14 ms·

Why I am building permapeople.org

137 points by roboben 6y ago

darkwater 6y ago
Nice idea! just tried to register and got a Rails error page "The change you wanted was rejected."
- alteriority 6y ago
  //I, too, tried to register and was rejected.
  - spthorn60 6y ago
    Ditto
    - roboben 6y ago
      it should work again
johnchristopher 6y ago
> buying food which was produced and delivered close to you by large, complex and very inefficient industries. Hmm. I wouldn't use the word `inefficient` so heavily. They are really good at bringing you some kind of products, not the home grown quality kind though. > This system spends incredible amounts of resources (time, energy, labor) which you can save by simply growing your own food. No, growing two potatoes only or a bunch of tomatoes take up time blah blah scale blah blah time money salary blah blah. I am hooked anyway, I always wanted to try to grow something and if filling up an ikea bag with dirt and some seeds is enough to watch green stuff grow I'll be happy to try that as an hobby !
- simgooder 6y ago
  The industry is absolutely inefficient when you consider what inputs required: pesticides, seed, machinery, fossil fuels for planting/harvesting/transport, massive government subsidies -- not to mention the depletion of the soils that come along with it. It is not even monetarily efficient: take for example the dumping of millions of gallons of milk to match quotas this past year. It's far from efficient. I would not consider something that requires so much input to be "more efficient at feeding a person". It is however a system that is efficient at feeding mass amounts of people -- if you ignore the inputs. We created Permapeople alongside the principles of permaculture. The efficiency you can create by designing systems that require few outside inputs is unmatched! While the output is not as far-reaching as industrial production, in the hands of enough local folks, growing in their yards, this maximized efficiency of land could technically provide a LOT of food. PS: growing potatoes is probably easier than you think. One could grow potatoes with very little time and no monetary input.
  - johnchristopher 6y ago
    > The industry is absolutely inefficient when you consider what inputs required: pesticides, seed, machinery, fossil fuels for planting/harvesting/transport, massive government subsidies -- not to mention the depletion of the soils that come along with it. It is not even monetarily efficient: take for example the dumping of millions of gallons of milk to match quotas this past year. It's far from efficient. > I would not consider something that requires so much input to be "more efficient at feeding a person". It is however a system that is efficient at feeding mass amounts of people -- if you ignore the inputs. I do agree but at the end of the day all that matters to most people regarding food is the price in the supermarket aisles. I have fun memories of my SO digging up her father's potatoes and getting back from the garden with 5 of them “damn, that took a lot of muscle to get them out of the ground”. They were really good though. Gertrude Betrand's stuff.
jstanley 6y ago
> You need to get a job to make money so that you can spend that money on buying food which was produced and delivered close to you by large, complex and very inefficient industries. This system spends incredible amounts of resources (time, energy, labor) which you can save by simply growing your own food. Are you sure about that? Intuitively I would expect commercially-produced food is far more efficient than everyone growing tiny amounts on a balcony.
- somesortofsystm 6y ago
  I regularly feed my family of 4 with delights from the garden. Its a lot of fun to get things working, and then when you do: the plants do all the work. No, doing it the first few times on a balcony - this won't be efficient. But, going through a few seasons and tweaking your plant code a couple iterations, maybe refactoring (the soil) a couple times: this will get you a long way towards highly productive gardening. Start with a good compost, get your seeds started earlier in the season than you might think (window seedboxes), get things in the soil, pay attention to the plants, use your local resources, and most of all .. love what you do. All gardening can be rewarding. Even if its not efficient at first. The more you do it, however, the better things get. Also: make that compost awesome.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    I'm pretty sure it's still not going to be more efficient. It's fun, it's healthy, you know what you eat, it's a hobby etc, that are perfectly valid reasons to do it. "It's more efficient than buying food" isn't one of them, unless you don't count the hours you work on it.
    - ainiriand 6y ago
      That is a very good argument. I think we should try to make a distinction between efficiency as the energy put into the system (the system would be producing food) and the energy we get, in one hand, and the efficiency in using the resources of the planet. Food from the supermarket is extremely efficient. It required a definite amount of energy in order to supply all your neighbourhood with potatoes, for example. It was just a truck and just one part of the production of a farm. We received a good amount of energy from the one we used. But that energy comes most probably from fossil fuels. If we can be more efficient in the delivery of this energy, we can improve what is called the aggregate efficiency. We can deliver from sources close to us, demanding a bit more energy to deliver 1 ton of potatoes but being able to source this energy from renewable sources. We can do that because the delivery is shorter and closer to us. No need to ship freight or carry the potatoes in a truck for 1500km. Cheaper fuel also means cheaper prices. Another way to beat the energy aggregate cost would be that if the produce is micro farmed, either by yourself or by a local entity, is that you can use less fertilizer as the soil is not run to exhaustion. Less weedkiller as you can pluck the weeds yourself. Being in a controlled environment also means less plagues, or if a crop plague comes, less pesticide used. Fertilizers, pesticides, weed killers... All that comes from fossil fuels.
Lazare 6y ago
> I got hooked on growing food for my family and me. It is really magical if you think of how much you spare our planet with growing your own food: You need to get a job to make money so that you can spend that money on buying food which was produced and delivered close to you by large, complex and very inefficient industries. This system spends incredible amounts of resources (time, energy, labor) which you can save by simply growing your own food. I mean, I know what the author is getting at here, but that's...really not true at all as written. Comparative advantage is a thing. And also, large agribusiness and monocropping and industrial farms exist because they are stupidly efficient. They have a lot of drawbacks and problems, but efficiency is never one of them; if anything they're too efficient. In the past we used far more land per person to grow food, and spent far more of incomes on food. That's still the norm in some countries. If we're trying to minimise resource usage and maximise efficiency, it's obviously better to have people focus on app development, doctoring, food production, clothing production, etc., and trade, than everyone split their time between all of these. I'm going to spend a lot more time, energy, and labour growing my food than an industrial farm would, much like the workers there would spend more time trying to debug a malfunctioning cache invalidation scheme than I would. Of course, all of that is irrelevant. It's a cool project and a cool idea; I wish them every success. It's just that the intro wildly misses the mark in terms of describing the advantage. People want to grow plants, it's a fun hobby, growing your own food is fun, this is great. Efficiency shouldn't be our only goal in life, it's totally fine to grow some potatoes, and I bet they're delicious. ...you're just not saving the planet. Which is fine!
- bluntfang 6y ago
  >...you're just not saving the planet. Which is fine! Every baby step away from industrialization is a step towards sustainability. Capitalism doesn't support long term health of the planet, so we must do it ourselves. Sustainability is beyond a hobby, it's a lifestyle. It's a lifestyle that rejects the norm of capitalism.
  - jopsen 6y ago
    That's a very extreme position. I think consensus is that capitalism with carbon taxing is a step towards sustainability. A call for deindustrialization is so far fetched it's pointless. Edit: I do not assume the author advocates deindustrialization, presumably author just wanted to write a nice intro, to a fun hobby :)
olah_1 6y ago
It kind of reminds me of PCPartPicker, but for gardens. You already have "build guides" with those lists (just let people vote and comment on them maybe?). Now you need to add a "Garden Builder" tool that accounts for geographic region (biome?) and plant compatibility?
- roboben 6y ago
  I never heard of PCPartPicker but you are right, it is similar just for PC parts. And you are right about the "garden builder": If I can get enough people to contribute data, then things liek this are possible: Give me a plant combination/guild which works in my hardiness zone, soil type and light conditions. I imagine that people also can add some kind of rating or anything else to tell others how this combination worked for them and then you could get things like: "people with your soil type in your area are mostly successful with growing X,Y,Z together"
mooreed 6y ago
Sounds like a fun idea. And there would be a large community overlap with https://farmbot.io https://farmbot.io - something I have wanted to do but not yet pulled the trigger on. Instead we limped in with an aero garden right behind the kitchen sink. So where ever you find “farmbot people” you will likely find a receptive ear. See below for how “efficient”could use some clarification with regards to what type of efficiency you mean.
- roboben 6y ago
  Thanks for your comment! I didn't know farmbot until now but I will see if I can reach out to them. It would be cool if everyone who uses a farmbot would report back into the database how it went for them so others can learn and compare their yields.
thomasfromcdnjs 6y ago
I've programmed for a while and also took up gardening a few years ago. There aren't many amazing resources and I think there is definitely room for a community/product like this. (I was considering building one my oneself) What I think has to be nailed is that you want to see tips from other users that garden under the same conditions as you. (Good filtering features) Take a tomato for example; - which breed? - what zone? (climate/seasons) - how much sun per day hits your garden? - what kind of soil? (Sand, clay etc) - what pests? - what style of garden bed did you use? - how often do you fertilize? (And with what) Now the tricky part is that all those variables affect each other so someone's advice should have all of those questions attached and answered. E.g. someone says I use a lot of mulch to grow good tomatoes (when in fact it's probably because it doesn't rain much where that person lives and the mulch maintains moisture) (someone with a lot of water might benefit from a lot less mulch) Hobbyist / permaculture people treat gardening more like an art (I'd say big ag farmers treat it more like science) I'd love to see something for the hobbyist, and optimising home growers through simple tips would be valuable. (Home growers can't use ag-science easily) === I grow my own vegetables in a yard and it's pretty much a joke when it comes to production. You get one harvest per year for most things, and the more you grow, the more pest you get. You need an avid gardener in your house, or a couple decently committed ones. (I actually like just eating vegetables seasonally because I subscribe to the idea that plants are generally toxic and you shouldn't eat the same ones every day of the year e.g. kale or beans) If you want to get into gardening, start with potatoes, they are low in toxins, and good for carbs. Best of all, you can just dig a hole, put a potatoe in and grow a plant. (The store so much energy in their bulb that they are almost impossible to not sprout) (I also just plant potatoes from the supermarket if they go green and had no problems with it)
- simgooder 6y ago
  Thanks for the reply! We've taken all these points into account with our database, with a free-form style key:value input. Please feel free to contribute! We could use your help! You're very on-point when it comes to the variance in growing conditions - this is something we definitely wanted to address. I live in a zone 7b (in Northern Canada) - but it's coastal and mild: good luck growing what they do in North Carolina -- another 7b! Definitely second your recommendation to start with potatoes. They are one of my personal favourites. I grow them pretty much all year long here. As soon as I get a few sprouting in the cupboard, I'll prepare a fresh pot of (home-mixed) soil and plant them in a bucket. This way, I get a bucket of potatoes every month. They store well if you cure them, and require almost no care. Another one of my low-maintenance favourites are strawberries and chives. I grow them together, and they keep producing babies, so they make for an easy filler for empty space to keep the soil alive for the next planting.
roboben 6y ago
Hey friendly HN, THANKS FOR ALL YOUR COMMENTS! I posted this 2 hours ago and went back to work. Didn't expect this to happen! The sign up is broken right now and I have no idea why but if you are interested, sign up for the newsletter in the meantime and I will get back to you as soon as it is fixed! Thanks again, ben PS: Will answer all your comments as soon as I can!
- roboben 6y ago
  Ok fixed it, it was Cloudflare's "flexible SSL" setting lol.
hosh 6y ago
Cool! I had been toying with the idea of writing something like that db, but never executed on it. Glad someone got that started.
- roboben 6y ago
  Thanks! I am happy for anyone to join in and help building it, it is a community-driven (wiki-like) database, so feel free to sign up and start adding/editing plants!
codingdave 6y ago
Microclimates make a big difference. I live in the desert, so first I need to find what works in my area in general, and then I need to talk to people near me to further tweak what works. I've been kicking around the idea for a few years of building a community where you could see what has worked for other people in your area, mapping out a location for each piece of information. One reason I never pursued it (other than time and energy) was the privacy worries of sharing locations... but if you are already building this out, it may be worth considering.
- roboben 6y ago
  Thanks for your comment and you 100% right. This is very close to what I experienced. If you could just see what others do in your area, what worked for them and what not, would spare you a lot of time. Until now everyone is doing trial and error by themselves. I think the privacy concern is very valid, but this is a solvable problem, for example only showing fuzzy vicinities or anonymize in another way. Happy to hear your thoughts on this one!
ahub 6y ago
Hey, similar interest here. I'm a programmer, my wife is a (proffessionnal) vegetable grower. At first glance I can tell the site is really helpful, but here are things I'd like to see too, in addition to other comments : - where does the data come from ? - more specific about different cultivars - i18n. I think most permaculture websites are very focused on english-speaking people at the moment. Being open to other language would definetly be an edge. (Related : you can refer to the latin name of the plant which is usually common accross language) About the planting & planning software, there is a very good open source one [1] used by proffessionals here in France. So maybe you could partner with it instead of trying to reinvent the wheel ! That said, congratulation for your work so far, all the best for the rest ! [1] : https://framagit.org/ah/qrop https://framagit.org/ah/qrop
- oever 6y ago
  qrop looks nice. Thanks for the pointer.
- roboben 6y ago
  Thanks for your comment! And I agree 100% with you. This is a community-driven (wiki-style) database, so we are happy of anyone to contribute. I am a native German speaker and added some German names but definitely would need help fro the french names. This is partly one reason why I started the website: All the info you find is very specific for the US, mostly California and doesn't help much anywhere else. Also all plants recommended are native to the US and not to other areas. The idea is, if a lot of people contribute, we can get to a state where you can see what others grow successfully on your area. Love to hear your thoughts on this!
- clairity 6y ago
  > "Related : you can refer to the latin name of the plant which is usually common accross language" that might be true of romance languages and close analogues (even then, its veracity is dubious), and ignores the billions of people who have other cultural roots (e.g., africans, asians). americans, for instance, generally wouldn't know the latin names for plants.
floatingatoll 6y ago
This article is missing the one key datapoint that would allow me to evaluate whether or not I can grow my own food. How many cubic feet of soil, at what depth, do I need in order to stop purchasing food plants from the store, year-round? This needs to be clearly stated and addressed if people are going to be convinced to grow their own food. Yes, it's impossible to select a perfect answer for all climates, but it's absolutely possible to select an approximate answer for all estimates. To make this more accessible, I made up four arbitrary tiers that approximately separate "basil in a pot" from "an apple tree": Tier 1: Herbs — basil, thyme, etc. Tier 2: Greens — lettuce, dandelions, strawberries^ Tier 3: Buried foods — potatoes, carrots, beets, etc. Tier 4: Large plants — fruit trees, tea bushes, artichokes, squash, etc. ^ These are grouped by my mental approximation of difficulty level, lowest to highest — not by taxonomic distinction. Please don't derail with arguments about "fruit or vegetable". They're all food plants, Brant. One strawberry plant is about the size of a head of lettuce, and they both have easy root systems, so they're both in tier 2.
- simgooder 6y ago
  Thanks for your input! > How many cubic feet of soil, at what depth, do I need in order to stop purchasing food plants from the store, year-round. While this is a pipe-dream of many gardeners, it's not necessarily realistic. You would need at least a hyper-efficient acre of land (which would take a few years to design) to provide for a family and neighbours. I think it's a lot easier than we've been lead to believe. You can do it for free (or very cheap) and with very little "quality" inputs. I appreciate your input with this list! We will definitely take it into account. The beauty of plants is their ability to adapt. Obviously you need depth of soil for root crops, but herbs will grow in a yogurt container, and strawberries will grow in 4 inches of sand. Regarding your list, there's an important distinction to make here. While you don't want to argue about "fruit or vegetable" - one of the limiting factors in your list is actually growth habits of said plant. For instance strawberries will grow perennially, and thus will grow in sand with a handful of woodchips, or forest soil or compost -- whereas lettuce, will require a nutrient-rich soil with relative shelter from rain and sun. One of the principles we chase in permaculture is efficiency, via "stacking of functions": For example, I would grow many of things in your list together, in a way that would require only a large pot of soil, top-dressed throughout the year with whatever biomass waste you have on hand (grass clippings, leaves, etc). I'd plant a dwarf fruit tree in a large pot, surround with a rosemary shrub, plant the outer layer with strawberry and thyme to act as a ground-cover. This would require very little in regards to skill or input. The plants themselves carry the difficult tasks, such as pest control and mulch (keeping the moisture in the soil), by mimicking natural niches. Now, depending how much soil/space you have at your disposal will directly affect your output. That would be a concern for aspiring farmers -- not necessarily your backyard gardener!
mooreds 6y ago
There are so many permaculture websites. I get it, I'm a techie who has taken a course and designed my site. I maintained a blog for a while, kept chickens, and grew some of my own food. But what permaculture really needs is the economics to line up and the wider culture to change. The main permaculture profession seems to be teaching. There just doesn't seem to be a plethora of jobs that are directly related to permaculture. I love it as a design system and it definitely has opened up my eyes, but permaculture doesn't need yet another website.
- roboben 6y ago
  Thanks for your comment! I think you make a really good point and this is part of my initial idea (and probably came too short in my blogpost): To make permaculture successful, we need to make people economically successful with it beyond teaching and giving workshops. I tried other forums and websites and couldn't find many people who make a living out of permaculture. On the other side permaculture is designed to not be part of any "economic thinking": One basic principle is lowering your inputs, so I get when people use permaculture to actually get out of any economic thinking. Happy to hear your thoughts!
  - mooreds 6y ago
    Fair points. I have been out of the game for a while so not sure what is currently out there, but a search for "permaculture network" turns up 3-4 viable candidates. I didn't mean to rain on your parade, too much, but wanted to drive home that information sharing is nice, but creating permaculture businesses is more important. It's the same thing as a CSA directory (I ran one for about 10 years). The CSA directory is nice and scalable and easy, and helpful to end users, but the crux of the economic system is the CSA farm, actually delivering value to others. To make an analogy, permaculture has too many directories and not enough farms. If you haven't, I'd suggest listening to Scott Mann/The Permaculture Podcast, as he has lots of inspiring stories about people making a living from permaculture: https://www.thepermaculturepodcast.com/ https://www.thepermaculturepodcast.com/
    - kyuudou 6y ago
dbingham 6y ago
Former permaculturist here - who at one point was working on this very idea, as it happens. I think permaculture appeals to a lot of programmers, because it's almost like programming with plants. It presents itself as "these plants relate to each other and support each other and you can compose them into guilds that will provide you food with minimal maintenance!" It's complex system design. The problem is that it's not actually based in hard science. We don't know if the nitrogen produced by nitrogen fixers is available to plants around them. It might only become available once those plants die back. The studies that support the idea of dynamic accumulators measured nutrient amounts in the leaves - not the nutrient amounts in the soil as the plants grew and died back. Most of the "companions" are based on folk tales, not research. The whole permaculture design system is the classic "anecdote is not data" fallacy turned into a design system. It's based on individual observation, not careful data collection and experimentation. The criticisms of the reductionist approach that science often falls into are well taken, as are the criticisms of industry's failure to account for unintended consequences when applying science. But that doesn't mean the alternative is to go back to a pre-scientific approach of individual naturalists observing the world and making proclamations based on their observations. Which - having spent five years embedded in the permaculture community and philosophy - is exactly what permaculture is. This failures of anecdotal observation means that permaculture in practice often boils down to the very thing it was meant to change: humans thinking they can engineer and control nature to fit their vision, instead of learning from nature and fitting their vision to the natural realities. Permaculture doesn't actually end up designing systems that work with nature most of the time, it designs novel ecosystems with non-native plants that could have massive unintended consequences. There's a lot to be said for the core concept of farming in nature's image, and I think Mark Shepherd is potentially on to something. We do need to explore whether we could redesign our farm systems to be habitat and feed us at the same time. Food forestry as an idea is a really promising one. But the suburbs need to go away if we're to live sustainably, not be turned into a bunch of experimental gardens. And any agroforestry system needs to be built to fit into the native ecosystem it is a part of, using native plants. And we need to base our approach to designing a permanent culture and regenerative agriculture in science and careful research, not individual observation.
- roboben 6y ago
Gys 6y ago
> You need to get a job to make money so that you can spend that money on buying food That is a good thing. I like my job and do not want to spend any time on having land and growing my own food. Better leave that to someone that likes to do that job. Everybody happy.
carapace 6y ago
A brain dump: I've been investigating a few systems of agriculture. - There's Small Plot INtensive (SPIN) which is specialized for market production, emphasizing minimizing labor and maximizing market crops. https://spinfarming.com/ https://spinfarming.com/ (Be aware that these folks are selling their system as a course, and this is a sales site not an info site. You can get the details from reading carefully and watching the videos that practitioners have made.) https://www.transitionculture.org/2011/09/05/spin-farming-basics-a-book-review/ https://www.transitionculture.org/2011/09/05/spin-farming-ba... Quitting Your Job To Farm on a Quarter Acre In Your Backyard? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJx1SPClg6A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJx1SPClg6A Backyard Farming: 2 Year Market Garden Update of Nature's Always Right Farms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zpn1oGkQrrg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zpn1oGkQrrg Profitable Farming and Designing for Farm Success by JEAN-MARTIN FORTIER https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92GDHGPSmeI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92GDHGPSmeI https://www.themarketgardener.com/ https://www.themarketgardener.com/ Neversink Farm in NY grosses $350,000 on farming 1.5 acres (area in production). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5IE6lYKXRw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5IE6lYKXRw - Then there's the "Grow Bioinstensive" method which is designed to provide a complete diet in a small space while also building soil and fertility. They have been dialing it in for forty years and now have a turn-key system that is implemented and functioning all over the world. http://growbiointensive.org/ http://growbiointensive.org/ (These folks are also selling their system, but they also have e.g. manuals you can download for free. I find their site curiously hard to use.) - Permaculture (which could be called "applied ecology" with a kind of hippie spin. I'm not a hippie but I'm sometimes mistaken for one.) and a similar school (parallel evolution) called "Syntropic" Agriculture. Both of these systems aim to mimic natural ecosystems to create "food forests" that produce crops year-round without inputs (no fertilizer, no irrigation.) The process takes 5-15 years or so but then is self-sustaining and regenerative. For Permaculture I find Toby Hemenway's (RIP) videos very good: https://tobyhemenway.com/videos/how-permaculture-can-save-humanity-and-the-planet-but-not-civilization/ https://tobyhemenway.com/videos/how-permaculture-can-save-hu... https://tobyhemenway.com/videos/redesigning-civilization-with-permaculture/ https://tobyhemenway.com/videos/redesigning-civilization-wit... There's a very lively and civil forum at https://permies.com/forums https://permies.com/forums For Syntropic agriculture: https://agendagotsch.com/en/what-is-syntropic-farming/ https://agendagotsch.com/en/what-is-syntropic-farming/ (FWIW, I find Gotsch's writing (in English) to be impenetrable, even though I pretty much know what he's doing. Anyway, his results are incontrovertable.) I'm afraid I don't have a good link in re: Food Forests and eco-mimetic agriculture yet. This "Plant Abundance" fellow's youtube channel might be a good place to start, in any event it's a great example: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEFpzAuyFlLzshQR4_dkCsQ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEFpzAuyFlLzshQR4_dkCsQ - If you really wanted to maximize food production and aren't afraid of building insfrastucture (like greenhouses and fish tanks) there's the (sadly now defunct) Growing Power model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growing_Power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growing_Power https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs7BG4lH3m4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs7BG4lH3m4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jV9CCxdkOng https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jV9CCxdkOng They used an integrated greenhouse/aquaculture/compost system to produce massive amounts of food right through Milwaukee winters. - Then there is the whole field (no pun intended) of regenerative agriculture, e.g.: "Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem with Gabe Brown Part 1, The 5 Tenets of Soil Health" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A and "Symphony Of The Soil" Official Trailer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXRNF_1X2fU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXRNF_1X2fU This is very much non-hippie, very much grounded in (often cutting-edge) science (ecology, microbiology, etc.) and ecologically and economically superior to artificial methods (e.g. Brown makes money. It's actually weird that more people aren't adopting these methods faster. You make more money, have fewer expenses, and your topsoil builds up year-on-year rather than washing away in erosion.)
ShamelessC 6y ago
Great idea, lots of potential. Made some quick notes browsing the site itself: Favicon would be nice. Lists: How do you ensure quality public lists? Curation? Upvotes? Rigid rules? Statistics on plants: In addition to "wants", and "haves", would it also be possible to implement a "satisfied"/"dissatisfied" stat for people who did/didn't have success with the plant in practice? I think something like this would be particularly cool with users having the ability to update little case studies they performed with individual plants, lists and companions that would be linked to on their respective pages. Companions: I love the idea of a list of "proven combinations". I see in the description you're claiming these combos work well. What I'd really like to see is an explanation for why each combination works well, if there is one, or at the very least a case study of someone else having used the combination effectively. I guess mostly what I'm looking for, as someone new to permaculture, is a vote of confidence that the information you're providing is well-informed. That can come in the form of just more in-lined text explanations, links to data/research used as reasoning for your companions, or just inlined case studies from wiki contributers themselves. I've got a buddy who is _far_ more into permaculture than I am. I'm gonna ask him to check it out later today. I'll respond here with any of his comments.
foofoo4u 6y ago
> It is really magical if you think of how much you spare our planet with growing your own food: You need to get a job to make money so that you can spend that money on buying food which was produced and delivered close to you by large, complex and very inefficient industries. This system spends incredible amounts of resources (time, energy, labor) which you can save by simply growing your own food. It's not the first time I've seen this line of thinking. It's economically naive. I'll explain why. Let's imagine everyone decided to grow their own garden like the author suggests. What does one need to start a garden? The common items are shovels, timber, soil, hoses, wires, fertilizer, knee pads, gloves, pots, pesticide, and many other things. Obtaining these items requires physically driving to one's hardware store. Most people drive SUVs. This means there is a sudden influx of people driving their gas guzzling machines to obtain these basic items. We also have to consider the reality that multiple trips will be made. People commonly forget to purchase basic things, need to make returns, or realize they are short on supply (such as soil) and need to purchase more. Now consider other realities. Most people don't know how to grow. Even fewer people know how to grow a plant to its maximum potential. It takes many seasons for individuals to learn the best techniques. Think about the wasted resources spent on this. Now think about the excess waste commonly found in gardens by those who finally learn how to grow. I see this all the time. Gardens filled with oversupply of produce. More than what even their friends want to take home. Consider the yield of produce in respect to time, labor, cost of materials, and CO2 emissions. For every shovel, glove, hose, pot, etc. purchased, for every car drive made, and for every supply chain used to produce these goods, is only put to work on a small plot of land in one's backyard. They are not used to their full potential. This is both a waste of resources and an unnecessary increase in CO2 emissions. If these same resources were used on an actual farm, then they will be used for larger portions of land which will in turn yield more produce. In effect, the costs are being spread across the land, thus making them more effective. I'd like to explain this in the opposite perspective. The absurdity seems to become much more apparent this way. The author says that these industries are inefficient as appose to simply growing in one's backyard. If it truly were more efficient, then wouldn't it be most effective if industries simply adopted this? They are looking to save money after all. Instead of purchasing one giant tractor, why not revert to shovels and an army of physical labor? Instead of hauling supplies on a few semi-trucks, why not dispatch an army of SUVs? Instead of having one massive farm that spans hundreds of acres, why not break it up into thousands of 500 sq/ft "mini gardens", each of which has its own dedicated set of shovels, hoses, gloves, knee pads, etc. And for every "mini garden", instead of growing being dictated by farm owners with many generations of growing experience, they will be grown by individuals who hardly have any experience at all.

137 points by roboben 6y ago

darkwater 6y ago

Nice idea! just tried to register and got a Rails error page "The change you wanted was rejected."

alteriority 6y ago
//I, too, tried to register and was rejected.
- spthorn60 6y ago
  Ditto
  - roboben 6y ago
    it should work again

johnchristopher 6y ago

> buying food which was produced and delivered close to you by large, complex and very inefficient industries. Hmm. I wouldn't use the word `inefficient` so heavily. They are really good at bringing you some kind of products, not the home grown quality kind though. > This system spends incredible amounts of resources (time, energy, labor) which you can save by simply growing your own food. No, growing two potatoes only or a bunch of tomatoes take up time blah blah scale blah blah time money salary blah blah. I am hooked anyway, I always wanted to try to grow something and if filling up an ikea bag with dirt and some seeds is enough to watch green stuff grow I'll be happy to try that as an hobby !

simgooder 6y ago
The industry is absolutely inefficient when you consider what inputs required: pesticides, seed, machinery, fossil fuels for planting/harvesting/transport, massive government subsidies -- not to mention the depletion of the soils that come along with it. It is not even monetarily efficient: take for example the dumping of millions of gallons of milk to match quotas this past year. It's far from efficient. I would not consider something that requires so much input to be "more efficient at feeding a person". It is however a system that is efficient at feeding mass amounts of people -- if you ignore the inputs. We created Permapeople alongside the principles of permaculture. The efficiency you can create by designing systems that require few outside inputs is unmatched! While the output is not as far-reaching as industrial production, in the hands of enough local folks, growing in their yards, this maximized efficiency of land could technically provide a LOT of food. PS: growing potatoes is probably easier than you think. One could grow potatoes with very little time and no monetary input.
- johnchristopher 6y ago
  > The industry is absolutely inefficient when you consider what inputs required: pesticides, seed, machinery, fossil fuels for planting/harvesting/transport, massive government subsidies -- not to mention the depletion of the soils that come along with it. It is not even monetarily efficient: take for example the dumping of millions of gallons of milk to match quotas this past year. It's far from efficient. > I would not consider something that requires so much input to be "more efficient at feeding a person". It is however a system that is efficient at feeding mass amounts of people -- if you ignore the inputs. I do agree but at the end of the day all that matters to most people regarding food is the price in the supermarket aisles. I have fun memories of my SO digging up her father's potatoes and getting back from the garden with 5 of them “damn, that took a lot of muscle to get them out of the ground”. They were really good though. Gertrude Betrand's stuff.

jstanley 6y ago

> You need to get a job to make money so that you can spend that money on buying food which was produced and delivered close to you by large, complex and very inefficient industries. This system spends incredible amounts of resources (time, energy, labor) which you can save by simply growing your own food. Are you sure about that? Intuitively I would expect commercially-produced food is far more efficient than everyone growing tiny amounts on a balcony.

somesortofsystm 6y ago
I regularly feed my family of 4 with delights from the garden. Its a lot of fun to get things working, and then when you do: the plants do all the work. No, doing it the first few times on a balcony - this won't be efficient. But, going through a few seasons and tweaking your plant code a couple iterations, maybe refactoring (the soil) a couple times: this will get you a long way towards highly productive gardening. Start with a good compost, get your seeds started earlier in the season than you might think (window seedboxes), get things in the soil, pay attention to the plants, use your local resources, and most of all .. love what you do. All gardening can be rewarding. Even if its not efficient at first. The more you do it, however, the better things get. Also: make that compost awesome.
- luckylion 6y ago
  I'm pretty sure it's still not going to be more efficient. It's fun, it's healthy, you know what you eat, it's a hobby etc, that are perfectly valid reasons to do it. "It's more efficient than buying food" isn't one of them, unless you don't count the hours you work on it.
  - ainiriand 6y ago
    That is a very good argument. I think we should try to make a distinction between efficiency as the energy put into the system (the system would be producing food) and the energy we get, in one hand, and the efficiency in using the resources of the planet. Food from the supermarket is extremely efficient. It required a definite amount of energy in order to supply all your neighbourhood with potatoes, for example. It was just a truck and just one part of the production of a farm. We received a good amount of energy from the one we used. But that energy comes most probably from fossil fuels. If we can be more efficient in the delivery of this energy, we can improve what is called the aggregate efficiency. We can deliver from sources close to us, demanding a bit more energy to deliver 1 ton of potatoes but being able to source this energy from renewable sources. We can do that because the delivery is shorter and closer to us. No need to ship freight or carry the potatoes in a truck for 1500km. Cheaper fuel also means cheaper prices. Another way to beat the energy aggregate cost would be that if the produce is micro farmed, either by yourself or by a local entity, is that you can use less fertilizer as the soil is not run to exhaustion. Less weedkiller as you can pluck the weeds yourself. Being in a controlled environment also means less plagues, or if a crop plague comes, less pesticide used. Fertilizers, pesticides, weed killers... All that comes from fossil fuels.

Lazare 6y ago

> I got hooked on growing food for my family and me. It is really magical if you think of how much you spare our planet with growing your own food: You need to get a job to make money so that you can spend that money on buying food which was produced and delivered close to you by large, complex and very inefficient industries. This system spends incredible amounts of resources (time, energy, labor) which you can save by simply growing your own food. I mean, I know what the author is getting at here, but that's...really not true at all as written. Comparative advantage is a thing. And also, large agribusiness and monocropping and industrial farms exist because they are stupidly efficient. They have a lot of drawbacks and problems, but efficiency is never one of them; if anything they're too efficient. In the past we used far more land per person to grow food, and spent far more of incomes on food. That's still the norm in some countries. If we're trying to minimise resource usage and maximise efficiency, it's obviously better to have people focus on app development, doctoring, food production, clothing production, etc., and trade, than everyone split their time between all of these. I'm going to spend a lot more time, energy, and labour growing my food than an industrial farm would, much like the workers there would spend more time trying to debug a malfunctioning cache invalidation scheme than I would. Of course, all of that is irrelevant. It's a cool project and a cool idea; I wish them every success. It's just that the intro wildly misses the mark in terms of describing the advantage. People want to grow plants, it's a fun hobby, growing your own food is fun, this is great. Efficiency shouldn't be our only goal in life, it's totally fine to grow some potatoes, and I bet they're delicious. ...you're just not saving the planet. Which is fine!

bluntfang 6y ago
>...you're just not saving the planet. Which is fine! Every baby step away from industrialization is a step towards sustainability. Capitalism doesn't support long term health of the planet, so we must do it ourselves. Sustainability is beyond a hobby, it's a lifestyle. It's a lifestyle that rejects the norm of capitalism.
- jopsen 6y ago
  That's a very extreme position. I think consensus is that capitalism with carbon taxing is a step towards sustainability. A call for deindustrialization is so far fetched it's pointless. Edit: I do not assume the author advocates deindustrialization, presumably author just wanted to write a nice intro, to a fun hobby :)

olah_1 6y ago

It kind of reminds me of PCPartPicker, but for gardens. You already have "build guides" with those lists (just let people vote and comment on them maybe?). Now you need to add a "Garden Builder" tool that accounts for geographic region (biome?) and plant compatibility?

roboben 6y ago
I never heard of PCPartPicker but you are right, it is similar just for PC parts. And you are right about the "garden builder": If I can get enough people to contribute data, then things liek this are possible: Give me a plant combination/guild which works in my hardiness zone, soil type and light conditions. I imagine that people also can add some kind of rating or anything else to tell others how this combination worked for them and then you could get things like: "people with your soil type in your area are mostly successful with growing X,Y,Z together"

mooreed 6y ago

Sounds like a fun idea. And there would be a large community overlap with https://farmbot.io https://farmbot.io - something I have wanted to do but not yet pulled the trigger on. Instead we limped in with an aero garden right behind the kitchen sink. So where ever you find “farmbot people” you will likely find a receptive ear. See below for how “efficient”could use some clarification with regards to what type of efficiency you mean.

roboben 6y ago
Thanks for your comment! I didn't know farmbot until now but I will see if I can reach out to them. It would be cool if everyone who uses a farmbot would report back into the database how it went for them so others can learn and compare their yields.

thomasfromcdnjs 6y ago

I've programmed for a while and also took up gardening a few years ago. There aren't many amazing resources and I think there is definitely room for a community/product like this. (I was considering building one my oneself) What I think has to be nailed is that you want to see tips from other users that garden under the same conditions as you. (Good filtering features) Take a tomato for example; - which breed? - what zone? (climate/seasons) - how much sun per day hits your garden? - what kind of soil? (Sand, clay etc) - what pests? - what style of garden bed did you use? - how often do you fertilize? (And with what) Now the tricky part is that all those variables affect each other so someone's advice should have all of those questions attached and answered. E.g. someone says I use a lot of mulch to grow good tomatoes (when in fact it's probably because it doesn't rain much where that person lives and the mulch maintains moisture) (someone with a lot of water might benefit from a lot less mulch) Hobbyist / permaculture people treat gardening more like an art (I'd say big ag farmers treat it more like science) I'd love to see something for the hobbyist, and optimising home growers through simple tips would be valuable. (Home growers can't use ag-science easily) === I grow my own vegetables in a yard and it's pretty much a joke when it comes to production. You get one harvest per year for most things, and the more you grow, the more pest you get. You need an avid gardener in your house, or a couple decently committed ones. (I actually like just eating vegetables seasonally because I subscribe to the idea that plants are generally toxic and you shouldn't eat the same ones every day of the year e.g. kale or beans) If you want to get into gardening, start with potatoes, they are low in toxins, and good for carbs. Best of all, you can just dig a hole, put a potatoe in and grow a plant. (The store so much energy in their bulb that they are almost impossible to not sprout) (I also just plant potatoes from the supermarket if they go green and had no problems with it)

simgooder 6y ago
Thanks for the reply! We've taken all these points into account with our database, with a free-form style key:value input. Please feel free to contribute! We could use your help! You're very on-point when it comes to the variance in growing conditions - this is something we definitely wanted to address. I live in a zone 7b (in Northern Canada) - but it's coastal and mild: good luck growing what they do in North Carolina -- another 7b! Definitely second your recommendation to start with potatoes. They are one of my personal favourites. I grow them pretty much all year long here. As soon as I get a few sprouting in the cupboard, I'll prepare a fresh pot of (home-mixed) soil and plant them in a bucket. This way, I get a bucket of potatoes every month. They store well if you cure them, and require almost no care. Another one of my low-maintenance favourites are strawberries and chives. I grow them together, and they keep producing babies, so they make for an easy filler for empty space to keep the soil alive for the next planting.

roboben 6y ago

Hey friendly HN, THANKS FOR ALL YOUR COMMENTS! I posted this 2 hours ago and went back to work. Didn't expect this to happen! The sign up is broken right now and I have no idea why but if you are interested, sign up for the newsletter in the meantime and I will get back to you as soon as it is fixed! Thanks again, ben PS: Will answer all your comments as soon as I can!

roboben 6y ago
Ok fixed it, it was Cloudflare's "flexible SSL" setting lol.

hosh 6y ago

Cool! I had been toying with the idea of writing something like that db, but never executed on it. Glad someone got that started.

roboben 6y ago
Thanks! I am happy for anyone to join in and help building it, it is a community-driven (wiki-like) database, so feel free to sign up and start adding/editing plants!

codingdave 6y ago

Microclimates make a big difference. I live in the desert, so first I need to find what works in my area in general, and then I need to talk to people near me to further tweak what works. I've been kicking around the idea for a few years of building a community where you could see what has worked for other people in your area, mapping out a location for each piece of information. One reason I never pursued it (other than time and energy) was the privacy worries of sharing locations... but if you are already building this out, it may be worth considering.

roboben 6y ago
Thanks for your comment and you 100% right. This is very close to what I experienced. If you could just see what others do in your area, what worked for them and what not, would spare you a lot of time. Until now everyone is doing trial and error by themselves. I think the privacy concern is very valid, but this is a solvable problem, for example only showing fuzzy vicinities or anonymize in another way. Happy to hear your thoughts on this one!

ahub 6y ago

Hey, similar interest here. I'm a programmer, my wife is a (proffessionnal) vegetable grower. At first glance I can tell the site is really helpful, but here are things I'd like to see too, in addition to other comments : - where does the data come from ? - more specific about different cultivars - i18n. I think most permaculture websites are very focused on english-speaking people at the moment. Being open to other language would definetly be an edge. (Related : you can refer to the latin name of the plant which is usually common accross language) About the planting & planning software, there is a very good open source one [1] used by proffessionals here in France. So maybe you could partner with it instead of trying to reinvent the wheel ! That said, congratulation for your work so far, all the best for the rest ! [1] : https://framagit.org/ah/qrop https://framagit.org/ah/qrop

oever 6y ago
qrop looks nice. Thanks for the pointer.
roboben 6y ago
Thanks for your comment! And I agree 100% with you. This is a community-driven (wiki-style) database, so we are happy of anyone to contribute. I am a native German speaker and added some German names but definitely would need help fro the french names. This is partly one reason why I started the website: All the info you find is very specific for the US, mostly California and doesn't help much anywhere else. Also all plants recommended are native to the US and not to other areas. The idea is, if a lot of people contribute, we can get to a state where you can see what others grow successfully on your area. Love to hear your thoughts on this!
clairity 6y ago
> "Related : you can refer to the latin name of the plant which is usually common accross language" that might be true of romance languages and close analogues (even then, its veracity is dubious), and ignores the billions of people who have other cultural roots (e.g., africans, asians). americans, for instance, generally wouldn't know the latin names for plants.

floatingatoll 6y ago

This article is missing the one key datapoint that would allow me to evaluate whether or not I can grow my own food. How many cubic feet of soil, at what depth, do I need in order to stop purchasing food plants from the store, year-round? This needs to be clearly stated and addressed if people are going to be convinced to grow their own food. Yes, it's impossible to select a perfect answer for all climates, but it's absolutely possible to select an approximate answer for all estimates. To make this more accessible, I made up four arbitrary tiers that approximately separate "basil in a pot" from "an apple tree": Tier 1: Herbs — basil, thyme, etc. Tier 2: Greens — lettuce, dandelions, strawberries^ Tier 3: Buried foods — potatoes, carrots, beets, etc. Tier 4: Large plants — fruit trees, tea bushes, artichokes, squash, etc. ^ These are grouped by my mental approximation of difficulty level, lowest to highest — not by taxonomic distinction. Please don't derail with arguments about "fruit or vegetable". They're all food plants, Brant. One strawberry plant is about the size of a head of lettuce, and they both have easy root systems, so they're both in tier 2.

simgooder 6y ago
Thanks for your input! > How many cubic feet of soil, at what depth, do I need in order to stop purchasing food plants from the store, year-round. While this is a pipe-dream of many gardeners, it's not necessarily realistic. You would need at least a hyper-efficient acre of land (which would take a few years to design) to provide for a family and neighbours. I think it's a lot easier than we've been lead to believe. You can do it for free (or very cheap) and with very little "quality" inputs. I appreciate your input with this list! We will definitely take it into account. The beauty of plants is their ability to adapt. Obviously you need depth of soil for root crops, but herbs will grow in a yogurt container, and strawberries will grow in 4 inches of sand. Regarding your list, there's an important distinction to make here. While you don't want to argue about "fruit or vegetable" - one of the limiting factors in your list is actually growth habits of said plant. For instance strawberries will grow perennially, and thus will grow in sand with a handful of woodchips, or forest soil or compost -- whereas lettuce, will require a nutrient-rich soil with relative shelter from rain and sun. One of the principles we chase in permaculture is efficiency, via "stacking of functions": For example, I would grow many of things in your list together, in a way that would require only a large pot of soil, top-dressed throughout the year with whatever biomass waste you have on hand (grass clippings, leaves, etc). I'd plant a dwarf fruit tree in a large pot, surround with a rosemary shrub, plant the outer layer with strawberry and thyme to act as a ground-cover. This would require very little in regards to skill or input. The plants themselves carry the difficult tasks, such as pest control and mulch (keeping the moisture in the soil), by mimicking natural niches. Now, depending how much soil/space you have at your disposal will directly affect your output. That would be a concern for aspiring farmers -- not necessarily your backyard gardener!

mooreds 6y ago

There are so many permaculture websites. I get it, I'm a techie who has taken a course and designed my site. I maintained a blog for a while, kept chickens, and grew some of my own food. But what permaculture really needs is the economics to line up and the wider culture to change. The main permaculture profession seems to be teaching. There just doesn't seem to be a plethora of jobs that are directly related to permaculture. I love it as a design system and it definitely has opened up my eyes, but permaculture doesn't need yet another website.

roboben 6y ago
Thanks for your comment! I think you make a really good point and this is part of my initial idea (and probably came too short in my blogpost): To make permaculture successful, we need to make people economically successful with it beyond teaching and giving workshops. I tried other forums and websites and couldn't find many people who make a living out of permaculture. On the other side permaculture is designed to not be part of any "economic thinking": One basic principle is lowering your inputs, so I get when people use permaculture to actually get out of any economic thinking. Happy to hear your thoughts!
- mooreds 6y ago
  Fair points. I have been out of the game for a while so not sure what is currently out there, but a search for "permaculture network" turns up 3-4 viable candidates. I didn't mean to rain on your parade, too much, but wanted to drive home that information sharing is nice, but creating permaculture businesses is more important. It's the same thing as a CSA directory (I ran one for about 10 years). The CSA directory is nice and scalable and easy, and helpful to end users, but the crux of the economic system is the CSA farm, actually delivering value to others. To make an analogy, permaculture has too many directories and not enough farms. If you haven't, I'd suggest listening to Scott Mann/The Permaculture Podcast, as he has lots of inspiring stories about people making a living from permaculture: https://www.thepermaculturepodcast.com/ https://www.thepermaculturepodcast.com/
  - kyuudou 6y ago

dbingham 6y ago

Former permaculturist here - who at one point was working on this very idea, as it happens. I think permaculture appeals to a lot of programmers, because it's almost like programming with plants. It presents itself as "these plants relate to each other and support each other and you can compose them into guilds that will provide you food with minimal maintenance!" It's complex system design. The problem is that it's not actually based in hard science. We don't know if the nitrogen produced by nitrogen fixers is available to plants around them. It might only become available once those plants die back. The studies that support the idea of dynamic accumulators measured nutrient amounts in the leaves - not the nutrient amounts in the soil as the plants grew and died back. Most of the "companions" are based on folk tales, not research. The whole permaculture design system is the classic "anecdote is not data" fallacy turned into a design system. It's based on individual observation, not careful data collection and experimentation. The criticisms of the reductionist approach that science often falls into are well taken, as are the criticisms of industry's failure to account for unintended consequences when applying science. But that doesn't mean the alternative is to go back to a pre-scientific approach of individual naturalists observing the world and making proclamations based on their observations. Which - having spent five years embedded in the permaculture community and philosophy - is exactly what permaculture is. This failures of anecdotal observation means that permaculture in practice often boils down to the very thing it was meant to change: humans thinking they can engineer and control nature to fit their vision, instead of learning from nature and fitting their vision to the natural realities. Permaculture doesn't actually end up designing systems that work with nature most of the time, it designs novel ecosystems with non-native plants that could have massive unintended consequences. There's a lot to be said for the core concept of farming in nature's image, and I think Mark Shepherd is potentially on to something. We do need to explore whether we could redesign our farm systems to be habitat and feed us at the same time. Food forestry as an idea is a really promising one. But the suburbs need to go away if we're to live sustainably, not be turned into a bunch of experimental gardens. And any agroforestry system needs to be built to fit into the native ecosystem it is a part of, using native plants. And we need to base our approach to designing a permanent culture and regenerative agriculture in science and careful research, not individual observation.

roboben 6y ago

Gys 6y ago

> You need to get a job to make money so that you can spend that money on buying food That is a good thing. I like my job and do not want to spend any time on having land and growing my own food. Better leave that to someone that likes to do that job. Everybody happy.

carapace 6y ago

A brain dump: I've been investigating a few systems of agriculture. - There's Small Plot INtensive (SPIN) which is specialized for market production, emphasizing minimizing labor and maximizing market crops. https://spinfarming.com/ https://spinfarming.com/ (Be aware that these folks are selling their system as a course, and this is a sales site not an info site. You can get the details from reading carefully and watching the videos that practitioners have made.) https://www.transitionculture.org/2011/09/05/spin-farming-basics-a-book-review/ https://www.transitionculture.org/2011/09/05/spin-farming-ba... Quitting Your Job To Farm on a Quarter Acre In Your Backyard? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJx1SPClg6A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJx1SPClg6A Backyard Farming: 2 Year Market Garden Update of Nature's Always Right Farms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zpn1oGkQrrg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zpn1oGkQrrg Profitable Farming and Designing for Farm Success by JEAN-MARTIN FORTIER https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92GDHGPSmeI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92GDHGPSmeI https://www.themarketgardener.com/ https://www.themarketgardener.com/ Neversink Farm in NY grosses $350,000 on farming 1.5 acres (area in production). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5IE6lYKXRw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5IE6lYKXRw - Then there's the "Grow Bioinstensive" method which is designed to provide a complete diet in a small space while also building soil and fertility. They have been dialing it in for forty years and now have a turn-key system that is implemented and functioning all over the world. http://growbiointensive.org/ http://growbiointensive.org/ (These folks are also selling their system, but they also have e.g. manuals you can download for free. I find their site curiously hard to use.) - Permaculture (which could be called "applied ecology" with a kind of hippie spin. I'm not a hippie but I'm sometimes mistaken for one.) and a similar school (parallel evolution) called "Syntropic" Agriculture. Both of these systems aim to mimic natural ecosystems to create "food forests" that produce crops year-round without inputs (no fertilizer, no irrigation.) The process takes 5-15 years or so but then is self-sustaining and regenerative. For Permaculture I find Toby Hemenway's (RIP) videos very good: https://tobyhemenway.com/videos/how-permaculture-can-save-humanity-and-the-planet-but-not-civilization/ https://tobyhemenway.com/videos/how-permaculture-can-save-hu... https://tobyhemenway.com/videos/redesigning-civilization-with-permaculture/ https://tobyhemenway.com/videos/redesigning-civilization-wit... There's a very lively and civil forum at https://permies.com/forums https://permies.com/forums For Syntropic agriculture: https://agendagotsch.com/en/what-is-syntropic-farming/ https://agendagotsch.com/en/what-is-syntropic-farming/ (FWIW, I find Gotsch's writing (in English) to be impenetrable, even though I pretty much know what he's doing. Anyway, his results are incontrovertable.) I'm afraid I don't have a good link in re: Food Forests and eco-mimetic agriculture yet. This "Plant Abundance" fellow's youtube channel might be a good place to start, in any event it's a great example: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEFpzAuyFlLzshQR4_dkCsQ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEFpzAuyFlLzshQR4_dkCsQ - If you really wanted to maximize food production and aren't afraid of building insfrastucture (like greenhouses and fish tanks) there's the (sadly now defunct) Growing Power model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growing_Power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growing_Power https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs7BG4lH3m4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs7BG4lH3m4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jV9CCxdkOng https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jV9CCxdkOng They used an integrated greenhouse/aquaculture/compost system to produce massive amounts of food right through Milwaukee winters. - Then there is the whole field (no pun intended) of regenerative agriculture, e.g.: "Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem with Gabe Brown Part 1, The 5 Tenets of Soil Health" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A and "Symphony Of The Soil" Official Trailer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXRNF_1X2fU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXRNF_1X2fU This is very much non-hippie, very much grounded in (often cutting-edge) science (ecology, microbiology, etc.) and ecologically and economically superior to artificial methods (e.g. Brown makes money. It's actually weird that more people aren't adopting these methods faster. You make more money, have fewer expenses, and your topsoil builds up year-on-year rather than washing away in erosion.)

ShamelessC 6y ago

Great idea, lots of potential. Made some quick notes browsing the site itself: Favicon would be nice. Lists: How do you ensure quality public lists? Curation? Upvotes? Rigid rules? Statistics on plants: In addition to "wants", and "haves", would it also be possible to implement a "satisfied"/"dissatisfied" stat for people who did/didn't have success with the plant in practice? I think something like this would be particularly cool with users having the ability to update little case studies they performed with individual plants, lists and companions that would be linked to on their respective pages. Companions: I love the idea of a list of "proven combinations". I see in the description you're claiming these combos work well. What I'd really like to see is an explanation for why each combination works well, if there is one, or at the very least a case study of someone else having used the combination effectively. I guess mostly what I'm looking for, as someone new to permaculture, is a vote of confidence that the information you're providing is well-informed. That can come in the form of just more in-lined text explanations, links to data/research used as reasoning for your companions, or just inlined case studies from wiki contributers themselves. I've got a buddy who is _far_ more into permaculture than I am. I'm gonna ask him to check it out later today. I'll respond here with any of his comments.

foofoo4u 6y ago

> It is really magical if you think of how much you spare our planet with growing your own food: You need to get a job to make money so that you can spend that money on buying food which was produced and delivered close to you by large, complex and very inefficient industries. This system spends incredible amounts of resources (time, energy, labor) which you can save by simply growing your own food. It's not the first time I've seen this line of thinking. It's economically naive. I'll explain why. Let's imagine everyone decided to grow their own garden like the author suggests. What does one need to start a garden? The common items are shovels, timber, soil, hoses, wires, fertilizer, knee pads, gloves, pots, pesticide, and many other things. Obtaining these items requires physically driving to one's hardware store. Most people drive SUVs. This means there is a sudden influx of people driving their gas guzzling machines to obtain these basic items. We also have to consider the reality that multiple trips will be made. People commonly forget to purchase basic things, need to make returns, or realize they are short on supply (such as soil) and need to purchase more. Now consider other realities. Most people don't know how to grow. Even fewer people know how to grow a plant to its maximum potential. It takes many seasons for individuals to learn the best techniques. Think about the wasted resources spent on this. Now think about the excess waste commonly found in gardens by those who finally learn how to grow. I see this all the time. Gardens filled with oversupply of produce. More than what even their friends want to take home. Consider the yield of produce in respect to time, labor, cost of materials, and CO2 emissions. For every shovel, glove, hose, pot, etc. purchased, for every car drive made, and for every supply chain used to produce these goods, is only put to work on a small plot of land in one's backyard. They are not used to their full potential. This is both a waste of resources and an unnecessary increase in CO2 emissions. If these same resources were used on an actual farm, then they will be used for larger portions of land which will in turn yield more produce. In effect, the costs are being spread across the land, thus making them more effective. I'd like to explain this in the opposite perspective. The absurdity seems to become much more apparent this way. The author says that these industries are inefficient as appose to simply growing in one's backyard. If it truly were more efficient, then wouldn't it be most effective if industries simply adopted this? They are looking to save money after all. Instead of purchasing one giant tractor, why not revert to shovels and an army of physical labor? Instead of hauling supplies on a few semi-trucks, why not dispatch an army of SUVs? Instead of having one massive farm that spans hundreds of acres, why not break it up into thousands of 500 sq/ft "mini gardens", each of which has its own dedicated set of shovels, hoses, gloves, knee pads, etc. And for every "mini garden", instead of growing being dictated by farm owners with many generations of growing experience, they will be grown by individuals who hardly have any experience at all.