# Gaia's Garden Chapter 1
Created: 2022-01-30 08:09 Topic: #Topic/Permaculture # Source: #Source/Book
Introducing the Ecological garden
Author asks questions:
- How do people fit into natural landscapes?
- How to integrate incomplete pieces into a vigorous, thriving backyard ecosystem that benefits both people & wildlife?
-> Answer is Ecological garden
- Meld best features, beyond adding styles together
- Feels like a living being, with a character and essence that is unique
- Combine low environmental impact, low maintenance and high yields with elegant aesthetics ^985214
What is Permaculture?
-> uses a set of principles & practices to design sustainable human settlements
Used to:
- Design buildings
- energy and wastewater systems
- villages
- school curricula
- business
- community groups
- decision-making processes
-> How? -> focus less on objects themselves than on the design of relationships among them
Permaculture is the toolbox that helps us organize and decide when an how to use those tools, connecting different disciplines, strategies and techniques. => a linking science
->Aim? -> design ecologically sound, economically prosperous human communities, guided by a set of ethics:
- caring for Earth
- caring for people
- reinvesting surplus that this creates
Permaculture Principles
-> indicators of sustainability
Core Principles for Ecological Design
Observe
Connect
Catch & store energy
Let Each element perform multiple functions
Let each function be supported by multiple elements
Least change 4 greatest effect
Use small-scale intensive systems
Optimize edge
Collaborate with succession
Use biological & renewable resources
Principles Based on Attitudes
Turn problems in solutions
Get a yield
Biggest limit = creativity
Mistakes are tools for learning
Gardens that Really Work with Nature
Ecology is concerned with the interrelationship of organisms and their environments. -> Ecological gardens connect people to their environment & looks and works the same way nature does.
“Nature has a broad back, and with a little ingenuity and a change in viewpoint, a gardener can shift plenty of labor to this willing partner”
Why is gardening So Much Work?
Let nature do the work for you
Tilling destroys weeds and pumps air to microbes that release a flood of nutrients for fast crop growth… burn up all the nutrients and then die => depletes fertility ^HighTimePreference
Conventional landscapes have torn the web of nature.
Creating a well-balanced garden means showing something about how nature behaves.
Beyond Natural Gardening
Every bit of food, every scrap of lumber, each medicinal herb or other human product that comes from someone’s yard means that one less chunk of land outside our hometown needs to be denuded of natives and developed for human use.
-> shortest chain possible
Yard with native plants lacking any for human use => somewhere else, out of sight, there is a nonnative-containing farm and factory forest with the environmental destruction they bring, providing for needs. => Taking care of ourselves (in our own yard) means that factory farms and forests can shrink ^SelfSovereignity4CommonGood -> this is a fight against the abstraction, cfr. Connor Veering
Embedded link: Death By Abstraction
The native vs. Exotics Discussion
- Species are constantly in motion
- Gardening with native plants -> [[Cause célèbre]] cfr. Climate crisis, BLM through George Floyd
- Exotics are not the issue, our intervention is -> opportunists move in after primary damage was done and often in direct response to it
When we lose something we love, we search for a scapegoat and a newly arrived species makes a ready target
Nature abhors a vacuum - create one, and she’ll rush in with whatever’s handy
You can’t fight nature - nature always bats last - but you can sometimes be first to get where it’s going
Nature has a patience that humans lack, nature take the long view.
Opportunistic species, after a boom-and -bust period comes into equilibrium with its surroundings, It make take a decade or a century
- native is merely a question of perspective
- We need to look deeper into our reasons for demonizing certain species
Hierarchy of safety for choosing plant:
- use native to fill desired role if possible
- use a tested exotic
- consider small scale-introduction of new exotic -> a good approach to test new procedures/techniques
Making the Desert Bloom, Sustainably
References
- [[Meshtadel Space ( 21.01.2022) - notes by Czino]]
- [[Permies.com - Review Gaia’s Garden - chapter 1]]
- [[Referral Points MoC - Gaia’s garden]]
- [[20220204-Telegram Parallels]]