Gaia's Garden
Whatever size yard or garden you have to work with, you can apply basic permaculture principles to make it more diverse, more natural, more productive, and more beautiful. Best of all, once it's established, an ecological garden will reduce or eliminate most of the backbreaking work that's needed to maintain the typical lawn and garden.
Stats for nerds
4recommend
4mentions
4people
2017–2020years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I’m not much past 1000 hours myself, which is about when you can string together original thoughts that might be correct. I was always a fan of systems thinking so it’s been sucking me in. The matriarch of the family was the last master gardener as far as I’m aware, but I still have 15 years to match her and I think I might just... except she had a massive apple tree whose match I’ve seen maybe once, and I’ll be dead before any tree I plant is over 18”.
Secret Life of Trees, Mycelium Running, and to a lesser extent Gaia’s Garden (by the late, great Toby Hemenway) all have different vignettes about solid ecology that created as many questions as they answered, but lacking a teacher that can be a good thing. I’m slowly filling those gaps in elsewhere.
- Good points about engaging in this work has changed the ways the author both thinks and feels about the landscape and ecosystem.
We've been learning about permaculture (old school Holzer, Mollison, Hemenway style) and small-scale homesteading for about 8 yrs now. Started from nearly scratch, in terms of practical gardening.
Every bit of work I've done with bees (solitary mason bees) and other permaculture (garden, orchard, efficient irrigation solutions, swaling, synergistic plantings, etc) has been fascinating.
The permaculture philosophy itself is more broadly-applicable than agriculture, in terms of a systems based view, but a lot of the practical instantiations are in ag, heating, irrigation, animal husbandry, etc. There's a lot on offer for many people who would be attracted to HN. E.g. looking at the thermodynamic aspects of siting water tanks, passive solar, masonry stoves, etc (physics and biomed background b4 software). Cost-wise and energetically a lot more scalable than widely existing solutions.
Also improved my perceptive ability and appreciation for natural surroundings and different human landscapes.
Anyhow, I'll get down off my soapbox now, but it's been a surprisingly rich vein of practical innovation and fun.
If you're curious, check out "Gaia's Garden" by Hemenway or one of Bill Mollison's books (former in Portland, so small yards, latter doing more wide-reaching stuff in Australia and developing nations).
- On my list to read in 2020:
Books/Authors I've read that I would recommend:The Visual Display of Quantitative Information The Rust Programming Language Progressive Web Apps Permaculture: Principles and Pathways beyond Sustainability Farming the Woods Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms Affinity Designer Workbook The Age of Surveillance Capitalism Walden A Guide for Desert and Dryland Restoration Ernest Hemingway On Writing The Two Hands of God (Alan Watts) The Anarchist's Design Book and/or With the Grain: A Craftsman's Guide to Wood Dune Some other fiction reading I'll decide on after I finish DuneTao of Physics, Web of Life, Systems View of Life, etc. (Fritjof Capra) ^Capra's work has heavily influenced my worldview and ability to think in systems Designing Data Intensive Applications (just finishing this week) Permaculture One & Two, Gaia's Garden, Edible Forest Gardens I&II Black Swan, Antifragile, etc. (Nassim Taleb) Cloud Hidden: Whereabouts Unknown (Alan Watts, written late in life) Ishmael, Story of B, etc. (Daniel Quinn) You are Not a Gadget, Who Owns the Future, etc. (Jaron Lanier) Goethe's Italian Journey Vonnegut, Hemingway, Steinbeck The Wheel of Time - Sure! When I started learning about agroforestry I looked for english books on the subject but didn't find good ones, Gaia's Garden by Toby Hemenway have really good info you could use. But in portuguese I've so a few good PDFs here, I guess that's because of the work of Ernst Gotsch here in Brazil, here's a good video that summarize his work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE
An agroforestry look like this: https://sitiocurupira.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/agroflores...
Take very special attention to the ground on the video I linked above. So the main thing is the soil, the work will basically be always improving it by pilling up organic matter, from regular pruning and your organic waste too, the school must have good source of organic waste, also the city gardens/grass pruning are a good place to look for organic matter you could use on this project.
Also, the more you plant together and at the same time the better. On the video you can see Bananas and Eucalyptus side by side, people think that Eucalyptus doesnt let anything grows near it, etc... but then I saw a lot of things fruiting just a few centimeters from Eucalyptus, because of the regular pruning.
I'll send you an email so we can continue to talk about this.
