Sustainable Gardening

I've been thinking quite a bit about 'sustainable gardening' lately.  I promote (what I consider) are sustainable gardening practices in the classes I teach -- minimal inputs of water, fuel, pesticides, herbicides, and inorganic fertilizers, don't let leaves leave your property, don't kill things, promote diversity, plant mostly natives, think naturalistic planting design, minimize areas devoted to lawn, etc. 

We've been happy with our 'natural garden' created with this approach in our own home landscape in the Piedmont of South Carolina.  And we're continuing this in our second home in the mountains (where we'll probably 'retire'), where we're populating the slope around our small mountain house with native understory shrubs along with native trees.

Vegetable gardening is a bit more problematic;  vegetables, by their domesticated nature, are nutrient and water hogs, so the gardener is ALWAYS grubbing around for more sources of organic matter and nutrients. 

Homemade compost is excellent, but it's hard to produce enough that's high nitrogen, unless you have chickens, rabbits, cows, or horses.  Chickens and rabbits are feasible in an urban environment if you're at home most all of the time, but not so practical if you're away for weekends or holidays.

But what exactly is sustainable gardening? 

I'll assert that it is creating an ecologically-balanced landscape on the property that you inhabit, and that restores most of the ecology that once was on that site, along with making sure that no extra inputs of fertilizer or pesticides get washed into the stormwater drains. 

That's what we've tried to do, in our attempt to create natural woodland and forest habitat and meadow on what once was almost 2 acres of lawn in the Piedmont, and incorporated organic vegetable gardens into the mix as well.

In the mountains, trying to restore an invasive-rich ravine into a rich cove forest of native trees, shrubs, and wildflowers is an amazing effort;  my gardening companion has made remarkable progress already. 

And converting part of the driveway and bare area below the house to vegetable garden beds is productive, too.

So, my first 'take-home' message, is let's get planting natives instead of 'ornamentals' in our gardens and landscapes.

Woo, hoo! More rain!

It's ungrateful not to be glad for the inch and a half or so of rain we've already received, but... we're glad to have an evening wave of thunderstorms and heavy downpours add to the total.

We came out of drought conditions officially last January after years of significant, if not severe drought, but went back into incipient drought (according to our state climatologist) in mid-summer, I think.

October is normally a dry month, and in a newspaper article today, she (our state climatologist) is predicting a dry fall and winter because of La Nina effects.  So anything helps at this point.

I'm beginning to think about focusing more sharply in my educational gardening programs towards sustainable gardening.  I've already been doing that, but really, we don't have any justification as gardeners to use landscape plants that need more water than we've ever normally received in rainfall.  And in a time of a changing climate, it's best to be more conservative than ever in how much 'life support' our garden plants need.  I don't see how we can justify watering lawns and landscape plants, when folks downstream need water for drinking and other essential uses.

Sure, our vegetables are water and nutrient-hogs, but that's to be expected.  We've bred them for productivity, not for their thrifty character. 

But we can go a long way with mulch, soil conservation techniques, and conservation of rainwater and gray water.

Gardening, stewardship, and sustainability

Transforming lawns to a vibrant wildlife habitats, growing vegetables, and carefully tending 'our' patches of land are sustaining activities, ones that ground me in what I can do, and away from worrying about the difficult environmental times that face us.

My work (as a garden educator) is also encouraging: I help folks learn how to be better stewards by being better gardeners, promoting native plants and restoring wildlife habitats, and am definitely an encouraging voice about growing more vegetables and fruits in the open spaces (lawn or not) that many Americans have access to, whether on their own 'property' or not.

I love the idea of guerrilla gardening - planting plants where they should be, but aren't! These are the curbside planting areas, empty 'hell strips' between sidewalks and roads, and barren parking lot edges.

Gardening and stewardship provides hope, for restoration of both native and created garden space. At least that's what true for me.

Sustainable gardening

Jan, at Thanks for Today, initiated an Earth Day project for garden bloggers on sustainability, which I'm glad to take part in. Earth Day is on April 22, but is often celebrated on days surrounding that date.

I find gardening an act of stewardship and restoration. My gardening companion and I have created a garden that supports wildlife, mimics nature, and supports our spirit. The trajectory that we've had of converting our roughly 1 1/2 acres of lawn to woodland, meadow (borders), shrub borders and understory along with two intensively maintained vegetable garden areas has been deeply satisfying to us.



In our small mountain house, the mulched areas, with minimal planting, have quickly yielded to adding more native trees and shrubs below the house, ripping out invasives (English ivy, honeysuckle, etc.) in the ravine below, and adding shrubs, bog, sedums, and meadow garden in front, with part of the driveway scheduled for raised bed vegetables this spring.



But I know as an ecologist that we need to create sustainable systems on a community and regional scale, not just on a home scale. To be sustainable, we need to include not only home gardens, but neighborhoods and city landscapes, and regional food distribution networks, and include watersheds and foodsheds in the overall picture. Ecological systems aren't balanced on an acre or 1 and 1/2 acres, but multiples of thousands of acres. Our food system is literally global.

It's fundamental for the earth's stability and the long-term survival of humans as a species that we, as part of the world community, commit our hearts, minds, and actions to living as lightly as we can on Earth. When there were many fewer of us (humans), resource exploitation and extraction was manageable. Now that there are 6 billion plus of us, and we all want stuff, electricity, water on demand, and bigger houses, we've got a big problem.



When I was a graduate student, I read Limits to Growth, a visionary book about how we'd run out of essential resources if the world population kept growing, and everyone kept consuming (like Americans). Unfortunately, their predications were delayed by technological innovation, and folks who don't understand the limits of the ecological capacities of our planet started to talk about how we'd be able to invent our way out of the negative impacts of population growth, energy consumption, etc.

Today we're at a critical point. I was teaching a course called People and the Environment in 1990, when PBS aired an excellent series about 'Race to Save the Planet.' We were hopeful then, but now we’re definitely needing to face the end of cheap energy (peak oil) and a throwaway society. Each one of us in the developed world (and the affluent folks in the developing world, too) needs to reduce our consumption of stuff, from electricity to water to goods and services. We need to help people in the developing world to raise their standard of living without making the same mistakes we made in the U.S. - this means cutting dependence on fossil fuels in favor of sustainable energy sources such as solar and non-habitat-degrading biomass fuel production.



As a vegetable gardener, I know about the work it takes to grow even a part of one's own food, not to mention the calorie-dense grains or tubers that provide the sustenance for most diets world-wide. And I'm in awe of folks who are growing all of their vegetables, much less raising urban chickens for eggs and meat. In ‘my’ environmental generation, we had Love Canal, Three Mile Island, and countless other wake-up calls about the impact of human-created pollutants on humans and the rest of the natural world.



My husband (aka my gardening companion) and I heard Al Gore many years ago at a Georgia Conservancy meeting talking about how many signs did we did to have until the (environmental) message was clear. He was powerful in his message then, and thank goodness he's continued along that road. His book, Earth in the Balance, was one that more of us should have paid attention to.

I'm always trying, not always successfully, to reduce our impacts and use of resources -- recycling everything that we use, choosing products that are recyclable or biodegradable, and produced from renewal sources, conserving energy, composting, etc, and gardening naturally and restoring habitat in our garden -- it's a positive step that provides me with hope that we can turn things around, starting with our homes, actions, yards, and communities.

We’re total recyclers, buy things to keep, compost everything, never waste food, turn off the lights, yada, yada, but still rely on nuclear power for electricity, drive to work (even though it’s only a mile), travel widely (offset, of course), and still buy apples grown in Washington, bananas from Ecuador and Costa Rica. But I don’t buy fruits out of season in the northern hemisphere, or tomatoes and peppers grown in hothouses, and try to avoid anything that seems to have too much of a ecological footprint in its production. And, I’m planning to freeze even more vegetables in the coming season for use in the winter.

The looming impact of climate change and the disappearance of cheap energy is daunting, to be sure. But I derive sustenance from trying to be a good steward to the gardens that I’ve created and fostered, and the many children and adults that I’ve touched as an educator.

Local and sustainable food

I'm itching to get back out into the garden. It's time. I've been at meetings two days in a row where local food has been a subject. One was a city environmental committee and the other was an information meeting about our Clemson University Student Organic Farm.

Local food (and sustainability, however defined) are growing interests, even here in a relatively small, reasonably conservative, college town in the Southern U.S. This is a good thing. Our town is quite progressive, actually, and we're often a model for other small communities in our region.

Growing food isn't easy. It takes time and effort. And growing sustainably and organic means taking care of the soil, balancing energy inputs and outputs, and replenishing nutrients that are harvested (and consumed). My friends who are permaculture fans are on the right track, to be sure. We have LOTS of land in our cities and suburban areas that's 'wasted' on grass or on ornamental trees and shrubs that don't support wildlife.

I'm a great advocate of greening our community landscapes, adding plants (trees, shrubs, and perennials) that add both ecological (wildlife) value as well as providing food resources. Why shouldn't we plant persimmons or pecans, for example, in public parks and open spaces? Or use vacant land for community gardens?

At home, we've transformed much of our former lawn into wildlife habitat (with mostly native plants) and grow lots of vegetables in our organic vegetable garden. But this wouldn't sustain us without chickens, perhaps pigs, and a concerted effort to convert a LOT more lawn to vegetable gardens devoted to calorie crops (potatoes and corn are the most sensible crops for us, if we really had to be serious about it).

I don't really think that our big ag food system will collapse anytime soon, but it's definitely worth focusing on local food and supporting local producers.

Sustainable gardening

I've been thinking more about what it means to be a sustainable gardener.

A request to sponsor a permaculture workshop, at the botanical garden where I work, finds me scrutinizing posted permaculture curricula online, descriptions of principles, book renditions of permaculture on a home scale (Gaia's Garden; Food not Lawns), or community scale guides (The Transition Handbook).

Of course, I've been familiar in general with permaculture for quite a while, and I had one of our SC extension horticulture agents talk about his home permaculture system last year for Winter Lecture Series. But I find myself reluctant to 'sponsor' a permaculture workshop that espouses a permaculture system as an achievable garden design. Hmm.

To me, gardening is an act of stewardship and restoration. We create gardens that support wildlife, mimic nature, and support our spirit. The trajectory that we've had of converting our roughly 1 1/2 acres lawn to woodland, meadow (borders), shrub borders and understory along with two intensively maintained vegetable garden areas has been deeply satisfying to us.

In our small mountain house, the mulched areas, with minimal planting, have quickly yielded to adding more native trees and shrubs below the house, ripping out invasives (English ivy, honeysuckle, etc.) in the ravine below, and add shrubs, bog, sedums, and meadow garden in front, with part of the driveway scheduled for raised bed vegetables this spring.

A post on Blogger Action Day in 2007 isn't too different from my thinking now.

But I know as an ecologist that we need to create sustainable systems on a community and regional scale, not a home owner scale. These sustainable gardens include not only home gardens, but neighborhoods, and city landscapes, and include watershed and foodshed in the overall picture. Ecological systems aren't balanced on an acre or 1/2 acres, but multiple acres.

As a vegetable gardener, I know about the work it takes to grow even a part of one's own food, not to mention the calorie-dense grains or tubers that provide the sustenance for most diets world-wide. And I'm in awe of folks who are growing all of their vegetables.

Permaculture systems are problematic for a plant ecologist with the suggestions of creating food forests, plant guilds, and mimicking nature's layers, but thinking that we can do it better, and even on a small scale.

I'm all for incorporating edibles into home landscapes (and city landscapes, for that matter), trying to keep all organic matter produced on site, and capturing rainwater (and greywater, too).

So I'm willing to keep an open mind, and include mentioning a permaculture approach (and 'principles') into my own ecological gardening and sustainable gardening perspectives. It's always helpful to think in terms of balancing ecological systems, and renewing and sustaining them.