Three permaculture lessons from a great summer growing season

Last Updated on July 2, 2019 by Aaron von Frank

Three permaculture lessons we learned from our summer garden. Learn from our experience and mistakes so you can grow your own thriving, resilient garden using organic/permaculture methods!

It’s hard to believe that fall is already right around the corner! We’ve even started seed trays for our cool weather annual plants.

Various winter squash, grown this summer, at Tyrant Farms. So many beautiful colors and textures!

Despite the crazy weather and record rainfall we’ve experienced in our area this summer, we’re still getting huge loads of produce. We’ve been canning, dehydrating, or both every single day for over a month, plus giving tons of food away to friends, family and neighbors.

Sure, we’ve lost a few plants to pests and diseases (recently many of our tomato plants have succumbed to late blight), but every conventional gardener or farmer we’ve heard from in our area has experienced devastating crop losses/failure under the same growing conditions.

Why?

We certainly don’t blame them for the bad weather (something that’s totally out of their control). However, we sure wish more growers would understand that there are things they could do to help their garden or farm ecosystems better endure extreme weather conditions.

What can they do?

Well, we don’t have any magic plant spells to pass along, and we’re certainly not going to take all the credit for the food we’ve grown. After all, plants/seeds are only as good as the environment they’re grown in, and all we’ve done is try our best to mimic natural healthy ecosystems so that nature can work it’s amazing magic on our plants for us.

Putting permaculture into practice

As we’ve mentioned before, we’re big advocates of permaculture, which is basically a “set of principles and practices to design sustainable human settlements,” in the words of Toby Hemenway, author of Gaia’s Garden.

It’s one thing to read about permaculture and abstractly say “that sounds like a good idea.” It’s another thing entirely when you put the philosophies of permaculture to work on your little slice of earth and watch it work in a near-magical fashion.

So, we wanted to share three permaculture lessons that have really been hammered home for us this summer:

Lesson 1: Healthier Soil = Healthier Plants

Think of your soil as a car’s gas tank. A gas tank needs fuel in order for the car (your plants) to turn on and run. Industrial agriculture or even conventional gardening techniques (constant seasonal tillage, sun-exposed soil, mono-cropping, applications of synthetic pesticides & fertilizers, etc) leaves your soil’s “fuel tank” on empty and requires constant fill-ups/inputs.

There are two basic ways to fuel your soil food web:

a. Build natural/biological soil fertility. 

Use natural, locally-sourced fertilizers such as wood chip mulches, leaves, compost, compost tea, manure, etc combined with living “green manures” (cover crops). The billions of organisms in a functioning soil food web convert these “fertilizers” to heathy soil over a long period of time and other symbiont microbes help feed them to your plants in exchange for carbohydrates.

b. Synthetic soil fertility. 

Synthetic chemical fertilizers like Miracle-Gro operate comparably to nitrous oxide in a car, ultimately leaving the soil food web starved and unhealthy. (Read more about synthetic nitrogen fertilizers and their impacts here.)

Guess which option most farmers and many gardeners go for? Yep, #2. The conventional farmer’s (or gardener’s) “car” zooms from zero to 100mph and then is completely burned out and exhausted after one lap around the track.

The long-term results? Dead or unhealthy soil that is unable to support life, which then becomes a breeding ground for weeds/pioneer plants that grow in early stages of plant succession. 

Dead or unhealthy soil is also incapable of maintaining ideal water and nutrient density levels needed for optimal plant growth under normal weather conditions without additional external inputs, much less under abnormal weather conditions (extreme drought, rain, heat or cold).

Young “Tlacolula Ribbed” tomatoes, an heirloom Mexican variety, at Tyrant Farms.

Gardening through global weirding 

Since extreme “once-in-a-century” weather conditions are the new normal, building and maintaining a healthy, living food soil web is more important than ever for anyone who wants to drive from zero to healthy soil (and stay there) on your farm or garden.

Be patient, trust the life-sustaining systems that have been growing plants for far longer than people have, and build your soil food web for the long-term with natural fertilizers.

A soil food web is a magnificent system when it’s healthy and functioning. We’ve been working to improve our soil web using lots of wood chips and other organic matter plus various living “green mulches” (nutrient accumulators and/or nitrogen-fixing plants such as legumes, daikon radishes, comfrey, etc). It’s been absolutely amazing and humbling to watch the results.

These are some of the interactions/relationships in a soil food web that make your soil healthy. As far as we know, these don’t come in a bottle and can’t be sprayed onto your plants.

What was once dead, acidic brick-clay dirt in our garden is now rich, black soil that we can dig into with our bare hands, pulling out piles of earthworms in the process. Our soil is being restored to a living system that is teeming with microbes — and it now requires almost zero input from us (certainly not any synthetic fertilizers or pesticides).

We’re surrounded by far more food than we could ever eat ourselves. Pollinators and other beneficial insects are everywhere. It’s a system designed for abundance for all the organisms that help make it work, including us (not just us).

Top-dressing our no-till garden beds with rich black compost and mulch is a key soil-building practice at Tyrant Farms.

It’s a paradigm-buster to imagine this, but gardening and farming don’t have to be hard, grueling work with huge fluctuations in yield (or profit) from year to year. Mimic natural ecosystems like forest systems (which require no human input to sustain or improve themselves from year to year), and you’ll get ever-improving yields with ever-decreasing work, energy input and money invested—and the system will continue to improve with time all on its own.

These aren’t new ideas. “Forest gardens” are the world’s oldest and most sustainable form of land use. For example, anthropologists now realize that the area we call the Amazon Rainforest, was actually a massive food forest created thousands of years ago. Most of the native populations who designed and managed these food forests were killed by imported European diseases in the mid-1600s, but their food forests are still thriving (at least the ones that aren’t being logged and cleared).

This shows the 3-dimensional layers of a biodiverse food forest, a design that can vastly outperform modern 1-dimensional monocrop systems on yields as well as producing superior ecological and human health outcomes. An additional eighth layer (not shown) is the fungal layer. Image by Quercusrobur at the English language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link. 

So, even if you hate nature and want to burn the planet to the ground before your children have a chance to grow up, perhaps your desire to earn a larger, more reliable and more diversified revenue stream or enhanced food production from your land will turn you into a natural gardener/farmer!

Lesson 2: Food crop biodiversity = greater abundance

Another important lesson that has really hit home for us this summer: pests and diseases LOVE monoculture plant systems. When they see a whole field full of their favorite food, it’s an all-they-can-eat buffet.

On the other side of this equation, farmers hate plant pests and diseases. This love-hate relationship creates a never-ending war between nature and mankind.

Hint: it’s not very smart to play M.A.D. (Mutually Assured Destruction) with another country. It’s even less smart to play M.A.D. against every other biological system and organism on earth. It’s like being in a Ford Pinto and playing chicken with a high speed train. We’re not going to win that battle folks, and we shouldn’t even be fighting it in the first place.

Good news: nature can actually be on your side.

Have you ever walked through a forest or mature ecosystem and noticed how much biodiversity nature produces? Have you ever walked through a conventional farm and noticed how little biodiversity we try to produce there?

At Tyrant Farms, we think it makes more sense to mimic nature rather than a corn field. As such, we’re growing hundreds of varieties of annual, bi-annual and perennial food plants interplanted on the ~1/2 acre we currently have planted, not to mention the existing forest out back which is full of edible nuts, plants, and fungi that know how to grow just fine without us.

If one plant variety we’re growing gets a disease or succumbs to a pest infestation we still have countless other varieties that will go on producing just fine. We’re NEVER dependent on any one type of plant for our yield.

Gourmet wild mushrooms (chanterelles, black trumpets and cinnabars) from the woods. These are the fruiting bodies of mycorrhizal organisms that form symbiotic relationships with trees, essentially giving the trees a second root system.

If we were operating under a monoculture plant system design, we might be more inclined to do crazy things like spray our food with neurotoxic, endocrine-disrupting chemicals.

“Crop failure” under mainstream farming or gardening methods might be more accurately described as “design failure” and attributed to human causes not natural ones (except in the event of truly cataclysmic weather events like hail, tornadoes, hurricanes, etc). If nature tells you that a plant you’re trying to grow isn’t working well despite growing in healthy soil, simply grow something else (ideally a perennial plant) and enjoy the yield from the hundreds of other plant varieties that are doing just fine.

Unfortunately, this is the exact opposite approach we use to produce food for the 7.5+ billion people on earth, our one-and-only shared biosphere (at least until we’re able to terraform Mars). Instead, we’re increasingly opting to put all of our proverbial eggs in one basket: a handful of nutrient-poor annual grain crops grown using methods that require constant and costly input and maintenance while concurrently destroying every single ecosystem they touch. Not a good design.

Yes, there’s a reason it takes $20 billion per year in US tax-payer-funded subsidies to pay *part of the real price of our terribly designed food system (*health care, bioremediation and war sold separately, see store for details!).

Cheap food isn’t cheap. It’s just very good at hiding its true cost.

Lesson 3: Everyone with access to land or a sunny window can help themselves and help each other. 

With well-designed, hyper-local food-production systems linked to larger organically grown staple crop farms, we could actually have a permanently sound way to feed every person on earth with real, healthy foods regardless of their location or socio-economic background. (Recent studies have shown that organic farming can feed the world.)

As an added bonus, we could concurrently HEAL the earth as we grow our food, not destroy it as we presently do. Imagine if everywhere a garden or farm went, the ecosystem improved, rather than getting ravaged. Also, it just so happens that using organic plant matter as fertilizer increases soil biomass and acts as a huge atmospheric carbon sequestration system.

As the FAO states, “The long-term conversion of grassland and forestland to cropland (and grazing lands) has resulted in historic losses of soil carbon worldwide but there is a major potential for increasing soil carbon through restoration of degraded soils and widespread adoption of soil conservation practices.”  

In our view, sustainability is a worthy aim IF you have a healthy ecosystem to protect/maintain. Unfortunately, that’s not where we are at the moment. We need food-production models that actually restore ecological health to the biosphere (sustainability isn’t enough), such as those proposed by various branches of permaculture and/or restoration agriculture.

As the FAO says,

“The objective is to reverse land degradation due to deforestation and inadequate land use/management in the tropics and sub-tropics through the promotion of improved land use systems and land management practices which provide win-win effects in terms of economic gains and environmental benefits, greater agro-biodiversity, improved conservation and environmental management and increased carbon sequestration.”

That sounds like a good idea to us.

Pretty isn’t it? That’s your home planet (and ours too). Let’s learn from it and take care of it. Image by NASA/ GSFC/ NOAA/ USGS – http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0304/bluemarble2k_big.jpg, Public Domain, Link

You can start growing food today! 

Even if you’ve never grown a plant in your life, new information technology makes it very easy to share ideas, best practices, and plants (or seeds) with each other. No matter who you are or where you are, you don’t have to remain uninformed, uninvolved, hopeless, and helpless. It’s your health and it’s your planet too.

Gotta window with some sun? A sunny porch? Access to a patch of dirt you can start nurturing and growing food on? Great! Here’s how to start gardening today.

Also be sure to connect with people and organizations near you who are doing great things — one great place to start is looking for local facebook groups. Meet in person and grow food together. The more connections you form, the stronger and more vibrant your community will be.

As an added bonus, the food you grow will not only taste great, it will also be healthy and virtually free. So jump aboard the food movement today!