the use of plastic materials and plastic landscape fabrics. Not only do these contribute to climate change in their manufacture and shipping process, they also are quickly becoming the leading cause of plastic pollution of water and soil. Plastic in food production systems has been found to contaminate food at unhealthy levels.
9. Start exploring no-till gardening. This won't necessarily work for every crop, or every ornamental in every garden or landscape. However, there ARE plenty of crops that will actually grow better and with less labor and cost, when grown in no-till systems. You might not be able to replace the entire farm or garden with no-till right away, but you might be able to start saving time, and soil carbon, by figuring out how and where no-till will work for you.
10. Utilize the power of biodiversity, Biodiversity will increase the health and resilience of your plants, while also assisting wildlife and threatened plants. Having a variety of crops will mean you're protected against crop losses, pest issues and extreme weather events in a changing climate. Again, perennial edibles and perennial systems like hedgerows and forest gardens may be the superstars of a climate resilient garden, as they build up energy and store it over many years, and have deep roots to pump water, they may be less susceptible to all forms of extreme weather.
So, that is our checklist of tips and techniques to make the most of the climate-resistance garden. Am I missing anything? What steps are you taking? Leave a comment below, or share on social media by visiting us on Facebook.
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If you would like to learn more about climate resistance gardening, water harvesting, no-till gardening, growing fertility, perennial vegetables and growing systems, or see these techniques in action, consider joining us for this special event. We'll be offering this event twice this summer, on June 7th, from 2:30 pm - 5, and again on August 11th from 9:00am - noon.
(Dynamically evolving French Intensive spacings and planting design at Lillie House)
I love French Intensive Gardening, or French Intensive Method (FIM.) This old evolved set of French techniques using planting designs with precise, tight, non-row spacings, interplanting, and clever companion planting - all to achieve the highest possible productivity and quality - has a lot to offer the Permaculturist and expert gardener or producer. And this goes beyond the lessons that FIM teaches us about true sustainability, companion planting, soil building, plant spacing and size, and producing top-quality produce.
FIM is one of the major things that gives our garden its distinctive look, which many conventional gardeners find incomprehensible, or even "impossible." Yes, we're now used to hearing that many of the key techniques we rely on to grow superior produce while absolutely minimizing maintenance are all impossible: no-till, continuous cropping while growing 100% of our fertility at home, exclusively polyculture growing, and of course our precise FIM plantings and spacings. Gardeners often recoil at seeing these spacings, despite them being the research-based optimal spacings for superior produce and sustainability.
(A typical FIM planting, optimizing productivity and garden health, From Sunset Magazine.)
Of our impossible gardening techniques, FIM is one of the most vital. For me, my gardening, and my understanding of Permaculture, which is about using DESIGN to achieve a goal, there has been nothing more important than understanding how to control levels of "intensivity" in the landscape. This is as true for the home garden, landscape, or homestead as it is for the profitable farm.
By levels of "intensivity," we're talking about a spectrum where we let nature do all the work on one side, and on the other side, we add "inputs" like energy, work, time, water, fertilizer, pest-control and most importantly planning and design.
And when it comes to this one point, I have learned a great deal from French Intensive Gardening, and the simplifed systems taught by Alan Chadwick (Bio-Intensive French Gardening) and John Jeavons (Grow Bio-Intensive.)
(FIM is incredibly practical, yet naturally produces beauty as a by-product. This is a low-maintenance sustainable, and highly productive vegetable garden design, via Awaken.com)
To come to the point, it's absolutely revolutionary to understand how these methods optimize the "Return on Investment" of a garden or farm system.
First, FIM gives the highest possible yield per square foot of any system. Consider this: Like historic FIM gardeners in the suburbs of Paris, Jeavons and Chadwich have both used similar methods to achieve yields that are typically 4-6 times the best conventional yields, and in some cases over 10 times! So, the FIM gardener can do on 1/4 or 1/6th an acre what a conventional market gardener using a tiller and planting in rows does on 1 acre.
Of course, this requires more work, more design and more fertility management. BUT - here's the key - NOT PROPORTIONALLY more.
(A somewhat formalistic FIM design from Sunset, uses tight plantings of companion plants like a Permaculture "guild.")
So, it will take significantly less time on average, according to Jeavons' research, to manage 1/4 or even 1/2 an acre using FIM than it would to manage that acre conventionally. And it will not require a tiller or imported unsustainable fertility inputs. And finally, quality is often higher, and so is profitability. So, while it will typically take a couple of full-time workers to manage that 1-acre farm, one person could get the same (or better) outcome from 1/4 of an acre under FIM.
This leaves 3/4 acres which can be managed in extremely "extensively," by handing management over to nature, in the for of edible hedgerows, edible forest gardens and edible-meadow type systems, or possibly small livestock. The best of these are traditional, evolved patterns with long-established proven viability and management techniques. All of this can add significantly to yield, while helping to maintain fertility sustainably. NOW, we're using good energy-efficient design! And it's also just good math.
As farm size grows, nothing changes this dynamic. The greatest yield is going to be defined by the same equation: how many labor hours you have to put in, how much can you put into intensive systems (which have the highest profitability) and how many do you need to maintain the rest of the land. Which is to say, at some point, once the farm is large enough, you will spend all your time managing broad-acre systems and have no time left for Intensive production. Because small intensive systems have been shown to be as high as 10, 30, 100 or more times as profitable per land area (University of Vermont, Berkley, etc.) Small market farms can sometimes gross in the ballpark of $100k/acre, whereas on the broad-acre, profitability is measured in hundreds of dollars/acre. So, once you are no longer doing intensive methods, to get back to the same value might require hundreds of acres with fossil fuels and chemicals, or large amounts of exploited labor.
So the best Permaculture designs will find ways to put as much land as possible into naturally managed "forage systems" to free up labor hours for more intensive forms of production with the highest ROI - this is the basis of the Permaculture "zones" system, which is radically under-apprecaited in today's Permaculture world.
However, these dramatically productive and sustainable techniques were once so associated with Permaculture designs, that it was common to hear the terms used interchangably by some observers, such as in this interesting article from Mother Earth news.
(Dynamic Polyculture at Lillie House, throw-cast then selectively thinned.)
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FIM gardening is a highy information-intensive form of gardening, which requires knowledge and experience beyond what I can blog about. However, there are some key points, which I've taken from Jeavons, Chadwick and Aquatias, one of the first to attempt to present French methods to an English-speaking audience.
1. Growing in double-reach sized, permanent beds, with permanent, narrow access paths. These are sized so that one can reach to the center of the bed from either side, without stepping on the beds. Certainly, the #1 thing one can do to improve the maintenance and productivity of a garden is to NEVER WALK ON GARDEN BEDS. Permaculture has improved on this with patterns like keyhole design and hierarchical path and node systems (see Gaia's Garden, or search this blog for more information.)
It's very important to note that these are often referred to as "raised beds," but that these differ greatly from the modern "raised beds" of wood or plastic made popular by HGTV and glossy magazine covers. These are created simply by deeply digging the soil and refraining from ever walking on it again. These actually aid good landscape hydrology and conservation of fertility and water. Meanwhile modern "raised beds" have benefits as well, looking tidy and in some cases increasing accessibility, but for both fertility and water, these have been proven to yield a decreased result.
2. Intensively managing soil. This is typically done through additions of compost, organic teas and sprays, and a one-time double-digging of the soil. In the best systems, FIM beds become no-till through a combination of careful succession planting, cover cropping and mulching.
3. "The Greenhouse" (Chadwick) - tight plant spacings with no rows. "Close plant spacings, as found in nature." (Jeavons.) Starts are spaced tightly in a grid-like formation, rather than rows, with naturalistic spacings so that there is no soil visible at maturity and leaves are brushing together. With many crops, seed are hand-cast, then thinned as they grow to dynamically maintain these dense spacings. This is what we do with most of our crops at Lillie House. Research by ecologists have discovered that plant cooperation in such conditions outweigh competition, helping to maintain optimal growing conditions in the top soil layer and the atomosphere under the plants. This is probably why FIM systems are so productive, sustainable and healthy.
4. Intercropping polycultures. While Jeavons and and Chadwick eliminated much of this tradition for their simplified versions for the American audience, intercropping was a major part of the French tradition, and one of Aquatias' 4 principles. This maximzies utility, yield, use of space, and garden health for home and small market garden systems. However, at a certain scale, it may become necessary to simplify designs. This is another major principle to our growing at Lillie House. (It is also something you can see in the FIM pictures in this post.)
5. Synergistic planting, or companion planting. This is especially done with a high percentage of strong, older, established aromatic herbs, kept in the garden over a long period of time. These are traditionally in every bed, and near every crop.
6. Growing your own fertility (Jeavons) or sourcing it smartly and sustainably (Chadwick, Aquatias.) At Lillie House we use 0 inputs, and grow 100% of our fertility on site. We feel that Jeavons was correct, that in this modern world, that is the only true measure of sustainability.
7. Use of open-pollinated seed, rather than hybrids, to enhance seed security, diversity and self-reliance.
To these Grow-Biodynamic adds some information crop selection for sustainability and self-reliance. These are excellent recommendations, but may be designed for in other ways in a Permaculture system.
Getting Started:
FIM gardening is a method that creates expert gardeners. This is perhaps one of its main benefits. But that takes time to develop as the soil develops.
Beginning gardeners may want to start with Bartholomew's Square Foot Gardening program, but try also creating some FIM beds. Jeavons' How to Grow More Vegetables is an excellent place to start, with resources for spacing and companion planting, as well as sustainability.
A more Permaculture approach is to create a bed in the FIM fashion, then cast a polyculture like the Iano Evans Polyculture in Gaia's Garden, thinning to maintain good spacing as plants grow. This both forces you to learn good plant spacings through observation, and to eat a salad a few times per week!
Later, expert gardeners can integrate other patterns and techniques, such as sheet-mulch, water harvesting and perennial guild design.
Yes, FIM takes some extra knowledge and design time. But the rewards are phenomenal. The FIM garden will build soil, grow incredible amounts of superior produce, create a beautiful healthy landscape, and most importantly, grow your own knowledge of gardening, plants, and the natural world.
