NY Times: Permaculture Movement emerging from Underground

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New York Times, Global Edition, Home & Garden, July 27, 2011

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/28/garden/permaculture-emerges-from-the-underground.html?_r=1&hpw

In the Garden

The Permaculture Movement Grows From Underground

"AS a way to save the world, digging a ditch next to a hillock of sheep dung would seem to be a modest start. Granted, the ditch was not just a ditch. It was meant to be a “swale,” an earthwork for slowing the flow of water down a slope on a hobby farm in western Wisconsin...

In practice, permaculture is a growing and influential movement that runs deep beneath sustainable farming and urban food gardening. You can find permaculturists setting up worm trays and bee boxes, aquaponics ponds and chicken roosts, composting toilets and rain barrels, solar panels and earth houses.

Truly, permaculture contains enough badges of eco-merit to fill a Girl Scout sash.

Yet permaculture aims to be more than the sum of those practices, said David Cody, 39, who teaches the system and creates urban food gardens in San Francisco. “It’s an ecological theory of everything,” Mr. Cody said. “Here’s a planet Earth operating manual. Do you want to go along for a ride with us?”..."


“We sheet-mulched about an acre and a half,” he said. “That’s something like 80,000 pounds of cardboard diverted from the waste stream.”


"At the lowest level of a food forest, then, are subterranean crops like sweet potatoes and carrots. On the floor of the landscape, mushrooms can grow on felled logs or wood chips. Herbs go on the next level, along with “delicious black cap raspberries,” Ms. Joseph said.

Other shrubs, like inkberry, winterberry and elderberry, are attractive to butterflies and birds. They’re an integral part of the system, too..."