Permaculture

When I wrote about messiness, one reason I had been thinking about the term was an article I had read about how cities did not want to deal with fruit trees, because then you have fruit falling and rotting and it takes more work. Of course, then there is a missed opportunity for a food source. 

In fact, I do remember an Italian prune tree on my way to the bus stop that scattered plums all over the sidewalk each year, where they would turn to fruit leather.

They are a fruit I like a lot, but it didn't feel right to pick them off of someone else's tree before they fell, and it was not desirable to pick them after they fell.

What puts the "perma" in permaculture is that there are members of the system that fill multiple different roles in the cycle so that it can be self-sustaining. That does tend to eliminate waste, but it can be messy.

About the time I went to Outdoor School (many years ago), there was this process going on of moving away from the concept of a food chain to a food web. They were beginning to understand that it wasn't linear.

Having ground cover of native species does mean that there should be local pollinators and probably soil compatibility and maybe that your ground cover acts as a source of food and housing for local fauna.

To get it so that there is food and shelter for the fauna at different stages of life, and something handling the decay so that nutrients are put back in the soil, that becomes more complicated, but at the same time it becomes sustainable. It can continue.

Yes, it produces food -- lots of food -- but not all of the food is for you. Then you have lots of healthy living things around you that contribute as part of the web to the part that is for you. 

It's beautiful, and something that takes place naturally all the time, but something that our interference can make really difficult.

I admit that if you are looking at trying to set that up it can feel overwhelming. You need to start looking at different layers and interactions. What's going on in the roots? It will take time to grow a canopy.

It also shows us a path for healing and making things better.

One of the most beautiful books I have ever read was Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture by Toby Hemenway.

It not only helped me understand some things that I had already observed, but also gave me hope for things I would not have expected, like a permaculture area in Arizona that was always 5 degrees cooler than the rest of the area.

Five degrees may not seem like much, but when we are talking about climate change, we are talking about one or two degree increases overall. If we could expand the area, and if we could heal polluted ground, and strengthen endangered species... there are a lot of things that we can do.

I recommend the book, no matter where you are in having a yard and what to do with it.

And it looks like next week -- instead of starting on one of the six areas I was already looking at -- I am going to go in a completely different direction.

These things  happen.