‘Permaculture is revolution disguised as gardening’. Will Hooker.
Oooh as a revolutionary activist at heart, that got me good and proper. This morning was filled with profound statements and stories about permaculture, what it is and what it means to us…
Ask most people who aren’t overly familiar with it, they’ll probably tell you it’s about ‘gardening’ and it is. BUT that’s just the surface of this design for life on earth.
Permaculture is a spiritual practice. And I don’t mean that we sit and meditate underneath the canopy trees or worship at the altar of richly mulched soil.
Permaculture is a design for ethical living and perhaps the only thing that will save this earth from the crap we’ve inflicted on it. Patricia, one of our lead teachers, suggested we start to call her ‘Earth’ leaving out the ‘the’. As she pointed out Earth is a living being and deserves to be recognized as such.
Chuck, our lead teacher with Patricia, and a 35 year-long permaculture activist and passionata, described it as
“An ecological design system for creating regenerative human habitats’. He said that when he heard politicians using the world ‘sustainability’ he knew it was time to find a new word. Regenerative kind of works for me too.
One by one the teachers stood up and shared their definitions of this thing called permaculture. Each of them were obviously moved deeply by their passion. I use the word passion a lot. Passion for the earth, for the sanctity of human life drives these people and I can feel it welling in me as I sit there immersed in it.
Bob told us that yesterday he saw a tree on this land that he could hardly put his arms around. It was a tree that he planted here 20 years ago. He’d tried living in different communities and somehow found himself back here in Georgia, homesteading 40 acres with his partner Isabel, because, as he put it, his mission was to ‘bring Permaculture to Georgia’. I’m with you Bob…
Penryn talked of the land she’d inherited in Kentucky and how she’d realized that her mission was to bring this work to Kentucky….
A theme was developing that touched me deeply… we all have a duty to spread the word, at local level, no matter how tough the resistance. That is what pioneers do… and in their own way, these people are all pioneers. Again, I feel humbled to be part of this growing movement…
Another description that moved me was the idea of permaculture as a ‘design dance between people and the natural world’ an interaction of flow and motion rhythm, give and take.
Patricia described Permaculture as an ‘umbrella for all her spiritual beliefs’ and that echoed what my husband has been saying for years in reference to his love for the earth first manifest in the woeful cry of a twelve year old writing a poem about his beloved… His warcry is ‘It’s my religion’.
That about sums it up. Permaculture is the new religion. Now I know that some people might consider this ‘sacreligious’ but it makes sense to me. Eons ago when the principle energy of the world was feminine, Gaia or mother earth was worshipped, adored and taken care of… and then the male energy came in and we entered a long period of earth rape.
I’m not getting at men… it’s just a way of describing the difference between softly treading and harshly marching… And now,I sense that this female energy is emerging again in both men AND women and we are finding a new way to honor Earth.
The big difference now is that we don’t have time to waste dancing naked in the woods and adoring the earth in ceremony, sweet as that may be. This lady is dying and we gotta get down dirty and give her CPR.
Which was exactly what we did today in the mulching exercise. I knew I was in love when I got down on the ground and dug my hands eagerly into the pig manure to spread it on the garden. There’s something so alive about touching her body… this lady we know as Earth. She’s so responsive…
We were presented with two young peach trees which had grass growing a little around them. Various heaps of material were piled up, in the same way professional chefs on TV have those little white bowls of ready chopped ingredients that they just pop into the mix.
First off we learned that turning the earth with tractors or even spades was an absolute no no. It compacts the earth…So all Bob did was stick a pitchfork in here and there to aerate it.
After that we shovelled on a heap of pig and chicken poop mixed with a bit of straw and other dirt which we spread in a 10ft diameter circle around the little peach tree. Then we stuck in some blueberries. And I literally mean, stuck in. Someone dug a spade into the ground, pulled back the sod and in went the yummy antioxidant cuttings…
After that we covered the entire circle with cardboard [all tape removed] and a discussion ensured about pure cardboard, chinese cardboard, soy printed paper and more… Bottom line is if people are starving a bit of chinese cardboard is better than none! But we were going for the full on organic thing here so we used pure cardboard. Every single gap was covered and double covered. This Bermuda Grass is a greedy blighter and will peek it’s head up through even the teeniest gap.
I realized that my rather half hearted effort to ‘mulch’ our bit of growing land was pretty inadequate.. sheets of cardboard and a scattering of yard mowings won’t cut the mustard here. And our gratitude to the Deputy Sherrif [our neighbor] who cut and turned the land with his huge tractor is somewhat diminished.. but as they say ‘bless them for they know not what they do’ and the generous intention is well appreciated].
The cardboard was watered down and then some..
After that we shoved on heaps of straw, fully covering the cardboard. Then we planted some irises around the circle of the tree, after Brendan, the lead gardener of the community, had placed some plastic pots around the base of the tree to protect it.
We used knives, trowlels and whatever was on hand that would cut the cardboard. Bob showed us how to make a slit in it and just laid the iris with its root on top.. after that, we just shovelled a little bit of soil starter to give it a booster. and tucked it up in a bed of straw.
Bob reminded us to plant the annual foody stuff where we could reach it. Irises don’t have to be picked but taters and onions do!
So here we have this little permaculture plot with a peach tree, blueberries and annual such as potatoes and onions. Seed potatoes grown up North were used. And we’re doing this in the beginning of February… Tthe temperature outside here in Southern Georgia was up in the late fifties and delightfully warm so God blessed our planting today.
A hole cut in the cardboard, the potato was simply laid on top and covered in straw. Bob assured us that it would be enjoying a period of growth while the cold was still with us and would give around 6 – 10 potatoes per one planted.
The onions were planted in triangular form… we used green onions… and again a little hole dug, in the cardboard, pop in the onion, shove on some soil starter and spread the straw around it and finally we heaped piles of pecan shells onto the top. Because people come to visit here and like it to look nice, we also placed circles of bricks around the garden.
A little part of me and all my fellow permaculturists in waiting will be left in this wonderful place. Perhaps like Bob, we’ll return in twenty years and with tears in our eyes look at the little bit of garden that we were responsible for starting.
I loved every moment of it, from picking up handfuls of piggy poop to spreading straw..digging holes in cardboard and putting in blueberries. And as I remarked to one of our group… these things are like weeds down here yet we still pay $3.99 for a pathetic punnet that’s probably travelled a few hundred miles. Not for long.
Somehow everyone just mucked in and did their bit… There’s something so satisfying about getting down in the dirt.. and even more exciting for me was that I’d actually done something practical and that for many years down the line, people will be eating luscious berries from those little shoots that we stuck in ground today.
After that we engaged in the planting of a number of yummy foodstuffs in our stomachs.. including the hog that was slaughtered this week. Quinoa pilaff, broccoli and cheese, I can’t even remember what we ate only that it was downright divine…Of course Earthy Girl is pretty versed in giving her lovers a great time!!!
The afternoon was taken up with patterns, led by Zev who talked earlier about how nature’s cuisine is different everywhere populated by species that want to be there. I thought about my husband and his affinity with patterns and wished he could have been there to see it..
I studied something called NLP for many years. NLP is about modelling what works and adopting strategies for success. Permaculture is Nature’s NLP… It takes what works, uses patterning and reapplies it to create edible gardens using strategies tried and tested by nature herself.. But as we learned earlier, this stuff goes way beyond gardening… It truly is a design for living…More of that later.
We in the West are well aware that we won’t be able to live the way we do for much longer.. The Cubans didn’t have a choice. When we embargoed them and Russia collapsed they were left with nothing. Our bedtime movie was all about how, through dire need, they learned to permaculture the entire country…
But it truly is bedtime now and I’m ready to hit the sack.. and despite the sunshine today it’s pretty cold right now… and tomorrow is another day….
And I leave you with the thought that, as we were told today…
It’s time to put the ‘nature’ back into ‘human nature’.
© 2010, Sunny Soleil. All rights reserved but relaxed Pierre Soleil We like to pass on the word so YOU are welcome to use this document in accordance with the Creative Commons license. That is, you can tweet, facebook, repost, excerpt and even adapt it so long as you don’t pretend it’s yours for commercial purposes
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed!
