This is chapter 12 of my book, A Natural Language, which exposes the environmental narrative as propaganda and puts bottom-up solutions in front of the actual problem.
The nature of weeds encapsulates the core difference between farming and gardening. A weed is, by definition, an out of place plant. It is a xenophobic sounding concept that betrays why farming societies tend to be authoritarian societies that passionately hate weeds. They prefer their fields razed and tidy, with everything erect and out of place beaten into submission. This is by design, since weeds get in the way of efficiency. To gardeners who don’t mind messy soil cover, weeds provide shade that prevents evaporation. They feed soil microbiology. They bioaccumulate nutrients that other plants will get to use eventually. They remedy soil structure and fertility as they do. They provide habitat for beneficials. Love your weeds. The only time you want to be suppressing them is when they take too much sunlight or nutrients away from the plants you care about. Chop and drop them for mulch at that point. Sprinkle in char, compost, and yeast every so often to get faster decomposition. Weeds are a trickier problem in a farm operation because they hinder automations like tool use, but there’s a good case to be made that we should be growing most of what we eat in or near garden beds anyway, with farms focusing on grass-fed animals, fuel, and fiber instead.
The reason for that is the abundance that you can get out of garden beds. They enable you to grow crops while seedlings are in trays or at their side. Experience helping, this allows you to companion plant and succession plant like you could never do with mechanized agriculture. You can pack plants close together to get faster growth early, and thin out early harvest to make room for plants that will mature. You can grow fast growing plants in between others that are maturing for extra harvest. You can sow or transplant in a bed full of mature plants that you will harvest soon. You can maintain a ready supply of seedlings so as to always have something to plant after harvesting (or if something goes wrong). You can fill gaps with spare seedlings or micro greens. You can move mature plants to a greenhouse to keep them productive as winter takes hold. A well managed, bio-intensive garden bed can be unbelievably abundant.
Passive solar greenhouses allow to extend this abundance out of season and or grow plants out of their usual growing zone. There are all sorts of astute ways to make well insulated greenhouses harvest and store solar energy during the day in order to release the heat back when it is cold. You can also dig the greenhouse deep in the ground to protect the plants in it from cold soil during the winter. The latter is how communist era Hungary would grow citrus trees, for instance. Include ventilation and windows that you can actually open so it doesn’t get too warm in the summer. Plant flowers in front of the windows to attract pollinators. You can incline the greenhouse slightly eastwards towards where the sun is rising, to get more heat in the morning when it’s cold and less in the evening when it’s already hot. You can also help heat it up the greenhouse with hot compost piles. These can make a warm workspace that helps seedlings get started in the early spring, too.
You can supplement the heat in a greenhouse with a rocket mass heater. The latter is based on a rocket stove, which is a J-shaped burner that works like a Dakota fire pit. The hot air goes up from the burn chamber to the heat riser. This creates a draft and produces the characteristic sound of a fire that is being continually blown at. The result is a full combustion without the usual soot or toxic fumes that make so many women blind in Africa. You then collect the heat above the riser with a steel bucket and pipe it through a mass that stores and slowly releases the heat. It will run on stick wood from a garden or a nearby forest, or dried dung, or even plastic trash if well designed. It will keep a greenhouse warm, but also a home, an oven, or a water tank. It uses a fraction of the energy of the appliances it replaces in a home. The barrel itself can be used as a cooking stove, or simply enjoyed for the sake of it: in contrast with condensation heat that needs to warm up the air around you, radiated heat is immediately comfortable. As a bonus, the plants in your greenhouse will get extra carbon dioxide to work with.
Gardening and farming optimize different things. Farming is about making effective use of your time and answering market demand. That means using tools, not hesitating to triage when it helps with effectiveness, and communicating well. It takes tremendous skill and experience to be harvesting what others want to be buying when they want to be buying it with time left for family and friends. You can learn incredible amounts of insights from market gardeners and regenerative farmers. At the same time, keep an eye out for when to ignore them if you are gardening. As professional activities, farming and horticulture optimize around producing output. A lot of gardeners reproduce what farmers do, which is fine but not necessary. Gardening (and market gardening) can also optimize around producing with low inputs and waste, like permaculture invites to do. The benefits of buying a commercial potting mix or growing medium, for instance, are consistency, scale, and weeding time. You can make your own potting mix if needed: mix soil, compost for fertility, and pebbles for drainage. Use an oven if you want to wipe out the soil biology and cook the seeds in it before that. You can also do without trays: hand-made mud balls work. Row cropping is likewise a farming optimization. It matters when you want to save time on sowing and harvesting for the same yield, or more yield at the cost of biodiversity. In a garden, you can mix plants together all over the place. Biodiversity will make the plants healthier and confuse the pests.
You don’t need the complex bed preparation that would allow the effective use of tools when planting a garden, either. An instant garden bed will get the job done just fine if you’re in a hurry or if you don’t care about having sophisticated looking garden beds. Use a transparent tube with water in it as a level to trace your yard’s contour. Layer some manure and veggie scraps on contour. Cover with cardboard to suppress the weeds. Give it a good soak. Add a bit more veggie scraps and a generous mulch on top to hold it in place. Soak some more. Create holes where you’d like plants. (Optionally use a knife or a screwdriver to pierce through the cardboard, so it’s easier for the plant root to get through.) Fill with compost. Add seeds or transplants as needed. Add perennials on the edges to keep things tidy. Plant a nearby hedge without blocking sunlight to attract beneficials like pollinators and hedgehogs. Let the chickens in at the end of the season to break pest cycles.
You can work in three dimensions, too. A classic example is the herb pyramid, with the herbs that prefer dry soil at the top and those that prefer humidity at the bottom. Plant towers are another classic. You can make one with a plastic barrel. Pierce holes at the bottom for drainage if needed. Create pockets for plants on the side with a hot air gun and a knife. Assuming this is to have your greens by the kitchen, this will be mostly to grow brassicas, so you can build fertility into it at that. Add a tube full of holes in the middle with a cover at the top. Add worms in there and feed them veggie scraps. To get worms, take a shoebox full of holes large enough for them to get in, put leaves and veggie scraps into it, leave it under a bush, and collect it a few days later. For potatoes, medium-sized buckets are a good choice — potatoes store well in soil. For a larger option, you can use a laundry basket or some other container that is full of holes. Add holes at the bottom for drainage if needed. Layer in some soil, some compost, a few potatoes on the sides, a generous layer of mulch. Water as you do and repeat. If you get potato beetles, you can add plants that bioaccumulate calcium and let your chicken patrol the towers from time to time. Chickens don’t like nightshades much, but they eat greens and bugs.
You can make things simpler still with a do-nothing garden bed. Layer some compost on the bed. Dump seeds in a salad bowl. Broadcast the mix and cover with a thin layer of compost. Transplant dandelions and white clovers from your lawn for fertility. Water, harvest, thin, and chop and drop as needed. Add biochar and yeast every so often. Let a few plants drop seeds to maintain the seed bank across seasons. Add in some compost at the end of the season. You can do this in front of your house, in beds on a rooftop, or in giant pots on your balcony. You will never know what you will be eating, but you will have food. You can toss seeds around for extras, too. Salads and other greens will grow fine in lawns, for instance. So will corn, sunflower, pigweed, or hemp, if you combine them with beans and clovers for nitrogen, and nettles and dandelions for nutrients. Get a bit of lawn out of the way to help the crop sprout, and borrow a page from Native Americans by adding squash and peppers for good measure. Plants basically want to grow. We just need to let them live and care for them instead of trying to control and poison them.
Aquaponics allows you to level up your food growing if you have a pump. You do not need sophisticated commercial products. Slice a barrel or water tank in two and piece the two parts on top of one another. Put water in the lower part to host fish. Create layers with baskets to at the bottom maximize floor surface if you’d rather crayfish. Turn the upper part into a wicking bed. Add activated charcoal mixed with coarse sand or small pebbles at the bottom, and larger pebbles above that. That will make the bed act like a water filter, which normally layers fine sand, charcoal, coarse sand or small pebbles, and larger pebbles. Give the sand and the pebbles a good rinse first. Put soil on top. Use the pump to move water from the fish tank into the wicking bed, and let the water drop back into the fish tank. The wicking bed will keep the soil moist without causing root rot. The bacteria in the filter will clean the water and make the nitrogen available to the plants. The soil in the bed will enable fungi and microbiology to extract nutrients that you would have needed to buy had you used commercial products like clay balls or a hydroponic system. The splashes as the water drops from the wicking bed into the fish tank will keep the water oxygenated. Keep a bug barrel nearby for fish carcasses and other scraps, and let the pupating larvae drop into the tank to feed the fish. You can make a section to grow aquatic plants in the tank, too.
What works for fish manure works for our own manure. We could redesign our homes and towns around growing food in sewage to clean the water. This makes good sense from a public health viewpoint, because modern health improvements can invariably be traced to improved sanitation, cleaner drinking water, and more nutritious food. One way to deal with sewage is to filter out the liquids and compost the solids. Create holes at the bottom of a trash can, put some pebbles and attach a metal grid over it, and let the toilet flush into that. Let the liquids flow towards a water filtering system. You can drop charcoal, sand, pebbles, and rocks together in a pit for that. (The snow melt cycle will make the larger materials migrate to the surface anyway.) Put some soil on top and grow trees, bushes, and flowers around it to avoid any smell and enjoy extra food. An alternative approach is to let the sewage flow through a succession of ponds with a shallow connection between each other. Plants, bugs, and shrimps will eat the sewage. Fish and ducks will eat the plants, bugs, and shrimps. You will get fish and ducks.
In passing, a small pond in a garden never hurts. You don’t need a plastic liner to make one. Locate neighbors that are using clumping cat litter, and collect their waste. Dig up the pond. Mix one part dirt with one part litter, and line the bottom of the pond using that. Fill with water or let the rain do the rest. You’ll be able to grow bamboo to trellis your tomatoes, and all sorts of aquatic foods. You can also grow duckweed and other alga to feed your chickens. Their eggs will then exhibit good fats that you’d normally expect in wild salmon. Ponds also attract all sorts of amphibians and dragonflies that help keep gardens free of pests and the pond clear of mosquitos. The latter are mostly tied to bodies of water like those in tires or abandoned plastic that don’t give predators enough space to live, or ephemeral ponds (typically from arctic or temperate ice-melt or tropical storms) that don’t give predators enough time to move in. If you have a major mosquito problem, help clean the trash in your area, and fill the offending ponds with pebbles (or use earthworks to make more permanent ones). You can use the pond to nourish extra aquaponics beds if yours is too small to stay oxygenated by itself.
An even bigger pond can make a nice natural swimming pool. The cat litter trick works for ponds of this size too, if you don’t mind a bit of sewage until biology cleans it up (or use clean litter). Another good option to avoid plastic is to have the excavator push its entire weight down to compact the bottom of the pond, to speed up what a heavy amount of water does in a natural pond. You want two sections: a cleaning area with gentle slopes, and a swimming area in a deep section. Keep the two separated from one another using concrete, or logs that do not rot when under water. This is so the dirt in the cleaning area doesn’t end up in the swimming area. Add a mix of soil, activated charcoal, sand, and pebbles to give bacteria plenty of habitat in the cleaning area, and plants to soak up the nutrients. Fish will need a deep area that is large enough for them to winter if the surface freezes. Oxygenate the pool by pumping air into it, by using aquaponics beds or a pump to create a small waterfall, or both.
If you lack power to create air bubbles or power pumps, you can use a trompe-ram to harvest compressed air. It is a very astute device that mixes the best features of a ram pump and a hydraulic trompe. A ram pump makes astute use of two one-way valves to turn a velocity head into a pressure head without energy inputs. You can use one to do things like fill up a water tank to get running water in a home. (Let the waste valve output flow towards garden beds.) A hydraulic trompe makes astute use of the vacuum created by water flowing next to air holes to harvest compressed air at ambient temperature. The trompe-ram combines the two ideas in order to ram far higher air pressure from the velocity head inside the compression tank. You can use the compressed air directly for use in tools or a workshop. You can blow it through a Tesla turbine to create electricity. Air cools down when it decompresses, so you can also use this to power a fan that cools your home in the summer. If you have a nearby river, you can use a Bunyip pump to create an artificial stream where you need one. That one is a very astute variation of the ram pump that turns velocity head from river flow into pressure head.
Summary | Next: Natural Health.