Contemplation #1

Just a small session yesterday. Periodic rain was spotting on us, and we were few in number. It was just Ed and myself, really, although Anna and Joe turned up at the end.

I forgot my camera, so there's nothing to show, I'm afraid. In any case, we didn't do much more than hack out some ivy and take down the rest of the tree which we had cut on Sunday. There's just the stump of it left now, and we'll have a bit of a back-breaking job digging up the roots. Other than that, Ed and I spent a fair bit of time discussing namby-pamby permaculture stuff, and since I don't have any photos, this is as good a moment as any to introduce this text, which I'll certainly be quoting from time to time.

As soon as Ed came out with the phrase "one straw" I jumped on it. The term was coined by Masanobu Fukuoka, a crazy Japanese guy (at least, everybody thought he was crazy) who dropped his promising academic career and went to live in the country, with the idea of developing a new, and yet ages-old technique of farming. A couple of decades later agricultualists were coming to visit him from far and wide to see how his super-organic farming method managed to produce amazing crop yields. His fundamental premise, as illustrated by the following quote in one of the early chapters of the book, is that the more we humans try to tinker with nature, the more complicated we make things for ourselves in the long run. Core Green values:

So, here's what Ed's thinking to do with Dave's garden. We can treat it as an experiement - do a completely hands-off Fukuoka-style patch in one area of the garden, and do a traditional "Dig For Victory" allotment-style patch elsewhere. The latter is what, for instance, Ray (see the previous entry, and this link) does every year, digging up all the ground to start all over again. The central notion in permaculture is that the closer you live to nature, the less you should need to make that kind of effort.

Let the battle of ideas commence.