Sunday, April 28, 2019 was exciting. We'd just gotten a load of wood chips to start mulching the forest garden.
After reading, listening, and learning about permaculture, homesteading, and gardening for a year or two, I finally got my paws on the wood chips I'd been hearing wonders about. I could finally be doing things right! It could finally look like a proper forest!
Look at all that! There's six fruit trees, three blueberry bushes, three or four blackberry bushes, a dozen or so strawberries, a goji plant, and like ten comfrey plants in that space! It's all young, so as it grows it'll fill that space nicely and we'll be getting a nice harvest here in a couple years when things are established. That'll be awesome!
One day shortly after that, I was performing my regular ritual of sitting on my ass looking at the garden when I remembered I hadn't planted like half of the seeds I'd bought. Where could I plant them?I didn't want to go to the north side of the yard; it just wasn't as integrated and fun. And there's no chickens over there. I couldn't go to the middle of the yard; that's where Melissa has claimed as a place for the kids. I couldn't go to the front yard; there's a busy street there and Melissa wants grass out there. Why grass of all things? I don't have a cow or sheep. But whatever.
I got to thinking and wondering where in a perennial forest was there space for annuals. Mostly based on how fun it was to sit there in my perennial garden. As soon as that notion entered my mind, I became immediately aware of the small, sunny, pasture-like patches all around the edge of my garden space. At the edges? What kind of weird unnatural system uses the edges? What a transformation when I saw that.
Now that looks like a forest!
Here we are, three months after those sunny micropastures became so obvious to me. Look at the difference those annuals made! Now we're talking food production! Those big lilly pad leaves are my squash. Those things turned out to be a huge mistake that I've fallen madly and evangelically in love with. I think we'll have nearly three hundred pounds of squash to eat from those. There's corn there too, and some kind of pole beans to climb up them. There's watermelon, honeydew melon, Israel melon, and cantelope in there. As well as a third generation of green beans, planted from pods we left on earlier plantings. That really took our little food forest up a notch. Or six. And that's not to mention the tomatoes that the chickens planted for us. Or the grains that sprouted from chicken scratch. From scratch you came, and to scratch you shall return! Now that's some regeneration. A little bit of annual cropping, and we're gonna have food to share and food for the chickens!
That's how Regenerative Permaculture works. It's not agriculture. We're not tending fields. We're establishing and manipulating an ecosystem that can support community.
Oh, and here's the boys playing in the same spot last July:
Woah, eh? I think it's working.
All action for the good of all.
Nate.
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