The afternoon sun is glinting on freshly-fallen rain, Lunchista had a particularly successful slug-blitz a few nights ago (and none have been spotted since), and it's the last sliver before new moon. Perfect. So what better time to share with you Lunchista's delight on discovering that an awful lot of this seed-planting lark, together with the ensuing angst about whether they'll come up (and why they don't), is completely and utterly unnecessary?
Welcome to the wonderful world of Permaculture ("Permanent Agriculture"), a way of designing landscapes of all sizes (and by extension, anything else) in such a way that Nature does most of the work so you don't have to! I stumbled across the term quite some time ago, but it has to be said that since then the parts of Chateau Lunchista's garden given over to it are doing rather well.
Now Permaculture does assume that you have quite a lot of time on your hands, at least initially, because you are asked to walk around (or sit and watch) your landscape and notice what's going on. Where do some areas naturally start and finish (e.g. dry parts, shady parts, parts frequented by any local wildlife...), and within each of these, what kind of plant (or weed, if you haven't planted anything yet) does well, and what struggles, gives up the ghost or is completely absent?
It almost sounds like cheating, but really it's best to plant the kind of thing you know is going to do well, and forego the kind of plant that's going to struggle. We started off with herbs, planting them near the door so there are the nice scents as you come out, oh and so you don't have to pick your way across a soggy lawn in the rain just to get some thyme for the spag bol. Those nice scents scare off various pests, so you can borrow herb plants and put them next to things that would otherwise suffer: all the little roses in our garden have chives as companions, to keep off the greenfly. There are a lot of "things that grow like weeds" which are actually useful: mint, strawbs, hazel, lemon-balm...
There are tactics such as thinking "upwards" if there's not much room in your landscape, or mimicking the seven height layers of a forest (Canopy, trees, shrubs, herbacious, ground-cover, roots, and climbers as shown in the illustration nicked from Spiralseeds: thanks guys!) if there is. So the Lunchista garden now has trees and shrubs. For the dosh-conscious, I might add that the phrase "mature garden" looks good on estate-agents' blurb.
The real hard-core like to take things which would otherwise be rubbish and turn them into something useful: they earth-up spuds in neat towers of abandoned tyres, make paths out of old bricks and assemble cold-frames out of disused windows. The softer option is to just make sure all the waste that a garden makes goes back in as something useful: we have a compost dalek, out of which something vaguely approximating soil comes every spring and autumn. The ash from the woodburner can also be spread about as fertiliser, but apparently coal-ash is a no-no because of heavy metal which can harm your plants. Something called "Jack-by-the-hedge" has seeded itself in our garden, and I'm just letting it carry on because it's edible and, as the name implies, will grow next to hedges: a place where everything else struggles.
Getting back to the seed question, why bother digging up expired annuals and replanting every year, when you could find something perennial which would give you almost as much yield? Recently that very question turned up in a rather thought-provoking BBC programme about the future of farming. One of the interesting factoids that transpired was that you could get almost as good a yield (calories and protein per acre, for example) from nut trees with assorted things growing around them as you can with grain. And none of that messing about with ploughing, spray-on weed-killer, fertiliser and the like. Alternatively you can be like Bruce the "lazy Aussie Farmer" and make more cash, even with less yield, by simply not bothering with a lot of the "input costs".
But Permaculture fans don't want to limit their design principles to gardens and farming: there's also housing, transport, healthcare, learning... And there isn't necessarily a size limit to the area involved, as long as you adapt optimally to each different part, letting nature do as much of the work as possible. So you could, in theory, have a village, with all its surrounding farmland, designed "permaculturally". Or a county, even a whole country.
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