Gardening Advice

When people see our garden, they often start asking me for gardening advice. 

Unfortunately, these days, I rarely have any to give. 

As a Forest Gardener and Permaculture enthusiast, I actually go out of my way to be a really bad gardener, and I try to encourage other people to do the same. 

When I used to garden conventionally (organically, actually) I used to try my best to provide everything that the plants need. So I tried to keep up with the best science on how and when to water, what kind of fertilizer or compost to use, how and when to weed, how to manage pests and treat diseases and so on. 

Now, I try to forget all of that!

Instead, I try to design gardens so that nature does all that work for me, the way it happens in natural ecosystems. Nobody ever weeds, waters, or fertilizes the forest, because the forest does all that work, or rather, the complex interactions between the various beings in the forest does it. 

And to help my garden build the connections that will work well, I try to find ways to do as little "gardening" as I absolutely can. 

But I do have some advice about that: 

1. Build high-diversity gardens with lots of plant, fungi and insect species. Ecologists believe that high diversity builds highly resilient, healthy ecosystems with few pest and disease problems, and that includes our gardens. 

2. Think of the health of the whole system. Make sure the garden harvests lots of water, sun and a variety of organic mulch materials to feed the soil. 

3. Learn about Polycultures and use them. These maximize yield in both time (by partnering plants with different harvest times) and space (by partnering plants that use different root depths and nutrients.) They also confuse pests, privide predatory insect habitat and build that diversity. 

4. Learn about Forest Gardening and Permaculture. 

Permaculture at Lillie House

What does "Permaculture" mean in the context of what we do at Lillie House?

Most of our BIG problems--on the personal level and the planetary one--are caused by the way we try to meet our needs. I used to feel discouraged from doing anything about them because all these various problems are so big and often our attempts to intervene in them only make things worse. On top of that, I felt trapped in the system, unable to escape from contributing to the problems myself, like a cog in some destructive machine. Then I discovered a way I could get out of trap and do something positve about all these "problems." Permaculture is a system for designing human habitats to meet our needs and create beautiful, rich lives without screwing everything up, by starting first with 3 ethics: Earth Care, People Care, and Respecting Limits. (Different folks have different ways of wording that last one, but that's the version most relevant to our approach.) It's methods are based on emulating and working with nature, instead of against it. 

There's an ancient Taoist story that demonstrates the value of this approach, from the philosopher Chuang Tsu (which I'll paraphrase) about a carpenter and his apprentice walking through the country side when the apprentice stops to stare at a tree. The master whacks the apprentice on the head: "come on! We haven't got all day!"

"But master, this is the most beautiful tree I've ever seen! How can you not even notice it?"

"Baw!" the carpenter says, "that tree's useless! The branches are gnarled and twisted and the wood too old and brittle to make anything out of!"

But that night, the tree appears to the carpenter in his dreams, and says:

"Who are you to judge me? It's only because of my "uselessness" that I avoided being cut down long ago. And so my branches remain to give shade to the animals, my fruit feeds the squirrels and the fish in the stream, which in turn feed larger animals, and my leaves feed the silkworms that in turn feed the birds. And so, without doing anything "useful" I care for all the beings around me."

The ancients well understood concepts like ecosystems, trophic levels and keystone species. 

Of course, that tree can feed us, too. In fact, for all of our evolutionary history up until 100 years ago, almost all the beings on this planet, including humans, met all of their needs--food, clean water, waste management, shelter, clothing, and even spirituality--through ecosystem services.

But that implies that we live within the limits of what the tree can provide. 

If not, we have to do that work ourselves. First, we'll have replace the tree with some other system, so we cut down the tree. Then we'll need to till the soil. So we'll need tools, resources, and workers, which requires us to cut down some more trees. You see how this gets complicated pretty quickly. Once our crops are growing, they'll need clean, healthy water, but since we destroyed the ecosystem that used to clean our water for us, we have to build a water treatment plant and an irrigation system and so on. And once the crops are growing we'll need fertilizer, and herbicides and pesticides, which come with their own cascade of problems. Once we harvest the crops we need storage and distribution systems, and warriors to defend our store. And we'll need social heirarchy and oppression, because we'll need to get people to maintain all these roles and carry all these new burdens. You see that inequity is a built-in prerequisite of this way of meeting our needs. And then we'll need landfills, and sewage systems... And that's just the start. Next we'll need a whole new layer of "solutions" to address all the problems we just caused! 

You know the song: "She swallowed the spider to catch the fly, I don't know why she swallowed the fly. I hope she lives in a country with a good health care system!"

And before we cut down the trees, all these services were provided by ecosystem functions, without the cascade of unintended consequences. You start to see why archeologists and anthropologists say our hunter-gatherer ancestors only worked 10 hours a week, while OUR burden grows larger each year. 

When we attempt to address all the symptoms created by the way we meet our needs without fixing the problem, it's difficult not to just make things worse and create more problems. Or worse--violently pass our problems off on others while patting ourselves on the back. We need solutions that are more "radical," which means getting to the center of the wheel, getting to the cause and not the symptoms. That's what Permaculture provides: ways we can meet our needs that naturally enrich life for all the beings around us, instead of causing harm. 

It's about emulating the tree. 

Selecting Plants for a Food Forest

With 10+ years of experience in observing planned food forests and similar "wild" ecologies, as well as 3 seasons of co-evolving with a home food forest, I'm just starting to form some good conclusions about what makes a really good forest garden in the Great Lakes bioregion. Interestingly, some of those opinions are quite different now than they were a dozen years ago when I first became passionate about the concept of forest gardening.

When first introduced to the concept, here are some of the criteria I would have had for a successful food forest:
--High yield.
--Would focus on productive trees.
--High percentage of the common fruits I liked to eat--a true "fruit forest."
--Lots of sunny edge for the annual veggies I was used to.
--Focuses on the future potential of a mature forest garden.

--Low maintenance. 
--Could produce a large percentage of my dietary needs.

With experience, that hasn't exactly been changed so much as refined to a more nuanced set of goals. Now, my ideal forest garden would be:

--Appropriately and flexibly yielding. A good forest garden provides things in amounts you can use, when you can use them, without becoming a burden. A really good forest garden is flexible enough that it can be scaled back to produce for a family's needs without becoming a chore, but could be quickly adapted to provide a yield large enough to provide excess for distribution if needed for friends, trade or income.
--Focusses much more on the understory. This is, afterall, what differentiates an forest garden from a regular "orchard." At least early on, the understory is capable of providing much more of value than young or middle-aged trees. Think about your diet now, the vast majority of it doesn't come from trees. When I go foraging in mature woodlands filled with edible canopy species, it is still largely the understory species that I'm there to collect!
--Appropriate and well-planned selection of trees, focussing most on easy, no-spray tree species and support species that provide ecological functions. Right now, on an acre, I'd focus 95% on species that are both very easy to grow without spraying or extra care, and also easy to harvest and use with minimal processing, such as Paw Paw, Persimmon, Honeyberry, Blackberry, Raspberries, Asian pear, Heartnut, Hazelnut, Mulberry, Nanking Cherry, Elderberry, and Hardy Kiwi. I'd also focus on plants that provide greens, such as the Toon Tree, White Mulberry and Linden. Only then would I plant a few more difficult things like apples or plums, focussing only on the easiest and most disease-resistant species. Personally, I'd probably save difficult specimens like dessert apples and green gage plums for green-houses, espaliers or zone1 treatments. 
--Lots of sunny edge for a large variety of useful plants, mostly perennials. This would include a lot of high value perennial vegetables, self-sowing annuals, medicinal plants, fiber plants, plants for fuel, plants for crafting materials, etc. Oh, and room for a few high-value annual vegetables.
--Focusses on "succession" and getting an early yield every year.

--Flexible maintenance. Can provide yields with little "work," but can be quickly "scaled up" to provide high yields with higher levels of input. 

--Can help me meet a wide variety of my needs, including building materials, heating, spices, herbs, and medicine as well as food. But more importantly, it greatly enhances life by providing high-quality, high value foods for relatively little burden. And perhaps most importantly, it provides an extremely beautiful living space and creates a very rewarding relationship with nature and the ecologies we inhabit.

Reviewing the Past, Planning the Future

Today, I'm spending a few moments remembering the last growing season as I continue to plan for the next one. Here are some of my favorite images from 2014's garden along with some things I was particularly happy about last year:

The garden was "thrown to the wolves" and managed to fend for itself, making a huge leep into becoming self-regulating with little maintanance beyond "chop and drop" mulching and mowing.

 

Almost no watering was necessary. Beyond the obligatory "watering in" at planting time, our garden was completely self-watering last year. 

A year of harvests--we ate something out of the garden almost every day from mid April through the end of the year. A great number of meals came 99% from the garden (salt and oils being the exception.)

Growing money on trees: Through most of that time, we purchased almost no fruits or vegetables. 

For the next growing season, I'm looking forward to planting the last of our major woody perennials to complete the overstory of our food forests, adding even more diversity to our collection of over 200 useful plants, finding new ways to share and distribute our "yields," and increasing the number of "open garden" days when we can share the wealth of knowledge this young ecosystem is capable of teaching us. And most importantly, finding new "chores" to leave "undone" in the garden as the ecosystem takes over more work for us. 

True Permaculture in "Zone 0"

As yet another round of Michigan snow forces us inside, perhaps like me, you're warming up by the fires of imagination, dreaming elaborate Permaculture fantasies then widdling those down into concrete and careful plans for the next planting season.

This time of year is when I find I'm most attached to the garden we're building. I too easily get stuck in daydreams about its future, and even when I'm outside in the garden now, I can fail to see the beauty of the winter landscape through my visions of a mature, prolific food forest.  

I'm reminded that there are a million ways I could easily lose this homestead through natural disaster, man-made catastrophe or even simple, human stupidity--as families have lost their homes and all their possessions only to prove later that it was all over nothing more than a small bank error. 

One of the benefits of "Perma-culture" is that buiilding a more resilient, enduring "culture" confers a more resilient, secure life for those building and investing in it. It gives us practical strategies to build REAL wealth that's less susceptible to the whims of a financial system built on elaborate fantasies. 

And yet, any of us could lose our possessions in the blink of an eye. 

So a "Permaculture" that's mindful of that impermanence would do well to focus on the things that can't easily be taken away. Here are some things that help me when my mind turns to the fragility of what we're building:

1. Invest in community. At Lillie House, we're especially proud of our large collection of edible and medicinal perennials and self-sowing annuals. By helping our community learn to value and adopt these plants, and sharing when we're able, we ensure that we'll continue to have access to them if we lose our garden. And it provides us with access and support if we ever need to rebuild. 

2. Focus on skills and experience, not possessions. The three years I've spent watching our young food forest, experimenting with guilds and learning from nature have been the most valuable education I've ever had. There is no school that teaches the skills I've built in rennovating and improving the sustainability of our old home in accordance with the principles of Permaculture. 

3. Emphasize wildcrafting and invest in public commons. If I were to lose my income and gardens today, I am confindent that I could easily forage my food for the year from within a short distance of my home, and probably even create a source of income from wildcrafting value-added products. Projects like community coppice lots, guerrilla gardening and food forests create more security and opportunity for everyone. 

4. And finally, while its official status as a "zone" is controversial in Permaculture circles, I appreciate the traditions that teach us to work on "Zone 0," or the self as we work on the other "zones" of our property. Because ultimately, what's left when everything else is taken away? As a non-religious person, there are a few tools that I find particularly helpful as I work on Zone 0: Yoga and Tai Chi for the body-mind connection; the philosophies of Sotto Zen (the most secular form of Buddhism) Daoism, and Epircurianism (which is quite different than the popular conception and very similar to the other two philosophies) because they are all studies of how to live a happy life; and daily seated meditation, as a way of getting to know my mind and be at peace with myself, the only thing that's truly left, when everything else is taken away.