Permaculture

[helwen]

Yesterday I spent some time learning a little about permaculture. It's a complex topic, so I think I need to find a good book on it; perhaps one by Bill Mollison, but next time I have a chance to get to a book store, I plan on seeing what's readily available. There's a farm the next town over, Northampton, that has an organic CSA that's working on creating a permaculture garden. There's also a guy in our own town of Holyoke who's working on one apparently, but I haven't emailed him yet.

Permaculture has a lot of plants in it, not necessarily in neat rows, but rather put together in a way that the plants can support one another (companion planting, but much more than just that). A lot of the original work was done in warmer climes, but there has been work done in the temperate zone as well, both in the U.S. and the U.K. You're sort of trying to create a more natural place instead of the more commonly known traditional methods of agriculture, but filling it with edible things.

No tilling involved, which is cool, so I was slightly annoyed at all the work we've been doing, but we need to re-level the ground a little anyway, no matter what type of gardening we're doing.

Here's one site on it: Permaculture (you can do a search at their site for your state and they have some groups listed for your area)

Here's one with a list of demos/talks coming up: Edible Forest Gardens

Here's one for the Northeast: Northeast

There's lots more out there, of course, but I have to go to my PT appt. and stuff. Have a great day!

Comments

[gigglingwizard.livejournal.com]

I'd highly recommend Permaculture: A Designer's Manual (http://www.amazon.com/PERMACULTURE-Designers-Manual-Bill-Mollison/dp/0908228015/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/103-5745887-1142221?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1178191732&sr=8-1), by Bill Mollison, but only if you can get it in the library. I've never seen it sold for less than eighty bucks or so. It's an interesting read. First time I've read anything about sustainability that featured chapters on bulldozing and banking.

The systems can be complex, but the concept behind them is very simple: let nature do the work. Don't pick berries and carry them to the chickens; just let the chickens graze where the berries fall. Don't catch your water downhill and pump it up to the house; catch the water uphill and let gravity bring it down to you. Grow your food close to the kitchen. Use natural, fractal or radial designs like the flower and the nautilus to achieve greatest efficiency in design of everything from fish ponds to garden plots. Instead of cutting down trees to plant field crops, harvest what the trees produce.

[helwen.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the recommendation! The curving patterns for the garden sound wonderful -- if we end up buying my nephew's house, curves will make a lot of sense there.

Yes, my hope is to have more trees in our next place, although here we at least have the two apple trees (tier 2). Our tier one is a beautiful sugar maple, which we have tapped a few times, but not this year -- we take the sap up to the farm to boil with the rest of the gathering, but this year the hills and the valley were out of sync.