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The chicken example was concerning the cycle of flies in fruit trees. You're right, they will eat anything people will eat, including your lovely garden. But
by fnid2 17y ago
The chicken example was concerning the cycle of flies in fruit trees. You're right, they will eat anything people will eat, including your lovely garden. But companion planting, like marigolds in tomatoes is also a permaculture design principle. Wormwood, the stuff in absinthe, is also good for chickens to keep away some parasites.
For anyone interested, it's definitely more complicated than I'm describing here (but not by much). Go to a video search site like bing or google and search for permaculture and filter by videos longer than 20 minutes. There's a wealth of information on it. Look for stuff about about Forest Gardens. There are several videos about Sepp Holzer in Austria who grows everything you can imagine. Really spectacular stuff!
As sethg said, by "more productive" I mean more food per acre. I've heard with permaculture, you can feed 10 people on an acre. The reason is because you have nut trees at the top, fruit trees below that, followed by bushes, herbaceous, root plants, then vines and climbers spread throughout.
In a monoculture, you have just one layer of productivity: a field of potatoes with no trees. An apple orchard with no herbaceous plants or vines. It's like a web server at 15% capacity. Permaculture is to agriculture what virtualization is to I.T. Infrastructure.
- HeyLaughingBoy 17y ago* I've heard with permaculture, you can feed 10 people on an acre* I'd be surprised it it wasn't even more than that if done carefully! You're right that by mixing plant types, you can achieve better density and get a synergistic effect (another example is planting garlic/onions next to potatoes to repel potato bugs). One problem with large commercial farms is that in order to reduce the labor needs you have to plant at a density that makes it easier for mechanized equipment to harvest and that means that you must generally separate crops. I have seen research projects that used robots to plant seedlings: typically a very labor intensive task. I'm thinking that if you could build robots/smarter machines that could harvest a wide variety of crops instead of just e.g, what a combine can process, then greater density & improved crop mix could be achieved. I've always enjoyed food gardening and more recently I've been thinking of ways to apply technology to large gardens/small farm plots to reduce the dependence on my very limited free time. The problem is that now my free time would be shifted from gardening to robotics research :-)