What is Permaculture gardening?

So to continue with my last post about how we are wasting land, I want to get into one of the things that could really save us, Permaculture.

When most of us think of vegetable gardening, we think of vegetables planted in straight lines across a garden bed… and nothing more. You water it when needed and wait until it produced a crop. I’d like to introduce to you, a very in depth alternative that could greatly benefit us all. I’ll also go into some of the details about how it can be beneficial as well.

Permaculture is a garden design system created in the 70’s during the oil crisis as a method of solving food insecurity. It suggests that we can grow food literally anywhere and that we will get a higher yield by growing crops with unconventional methods.

So what sets permaculture apart from conventional gardening?

The first difference is plant choice. Diversity is your friend here. Permaculture gardeners typically grow two to four different varieties of a plant during any
given season. They also typically choose heirloom plants as they’re higher in nutrients, taste better, and you can save the seeds for next year. There’s also heavy attention paid to soil health because you’ll harvest higher quality produce if your soil is rich with nutrients.

There are different ways permaculture can manifest. Some things you might be interested in looking up if you’re interested in permaculture are:

No Dig Gardening
Keyhole Garden Design
Worm Composting
Chop-and-Drop Organic Mulch
Companion Gardening
Rotational Cropping
Green Manure

Herb Spiral
Clipping Beds
Plucking Beds
Narrow Beds
Broad Beds
Broad Scale Beds
Vertical Planting

Image result for vegetable garden — conventional planting for comparison

Each of these has it’s perks and no matter what you choose to do, they’re all interesting to learn about! I’ll talk more about what I end up going with in future posts. Also look out for my post on live soil/soil amendment coming soon! I hope you’re having a great day!

We are wasting land.

The United States is roughly 9,158,918 square miles. For reference, I’ve included a picture of a square mile in Houston.

That’s a shitload of land. Now let’s think about how that land is currently being used in conjunction with some of the issues we have in this country.

Corporations, smaller businesses, homes, parks, roads, schools, all in concentrated areas. Seems USEFUL right? Wrong.

The first factor making our usage of this land wasteful is that 47% of the US is uninhabited. The Dark green areas are uninhabited areas. (Picture acquired from the US Census Bureau)

A new interactive map of the United States shows that a staggering 47 percent of the country remains unoccupied - the green represents the blocks where no one lives

Secondly, Let’s think about our homeless and hungry population. If the US alone optimized land usage in just the populated areas, we could cure no only our own countries hunger and homelessness, but also other countries as well…but we don’t.

Look at your property, your neighbor’s properties, your local businesses. How much of that land is just grass? How much of it is wasted on mulched shrubs that serve absolutely no purpose? A bland aesthetic that corporations deem visually pleasing but is really just boring and serves no function. I’m willing to bet most of what you see is like that. We’ve grown accustomed to that. Now I want you to look at those same properties and mentally replace the useless shit with heirloom plants, beautiful, lush flowers, herbs, all growing under the model of permaculture.

I’m not saying we can’t have buildings or roads but what if we turned the US into basically a giant Poteger garden. How do we get to where this is the norm?

and not this

All of these plants are useless. whyyyyyy

It starts with growing beautiful, useful plants absolutely everywhere we can get our hands on and ends with us demanding that companies start caring about the consumer again or we stop putting our money toward that company. Corporatism works both ways. We will allow you to exist on the market if you use your property as efficiently as possible for the people that support you. I propose that to mean that they use the excess space on their properties to grow plants and donate the food to those in need.

Again, if we used just the populated areas more efficiently, think about how quickly hunger would become a thing of the past.

Now for the uninhabited areas, why do we not use that land for people who are homeless? We’ve proven that real, structurally sound houses can be 3D printed in a day and for very little money. Teach them how to sustain themselves and each other through modern homesteading and booom. Homelessness becomes a thing of the past.

I know what you’re thinking. “This is all very ideal.” but if it is ideal, why are we not striving for it? Heirloom seeds are cheap. Soil amendments are cheap. Straw mulch is cheap. In a very small amount of land, you can have more food than you’ll know what to do with. We have 9 million (and some change) square miles!

I hope I can help you understand over time that this is very easily doable with not that much effort. There’s no excuse that we still have people suffering and don’t even get me started on our reliance on Big AG.

Anyway, just some food for thought. No pun intended. I hope you’re having a wonderful evening. If you like this idea and have some of your own that you’d like to share, please feel free to comment on this post. I’d love to feature your ideas on the blog 🙂

Thank you for reading! I’ll talk to you guys soon.

Okay, let’s start with Anarchism.

First of all, I adamantly reject bipartisan politics. I have always been disgusted by it. It’s nothing but a silly game used to make us think we have control.

With that out of the way, Anarchism is defined as belief in the abolition of all government and the organization of society on a voluntary, cooperative basis without recourse to force or compulsion.

You might be wondering how I came to this belief and the simple answer is, I studied and continue to study philosophy. The label I identify with philosophically is Egoist.

Egoism is an ethical theory that treats self interest as the foundation for morality. If you are unfamiliar with it, I highly recommend looking into The Ego and His Own by Max Stirner. Though I am by no means a Stirner sychophant, I do think he was on to something and I do look up to him and his work.

In short, people cannot act out of “selflessness” and ones actions are only “right” or “wrong” based on one’s own self interest.

So how does this relate to anarchism?

Stirner wrote off social constructs as “ghosts of the mind”. Modern day egoists call them “spooks” because they do not actually exist.

Society? Spook. Natural rights? Spook. Right and wrong? Spook. “Should” spook. “Deserve” spook. Government? Spook. Wait, the government is a spook? But government does exist.

No, it doesn’t. The “government” is nothing but a bunch of people acting in self interest. Their power does not exist outside of what you (an individual acting in self interest) give them.

I choose to give them nothing. If I’m giving anyone power, it’s going to be me… in an act of self interest. *wink

I don’t subscribe to any particular brand of anarchy, but there are different sects of it and they’re separated by an economic system preference. So let’s say you’re not a fan of corporatism or government but you really like capitalism, there is a brand of anarchy for you. It’s called anarchocapitalism. Or maybe you like none of that but really like communist theory, anarchocommunism is for you. There are many more but those are the two popular ones.

I personally don’t have a preference in economic system as I don’t intend on participating in one. This is because my goal in life is to make, grow, and create everything my family consumes. This is one of the ways Agorism (the solution to the problem of government) will manifest in my life. My motive is to not only to provide for my family but eliminate government and my dependence on it.

Before you say it, I don’t mean food stamps, medicaid, social security dependance. I already don’t participate in those. I mean who builds the roads, big ag subsidies, taxes, and banks dependance.

I can’t fix the roads but I can eliminate some of the demand of big ag for my food. This is where my passion for the environment, permaculture, and homesteading come in.

So I hope you enjoyed my long explaination of how I came to be an anarchist and where I stand on things. I’ll be able to elaborate more as we go along. In the meantime, if you have any questions, please feel free to ask.

Thank you for reading! I hope you’re having a good day🖤

GREETINGS FELLOW NERDS!

My name is Erica Payne and I’m writing to you from the comfort of my bed. Haha

I want to take a moment, before I get started with the craziness, to introduce myself! Again, I’m Erica. I’m 25 and originally from Augusta, Georgia. I’m passionate about environmentalism, homesteading, art, philosophy, respectful parenting, and Anarchism. I’ve done a lot of traveling and learned a lot about who I am and what I want in life and I believe I’ve found myself and where I belong. I look forward to sharing my small existence with all of you! 🖤