I'm starting this blog by confessing my underlying conflict between permaculture theory and force of habit: to till or not to till. Having taken a year-long theory-and-practice permaculture class, presented by Alice Kidd of Lillooet, and finding the principles sensible, I'm keen to put the learning to practice. Permaculture gardening* (a contraction of permanent agriculture) is holistic, resilient, self-perpetuating, energy and resource efficient, uses principles observed in nature, is fitted to local conditions, and fosters food security. It frowns on tilling, which disrupts soil structure and the quality of permanence. At the same time, however, the previous owners of this property invested a lot of sweat in clearing a large area of land, in order to create tillable vegetable plots. I'd feel awful about letting their efforts go to waste.
Left to its own devices, a piece of land will seek to achieve its climax vegetation--the most complex ecosystem that it can support--using whatever is available. It starts with small colonizing plants, commonly called weeds; dandelions reach deep with their taproots and bring minerals to the surface, in their leaves; plants in the clover family take nitrogen from the air and fix it in the soil on root nodules; plants needing more readily available nitrogen and minerals can get a toehold by utilizing decomposed plant material from the previous season's clovers and dandelions; and little by little a patch of bare ground gets bushier, and saplings try to establish a pioneer forest. This is what happens to a vegetable plot if you don't till it.
So I've just spent two long afternoons trudging in the exhaust plume of the tiller: the machine powered by gasoline, and me powered by conflict and guilt...guilt about the years of work that have gone into the garden plot, guilt about the permaculture theory waiting to be put into practice, and guilt about the vintage machine that was generously refurbished and gifted to me, and therefore "has to" be used. It has a Briggs & Stratton engine that fires on the first pull; new, specially ordered wheels with tubes in them; a non-original gas tank that can only feed the top half of the fuel into the engine because it is set too low, so "is out of gas" when still half full; tines that are always engaged whether or not the drive wheels are; no steering but is light enough to push/pull/drag to a different direction; and it has also been thoughtfully repainted orange rather than left with the Pepto-Bismol pink paint job that it was discovered in. This tiller will go resolutely forward (never backward) wherever you ask it to, it at one mile per hour. Tilling the vegetable plot is a day's work and a job not undertaken lightly...thus I dub the machine Toilie the Tiller, as the name Tillie the Toiler is taken.
Rather than use valuable time and energy spending a whole day in spring and fall pushing a single-purpose, fossil-fuel powered machine brought in from far away, working against the force of nature, permaculture advocates working with nature by fostering one's own ecosystem, which produces food as a by-product of its own will to flourish...no tilling, no soil disruption, just carefully chosen plants and animals on thoughtfully stewarded land. I will be exploring this concept, my experiments, and their degree of success, in this blog--and in a different part of the yard, than the one that seems morally committed to tilling.
*(Permaculture as a larger movement includes those same values, but shifts the rest of one's personal economy away from dependence on larger economic and political structures, and promotes change from the bottom up, by individuals changing the way they operate in the world. Some people, including Bill Mollison and David Holmgren who developed the permaculture concept, consider this tactic subversive, but I'm not writing to discuss that point...let's stick to home food production, to start with!)
Left to its own devices, a piece of land will seek to achieve its climax vegetation--the most complex ecosystem that it can support--using whatever is available. It starts with small colonizing plants, commonly called weeds; dandelions reach deep with their taproots and bring minerals to the surface, in their leaves; plants in the clover family take nitrogen from the air and fix it in the soil on root nodules; plants needing more readily available nitrogen and minerals can get a toehold by utilizing decomposed plant material from the previous season's clovers and dandelions; and little by little a patch of bare ground gets bushier, and saplings try to establish a pioneer forest. This is what happens to a vegetable plot if you don't till it.
So I've just spent two long afternoons trudging in the exhaust plume of the tiller: the machine powered by gasoline, and me powered by conflict and guilt...guilt about the years of work that have gone into the garden plot, guilt about the permaculture theory waiting to be put into practice, and guilt about the vintage machine that was generously refurbished and gifted to me, and therefore "has to" be used. It has a Briggs & Stratton engine that fires on the first pull; new, specially ordered wheels with tubes in them; a non-original gas tank that can only feed the top half of the fuel into the engine because it is set too low, so "is out of gas" when still half full; tines that are always engaged whether or not the drive wheels are; no steering but is light enough to push/pull/drag to a different direction; and it has also been thoughtfully repainted orange rather than left with the Pepto-Bismol pink paint job that it was discovered in. This tiller will go resolutely forward (never backward) wherever you ask it to, it at one mile per hour. Tilling the vegetable plot is a day's work and a job not undertaken lightly...thus I dub the machine Toilie the Tiller, as the name Tillie the Toiler is taken.
Rather than use valuable time and energy spending a whole day in spring and fall pushing a single-purpose, fossil-fuel powered machine brought in from far away, working against the force of nature, permaculture advocates working with nature by fostering one's own ecosystem, which produces food as a by-product of its own will to flourish...no tilling, no soil disruption, just carefully chosen plants and animals on thoughtfully stewarded land. I will be exploring this concept, my experiments, and their degree of success, in this blog--and in a different part of the yard, than the one that seems morally committed to tilling.
*(Permaculture as a larger movement includes those same values, but shifts the rest of one's personal economy away from dependence on larger economic and political structures, and promotes change from the bottom up, by individuals changing the way they operate in the world. Some people, including Bill Mollison and David Holmgren who developed the permaculture concept, consider this tactic subversive, but I'm not writing to discuss that point...let's stick to home food production, to start with!)