Action oriented: part 5

DO perennials

In this series we are asking doomer optimists to give us a little taste of the kinds of actions they are taking in the face of the doom. The idea here is to start to map the breadth of the available activities out there that could get one started on a path toward something optimistic.

Just like our mini-manifestos, we all don’t have to agree about the best activities to pursue, or the ways in which we pursue them. What we agree on is that we should all be taking steps toward action.

It’s a coincidence that doomer optimism shortens to DO, but it could be our mantra, “do!”

Part 1: Small lot urban edible garden by Prasan (dhanuraashi@)

Part 2: How to start a micro-nursery for free by Sim

Part 3: Introducing Parents’ Nook by Parents Nook

Part 4: DIY decentralized water supply and treatment by Josh

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DO perennials

by Grant

In a previous life I owned a CrossFit gym. One of the principles I espoused was to fix the mandatory behaviors before addressing the optional layers. The two mandatory behaviors I most frequently addressed were eating and sleeping. It matters not what your workout routine looks like if you are not sleeping adequate quality hours. And of course, as every person knows, you cannot out train a poor diet. I have taken much the same approach with the strategies I am DO’ing in setting up my roughly twenty acres of farmstead. 

First, allow me to give some context, because context, specifically ‘your context,’ will be a constant refrain throughout this particular DO. My wife, three young children, and I reside on about twenty acres in East Tennessee (Zone 7a), just a few miles from where I grew up. We purchased this land in 2018, but my history with the property goes back several decades knowing the family that built the cabin in which we now live. I run a small farmstead on this land specializing in pastured proteins like eggs, chicken, and pork as well as a tenth of an acre market garden. We are fortunate that our property possesses many of the key characteristics Cato the Elder lays out in De Agri Cultura: good climate, strong soil, lies at the foot of a south-facing mountain, and near a flourishing town and well-travelled road. And while farming is my full-time job, it does play second fiddle to my primary role as the parent at home with the toddler and infant twins.

‘Aerial shot of market garden, terrace beds at six o’clock, cabin, and tree lanes at 11 o’clock.’

Now let us return to the mandatory behaviors principle. In setting up this farmstead I had several goals, some of which were to provide more of the food my family consumes, create an awesome space for my kids to grow up, live more simply, and become more self and locally reliant. There are some obvious behaviors that undergird those goals like eating, drinking, and community making. So it was important to me to get to work right away on those three. But this article will focus on that first non-negotiable: eating.

One of my biggest constraints on the farm is time, and I know I am not alone here. When I was setting up food systems to help feed my family and potentially sell the abundance, I needed systems that could care for themselves in at least some small way. I will do about a thousand meat birds on pasture this year. I run four hundred layers on pasture. This year will see eight or so pigs on a rotation through a mast forest. And I have twenty-five garden beds fifty feet long, thirty inches wide. All of these enterprises require a time input. However, one of the biggest enterprises on the farm, requiring a large time outlay in the beginning but dwindling over time, is the constant planting, year after year, of perennial foodstuffs.

Some call it perennial farming. Graeber and Wengrow might call it play farming. You might call it food forests or edible landscaping. And while these names may, in fact, pertain to unique practices, there is a lot of overlap and shared principles. So I will leave the quibbling over names to twitter while I plant out the thirty bare root pecans sitting in my basement.

As I said previously, I was fortunate to know this land very well before ever moving onto the property. So I had a couple decades of implicit knowledge and a full year of explicit, detailed observation. As soon as we moved in I set about planting perennials. The first big project was a permaculture orchard in the style of Stefan Sobkowiak. I bent it a bit to fit my context, that of needing to divert sheet flow coming from hardscape away from an eroding gully and out to a dry ridge. I planted four tree lanes on small swales that dropped one percent off contour to slowly move the water. The tree plantings were very diverse with a mixture of apple, pear, peach, apricot, plum, mulberry, and cherry. Each tree was next to a honey locust nitrogen fixer that I will one day plant a vining crop like grapes or hardy kiwi to grow up using the locust as trellis. Between each tree is a fruiting bush with each lane having its own particular fruit of either black currants, red currants, elderberry, or aronia berry. Nestled in among the fruiting trees and bushes are also many other edible perennials like Turkish rocket, rhubarb, sorrel, strawberries, and Jerusalem artichoke to name just a few. After spacing the trees and bushes appropriately, I packed all of the perennial foodstuffs and flowering plants (edimentals) in tight to bring diversity to the soil and lanes, crowd out weeds and undesirable growth, and give habitat to the many arthropods that call my farm home.

‘Permaculture tree lanes aged 2-3 years’

Another project, this one ongoing, is a terraced perennial bed consisting of three levels roughly three feet deep and about one hundred feet in length. This was a very low organic matter, high clay, acidic, edge space sandwiched between my gravel driveway and a predominately pine regrowth forest edge. It had been partly shaded and was full of pine needles, rocks, and the early succession growth one would expect in a fungal-dominated soil. I spent the first three years sowing a diverse cover crop, manually crimping with my foot and a T-post, and mob grazing laying hens. This served to bring in some much needed organic matter and began the process of revitalizing the soil for future planting. The slope of the space dictated terraces, and, with plenty of forest thinning cuts happening all around, I had much material to build the terraces. Now the bottom terrace is being planted out with roughly seventy five crowns of asparagus, the middle terrace was planted last fall to three year old, bare root blueberry bushes, and the top will soon receive a thick covering of compost and wood chips then have elderberry cuttings pushed in this spring. This terrace faces south, and with the thermal mass of the dark soil and mulch, I fully expect the asparagus to come up a tad earlier, the blueberries to handle late frosts with ease, and the elderberries to proliferate.

‘Terrace garden currently in construction with asparagus, blueberries, and elderberries’

One final project I will note is really a combination of two perennial feeding strategies. I would suggest not thinking of feeding just you, your family, or community with perennials, but also whatever livestock you might now or in the future have on your land. For instance, I have planted several varieties of crab apples, pears, mulberries, pawpaws, hybrid chestnuts, hazelnuts, and other mast trees around the edges of my fenced off, forested pig paddocks to help (one day) offset feed costs and increase the diversity of feedstock. And I have planted many fruiting guilds throughout my pasture and savannah areas to help feed my laying flock and meat birds. I would also recommend thinking about what ‘wild livestock’ you might have on your property or bioregion. In my Zone 4, to use the permaculture parlance, I have planted and/or selected for trees and bushes that are high value feed for bear, deer, and turkey. Some of the trees valuable to these fauna are oaks, chestnuts, hickories, pecan, beech, wild plum, apple, and persimmon.

‘Edge plantings of fruit and mast trees and bushes in a future wooded pig paddock’

These are just a few of the perennial strategies I have implemented on my property. My plan is to continue planting perennial crops for years to come. The potential for human and animal feed is high, and it is made even higher by the resilience that comes with perennials planted well and nurtured for those first few years. Put a bit of extra work in now while we are merely in slow collapse, because post collapse you may be busy with other things. Happy planting!

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If you want more information on topics related to this post I suggest checking out J. Russell Smith, Mark Shepard, Eric Toensmeier, and Steven Barstow.

If you would like to converse more on this or other topics I can be found @biblioagrarian on Twitter and @beechgrovefarmtn on Instagram.