In the United States alone, over 40 million acres of land is devoted to growing a single crop: lawn. You probably have a lawn, or grew up with one. More houses on your street probably have lawns around them than not. What are these lawns doing for us to justify such an investment?
Lawns may be nice to walk on, but they actually don’t do much else for the world. they provide almost no habitat for critters, and no food for pollinating insects. They deplete the soil of key nutrients like nitrogen, and allow carbon to escape from the soil into the atmosphere. When it rains, the shallow roots of lawn grass hold onto very little water. Rainwater washes over lawn after lawn, taking critical nutrients with it that become pollutants when they wash into waterways. And unlike diverse ecosystems, lawns do nothing to clean toxins out of that rainwater, like the gasoline that leaks from cars. Covering 40 million acres of land with lawn is one of the worst things you could do with that land for the environment.
Not only that, but lawns are a huge pain in the butt to maintain! You have to mow your lawn every week, and weed it periodically. When the trees in your yard give their annual gift of leaves to the ground, you have to rake them all up and put them in bags destined for the landfill. And if you want your lawn to stay green, you have to water it every few days — not to mention fertilizing it every year, too.
We are breaking our backs, spending hours every weekend...for what? For an expensive green carpet that actively harms the planet. Fortunately, there is a better way: permaculture. It is very old, very common across times and cultures, and compared with maintaining a lawn, very easy to put into practice. Instead of expensive green carpet, you can have a rich, aesthetically pleasing, complex ecosystem right in your own backyard.
This doc describes key takeaways from what I’ve learned about backyard permaculture so far, including general reading and research on the subject, as well as my learning from my own brief and haphazard adventures in backyard permaculture gardening. I hope it will be useful to you! Please add questions, comments, corrections — and let me know if you try any of this stuff!
Permaculture is “a set of design principles centered on whole systems thinking, simulating, or directly utilizing the patterns and resilient features observed in natural ecosystems.” (Wikipedia) It can be contrasted with what we might think of as traditional Western gardening, farming, and lawn maintenance, where we tend to focus on continually providing inputs like water and fertilizer so that plants will grow. Permaculture gardens are designed to create self-sustaining nutrient cycles so that fewer inputs are needed from farmers or gardeners, and the system can exist on its own for a long period of time. Some permaculture gardens around the world are thousands of years old.
How does that work? How can a garden be self-sustaining? Permaculture is a huge and diverse field, and I’m sure there are many different answers to that question. But in my learning, I’ve zeroed in on a few general principles that seem broadly applicable to casual, urban and semi-urban home-gardeners.
Each of the million nutrients on Earth has a cycle that takes it through the sea, land, sky, and back again. The biggest nutrients in your garden are carbon and nitrogen (and to a lesser extent, potassium, but we’re not going to worry about that one). This section is mainly summarized from Wikipedia’s detailed account of the carbon cycle and nitrogen cycle. These cycles go hand-in-hand in nature...and in your garden, too.
Nitrogen
Nitrogen is the foundation of all proteins and amino acids, and other stuff too — so it’s not surprising why it’s necessary for life. Nitrogen in the form of N2 composes 70% of the atmosphere. But N2 is inert — it doesn’t react chemically so it can’t be used directly by most living things. In order for it to get into the food chain, it has to be made into something else. The main “something elses” are ammonium, nitrate, and nitrite. You don’t have to worry about the difference between those, except to remember that ammonium smells bad and plants can’t use it directly because it’s toxic to them. (That’s why you shouldn’t pee directly on plants. Well, one reason.)
Starting from N2 in the atmosphere, the “first” organisms to change its form are nitrogen-fixing bacteria that live in the soil. Most of these bacteria are free-living, but some are symbiotic with the roots of nitrogen-fixing plants (legumes). Plants then use the soil nitrogen to build their roots and leaves, animals eat the plants, and so-on up the food chain.
Anyway the important thing to remember from your garden is that nitrogen can wash out of the soil and get used-up and depleted pretty easily. Often when soil is considered “poor” it’s because it’s low in nitrogen. Most fertilizer is heavy in nitrogen. And in fact, in modern times 30% of global nitrogen fixing comes from industrial fertilizer production, rather than nitrogen fixing in the soil. So in your home permaculture garden, you’ll want to pay attention to setting up systems that replenish nitrogen automatically.
Carbon
Whereas Nitrogen makes up molecules like protein, Carbon (along with Hydrogen) makes up just about all the rest of the Earth’s biomass. Yet compared with Nitrogen, Carbon is rare in the atmosphere.
So if your goal with your background garden is to improve your household’s carbon footprint, then the carbon cycle is one to get to know better. A general rule of thumb is that the more biomass gets created, the more carbon you’ve sequestered. (When thinking about biomass, don’t forget about roots! Sometimes plants with humble tops will have extensive root systems that sequester tons and tons of carbon.)
Unlike Nitrogen, plants can get carbon right out of the air. It’s the key input to photosynthesis. Every time your eye sees a lush panel of green leaves, you are witnessing carbon sequestration in action. So while plants rely on soil for their nitrogen, the soil relies on plants for its carbon. Why does the soil “need” carbon? Because, the soil is alive. Or at least, it’s primarily composed of trillions of different kinds of stakeholder organisms that are each themselves alive and together create an emergent consciousness that you’d be hard-pressed to call inanimate. Especially if you’re willing to count ant hills and beehives and the Internet as examples of collective emergent consciousness. Which, come on? What else would they be? Your brain is nothing but a collective of formerly-independent types of eukaryotic cells. (See below.)
Anyway, the point is that plants (and the rest of the food chain) get their nitrogen (protein) from soil, which gets it from nitrogen-fixing bacteria which get it from the air. And the soil gets carbon from plants, who turn it into biomass via photosynthesis. See the nice parallelism there? It’s almost as though life were a beautiful dance of carefully-balanced forces that are capable of creating immense abundance when used in particular ways.
That’s great that you want to see something other than lawn out your window! But what can you put there instead? This section has some ideas about that.
The first principle here is easy: plant something rather than nothing. Do you have a bare patch of dirt or plain grass, and don’t want to go to all the trouble of learning about nitrogen cycles and a bunch of hippie B.S.? Fine. Go get a plant and put it in the ground. Then water it. Or don’t. I don’t know. It’s your plant. You can also fertilize if you’re feeling extra spicy. But you probably don’t have to, unless your soil is really poor. (Try to find an organic fertilizer brand. You know a fertilizer is organic if the person selling it to you has dreadlocks.)
Remember, biomass = carbon sequestration. Want to sequester a bunch of carbon? Plant a big tree. Or if you don’t have room for a tree, try a big bush or just something with a lot of foliage. If you want extra points, it can be a fruit tree (all that sugar sequesters more carbon). Trees take a little extra care — most non-native California trees will need a lot of water in the dry season. If you don’t like watering, find a native, drought-tolerant tree like a native oak tree or a manzanita.
Even if you only have a small bit of land to work with, you can build a plant guild! The general idea is to combine a nitrogen-fixer, a mulch-generator, and a central plant like a fruit tree. This can be a great way to sequester a ton of carbon on a small plot of land, while also creating beauty and biodiversity! (Not to mention food, in many cases)
You can start anywhere you want to! But my advice is to start by building up your soil. If your soil is in really poor shape, it’s going to be an uphill battle to get anything to grow well.
Now your soil is in a little better shape, plant something! (See above)
My whole life had been spent waiting for an epiphany, a manifestation of God’s presence, the kind of transcendent, magical experience that lets you see your place in the big picture. And that is what I had with my first [compost] heap.
- Bette Middler [REF]
Composting can be a great way to add to your soil and get your own local nutrient economy going. It avoids food waste, and enriches your soil. Plus, it’s fun!
Remember the carbon and nitrogen cycles? Well, compost is an extension of these cycles, and it needs a balance of carbon and nitrogen sources. Nitrogen is the “green” part of compost, and it’s everything that you’d consider “fresh:” grass clippings, green leaves, and all food waste are greens. Browns/carbons are everything you’d consider “dried out:” brown autumn leaves, paper, and cardboard are all browns. (Even foods that are “carbs” are still nitrogen because living tissue generally has a lot of nitrogen compared with dead plant matter, which is just cellulose i.e., carbon.)
You need a mix of about ⅔ browns and ⅓ greens to get to that black dirt. (Those ratios are pretty flexible.)
You can compost:
If it’s dry outside, then it’s best if you can water your compost. You can even pour pasta water over it, or water from cooking beans. Some people even pee in their compost (pee is a green!). But you don’t have to. It’s also a good idea to mix up your compost every once in a while so that it doesn’t get clumpy and nasty. But again, you don’t have to. You can’t really mess up compost. It’s just dirt.