Design

I've been thinking more about what it means to be a sustainable gardener. A request to sponsor a permaculture workshop, at the botanical garden where I work, finds me scrutinizing posted permaculture curricula online, descriptions of principles, book renditions of permaculture on a home scale (Gaia's Garden; Food not Lawns), or community scale guides (The Transition Handbook). Of course, I've been familiar in general with permaculture for quite a while, and I had one of our SC extension horticulture agents talk about his home permaculture system last year for Winter Lecture Series. But I find myself reluctant to 'sponsor' a permaculture workshop that espouses a permaculture system as an achievable garden design. Hmm. To me, gardening is an act of stewardship and restoration. We create gardens that support wildlife, mimic nature, and support our spirit. The trajectory that we've had of converting our roughly 1 1/2 acres lawn to woodland, meadow (borders), shru...

Our food system in the U.S. is complex. It's burdened with subsidies for production of foods that are perfectly good in their 'whole' state (corn, soybeans, wheat, etc.) but are increasingly difficult to justify in their refined and remixed versions, in the plethora of processed foods available in the average American supermarket. Lots of folks have been trying to redirect this; the last Farm Bill authorization saw a big push to refocus encouragement of industrial agricultural production to at least some support to more locally-focused agriculture. I went to a meeting of a local chapter of the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association this afternoon. It was impressive because of the number of folks who showed up (at least 75 of them): local growers, local eaters, people interested in fresh food, people interested in delicious food, people interested in encouraging kids to eat nutritious food instead of junk, and folks interested in good, fresh food, period. We met in a loca...