Permaculture and Food Forests as Sustenance for Body, Mind and Soul

Permaculture and food forests are among the best ways of farming for a truly sustainable future, with zero need for GMOs or petrochemical inputs. They progressively build better and better soil over time, rather than stripping, depleting and poisoning the soil, as is currently occurring on a massive scale in conventional factory farming.

The depletion of our arable agricultural soils is a serious issue worldwide, leading to lower harvests of food with fewer minerals and drastically reduced nutritional values than in decades past. Commercially available seed for large scale production are typically bred for long keeping, so that they can be shipped long distances without spoilage, rather than for nutritional value or taste.

Heirloom open-pollinated seed varieties are rapidly being lost, which include varieties selected b gardeners over hundreds and thousands of years for their adaptations to specific conditions in specific locales, and only by ramping up our efforts at seed saving from year to year can we maintain and expand the available varieties once more. And as one who grows only heirloom tomatoes, as just one example, I can tell you without hesitation that a fully ripe heirloom tomato, plucked fresh and eaten that day, is vastly superior in taste and nutrition to the pretenders being sold in your local supermarket. There is simply no comparison.

Unfortunately, too many of our governments have failed to learn from past mistakes, and seem instead to be intent upon repeating them. And, in the case of the United States government, they are complicit in allowing, and even encouraging, the hostile takeover of our food supply. This must end, now.

I've been growing organically since I learned what it meant, which was the summer when I was fourteen, and got my first after school job in my dad's new business, which my mom convinced him to buy shortly after their divorce. This was a small health food store near our home in Monterey Park, a Los Angeles suburb, where I became the relief cashier for the main cashier, my older sister Carol, who was also the de facto store manager.

Since afternoons were the slow time, I had a lot of time to myself, and spent most of it reading the magazines that the store carried, which included Organic Gardening and Farming, The Mother Earth News, Prevention, and more. I was completely shocked to learn how toxic our food supply had become, and how easily it could be remedied, so I was determined to do something about it, which was supported by both my mom and dad.

Of course, my mom had been gardening mostly organically all my life, as our large back yard included numerous fruit trees, including peaches, nectarines, natal plums, lemons, strawberry guavas, loquats, a strawberry patch, large artichoke bushes and more, along with a large compost pile. We also had wonderful Russian olive trees that I loved to climb as a kid.

During summer vacations, I visited my mother's parents in Gallup, New Mexico, where my grandmother had an enviable garden in the backyard, including many of her favorite miniature rose bushes. And it was in my grandmother's garden that I was introduced to my first edible flowers, when she plucked a daylily for me, and instructed me to eat the petals, which I did. They were sweet, crunchy, and delicious, and quite lovely as a garnish in salads.

My great-grandmother died when I was twelve, but I remember many visits to her house as well, and like my mother, while she had plenty of flowers, she was more into fruit trees and edible crops, including a huge mulberry tree by her front ditch. My sister and I lamented that we were never able to visit when the tree was actually in fruit, as by the time we got out of school for the summer, the fruit had been done for over a month.

She also kept a flock of bantam chickens, for eggs, which were underfoot pretty much any time you were in the back yard, and which I dearly loved. They were hilarious and very sweet, and were among the reasons why I wanted a flock of my own one day.

But it wasn't until I worked in the health food store that I became determined to one day have my own piece of land on which I could grow my own food, raise some animals, and make the land bloom. My goal was always to have a place that was at least partially wooded, providing excellent habitat for wildlife, and kept as natural as possible, while adding useful and beneficial native plants that were rare or absent on the land.

We are still in the very early stages of developing our current place, which will ultimately include a permaculture food forest with a series of ponds and swales. It will incorporate a series of greenhouses, each suited to plants from different ecological niches, and aquaponic systems to feed the plants and provide protein for us and our animals, while helping to keep the greenhouses warm in the winter.

Toward that end, we have already planted well over a hundred fruit and nut trees and bushes, along with other beneficial perennial plants, such as rhubarb, horseradish and asparagus. We have a small flock of egg-laying poultry, small animals and a couple of pasture pets, and we're just getting started.

Part of my purpose here on Steemit is to inspire others to do the same, whether on acreage or a small city lot, or even in an apartment: with today's technology, a lack of space is no longer a barrier to growing at least some of your own food, and you can do so easily and inexpensively, while feeding your body, mind and soul in the process.

Let's do this together.