Persephone Days: Designing Wildness
Skip the stressful part of gardening and embrace the lazy chaos of nature
Permaculture has a reputation for being concerned only with planting tons of trees or encouraging everyone to eat weird perennial vegetables nobody has ever heard of. To be sure, the “perma-” part of “permaculture” does speak to the need to plant perennial food systems to form a regenerative food system. Even a fully-realized permaculture system would definitely not exclude an entire category of wonderful, super-productive food plants.
In the meantime, we’ve gotta eat. Usually multiple times, every single day — and as I mentioned last month, annual plants (like most of what we think of putting in our vegetable garden) are the ones that deliver real quantities of food in just a matter of a few short weeks.
I still notice a lot of people neglecting to include themselves in the design of their garden systems.
Permaculture is all about design. The question is regarding how annual vegetables are grown. How are they included in the system? Last year, for example, I grew lots of oyster mushrooms on straw. When the straw wasn’t useful for mushrooms anymore, it became mulch for my hot peppers. So instead of having a waste product and a weed problem, I just had lots of delicious produce. Pretty obvious, right? Yet I still notice a lot of people neglecting to include themselves in the design of their garden systems.
When we plant home-scale gardens, we’re actually emulating a lot of techniques that come from agriculture on a larger scale. In this case, that means unconsciously including invisible machines in our designs, rather than the actual humans involved. We often use tractor spacings and keep things in tidy rows for mechanized picking machines that — at least in my garden — have never materialized. These techniques leave a lot of bare ground, which several popular gardening books (stuff like Square Foot Gardening) have tried to compensate for. These methods still ask the gardener to do a lot of measuring and planning and careful seeding, and this is exactly the part of gardening that stresses a lot of people out. I’m suggesting there’s an even easier, lazier way that might just lead to bigger harvests and greater gardening joy: annual polyculture.
Onthe first day of my brief stint farming in Oregon, I was sent out to the garden to pick some vegetables for dinner. The farmer pointed to a hillside that I could see was covered in what looked like garden beds. As I approached on the mown path, though, they looked more and more like tangled weedy messes. Was this a joke? Was my job going to be to weed this?
Looking closer, I saw a branch laden with cherry tomatoes spilling over lettuce butting up next to a fava bean shading a beet nestled under some basil entwined with curly kale growing against the stem of another tomato. It was complete chaos, but everything was thriving. I have never forgotten the pure delight of foraging for familiar foods I felt when gathering veggies from that garden. The whole thing was magical, even though I learned it was simply tractor loads of composted manure laid out in big mounds with seeds scattered randomly over them. Never were they weeded; harvesting WAS the maintenance.
I’ve never recreated this type of annual polyculture on that kind of larger scale, but my most productive gardens have been planted in a similar vein. Plants need and want other plants: look at any wild place to see that they are jumbles of species all growing together, covering every bit of ground. Rare is the pine tree clinging to a rock who doesn’t have the above- and below-ground support of a community of plants. If we fight this, we’re just making work for ourselves. Wouldn’t it make more sense to work with nature’s tendency to grow by guiding her to grow things we want? This idea is not just at the heart of permaculture design, but applies well beyond the production of food: how can we stop making work for ourselves by fighting natural processes and instead learning how to guide them to work for us?
Plants work together in ways we don’t understand. In a forest, fungi tie together the roots of different trees, allowing them to exchange water, nutrients, and maybe even other kinds of information. It is unknown whether this happens on a smaller scale in an annual garden, but why not? In any case, having a dense cover of plants growing closely together demonstrably means conservation of water, since the soil is cool and less moisture is lost to evaporation. Maximum diversity of growth patterns, plant families, and leaf shapes also means fewer pests and healthier plants (other plants buffering individuals of the same type makes spread of disease less likely).
What this kind of garden also shows me is that seeds are cheap, plants make many of them, and it’s okay to overplant seeds and harvest to thin. Not all of our plants have to be the best plants if we plant a lot. If that little kale is shaping up to be stunted and there’s a promising beet growing up next to it, rip out that kale and sauté it tonight. This kind of garden is like a vegetable brainstorming session, with the awesome bonus that you can get a meal from the rejects!
According to the prevailing myth, vegetables growing close together will compete for water and nutrients. But even corn, one of the heaviest feeders, has traditionally been grown in an annual polyculture in the three sisters method of beans climbing the corn with a ground cover of winter squash. The list of benefits for all three plants in a system like this is well known to gardening types (although it does require some attention to which varieties are chosen). Start with a nice helping of compost each spring* — annuals do need this kind of input regularly — and you’ll reap even more of the bounty of that fertility by not letting it roast in the sun or wash away as the bare soil is watered.
If all of this sounds a little too nuts, maybe at least keep the idea in mind as you’re dealing with the inevitable weed barrage this year. Letting plants like purslane and dandelions stay where they are amongst your crops is actually benefiting them (and they’re both edible, too).
One of the wonderful things about annual growing is that you can try something new every single year. And it’s true, the image of the ideal vegetable garden — tomatoes neatly tied up to trellises, nice rows of identical vegetables, maybe a little mulch to keep weeds down, maybe some cute Pinterest-worthy labels for the rows — is compellingly beautiful. Even with everything I love about annual polyculture, every now and then I try again with the mulch and the weeding and the rows so I can attempt to achieve that Platonic ideal of a tidy garden. (Although even then I can never resist a little salad bed bursting with multiple species over in a corner.) Isn’t it really nice to know, though, that one of the choices is a kinda chaotic, possibly blissful, jumbly mess of low-maintenance food?
An Easy Recipe for Annual Polyculture
- Bush bean seeds
- Kale seeds
- Radish seeds
- Calendula seeds
- Lettuce mix seeds
- Carrot seeds
- Bunching onion seeds
- Basil seeds
It is definitely not too late to plant something like this in New Hampshire. Plant out your bush bean seeds first, making sure to plant them at the depth and spacing recommended on the packet. Sow radish, kale, and calendula in little pinches here and there over the bed. The rest of the seeds you can scatter thinly over the whole bed. Make sure to thin a lot when everything is young — let yourself reap the ongoing harvest and make some space for plants to grow! As big gaps open up later in the season (when you harvest a big head of lettuce, for example), add a little mulch. This is just a starting point for your experimentation — many different species will work here. I once had a successful polyculture which centered on Asian greens, chickpeas, and parsnips. Go wild, and let your garden follow.
*You know what, you can also just plant things. Plants want to grow. Don’t stress. You’ll probably get some food even in poor soil — figure out the right balance of work/harvest for yourself and learn your site and your strengths. If you get half the veggies but put in a quarter of the time and money, is that alright with you?