Gardening, foraging, permaculture (not agriculture!)

Regenerative Subsistence Land
#6

oy! the winters are really, really changing

when i was 9, we moved from San Diego to SE Ohio, and i remember that that winter was cold and it wasn’t just me; we kept moving from house to house 'cuz pipes were freezing and busting or furnaces would crap out etc.

in the following years i went from a kid who’d never seen snow (and figured it looked like it did in those “Peanuts” comics) to being very familiar w/ snow 3ft deep.

now, we get a foot of snow and its all “Winter Storm 07” (dramatic musical cue)

yeah, i’ve watched the winters here get pretty dang mild over the last 20-ish years…

i’m feeling pretty optimistic about the patch of greens. i was a little worried cuz they all started kind of slow in the spring, but they’re doing great now and my grazing doesn’t seem to have had much of an impact.

i have managed to get a tomato patch to reseed for a few years, but this year it was pretty disappointing.

#7

[quote=“jhereg, post:6, topic:486”]oy! the winters are really, really changing

when i was 9, we moved from San Diego to SE Ohio, and i remember that that winter was cold and it wasn’t just me; we kept moving from house to house 'cuz pipes were freezing and busting or furnaces would crap out etc.

in the following years i went from a kid who’d never seen snow (and figured it looked like it did in those “Peanuts” comics) to being very familiar w/ snow 3ft deep.

now, we get a foot of snow and its all “Winter Storm 07” (dramatic musical cue)

yeah, i’ve watched the winters here get pretty dang mild over the last 20-ish years…[/quote]

Yep, I was home for October (normally my favorite month because of the trees turning) and at the beginning it was 90-100 degrees out, and on Halloween I kept saying “I remember when it was snowing on Halloween!” when this year it was sunny and WARM! I mean, tshirt weather! And it’s STILL WARM, enough that you don’t have to wear a coat at least. I was at some parks with a friend the other day and I had just a long sleeve shirt on and it was so nice and warm and sunny. Don’t get me wrong, I love the weather we are having, but it is so different than when I grew up. I am wondering what this winter will be like. Jokingly, I was telling my friend that there was not going to be any snow at all, that it was going ot be like the winters in portland! Hmmm… maybe that’s not too far off…

#8

yeah, it’s still reasonably warm. i figure i’ll be wearing shorts til Dec this year

i’ve been noticing that winter is shifting a bit. not really kicking in til mid-ish Dec and not really stopping until late March/early April w/ Feb being “snow month”. prolly get some flurries/light snow before & after Feb, but i wouldn’t expect much on the ground outside of the Feb window. at least, that’s my guess based on the trends i’ve seen from the last few years…

#9

Yes! This is the type of gardening I do as well. My interest in plants started with edible wilds and then I moved into food and agriculture studies, which became permaculture and rewilding (feralization.) I saw people working so hard to grow these pampered vegetables and realized quickly that it was a hobby, not a viable food production system. I have feralized chard, amaranth, lemon cucumbers, and pumpkins so far in my garden. It’s been very exciting to watch these plants to their thing. Kale has perennialized in my garden, but the birds eat all the seeds! Salsify was growing wild when I took over the management of my garden, and in two years I have wildmanaged it to be an incredible crop! The leaves look like grass, and provide a great understory for my fruit trees and berry bushes, but when you dig them out you realize that the soil is FULL of these amazing edible roots!

The main methodology is “benign neglect”. I just don’t run that clean of an operation, so I allow things to expand and grow and do their thing. I do weedwhack (or “powergraze”) and if I see chard or salsify, I just will weedwhack around it.

Beyond that, it helps to plant things that I know will grow well in my area. Mostly I plant things that are considered “wild” or things that I have noticed that have gone feral in the neighborhood. If I am going to plant an annual and give it some pampering, it needs to be WORTH it in my opinion. Here, tomatoes, garlic, potatoes, and squash are about the only thing that seems worth it for the amount of effort.

Great to see others doing this work!

#10

I took my first real stab at horticulture this year.

I had nice results with some things like tomatoes and squash and a lot of my herbs (oregano, basil, spearmint, cilantro.) My nettles and catnip didn’t do well during the summer, but they had a resurgence after the heat backed down. And I finally got my landlord’s lawnmower guy to stop cutting down my maypop, it finally took off midsummer – though I haven’t had any fruit from it yet since it suffered two years of abuse.

I know clover can definitely take over your garden, but since it's edible, no harm done! Plus it is very beneficial for the soil and as a cover crop, and attracts beneficial insects.

If I remember correctly, clover works really well to fix nitrogen from the atmosphere into the soil. So it works as a winter ground cover and does its N fixing at the same time.

#11

If I remember correctly, clover works really well to fix nitrogen from the atmosphere into the soil. So it works as a winter ground cover and does its N fixing at the same time.[/quote]

oh, yeah, it’s totally worth it to me. clover is just one of those great community plants…

#12

Hey feral kevin! Nice to see you on here! I love your blog!

-emiy

#13

The best book to get for natural gardening and farming is the One Straw Revolution, by Masanobu Fukuoka. Thanks for this thread, this is a subject close to my heart.

#14

I’ll defintely take a look at that book! Thanks!

-emily

#15

Check this site for Fukuoka Books free online books:
http://www.soilandhealth.org/01aglibrary/01aglibwelcome.html

#16

So I have been trying to plan the foraging garden design for this spring… I have a fairly large space (my parents are allowing me free range of half of their large garden, and all of the small garden in the front of the property, which will be the berry garden)… has anyone established a foraging garden before? I am most concerned with pathways throughout the garden… I really want it to not only be a beautiful, functioning perennial edible garden, but also want to have pathways and a bench in the center so that we can spend time in the garden and relax and enjoy it. So I am thinking about have a spiral walkway and raised beds in the planting areas, so that the ground does not get compacted and hinder root growth. I have always been a lot more interested in raised beds, and I think that it is the best method for gardening. I want this to last year after year so I think it’s important to have a really functional, lasting design… I am gonna go search for some books on the topic! Any suggestions?

-emily

#17

The book “Gaia’s Garden” by Toby Hemenway has great ideas about designing pathways. He suggests using the keyhole design, a spiral design for an herb garden, and for larger areas a main pathway with smaller pathways coming off like the veins of a leaf.

#18

I’ll second “Gaia’s Garden” and also offer Toby Hemenway’s website.

you may also want to look over Fukuoka’s methods as well as Emilia Hazelip’s Synergistic Garden.

as for personal advice; be ready to experiement, fail, and learn; whenever you don’t have a clear method laid out for rewilded cultivation, try it more or less the “conventional/traditional” way, then start looking at how to adapt it to a more rewilding way; if possible, try eating the intended plant(s) before cultivation, and have friends & family try as well.

you’ve mentioned before that your parents have been long-standing gardeners. out of curiousity, what techniques/methods do they use now?

#19

Emily,
I meant to ask: where do you get wood to make raised beds? A friend told me that treated lumber leaches toxins into the soil.
Vicky

#20

Vicky, treated lumber does leach toxins into the soil, and your plants! Do not use treated lumber (or salvaged wood from construction sites, unless you know it’s untreated). You do not have to use wood for raised beds, they can just be raised dirt beds, but you can also get untreated wood from the hardware store, just ask someone that works there. Also, you can use other things like bricks, cinder blocks (and plant herbs in the holes), sticks, bamboo, rocks, etc. to line your beds… I will probably just use piled compost, dirt, mulch for the beds this year, as I won’t have a lot of money to spend for the wood, but my dad does have a lot of bamboo growing in the yard, so that could be useful too…

-emily

#21

chromiated copper arsenate …very bad… very residual in tissue

#22

They just plant in rows, with everything really spaced apart, and to me, this doesn’t seem to utilize the space/mimic nature in anyway… I want to use raised beds because that way the plants’ roots will not get compacted when you walk in the garden, allowing healthier roots and plants to grow, less disturbed…

They also do not utilize companion planting to the extent I want to, which I think is very important for organic gardens and a self-supporting system… and they have no water concerns addressed (this last summer there was a drought and the garden did not do very well because they don’t water it) like water retention in the soil/compost/mulch that I want to experiment with…

Thanks for the book recomendations, I think that they will be on my christmas list!

-emily

#23

regarding water: you’ll find that addressed in “Gaia’s Garden”, but i’ll share the best suggestions: swales, dead-wood swales, and hugelkulture. these are all on my list of things to try (i’ll say upfront, that i haven’t really put these to the test yet as i only found out about them mid/late summer)

swales are when you dig a trench with a berm on the down slope side. the bottom of the trench is kept completely level and runs along the contour of the land. this helps to retain water longer, allowing the soil to absorb more of it. generally the berms are planted. the size of the swale is dependent on both the slope involved and the amount of rain/snow that gets dropped at any one time (so if you get heavy downpours during one part of the year, you want wide and deep swales to hold all that water). here’s a link (not the best, but it should get you started).

deadwood swales are similar, but the trenches are at least partially filled with dead, dry wood (or other high carbon material, like straw). the dry wood, being in contact with soil, will slowly rot, and while it does that, it also helps to retain additional water.

hugelkulture is somewhat similar but smaller scale. you take dead wood (twigs, small limbs, etc), lay them out on the ground, then cover with soil/mulch. again, the wood helps to absorb and retain moisture. this method is supposed to be particularly good for things like melons, squash, potatoes (“hill” crops, I suppose), but i would think the applicability would be much larger than just those.

also, i’ve been doing research on positive impacts people can have on the earth, i’ve come across “terra preta”, which appears to be a soil made by including charred wood (charcoal) along w/ organic fertilizers into garden soils.

as for the row plantings, have you looked into John Jeavons’s Grow Biointensive? i won’t lie, it’s labor intensive, but it stresses efficient spacing. you may be interested in reading about their spacing methods. his group (Bountiful Gardens) has a website here and you can probably find the main book at your library (or borrow it via intralibrary).

ooh, one last thing, it’s still a good time of year to grab those bags of leaves…

#24

I’ve always considered permaculture and gardening, Agriculture.

#25

a lot of people consider them the same, but a lot of people also see a big difference between gardening & farming

for my part, i see too many differences to lump them together