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Do not make the mistake of getting Milton’s Paradise Lost mixed up with Paradise Lot by Eric Toensmeier and Jonathan Bates. If you get confused you will be disappointed, though I suppose to some people, the idea of a permaculture garden on your one-tenth of an acre city lot might be Hell. I have a coworker who would feel that way. She came to me today to ask about a fast and easy solution to a small weedy patch of grass between her sidewalk and driveway and in the process told me she hated being outdoors. Huh? Bugs! Sunburn! Dirt! I am baffled, but I gave her an easy solution that will require very little time outside and she will probably even be able to manage it without getting her hands dirty. She was happy. But back to the book.
Besides the subject matter being totally different than Milton, the writing is, well, let's say it's not Milton. It is competent, don't get me wrong, but you won't be sent into raptures over the beauty of a description of sweet cicely. This is not one of those lyrical, meditative “I made a garden” books.
Nonetheless, I enjoyed it very much. Eric and Jonathan, each trained in permaculture, had been renting a farm in Massachusetts and running a mail-order permaculture nursery. They decided that they wanted to put their knowledge to the test in an urban setting. They bought a duplex in Holyoke. The yard was a patch of scraggly grass and the soil was typical compacted city dirt of poor quality. Perfect.
They moved into their house in January 2004. They spent a year getting to know the light and shade, the wet and dry areas of their lot. They also got to work on improving the soil. They talked about what they wanted to accomplish and began designing on paper. In the spring of 2005 they started planting.
The goal of permaculture is to create a self-sustaining food garden ecosystem that needs no outside input of materials. Through a lot of hard work and trial and error and lots of failures, they managed to do it. After eight years the garden was grown up and producing a huge amount of food. Unfortunately, dopey me, didn't mark the page with the numbers, but I was astonished. Even more astonishing is that they thought they could produce even more if the two of them and their wives (they each got married in the midst of their experiment) could quit their day jobs and spend all day working in the garden. Not realistic, but it is quite something for a small garden like that to be able to produce such large quantities of food.
Their garden was a lot more work than the ideal permaculture garden should be but their goals were quite different than mine would be. I'd want to plant it all and then maintain it. They were constantly experimenting, trying new plants they weren't sure would be hardy, grafting fruit trees, and conducting plant breeding experiments. To be able to do this on one-tenth of an acre is inspiring as is the fact that they had something like 250 different kinds of plants growing there.
The garden they created helped them get to know their neighbors who also benefited from the fruits of their labor. They also received lots of requests for garden tours from individuals, garden groups and students. They love giving tours because it gives them the opportunity to teach as well as learn from others.
At the back of the book they kindly include plant lists, an extensive bibliography, and web resources. While they called their climate cold, they are not as cold as it gets in Minneapolis and I doubt I will be able to grow any of the tropical plants they were able to create microclimates for. I also don't know if I would be able to grow greens all winter in an unheated greenhouse, but that is something to investigate. Still, a good book for anyone interested in this sort of gardening. The initial work of creating such a garden can be daunting, but it helps to learn that even experts suffer from the aches and pains of physical labor as well as face challenges and setbacks. It is also a reminder that gardening is a continuous process that is never truly finished.
What’s nice about this is that it sounds like the garden came first and then the book. Call me cynical, but I baulk these days at the idea-for-a-book ventures that then become the requisite book. They lack soul. These guys sound much more authentic.
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Litlove, you know, you are right. So many nonfiction books seem to be written in order for the author to have an adventure. Eric and Jonathan made their garden with no view of a book. Eric has written a few books on permaculture design but this undertaking was entirely personal. From the acknowledgments in the back it seems it was friends and colleagues who encouraged them to write about their garden which does make for a more authentic book.
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This sounds like a gardening book that might interest even me! As well as creating their microclimates they seem to have inspired a sort of mini “spirit of the blitz” in their neighbours and friends.
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Ian, their garden work did do much to inspire the people around them. Neighbors on both sides of them lost large trees for various reasons and were going to plant big purely ornamental trees instead that would have caused trouble in Paradise. But they had such good relations with them that they were able to talk both neighbors into planting different trees that would provide the owners food and also work as additional pollinators for their own garden trees. And, it seems, the kids in the area loved to come visit and learn and help out. At the close of the book they were hoping to start working to get city ordinances changed to allow for beekeeping and the installation of grey water systems.
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Makes me sad. My neighbors cut down their beautiful mature trees and put in grass and ornamentals which require a lot of water and chemicals to maintain in our acid-clay soil.
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severalfourmany, oh that is very sad. I understand cutting down a mature tree if it is sick or causing damage to a house or something but to do it in order to plant grass and ornamentals? Ridiculous.
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On a site about their book Toensmeier/Bates are described as “plant geeks”- I love it!
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Ian, oh yes, they are totally plant geeks. It’s fun because it means they are passionate about what they do.
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Sounds like an interesting book and it helps me to feel better about my own gardening adventures. What a luxury to have a year to explore the sun and climate patters. I couldn’t wait that long and did my best estimates based on a month or two. However, I never could have figured out the microclimates in my yard without actually planting and growing things. Strong storm winds have a big influence on parts of my yard. The only way to learn about that is to see what happened to stuff the next day.
This is my fourth year and hopefully the first year that I will have spent substantially less on the garden than buying similar produce at the store. It took that long for me to learn what will grow well vs. what doesn’t grow (or what grows well and feeds the birds, bugs and critters). I’ve tried hundreds of varieties of plants and am gradually narrowing down to ones that grow, yield and taste the best. Nice to know that the pros didn’t get it right the first time either.
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severalfourmany, I agree about discovering the microclimates in your garden requiring experimenting. They show though that you can create microclimates too with things like a pond or trees or stone walls. In front of their house they have an asphalt parking area and since it retains heat, it makes for a really warm area and this is how they managed to grow tropical plants.
It sounds like you are quite the gardener! The pros always make it seem so easy though don’t they? But these too freely admit that it is not which is quite heartening. I hope you have a good gardening season!
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Once upon a time I dug up a small corner of the sod right next to my patio and started planting flowers. It became such a passion that gardening stuff was always what I got for my birthday and Mother’s Day. I fell in love with mushroom compost – the smell the feel and what it did to the soil. After a few years of joyful gardening I had to stop and take care of other things. But inspired by your recent posts, I’ve started again, albeit in a small way. Now I want to relearn the Latin names of the plants and cut back the lantana, and re-fill the hummingbird feeders, and dead-head the flowers and marvel at the delphiniums and smell the sweet basil. I had forgotten, but now I remember. Thanks Stef.
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Grad, oh, so wonderful! There is something magical about taking care of growing things and the payoffs are many. So glad my gardening adventurous have jogged your memory about why you love gardening so much. Did you know there is a book called Latin for Gardeners? I am hoping to add a copy to my personal library one of these days.
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Your garden posts always inspire me to go out and work in my yard. Alas I don’t quite have the time or money at the moment to invest in it like I would like, but I feel like I could do something on a small scale (and need to look for the flowers you suggested for containers still…). I keep thinking that when it warms up properly I will and here it is June–I had better not wait much longer I think. Do you think you would ever want to create a garden on the same scale as the authors did?
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Danielle, I am a big advocate for gardening at any scale so I am glad you enjoy my garden posts! We are waiting for it to get warm here too. My poor tomatoes and peppers are looking so sad and scraggly and haven’t grown an inch since I planted them. I would love to do a garden on the same scale as the authors. That is my backyard plan. I don’t have the resources to do it as quickly as they did but all those berries I planted this year are part of the plan. The front yard will all be prairie, more or less. So much to do!
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I absolutely love the name of your blog!
I found your post quite entertaining – I think your words are written in a very unique tone that I really don’t see that often!
I recently posted a review on Milton’s Paradise Lost:
http://arewethereyetblog.us/2016/08/27/review-paradise-lost/
Audrey š
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