Permaculture -- sustainable soil plantation
Jianhu Shi
and practice. When we have a vegetable garden, the soil may be
depleted of its natural nutrients after several crops unless we plant
some different crops that are complimentary and replenish these
nutrients. The practice of permaculture is to design the garden/farm
so that a set of crops naturally do that and actually enriches the
soil rather than depleting it. It also produces greater yields with
more varieties so that a small amount of land can allow the human
settlement to become self-sufficient.
This is of interest because, while we don't have any land at the
Sunnyvale Zen Center, we are designing a Buddhist Garden in Seattle,
and I wonder if it is feasible to incorporate that into the design.
Also, we have land in our Oklahoma, Texas, and Atlanta Zen Centers
that may, one day, be use to build permaculture gardens.
Moira Shek
There are Permaculture Guilds in different parts of the country and their websites are quite informative based on the few I have perused. For example, there is a Seattle Permaculture Guild and its website, especially the SPF wiki page, has very helpful information including permaculture sites around town. Perhaps BGM could consult with the Guild and check out some of these sites for ideas.
A fairly recent article in the SF Chronicle is worth reading. A staffer started a rooftop garden in planters using the premaculture practice. See excerpts of her article below; click link for full coverage. Although the Zen Center of Sunnyvale does not have the ground space to grow a vegetable garden, we could see if we could further develop our "container vegetable garden", could we?
May 30, 2009 Chronicle staffer Jane Tunks, a novice gardener, is using The Chronicle's rooftop garden as her classroom "......For example, one of the planters on our rooftop has an espaliered apple tree, runner beans, strawberries and spinach. The low-lying strawberries act as ground cover, which helps the soil retain moisture, and the nitrogen-fixing runner beans feed the soil underneath the apple tree. And when the runner beans get tall, they can climb the lower branches of the apple tree as well as a nearby trellis. The shade-loving spinach thrives in the shadows created by the apple tree and the runner beans.
Though the term permaculture wasn't coined until the 1970s, the practice borrows many of its techniques from cultures that have been tilling the earth for centuries. The American Indians, for example, have long planted beans, squash and corn together, a grouping commonly referred to as the Three Sisters. In addition to providing the American Indian diet with a complete protein, the crops can be stored without refrigeration through the winter.
For one of our garden guilds on the rooftop, we borrowed heavily from American Indian wisdom, planting Hubbard squash alongside bush beans and blue corn (see cover illustration). The squash leaves provide a cool, moist ground cover that also suppresses weeds, and when mature, the beans climb up the corn stalks. We also added sunflowers, which provide a windbreak and act as a trellis for the beans. All of the elements, once harvested, produce biomass that can be chopped and added to the already nitrogen-enriched soil, ensuring a head start on next year's crop. …"
Jenny
but at the Charles Street Gardens in Sunnyvale they use this method.
They invite volunteers and they have classes of varying topics
(container gardening gardening 101 etc.), and maybe the method can be
taught to those willing to learn, they also rent out garden beds to
sunnyvale residents (although it says all the beds are full now). I
just posted a discussion topic about volunteering that has a link to
this gardens web page, check it out!
*Jenn*
Ellen Chu
and
"Landscaping with Edibles". These are research papers from the
"Environmental Horticulture and Urban Landscape" class I took at
Foothill College. Both articles promote sustainable landscape
practices in an urban environment. To read the articles, click on
"Files" after you enter the http://groups.google.com/group/ctzen-dev/
group.
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