The Bones of Permanency
It may not look like it from this image taken two weeks ago in mid-February, but the bones of permanency are built into this landscape.
Permanency can be a dangerous word — “I want to do this for the rest of my life” can easily become “I am stuck with this for the rest of my life.”
But our success as a species up to this point — and our continued survival — is inexorably tied to our relationship to permanence. In fact, there’s risk if we ignore that relationship.
Like most folks, I rely upon the permanence of a job and an Internet connection. I can’t see that changing until I retire and until I develop the ability to telepathically tap others’ minds for info!
But, I believe humanity’s permanence really starts with our relationship to the permanence of food, water, and soil.
And that’s when Permaculture comes in.
Two Australian researcher/educator/environmental designers co-developed Permaculture in the mid-1970s as a way of expressing a perennial, sustainable agriculture philosophy. Its three core ethics — caring for the Earth, caring for people, and sharing abundance — are manifested by 12 design principles (“thinking tools”):
Observe and Interact
Catch and store energy
Obtain a yield
Apply self-regulation and accept feedback
Use and value renewable resources
Produce no waste
Design from patterns to details
Integrate rather than segregate
Use small and slow solutions
Use and value diversity
Use edges and value the marginal
Creatively use and respond to change
The “bones of permanency” we’ve built into our Happy Boolo philosophy pillars of Community and Sustainability and into our current landscape certainly reflect many of these design principles, but are also the result of our inherent reliance upon the permanence of habit and humanity.
In her work as a change consultant, Amy has learned that forming habits is key to companies being able to achieve their strategic goals, which led her to coin the phrase “Change happens one conversation, one experience, and one behavior at a time.”
This led her to developing “keystone habits” such as a daily “morning pages” writing practice, reading for pleasure, daily meal prep, and making the bed every day. Like every day. Whether I’m still in it or not.
Apart from writing all the gol-dang time, one of my keystone habits is reading and study. I am constantly reading about this stuff to the point where I get to practice the #4 principle of self-regulation over and over again.
Like a family reunion… neat and tidy just for this shot… then they’re off to their own reading stash locations!
So, what are some good examples of the “permancency” habits we’ve developed, based upon Permaculture’s design principles?
And… keep in mind that all 12 of these can be looked at as they apply to each one of the three core ethics. In our case, look at Care for the Earth. That’s where the permanence of food, water, and soil is “grounded” for us. What habits have we developed — and which ones can we still develop? — that further the notion of food security, water security, and soil security? What habits have we/can we develop to ensure we build resiliency into our food supply, how we use water, and how we build soil at the home level in hopes that it spreads to the community level, regional level, state, national, global, and (if you follow the news) the planetary level?
Here’s a list of easy examples of the 12 design principles from above that we’ve implemented ourselves:
Observe — always watch where the sun falls on your landscape before you plant something
Catch/Store Energy — make use of micro-climates — a sunny south-facing brick garage wall, a sunny stone wall, a shady northeast corner of the house
Yield — use succession planting (sow one row of carrots each week during the early growing season) — ensures a sustainable (eatable) weekly yield instead of one unmanageable, one-time crop
Self-Regulate/Accept Feedback — avoid walking in the garden right after it rains; you’ll compact the soil // avoid planting squash in the same place each year if you have squash bugs
Renewable Resources — capture and store rainwater // use a large cardboard appliance or storage box as an inverted potato bin
No Waste — compost kitchen scraps (greens=nitrogen) and cardboard (browns=carbon)
Patterns to Details — containers of intensively planted lettuce overlap one another to shade the soil below
Integrate — interplant a row of slower-growing lettuce with radish in-between each lettuce plant in the same row — radish matures and can be harvested before lettuce crowds them out
Small and Slow — start with herbs and actually cook with them — try that for a full year without doing anything else
Diversity — try planting five different cucumber varieties versus five plants of the same cucumber variety (especially if three neighbors are growing the same one!)
Edges/Marginal — the parkway (that strip of grass between the sidewalk and street) is as marginal/edge as you can get in the suburbs — Amy harvests the dandelions that grow there and makes a dandelion farro tart
Creatively Respond To Change — decreased natural predation resulted in an increase in rabbit pressure, which forced us to move our lettuce containers off the ground onto a patio table, but intense rainfall destroyed freshly sown seeds and later, hotter summers made the lettuce bolt. We built a hybrid rain shelter/sun shelter for our lettuce containers from wire hoops covered with landscape fabric supported by green willow twigs cut precisely to stick in the soil while supporting the hoop. The fabric let water drip slowly onto the freshly sown seed bed without destroying it. And then in the summer, the hoop opened at both ends to allow airflow without exposing the lettuce to direct sun, letting it mature without bolting.
It took a while to arrive at our present outlook of permanency. And we certainly didn’t get here on our own.
Our reliance upon the permanency of humanity is responsible for this!
I’ve been asked by many “how did you think of all this stuff?” or “where did you get all of these ideas?”
The answer: 16,000 sticky notes gathered over the period of a decade.
The Happy Boolo Project is the end result.
This image above is a perfect example of how the permanency of our human relationships — the friendships, partnerships, and tight bonds we’ve formed with others — have helped us arrive at this vision for our landscape. This completely embodies the Community pillar of our Happy Boolo philosophy.
The pallet garden comes from our gardening friends Lacey and Steve (who are also responsible for the idea for our awesome strawberry barrel!). The recessed greenhouse (wofati) in the center comes from our rainwater harvesting system’s designer, Marcus. The vertical plant support “torpedoes” in the raised bed come as a result of historic re-enactment with Regia Anglorum, which led to learning about how to shape willow.
And that led to stacking a raised bed’s function with the lateral growth concept of espalier (growing fruit trees on horizontal wire supports) — and the whole idea of “stacking functions” comes straight from my one-week experience with Bill and Becky at Midwest Permaculture in Stelle, IL, where I first studied Permaculture (there will be more on this in a later post!)
One page of one day’s-worth of notes during my PDC at Midwest Permaculture!
And there’s Gina in Denver whose square-foot gardening approach (and all her literature) is still tucked away into one of many notebooks. And there’s of course our friend Elaine, whose market research-to-farming career transition has introduced us to community farm dinners and a host of other like-minded individuals, to say nothing about the actual farming techniques that apply directly to home gardening. There are those we’ve met at the Good Food Expo (formerly known as The Good Food Festival), who demonstrate by their presence at the expo that yes, one can actually make a living off of growing food.
There’s Julie at Goldberry Woods in Michigan, whose cucamelon, pumpkin-on-a-stick, and Mexican sunflower seeds will find a place in our diverse landscape.
Julie’s seeds… can’t wait to sow these!
It also doesn’t hurt when you have a soil scientist as your dad.
Our hopes are that, despite the slowly melting snows of winter, our landscape’s yield will continue to be a product of habit, humanity, and permanence.
We look forward to literally getting our hands dirty in showing you our rainwater harvesting system, garden shed, cold frames, vertical structures, raised beds, micro-climates, goofs and gaffs, and gratuitous images of giant plump melons as the year progresses!
That makes us two Happy Boolos!
(by the way, you can read all about the 12 Permaculture principles here).