Journey to Permaculture — Year Two

Merry Teesdale is a field biologist and permaculture designer who specializes in win-win solutions. She manages OwlWood Wildlife Refuge and OwlWood Garden, which displays and encourages the development of sustainable food production within the community.

Part 2

It’s 2004 and the green grassy lawn at my home covers about a third of an acre. Mowing is my least favorite chore. I feel guilty each time I’m doing it. Mowing is noisy, disturbs the peace, obscures birdsong, the exhaust stinks and the two-stroke lawnmower throws out as much smog by itself as over 300 cars do.

The air pollution generated during the hour and 15 minutes I run that mower contributes to the haze in Bellingham’s air that sometimes becomes visible in late summer when the winds don’t blow it away.

In an effort to maintain or improve their lawns, some of my neighbors spread legal poisons in the form of pesticides and herbicides to eradicate bugs and weeds. Rains wash these poisons from their lawns into ditches, which lead to creeks, toxic all the way into our beloved Bellingham Bay where we should be growing, harvesting and eating our local seafood, i.e., clams, oysters, fish.

All in all, maintaining grass is a total waste of energy and more importantly, my time! Not only is mowing a polluting, unproductive use of my time, the mowed lawn tends to keep away the interesting wildlife that would ordinarily be nearby. A monoculture of grass which is not allowed to go to seed will not support the local prey base (voles), who are needed to support almost everything on up the food chain.

Thoughts like these go through my head every monotonous hour I reluctantly spend mowing. Will I be doing this over and over and over for the rest of the time I belong to this place? What underlies the belief that our culture has about lawns? How can it be changed?

I make a personal decision to permanently cut down on my mowing time. Just to make it interesting, I give myself a five-year time limit to change the lawn into something that doesn’t need mowing, yet looks good and is good for the land too.

This is a grand experiment and it’s a great time to apply permaculture principles like #12. Turn problems into solutions. Make the greatest change for the least effort. We are only limited by a lack of information and imagination. Work with, not against nature. I add a planting rule too. Everything has to be edible, or fragrant or medicinal.

I decide to convert a section of the lawn into perennial food production! Instead of regular mowing, I will spend less time watering, pruning and harvesting and for a reward, I gain a useful product as well as saving time and money by not going to the store. No mowing plus great food, more money and leisure time — Right On! Best of all, permaculture has a free, fast, labor-saving way to implement this new growing area! (principles 4 a, b, c, 5, 7, 8.)

Sheet mulching is an easy technique that gives immediate results, looks great and costs practically nothing! The real work is done by the critters living in your soil! Here’s how to do it. Get some free big cardboard sheets from the appliance stores or local recycle bins. Place them down in overlapping layers two to three sheets thick on the grass where you want a garden bed. Cover it with something like wood chips to keep it moist and from blowing away, then forget about it for three to four months.

After that, Voila! your grass is gone, the roots are gone and even the cardboard will be gone! Only bare soil is left, loosened, fertilized and aerated with worm tunnels! Your friends and neighbors, the earthworms, have done all this work for free.

Embellishing the sheet mulch technique will give improved results. You can plant something immediately by cutting a hole through the cardboard and sod and prepping the soil in that spot. Or, start by spreading a four-inch thick layer of composted manure right on the grass, top it with cardboard and woodchips and in a few short months, your garden will already be fertilized and full of beautiful humus when you plant it.

Replacing the cardboard every year will eliminate the need for ever weeding again. If you want a garden immediately, spread the cardboard on the grass and cover it with six-inch thick layer of manure. Plant your seeds or starts in rows like a regular garden and by the time the worms have eaten the grass and cardboard, the roots of your starts will be growing down that deep.

My vision is to have continuous fresh fruit from strawberries to December. The strawberry patch is in the Chinese raised bed garden mentioned in my December article, “Journey to Permaculture.” I purchase eight blueberry plants, early, mid and late varieties, a couple rhubarb plants, some artichokes just for fun, a truckload of cow manure and from this, create a sheet-mulched berry patch. Until the blueberries reach full size in a few years, there’s room to plant squashes and pumpkins between them (principles 8, 9, 12 a, b, d).

As the growing season progresses and the squash plants increase in bulk, I discover the very best secret of sheet mulching. Not only does cardboard kill grass, it eliminates weeding. Repeat — eliminates weeding.

It’s pure permaculture to find a use for your waste products that completes a circular connection. Instead of throwing away cardboard, kill weeds with it, and at the same time, feed your best farmhands, the worms, who will burrow and poo in the soil and nourish the plants you love to eat! It’s enough to make you feel smug.

By the end of the second summer, grass seeds are starting to sprout up around the blueberries. To my way of thinking, weeding is a supreme waste of my time, something on par with mowing, so I smugly apply more cardboard. A few months later there are weeds again. The woodchips are breaking down into humus, which is the perfect substrate for germinating seeds.

I refine the process and construct a more permanent sheet mulch made with old carpeting from my upstairs room. The blueberries have stayed weed free for several years now because each fall, I rake the old decomposing woodchips into heaps over the rhubarb and artichoke plants to protect them from the winter cold. I then inspect the carpet and loosen or turn it over if weed roots have grown through. Then I apply a new top dressing.

Wood chips can be had for free or next to nothing. The county has a chip dump on Brittain Road, but I get mine from a local tree surgeon or sometimes from the Asplundh (tree trimmer) guys. Wood chips are not the only solution — straw, grass clippings, pine needles and cones are all great coverings.

Now this area is an attractive, productive zone of pleasure providing food for many people throughout the growing season. My friends and I have happy moments circling the gorgeous dark-berried plants, feasting on blueberries. The different varieties span a two-month fruiting season and yield handfuls of healthful snacks whenever I walk by.

How much work is it? I tend to the sheet mulch and prune the berries once a year, fertilize three times, water occasionally, and get paid with fresh food in the summer, pumpkins for Halloween and pies and beautiful delicata and acorn squash for winter eating. All in all, it’s more rewarding than mowing and the garden is pretty to look at.

I highly recommend blueberries as landscape plants. Beyond supplying nutritious food, the new leaves in spring are the color of nectarines and in the fall, the leaves turn orange red creating a stunning look. Blueberries can even be grown into low hedges.

The fruit area and the Chinese raised-bed annual garden over the drainfield (described in the last article) eliminate about 15 minutes of mowing time and provide me with plenty of food, enough in fact to trade for fish and time dollars. This still leaves a lot of lawn to mow. What can I do with that?

The permaculture way minimizes work and maximizes value gained. The challenge is to find ways to replace the grass with things that produce value and are less work for me.

The thought arises of replacing the grass with a crop to sell. To do that, I’d have to remove the grass and enrich the soil and there’s a dilemma with that. Plowing up or turning soil causes many problems.

1. It’s hard work.

2. It enables zillions of dormant weed seeds to sprout which have be dealt with at some point, often with herbicides.

3. Plowing releases excess carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere and depletes the humus component of soil.

Explanation — Humus is made up of stabilized decomposed organic matter that comes from roots, leaves, bark and wood, or material we add such as manure, peat or composts. Humus acts like a sponge, storing water and releasing it slowly for plants to use. It’s made by natural bacteria in the soil, which break down organic matter either aerobically (in the presence of oxygen) or anaerobically, (without the presence of oxygen).

The byproduct of aerobic respiration is CO2 gas. With anaerobic respiration, however, the carbon atoms stay in the soil. In undisturbed soils, there is a balance between aerobic and anaerobic respiration, but aerating the soil by turning it favors aerobic decay, and releases more CO2 into the atmosphere than would naturally occur.

So how does Mother Nature make enriched soil? Greenery is the skin of the earth. All life on land is produced from and depends on the top six to eight inches of soil. It is reassuring to know that in less than 50 years, any cemented parking lot can and will be completely reclaimed by plants.

Let’s take a close look at a forest soil building process. In a natural system such a forest, the soil is never turned and yet it is soft, uncompacted. This is because worms keep it well tunneled and loosened and animals don’t regularly walk on it. Leaf litter, branches and dead trees fall to the ground and are colonized by bacteria and fungi.

Like we make tea, rainwater dissolves nutrients from the fallen leaves and this fertile liquid drains into the soil easily through the worm holes. Worms come to the surface to eat the softened leaf litter and leave their water-soluble poo underground where it is available for hungry plant roots. The compost-covered soil surface stays cool and moist from the shade of the plants above it. Here is a looped system. The plant layer creates compost and supplies food for the worms, which aerate and fertilize the soil creating better conditions for plants. Soil improves.

If we were to plant our edible plants mimicking a natural system, we would not turn over all the soil, instead only where we put our plants. Then, like nature, we add as much compost and manure to the surface as possible as mulch to keep the soil surface cool and moist and to suppress the weeds. We would plant closely so the mature plants completely cover and shade the soil surface. We would plant a variety of species.

If there were weeds, we would pull them before they flowered and lay them back on the soil surface to decompose and help keep the soil surface shaded and moist. This would eliminate the step of composting elsewhere and having to return the finished product later. We might even let our favorite plants self seed. Finally, we would use groupings of plants called “guilds.” These groups work symbiotically to supply each other’s needs without human input. This is the subject of a future article. §

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