For as long as there have been humans, our species has gone through long periods of great knowledge about ourselves and the world we live in, an understanding that we, being humans, periodically and promptly forget and have to painstakingly relearn.

Knowledge can be lost for a variety of reasons: War with its accompanying disruptions, population-decimating diseases, or the climate becoming inhospitable to humans and animals alike. Centuries-long droughts, or excessive flooding, earthquakes, volcanoes, heat and cold have been the downfall of many a civilization.

Losing and regaining knowledge is cyclical.

Partially because of the Industrial Revolution, we’ve been in a long forgetting stage with centuries of hard-won knowledge pushed aside for the sake of convenience.

For untold centuries, skills were passed down from one family member to another, from master craftsmen to eager apprentices.

The Industrial Revolution, along with various wars and famines and pestilences, has changed many present-day civilizations from nomadic herders and more settled farmers to city dwellers.

There’s nothing wrong with living in a city, but herders and farmers need more land in order to produce food — not only land, but also the intimate knowledge of such.

Family farms, although dwindling in number, still produce vast quantities of our food. Other than farmers and herdsmen, too many people have no understanding or knowledge of the skill and effort involved, and sadly, even more think food comes out of the back room at the grocery store.

In reality, our food, whether it’s animal or vegetable, has to be raised. Whether it’s calves, or chickens, or vegetables, there’s a tremendous amount of time involved — and care. Animals have to be fed and cared for. Vegetables have to be planted and harvested. All of this has to be processed and shipped.

All of it is a labor of love.

Farmers have a deep and abiding passion for their land and what their land produces. They have to, for their job is no 9-to-5, heated and air-conditioned, cushy, paper-pushing profession. Farming is 24-7-365 and intensive.

Where am I going with all this?

Circles. Circles and cycles.

Hopefully we’re coming to the end of the forgetting cycle!

While many are willfully oblivious, many more are coming back around to respecting and revering the land that feeds them.

People are relearning how to care for the soil, how to plant and grow their own food, how to pay attention to the weather and the seasons to maximize their land’s potential. They are recognizing that most weeds have a purpose, whether as medicinal or as food, or even just a measure of the health of your soil.

All of those are seemingly simple things that our grandparents took for granted. After two world wars, and having been exposed to other cultures and other ways of life, people eagerly left their agrarian roots and flocked to concrete jungles. That’s because farming was, and is, such unrelenting hard work. After our guys — and gals — came back from overseas, many had no interest in staying on the family farm and working themselves to death, opting instead for city life, and an easier life.

But with that ease comes a cost, one many are unwilling to bear any more.

Sure, it’s easier to go to the store and buy a bag of potatoes, or apples, but those who grow their own know nothing tastes like fresh, in-season produce.

We’ve become accustomed to having produce available year-round. Most folks have no idea when a particular vegetable or fruit is in season and at its peak of flavor, much less how to get it to that stage.

Does growing your own mean only eating what’s grown locally? Not necessarily. What if a certain type of fruit won’t grow in your area? Should you do without? Cherries, for instance. They will only grow well in areas that have cold winters.

While most people nowadays have no desire to spend 12 to 18 backbreaking hours a day taking care of never-ending chores such as chopping cotton and suckering tobacco and hoeing gardens and milking cows, many are opting for a simpler lifestyle that includes learning more about sustainable farming in a small area, or even in containers, and keeping a few chickens in their backyard.

Also, people are again learning how to keep and use a sourdough starter. Some are even getting involved in sourdough to the extent of buying countertop mills to grind their own wheat berries into flour. Far more nutritious — just like homegrown vegetables — fresh-milled flour contains all the nutrition lacking in store-bought flour, due to its over processing and shelf-life-extending preservatives.

While during the past few decades, we had excelled in forgetting how to do things like permaculture, we are now seeing a resurgence in relearning what our grandparents knew.

They wouldn’t have recognized the word permaculture, but they lived it. Everything had a purpose. Nothing went to waste. Cleaning out the barn stalls or the chicken coop served the dual purpose of removing manure in order to keep the animals’ pens clean, and then using that manure as fertilizer. Whatever wasn’t eaten or preserved out of the garden was fed to the chickens and hogs, which then fed the humans.

Life has a rhythm, and our grandparents’ knowledge of where their food came from and how it had been raised was a great part of that rhythm. Those same core values are making a comeback, and we’re better off for it.

In search of easier and faster, we’ve lost that rhythm, that oneness with the land. We’ve lost nutrition and substituted chemicals. We’ve traded honest physical work for working out at the gym, or vegging in front of the TV.

It’s past time for us to get back to the learning stage. Here’s hoping my next few articles will help you, inspire you, and possibly guide you a bit in making your way back to being closer to the land, to understanding more about gardening, and being more self-sufficient, to living a healthier life, and maybe making your soil a little healthier and more productive as well.

Prerequisites?

What? Like … classes?

No. No need to take classes and get certified or anything so drastic. Although classes on any subject are always helpful, permaculture doesn’t require classes so much as knowledge of your subject.

Well, shouldn’t you take classes to gain more knowledge?

Not so fast. Don’t feel like you have to rush right out and sign up.

Knowledge about permaculture is more about observation and utilizing nature. Know your land. Go with the flow instead of swimming upstream. Enhance preexisting land contours and natural elements to create more bounty with less work.

Merriam-Webster defines permaculture as “an agricultural system or method that seeks to integrate human activity with natural surroundings so as to create highly efficient self-sustaining ecosystems.”

An easier definition might be simply “no waste.” Everything in nature is a closed-loop system, meaning everything gets used by something, creating zero waste.

By paying attention to nature and the ways nature uses every scrap, we can strive to recreate the same type of closed-loop system, or permaculture.

In other words, instead of cutting the forest down and plowing natural contours into flat fields, think of permaculture more as living in harmony with your surroundings. It’s observing things and asking yourself questions like:

• At what angles does the sun hit your piece of land at different times of the year?
• What are the times of year when you get more sun, more shade?
• What is the direction of prevailing winds.
• Are there any natural water courses?
• Which way does the water flow after heavy rains? Does it pond anywhere?
• What kind of trees or weeds are already growing naturally there?

Trees and weeds are designed to grow in optimum conditions. If they’re not planted by humans, their seeds will drift on the wind, be borne along by water, or carried by birds and animals. When they find conditions conducive to their growth, they germinate and take off.

Before things like soil tests were available, savvy farmers and landowners would take advantage of normal growth patterns in order to know what crops would grow best and where.

For instance, sheep’s sorrel (Rumex acetosella) and moss are good indicators of acidic soil.

Low nitrogen? Look for clover (Trifolium repens) and lespedeza (Kummerowia striata).

Moist or poorly drained soil? You may see cattails, chickweed (Stellaria media), violets, nutgrass, Virginia buttonweed (Diodia virginiana).

Weeds can even be indicators of pest infestations. If you have an abundance of prostrate spurge (Euphorbia humistrata) or Florida pusley (R. scabra L.), you might have a nematode infestation.

Stinging nettles, (Urtica dioica), as nasty as they can be, are indicative of nutrient-rich soil.

Unsurprisingly, most of these weeds have medicinal or other uses beneficial to humans.

For uncounted centuries, people have even learned to find mineral or metal deposits by paying attention to what vegetation is abundant or lacking.

It’s the same with trees. If you pay attention to what trees are growing on your land, their presence is a good indicator of pH, available nutrients, how wet or dry your soil is, and many other useful tidbits.

So, in order to practice permaculture, do you need a spread in Texas? At least a good-sized farm? Nope! Whether you have a small backyard or half an acre or even substantial acreage, permaculture is more about good stewardship and living in harmony with your space than how much space you have.

Of course, the more land you have, the more you can do with it.

Permaculture advocates for no-till, focusing on improving the soil instead. This can be done by adding compost or manure, using layers of newspaper or cardboard to keep weeds down. Called sheet mulching, or lasagna composting, this process uses alternating layers of carbon (cardboard or newspaper) and nitrogen (compost or manure) to create rich soil. To be fair, I’m not sure how many layers of cardboard it would take to smother pennywort.

If you’re in the market, finely ground bulk mulch can often be obtained from local landfills for a small fee. Termite larvae, also known as root maggots, like ground-up trees and bark, too, so until your mulch is well composted, it may attract these critters. It’s all a part of the process.

If you’d like to see videos of no-till versus till, a good friend recently turned me on to Charles Dowding. Amazing stuff!

Keep in mind as well, with our nutrient-deficient sandy soil, anytime you improve the soil, everything close by – pine trees, grass, sweet gums – is going to send questing roots and shoots into your prime gardening soil.

Terracing works in some areas, even on small patios, and has been used for centuries. The Aztecs used it to great advantage over an immense area. Yours certainly doesn’t have to be on their scale. They also made floating mats of reeds edged with woven branches. Called chinampas, these man-made islands were anchored to the shores of shallow lakes, often by planting willows at each corner. Soil from the lakebeds and shores was added to the mats and, voila! The Aztecs successfully grew a multitude of crops this way.

Walls or hedges can double as windbreaks or trellises. Brick or stone walls were and often still are used around kitchen gardens to keep the unwanted critters out and also to hold heat. Fruit trees can be espaliered — trained to grow flat — along the walls, adding another dimension to the garden and utilizing otherwise wasted space.

Theoretically, once your space becomes more attuned to permaculture — and because everything is on a perpetual cycle, there’s no end date — the insects and diseases should take care of themselves. Hopefully the beneficial insects and bacteria will offset any losses from the unhelpful ones.

Again, coastal North Carolina is a tough area to garden in. Gardeners here on the coast face a multitude of challenges, often causing people to give up and go back to more conventional, less Earth-friendly methods such as using commercial fertilizers and pesticides.

Here’s wishing you success and hoping fire ants don’t consider your lasagna to be their personal Dubai!

What do hedgerows and permaculture have in common?

Hedgerows are multilayered, permanent habitats for birds, animals, reptiles, insects, and a host of other living things, providing something for each of them: shelter, habitat, easily renewable resources for building nests and burrows, water, hidden highways and resting areas.

Permaculture for humans is much the same thing, only the expanded, geared-for-humans type instead of wildlife version. The ideal permaculture — the word was coined from a combination of “permanent” and “agriculture,” with a side of plain “culture” — is pretty much an enclosed, or loop, system.

The idea is to provide for a variety of needs, with everything that can be, recycled and reused.

By mimicking nature, and the way certain plants grow in conjunction with others, humans have figured out how to make hedgerows, or permaculture, work for the benefit of humans.

Working with, rather than against nature, and utilizing practical and thoughtful observation instead of mindless labor, permaculture aims to use less work to gain better results.

Basically, instead of growing one crop over a large area, such as wheat or corn — both products we need and both somewhat counterproductive to grow in small plots of land — permaculture is the method small family farming used to embody.

Everything had a place, and was utilized to the fullest extent it could be. Starting with a kitchen garden full of herbs and some vegetables located close to the kitchen door and easily accessible, the areas would expand out into more diverse areas such as a bigger garden, pastures for livestock, fruit and berry orchards, and larger specimens such as nut trees and woodlands.

By observing nature, it could be determined what plants would grow best and where. Manure from the animals would be used to enrich the soil. The movement of water would be catalogued, and ditches and wells and ponds placed in the best areas to sustain drainage and containment. If you’ve ever lived on a farm with a shallow, usually hand-dug well, you know the importance of easily accessible water.

Besides how much water humans need on a daily basis, the stock needs to be watered, and trust me, a herd of cows or horses or pigs can drink a lot of water! The garden needs water. Orchards need water.

Left to themselves, plants will only germinate and thrive in the soil, light, and water conditions best suited to their needs. Humans like to plant things where we want them, to suit our needs. The two are not always compatible.

This is where permaculture comes in.

Permaculture should be designed so everything has more than one purpose. Need a fence? Plant a hedgerow so it can double as a windbreak or as a trellis. In colder regions, a living fence will also reflect sunlight and heat onto plants and livestock during winter months.

Let a rain barrel double as a home for aquatic edibles, and even for fish, then use the water for irrigation.

Use a chicken tractor – a small, lightweight and portable enclosure – to not only protect your chickens from predators and your garden from chickens, but also to enrich the soil.

Called “stacking functions,” this kind of setup allows for multiple purposes for each item.

Establishing permaculture can be a slow process of trial and error, taking into consideration the needs of plants and livestock and humans, and finding the best solution for each.

For instance, just because you love black raspberries doesn’t mean they’ll grow here. The biggest patch of wild black raspberries I’ve ever seen is on top of Mount Mitchell. That’s a good indication those particular plants need cold weather to thrive, so our coastal heat and humidity and mild winters are no good for them. Same with fruit trees. Our climate is not conducive to peaches, and forget about cherries. Apples do marginally better.

Blackberries and figs and blueberries, however, do great on the coast.

If permaculture is such a great idea, and it is, why don’t more people use it? For one thing, it takes time and effort, and it an ongoing process, not a one and done.

Permaculture advocates for no till, which means instead of plowing, less invasive methods are used, and that means less fertilizer, more water conservation, and less soil erosion.

We’ve been taught that in order to have a successful planting, we need to till or plow. Maybe we were taught wrong. Tilling or plowing tears up the soil, loosens compacted soil, and helps with weed control, but we’re learning that tilling or plowing also destroys fungal networks and organisms that hold soil together, not to mention beneficial root mass.

When was the last time you dug into soil and found an abundance of earthworms? Or any earthworms, for that matter?

The purpose of permaculture is to create a mutually beneficial living space for humans and the environment. We’ve lost touch with infinite interactions that exist between humans and the environment. They’re forgotten, these interactions we desperately need to rediscover.

Permaculture also has drawbacks. In giving ourselves a better habitat, we encourage wildlife, which in turn love to feast on our plantings. More plants and bushes and trees mean more insects. More birds. More birds mean more wildlife, each compounding the others. Foxes and snakes and ticks and chiggers, oh my!

Permaculture can be difficult, especially in our area, with our already challenging growing conditions. On the other hand, at least we don’t have rocks and clay soil to deal with.

Someway, somehow, in order for permaculture to work, a perfect balance has to be struck, otherwise all our efforts turn into a chaotic, unbalanced mess.

For more information and probably a better explanation than I can provide, check out these sites:

• The Permaculture Institute.
• Permaculture: A Beginner’s Guide.
• Permaculture – Sustainable Farming, Ranching, Living… by Designing Ecosystems That Imitate Nature – SARE.
• North Carolina State University’s Growing Small Farms.
• Wild Abundance school near Asheville teaches permaculture, carpentry, and earth skills, offering a degree in permaculture.

Once a vital part of our ecosystem, hedgerows are mostly considered a nuisance nowadays.

Used for well over a thousand years in Europe to delineate boundaries or roads or fields, they have fallen out of favor, both in Europe and here in the United States.

The ones here are often sprayed or string-trimmed or bushhogged into oblivion in keeping with the idea of perfect golf course yards. After World War II, many of the hedgerows that divided smaller fields in Europe were bulldozed and combined into larger, more crop-productive acreage better suited to then-modern farming methods, and also to meet increased housing demands.

Thankfully, Europe has halted the destruction of their hedgerows and they are now protected.

Just to give you an idea of how impenetrable the European hedges are, despite the World War II-era military higher-ups having tons of aerial footage of the countryside around Normandy, our guys got trapped and slaughtered. For whatever reason, the higher-ups didn’t take the hedgerows into serious consideration.

Perhaps they assumed European hedgerows were like the natural ones here; a scruff of bushes and then somewhat clear inside. The hedgerows in Normandy, however, became deathtraps. Our soldiers couldn’t get around or through them, and they became sitting ducks for the enemy.

Whether it’s a hedge — those made up of mostly one type of plant — or a hedgerow, which consists of a multitude of different plants, both serve a purpose. A hedge can be a screen along a driveway or fence, or the hedge can be a fence.

A hedgerow, on the other hand, while it can be a fence, is more often a habitat, a hide-away, a highway.

It’s thought that the first hedgerows originated from strips of woodland left around cleared fields and spaces. Humans figured out that hedgerows worked pretty well for delineating boundaries and keeping livestock from wandering away. The rest, as is often said, is history.

Ancient hedgerows were often planted in a specific way, and the method of construction can be used to determine the age. One method showcases rocks or dirt banked as a foundation for a row of plants above, usually hawthorn whips or something similar that’s allowed to grow straight up before being slashed near the bottom of the trunk and then bent sideways.

Usually done in the winter, the following spring would see the slashed plants sending up lots of straight branches. Successive rows of various plants would be interspersed alongside this main planting. A few seasons of growth resulted in a nearly impenetrable explosion of plants.

Once the hedgerow was started, other than an occasional trimming, those hedgerows thickened pretty much by themselves. With a lot of help from birds and small mammals and reptiles, they soon became thriving ecosystems, teeming with wildlife and plant species.

As the birds perched and roosted, they spread berries and seeds, which encouraged more types of plants to grow. Same with mammals.

Hedgerows can be planted intentionally, but some of the best ones evolve naturally.

Around here, and specifically, the hedgerow beside the Newport Garden Center, provides endless opportunities for observation and enjoyment for me, but to the guys who keep it trimmed back, not so much!

Here, hedgerows consist of natives, especially along ditch banks, where it starts with a few scrub bushes, followed by a few pines and maybe some sweet gums or maples. A bit more scrub grows up around the base of the trunks, and so very gradually — you hardly notice — the hedgerow expands outward.

Privet appears, seemingly overnight, and soon wild roses begin to wind and cascade. Southern wax myrtle, or myrkle as it’s known locally, is next, then maybe poison ivy, wild grape vines, honeysuckle, jasmine, magnolias, persimmons, dogwoods, blackberries, smilax, Virginia creeper, and around the verge, mosses and ferns, thistles, grassy weeds and just plain weeds.

But how? Magic? Kind of.

Many seeds, magnolia for example, have to be scarified. What is that? It simply means the seed has an extremely hard coating that needs to be filed or scratched in order to germinate. When a bird eats a magnolia seed, as the seed travels through the bird’s crop and intestines, the outer coating is scarified. The bird perches on a branch, does what birds do, and voila!

Eventually, instead of a lone tree with a gauzy skirt of scrub brush, a whole ecosystem develops. The outer edges of the hedgerow present a solid front. The interior is made up of a tangle of countless trunks and branches and vines, twisting every which way. This wall and tangle, while offensive to humankind’s sense of order, is a haven for critters.

The more species of plants that end up thriving in a hedgerow, the more diverse the animal life that takes advantage of the habitat: Birds, of course, but also raccoons, possums, squirrels, foxes, turtles, rabbits, insects, lizards, toads, snakes … the list goes on and on.

Unfortunately, no matter how great your hedgerow becomes, you’ll never attract hedgehogs, not here. Wouldn’t that be neat?

Still, hedgerows not only provide above-ground habitat, they also improve the soil and provide homes for earthworms and grubs and snails. Their extensive root systems help hold the soil in place, slowing erosion. The leaf detritus from the fallen leaves adds nutritious mulch to the earth, and will eventually turn into rich soil, as will the windblown leaves that get caught along the edges.

Established hedgerows provide numerous other benefits, not the least as windbreaks. They provide ample forage and shelter, protected paths for animals to travel from one place to another, blossoms to feed bees and butterflies, seeds and berries for the birds and critters to feast upon.

Europeans have long taken advantage of their hedgerows for wilding, harvesting herbs and mushrooms and rose hips, among many other things from their hedgerows. Some hedgerows are even deliberately underplanted with perennial edibles that are left to grow and spread. There are also hedgerows used as a renewable source of firewood.

Far more than just a useless tangle of brambles and weeds, hedgerows are amazing places. Ever-evolving, what was once hedgerow will eventually become forest. Pushing outward, the cycle continues endlessly.