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Top Permaculture Things You Can Do Right Now to Make a Better World |
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By Larry Santoyo
Because you’ve already changed your light bulbs and you turn off the water while brushing your teeth...
1) Swan Song for your Lawn!
The best thing about lawns is... they are so easy to remove! Actually, no need to remove -- just smother them. With the technique known as sheet mulching, you just cover the grass and weeds with cardboard, pile on compost and mulch, and you’re done. You’re instantly ready for planting something a lot more interesting and useful. ‘Cause really, once the kids are grown, most lawns go unused, except for the regular demands of water, fertilizer and the time and energy spend in mowing and tending to them. Lawns use more agricultural chemicals and biocides than all of agriculture! Eliminate lawns, and you immediately decrease a source of toxins in your surrounding environment. Replace with a mix of flowers, vegetables and herbs -- and keep it all growing with:
2) Compost!
Contrary to popular opinion, you can compost pretty much anything that was once alive (we’re talking in human years, not geologic time). You probably already know about fruit and vegetable peels, coffee grounds and eggshells, but did you know that meat, dairy, fats and oils will all do fine in the compost, especially if they are balanced out with high carbon sources such as paper napkins and plates? The paper doesn’t even have to be specialty “bio-compostable” products either; any and all paper will compost, even milk and ice cream cartons-they’re made from trees and other plants, remember? (After the soil biota finish eating the cartons, a thin layer of plastic remains, which can be discarded.) If you bury your compost scraps in shallow trenches, instead of making piles, you avoid creating the conditions for odors, pests and more work.
3) Pee Outside!
Yep, dogs do it, birds do it, even bees do it...! Please pee freely -- not on the sidewalk or behind the bar! -- but in your garden, and around your trees and bushes. Urine is sterile, composed largely of nitrogen, and nitrogen is what plants need. All you have to do when you pee on your garden is to remember to water your plants at some point to dilute the dosage and avoid fertilizer burn. Sponsor a circle garden of sunflowers or sun-chokes in your own backyard: make it large enough to step into the middle, and grow a privacy screen. A clump of bamboo would also be happy with becoming a living pee processor. Females may find it useful to grow plants nearby with soft, fuzzy leaves, such as lambs ears (Stachys sp.) or mullein (Verbascum sp.) or fragrant herbs such as mint and lavender. I’ve also seen great garlic and onions grown using this “PeePeePonics” method. NOTE: It’s important to practice this...where the neighbors can’t see you.
4) Collect Rain Water!
Collect rain water, and don’t waste it on the garden. Drink it! Well, it wouldn’t actually be a waste on your garden, but as clean water is an increasingly dwindling resource, it would be foolish not to quench your thirst with it. Besides, most of the world drinks rain water; it’s free, easy to obtain, and available to anyone with a collecting surface like a roof. Did you know that for every square foot of your roof’s drip line, you can collect 5 gallons of water in every 10 inches of rain? So if your house is 20ft x 40ft, your 800 sq. ft roof area can yield 4000 gallons of good clean drinking water from 10” of rainfall! For roofing, painted steel is best, but any roof can be used to collect or “harvest” the water, and direct it to storage in appropriate containers (cisterns, water tanks, wine barrels- whatever you can get). Later, you can filter the water as needed.
5) Re-Use your Greywater!
I think this should really be called Great Water! The water that comes from your sinks, baths and laundry machines is enriched with nutrients. This water, depending on where it goes, becomes either pollution (in energy-intensive, overburdened municipal treatment plants) or, through a greywater system, becomes food for your landscape and lowers your need and costs for irrigation.
Plumbing water to drain out to the garden and trees is one of the easiest, most reliable and ecologically sound efforts that any home manager can do. Greywater systems can be simple shallow trenches filled with gravel, gently infiltrating water to the roots of nearby plants. But there’s plenty of room for creativity here, too. Dig your trenches deeper and wider, line with whatever material you can find to retain water (old tarps, sheets of plastic, etc), backfill with soil, and you have the beginnings of a bog garden. Now you can grow a variety of edible and useful plants: celery and celeriac, mints, strawberries, edible cannas, banana, sugarcane, rushes and equisetum, and they all benefit from the nutrient-rich water, just as we benefit from them.
6) Have a Party!
A prime Permaculture Principle is to share the surplus. So invite friends and neighbors over to celebrate abundance! Create the conditions for spontaneous “community” to erupt. Show them your projects, fill vases with your home-grown flowers, toast each other with rainwater, snack on greens from the greywater zone, bury your party scraps in the garden and then make a date to help others at their homes. Share the surpluses of what you are creating and, most importantly, share your ideas and become a resource of innovation to help make a better world.
Larry Santoyo wants to encourage you to drive less (...so he can feel better about driving so much). Learn more about Permaculture Design Services and Permaculture Training Programs at www.earthflow.com .
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