I met Steve Whitman a few months ago at D Acres in Dorchester, New Hampshire, where, for the past year, I’ve been filming a documentary. Steve teaches permaculture design at a couple of colleges in NH, as well as at venues like D Acres, an organic farm worked by Josh Trought and a talented team of human beings, oxen, pigs, chickens, bees, worms and countless micro-organisms.
For the past 7 or 8 years Steve has been gradually turning his suburban lot in Plymouth, NH into a mini-farm, experimenting with various permaculture design concepts, and continuously adjusting what he’s doing as he finds what works best. A few years ago he built several small ponds to manage the water that runs across a slope in his yard. Last year he turned one of those ponds into a rice paddy (yes, a rice paddy in NH; I’m not making this up.) And next year he’ll convert the remaining ponds into paddies while he tries out some ten varieties of rice. This year he covered his front lawn with cardboard and woodchips and built up beds with manure, chips and small branches from an ash tree which formerly shaded the lawn. Next spring he’ll plant potatoes in those beds. Last week he was cutting winter greens in his green house as we talked and as nine hens sang about egg-laying in the background.
The neighbors, of course, are curious. They ask questions. And Steve likes that. His vision is a neighborhood of little mini-farms, a marvelous, rich and productive web of local agroecological food production.
Something that may give new meaning to the pejorative “Well, there goes the neighborhood.”
Steve and Josh met back in 1997 at a point when Josh was just beginning to think about how to turn some scrappy north slope forest into land for growing food crops. If you’ve ever walked an acre of this kind of land after the trees have just been cut, you’ll know that any guy who can look at that thin, stony, almost sterile forest floor soil and imagine growing serious food crops instead of moose browse, brambles and tree stump suckers is either in the grip of a serious delusion or in possession of some secret knowledge that none of the rest of us are privy to.
In Josh’s case, it was more of the latter and less of the former. And the knowledge isn’t really secret; it’s just floating our way, still a considerable distance up a tributary that is feeding the Main Stream. But mention permaculture, evergreen agriculture, woodland gardening or agroecology the next time you find yourself in a bar crowded with hard-core food growing types, and somebody will probably buy you a pint of local brew. (If you do find yourself in that bar, please email me the location.)
People like Josh and Steve are not just pushing the boundaries of more conventional organic agriculture with new technologies or clever new ideas. They are working out ways to fundamentally change the way we think about growing food on a relatively small scale. The big idea here is to encourage the growth of a local perennial ecology which is more or less self-sustaining and is specific to the patch where it, hopefully, flourishes.
So agroecology or permaculture is about trying to figure out all the stuff that’s already in place, or going on, where you want to grow food, figuring how the systems (water flow, insect life, soil composition, existing plant growth, human and animal activity, and more) work, and then adjusting things so you eventually get the most food for the least effort and use of inputs.
I had been filming at D Acres for more than half a year before I finally began to get it. Beth was standing in the middle of what she called a “woodland garden”, an eighth of an acre of 20 or more plant varieties, all growing more or less happily together: nut trees, fruit trees, mullen, rhubarb, currants, jerusalem artichokes, berries, echinacea, sea kale and on and on. The D Acres farmers had planted this crowd with considerable care, and have been tending it to be sure that all the plants play well with each other. In mid summer the bumble bees are so loud you have to raise your voice to talk. And throughout the summer and into the fall there’s always some crop coming ready to harvest.
Beth said it very simply: “The most important plants growing here don’t feed us; they feed the bees and feed the soil.”
I’m off to the grocery store to grab a car load of cardboard. There’s still no snow on the ground here, and so I’ve got a few days to put the cardboard on my lawn, manure and wood chips from a local horse ranch on the cardboard, top off this lasagna with a mulch of leaves, plant it with potatoes in the spring and see if I can get the neighbors talking.