by Tom Gibson

Okay, permaculture is an interesting gardening technique, but what else besides a New Age-y philosophy does it have to offer?   Can permaculture really “save the world” or, as Toby Hemenway likes to say, does it smell too much of patchouli oil?

Elsa Johnson and I have been working on a very down-to-earth project that, proves, at the very least, that people who disagree about permaculture  can still find common purpose. 

It’s the Oxford Community Garden.  Since last spring Elsa and I have worked with the gardeners to plan a 6,000 sq. ft. tasting and pollinator garden around the community garden’s periphery.

Click on the following link to see the plan for the first 4,000 sq.ft.:

OxfordCommunityGarden_o_11

Pretty neat, huh?

We got there first by building soil with a typical permaculture lasagna mulch [compost, cardboard (to kill grass and weeds), top soil and wood mulch]. 

In all, about 40 people–both inside and outside the neighborhood– helped. I actually have grown to love these communal work sessions.  Some of my regular volunteers do, too.  They say,” Call me when you’ve got some mindless grunt work.”  What they’re really saying is when you do lots of shoveling and raking as a group, such work becomes deeply (if surprisingly) satisfying. 

The next part was fun, too. A half dozen OCG members took a four session permaculture course where they learned the basics and each came up with garden designs that for first-timers were pretty good!  Elsa then refined their collective ideas up to a professional level–as displayed above.  The plan is to establish an addition to the garden that welcomes the neighborhood via a combination of aesthetic landscape, edible perennials, and conviviality-promoting gathering spaces.  As Phyllis Thomas, the site leader says, “The new garden addition is something we’ve dreamed about!.”

We accomplished early stage development with seed funding from the Heights Community Congress and the First Unitarian Church, but we’ll need significantly more outside funding to complete the project.

So why would any outside funder be interested? We think the argument is pretty compelling:

1. Shoulder-to-shoulder work of the kind Oxford gardeners and friends engage in is one of the best ways to promote stable diversity.  The garden is already a mini-U.N. with half of its membership African-American and the rest a nationality and racial hodge-podge–Eastern European, Indian, Nepalese, Filipino.  If there is anything we have learned in the last 50 years about integration is that it only succeeds when pursued actively. Passive integration, even where diverse people of good will choose to live next to one another, inevitably produces “leakage” and resegregation.

2. Permaculture’s most famous saying–“The Problem Is The Solution”–applies to the Noble/Oxford neighborhood in spades.  The problem is that despite great structural housing stock the threat of racial resegregation has reduced home prices to disastrous lows–e.g., a $6,000 sales price for a single family, single lot dwelling in decent structural shape! Could this “problem” provide an especially inviting “solution” for prospective eco-pioneers? It wouldn’t cost that much to add solar, on-site water capture, and a mini-food forest as demonstrated in places like Alberta.  We’re already seeing early signs that such a transformation could happen. Tremont, the last Cleveland-area neighborhood to undergo bottom-up renewal, has gotten way too expensive.

3. The garden plan links directly–via a “Children’s Garden”– to the adjacent Oxford Elementary School, a lively, hopeful  school that is burdened by an “F” rating. The prospect of such a planting space next door has already inspired a worm-raising/microgreen/outdoor planting program just getting started with Oxford Elementary’s first grade classes.

Other schools around the country  have reinvented themselves through inspired eco programs.  Why not Oxford?

So, smell any patchouli oil?  I don’t, either.  Maybe we can save at least one small piece of the world!

by Ann McCulloh

The word “permaculture” rears up like a mighty monolith: imposing, enigmatic, encoded with a message that will change the world, if we can just decode it and get our heads around it…

My own struggle to define permaculture amuses me, really, because some of the inherent joy in this wonderfully empowering design philosophy/practice is in ceasing to struggle. When we slow down and begin to really observe and understand how the natural systems around us are functioning, we begin to see how we can just fit ourselves into those existing ecological processes with minor adjustments to them and us.

I’m a concrete thinker who appreciates material examples more than intellectual constructs. So, a small example:

The Ithaca Children’s Garden was fighting a perennial flooded soggy place in the lawn where the sloped parking lot channeled water into the grass. What to do? Fill it with gravel? Add dirt, level it and seed with grass? Build a dam or install curbing? Dig a drainage system? All solutions that involved expense,  long term maintenance, and commitment to an extended struggle.

Instead, their permaculture perspective suggested digging out a little more, planting bog-loving plants at the edges, building a little boardwalk, and, Voila! A mini-wetland that attract dragonflies, birds, frogs -and children- in droves. As usual, the problem WAS the solution.

On my property, I use all of my autumn leaves as mulch and fertilizer. (Rather than blowing, raking, bagging and hauling, then purchasing commercial fertilizer and mulch.) Dandelions, purslane, violets and other “weeds” are groundcover, bee forage, butterfly hostplants, food and medicine for me, and green manure for the compost. (I could drive myself nuts digging them out or killing them with toxic herbicides, I guess.)These are small-scale adjustments, not permaculture design on a grand scale. But practices like these keep me in the right frame of mind: observing, appreciating and working with the incredible systems of abundance that surround us.

by Elsa Johnson

I come by my grumpiness honestly – I am the child of grumps . . .and they came by it honestly too. But I mostly blame my dad. Both my parents were young adults at the start of the Great Depression: she was 19, attending Flora Stone Mather; he was 22, going to Antioch College on the work-study program… in the course of which he became an English major, worked on a Great Lakes ore boat, taught at a progressive school in Michigan, and learned architectural drafting (which turned out to be far more marketable than English over the long haul). Somewhere in all that he was exposed to the agricultural writings of Louis Bromfield, which inspired a dream of having land of his own on which to develop a self-sufficient place.  The dream did not die. After my parents met and married my mother’s father sold them the 40 acres he had bought in Twinsburg to run his hunting spaniels.  They moved there in 1944 to begin their great adventure — in rather primitive circumstances. I was 20 months old.

Of course, at that age I can’t remember being saved from falling off the hay-wagon and almost being run over by a tire. I only vaguely remember being chased by the geese (a year later). But I do happily remember family excursions through the fields to the woods, ledges, and forest; the beauty of bloodroot and hundreds of trillium in the spring wood; the scent of black walnuts in their pulpy cases; the juice of peaches fresh off the trees, warmed by the summer sun.   

What I missed as a young child was an awareness of the hardship and hard work — that the cow had to be milked every day; that butchering a rabbit took a toll; that half an acre of garden meant hours of weeding (which included me…and I didn’t like it!); that fields had to be tilled, planted and harvested; vegetables and fruit processed and canned; and that despite all that, we really couldn’t live self-sufficiently on 40 acres. My father took a job as a draftsman (and modeled tractors!). Piece by piece the dream began to fall away… first the rabbits; then the geese; then the cow; until, by the time I was 7 or 8 the chickens, the orchard, and the garden were all that was left, and much reduced in size. There wasn’t much canning going on. My mother also took a job (law degrees help). Piece by piece, I became aware.

But there was always a garden up until the year my father, in his seventies, broke his hip.

So I come to permaculture with not the enthusiasm of the idealist and convert, but with suspicion and grumpy pessimism. I know that, unlike a building, something created of nature is not static. In permaculture the model of a food forest that is used is that of a young forest/meadow intermix. But I know forests do not stay young. They grow and change and as they do so, they change the environment of everything around them. And what then, I ask?  So I am skeptical that there is such a thing as ‘permanent agriculture’ (and at any rate, I think, it is definitely for someone younger than I am).

That is not to say I do not see value in permaculture. There is much I value. In particular I value what permaculture has to say about soil, soil structure, soil organisms, how soil functions, and how important it is to have healthy, living soil, because that is the one thing on which everything else depends. ThIs knowledge informs a deeper understanding that I incorporate into my landscape design practice today.