Abby Quillen

Freelance Content Marketing Writer and Editor

Permaculture

3 Powerful Reasons to Plant Flowers

By

Whether they’re in the ground, in window boxes, in pots, or in a vase on your living room table, there’s such a thing as flower power.

Often the way our environment looks gets pushed to the bottom of our to-do lists. Yes, it would be nice to add a little beauty to our homes or yards, but there are more practical things to take care of, such as procuring food and keeping the children alive. For that reason, flowers once ranked low on my gardening to-do list. But I’ve changed my mind, and here’s why.

Flowers are Healing
[clickToTweet tweet=”Flower power is real. Indoor flowers are linked with health, energy, happiness, and compassion.” quote=”Flower power is real. Indoor flowers are linked with health, energy, happiness, and compassion.” theme=”style1″]

In one study, people who have flowers in their living area reported less anxiety and worry, more energy and happiness at work, and more feelings of compassion toward others. In another study, surgical patients with flowers or potted plants in their environment had lower blood pressure and reported less need for pain medication, better moods, and less anxiety and tiredness than patients without flowers.

 

3 Powerful Reasons to Plant Flowers #gardening

Flowers Breed Biodiversity

Moreover, planting flowers is a small way to begin to change the devastating story of species loss.

What do flowers have to do with species loss?

We’re currently in a biodiversity crisis. (Biodiversity is the term scientists use to describe the abundant variety of life on Earth.) Alarmingly, the International Union for Conservation of Nature warns nearly a third of known species are threatened with extinction.

The culprit?

Us.

Especially our cities.

Urban sprawl is one of the leading causes of species endangerment; it contributes to the collapse of honey bee populations and the dramatic decline in Monarch butterfly colonies.

We need biodiversity. Plants and animals clean the air and water, create soil, pollinate crops, and recycle waste. It’s our life support system.

Feeling hopeless yet?

Don’t worry, I’m getting to the hopeful part.

A big part of the problem is that our cities are remarkably homogeneous. Ever wondered why nearly every city in the U.S. is covered in Kentucky bluegrass, even in the desert Southwest? We’ve transformed wide swaths of our country into relatively lifeless corridors, and pollinators have dwindling places to live, eat, and drink.

But we can make a difference. The Biodiversity in Urban Gardens (BUG) research project, a large-scale, eight-year British study, indicates what we plant in our yards and gardens can significantly impact the biodiversity of a city. By designing outdoor spaces to attract and accommodate birds, bats, bees, butterflies, beetles, and other small animals, we can create safe corridors for wildlife and protect endangered species.

Biodiversity depends on bugs.

Insects are food for a large number of species, including amphibians, reptiles, rodents, spiders, and birds. Plus, insects are pollinators, so they’re necessary for plant biodiversity.

How do you feed and attract insects? First, put the pesticides away! Then, plant flowers!

That’s right, those very same lifeforms that are healing to us can turn a lifeless lawn into a humming, buzzing, biodiverse place of life.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Don’t underestimate flowers. They’re powerful, healing, and essential for healthy ecosystems.” quote=”Don’t underestimate flowers. They’re powerful, healing, and essential for healthy ecosystems.” theme=”style1″]

Flowers Help Your Vegetable Garden Thrive

If you have a vegetable garden and you’re thinking the last thing you want to do is welcome more insects into your life, I can relate. But trust me, you want to plant flowers. Flowers have been shown to increase veggie yields and minimize pest damage because they attract beneficial pollinators and predators. In one study, farmers reduced cereal-leaf beetle damage in winter wheat fields by 62 percent by planting flower strips within rows of wheat. In another, farmers increased mango harvests by 40 percent when they planted native flowers nearby.

Flowers are Good for Everyone

When we plant flowers, everyone wins.

Humans have a disastrous track record when it comes to the environment, and it’s natural to feel paralyzed, grief-stricken, and angry about it.

Meanwhile, let’s plant flowers!

Welcoming biodiversity into yards and cities creates a welcoming space for all life.

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us. - Iris Murdoch #quote

If you liked this post check out these related posts:

Do you have a flower garden? What kind of insects and wildlife do you see in your yard?

Save

Save

Become the Solution

By

garden 005

I love brainstorming for solutions. That’s why I started this blog. I wanted to ponder answers to some of the questions I was asking myself after my first son was born, like how can my husband and I create a healthy, happy, sustainable family life? How can societies redesign communities for health and happiness? Four years later I’m still here brainstorming.

Often I come back to a movement that may hold some of the answers: permaculture.

Permaculture is a gardening movement that originated in the 1970s in Australia. Its “father” Bill Mollison defines it as “a philosophy of working with, rather than against nature; of protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless labor; and of looking at plants and animals in all their functions, rather than treating any area as a single-product system.”

Sound confusing? I haven’t even gotten into the three tenets or twelve design principles. Honestly, I don’t wholly understand permaculture, which may be why I’ve yet to transform my yard into a food forest.

But I find it to be an incredibly refreshing and hopeful philosophy because it re-frames a tired conversation about our role in nature.

Most of us are well-versed on humans’ criminal performance as stewards of the natural world. Nearly all my earth science lessons from first grade through college ended with discussions of humans’ destruction: a hole in the ozone layer, acid rain, rampant pollution, global climate change. After my dad died, I saw a photo of a polluted landscape and immediately recognized the emotion I’d been feeling during all of these environmental lessons: grief. I’m sure I’m not alone in that emotion.

The environmental movement often espouses footprint reduction as the solution to the devastation. In An Inconvenient Truth, we saw a list of the same solutions I heard in elementary science classes: turn off the lights, drive less, buy energy efficient appliances.

As you know, I’m all for finding joy in simpler lives. But I’m not convinced it’s the answer to our environmental problems.

Derrick Jensen makes a good point in his 2009 critique of simple living “Forget Shorter Showers”: “The logic behind simple living as a political act is suicide. . . . we can easily come to believe that we will cause the least destruction possible if we are dead.” Jensen is trying to provoke political action in his essay, but he captures how psychologically depressing and even destructive it is to think the way we can best serve the world is to disappear.

If our presence itself is the problem, how can we be the solution?

Perhaps that’s why when I first read about permaculture, I felt a rush of relief. The movement is not about shrinking, shriveling, or getting smaller. The ultimate goal isn’t disappearing. It’s about doing something productive that makes the world a better place. It’s about improving the environment through our actions.

In their memoir Paradise Lot: Two Plant Geeks, One-Tenth of an Acre, and the Making of an Edible Garden Oasis in the City, Eric Toensmeier and Jonathan Bates describe how they built a permaculture food forest that transformed their barren urban lot into a high yield food-producing habitat for fish, snails, frogs, salamanders, raccoons, opossums, woodchucks, bugs, and worms. “Imagine what would happen,” Toensmeier writes, “if we as a species paid similar attention to all the degraded and abandoned lands of the world.”

Permaculture is incredibly powerful because it inspires us to become the solution. It shows us that we can create systems of abundance where everybody wins.

What if we apply the same mindset to other seemingly entrenched problems? We’d probably be able to re-frame all kinds of tired conversations and focus on what we can design and create to affect the world for the better.

It’s the mindset that inspired Seattle to create Beacon Food Forest, seven acres of fruit trees, berry bushes, herbs and vegetables that will be open to the public for foraging, that helped Judy Wicks build a successful business while creating a thriving local economy in Philadelphia, and that helped a Spanish biologist build a fish farm in Southwest Spain that reversed the ecological destruction of the Guadalquiver River valley.

If you haven’t seen Dan Barber’s TED Talk about that Spanish fish farm, it’s an incredible reminder of what can happen when we become the solution.

Check out these resources for more inspiration:

Save

13 Aha Moments in 2013

By

IMG_6948

In 2010 and 2012, I shared the magic moments when I heard or read something that surprised or inspired me. Moments that made me say, “aha.” As we say farewell to 2013, I have 13 more for you:

Cooking might be the most important factor in fixing our public health crisis. It’s the single most important thing you can do for your health. – Michal Pollan

The next time you look in a mirror, think about this: In many ways you’re more microbe than human. There are 10 times more cells from microorganisms like bacteria and fungi in and on our bodies than there are human cells. – Rob Stein

You can find a way to make economic exchange one of the most satisfying, meaningful, and loving of human interactions.” – Judy Wicks

Since there is no “healthy soil/healthy microbe” label that can steer us toward these farms, my suggestion is to ask this simple question: “Does the farmer live on the farm?” Farmers who live on their land and feed their family from it tend to care for their soil as if it were another family member. – Daphne Miller

In Asian languages, the word for mind and the word for heart are same. So if you’re not hearing mindfulness in some deep way as heartfulness, you’re not really understanding it. Compassion and kindness towards oneself are intrinsically woven into it. You could think of mindfulness as wise and affectionate attention. – Jon Kabat-Zinn

“A seed makes itself. A seed doesn’t need a geneticist or hybridist or publicist or matchmaker. But it needs help. Sometimes it needs a moth or a wasp or a gust of wind. Sometimes it needs a farm and it needs a farmer. It needs a garden and a gardener. It needs you.” – Janisse Ray

Thanks to cutting-edge science, we know that happiness and optimism actually fuel performance and achievement — giving us the competitive edge that I call the happiness advantage. – Shawn Achor

I melted, and accepted, and only then could I actually enjoy his presence instead of worrying about losing him or changing him. And this, as I’ve learned, is the best way to be. – Leo Babauta

Analysis of the mid-Victorian period in the U.K. reveals that life expectancy at age 5 was as good or better than exists today, and the incidence of degenerative disease was 10% of ours. Their levels of physical activity and hence calorific intakes were approximately twice ours. They had relatively little access to alcohol and tobacco; and due to their correspondingly high intake of fruits, whole grains, oily fish and vegetables, they consumed levels of micro- and phytonutrients at approximately ten times the levels considered normal today. – Paul Clayton and Judith Rowbotham

The findings suggest that job burnout is “a stronger predictor of coronary heart disease than many other known risk factors, including blood lipid levels, physical activity, and smoking. – Anne Fisher

We also know, more definitively than we ever have, that our brains are not built for multitasking — something that precludes mindfulness altogether. When we are forced to do multiple things at once, not only do we perform worse on all of them but our memory decreases and our general wellbeing suffers a palpable hit. – Maria Konnikova

Over the same decades that children’s play has been declining, childhood mental disorders have been increasing. … Analyses of the results reveal a continuous, essentially linear, increase in anxiety and depression in young people over the decades, such that the rates of what today would be diagnosed as generalised anxiety disorder and major depression are five to eight times what they were in the 1950s. – Peter Gray

The most profound thing I have learned from indigenous land management traditions is that human impact can be positive — even necessary — for the environment. Indeed it seems to me that the goal of an environmental community should be not to reduce our impact on the landscape but to maximize our impact and make it a positive one, or at the very least to optimize our effect on the landscape and acknowledge that we can have a positive role to play. –  Eric Toensmeier

Did you hear or read something in 2013 that surprised or inspired you? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Save

Reaping the Harvest

By

July garden 015

This weekend we harvested all that remained in our three sisters garden. The boys and I dug out the ten-by-ten plot and planted it at the beginning of May on a bit of a whim, and I wrote about our adventures in polyculture in June when it was in its infancy.

Since then we watched a few heirloom corn plants shoot toward the sky. Spotted rattlesnake beans twisted up their hardy stocks, and half a dozen varieties of spiky squash plants covered the ground beneath them. The soil in our plot wasn’t great, but we harvested loads of zucchini and summer squash and at least a dozen winter squash. We ate many rounds of green rattlesnake beans and let the rest dry on the vine for cooking beans.

We eat a lot of beans around here, and it was an educational process to grow them ourselves. Beans are such a humble and inexpensive food; it’s easy to take them for granted. But once you spend an afternoon hunched over a bowl shelling them, you’re less likely to do that.

What a thrill it’s been to watch what was a patch of weeds last April transform into a robust and beautiful garden. And because beans fix nitrogen in the soil, we’ll hopefully see even bigger harvests in our plot in future years. I definitely understand why this sisterly trio has such a rich history in the Americas.

IMG_6557

IMG_6553

IMG_6558
What have you been harvesting this fall? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Save

Save

Save

Adventures in Polyculture

By

Have I mentioned that I’m in love with gardening right now? I’m finding it hard not to gush about my spinach, chard, kale, salad greens, and snap peas. We’ve also already harvested a couple of artichokes and lots of strawberries, and the hop plants are conspiring to take over our back fence. It’s thrilling to eat from our garden morning, noon, and night, and to watch the boys’ delight in finding peas and berries.

Grandma 024

Grandma 030

This season, I had the fortune of reading Paradise Lot by Eric Toensmeier and Jonathan Bates just as my gardening season began. (I reviewed it for the Summer 2013 issue of YES! Magazine.) Toensmeier and Bates managed to turn their blighted tenth-of-an acre, inner-city backyard in Holyoke, Massachusetts into a lush permaculture food forest. What struck me most about their approach to gardening was their commitment to experimentation. They inspired me to experiment with polyculture this spring.

Polyculture is the practice of planting interdependent plants together in a garden to mimic the complex relationships found in nature. The most famous polyculture is the Native American Three Sisters: beans, corn, and squash. The prickly squash leaves cover the ground to keep out weeds and predators. The corn stalks offer supports for the beans to wind up. The bean flowers attract bees and beneficial insects and fix nitrogen in the soil. Together the Three Sisters provide a balanced, nutritious diet for us.

In April I dug out a ten-by-ten foot garden to plant the Three Sisters. The soil is not ideal yet, and only a few corn came up. But the squash are doing great. I just planted the beans, so it’s too early to know whether they’ll thrive. Regardless, I’ve had a lot of fun planning and sowing a garden with such a rich history in the Americas.

I’m hooked on polyculture!

How’s your garden growing? Are you experimenting with anything new? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Save

Save

How Two Plant Geeks Grew a Permaculture Oasis in an Ordinary Backyard

By

Here’s my review of Paradise Lot by Eric Toensmeier and Jonathan Bates, which appears in the current issue of YES! Magazine.

Paradise Lot Book Cover

How Two Plant Geeks Grew a Permaculture Oasis in an Ordinary Backyard
by Abby Quillen

In “Paradise Lot,” two residents of an inner city write about how they transformed less than an acre of their blighted yard into a thriving food forest full of mushrooms, gooseberries, silkworms, and more.

Eric Toensmeier and Jonathan Bates are not your average backyard gardeners. They call themselves plant geeks, and they’re not kidding.

Toensmeier sustained a serious head injury in 1994, and to heal, he memorized thousands of Latin plant names, families, orders, and superorders. He also cross-indexed a tome of edible plants with references listing cold-hardy varieties and perennials. Bates studied biology and ecology and spends a lot of time poring over Plants for a Future, an online database of useful plants. Not surprisingly, when the two friends bought a duplex together in 2004, they didn’t build your average garden.

They set out with a list of ambitious goals. They wanted to transform their yard into a permaculture oasis by planting “a mega-diverse living ark of useful and multifunctional plants” from their bioregion and around the world. They hoped to harvest “two handfuls of fresh fruit every day for everybody in the house, including guests, for as long a season as possible,” and also to attract birds, beneficial insects, and a couple of bachelorettes.

Toensmeier, the main author of Paradise Lot, who also wrote Perennial Vegetables and co-wrote Edible Forest Gardens, doesn’t skimp on details about how he and Bates turned a “dead and blighted” one-tenth of an acre of compacted soil in a “biologically impoverished neighborhood” of Holyoke, Mass., into Food Forest Farm, an Eden for edibles. Although it is more memoir than how-to, Paradise Lot outlines the basics of sheet mulching, raising silkworms, keeping chickens, and growing mushrooms. Readers will gain an understanding of the principles and objectives of permaculture, a movement that began in Australia in the 1970s. It combines indigenous land management practices, ecological design, and sustainable methods to create low-maintenance gardens that function like natural ecosystems.

It’s inspiring and a little daunting to read about what Toensmeier and Bates achieved on their small plot in eight years. They managed to transform their Massachusetts front yard into a tropical garden. In their backyard, they installed a pond, shed, and greenhouse, and they grow about 160 edible perennials, many of which you’ve likely never heard of before. Here’s an inventory of the berries they harvest each season: honeyberries, strawberries, goumi cherries, Gerardi dwarf mulberries, four kinds of currants, gooseberries, jostas, blueberries, wild raspberries, golden Anne raspberries, ground-cherries, wintergreen berries, juneberries, and lingonberries.

Toensmeier hopes the complexity and diversity of Food Forest Farm won’t dissuade beginners from experimenting with permaculture in their backyards, since part of the reason they undertook the project in an urban area with typical inner-city problems was to make it a relevant example for amateurs to emulate. “Our desire to try many new things—new models of production, hundreds of new and interesting species—meant that we put a lot more time into a garden of this size than any reasonable person would ever do,” he writes. It’s helpful that the book shares the friends’ ample mistakes, setbacks, and revisions, making it clear that the most important thing a gardener needs if embarking on a similar project is a dedication to experimentation.

Paradise Lot offers gardeners more than inspiration and instruction. Toensmeier and Bates present an unconventional alternative to the American dream: two single men committed to a friendship and to making their backyard and neighborhood better. “Trusting each other with such a responsibility felt especially rare in this world,” Bates writes in one of the short essays he contributes to Toensmeier’s text. The friends’ dedication to each other and to a patch of land paid off. “We made our little paradise here,” Toensmeier writes.

Moreover, Paradise Lot is permeated by an incredibly hopeful and compelling vision of humans’ place in nature. Toensmeier is critical of the environmental movement’s emphasis on minimizing footprints, because he thinks that permaculture and indigenous land management practices offer us ways to affect ecosystems for the better. After all, he and Bates turned a barren lot into a habitat for fish, snails, frogs, salamanders, raccoons, opossums, woodchucks, bugs, and worms.

And the wildlife actually helps them manage the garden. The birds eat insects. The opossums eat rotten fruit when it drops. The squirrels eat unwanted Norway maple seedlings. Some permaculture farmers even employ squirrels as labor by setting out buckets near their nut trees, letting the squirrels fill them, and swapping the nuts for corn. Toensmeier is convinced it’s time for us to re-evaluate our ideas of “nature,” “agriculture,” and “wilderness” and embrace the potential to transform our communities into beautiful, healthy ecosystems like Food Forest Farm.

“Imagine what would happen,” he writes, “if we as a species paid similar attention to all the degraded and abandoned lands of the world.”

Abby Quillen wrote this article for Love and the Apocalypse, the Summer 2013 issue of YES! Magazine. Abby is a freelance writer in Eugene, Ore. She blogs at abbyquillen.com.