Week 9 : Establishing the Food Forest

This week's class was very interesting and informative. After going over most of Gaia's Garden chapters, it is finally the time to actually see how a permaculture garden is designed and built. What we learned from the readings is crucial to understand the basics of growing a permaculture garden. However, watching in real stories how that garden was created and be able to follow its progress was very motivating and touched us on a different level!

Last Wednesday (October the 21th, 2009), we watched numerous videos on permaculture gardens by Geoff Lawton, an Australian permaculturist internationally famous for growing the most productive food forests in the most arid places on earth, such as next to the dead sea and in the desserts.
This video below shows a quick summery for one of the great movies watched in class!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWayqR9RRys

Lawton showed us the easy steps to follow is order to get the perfect garden. Soil is the base for a good garden. First, the ground has to be covered by mulch, and left to decompose for few month. Then, the seeds of a fast growing summer nitrogen plant and a winter one are added, in order to fix nitrogen and add it to the soil.  We learned the use of chop and drop mulching for N-fixing plants. A ground cover such as sweet potatoes are grown to prevent grass from growing. Little shrubs will start emerging, will N-fixing are still added. And finally, the soil is rich enough to provide the nutrients needed by a fruit tree. In a permaculture garden, nothing is lost, all is transformed to another usable form, essential for the growth for another species. For example, wood obtained from dead trees will be decomposed by mushrooms, fungus, bacteria, soil organisms, back into organic material. No added fertilizers are needed to be used in such a self sustaining system.

Conservation of water is very important in a permaculture garden. Rain water is collected in swales and ponds, and the water is then passively being absorbed by the soil. Minimum human effort is needed compared to other irrigation systems in traditional agriculture.

If the right steps were followed, the final results might be shocking =) The plants grown will be nutritious, healthy, and help us save thousands of dollars.

On the other hand, I went back Friday, October the 23rd, to ECHO, in order to get more information about the N-fixing plants for our database project. Larry was extremely helpful and he provided me with very important information. I got the chance to eat the best tangerine in my life, my first star fruit, save a lot of seeds, buy amazing jam and honey, and got beaten by plenty of aunts.

Looking forward for our next field trip =) - Maria

This week we watched permaculture videos.

     The video was called "Establishing the Food Forest" and featured Geoff Lawton an Australian permaculturist who  has become internationally recognized as a a creator, even in the most unpromising ecosystems, of food forests and abundant, productive landscapes.
     The video was very educational and showed stages of creating food forest, starting with planting groundcovers and legumes. Starting with cowpea which is a summer legume, a cover crop and innoculant. Then the fast short lived trees are planted such as a nitrogen fixing  Leucaena tree which will provide shelter for small fruit trees and later will be used as mulch.

     We also learned about importance of the fungi in the forest garden. Fungi are the mouth of the soil, they transfer wood into the soil and are important part in creating rich dark soil in the food forest.
      The video also showed implementation of animals in creating food forest such as chickens, that would dig up the soil and fertilize the soil. Or whenever the garden has snail problem we would call it " lizard deficiency" or " duck deficiency".
       The video made a point that swales are an important part of designing and creating a food forest.

        In the forest garden, all thats needed is already there. 
-Alex

Week 9 of colloquium and each day is a day closer until our dream is going to be accomplished! Now with all the right techniques learned, our implementation is feasible. In only 9 weeks of one class, my outlook on a variety of things has changed drastically. One of them is concerning vaccines, which I had never previously given much thought to. It was brought up in discussion the flaws of the vaccine, and I am completely against taking any vaccines now, if I don’t “NEED” them. One of our classmates Crystal, received the H1N1 vaccine, and was extremely sick the following day after receiving it. The H1N1 vaccine was just recently released without much testing, and I am wary of its effectiveness. I strongly believe that the vaccine was developed without much testing to make billions of dollars for the pharmaceutical companies. In this class session we watched a variety of different videos pertaining to permaculture. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyaVxYYVfQE

The most interesting video in my opinion was the 2,000-year-old food forest in Morocco.  I’ve found that since this class has begun I have looked at plants quite differently. Instead of just viewing them as something aesthetical, I view them as having multiple uses and attributing much value to them. I know this may sound weird, but I have always wondered why our society values animals lives (which I do as well) but not the lives of plants or trees, which are of equal if not greater value.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hftgWcD-1Nw

Technically, by the laws of science, trees and plants are alive as well and are under the same category of eukaryotes. I also truly enjoyed learning about fungi because I have studied the various structures of fungi, and it was interesting seeing how important it is in an ecosystem. They are a crucial part to the vitality of the soil, which is a huge link to the success of various plants in a permaculture garden.

The database project is almost complete as well, and I have found it very interesting to learn about the various herbs I use on a normal basis. Some of the herbs and spices I have done research on, I was completely unaware of their multiple purposes which varied from food to medicinal purposes.

-Rebecca