Start with the Low Hanging Fruit

“Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” -Martin Luther King

Even the great visionary MLK probably did not imagine just how deeply and widely his dream would spread. He made it to this transformative point in our national psyche because he had the faith to begin and the ability to build and compound momentum. He doesn’t win the Nobel Peace Prize or give the I Have a Dream speech to the world without the decades of dedication and smaller victories to build up to that point. By the time he gave that speech in 1963, he had already consulted with two different presidents and had been on the cover of time magazine years beforehand. His first publication in a newspaper was almost 20 years before that. It had been a long time ‘comin.

The same is true of Geoff Lawton. He is probably the leading Permaculture Designer in the world today. His main demonstration site, Zaytuna Farm, is a living example of what humans are capable of creating. It is completely off grid and feeds hundreds of people and houses dozens of people per year. They have many acres of food forests and have built dozens of ponds that are used for aquaculture, passive gravity flood irrigation, wildfire prevention, chinampas, and more. They create all of their own compost and have tree nurseries supplying thousands of useful trees. They have cows, chickens, ducks, and horses all serving different functions within the systems. It’s a lot. And it’s been about forty years in the making (Geoff took his first Permaculture Design Course in 1983.) Tony Robbins sums it up well: “We usually overestimate what we think we can accomplish in one year – but we grossly underestimate what we can accomplish in a decade.”

To get your permaculture freight train rolling, it will help if you start with some easy wins to build behavioral momentum. Behavioral Momentum is a tool in teaching and psychology that helps adults get children moving in the right direction. For example, if you have a difficult task to ask of your child, it can often help to build up to it with easier or more enjoyable things. You might ask Johnny to grab a snack first. He happily says yes and does it, setting a positive collaborative tone. Then you ask him to fill up a glass of water. Might not be as exciting, but it’s likely another easy win. Johnny now starts to see himself as happy and compliant and is much more likely to go with a more difficult task like starting his homework. This helpful strategy is also a great tool to use on ourselves, because, let’s face it, we’re all just big babies walking around in adult bodies pretending to know what we’re doing. So what are the easiest places to get the ball rolling?

“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” -Arthur Ashe

Since you’re here on your device now, I would suggest going back to my How I Discovered Permaculture post and checking out some of the various free blogs and videos I mentioned there or going to the library to try to grab some of those books. Once you get out of the virtual realm and back into the real world, the best place to start is on paper. First you want to assess your goals. Talk them over with family or other stakeholders and write them down. These often include things like:

• Start a small business or a side hustle
• Save money on groceries
• Eat healthier
• Avoid plastic and pesticides in your food
• Help the environment by sinking carbon and water
• Plant more native plants
• Create habitat for wildlife and pollinators
• Live in a beautiful landscape

The benefits of permaculture are vast and this list could go on and on, but this is just a common set of ideas to help you get started. Figure out what you want to achieve first, then start to draw it out. Vision boards can be helpful reminders that also look nice if you leave them in places where you will see them often. This is a quick win and continual motivator that can also provide a framework for what you prioritize in your permaculture adventures.

Once you have brainstormed and visualized your goals, hopes, and dreams, a good next step is to start drawing basic maps of potential garden or life designs. It is much cheaper and easier to make mistakes on paper, rather than in the field. If you are not yet comfortable drawing up your own designs, we offer year-round design services and would be happy to help you discover the best setup for your landscape and life. My two most basic approaches for maps are pictured below:

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The first is more focused on a small area and includes specific plants using a color-coded design. This is helpful for visualizing how diverse your plantings and harvests might be. It also helps strike a balance of different functions and aesthetics of your gardens. The second is based on a larger project. This one was over 20 acres, but I would do the same thing for a smaller site as well. I printed a contour map to show elevation changes on the landscape. Then I made several copies of that map to draw different outlines on. This gives you a good framework for channeling water, frost, wind, sun, and all of the elements across the entire landscape. Making your mistakes on paper is the best way to start out, but at some point we need to take this outside to really get rolling.

Moving Beyond Analysis Paralysis

Since permaculture is about protracted thought rather than protracted labor, a common pitfall for many people who get into it is to get stuck in analysis paralysis. There are millions of different plants you could try to use and infinite potential layouts to arrange them in. It’s easy to become a sort of mad scientist stuck in the lab losing touch with reality. The whole point of this is to get outside and plant something, harvest something, or forage something!

The best place to begin is at your doorstep. In permaculture design, we call these areas that you walk by multiple times every day “zone 1”. I have two 150 foot rows of oregano as a cover crop in my extensive food forest that is about 30 yards away from the house down a fairly steep hill. Do you know how many times I was making a dinner and worked up the time and effort to go grab some? Zero times. Compare that to the small patch I planted right outside the door that I pick from it at least 20-30 times per year. The rush of our lives gets to all of us and it the reality is that the closer the garden is to the kitchen, the more often you are going to use it. That doesn’t mean that the larger rows I have in the food forest are useless. They still serve many functions – providing lots of seed every fall, keeping grass and weeds back from the young trees I have planted, feeding pollinators, and they give the option of a massive harvest if we ever choose to invest the labor into it.

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Let’s take this back to the doorstep, since that is the highest ROI and quickest win you can give yourself. If you have a patch of grass or some landscape plantings there, you can start preparing beds immediately. There’s many ways to do this, but my favorite method of bed preparation is a simple sheet mulch. I just use carboard and wood chips if I’m planting in sod because that usually gives enough fertility, but you can always add layers to this to make it even better! Compost, manure, straw, grass clippings, leaves, branches, whatever organic material you have can be added to make a sheet mulch lasagna. You can also use this method along with a raised bed. This gives you a more formal look, defined edges, and helps stack up the fertility and mulch deeper to keep weeds back and plants healthy.

Collect some cardboard from a store or your workplace, preferably plain brown without a lot of ink. I peel any tape off first as well. Call some arborists in your area and offer your yard as a place for them to dump woodchips. They’re often happy to get rid of them. Carefully plan and clearly communicate where you would like them to dump. A truckload of woodchips is quite a bit. Then just lay out your carboard making sure not to leave any gaps between pieces and layer on a few inches of woodchips. Voila! You just prepped a no-till, no-poison, no-plastic garden bed! Pat yourself on the back and kick back and relax for a bit.

I like to wait at least two or three months until the cardboard and sod has pretty much broken down, then I go in with a hoe or a shovel and pull back the woodchips where I want to plant. This exposes rich soil that is perfect for planting! I lay down seed, always putting in extra amounts and at least 2-3 different types of seed to ensure that something takes and fills in the area. Bare soil is an invitation for weeds, so it’s worth the expense for extra seed to get it right during this crucial transition period. After a spread the seed, I cover it lightly with whatever I have that will give it a bit of protection but still let light in and allow it to sprout. Seed free, pesticide free hay or straw is perfect, but this is hard to find in our area. I mostly use shredded leaves, grass clippings, and cattails since I have those at hand nearby. This light scatter mulch gives your seed protection from baking in the sun or getting eaten by birds and gives them a little extra nutrients as it breaks down as well.

Other options for bed preparation

If you have highly compacted soil I like to use a broadfork before sheet mulching to get a deep aeration. It’s much easier for us to do this work than to ask our garden plants to break up the concrete soil! This is also an excellent workout. Unlike many gardening activities that encourage poor form and a bad back, this workout is like going to the gym. Good resistance training, good cardio, and good form. A similar high labor endeavor is the double dig method. Basically, you remove the sod in one pile, then dig a foot or so deeper and put that in another pile. You then bury the sod and break up the subsoil on top of it and you’re ready to plant! This gets really deep aeration and the sod breaks down for perfect compost. It’s a lot of work, so make sure you plant heavily, plant perennials, and plant fortress plants to keep grass out so that you only do this work once!

Tilling is not a terrible way to start a bed if you have the machinery for it. Just don’t make it a yearly habit or you will face the same issues as industrial agriculture: loss of fertility, topsoil erosion, drought susceptibility, compaction, and weeds. If you do up sod, you will need several passes to kill the grass roots. I would recommend one as soon as the ground thaws and is not too muddy for your machine, another 2-3 weeks after that, and a third 2-3 weeks after that. By then almost all of the grass roots and weed seeds will be killed off, but you will also have some compaction. That’s why I then break it up deeper with a broadfork. I use a scatter mulch after I spread the seed, and then add a deeper mulch after everything sprouts. It’s not the best method, but it is better than plastic and herbicides in my opinion.

If you have an area by the house that is already dedicated to landscaping with rocks or mulch, your work is even easier. Just fill in the gaps! There are a few common problems with the typical ways these landscapes are set up. First, they usually have too much spacing between plants. This means you’re either going to need to spray poison, pull weeds, or pull up and re-do plastic sheeting every few years. Usually it’s some combination of all three. That’s a ton of expense, hours of work, and it brings poisons and phthalates right into your living space. Second, they often have plants that are not super useful to us or to wildlife. Quite often there are edible and medicinal options that can also serve the purpose of being ornamental. I will have a future post on some of the top “edimental” (edible + ornamental) plants for our area soon. Plant these areas tightly with useful polycultures and you can have a beautiful, edible forest garden without much prep work.

What if I don’t have access to land?

This is where you need to get creative. Tap into your social capital if you can and start a plant collection in the yard of a friend, family member, or neighbor. Then when you get your own space you will have plants ready to multiply. Look out for community gardens in your area. They are becoming increasingly common across the country. Ask some neighbors if they would let you plant an edible hedgerow or a small garden so that it is right by your house. You can eat from it and collect seed for future use when you get more land access. The bottom line is to get creative, get social, and get planting!

Even people with no land access and no social capital nearby can get in on the highest ROI activity there is – foraging. I will have future posts on the top plants in our area to learn to forage. There are public lands, roadsides, vacant lots, hedgerows, and neighbors yards that are bursting forth with more edible greens, veggies, tubers, fruits, nuts, and seeds than you can imagine! Learn one plant at a time, make sure you know how to ID it properly, and then stay on the lookout for it wherever you go. There are several plants that are considered invasive to our region that people would be happy to have you eat from that also happen to be legit superfoods.

To sum it up:

1. Dream big. Dream with your team. Create a vision and put it on paper.
2. Make a plan and draw it out. Make your mistakes on paper, not in the field.
3. Start at your doorstep. Plant one small permanent bed per season and add on from there.
4. Get creative in the community. Learn to forage one plant at a time.
5. Celebrate your progress every step of the way. Enjoy the journey and the process, and keep on planting!