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INTERVIEW:
ECOTECTURE:Does your garden feed you?
LIVINGSTON: Yes. We don’t buy any
fruit or vegetables, only staples like bread and the scones we had
when you came here today.
Four of us eat out of the garden, my husband and I and my two resident
Permaculture students. I didn’t even show you the back, but
it is real sunny (in early January). We have broccoli, cauliflower,
lots of kale, collards, chard, lettuce and onions coming in. We
still have tomatoes, because we have had such a warm winter. We
still have potatoes and a number of different kinds of tubers all
throughout the garden.
I don’t have to import anything into this garden any more,
and I will be able to grow food for . . . ever. If I kept it managed,
with the chickens, and composting and keeping our food loop going
from the garden to the table to the compost, there is no need to
import any food. This is a sustainable system.
If the Y2K thing had happened, and there was no food, and we did
not stock up on anything, we would be still eating just fine out
of the garden for the whole rest of the winter, and be starting
more. Now is the time to start more seeds. In another two months
there would be even more food on its way.
ECOTECTURE: Do you collect your own
seeds?
LIVINGSTON: Yes, we do. We collect not
all of our own seed. For example, cabbages. If you have broccoli,
cauliflower, and Brussel sprouts all coming in at the same time,
you will get some weird crosses from the Romenesco Broccoli’s,
for example. But, you know you could, you could save your seed,
people have done that for millennia, and you could create your own
varieties. Or, if I only grew one kind of cabbage that I really
liked I’d get the two varieties by saving the seeds. But it
is insect pollinated, so, in a small space like this, it is a little
tricky to do.
On one level, you could say, "Sure, I could collect those
seeds and plant them and I would be growing food. Anything I would
grow from those seeds would be edible. It probably would taste pretty
good. But it wouldn’t be necessarily the broccoli that . .
. . it would be a brocciflower, or something like that (laughs.)
ECOTECTURE: You are eating entirely
out of your garden. How much land to you have?
LIVINGSTON: A little less than an acre.
About three quarters of an acre.
ECOTECTURE: And you are feeding four
people?
LIVINGSTON: Yes. And out of that—you
can see—we are not even planting all of it. We could be producing
a lot more. With all this running around we do . . . we are really
only growing for our own needs.
ECOTECTURE: With a Permaculture garden,
approximately how much space you would need to feed, say, a family
of four? Half an acre?
| I guess you could probably feed twenty to thirty
families on a half an acre. |
LIVINGSTON: That’s a hard one.
I would guess way less than half an acre. I guess you could probably
feed twenty to thirty families on a half an acre.
ECOTECTURE: On a half an acre?
LIVINGSTON: Oh yeah. You can grow a
lot.
ECOTECTURE: . . . of regular soil. You
are not talking about in barrels or anything like that?
LIVINGSTON: No, with Permaculture if
you wanted to double that, you could.
ECOTECTURE: Really?
LIVINGSTON: Yes, you could. You absolutely
could. Because you start thinking in terms of cubic feet instead
of square feet. You can start trellising, for example. One of the
methods of increasing your production is going vertical. It is called
stacking. Permaculturalists think in terms of multiple canopies,
so you have the high tree layer, lower tree layer, vining layer,
shrub layer, herb layer, ground cover layer and the root layer.
You have all these different layers, then you pattern your garden
to allow the sun to come in as you need it. So you might create
little meadow areas where you can grow cantaloupes or tomatoes or
something that needs really hot sun.
One of the things we do here on the (California) Coast is pattern
our garden into a south facing horse shoe shape with something like
clorin or bamboo with a light colored, big, reflective leaf on the
back side so you are not only getting convection heat from the ground,
but you are also getting reflected heat from the leaves of the plant.
Then you add straw mulch. If you notice . . . . this came to me,
though everyone else knows about it . . . I discovered it by walking
into an area that is mowed, and it is all brown underneath the mowed
area. You go from where it was kind of green and taller grass into
the mowed grass and you can feel the heat coming up to your face
on a hot day or a warm day, just from the color of the straw. I
got, "Oh, we can mulch our tomatoes and our cantaloupes with
straw and that will help them ripen in the sun. Otherwise, it is
very difficult to ripen tomatoes on the Coast unless you are growing
hybrids that are designed for that.
If your goal is to have the most productive farm, to be able to
create as many crops as possible, and, say, to make the most money
from those crops, you certainly can do it. Working within these
Permaculture principles is great.
That is not our goal here. I’m already enjoying about as much
abundance as I can stand. I touched down—I’ve been traveling
a lot—I come home and I have one day and it’s, "OK.
Let’s put up two more bushels of apples." Slice them,
puree them, can them, dry them and do whatever we can do and that
is what we have been doing all summer. So, one of the other principals
of Permaculture is that you design these productive systems so that
you have some place to put all this stuff, or it will result in
pollution.
It will either end up as an imbalance of too much rotting food
on the ground, or an imbalance of not enough habitat and too many
exotics to have a nice balance with the birds and other critters
that cohabitate this place with me. I don’t necessarily think
that to just go in the full production direction is necessarily
wise, but we can certainly provide for enough for you and however
many other people you need. From there, you can figure out what
you will do with your space.
| We got the clay (for the cobb-construction walls)
from the pond we dug, and built the building with it. |
When we look at a yield, we don’t look only look at how many
tomatoes we can grow. We consider how many inputs are we adding
to the garden, and subtract that from the outputs. We will get all
the energy that goes into what
we are producing.
My office building is a good example. (See Photo, Part
1 of this interview in the ECOTECTURE library.) We got the clay
(for the cobb-construction walls) from the pond we dug, and built
the building with it. That is different from importing wood from
Pacific Lumber. The little lumber we did use came from a local mill.
Two local guys resurfaced old boards. They also resurface old telephone
poles, and only take trees that have to come down for some other
reason rather than for logging. They have either fallen down, or
threatened someone’s house, or they are coming down anyway.
They will be chopped up for firewood—chipped up. Or, these
guys can mill them into lumber. That is where we get our wood. It
is all local. The cabinets we are getting for our kitchen come from
an oak tree that fell two miles from here. Two years ago, our cabinet
maker milled it, stickered and dried it, and now he is going to
use it and we are fortunate enough to be able to buy that from him
instead of supporting some unsustainable logging operation.
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