Green Calgary

Permaculture – Going Beyond Sustainability

Reader Question

I have a large yard devoted entirely to grass and I’m ready for a change. It takes an incredible amount of work to keep my lawn picture perfect and, quite frankly, it’s getting a bit tiresome. I have a pretty good understanding of xeroscaping but more recently I’ve come across permaculture and I wonder if it something that could be applied to Calgary. If so, where does one get started?

Many thanks,

Julia

Ashley's Answer

Dear Julia,

Permaculture is a design system that mimics the structure and interrelationships found in healthy ecologies in order to meet our own needs - food, water, shelter, and community. It is not organic gardening, a compost bin or a rain barrel but, rather, “the match maker, creating passionate love affairs between rain and plants, humans and animals, and ultimately achieving systems that produce enough natural resources to provide for their own maintenance and reproduction.”1 Permaculture practitioners look to nature’s infinite wisdom to guide their designs, taking clues from millions of years of evolution to best achieve productive and regenerative systems that work for people.

Though a relatively new concept (developed in the 1970’s by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren), permaculture borrows on ancient and traditional knowledge, as well as modern science and technology to meet the needs of people and communities. Furthermore, it is guided by a set of ethics: Earth Care, People Care and Fair Share (or Return of Surplus). Protecting living and non-living things is a top priority, as is promoting self-reliance and community responsibility. Fair Share suggests that anything surplus to our needs (labour, resources, money, information, etc.) is shared with others to further the aims above. These ethics, along with the strategies and techniques used to design systems with built-in endurance, allow practitioners of permaculture to not only sustain these activities but also begin to repair our planet.

If this is all sounding a bit abstract, and idealistic, let me bring it closer to home. You asked about permaculture in relation to your “tiresome” lawn. Now, if you ask yourself, “what are the needs of my lawn and what, in return, does my lawn do for me?” it is possible to see that a lawn is a voracious consumer of resources – water, fertilizer, pesticides, fossil fuels, time, money, etc. – and, by the sounds of it, you probably spend more time tending it than you do enjoying it. Sure, a piece of grass is a nice thing for the kids to play on, but there are hundreds of thousands of lawns in Calgary, particularly front lawns, that simply suck up resources without giving anything in return.

Permaculture allows us to look at a lawn differently, opening up a wide world of possibilities – possibilities that provide food for you and your family, habitat for wildlife and a beautiful space to relax – all with minimal effort. How can this be?

First, lawns do not want to grow in Calgary. This is why we have to devote so much time and resources to keep them from dying. Secondly, lawns are monocultures, meaning they are made up of a single species and, therefore, vulnerable to infestations and disease because they lack diversity and resiliency. Thirdly, all ecosystems move through a state of succession, eventually reaching a climax, or state of maturity. A forest best represents a climax community. A lawn does not.

So, with this in mind, it is possible to “help” move this succession along by filling the various niches with groundcovers, plants, shrubs and trees, such that the system mimics a diverse and mature ecosystem and not simply one in transition. To maximize output (yield), species are selected to bear fruit (apple or plum trees), provide pollen (borage) and nectar (honeysuckle) for bees and other beneficial insects, fix nitrogen in the soil (Russian olive), accumulate nutrients for plant and human health (yarrow) and to create habitat for birds and other mammals (Saskatoon berry shrub).

Perennial species are often selected over annuals, as they result in less soil disturbance and require less work to maintain but annual vegetables – carrots, onions, beets, cucumbers, cabbage, peas and beans – are often interplanted within these arrangements. Both annuals and perennials can coexist in harmony.

Now combine these beneficial planting arrangements with other strategies and techniques and you begin to see what permaculture can do for you. For example, to deal with watering, you could simply divert the rain off your home’s roof into a rain barrel, which would then spill into a swale (a self watering system) - thereby recharging the soil moisture and directing water to the plant roots. Add to this some mulch (both leaves and straw work well for this), which sits on top of soil, keeping things from drying out, getting scorched by the sun, or getting overtaken by “weeds”, and you have the beginnings of a system that requires very little work (except to get established), and continues to give year after year. 

Contrast this with your current lawn and you’ll soon see that raising a lawn in Calgary is similar to raising a child on a diet of candy (fertilizer), painkillers (pesticides) and television (watering), and then spanking him (mowing) when he misbehaves. Permaculture provides the lens that allows us to see the world differently, along with an amazing set of tools for arranging systems that work well for people and their communities. These harmonious arrangements can be applied anywhere people live and the design possibilities are more limited by our imagination than by the climate or geology.

I encourage everyone to learn about permaculture – it will change your life – and both Big Sky Permaculture and Verge Permaculture offer amazing introduction courses throughout the year. You may also be interested in taking a 72-hour Permaculture Design Course offered by Verge Permaculture, which is the world standard and first step to becoming a permaculture designer and teacher. For those too excited to wait for the next course, I’d encourage you to pick up a copy of Toby Hemingway’s amazing book Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture. It’s quintessential reading for anyone interested in the subject. Finally, if you have a chance, I would encourage you to get yourself involved in a permablitz, whereby a group of people descend on a yard and convert an unproductive lawn into a multi-layered, high-yielding food forest in just one day. It’s absolutely mind-boggling!

Restoratively,

Ashley

1 http://urbangardenmagazine.com/2010/04/what-is-permaculture/

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