How I learned how to learn about gardening

In college, I took a course in Permaculture, or permanent agriculture, from a pair of dreadlocked hippies journeying through Southern California. They ran their own bio-diesel-powered sustainability bus tours, teaching like-minded folks across the Southwest how to dig up their lawns and make gasoline from fast-food fry oil. They got a gig teaching this Permaculture class to me and about eight other food-growing hippie wannabes, and proceeded to try to download a lifetime's worth of engineering and gardening knowledge in one college semester. They seemed to have as many slogans as Mao's little red book, with themes like, "protracted observation, not protracted labor!" and "yields are potentially infinite!" They were zealots, that's for sure, out to to save us from future starvation with smart design. Nothing was to have just one use: beans fertilized the soil, chickens not only laid eggs but could be placed in a "chicken-tractor" for soil prep, grape vines provided fruit and summer shade, and our shower water could be filtered through a system of ponds (filled with edible fish, of course) to irrigate our fruit trees.

I remember baking out on a California hill, trying to handle my pencil, my notebook, and an A-frame level, trying to map out elevation for a potential terraced orchard, thinking, I will never get this down.

Gardening seemed to be this incredibly complex process, that involved grazing sheep and outbuildings and nut trees - how was I supposed to remember which plants put nitrogen in the soil, and which sucked it out? Worse, the Permaculture-inspired "farm" at our college was staffed by more irascible hippies, chock full of Swiss chard and rock-hard Daikon radishes, each placed for it's tolerance of harsh drought and it's ability to bring nutrients to the soil. I wanted tidy rows of tomatoes and broccoli - here, we had wild fields of nitrogen-fixing clover, and most folks were more concerned with building a mud-and-adobe brick oven than with cooking dinner. I was repelled by the whole operation. The only thing I liked was the dozens of fruit trees, planted in classic agro-revolutionary style exactly where the college wanted the land back. They literally wanted to pave paradise and put up a parking lot.

Looking back now, I have much more tender feelings for those gardeners than I did at the time. Although I resisted the wildness of their "farm", it also was my first exposure to the idea that we try to work with nature, not just make it our blank slate. And I love the radicalism of their vision - we, as a planet, must not forget how to feed ourselves in some kind of sensible, sustainable way. Now, years later, my own garden is a hodge-podge of everything I’ve learned. I’m still too stubborn to to let the weather determine absolutely what I will grow, and in my house, the shower water goes down the drain, our heat is provided by a regular boiler, there are no orchards or chicken tractors or even water-catchment devices on our tiny backyard plot. Zucchinis and broccolis and carrots and tomatoes all grow here, sometimes in rows, even, watered with the city water system when the rain quits. But I realize too how much my gardening education was influenced by Permaculture – it’s the reason I get so excited by rain barrels and garden hedges made out of blueberries. It’s also why my garden looks so “crazy” and “crowded” compared to a typical rectangles ‘n rows garden. Although at the time I pooh-poohed the chard-and-radish beds, I’ve found the philosophy, if not the engineering, of permaculture has become a huge influence for me.   In my next post I'll try to boil down some of the Permaculture "slogans" that have helped me think about how I want to grow food.   Please feel free to read more about Permaculture and other garden and design philosophies, but also feel free to follow the basics: observe; work with, not against nature; be guided by your own experience of what works.

Read my next blog post to see how I've actually incorporated some Permaculture concepts into my own gardening.