What if we have everything we need?
How does a garden begin? Past the first dream of ripe and gnarly heirloom tomatoes, and after finding the perfect space in whatever land we are lucky enough to be able to alter, how do we start our garden beds?
One of the first moments of action for many of us is to get in a car and go shopping. We buy wood for raised beds. We buy soil. We buy fertilizer and maybe mulch and some kind of fencing and maybe some stakes for our beans and tomatoes and we buy seeds.
There’s no blame in this. It’s what most of us are used to doing. Though I didn’t grow up with a lot of money, I was still conditioned to think that the first thing to do in response to a problem is to go to Wal-Mart or some other store crammed with the big and the cheap and acquire a solution boxed in cardboard and tape or bagged in plastic.
It can be fun, too. We catch the first promise of all that’s green and growing on a particularly warm February breeze, and off we fly on its current to accumulate the things that will let us make a garden real. If we’re lucky, we still have a local garden store with all the attendant good vibes those can bring. We pull out the credit card and it feels like we’ve accomplished something.
Yet more and more, we’re all coming to understand that there are costs to buying our solutions. Inflation, aka everything is expensive now and probably will be until we die, means a simple home project can suddenly look like a stressful investment. It quickly puts any argument that we’re saving money by growing our own vegetables or raising our own chickens for eggs into question. Yet that high price on the receipt is only the visible cost. If you’ve taken a step towards Permaculture, it’s likely the less visible cost matters to you as well.
We all know, but we can often forget, that almost everything we buy now for cheap is made somewhere far away that we’d rather not see with workers working in conditions that we’d never want to work.
We would not want to live by the factories, mines, distribution hubs, or power plants it takes to make what we buy, or the landfills that what we buy usually ends up in down the road. We wouldn’t want to breathe the air or swim in the river by the industry that makes the items we buy to build our gardens or our homes. Most of us never encounter these places put out of sight by design; yet years ago, before I ever heard the word “Permaculture,” life took me right into the belly of one of the places that all those cheap things in the blocks of windowless warehouses come from.
Working Behind Barbed Wire
We can never know where life will take us or what it will ask us to witness.
In my mid-twenties, I ended up in a car crossing the border to one of the maquiladoras (giant factories) in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.
I had been working a skilled, low-wage job for a small startup business in North Carolina that was starting to grow. Since the job involved manufacturing, growth meant moving manufacturing out of the backroom where a handful of US seamstresses made the product to an industrial factory in Mexico across the border where they could pay the workers a whole lot less.
I was brought on the trip to teach my job to a college-educated worker in Mexico who could do it for cheaper than my already low wages. For days I worked a relatively easy job in a closed office inside of the massive fluorescent humming beast of the maquiladora.
When I toured the factory floor, I noticed that the hundreds of workers were grouped into different sections sewing and soldering different things. I was especially struck by watching the production of what looked like camping equipment.
Tents, outdoor canopies, hiking backpacks, canvas parts for campers, sleeping bags – the items that I’d use when I was taking time to relax in the wild were made by workers, mostly women, mostly exhausted, working twelve-hour shifts on a concrete and windowless factory floor in a building barely distinguishable from a prison. The tools I used to get out and breathe fresh air depended on a whole lot of people breathing bad air for most of the hours of their days.
Whatever label was put on it later with promises of sustainability and a quality product, I saw that these things were being made by people whose lives I would be frightened to have to live for even one week, working inside of a building surrounded by ten-foot barbed wire fences. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the fences were there to keep people in. From then on, I never lost the awareness that most of the things that we buy come from a place we ourselves would not want to be.
Where it Comes From and Where it Goes
The truth of where things come from and where things go is one of the essential threads of Permaculture. We can follow it into a total transformation of our lives. It was always there for the founders of Permaculture. When I teach Permaculture, one of the most important teachings is to learn to ask, “Where does it come from and where does it go?”
This question is not to shame us or punish us or mess with any pesky feelings of personal inadequacy. We are born in the world we are born in. I don’t find any help in blaming ourselves or anyone at all. This question is meant to set a part of ourselves that is locked in those factories free.
Opening Ourselves to Life
Caring about where things come from is not only altruistic. Our disconnection from the origins of our goods, our energy, our food and our homes does not only affect those people we will likely never meet; it also disconnects us from ourselves. To be fully alive, we need to turn to face the full truth of our existence and decide, in the light of that difficult understanding, what our responsibilities are. As long as our life requires us to ignore and wall off a painful part of the reality we depend on to live, we are only living half a life.
Our very ability to feel pleasure is one of the first victims of this disassociation. The teacher Joanna Macy wrote about how our sense of Eros, the sensual pleasure inherent in experience, is impossible to fully feel without also consenting to feel our sense of Grief. Buddhists have said: No Mud, no Lotus.
Ultimately, there is no real escape from what is happening. There are only the ways – that a large part of our economy is based on selling to us – to numb and distract ourselves; and a secret not mentioned in the commercials for all those palliatives is that none of them work for long.
If we want to feel the bliss of the life force that the antelope feels when it bounds or the raven feels when it dives and barrel rolls on a highland current, we can’t leave out any part of this reality. And part of this reality is that everything we have, everything we buy, everything we are comes from somewhere and goes somewhere.
It can sound strange to say that Permaculture can open our bodies to greater pleasure and it is absolutely true. I’ve experienced it first hand. My willingness to face and understand all that I am connected to has often been a source of tremendous pain and sometimes a great loneliness; and, it has opened for me the ability to feel the wing brush of a zephyr on the hairs of my forearm and to taste the bitters and the syrup sweetness of the wild weeds I eat in Spring. When I see a raven dive, I dive with it. I was not raised this way. I don’t know that I could have learned it without the holdfast of Permaculture.
It wasn’t just that Permaculture helps me know where things come from and look at the shadow of our society. I could do that without Permaculture, alone in front of a computer reading upsetting websites or watching depressing documentaries all day. Permaculture does something different: it gives us the capacity to face the disconnection by giving us small ways, every day, to heal some portion of it. It helps us do this by giving us the understanding and tools to meet our needs in ways that we would want to witness. It turns out that to feel more whole and alive in the face of so many broken systems, we don’t have to fix them all or even any of them.
We only have to take one small step, every day, to come a little closer to a world where the beginnings and ends of things and the ways that we meet our daily needs all consist of experiences we would be glad to show our children and grandchildren.
What is eating food we grow, wearing clothes we make or living under a roof we built in the face of all that’s broken? I can say from experience: it’s a lot more than we might think. In every small step that moves us from consumer to creator, we can get a taste of complete liberation from the systems of harm. Every homemade sauerkraut, every spoon of wild autumn olive jam, every meal cooked with kindling or bookshelf built from scraps opens the window of our life to a fragrance that blows from a vast green place of benevolent mystery.
And so, by way of long introduction (!), I share a raised bed I would not hide behind a security gate, but would love for you and everyone to see.
A Raised Bed of What’s Already Here
Wood for Raised Bed Borders
Don’t buy the wood. Pressure treated wood is full of heavy metals that you have to worry about anyway, and other wood costs a bunch, is cut from forests far away, and rots pretty quickly. Where you are or somewhere nearby, there are trees that no one is valuing. Use standing dead wood or ask a tree if it’s OK to harvest it for this purpose.
If you use live wood, consider inoculating it with mushrooms. Shiitake logs can be great. Raised beds that fruit mushrooms for you to pick while you harvest veggies; Home Depot can’t do that! The logs won’t require any nails. If you want to stack them more than one layer, you can cut notches or cut stakes from saplings and pound them in.
If you buy lumber that’s not pressure treated, it will rot, but in relatively boring ways. Logs will rot interesting. In a season, they will be full of other organisms. You want those organisms in your garden. What the logs leave behind feeds fungal life brilliantly. After a year, the soil under those logs may be some of the most beautiful in your garden. After 3 or 4 years, you might replace them. That’s fine. No landfill, no factory, nothing but beauty in all directions.
Stakes and Trellises
Don’t buy stakes or trellises. Use saplings or grow a thin bamboo just for the purpose. Making stakes may seem time consuming but compare it to a trip to the store and time worked earning money to buy them and it’s nothing.
Need to lash the stakes? Why not use a honeysuckle vine? Or make fiber from Tulip Tree bark, or from Basswood, or any of the countless sources of free cordage?
Or want to skip stakes altogether and have a little more time? Grow your vining tomatoes (or Air Potatoes, or Passion Flowers or Grapes) up Tag Alder saplings you plant for that purpose. In Italy, there were vineyards grown on Alders in just that way; and the Alders, unlike anything you could buy, fix atmospheric nitrogen to fertilize the plants trellised on them!
Soil
Don’t buy soil. We can build soil right where we are. My favorite way to start a raised bed is to sheet mulch for the first season and then plant only big-seeded plants or transplants into holes in the cardboard that I surround with just a little fresh compost. There’s also the whole mulch-bed potato pattern to try. I also love the pattern of compost pile to garden bed [link]. As the compost breaks down in place, your garden bed will be the most nutrient-rich microorganism party in the garden.
If you really want to have some obvious soil in that bed from the start, you can also look for a nearby spot to dig a micro-pond or micro-swale; just be sure to keep the subsoil on the bottom and retain any top soil for the top. This will work best for plants that don’t need mature soil, like grain crops, and you can always add a little extra compost on top. I’ll even forgive you if you buy it. But…
Compost
Don’t buy compost. I mean, there are worse things you could buy. A lot of the best Permaculture gardeners buy compost every year. If you’re taking a lot of fertility out of the garden in the form of sold or shared veggies, bringing in compost can be a good way to replenish.
But… if you’ll forgive me for inventing a term, I’ve found gardening without importing compost to be “eco-kinky.” It opens all sorts of weird and wild possibilities. What can you get away with by only using the sources of fertility right around you? Where is the fertility in the land you are in? It can’t be far. Certain tree roots draw up certain minerals from far sources and from the bedrock. What do the weeds carry? The leaves? The food scraps, and your own human “waste?”
Fertilizer
…and of course, don’t buy fertilizer. There are dozens of simple and advanced homemade garden amendments you can make yourself [link]; but lacking that, urine and wood ash are thought by some to be a complete fertilizer [link] and all you have to do is pee and burn things. A unique joy we’ve taken more than once has been to do a low-temperature from piles of weeds right atop the new garden bed we hoped to prepare.
Mulch? Probably not, right?
You definitely don’t have to buy mulch. Sometimes it’s convenient. But almost anything can be mulch. Put stuff on stuff. Preferably organic. Preferably not too compacted. Try different things. We mostly “chop-n-drop.” Living plants can sometimes be mulch too if there’s sufficient water and no root competition with the plants you want to mulch. Have fun with it.
Oh come on. Fencing?
OK, but what about fencing? can I buy that?
…look, you can do whatever you want. I’m just some guy. But since you’re asking…
fencing can be a challenge. People have grown living fences out of trees or built dense barriers out of saplings. Those with a knack for scrounging craigslist or Facebook or whatever can often get free or cheap used materials that could be a makeshift fence. All of these can be needed for something bigger like a forest garden. I want to share with you another solution that worked so well, I wanted to do it every year.
Sheilah came up with this one. When we moved into our first shared homestead, she felt that the tangles of Greenbriar (Smilax) were making it hard to enjoy the forest right around us. She wanted to open paths to walk as well as airflow and a little more light to the forest floor.
We already loved Greenbriar for its generosity as a Spring perennial vegetable [link] and its value (and delicious taste!) as an herbal medicine and I think that was part of why Sheilah didn’t want to just throw her prunings in a pile somewhere. Instead, she wove them into dozens of circular thorny wreaths. I don’t think she even had a plan for them in the beginning, but we quickly learned they were the perfect barrier to protect new seedlings and transplants from animals.
Our main problem at the time was bunnies. Bunnies have sensitive paws and sensitive noses. The plants with Smilax thorns around them survived when the ones next to them didn’t. Finding another Smilax wreath became my response to seeing bunny damage. Instead of getting angry, I’d just put a wreath around it and never worry about it again. Like making our own stakes, it may sound like a lot of work; but the same wreaths lasted for over 2 years. It was so satisfying to have our own free rabbit protection and to watch those newly protected plants grow!
Enjoy the Little Rebellion of Having What You Need
Every time we skip the checkout, physical or digital, we feel the satisfaction of the quiet rebellion that Permaculture disguises as gardening. Whatever we may have gone to school for, I think the main thing we are really trained to do in America is to consume things.
The good news is that the gifts of the earth are closer than we know. It won’t take years for you to learn a few plants already growing around you that make a more delicious tea that you can buy in the hippest of downtown haunts or order from the splashiest website. It won’t take you long at all to learn to save your own seeds or build your own soil.
And if you want to make a garden bed, there is no better place to begin than with the life surrounding you and no better place to start our quiet rebellion against anything that would dare to put our wild hearts – or those of people we have never met – behind barbed wire and fluorescent lights.
To begin, you don’t have to know a thing. Your hundred-thousand ancestors who lived and lived well before there were factories will remind you how to walk every step of your own way home.
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