Natural World: A Farm for the Future: a documentary

Me & Sunsugars and a Silvery fir

The season's first frost came in and killed our garden. Ryan started clearing the dead plants away and it has made me sad. No more fresh real veggies till next year. It was our first garden, and we planted tomatoes, peas, cauliflower, carrots, onions, peppers, basil, cilantro, lettuce, rosemary, eggplant, cantalope, zucchini, and cucumber. Not everything worked out (most disappointingly the cauliflower and cantalope), but we had a huge tomato harvest and that alone was worth all of the work. Whenever I eat a home-grown tomato, I feel like I am eating the sun.
But I found this documentary just in time for me not to be too sad about seeing all the dead gardens around Provo (you can watch it for free by clicking on it). You can watch it and a lot of other documentaries for free on that website. Anyways, LOVED this documentary. The beginning is a bit boring for me because it spends a while convincing the viewer that our contemporary acrigultural methods are not sustainable because of its dependence on oil. Nothing I had not heard before, but the part that got really interesting was when the narrator interviewed permaculturists. Permaculture is something I did not know about so this was fascinating! If you want to watch the documentary and don't want me to ruin it for you, then stop reading and go watch it now.

Cucumber & pepper about to go into our omlette

The most person I found most interesting is a man named Martin Crawford, who studies the woodland forest native to his area and mimicked it by slightly shifting it by using more edibly-desirable plants. The idea is that nature doesn't need humans to come and tend it, it is entirely self-sustainable. Not every plant produces food, but every plant has a purpose: some attract beneficial insects (like mint), some have long roots that bring nutrients up from deep in the soil, some deter pests, and some help with drainage, some have shallow roots that hold together the soil, and some choke out weeds (like raspberries).
The man says he labors on average about 1 day a week, and that if his woodland farm were designed for high-yield (it is not because he is doing lots of experimenting), it could support 10 people per acre. That is amazing.

Me being a Black Pineapple tomato

I didn't spoil the whole thing, there is lots more to be learned so you should still watch it! I really want to visit some of these farms when I am in England.
I must learn more about permaculture. We did square foot gardening this year, which I am questioning right now because plants in nature are not neatly organized into squares and rows, they grow where they need to.

I remember a specific instant when I was mad at the mint because it was taking over the area around are garden and I was afraid that it would infiltrate. So I started pulling it up by the roots (did you know mint's roots grow horizontally instead of straight down, making it easy to pull up, but hard to dig up with a shovel?) but then I realized that it had tons of spiders living in there so I left them there. This bit of knowledge excites me because it is something I learned on my own. My first self-initiated bit of permacultural knowledge! I am a bit overwhelmed by the idea of permaculture because I only know a little bit about each plant, but nothing different between species or the relationships between them. The connections between them seem to be the key.

Cherry tomatoes. This picture is sideways. 

 I don't know much. But the internet does...