If you have a house, the green space around the house is designed to support you.
If you’re living in a typical suburban house, the green space there is intended to support homeowners in a game of status based on having excess space to waste on monoculture or displays of colour and fashion.
Sadly however, for most in the west, their gardens have little to do with sustaining anything that matters.
That is of course you’re part of the ‘food not lawns’ suburban agriculture movement. There you get into crazy ideas like no till gardening. No till gardening is exactly as it sounds. It’s a method of growing crops without disturbing the soil through tillage, which involves plowing, digging, or turning over the soil. Instead of tilling, gardeners and farmers use techniques like mulching, cover cropping, and minimal disturbance to maintain soil structure and health.
Though growing food in permaculture is really important, most important is the permaculture gardener’s focus on the soil. A permaculture gardener is constantly working to improve the soil by adding materials to increase the diversity of life within the soil. In doing so, permaculture gardeners don’t grow vegetables, they grow soil.
Grow great soil and you’ll grow great plants with fewer inputs.
What is the soil that you tend to?
How can you add life to this soil?
What’s the compost?
How can you maintain and use the planting medium of your existence without disturbing, disrupting or destroying the natural processes that are already present there?
I love this line of thought. I've been reading a few books by Michael Pollan lately, which have me falling down rabbit holes of soil health and permaculture and reciprocal loops, which collided nicely with an ecologically friendly art club I'm thinking of putting together affectionately called Dirt Club. It reminds me of playing in the mud as a kid, and curiosity and poetry and eating cherry tomatoes out of the garden as a young child, and the joy and exploration involved in getting dirty in the garden or digging into a messy art project, or especially messy journeys of finding ourselves tied so intricately into our ecosystems, and finding a way to support each other while we play.