A client contacted me last year to design a permaculture garden for her. A sector analysis showed that she had a lot of sunny spots that were just grass and a lot of rain runoff converging on her driveway in a problematic fashion. However, she wanted me to focus instead on designing a flower garden for the shaded southern end of the property, just north of the neighbor's row of arbor vitae.
A few years ago I published a design for what I called Simpler Ultimate Rain Barrels. I hadn't tested the design except as a small scale model.
Since moving to Omaha in 2018, I've been slow to re-establish my permaculture consultancy here. On the one hand it's frustrating: I'm eager to make a difference! But on the other hand, there are a number of good reasons to take it slow. Here are some of them.
I've decided to release the 2018 print edition of my 2017 book, I'm Not a Rancher! What Can I Do to Rebuild Soil? into the Creative Commons at archive.org.
At just 34 pages plus endnotes, the book is a primer intended to address the frustration of home gardeners who have just learned that the best way to build soil is to intensively graze livestock on it. While that remains true, there are still plenty of things that can be done on the home scale!
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Dr. Christine Jones gave another mindblowing talk on Tuesday for the Green Cover Seed conference, this year via Zoom. Her topic was how phosphorus cycles in healthy and unhealthy soils, and why most farm soils already have more than enough phosphorus to last a century.
This publication by UNL lists over a hundred plants recommended for Nebraska rain gardens.
This article from last year is a great summary of the benefits of Libraries of Things and how to go about starting one in your community:
This outstanding article by Nathaniel Rich was printed in The New York Times in August 2018, and while it has faced some criticism since then, it stands out as one of the best histories of the climate crisis and what went wrong in our response to it.
This 2001 short story by Gene Logsdon is a work of fiction in the same vein as The Man Who Planted Trees, but as the more recent movie The Biggest Little Farm makes clear, it is completely possible to bring dead landscapes back to life. It's an inspiring read that tugs at the imagination.
This 2015 study by Naomi Van der Velden mobilized citizen scientists from around the UK to compare the productivity of highly diverse garden beds to less diverse ones. The results suffer from small sample size (n=50 to start, but only 24 completed the trial): no statistically significant difference between the two groups. Participants felt that the more diverse plots were harder to tend and had more damage from pests and disease than the less diverse plots.
