Polyculture
My mind was completely blown by a permaculture design course I took seven years ago. It directly changed my life and the way I see the world.
One of my favorite sections during the two-week program covered sun traps and guilds, in relation to forest gardens. The idea of designing micro-ecosystems to provide resiliency and abundance made perfect sense — this is the way things should be. More accurately, how they are in nature.
Last year, as my wife and I embarked on our urban agriculture adventure, we dedicated one acre of our initial chunk of land to building a food forest. It is one of my greatest hopes that this would be an example of productive and beautiful use of abandoned land in the city, and widely adopted as a viable solution to urban vacancy problems. As a whole, I am certain that replacing our dependence on annuals with perennial agriculture is critical to fixing our food system.
There is a lifetime of information to learn about edible forest gardens, and surely more left to even discover. To summarize just a few of the benefits of having a polyculture of plants and animals together, complimenting one another:
- Stacking multiple species in many layers increases overall abundance. There are at least five potentially productive layers in a forest, whereas you get a single plane of plantings in conventional modern farming.
- Resilience to pestilence — where a particular pest or disease will spread like wildfire through a monoculture, such as a giant field of corn, multiple species break vectors.
- Soil fertility is built through natural systems and cycles, as opposed to be needing to be trucked in.
I plan to write about forest gardens regularly, and look forward to sharing much more about our specific project.
Today, however, I simply introduced this concept to share something that’s bouncing around in my head:
