Rather than focus on the book I didn’t like, I’ll talk about the book I LOVE that I also brought on this trip:
GAIA’S GARDEN by Toby Hemenway, A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture.
This amazing book is written focused on natural gardening, and very specifically growing food in the garden without need for chemicals, neither insecticides, fungicides, herbicides, nor synthetic fertilizers. The concept obviously appeals to me, not just from a “save the earth” standpoint, but the methods described seem to be much less labor intensive than the standard way of growing things.
The first idea that stretched my mind in this book was in a subchapter titled “The Natives versus Exotics Debate.” Hemenway asks, “Does exotic mean a species that wasn’t here before you got here, or before the first botanist did, before Columbus, the first human, or what?” An excellent question. Hemenway prefers to call plants opportunistic, rather than invasive—and he points out that in the most well-known cases of new plants taking over large areas (Purple loosestrife, European bittersweet, Japanese honeysuckle, Kudzu, and Russian olive), the plants were “invited” by the disturbed land and disrupted ecosystems. “Humans create perfect conditions for exotics to thrive.” He goes on to explain that Nature will fill in disturbed places with pioneer plants, and “she doesn’t care if the plant arrived via continental drift or a bulldozer’s treads, as long as it can quickly stitch a functioning ecosystem together.”
These thoughts were meaningful to me because I’ve seen so much effort being put towards eradicating so-called invasive plants, and very little of it seems successful. It all feels like a case of “too little, too late.” Certainly, this is a complex issue, and losing native species entirely due to invasive species doesn’t feel right. Native animals are also affected greatly when native plants are no longer available to them. What I like most about this book is that it approaches gardening as a healthy mix of natives and exotics…which certainly seems like a more realistic approach.
The second idea that completely spurred my imagination is the concept of plant “guilds”. This concept started with the Native American’s plantings of corn, beans, and squash in the same hills—called The Three Sisters. The idea of a guild is that all the plants support and benefit the others. The beans fix nitrogen in the soil, the corn stocks provide a trellis for the bean vines to climb, and the squash leaves densely cover the ground, keeping out competing weeds. Grown this way, a plot will produce 20% more food than if just one of these crops was grown. A fourth “Sister,” is the bee plant, Cleome serrulata, that was also a food plant, but contributes by attracting pollinators for the beans and squash.
Hemenway describes how to plant fruit trees with plants underneath/around them so that they are mostly self-sufficient. I took this idea and designed a front yard that meets my wants regarding providing food and my likes of having flowers and year-round garden interest. I’m extremely excited about this plan and hope to implement it in the same timeframe as the parking strip—so that the fruit tree guilds are planted by spring of 2018 and the rest of the garden will be completed by spring 2019.
The dogs need some lawn out front, so I’ll measure off a fair amount devoted to them and then start the orchard beyond that. I plan to add another semi-dwarf cherry tree, a leaf-curl resistant peach tree, a multi-graft apple tree, along with mini dwarf pollinators for all of them. There is room for two more trees/guilds in addition to these three; I thought about combining them into one, with an arbor for kiwis and a bench underneath. I’m not sure of the light in that area, so may have to adapt to the fact that there may be too much shade. If so, I’ll utilize the sunnier space for one more fruit tree—maybe a pear. And the final guild may just be an evergreen huckleberry surrounded by ornamental shade-tolerant plants.
There is much work to be done to have the ground ready, the plants ready and the time available to implement all of this, so I really need to plan far in advance. For example, I’ll need to winter possibly hundreds of seedlings in the greenhouse next winter, so I need to clean up that entire area, especially under the benches, to allow for more “storage”. This clean-up project has been on the “list” for years now, but if I want to move ahead with the planting strip and the orchard guilds, it will have to be done before November.
