An Introduction to Permaculture

PERMACULTURE

It is a word that many Americans would have difficulty describing accurately.  It can be complex and difficult to understand.  Countless definitions exist that try to capture the essence of permaculture, yet they are often incomplete.   Many associate permaculture with the new age movement or a hippie lifestyle.   Though many proponents emphasize a deep spiritual connection with the earth through the practice of biodynamics, or advocate an off the grid lifestyle as with the use of composting toilets, these are not fundamental doctrines of permaculture.  These spiritual and social activities may complement permaculture, but they are not permaculture.  Permaculture is a biological science, not a social science or a spiritual science.

(I define spirituality as strictly a human endeavor.  Whether or not a tomato has the capacity to connect spiritually with basil growing next to it is a subject for a completely different blog entry.)

Permaculture describes the ecological vitality and diversity of a cultivated parcel of land, both horizontally and vertically.  It requires the presence of trees, hence the use of the term “forest garden” by many practitioners.  Many gardens that exist can never be considered permaculture, no matter how biologically vibrant and diverse they are.   Once you understand how nature operates, especially in an old growth forest, the concept is rather simple.   

Permaculture mimics how a forest operates when not disturbed by human activities.

Tomatoes planted with mint utilizes the groundcover and herbaceous zones of permaculture.

 

Onions planted with lettuce utilizes the underground and the herbaceous zones of permaculture.

  

Permaculture, as I define it, is:

A temporally and spatially diverse gardening system that is self-sustaining and inherently resilient, agriculturally productive and ecologically vibrant due to its interconnected, redundant, and cooperative elements.

Because gardening is a human activity, human intervention is required to create a permaculture environment. 

My role with Trees for the Future is to facilitate the adoption of the forest garden system to restore degraded lands, as well to improve food security and household incomes.   To help focus my efforts and those of the lead farmers in the region, I have condensed the key philosophies that underlie permaculture/forest garden systems.

Key Philosophies of Permaculture Include:

1.    All vertical and horizontal spaces, known as the seven permaculture zones, are utilized to enhance productivity in three dimensions.

2.    The productivity is abundant and continual, as there is always something ready to be harvested. 

3.    Chemical inputs are not allowed as they destroy life within the ecosystem.

4.    In a well-balanced and mature ecosystem, everything is recycled, with minimal external inputs.

5.    Effective and sustainable agriculture techniques are practiced and serve to support the diversity and abundance of the ecosystem.

6.    Multiple methods are used to achieve important functions and to create synergies.  This redundancy protects the health of the garden when something fails.

Like I mentioned previously, permaculture is a concept not easily understood by Americans, let alone by villagers living in remote villages in Africa.  Even though gardening is often practiced by women’s groups or by individuals, they often farm in ways that are unsustainable.  The excessive burning of organic material, lack of composting or mulching, and monocropping are a few practices that invite problems when employed habitually.   

For instance, it is frustrating to watch a woman ignore your advice to align her garden bed with the slope of the land, rather than the aligning it geographically with other beds nearby.   In concentrating solely on the uniform shape and placement of each bed, soil is continuously eroded to the lowest point of the bed with each successive watering.  (Yes, my counterpart spoke to her in her native language that she was fully capable of understanding.)

The land is wiser than you are.  It was here before you were born.

Listen to it!

It is not my goal, nor is it the goal of Trees for the Future, to simply provide an enclosed space in which the community can speed up the degradation of an already degraded land.  Part of the 4 year program designed by Trees for the Future is in monitoring and evaluating the success in not only improving the livelihoods of the target community, but also in teaching and reinforcing the agricultural knowledge that will allow farmers never to go hungry again.

The techniques that I teach are often foreign.  (But so are many of the vegetables and fruits that have become staple crops for most Africans.)   They also are not easy.  Building and maintaining a compost pile for instance is more labor intensive than simply throwing the manure you collected from your livestock on your fields prior to cultivating.  The regular practice of improved farming techniques will bring long-term dividends.  They are simple to understand and to implement.  I am always open to questions.  And if we disagree on the efficacy of a technique, I usually recommend an experiment, where two different techniques, where one is the traditional “African” method, are tested side by side.  (Though I understand that some techniques require several years to prove their superiority.)

My counterpart taking a soil sample.  He will refer to it to verify soil improvements in future years.

 

Despite the challenges with some individuals, it is refreshing to have a participant farmer enthusiastically tell me that he implemented companion planting of lettuce and onions after hearing from me that it was a great combination.  These are the farmers I try to nurture.  As a volunteer, I am prohibited from profiting financially from my efforts.  I freely share this with the farmers I work with.  I have no ulterior motives. I am not trying to advance the interests of a big multinational firm looking to make an easy profit off the African peasant.  All profits and improvements that they make are theirs to keep, to do with as they wish.

For those that lag behind, there is but one option. 

Repeat.

Repeat.

Repeat.