Waste not, want not.
What of a tree goes to waste in a tree-based community (a forest)?
Everybody eats, everybody gets eaten. If not for you, what is this food for? Earthworms or entropy itself?
What are you made of? See what you can do!
Tag Archives: cycles
Monthly Permaculture Principle: 4 – Apply Self-Regulation and Respond to Feedback
This month we’re kicking off our Monthly Permaculture Principle series. Each month we’ll introduce a permaculture principle and highlight examples of it. We encourage folks to join in, seeking out and sharing examples of permaculture design principles in action.
To start with, what are permaculture principles? Briefly, they are design principles, used in the continuous and evolving process of designing one’s landscape and lifestyle.
“Continuous and evolving” is a key phrase for this month’s permaculture principle:
4 – Apply self-regulation and respond to feedback
A go-to location for permaculture principle explanations and examples is PermaculturePrinciples.com:
We need to discourage inappropriate activity to ensure that systems can continue to function well.
The icon of the whole earth is the largest scale example we have of a self regulating ‘organism’ which is subject to feedback controls, like global warming. The proverb “the sins of the fathers are visited unto the children of the seventh generation” reminds us that negative feedback is often slow to emerge.
And a thoughtful bit about reflecting backward and forward in self-regulating:
I always thought the Native American idea “think of seven generations” meant to think ahead seven generations into the future. But I have been shown that it also means thinking back to our own great-grandparents, grandparents, parents, and ourselves, as well as forward to our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.In a garden, it means behaving as though we are part of a continuum, starting with an appreciation of the harvest of the land stewards of the previous generations, and planting perennials and enriching the soil so that years later our future grandchildren can continue to enjoy and reap the harvest of our labors. Responding to feedback can also mean remediating our own mistakes or those of our predecessors. This may mean replanting unproductive areas of the garden, or improving soil that has been impoverished.
via https://www.timberpress.com/blog/2013/02/12-principles-of-permaculture/
What examples of self-regulation and responding to feedback have you found in your own or your peers’ work designing landscapes, lifestyles, and other systems? Please share in the comments, and pass this principle on to others!
To hugelkultur or not to hugelkultur? Mulch is the question @ Rahma Forest Garden
Rahma Forest Garden is likely home to some of the most carbon-rich soils in the City of Syracuse. Trees and perennial plants have been established there for almost 10 years, and many truck loads of mulch have been spread on the site with Syracuse Grows’ annual garden Resource Drive. We chop and drop some plants like black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) and comfrey (Symphytum) to help build soil carbon & nitrogen. In addition to chop & dropping some plants, we accumulate a lot of plant matter from weeding, thinning, and pruning on site, which gets piled up in a low pallet fence roughly separating woody debris from green materials. Our carbon accumulation is in need of problem solving however, and strategies for handling yard waste have become a point of debate.
The piled up plant debris is useful in theory, as it could decompose and become a soil amendment for the garden. In reality, the piles are too loosely stacked to effectively break down, they are unwieldy to move or turn over, and they ultimately end up an eye sore (or once upon a time, a nest for abandoned kittens!) Occasionally, we need to empty the piles out by bringing them to the curb for city pickup.
Mulch from Syracuse Grows, waiting to be spread with pitch forks & shovels, buckets & wheelbarrows at Rahma Forest Garden September 22, 2018
City pickup is a nice option as the city has substantial mulching infrastructure & logistics, and the mulch made from city yard waste like ours is available for pickup at various locations for free. We end up cycling nutrients from Rahma Forest Garden, to the city composting facilities, then back to Rahma Forest Garden to some extent! Taking a closer look at this nutrient cycle, city pickup means the use of fossil fuels (trucks, heavy machinery) and the removal of nutrients from on the garden. That yard waste grew from sun, water and soil. If the goal is to build soil with a low-footprint as part of this regenerative garden, isn’t there a more regenerative solution that uses less fossil fuels? Some options being considered are listed below. The question at hand is: what’s the best way(s) to handle plant waste from the forest garden, maintaining healthy nutrient cycles for the site and beyond?