Chapter 17 - Double the Food with One Tenth of the Effort

When I was a little boy, I was tasked with pulling weeds in the garden. There were so many other things I would rather be doing. When I entered adulthood, I was pretty well set against gardens. And then things happened, and I found myself obsessed with gardening. That obsession expanded into permaculture, and the fruit of that obsession is this book.

At the same time, I am freakishly lazy. As the decades passed, I found others of a similar mindset, and we would swap recipes for lazy gardening. It appears there are millions of lazy gardeners all over the world practicing these techniques. Compounding these techniques with authentic effort is now greening deserts1 and feeding millions.

For the sake of this book, I wish to share just enough to give you a taste of what can be.

A great example of what I’m shooting for is a single apple tree in somebody’s yard. You have probably seen the very apple tree I am talking about. The tree gets zero care and yet once a year there is a massive bounty of magnificent apples. Yet orchards require massive care: spraying, mowing, spraying, irrigation, spraying, pruning, spraying, grafting…but mostly spraying. Lots of money and time. As a lazy person who is cheap and also wants to avoid the stuff in the sprays, that neglected tree is looking pretty good. My twisted mind starts to think “how can I do something like that for nearly all of my food?”

The steps for growing a normal garden in a cold climate are:

The recipe for the apple tree was to make the harvest bigger, and eliminate all the other steps. Did the apple tree ever have any of the other steps? Years before we admired it? Did somebody prepare the soil and plant the tree? Maybe. I choose to believe that the tree grew from a seed from an apple core tossed on the ground.

Corn, however, cannot reproduce without human intervention. If people stopped planting corn, corn would be gone in two or three years. So not everything can be as easy as an apple tree.

Using the foundations of basic gardening and just a few pages, I will now attempt to reduce effort to one tenth and double the harvest. I feel a little bit like a magician standing on a stage announcing the trick. And my beautiful assistant is Shawn. Say hi, Shawn. (“Hi!”) The secret behind this trick is not a single sleight of hand, but dozens of little things that all add up to one big performance!

Transplanting? That’s Unnecessary Work!

The icon of gardening is the tomato. Pizza, tacos, or burgers just wouldn’t be the same without tomatoes. And I’ve heard rumors of people eating something called “salad” with tomatoes.

People will buy tomato seeds, plastic trays, and potting soil. Mix them all up with some water, grow lights, six weeks, and ten hours of your time, and PRESTO! Little tomato plants in super-flimsy plastic pots. Skipping over “hardening them off” and the many debatable ways to transplant – BANG, the tomato is now planted in your garden. Daily watering, plucking out surrounding weeds, and…after 7 to 14 days of “transplant shock” the tomato is growing again.2

A few weeks go by and you notice, in another part of your garden that you were ignoring, there is a tomato plant. It had none of the expense, nor effort, and yet there it is. It is currently about the same size as your pampered tomato. How rude.

This “other” tomato is called a volunteer. Some tomato plant from last year must have had a tomato drop unnoticed. The little seeds waited through the winter and then some seeds germinated earlier than others. Maybe there were fifty little baby tomato plants, but only one survived to this point. Most gardeners have observed that the volunteers typically outperform the coddled plants – they are bigger, stronger plants with more fruit. They get a later start, but they don’t go through transplant shock. Further, a tomato has a taproot that can find resources very deep in the soil – but transplanting kills the taproot. Volunteers still have their taproot.

Permaculture is a more symbiotic relationship with nature so I can be even lazier. Which path is more aligned with nature? Which path is lazier? That volunteer tomato is singing my lazy permaculture song.

Most transplanting for any species can be replaced with direct seeding.3 And when you have been gardening long enough, you start to get lots of volunteer squash, melons, lettuces, and fruit trees – food plants become your “weeds”!

Prepping the Soil to Not Need Prepping

Most people run a rototiller on their garden every spring. It destroys a lot of the “weeds” that are getting started, and it makes for a fluffy soil that is easy to plant in. And the garden plants LOVE it! Oh, sure, that tiller was crazy loud, extra stinky, and definitely a long way away from nature, but look at how much the growies thrive on freshly tilled soil…for the first year or two.

Every time you till the soil, you lose 30% of the organic matter (microbial soil life is killed and the plants feast on their dead bodies).4 In other words, every time you till, you bring your garden closer and closer to being a cement-like dirt that nothing will grow in. You are sacrificing your future for the sake of this year’s garden. This is why people with older gardens will till in manures – to replace the organic matter lost with previous tilling.

Eventually, people get tired of tilling and bringing in mountains of manure, so they switch to no-till, raised-bed gardens.5 By not walking on the gardens, the gardens are less compacted and the growies can have all of the happiness from till, without all that effort. Aged soil loaded with organic matter soon becomes loaded with earthworms that provide far more benefit than the tiller ever did. And a raised bed that is two feet tall will typically add two weeks to both ends of the growing season because cold air tends to hug the ground. In time, raised beds need far less water and far fewer nutrients. A strong win for the lazy gardener!

After 15 years of improving my techniques with raised beds, I learned about hugelkultur: raised beds with wood buried inside.6 As the wood rots, it provides a massive sponge for soil microorganisms, nutrients, and water. The sponge can be so massive that eventually you can eliminate the need for irrigation and fertilization! And that rotting action makes the wood shrink, leaving behind air pockets – a bit like the air pockets you would get from tilling. The ultimate raised-bed garden!

Hugelkultur is a gift to your future self. Take the effort you would have put in with that rototiller and manure, mix in the hugelkultur recipe, and you have the rough shape. Next, mix in all the garden care you would have put in for that first year of the tilled garden and you have a giant step forward. Next year there will be one tenth the effort, and in the third year there will be one twentieth of the effort. In those years, you can use your extra energy to build more hugelkultur beds. Or just lie in a hammock and watch the clouds pass.

Long-Term Carbon Sink

“Biochar (charcoal) from wildfires can help soil hold more water, nutrients, and soil life for 1000 years! You can do this yourself.7 No wildfires needed!”

– Greg Martin, biochar.com

Planting Once and Harvesting for Years

It seems to me that most of the time when someone is growing some of their own food, their gardens are almost exclusively annual plants. This means that every year they plant up to 100% of their garden from scratch. If you’re just growing a couple of tomato plants and a few carrots, that might not matter too much. On the other hand, if you’re trying to grow a huge garden, planting can be a lot of work!

A key component of a permaculture garden is a much larger focus on perennial plants.8 One reason is that perennial plants are typically more resilient than annuals once established – they’ve stored up energy from previous years that can help them get through a rough year.

Depending on where you live, there are any number of edible perennials that can be included in your garden, both woody plants like apples, plums, and hazelnuts and non-woody plants like asparagus, broccoli,9 and sunchokes.10 The idea is to plant once and reap the benefits for years to come.

While focusing on perennials really brings the work down, we can still have a fresh garden tomato once in a while. But rather than doing all of the work myself, I like to encourage my annual plants to seed themselves among the perennials. And rather than harvesting all of the seed and then planting it again next year, I just let it fall where it may. If it grows, great. If not, no harm done. Either way, very little to no planting is required on an annual basis.

Mulching 2.0: Being Naked Is No Longer Required!

Ruth Stout11 is famous as “The Queen of Mulch,” and equally famous for gardening naked. She pioneered a gardening technique that she called “no work gardening.” Instead of tilling and composting and the other things that most gardeners do, she just put a whole lot of hay down and threw her seeds and compostables under the bits of hay. She did nothing else but harvest. As the years passed, she added seeds, compostables, and a bit more hay. Her garden became more glorious with each year.

Decades later, people use all sorts of different things for mulch: straw, rocks, wood chips, sawdust, twigs, leaves, bark, compost, coffee grounds, grass clippings, pine straw, and, of course, hay. And we have learned that some growies like certain mulches better than others: strawberries like straw (go figure) and raspberries are especially keen on wood chips.12

Hay is nearly perfect for most crops.13 It is loaded with nutrients, so that each time it rains it’s as if the growies get a perfect cup of fertilizer tea. The hay provides magnificent earthworm food and shelter. A few plants will find that hay has a bit too much fertilizer, but most plants find it to be exceptionally delicious. The only mulch that might be better is homemade compost.

After Ruth Stout died, nearly all hay, straw, and compost was made unusable for gardeners. But it’s not Ruth’s fault! Persistent herbicides gradually gained popularity. They have a half-life of 7 to 11 years and are found to be handy for people growing hay or grass crops. These persistent herbicides will kill any plant that is not a grass. I suspect that most of your garden is not grass. So when you put hay or straw on your garden today, there is a 96% chance that your garden will die. Nearly all commercial composts also have enough persistent herbicide residue to stunt or kill your garden.14

The moral of the story is that mulch is excellent for our quest. And the best mulches have now become mostly unavailable to us. You can find usable hay and straw – or grow your own. And you can even make your own compost. But this sorta shifts the work from old-school, labor-intensive gardening to a whole different type of work.

And as long as we are tempering the magic of mulch: Ruth had a LOT of rainfall in her area. I think that mulch combined with some extra rain and magnificent garden soil definitely does the trick. For those of us with less rain and beginner soil, ample mulch will need to be combined with some other tricks.

Many people in the permaculture world love advocating the use of newspaper or cardboard as a mulch material. And while I think it is possible to make newspaper or cardboard that would be safe (by my standards) for gardens, most use toxins that I am not comfortable with.15 Some people have recipes for making these materials “safe” by peeling off the tape, or selecting only black and white pages, but my issue is with the chemicals used to make the paper or cardboard – so the toxicity is throughout the material, not something that can be scraped off. I have a lot more concerns about these materials, but the grand summary is: don’t.

My favorite mulch today is “chop and drop.”16 Most of my garden has already been mulched and the only plants growing there are plants that I have encouraged. For the parts of the garden where I didn’t have enough mulch yet, there are things growing there that I don’t want. So I cut the things I don’t want, and, rather than hauling it away or to a compost pile, I make a thick wad and place that wad on top of other stuff I don’t want – effectively smothering it. It is far faster than driving far away to get a load of pristine hay, parting with money, and then hauling that hay to where I will use it in the garden. Chances are that what I am chopping is not a grass – thus proving that it is free of any persistent herbicides!

I also use rocks, sticks, twigs, pinecones, rotten logs, and sawdust as mulch.17 Wherever there is something from nature I wish to get rid of, it can almost always work as a mulch if I can’t find a better use for it somewhere else. And if I don’t have chickens or pigs to take kitchen scraps, they go under a bit of chop-and-drop in the garden – just like what Ruth Stout did.

3D Gardening – Big Berms Bring Big Benefits

A few years ago, I was asked to speak to about 50 master gardeners in Great Falls, Montana. It was my first time to Great Falls. As you stand in Great Falls and look west, you can see the Rocky Mountains. And when I say “stand” I mean that you should be sure to lean into the wind.

In many ways, the climate of Great Falls is the same as Missoula. Temperatures are about the same, precipitation is about the same, and the elevation is pretty much the same. The only big difference is the wind. Missoula is in the middle of the Rocky Mountains, and Great Falls is part of the Great Plains with a view of the Rocky Mountains.

I visited a few farms and gardens. As you look far in every direction, there are hardly any trees. The only trees I could see were Russian olive – a tree famous for tolerating extremely dry conditions.18 The area around Missoula is covered with trees.

Wind is desiccating (drying) and cooling. I recorded a podcast there while standing on a small suburban lot.19 The backyard was a little bigger than an urban backyard. The woman who lived there told me she could hang wet clothes outside, and it would take about ten to fifteen minutes until they were dry.

My #1 bit of advice for her was to make tall berms: piles of dirt and soil about 15 feet (~5 meters) tall.20 Just within her fence line. And, near the top of the berms, plant trees that can tolerate desert conditions. All of the neighborhood would be able to see her new jungle. Neighborhoods from ten miles away will probably be able to see it! And between the berms would flourish a magnificent jungle garden. At least it would appear to be jungle-esque compared to her neighbors. In time, I think she would not need to water it. A decade later, the properties next door would start to develop jungle-like attributes.

She will never eliminate the wind, but she will be able to eliminate 95% of it.

So we have now created a spot that is moister and warmer, which means less irrigation and a longer growing season in Montana. But this is just the beginning.21

The south-facing slope of the berm will be, overall, warmer than the north-facing slope. So plants that love heat, or a long growing season, will have a home, and plants that prefer things to be cooler will also have a home. And plants that tolerate both will ripen at different times and have different flavors.

When the rain falls on flat land, everything gets the same amount of water. When rain falls on a berm, the water tends to be shed from the peak and accumulates at the bottom. Plants that do better with dry conditions will flourish at the top, and plants that need lots of water will be comfortable at the bottom.

She later told me that the only thing stopping her is that she felt her neighbors would object. And pleasing her neighbors appeared to be very important to her. No problem. Map out where the berms would go and create something of a size that would not push that neighbor’s buttons. Each year, make it a little bigger until it is the size you want!

How Trees Nurture Gardens, Cool Your Home, Heat Your Home, and Save the World

Permaculture systems have a lot more trees than most gardens. Conventional gardens emulate conventional farms – they are flat and have few trees for the convenience of the machinery. Once we eliminate the machinery, we can “un-flatten” the land and add trees back in. This way, we can take advantage of the superpowers of trees in our garden.

For starters, trees are typically the most resilient and reliable food-producing plants. They keep producing year after year with very little care. Trees can usually handle much more adverse conditions than herbaceous plants. For example, once established, people with an apple tree in their yard are likely going to get apples every year until the tree dies – and the tree may live longer than you do. Trees also often provide the best nectar source for honey.

Trees accelerate the benefits of polyculture by sharing water and nutrients from deeper in the soil with surrounding plants. They also act as giant water pumps, pumping water from their roots all the way up their trunks into their leaves. Most of this water transpires out of their leaves and significantly raises the humidity in the area. Because of this, water that was once not available to shallow-rooted plants now becomes available because of the presence of a tree. And if you add in a couple of berms to reduce wind, even more of the moisture will stick around for all the plants.

When a forest is cut down, local creeks usually dry up shortly thereafter. That’s because trees play such an important role in slowing and soaking water into the soil rather than allowing it to run off. By doing the reverse and planting enough trees in and around dry gullies, we can bring back streams!22 If that tidbit wasn’t cool enough for you, here’s another one: Trees create rain. An excellent example is Willie Smits’ work, where he was able to increase the rainfall in an area of Borneo by 20% in only three years – mostly just by growing trees as part of a polyculture!23

Another excellent benefit of deciduous trees is that they produce enormous amounts of mulch that are delivered straight from the tree to your garden every fall – free of charge.24 This helps feed the soil in all the wonderful ways mentioned earlier in this chapter.

Trees also reduce evaporation, partially because they act as a bit of a wind barrier (though not as good as berms),25 and partially because the shade helps keep the sun off the soil. This works well because many plants have evolved to grow in the partial shade beneath a tree, and many food crops will produce more with a bit of shade than if they have a full day of sun.26

With proper use of tree shade, we can keep the sun out of our homes in the warmest months, possibly eliminating the need for an air conditioner.27 In the colder months, the leaves fall off the trees and allow the sun in, warming the house.28 Of course, there’s a bigger way trees can heat your home – with a rocket mass heater.

But wait! There’s more! Now free with every tree comes a massive solution to the carbon footprint game. There is a bit of uncanny math between trees and atmospheric CO2: Trees convert about one ton of atmospheric CO2 into one ton of tree matter. And one ton of tree matter will, eventually, transform into about one ton of atmospheric CO2 (typically through fire or decomposition).29 With a pocketful of tree seeds, you can offset your own carbon footprint in an afternoon. Repeat a dozen times and you have offset the carbon footprint of a dozen people.

A huge chunk of our carbon footprint comes from cutting down or burning rainforests to make room for conventional agriculture.30 Yes, yes, I know that you, personally, did not cut down any rainforests. But we both know who bought that food. And now you know why I am so passionate about folks growing their own garden.

Long ago, far more land was covered in jungle and forests. If more carbon is locked up in a giant jungle (or forest), the result is less carbon in the atmosphere.

Here’s an odd thing to consider at this point: If you build a log cabin, that postpones the decomposition of those logs by 80 years. You have sequestered more carbon. The same can be said for anything made of wood that will have a long use cycle.

Oh! That reminds me of another benefit of trees: wood!

Replacing Fertilizer with Polyculture

About 20 years ago, I bought 80 acres (~30 hectares) from a hay farmer. He was selling the property because the cost of fertilizer got to be more than he earned selling the hay. And that doesn’t even take into account having to get the fertilizer to the farm and apply it.

I would like to have infinite free fertilizer. And I would like to not have to go get it and apply it. I will do a little bit of work up front with about twenty things so that I will get all the free and effortless fertilizer, but the tippy top thing in this list is “polyculture.”31

In order to have the word “polyculture” we need to have the word “monoculture.”32 A monoculture is where you might have an acre of carrots. All one thing. A lame polyculture might be two different species mixed together. A magnificent polyculture would be fifty different species all mixed together.

As the centuries have passed, farmers have gained some idea of what to add to the soil to make for a good-looking, marketable carrot (which might be different from a healthy and nutritious carrot). The farmer would test the soil each year to make sure that the amendments were optimized. A lot of work.

Each carrot takes what it needs and wants from the surrounding soil. And, each carrot exudes stuff from its roots (carrot poop – technically called “exudates”).33 In a monocrop, the only stuff that is available to the carrot is what the farmer provided and the exudate of neighboring carrots.

I believe that the best carrots are fed the stuff that the farmer has figured out, PLUS a few hundred other things. Research has shown that, in a polyculture, the carrot will take in the exudates of other species. But what it does not want is the exudate of other carrots. So other plants generate carrot food and take away carrot poop.

Further still, research has shown that certain foreign substances, when given to one plant, can be detected in plants twenty feet (six meters) away several days later.34 The substance was exuded and taken up by several plants to eventually reach the plants twenty feet away.

But it gets better! Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of fungi. Most of the life of fungus is as webby stuff in the soil called mycelium. And fungus loooooooves sugar. But without green leaves, mycelium has no way to make its own sugar. It depends entirely on the sugary exudates of plants. But the wacky thing is that mycelium trades stuff for sugar.35 While the mycelium can trade some minerals it has managed to mine, its favorite item to trade is the exudates of other plants or microorganisms (“if you give me sugar, I will give you…mystery poop!”). Research has shown that the amount of exchange between plants increases tenfold when the soil is rich in mycelium. It can take months or years for mycelium to get to its full power – which is another great reason to not till.

As a bonus, this combination has a powerhouse of additional features including reducing the need for irrigation (tap-rooted plants get more water and share) and optimizing the amount of sunlight each plant gets (most plants prefer less than full sun and end up getting a little shade from bigger plants). There are a dozen more benefits, and probably a dozen more on top of that to be learned about as these techniques become more popular.

Monocrops Need Pest Control; Nature Doesn’t

Most modern organic farming practices are very similar to modern chem-ag practices – only the fertilizers and pesticides are replaced with OMRI-certified products.

Suppose you have a 40-acre (~16-hectare) field of organic potatoes and you see Colorado Potato Beetles.36 As a farmer, you better do something or you will lose your crop. It will not be possible to pick the beetles off by hand, so the OMRI-certified pesticides are starting to look very tempting.

An important note at this point is that the 40-acre field is flat – to be tractor friendly. All of the potatoes get the same amount of sun, water, and fertilizer. The pH, organic matter levels, and everything else about the soil is all about the same. And, of course, it’s a monocrop.

A permaculture system is a polyculture. The land is not just full of 7-foot-tall (~2 meters) hugelkultur beds, but a few 15-foot-tall (~5 meters) berms too.37 And not only is it a polyculture, but there are trees mixed in. Including a few really big trees. All of those variations create a lot of diversity in how much sun each plant gets. Rainfall tends to run off the tops of things quickly and puddle in the low spots. What is inside the hugelkultur is quite wacky – different kinds of woods, soils, some kitchen scraps here, some hay there…maybe some big logs in that one, and just little twigs in this one. Different types of mulch and soil history make it so there is as much diversity on the inside as the outside.

On top of all this, remember: permaculture is a more symbiotic relationship with nature so I can be even lazier. If I see a Colorado Potato Beetle, that beetle is part of nature. That beetle has a job to do in the garden: to take out plants that are doing poorly.

Since my garden is not all the same, then it makes sense that there will be potatoes in a spot that is great for potatoes. And there will be potatoes in a spot that is not great for potatoes.

If I see Colorado Potato Beetles doing their job, they are helping me out. They are removing the potatoes that are in a spot that is more suited for, say, carrots. So the potatoes come out and the carrots thrive. Thanks, beetles!

In other parts of my garden, the potatoes are in a good spot for potatoes. So the potatoes thrive, and the beetles don’t bother them.

The organic monocrop farmer will lose the entire crop if something isn’t done. I, on the other hand, do nothing and still harvest heaps of potatoes.

Let’s Do the Math

The title of this chapter is “Double the Food with One Tenth of the Effort.” Is it truly possible? Well, how much time does it take to grow a garden the conventional way? How much time does it take to grow a garden the permaculture way? The answer to these questions is the same answer to “how long is a piece of string?” The answer is “it depends.” Here is my attempt at a solid answer:

Bob and Alice are neighbors. They have both been gardening for five years. Bob has chosen the conventional path and Alice has chosen the permaculture path. Their yards receive the same amount of sunlight, the same weather, and, by some stroke of luck, they have both chosen to grow a garden that is exactly 40 feet by 60 feet (~12 x 18 meters).

Here is the amount of effort Bob puts into his conventional garden in the fifth year:

Here is the amount of effort Alice puts into her permaculture garden in the fifth year:

That’s 114 hours for Bob’s conventional garden and 10 hours for Alice’s permaculture garden. Alice is putting in less than one tenth of the effort of Bob!

In addition, the permaculture garden produces twice as much food because:

As just a touch of frosting on the cake: maybe you can start to save your own seeds. And put some small effort into selecting seeds for the plants that did the very best on your soil, in your climate and with your style of irrigation, to double your overall production again!38