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As the title says, in gardening, and I think particularly permaculture, there is a lot we can learn from traditional wisdom and practices. However, obviously not everything that was common practice or common knowledge 200 years ago was true. As a species, we have also learned a lot since! If you were given the chance to exchange one bit of gardening/agricultural knowledge with someone from that time, what could you teach them?
(if someone mentions something that people from that time actually DID know, please be kind in your corrections! We can all learn something!)
Hey friends – interested to hear stories about what project has given you the best result in your backyard?
Not trying to get too caught up in the medium/average sized space, I’m in Australia and my block (including house) is about 450sqm which is a relatively typical suburban block (the internet calculated this as about 5000 square foot for my friends in the northern hemisphere).
My input, and I’m just beginning my journey, is I tore up a whole lot of disgusting concrete and spent a solid year improving the hard, compact, clay soil by aerating it and incorporating composts and gypsum to the point where I can now reliably grow tomatoes, chili, eggplant, zucchini etc.
Very basic but I’m quite proud 🙂
Keen to hear similar beginner up to advanced stories!
The curved structure, which has been described by the HS2 Ltd chair, Sir Jon Thompson, as a “shed”, will run for about 1km alongside Sheephouse Wood to create a barrier allowing the creatures to cross above the high-speed railway without being affected by passing trains.
But Steve Reed has criticised the plans and told the Fabian Society’s new year conference: “I mean, (to spend) that vast amount of money on a tunnel for bats when there were so many other public services crying out for funding – it’s batshit crazy.
“And it happened because the previous government didn’t have a grip on the public finances, didn’t have a grip on infrastructure projects, and didn’t really have a grip on what was happening to nature either.”
Asked about the potential for tension between prioritising wildlife and the environment and pushing through planning projects, as the government has promised to do to boost economic growth, Reed said both could be achieved.
“It’s not either or, it’s not growth or nature or the environment. We can do the two together,” he said.
Reed also suggested any plans to build a third runway at Heathrow airport would be subject to a “proper consultation” to ensure “mitigations” were in place to make it work.
Asked about the prospect of expanding the airport, which reports suggest the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, will back, the MP for Streatham and Croydon North in London said: “Of course, it’s speculation that you’re talking about … but if there were any proposal like that, then there would be a proper consultation, hopefully not lasting decades as it has done previously, because you don’t have to take that amount of time to get to good decisions.
“But it would take into account all of those factors, mitigations, what we will need to do to make sure that it could work.
“Since you mentioned my voting record on that one, I voted against expanding Heathrow last time because I was in favour of expanding Gatwick because it would provide economic growth that would benefit south London, where my constituency is. So I see the link.”
Pumpkin plants, like all cucurbits, require pollination for fruit development. These plants produce separate male and female flowers, with the female flowers being responsible for forming the pumpkins. While bees and other pollinators naturally carry out this process, hand-pollination can be an effective technique to […]
University of Cambridge research suggests living collections have collectively reached peak capacity
Botanic gardens around the world are failing to conserve the rarest and most threatened species growing in their living collections because they are running out of space, according to research from the University of Cambridge.
Researchers analysed a century’s worth of records from 50 botanic gardens and arboreta, collectively growing half-a-million plants, to see how the world’s living plant collections have changed since 1921.
I feel like I’m speaking into the void right now and maybe I’m just writing this for myself but our world is fucked. It’s not good, virtually anywhere; and it’s not getting better.
Authoritarianism is on the rise for many reasons but permaculturists will understand it more than most when I say our structural underlying deficiencies are not political. They are ecological. They are spiritual. Now don’t misconstrue me, I’m not religious. But both our religions and our institutions are. They are dominionists. They are consumptive and violent. We have structured our civilizations that way and we have unleashed that malevolence unto the world. To Gaia, the collective biome of the whole planet.
We are eating the planet whole; and with it, ourselves. Now, everything we’re seeing politically makes sense when you view it ecologically. We have overshot our carrying capacity and resources are thin. Opening up more drilling operations, bringing more acreage into production and industrial fish farming won’t stop the long term repercussions of overshoot, they will only make it worse.
So to ye I say this. Permaculture is intended to be an act of resistance. If you’re not growing as much food as you possibly can and restoring as much habitat as possible, then you’re letting the man win. Geoff Lawton always says that all the world’s problems can be solved in the garden. He means all of them, fascism included.
If you’re still here; I’ll get you my main point. I am starting a micro permaculture nursery. I’m in cantonment FL zone 8B and have prepared space, bought a bunch of seeds, and direct sow pots, Inoculated mushrooms, obtained two cast iron bathtubs for worms farming, purchased 30 yards of some pretty well composted wood chips and have another 50 coming. Have a place to start seeds inside and will soon hopefully have the time. I want to do this to slowly supplement my income while providing something the community desperately needs.
I feel really overwhelmed with it all though and are either looking for some encouragement or strategies to materially start to implement this. I sat down tonight trying to put together a Gantt chart for successional plantings of seedlings and gave up. Decided that I would just take good notes of what was planted when and find out the limits that way. I only started gardening in the fall of 2023, and that was basically a dud. Last year is when I started practicing permaculture and gained a lot of knowledge but I still don’t feel like I know anything. I know it takes time; and with the recent political developments I don’t feel like that’s a resource in abundant supply any longer. What do you think?
