Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

First, another reminder than personally I don't tell anyone how they must 
live or what they must or must not do. That said, Let me stress that 
permaculture as I understand it is an integrated whole, a philosophy that 
must depend on all its parts working together. We don't use a little bit of 
permaculture. It's like we don't grow a tomato that's partly organic.  That 
would be like being partly pregnant.

When we do a part of permaculture in our growing what we're actually doing is 
just using certain sustainable techniques that have essentially been around 
for eons. Most of our organic or sustainable growing practices have been 
carried out long before in one form or another somewhere in the world.  
Mollison's contribution  was in pulling it all together and demonstrating how 
all the parts are needed for the synergistic effect. In Mollison's philosophy 
the output from one part is the input for another part. Which is why he 
called it permaculture - permanent culture - a whole sustainable lifestyle.  
And to say we have a small permaculture project in the back yard, with no 
animals taking part in the ecological cycles, with McMansion in the middle 
and SUVs in the garage, is really a stretch.

There are other parallels to this integrated whole (other than being partly 
pregnant). For example, we don't say we use a no-till approach part of the 
year and conservation tillage the rest of the year.  No-till isn't a little 
tilling; it's no tilling.

I use several organic or sustainable practices in my own food growing, but I 
can't possibly call it permaculture. I don't produce the manure on my own 
place to recycle into compost for the beds. I don't have a 
livestock-vegetation cycle going for mutual benefit. I don't have a house 
properly oriented for solar gain in winter, nor a composting toilet. I don't 
have a woodlot for sustainable firewood harvesting. And so on. It's obviously 
far more than just planting some stuff under the trees.

paul, tradingpost@riseup.net
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The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our 
most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its 
renewal is our only hope.
   - Wendell Berry