Organic Garden Design
What’s the difference between organic gardening and permaculture? Permaculture is a multidisciplinary activity that mixes organic gardening with other fields like water, housing, animal husbandry and many more. If that sounds complex, the idea is to achieve a garden that produces a lot of food in a small area without needing a lot of time or inputs.
Some organic gardening is quite heavy in inputs. An input is something you need to regularly import to the site. It might be town water, organic fertilizer, biological pesticide or mulch. An organic garden can be low in inputs by using water that moves passively through the site, biological resources and inbuilt mulch sources.
High biological activity produces a lot of food. You can create conditions for high soil biological activity by:
moving plenty of on site moisture through it
thick & complex mulch
shade & shelter
minimal compaction or disturbance
high site biodiversity.
Set this up and the system largely self maintains, because a healthy biology is quite capable of doing well without any human interference.
The design of such a garden means setting up all the above factors and probably a few more. Spend time thinking about how to set up a healthy garden and you should save work later.
