Permaculture seems to be a kind of trendy thing right now, so I thought I'd give it a go. What is permaculture? It's hard for me to explain, actually. The definition seems to be fuzzy. To simplify it as much as I can, it seems to be an attempt to make agriculture mimic natural ecosystems more closely. For example, using polycultures instead of monocultures, using organic methods of fertilization and pest control, and so on. However, when you start reading about permaculture, it can start getting very philosophical and Utopian. Its most enthusiastic supporters seem to think we can Save the World with this technique. It actually reminds me of the Grow Biointensive method in that way, even though they're kind of opposites. Grow Biointensive is actually very unnatural, with all the double-digging and intensive planting to maximize yields. Permaculture seems to be less concerned with maximizing yields on limited space, and more concerned with minimizing inputs of labor, water, fertilizer, etc. The similarity is in their promises to Save the World by growing food for humanity in a more environmentally sustainable way.
Obviously I'm going into this skeptical that it will be quite as awesome as people say it will be, but I have this area in my front yard with fruit trees, so I thought I might give it a shot. Gardening is my hobby. I'm not trying to completely feed my family with this, so if it doesn't work out, it's not a big deal.
OK, so what I started out with was a suburban front yard in Central Texas in a neighborhood that thankfully doesn't have an HOA, so I can plant whatever I want in the front yard. The fruit trees went in the front yard because the back yard is too shady. In the front yard we have a cluster of live oak trees that shades the house nicely, with non-native St. Augustine grass underneath them, and then a sunny strip between the oak trees and the street with non-native Bermuda grass. The fruit trees were planted in this sunny area.
My house is in the Texas Hill Country (also known as the Edwards Plateau), which means we have a thin layer of black clay soil on top of limestone bedrock. It's Texas, so the summers are scorching hot, the winters are mild (we get freezes, but it seldom stays below freezing for more than one night at a time), and spring and fall are our rainy seasons. The natural ecosystem here would be a Plateau Live Oak and Ashe Juniper woodland. Permaculture enthusiasts claim that you can make a food forest anywhere, in any type of climate, on any type of soil. OK then.
The Fruit Trees
The first fruit trees we planted, soon after we moved into this house in 2012, were a Wonderful Pomegranate, Meyer Lemon, Satsuma Orange, Key Lime, Gold Nugget Loquat, and an unknown fig variety I got as a cutting from my in-laws.
Pretty soon we found out that Key Limes cannot survive in the ground in our area, at least not until global warming takes away what little winter we have. Apparently Key Limes cannot deal with freezes at all. The first freeze we had killed the entire top of the little tree. I was afraid it was dead, but in spring shoots grew back up from the roots, so we dug it up and put it in a large pot, and that's where it's lived ever since. When it freezes, we take it inside, which be dangerous because it has some nasty thorns. I get a nice crop of golfball-sized limes from it every year.
The Meyer Lemon is only slightly hardier. It might be better off in a pot as well, but it's still in the ground at this point. I try covering it with frost blanket when we have a hard freeze, but it still gets damaged often. Last winter despite getting covered, all of its leaves were killed again. It hasn't yielded fruit in a long time because it has to keep recovering from freeze damage again and again. The main reason why I'm reluctant to put it in another big pot is because we have limited space in this house, and already have a key lime, rubber tree plant, and Norfolk Island pine in big pots that we have to find room in the house for each winter. One of these days I guess I'll have to get a greenhouse, but we have so many other household projects going on, I'm not sure when that will happen.
When we removed the Key Lime, I planted a Kumquat in its place. Now that's a good fruit tree to have in the ground in Texas! Even though the tree is still only about 3-4 feet tall, I get a nice crop of fruit off of it every year, and freezes hardly bother it. We do cover it if it gets into the 20's, but I'm not sure if it even needs that.
The Satsuma is also doing fine in the ground. We covered it with frost blanket while it was little, but eventually it got too tall for that. Every now and then it freezes enough to kill a few leaves, but it grows news ones back in the spring. A couple of years ago we got a bumper crop of about 40 fruits. The fruits are like a large tangerine or navel orange, with thick skin that's very easy to peel. I've heard that in Britain, Satsumas are known as "Christmas oranges," and that is around the time when they ripen. I've also been told that a light frost actually makes them sweeter. While the kumquat consistently bears fruit every year, it seems like the Satsuma is doing that thing some fruit trees do where it has a heavy crop one year that wears out the tree, and then doesn't do much the next year. The year after we had the 40 fruits, it only made two fruits, and then this last year we had a weird late freeze in March that killed a lot of its blossoms, but even after that I harvested 11 fruits in early December.
For the non-citrus trees, the best one is probably the fig. Nobody knows what variety it is, but it gives us a good crop of small figs each year. The figs are light purple and only about 1-2 inches long, so they are smaller than figs from the grocery store, but they are very sweet and tasty. The tree sheds its leaves in the fall and grows them back in the spring, and our freezes don't seem to bother it at all. It's been growing very fast, and it's amazing that it started out as just a little cutting.
The Gold Nugget Loquat has also been growing fast, and has become the largest fruit tree in the food forest. However last spring was the first year we actually got a good crop of fruit off of it. Loquats are a little weird because the tree is cold-hardy, but the flowers are not. They flower in November, grow fruit through the winter, and then the fruit ripens in spring. Every single year we've had freezes that killed the flowers before they could make fruit until last year.
Perhaps the most disappointing tree so far is the Wonderful Pomegranate. The tree itself is beautiful. It's grown really big. It gets large orange flowers on it that the hummingbirds love, and then they fall off and that's it. Last year 3 or 4 of them tried to make fruits, but then when they were about tennis ball sized they split open and rotted. I could tell that happened before they were ripe because the insides were still white. I don't know what it's problem is.
A couple of years ago I added three more fruit trees in a second row behind the first row. They are a Houston peach, an Anna apple, and an Ein Shemer apple. This might be pushing things a bit because they are getting pretty close to the oak trees, and might be in too much shade. We did trim some of the limbs off the oak trees, but I've still noticed that they are starting to lean away from the oak trees to get more sun. But maybe a little shade will help them survive the Texas heat? We'll see I guess.
None of them have produced fruit so far, but last year the peach had some blossoms, got 2 or 3 small green fruits on it, and then they fell off. The Ein Shemer apple has gotten a few blossoms each year that just end up falling off, and the Anna apple hasn't even blossomed. Maybe they just need more time. Apple trees aren't self-fertile, which is why I planted two, so Ein Shemer won't make fruit until Anna blossoms anyway.
The Hügelkultur Beds
A food forest is supposed to have an understory of other plants below the fruit trees. My fruit trees started out stuck in lawn grass. I needed to figure out a way to remove the lawn grass and replace it with something else without disturbing the roots of the established fruit trees. That's when I stumbled upon something called Hügelkultur. This is another thing where I'm not sure if it will work as well as they say it will work, but might as well give it a shot. I decided to start by making a bed between each of my fruit trees and then eventually I'll expand out from there. If nothing else, this will mean I won't have to mow between the fruit trees, which has always been a pain.
 |
| Melons in a hugelkultur bed last year. |
I modified the technique somewhat from what I read about it. I didn't dig a trench or even removed the grass because that seemed like too much work and also might damage the fruit trees' roots. Instead, I covered the grass with a couple of layers of flattened cardboard boxes. We always have plenty of boxes from Amazon or Costco, so this was a way to recycle them.
On top of that is where I put the wood, which is the main distinguishing feature of this kind of raised bed. In our wooded back yard, we have two big brush piles and some logs. I didn't want to use our oak, mesquite, or juniper logs because I prefer those for firewood, but we did have logs from a big Chinaberry tree that fell down. Chinaberry is such a lightweight wood that it doesn't make very good firewood (it burns up too quickly), so I used those logs to line the outsides of the bed, and then in the middle I put all kinds of stuff from the brush piles that I chopped up with loppers or just broke up by hand if they were really rotten.
Then on top of that you need something nitrogen-rich to balance all the carbon in the wood. I used grass clippings from mowing the lawn.
Then on top of that goes some kind of soil-like substance that you can plant things in. I ended up using store-bought topsoil and cow manure. That is probably not ideal because I had to spend money on that part and buy a bunch of individual 40 pound plastic bags of the stuff and spread them on top. But at the time I didn't have a lot of homemade compost ready for something like that, and since I didn't dig a trench, I didn't have soil that I removed from the trench to put on top.
Then I immediately plant them with vegetables. I've found that I should plant them immediately because the roots of the vegetables are needed to hold everything together. So far the best thing to plant in them seems to be winter squash or melons with long vines. The vines also help hold everything together.
How have they done so far? I started them last summer, so they're over a year old now. For one thing, they DO need to be watered. Some people claim that the rotting wood in the beds soaks up so much water like a sponge that you never have to water them. That is not true in Texas, at least not in the summer. The wood I used ranged from very rotten to very fresh, so the fresh wood may not soak up as much water as the rotten wood, but the important thing is I've still had to water them. So far I can't tell if they need to be watered more or less than a traditional raised bed.
I haven't noticed any problems with the plants having nutrient deficiencies. I've seen some people write online about how the wood draws up too much nitrogen as it decomposes. I do occasionally sprinkle fertilizer on mine, but they don't seem to require any more fertilizer than a traditional raised bed.
One thing that ends up happening is as things decompose, the mound starts to collapse and gets big holes in it. Part of that may be because I used a tangle of sticks in them middle instead of logs, and they were sticks of various species of wood at varying stages of decomposition, so they aren't decomposing evenly. When I plant a new crop of something, I stomp around on it a bit to break up the sticks further and compact it a bit, and sometimes fill in the holes with more compost. I figure they'll eventually settle down into something more solid.
At least some of the vegetable plants seem to enjoy the partial shade they get from the fruit trees during the hottest part of the summer, and the fruit trees have essentially gotten a thick mulch between them that probably helps them in the summer as well.
The Biggest Problem with my Food Forest
I'm trying to grow a fruit and vegetable garden in the front yard with no fence around it in the Texas Hill Country. Nobody else in my neighborhood are bothering to do that, and maybe I'm just in denial about how nuts this is, because maybe I'm just going to all this work to feed the local deer herd. Aaarrrgh! DEER! Yes, I know they are cute. I'm also having to constantly battle them to keep them from eating everything.
I use a combination of various techniques, so I haven't done any kind of controlled experiments to see which techniques are the most effective. I put wire cages around some things (which are ugly, I admit). I spray deer repellent that smells like rotten eggs (gross!). When my husband cuts his hair, I sprinkle that around. I have even hung up socks with Irish Spring soap in them from the fruit trees.
Still the deer sometimes munch my plants. I found out that their favorite fruit tree to browse is the peach tree, but the apple trees are also tasty. Any leaves that aren't protected by a wire cage or aren't too high up are eaten. They eat a few leaves off the pomegranate tree too, but don't like the citrus or the fig leaves. They will also rub their antlers on the trunks of young trees of any kind, so they have to be protected with wire cages.
As for the vegetables in the Hügelkultur beds, I pretty much gave up on legumes of any kind. Despite their value for nitrogen-fixing ability, they're also extremely tasty to deer. They also seem to really like cucumber leaves, but aren't as much into the squash leaves (I guess because they're spiny?). They will eat squash leaves, but it's not the first thing they eat. In the winter, greens like lettuce MUST be under wire cages or they all get eaten.
Maybe one day I'll have to give up on growing anything other than citrus trees, or build a fence around the whole thing, but for now I'm making do.
General Thoughts So Far
I'm not expecting my food forest to be like the Garden of Eden, where I can just pick abundant fruits and vegetables with no labor, no watering, no pests, and no need for added fertilizers. That doesn't sound realistic to me at all. I would think that shouldn't sound realistic to most other people either, but that's how some permaculture websites make it sound. The natural ecosystem in my area is an oak-juniper woodland, not an apple-peach woodland or even a citrus-fig woodland, and there are good reasons for that. You can't get something for nothing, and if you want sweet, juicy peaches here instead of acorns and juniper berries then you have to put work into it. Fruit trees are domesticated trees, so they need human help to grow. Just like I couldn't abandon my house cat in the wood and expect her to survive in the wild like a bobcat, you can't expect to be able to plant a peach tree and then let it fend for itself and expect it to survive like a juniper tree.
A fairer comparison would be between a food forest and other methods of fruit and vegetable gardening, such as my raised bed vegetable garden on the other side of the driveway, where I do more of a Square Foot/Biointensive technique. Is the food forest less work, about the same amount of work, or more work? If it's either of the first two, it might still be worth it.
I expect it might depend on the exact species of plants too. I've already gone over how some of my fruit trees are doing much better than others, the fig and kumquat being the best trees with the biggest yields with the least amount of help from me. For the annual vegetables, I prefer growing vining squash in the food forest because it has more room to roam and spread out. On the other hand, I do potatoes in the raised beds because of all the deep digging required to plant and harvest them. I really don't want to be trying to dig potatoes out of a hügelkultur beds with all the sticks in the way, and I don't want anything that requires digging too deeply because that might hurt the fruit tree roots.
Of course gardens are always a work in progress. There are some plants like tomatoes that seem to do OK in both places, though to be fair I've only grown cherry tomatoes in the food forest so far, and cherry tomatoes are tougher than large-fruited tomatoes. I haven't tried peppers in the hügelkultur beds so far, but peppers are almost perennials in this climate (I've had some live for as long as three years before an especially hard frost killed them), so they might be a great candidate for the permaculture garden, which is supposed to be skewed more towards perennials. And I'm still not giving up on figuring out how to coax my pomegranate, peach, and apple trees to set fruit. I've also started planting I'itois onions, multiplier leeks, and ginger here and there in the hügelkultur beds. At least the deer don't like to eat those.
The important thing is it's been fun so far figuring some of this stuff out.
No comments:
Post a Comment