Sustainable gardening

I've been thinking more about what it means to be a sustainable gardener.

A request to sponsor a permaculture workshop, at the botanical garden where I work, finds me scrutinizing posted permaculture curricula online, descriptions of principles, book renditions of permaculture on a home scale (Gaia's Garden; Food not Lawns), or community scale guides (The Transition Handbook).

Of course, I've been familiar in general with permaculture for quite a while, and I had one of our SC extension horticulture agents talk about his home permaculture system last year for Winter Lecture Series. But I find myself reluctant to 'sponsor' a permaculture workshop that espouses a permaculture system as an achievable garden design. Hmm.

To me, gardening is an act of stewardship and restoration. We create gardens that support wildlife, mimic nature, and support our spirit. The trajectory that we've had of converting our roughly 1 1/2 acres lawn to woodland, meadow (borders), shrub borders and understory along with two intensively maintained vegetable garden areas has been deeply satisfying to us.

In our small mountain house, the mulched areas, with minimal planting, have quickly yielded to adding more native trees and shrubs below the house, ripping out invasives (English ivy, honeysuckle, etc.) in the ravine below, and add shrubs, bog, sedums, and meadow garden in front, with part of the driveway scheduled for raised bed vegetables this spring.

A post on Blogger Action Day in 2007 isn't too different from my thinking now.

But I know as an ecologist that we need to create sustainable systems on a community and regional scale, not a home owner scale. These sustainable gardens include not only home gardens, but neighborhoods, and city landscapes, and include watershed and foodshed in the overall picture. Ecological systems aren't balanced on an acre or 1/2 acres, but multiple acres.

As a vegetable gardener, I know about the work it takes to grow even a part of one's own food, not to mention the calorie-dense grains or tubers that provide the sustenance for most diets world-wide. And I'm in awe of folks who are growing all of their vegetables.

Permaculture systems are problematic for a plant ecologist with the suggestions of creating food forests, plant guilds, and mimicking nature's layers, but thinking that we can do it better, and even on a small scale.

I'm all for incorporating edibles into home landscapes (and city landscapes, for that matter), trying to keep all organic matter produced on site, and capturing rainwater (and greywater, too).

So I'm willing to keep an open mind, and include mentioning a permaculture approach (and 'principles') into my own ecological gardening and sustainable gardening perspectives. It's always helpful to think in terms of balancing ecological systems, and renewing and sustaining them.

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Suppporting good food

Our food system in the U.S. is complex. It's burdened with subsidies for production of foods that are perfectly good in their 'whole' state (corn, soybeans, wheat, etc.) but are increasingly difficult to justify in their refined and remixed versions, in the plethora of processed foods available in the average American supermarket. Lots of folks have been trying to redirect this; the last Farm Bill authorization saw a big push to refocus encouragement of industrial agricultural production to at least some support to more locally-focused agriculture.

I went to a meeting of a local chapter of the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association this afternoon. It was impressive because of the number of folks who showed up (at least 75 of them): local growers, local eaters, people interested in fresh food, people interested in delicious food, people interested in encouraging kids to eat nutritious food instead of junk, and folks interested in good, fresh food, period.

We met in a local historic setting, Farmer's Hall in Pendleton, SC, which has been a gathering place for people interested in promoting agriculture for almost 150 years. It was the gathering point that provided the genesis for the University where I work today.

How do we encourage Americans back to eating real food (that is, at least whole food, but hopefully fresh and local food)?

I really have no answers, but it definitely would be helpful to eat more delicious vegetables and fruits (whether your own, from the farmer's market, or locally fresh at the neighborhood supermarket). There are always delicious things harvested elsewhere (currently, fresh nectarines from California, for example).

Knowing where your protein comes from is a good thing, too. I'm working on trying to be more sustainable in my milk, cheese, egg, chicken, beef, and pork choices. Currently, good eggs are the easiest and most available, followed by milk and cheese.

But fish and shellfish require another level of sleuthing to be sustainable. I've stopped buying farmed salmon and shrimp, most wild-caught fish populations are in a downward spiral, so it's hard to justify buying many species of wild fish, whether local or from Asia. Wild Alaska salmon are from apparently well-managed fisheries, so presumably they're OK, but they're an exception.

We've been to many distant places well-known for seafood dishes that have not had much to offer in terms of locally-caught fish. Their fishing grounds have collapsed due to overfishing, often because of outside 'industrial' trawling, but just as often from local overfishing, too.

I didn't mean to start on an essay about sustainable food, but that's really what I'm thinking about.

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