Permaculture Gardening Helps Me Garden

I’ve spent the last 6 years trying to figure out how to continue gardening despite my chronic illness struggles. I’ve had to make adjustments to pretty much every activity in my life and gardening has been no exception. To confound things further, 6 years ago we moved into a new house, which meant starting over in some ways. I had to learn a new landscape with different established plants and different animals around. What I’ve found is that I keep coming back to permaculture practices.

I don’t remember a time I wasn’t interested in growing food. When I was a teenager I used to secretly plant carrots in my mom’s flower beds (which was the only part of the yard that got good sunlight). In college I turned half of my apartment’s tiny yard into a vegetable bed, grew things in pots on the roof, and planted a peach tree that’s still there to this day. I’ve still never eaten a peach from that tree, as it was too young to produce while I was living there. Towards the end of college I got a summer job at an urban farm where I was first introduced to permaculture.

I remember learning permaculture principles and thinking that it all just made so much sense. To put it in the most basic terms possible, permaculture is about creating healthy ecosystems in order to work with nature rather than against it. You think about the health of the soil, plants, insects, animals, and humans. By creating a diverse ecosystem you also promote resilience, which comes in very handy when I have bad periods with my illnesses. By working with nature instead of fighting it I don’t have to constantly interfere. If I have a bad spell I can just let nature do its thing for a while.

Obviously this approach works better in some situations than in others. If I have to step away for a while my perennials do just fine without me but my annuals will eventually suffer. But knowing that also allows me to direct my often limited energy to the things that will benefit the most. When I do have more energy I try to focus on projects involving perennials. I figure that the more perennials I have going the less affect my occasional neglect will have.

All this is not even getting into the health benefits of maintaining a garden. My garden gets me outside nearly every day (except in the dead of winter). Fresh air and sunshine are tremendously helpful for my depression, and I suspect for many other things too. Most mornings I do a ‘garden tour’ where I walk around my yard looking at all the things that are growing. I try to notice wildflowers and I check on the plants that aren’t yet well established. I may pull a few weeds but this is not meant to be a work time. If I notice something that needs to be done I’ll take a note of it and address it later. This is really more of a ‘stop and smell the roses’ type of endeavor.

My garden also provides me with all manner of physical activity. Unless I’m doing a really large project I don’t normally think of gardening as exercise per se, but it is certainly a more active way to spend time than I might otherwise opt for. Our property is half way up a rather large hill. All in all it probably spans 4-5 stories. With things growing all throughout I end up doing a lot of hill and/or stair climbing. I often haul around 5 gallon buckets filled with dirt, mulch, or chicken feed. While planting or weeding I use positions and postures recommended by my physical therapists that provide both a solid base and some stretching. So in the end I am getting some cardio, some weight training, and some stretching on any given day in the garden.

And then of course there is all the healthy food I get. Produce is at its most nutritious just after it’s picked. By having it in the yard I can often get it as needed for whatever meal I’m cooking. I find this particularly helpful for herbs and cooking greens. Both can be expensive to buy and generally come in bunches that are larger than one recipe needs. By growing them I can take what I need and leave the rest to keep growing. I also find that I am more motivated to cook vegetables that I’ve grown as opposed to store bought. I’m just so much more invested in my own produce. We keep chickens too, which means we have a steady supply of eggs and a way to magically turn food scraps into eggs. We tend to eat a lot of frittatas and omelets.

I continue to look for new ways to adjust gardening to make it better suited to my limitations, but over and over again I find myself coming back to permaculture for new ideas. If you’d like to read more about permaculture principles I would recommend checking out either of these two books:

The Food Forest Handbook

Grounded