GranolaBox

Think about how much effort you put into your garden, but what you get for it? Yes… a summer of beauty, but after that? Nothing. You don’t get doodly squat. Isn’t it much more efficient to put your sweat and, as if often the case when I garden, blood into something that will bring benefits later?

So, I’ve started reading Gaia’s Garden, which is the gardener’s permaculture bible. For those of you, who like me didn’t know what the hell permaculture was until a couple months ago - here’s the definition. Permaculture is a set of techniques and principles for designing ecologically sustainable human settlements. The term was coined by Bill Mollison, a schoolteacher, trapper,naturalist and permaculture guru.

Without barely getting past the introduction, the book has turned my view of the enivironment around us, both the larger and smaller picture, completely on it’s end.

For you visual learners who have a few minutes to spare… check out this video.

In his foreword to Gaia’s Garden, John Todd, an ecology teacher , conducted an experiment in which each student in the class created their own ecosystem inside a mason jar. He loaded each jar with a small amount of muck from a nearby pond. He introduced some of his own variables, but for the most part the ecosystems in the jar began to develop in fascinating ways.

Each system developed in complexity in completely unique ways, however all the jars went through remarkably similar patterns in their development. Each environment went through a miniature process of evolution as some organisms survived and others thrived.

It reminded me of a scene in Animal House in which Tom Hulce’s character, Pinto, smokes pot for the first time. The camera pans in on Pinto as he’s responded to something Donald Sutherland’s character had just told him. “So… you mean there could be a tiny universe on the head of this pin?” Then the character collapses into fits of laughter.

Returning to the Mason Jars now, these systems, although complex and able to absorb most internal disruption have a hard time dealing with even the smallest “invasions” of species from outside their environment. It’s a trenchant reminder to us of what happens we mess with our environment.

What we hope to do on our lovely slice of Naples heaven is to create our own sort of eco-system based on what kind of plant life thrives in our climate, instead of what’s artificially introduced from other climates and therefore not sustainable. Finding virtually nothing of nutritional value on our property, we’re starting completely from scratch, thanks to the eventual services of Bill’s backhoe.

For me, learning to garden this way has forced me to toss out many of my long-held beliefs about gardening. Not that I’ve ever had dogmatic rules about gardening, but very few upon closer inspection held up to any level of scrutiny. No big really since I didn’t know diddly-squat about gardening anyway.

It’s like I took everything I know about horticulture, put it inside one of those snow globes, and completely shook it up, completely displacing everything.

The incurable romantic in me was a little disappointed because I thought we would be completely sacrificing beauty for functionality. As it turns out, that’s not true at all. There are a few species of flowers that, while not readily edible, help improve the nitrogen level in the soil. Many flowers are awesome in tea. If you’ve ever seen a thriving wild forest, you know how beautiful it all can be when it’s functioning properly.

Filed under: EWAKI on April 1st, 2008