Living off the Land

Our friend, Stu (or Preacher Man as we call him because he is) is a fanatic about ecological gardening and living. We spent last weekend with him .... and it's always an experience. :gnthb:

Here is his latest article from here ..... but it's global ....

Stu will be happy to answer any questions if you would like to contact him ... he's still toying with the idea of joining GC.

Fifteen to the dozen


By STUART MERELIE

[email protected]

Stuart Merelie, Landscaper, Ecological researcher and Permaculture fanatic, shares his passion for correct and sustainable landscaping in the Algarve and is our permanent garden and landscaping correspondent. This week, Stuart reports from his rolling tour of Portugal with the sixteenth part in a series of twenty four exploring Permaculture and its importance and uses in todayâ??sâ?? world.

ONE OF the good things to come out of the current credit crunch is you can now watch daytime TV without that affable Geordie jumping out of the television screen and offering you a nearly new car at an unbeatable loan.

What has happened to the real world? What has happened to proper adverts like milk and Mars bars? Well, the real world is back and, ignoring the Helter Skelter FTSE and bankety bank, life is great. Suttons Seeds now sell more vegetable seeds than flower seeds, allotments have 30 year waiting lists, and Jordan (Katy Price) now has four legs!



It is time to take stock, to look, to learn where we should be going. To observe natural cycles, the circle of life, accept the mistakes and develop strategies that will prolong our happiness, our lives and relationships, and sustain this wonderful planet we live on.

Permaculture is a term coined by Australian Bill Mollison in 1978. If the initial set up is right â?? like a mature forest garden, then it becomes self sustaining, plants grow in five dimensions, forwards and backwards, from side to side, upwards, and listen to this, the dimension of time and the pièce de la resistance, the relationship with all the other plants (like us with our neighbours) is that some are helpful and others are poisonous. Bill summed up three things very acutely. Look after planet earth, look after all the people on this wonderful planet and share the surplus. No point in dying with buckets of cash or the answer to the universe if you havenâ??t shared it a little â?? I actually rate the free dispersal of information, teaching, training and helping a lot above writing a few extra lines in your will giving money to charity.

Bill Mollison, in his mid seventies, is still teaching people and has established a series of principles that we should all follow:

Work with nature rather than against it

Artificial fertilizer kills nitrogen fixing bacteria. A lot of the weeds in your garden will actually produce nitrogen nodules and naturally enrich your soil. Mulching, compost heaps and good planting will enrich your soils on a long term â?? no wonder Bayer, Monsanto and crew recommend fertilizing your garden three times a year, it doesnâ??t work in the long term!



Everything we do alters nature

On a small scale, walking across a flower bed repeatedly in your garden compacts the soil and generally makes it less fertile, less likely to produce and less likely to hold rainfall and become more barren. Take this on a national level, like the removal of ancient Ficus in Seville and more traffic and I leave the answer to you. On a human level, accepting food that has been microwaved, nuked, reconstituted, rehydrated, etc, is hardly likely to make us more healthy, is it?

Make the least change to create the biggest effect (synergy!)

Ever wondered what synergy means? Synergy (from the Greek syn-ergo, meaning working together) is the term used to describe a situation where the final outcome of a system is greater than the sum of its parts. We Permaculturalists spend a lot of time carefully planning our next project. Donâ??t run like a bull into a china shop. The removal of one big olive tree may make a dark and unyielding corner come alive.

The yield of the system is theoretically unlimited

If I plant a tree south of my vegetable patch, it will give me more shade for high summer, needing less watering. If birds sit on that tree, they might fertilize the vegetable patch. It may attract worms that aerate my vegetable patch, I can harvest the wood, I can grow an edible climber up it, I can eat the fruit. Think big â?? this is just one tree!

Companion planting in gardening and agriculture is the planting of different crops in close physical proximity, on the theory that they will help each other. It is a form of polyculture. Polyculture is agriculture using multiple crops in the same space, in imitation of the diversity of natural ecosystems, and avoiding large stands of single crops, or monoculture. It includes crop rotation, multi-cropping, intercropping, companion planting, beneficial weeds, and alley cropping. Polyculture, though it often requires more labour, has several advantages over monoculture:

The diversity of crops avoids the susceptibility of monocultures to disease. The greater variety of crops provides habitat for more species, increasing local biodiversity. Companion planting is used by farmers and gardeners in both industrialised and developing countries. Many of the modern principles of companion planting were present many centuries ago in the cottage garden.

Big ideas, life continuing ideas. Sometimes the best hopes and inspiration for the future are closest at home â?? like going to my local market and asking for a dozen lettuce seedlings and being given 15.

With 24 years experience in garden design and construction, Stuart is resident landscaper for QM Garden Centre and with his new company Merelie,The Landscapers is available for design and construction of all types of sustainable landscaping as well as consultations on Permaculture projects including swale orchards, meadow gardens, rainwater harvesting and composting. He offers free help and advice on compost heaps and compost toilets and is looking for volunteers to help building a straw bale barn. Stuart lives near Estoi on his farm. For inquiries please contact Stuart at [email protected]

Copied with permission from Stuart Merelie.

 

All sounds very nice, and it would be good to go back to that.
Lets face it, there is nothing new there, its all old stuff, times gone by.

Nice if you can live in your own little world without outside influence, but its not possible these days, not for the masses anyway.

But I wish him luck.

 

Halaluya..........I love him.............
But he sure can preach

 

Pete, he doesn't live in his own little world ....he works full time as a landscaper gardener and probably puts in a good 8-10 hours a day and then does his 'thing' with his land. He's young, 44, but it's what he ultimately wants so is going for it.

In all the years we've known him, never heard him preach roders (we just eat, drink, play cards and listen to music ....that is when we are not talking about flora) but I bet he'd be VERY convincing. :thumb: ..... but he has to fill a page up in the magazine ....

 

Whatever else, he sounds passionate and committed to what he believes in. That's the main thing, so good luck to him.

 

Definitely a man of passion and talks a lot of sense.

 

I would agree with him whole-heartedly. I do think the key to gardening is understanding.

 

I like the ideas in the article, it made me think of this quote by Robert Hart "progress is a spiral; the pendulum swings back as well as forward...". The ideas of forest gardening really are what made me become a landscape gardener, probably much like your friend. However I also spend days just pushing a mower or lumping gravel about.

 

LoL, I am glad you brought this up because I read a library book on permaculture some years ago and really fancy doing this but in a small way as I only have a small garden.

But the problem for me is that it is so complicated and needs a lot of study time to work out just what plants work best with each other and in what combinations throughout the seasons. It is one thing to know that certain beneficial chemicals are given off by one plant that would greatly help another plant if it was close enough, but since there are millions of combinations it obviously needs a lot of research before you even start.

I don't have enough ground really for a respectable veg. garden now, so it would be nice to grow a few veg. here and there in between other plants and accept the challenge of making it both work and look good as well. Since most town gardens are quite small these days, this is surely a common problem that needs to be properly recognised and addressed so that many of us can have a go without it being too technical or daunting.

It would be great if he did join GC and could advise us on our specific needs, as everyone would be different in some way, and help out with knowing how to make the best use of the ground through the changing seasons.

 

Hi DAG ...

Here is another article written by Stu which I posted in Edible Gardening back in January which may be of interest to you ....

http://www.gardenerscorner.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?t=8100