Over the weekend I listened to a webinar introducing the concept of permaculture, including backyard permaculture gardening for those of that don’t (yet) have much land to work with.
Permaculture can broadly refer to a way of life that is sustainable and works with instead of against nature. Efficiency. Closing open loops, where resources are put in and lost. Self-sustaining (permanent) systems.
Yes! I want to learn easier, more sustainable (and less expensive) gardening methods. Because being a better gardener now will help me be a better homestead(ish)er when we eventually move out of town. And I just love efficient systems. That’s my love language.
We’re not set on like grinding our own grains and raising our own meat animals or anything (though who knows what the future ever brings…). But I can see a life where we grow a lot of produce, preserve some veggies, have some solar panels, that sort of stuff. Oh, and chickens. Definitely having some laying chickens! Ultimately, whatever helps us create a simple, more self-sustaining existence.
So if we can’t yet live out on the prairie, we can at least develop some skills! Right here in suburbia.
What's In This Post
Homestead-y skills I’d like to develop
This list is based on a preliminary whim of ideas since I don’t even know enough to really make an informed goal list. But every journey starts with a first step, right? Here are some goals I can work on at our “suburban homestead” to gain some skills and experience for a future life on our own little slice of land. The other benefit of working on learning these things now, is it’s a good way to test out what things we truly enjoy. Some practices sound good in theory, but could serve up an unpleasant surprise we don’t need after taking a giant leap!
- Be a better vegetable gardener and make it easier
- Learn to can/preserve garden produce
- Get a good repertoire of easy bread baking figured out (I used to bake a lot, so this shouldn’t be too much to ask of myself)
- Learn more about sustainable/renewable energy options for our future home
- Master composting
- Get a farmer’s tan for the first time in more than 10 years
The focus of this post is my first goal for this spring and summer: to be a better vegetable gardener (with less effort!), using principles from permaculture. Hence, listening to that webinar I mentioned earlier.
Goal #1 : Better, easier vegetable gardening with permaculture
Being spring and time to get the veg garden going, focusing on the better gardening is my first aim of this year’s homesteader skills. I have learned enough about permaculture gardening to know I know barely anything. Truth.
But I also know enough about gardening in general to know that you just have to dig in and try. Perfection is the enemy of good. So while I could spend the next several months and a lot of money earning a permaculture certificate or immersing myself in everything I can find to read, I’ve elected to focus on a few core takeaways and go for it. What better way to start the learning process?
So, these three new approaches to my food gardening (which was a feeble skill set to being with) will keep me plenty busy reading, planting, and analyzing what’s working (& not) all summer. They are small, attainable steps towards incorporating backyard permaculture elements into growing our own vegetables.
Here is what I’ll be incorporating into my gardening practice this year to move towards a backyard permaculture vegetable oasis (or at least my attempt of it):
1. Mix edibles into ornamentals
Mixing up plants. Seems like an obvious one for ornamental flower gardens, creating a nice natural looking sea of different heights, textures, and colors. But vegetable gardens are always separate and seem to be best done in tidy rows. Even the seed packets tell you about row widths and how far to separate plants. This is all based on conventional row agriculture. Not the way plants grow together in natural settings by any stretch. Mind blown. Duh, right?
So my easiest step towards mixing things up and thinking in terms of edible landscaping (thinking outside the vegetable garden box literally!) is to just mix stuff around in the beds I have. For example, I planted flower bulbs for the first time ever in a couple places in our front yard last fall. So now we have some daffodils and tulips popped up. They’re so pretty!
But there’s space in between and they’ll die back soon. Some liriope will pop up in there come summer. But I went ahead and moved four strawberry plants from our rapidly expanding strawberry bed in the back to this spot with the flowers and liriope. It will spread to create a living mulch around the other plants without needing to buy annoying wood chips. (I never understood mulch, and my annoyance with constantly paying for bags of wood chips was solidified after reading this book). So, in effect, the sprawling strawberry plants will suppress weeds and help keep water in the soil.
Also, the strawberry blossoms should attract pollinators. And the fruits will either make a nice snack for us hanging out on the porch, or more likely, the chipmunks that live under the porch. Maybe the strawberries will spread obnoxiously into the lawn and I’ll rip them out. But, hey, I mixed things up and tried something new. Experimentation is key when it comes to gardening. And I think the same goes with incorporating permaculture. Try, evaluate, tweak, repeat.
2. Build plant “guilds” with companion planting
This is definitely a core tenant of backyard permaculture landscaping or gardening. In small spaces, it makes so much more sense!
Instead of laying out rows, you surround a central plant with complementary plants. Think a deep tap-rooted tomato plant surrounded by shallow rooted lettuce, and then medium-deep carrots mixed in the outer edge of the lettuce. Pop a couple of aromatic herbs to repel pests, like tomato’s friend basil, into that mix as well and you’ve created a thoughtful guild.
This mixing of plants with varying structures emulates what you would find in a forest (indeed, you’ll see the term “food forest” a lot reading about permaculture). A big tree surrounded by smaller trees, then shrubs tucked in around those, and ground cover plants and vines throughout. When you apply a similar concept to your garden, you’re maximizing the soil’s capacity to support the plants (based on their structure down in the soil as much as above it) in a smaller amount of space.
I saw this referred to as “polyculture” in another post. I think that makes a lot of sense to draw that contrast again any monoculture, where all the same species is planted in an area (like all modern agriculture, eek). Though not a vegetable gardening example, the reason we had to spend $14,000 dollars in tree removal at our rental property is because decades ago someone planted 20+ trees of the same species all around the property perimeter. Well, when a disease that affected that species came through, guess how many trees got sick and died. Every. Single. One. Monoculture, risky. Polyculture, ecological!
3. Don’t leave soil bare
This is my favorite of the permaculture principles I’ve learned so far. With using the mixed plant guilds with different root systems, you naturally cover more area. And in between you can use living mulch, i.e. ground cover crops. So you might even plant something that you won’t necessarily sow to eat, but fixes nitrogen to benefit the soil, for example. And the second benefit would be natural weed suppression. Soooold.
I HATE dealing with weeds. I mentioned previously I’ve discovered I’m more of a spring gardener. This is because I love all the tiny baby plants, all the possibilities of a bountiful harvest. But then weeds happen and overwhelm me in the hottest part of summer. Add on the bugs and weird plant diseases and I wave the white flag.
But with this permaculture concept, you use more plants to suppress the weeds by covering the bare soil. To do so, you choose types of plants for this job that either repel pests or make your soil (and therefore plants) healthier and, consequently, more resistant to diseases. So all those other problems should improve over time too. It actually seems quite obvious once you think about it. In a sense, weeds of certain types become your friends. Mindset shift.
Learning this concept definitely appeals to me because of it’s trifecta of benefits, so I’m going to plant my heart out covering soil with beneficial groundcover plants this season. To start, I already scattered some lettuce seeds in the raised garden bed even though I haven’t gotten around to anything else. I figure they can get started all around and any spot I need for my tomato or pepper plants, I’ll just pull it out and eat it. Or chop it back to enrich the soil and let the new bigger plant take over. I’ll see how that fills in and find perhaps another ground cover to mix in as well. Spinach? Clover, a legume nitrogen fixer? I still have a lot to learn…
In the fall, there will be another rendition, as you are not to leave the soil bare over winter either. The over-wintering cover crop should be something that you’ll chop down in spring to create a natural mulch and provide nutrients and organic matter back into the soil. Bril.
Final thoughts on backyard permaculture
I’m excited to have some new experiments in the backyard this planting season. And, gosh, excited to start letting go of the concept of a “planting season” altogether. Instead, I’ll be thinking more of building a little food producing ecosystem here and there in our existing garden beds. Systems that have a life cycle year round.
Keep checking back to learn more with me on this backyard permaculture endeavor. If you have some great ideas or experiments of your own, please do share in the comments below. I love seeing those, and gosh, could use all the help I could get on this topic!
Happy permaculturing.