The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Permaculture obsession

The back garden

As long as I can remember, I've hopped from obsession to obsession --- Robin Hood, water gardening, identifying native plants.  This year's obsessions are permaculture and forest gardening, topics that will probably take me decades to truly mull over.  In the last year, we have started two forest gardens around young fruit trees in the yard and a more traditional forest garden in existing young woods, all of which are in early stages.

One of the biggest things I've learned about permaculture is that comfrey is unstoppable.  We started off the year with one large, two-year old plant.  All summer, I hacked off pieces and spread them around our new forest gardens.  Now we have dozens of thriving comfrey plants that don't seem to mind being mown to the ground once a week.

I'm also starting to feel the homestead turn into a closed food web. 
Mulching with grass clippings has turned our grassy areas into working elements of the forest garden.  Nitrogen flows from chickens to grass to my garden beds, and I get pure joy out of seeing my plants thrive.  Meanwhile, our honeybees pollinate garden plants and will eventually feed us honey.  Around and around the permaculture wheel rolls.


This post is part of our Third Year of Homesteading lunchtime series.  Read all of the entries:





Anna Hess's books
Want more in-depth information? Browse through our books.

Or explore more posts by date or by subject.

About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



Want to be notified when new comments are posted on this page? Click on the RSS button after you add a comment to subscribe to the comment feed, or simply check the box beside "email replies to me" while writing your comment.






profile counter myspace



Powered by Branchable Wiki Hosting.

Required disclosures:

As an Amazon Associate, I earn a few pennies every time you buy something using one of my affiliate links. Don't worry, though --- I only recommend products I thoroughly stand behind!

Also, this site has Google ads on it. Third party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a user's prior visits to a website. Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to users based on their visit to various sites. You can opt out of personalized advertising by visiting this site.