Principles of Permaculture - by Sam George-Allen
1 Observe and interact
Get in your car and drive north from Hobart. It is late January. It is 17 degrees. It is after seven in the evening and the sun is glancing sideways at the world, as though it’s a treasure too sacred to be looked at straight on. Drive through the outer suburbs, past old council housing and the entertainment centre and the rust-licked fortress of Mona. Pass the dry paddocks glowing in the slanting rays, see the bare limbs of the gums on the far shore picked out in lemon yellow. See the river and the bridge and the Golden Arches, feel the comforting hum of humanity at a distance.
Go past the roundabout, the cherry sellers packing up, the black swans. Go on, go north-west, go towards the blaze of gold, the translucent hills overlapping like screens in a throne room. On your left, tough scrappy eucalyptus scrub, placid sheep, a vineyard. On your right, the river, colour of an old tattoo, and beyond, new green of irrigated farmland, Finnish green of timber plantations, silver-green-gold of the hills.
Go on: roadkill, rabbits and swamp hens in the wetland fields, cherry and berry and hop country, caravan parks, flower gardens, loads of wood in ute trays, the new housing estate like a big shiny burn on the skin of the earth. Open the window, breathe in the stink of African daisies and horse shit and the creek; turn right, pass the horses, the silver birches, the blackberry scramble, and all of a sudden, in a solitary heap of habitat, there it is: you’re home.
“Open the window, breathe in the stink of African daisies and horse shit and the creek; turn right, pass the horses, the silver birches, the blackberry scramble, and all of a sudden, in a solitary heap of habitat, there it is: you’re home.”
2 Catch and store energy
We bought the place in mid-November. On a humid Thursday morning we piled our Toyota Corolla with the possessions we couldn’t bear to sell or leave on the side of the road, strapped our dog onto a seatbelt attachment, and drove for five days from Brisbane: onto the Spirit of Tasmania, on to Devonport, and through the golden midlands to the cottage in the town on the river. He had to go back to Queensland to finish up work, but I was staying: me and the dog and our mismatched necessities in a pollen-rich spring ripening to summer. For half a year I lived here alone, feeling my body and the place it was in line up like an image in a microscope coming into focus. There is no luxury like being alone under circumstances of your choosing.
The block I live on is nothing approaching a farm. It is a quarter-acre oblong island in a sea of golden grass, wedged between two improbable paddocks on the edge of a run-down country town. It is half concreted with blinding white pavers, but because I am compelled to try to coax food out of the earth I have done my best to grow things here, guided by the twelve principles of the gentle, patient landcare system set down by Tasmanians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in the 1970s: permaculture. It is a way of agriculture that seeks the path of least resistance, in the footsteps of Masanobu Fukuoka’s One Straw Revolution, that follows the contours of the natural world and rightfully positions the person as a single element in a web of existing organic systems. It is slow and watchful and obsessed with soil. There are worse ways to scaffold a life.
“It is slow and watchful and obsessed with soil. There are worse ways to scaffold a life.”
I started gardening as soon as I moved in. The front garden and the beds at the side of the house were thickly mulched, which at first I thought was a stroke of luck: I imagined the good soil underneath, intricate fungal and microbial cycles at work, worms. But wherever I dug, I struck plastic. Some previous owner had laid down layers of it – weed mat, tarpaulin, feed bags, sheets – underneath six inches of wood chip (why wood chip? It’s so expensive), presumably to smother weeds and the persistent grass.
I couldn’t tell you the extent of my dismay. That impermeable barrier between earth and mulch meant there were no worms, no microbes, no rich, soft soil. Instead, the dirt beneath was hard and sour. I scratched at it with a fingernail and hurt myself. The mammoth task of shovelling off the mulch, pulling up and disposing of the plastic, and replenishing the soil loomed before me.
But I was alone and underemployed and a new home owner and a gardener. What else was I going to do?
Everything is a transfer of energy. I caught it in my arms and threw it at the ground and up came the mulch, the tarp, the weed mat in a cloud of swearing and sweat, and down went the bags of sheep shit and the straw and Seasol and water and sun, and after I was done and sprawled on the cheap bed covers, I imagined I could hear the soft shuffling of collapse and decay and giving and taking of energy going on beneath the soft new sheets in my garden beds.
3 Obtain a yield
I began eating weeds. Over winter, thick mats of chickweed grew between my leggy sage and thyme, and I, admiring the chickweed’s vigour, its rude, glossy good health, decided to eat it.
First I ascertained that it was indeed chickweed, looking for the mohawk of hairs along its stems that distinguish it from its caustic lookalike, petty spurge (and how’s that for a name for a poisonous, skin-burning herb. A name to model yourself on).
Chickweed’s Latin name is Stellaria media, a beautiful name for an ordinary-looking plant. It comes from the medium-sized, star-shaped flowers that bloom on the plant in late winter, but I prefer to think of it as meaning ‘between the stars’. It might as well; Latin names for plants are applied with such slapdash whimsy as to mean practically anything. I like the idea of this unassuming, middle-green weed, low-growing and humble, being named for the wonders between celestial bodies. Why not?
In my weed-eater’s handbook, the authors describe the taste of chickweed as ‘a little like grass, albeit pleasant grass’. I mostly agree. The overwhelming flavour of it is green. Chickweed is full of antioxidants and vitamins and iron, and probably for these reasons is one of the ingredients in a traditional Japanese dish called nanakusa-gayu, or seven-herb porridge, eaten as a tonic in the spring.
When I eat chickweed, I feel as though I have taken a tonic, although I believe this to be more psychological than gastrointestinal. It is a powerful combination of triumphant emotions: victory over weeds in the garden by the greatest humiliation possible to visit upon an enemy (bodily consumption); mastery of my domain in the manner of a vengeful god (torn, root and stem, from the earth, followed by bodily consumption); plundering the natural world for its craftily hidden riches and bodily consuming them, thus becoming ever more powerful; along with the more prosaic but no less satisfying thrill of whizzing something to bits in a blender.
I mostly eat chickweed in the form of pesto: dumped, roughly chopped, in the blender along with handfuls of parmesan, a long stream of olive oil, pine nuts, salt, pepper, lemon and an ill-advised quantity of garlic, to be pulverised into a creamy green paste that I spread smugly on toast. It all seems very natural to me now, but the first time I did it I was aware of a creeping apprehension. I had nibbled on the fresh tips of chickweed while pottering in the garden, or stuffed a frond in my mouth to show off to friends, but I’d never made an honest go of eating the weeds. I grow a lot of food in my garden – kale, silverbeet, cabbage, tomatoes, herbs – but they all look like the food I used to buy from the supermarket. How quickly our confidence dwindles when we step back into the realm of the hunter-gatherer, and go to eat the stuff that just grows, lewdly and abundantly, on the ground. Even though I was certain that what I was eating was edible (chickweed’s hairy mohawk makes it very easy to identify beyond a doubt), I spent the hours after my first weed meal anxiously waiting for a stomach cramp, a rash, a fit of fainting.
None came. The human body wants to devour all it surveys. We’re one of the few animals who can survive on pretty much anything. In various parts of the world, local diets consist of only meat, or only carbohydrates, or tubers that require complicated treatment before their poisons are rendered inert, and somehow we thrive. Weed-eating is my birthright. These days I champ down bunches like a grazing cow.
4 Apply self-regulation and feedback
I am looking at the sky. I am holding my ankle with both hands. I am sucking the air. I am crooning like a sea mammal. I am cursing the dog, his paws, the soft soil of the lawn where he has dug, the persistent indignity of gravity. I am lowing at the heavens like a cow locked outside the milking shed, where no one can hear me.
5 Use and value renewables
A tonne of wood costs $110 from Jason, who lives across the road, and wakes me up at 4.30 every morning with the guttural roar of his old red truck as he leaves for the plantation. He and his son back the truck across the street and hurl the logs into the garage. The clatter and smash as some of them break apart, the almost-audible hiss of wood missing skin by inches as they fling the logs past one another’s faces, the new chill that’s blown in from the south in the last couple of days, it is all vivid and thrilling.
Another renewable: horse shit. I am surrounded on three sides by horse paddocks, and I am a gardener, so every couple of weeks I take the dog and the wheelbarrow through the back gate and into the fields, and I shovel shit. I try not to let on to the stallion that I am scared of him. The mares in his harem accept pats, sometimes put their heads over my shoulder and huff into my shirt. I wonder if they feel indignant at having their waste stolen like this; is it indecent to handle the grassy clods in their presence?
A further renewable: a patch of yellow-green pasture shorn into the bush, maybe a couple of acres across, on the hill beyond the office window, and the sun shining on it like a coin.
6 Produce no waste
If the balance is right, everything can be composted: potato peels, paper towels, onion skins, dog shit, chicken bones, dead mice, hair, bank statements, flesh, fingernails. If the balance is right.
7 Design from patterns to details
I am putting off a job, so I walk through the house flexing my imagination like an atrophied muscle and reading from the house design section of Introduction to Permaculture by Bill Mollison and Reny Mia Slay. I’ve become bewitched by the line drawings: a grinning, genderless figure soaping their hair in a hybrid bathroom/greenhouse; a grapevine growing over a bower on the north side of a haybale house. I stand in the middle of the living room and knock down walls, put in French doors, grow a deck and a shadehouse and greywater lines, I sink my foundations into the cool earth and I spread my eaves, as Mollison tells me, to block the high summer sun and let the winter rays in.
8 Integrate don’t segregate
Solitude is becoming a part of me, and I feel my borders blurring. I read Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond, and then I read an essay she wrote about writing Pond, and she says: ‘In solitude you don’t need to make an impression on the world, so the world has some opportunity to make an impression on you’. I am waking up at sunrise and going to bed when it gets dark, caught in the swing time of these absurdly long high-latitude summer days. I am freckling in the unchecked UV. I am impressed upon.
The country around where I live is vividly seasonal. I had forgotten what that was like. Summer bakes the paddocks, burns my snow peas and whips the lawn to dust, but in autumn – bless the autumn, my favourite season – I walk, dog at my side, beside the swollen river and beneath rows of poplars and birches, all obscene with colour. It seems improper that leaves should glitter, but they do, shimmering in the wind like scales flashing, and my borders blur further, and I could lift and glitter with them. I feel like a champagne bubble. The empty lot is glowing with purple clover.
Haws gleam in the hawthorn hedges. A rabbit lopes up a driveway. Twilight, long and cool as a hand, presses over me earlier every evening, and in the blue light makes everything grey and silver: an embroidered blanket of countryside, and me, a single stitch.
“Haws gleam in the hawthorn hedges. A rabbit lopes up a driveway. Twilight, long and cool as a hand, presses over me earlier every evening, and in the blue light makes everything grey and silver: an embroidered blanket of countryside, and me, a single stitch.”
9 Use small, slow solutions
Three cups of flour, half a teaspoon of yeast, a big pinch of salt, a cup and a half of warm water, and time will make the best bread you’ve ever eaten.
Salt and cabbage and time will make kraut. Salt and almost any vegetable and time will make something of sur- prising deliciousness and vitality. Salt and cucumbers and garlic and time will make a pickle so good you’ll call your mother about it.
You have plenty of time.
10 Use and value diversity
Blackberry season. It is the summer of indolent selfhood. Everyday I wake up and I decide what I want to do. If I want to walk, I walk, and the dog walks with me. If I want to sleep until noon, I sleep. If I want to eat, I eat, and I find myself eating less and peculiar things and at strange times, whenever my body rings the hunger bell and I go obediently to the fridge: a handful of cherries, a long slug of wine from the bottle, a fistful of leaves. All my life I have been a herd animal and now I am in solitude, like a snow leopard or a mole. More a mole.
“All my life I have been a herd animal and now I am in solitude, like a snow leopard or a mole. More a mole.”
In blackberry season I am stretching myself to the edges of my body and feeling how it feels to have it do whatever it wants. It is like letting your arms float into the air after pressing them against the sides of a doorway. I am listening to the soft animal of my body, like Mary Oliver says I ought to, and I am letting it love what it loves.
What it loves: bleeding on the blackberry thorns, hands and mouth stained purple, buckets full of soft sun-warm fruit, the wilful dog diving in and out of the river, and overhead not wild geese but black cockatoos calling, harsh and exciting, like heralds announcing the end of the day.
11 Use edges and value the marginal
I have taken The Weed Forager’s Handbook by Adam Grubb and Annie Raser-Rowland and gone down to the river’s edge again. The dog is paddling upstream and I am crushing a spear of angled onion between my fingers, sucking in the smell of primary school lunchtimes at the edge of the oval where it grew in opulent abundance. Stinking white bells, like snowdrops making a joke; I dig some up and take it home.
12 Creatively use and respond to change
In the back of my mind a small bell is ringing, all the time. On the bell-pull is a tag: EMERGENCY. I am always thinking, in the manner of a small bell frantically pulled in a room far from the dinner party, about the end of the world.
I read recently a slightly hysterical article in which the author realised that not everyone has an internal monologue. Some people don’t have a voice in their head narrating their lives; some people don’t silently talk to themselves. When I am planting out seedlings or shovelling compost, I don’t either. When I am focused on the ground where I live, the bell grows distant, the voices quiet; things get calm.
My early memories are of solitude and being close to the ground: the leaf litter in the cubbyhouse I made in our suburban shrubbery, the rock pools at the shabby beach down the hill from my house.
Now, alone and an adult, I am having a renaissance with the ground. I am changing; I am getting lower down. Mole-like, I want to go beneath the grass, I want to swim in the earth. I imagine seeds and the root-hairs they send down into the soil. I want to silence the bell even further with the press of earth, with the silent growing living things down there that go on living while the world above them falls to bits.
“I want to silence the bell even further with the press of earth, with the silent growing living things down there that go on living while the world above them falls to bits.”
If you have poor soil, you can improve it simply by putting the right things on top of it. Layers of cardboard, manure, compost and mulch will turn, over time, into rich, nutrient-filled soil, and will feed the microbes that live below them, and lure worms and larvae and fungi and other good members of the microbiome into the piece of earth you claim to own, and then they can go about changing the stuff of the earth into food for you. It is an ordinary miracle, a magic like no other. It is the prayer I repeat when thoughts of the future press the hope out of me.
I read somewhere that growing your own food is the highest calling there is. In my earthboundedness, I feel religious while moving among the tomatoes. What better meditation on the passing of time than waiting for a fruit to ripen? I can will the flesh to redden but the tomato doesn’t know or care. To the tomato, I am as insignificant as the hoverfly, I am as inconsequential as the mole (although we know, really, that both mole and hoverfly are profoundly significant, consequential, tiny pieces bearing the weight of the world evenly with the rest of us).
What can I learn from the tomato? To grow where I am planted; to lift myself towards the sun; to lean on my neighbours; to absorb the press of expectations and the oncoming apocalypse and still ripen in my own sweet time. To send my roots into the heart of the earth, to mingle with everything else that’s turning into everything else down there. To live less like a jangling bell and more like a plucked string, vibrating at the frequency of growing things. ▼
This article appeared in Island 159 in 2020. Order a print issue here.
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