Permaculture Foundation Planting

I am really excited about a new garden area that I've been thinking about for over a year.

When we bought our house a decade ago, it was basically brand new and it had zero landscaping. We started a garden and began to add fruit trees early on, but the areas along the foundation of our house remained depressingly bare. We've finally made a start towards fixing that with a permaculture food/flower border.

Planning 

When I was designing this border, I wanted it to fulfill several functions. First, I wanted it to take advantage of the microclimate. The south side of a brick house is a great place to grow more tender plants. I also wanted to mix edible plants with those helpful to pollinators. Lastly, I wanted it to be attractive.

My initial planting plan

Sheet Mulch

Last spring we sheet mulched a long bed around the west and south foundation of our house. First, a layer of cardboard was laid to block weeds and grass. This was topped it off with some good quality topsoil left over from our hugelkulture project, some compost, and then a 6" layer of wood chips. We let it sit for a full year.

By this spring the wood chips had decayed significantly and the soil underneath was rich, black, and full of worms.


The plants

The first plants I selected for the border were fig and wisteria. The fig I chose, Chicago Hardy Fig, is, like its name states, a more hardy selection, but it will greatly benefit from the warm southerly aspect. Wisteria is a nitrogen fixer, and native American Wisteria (Wisteria frutescens) is much less likely to grow out of control than its Asian cousins.

I also knew I wanted to try rhubarb and rosemary in this location. Rhubarb is a perennial, and I think its leaves are quite dramatic and will be a nice contrasting foilage. I have never managed to over-winter rosemary successfully in other locations on our property, so I decided to nestle in a plant close to the fig tree and hope for the best.

The other main nitrogen fixer I chose is Lespedeza thunbergii 'Gibraltar'. I have wanted to plant this for years and finally located it in a specialist nursery on the east coast. It is a truly gorgeous plant that is covered with blossoms in the fall. It will make great mulch as it has to be cut back each year, releasing nitrogen to feed its neighbors.

I decided against comfrey in the border. Comfrey is incredibly useful and (I think) beautiful, but once you plant it, you'll have it forever. I didn't want to make that commitment in this location. I decided instead to plant borage. Borage is also a great mulch plant. It self-seeds readily, but doesn't have such a tenacious root system.

The last plant I decided was a must-have is Butterfly Bush (Buddleia davidii). I know this is a controversial choice as it is not native and can be invasive in some areas. Although butterflies like it, as a non-native, it does not provide all the necessary food, habitat, etc. that natives do. After weighing it out, I decided to go ahead and plant it. I don't think buddleia is particularly rampant in NE Kansas. I will be providing many native plants, both in this border and throughout our property. The structure that a medium-sized bush will provide to the design will be welcome.

The remaining plants are a variety of flowering herbs chosen for beauty and value as medicine and/or for pollinators.

It doesn't look like much now, but with time, it will be lovely and productive

Plant List and functions*

-American Wisteria (Wisteria frutescens) 'Amethyst Falls' - Nitrogen fixer, invertebrate shelter, nectary
-Black-Eyed Susan (Rudbeckia fulgida) - nectary, wildlife, possibly medicinal
-Blazing Star (Liatris spicata) - nectary, medicinal, wildlife
-Borage (Borago officinalis)  - edible, medicinal, nectary
-Bush Clover (lespedeza thunbergii) 'Gibraltar' - Nitrogen fixer, nectary
-Catmint (Nepeta) - nectary
-Chamomile (Matricaria chamomila) - edible, tea, medicinal, nectary
-Chives (Allium schoenoprasum) - edible, aromatic confuser, nectary, dynamic accumulator, ground cover
-Coreopsis (Coreopsis verticillata) 'Moonbeam' - nectary, groundcover
-Cosmos (Cosmos bipinnatus)- nectary
-Daisy (Leucanthemum x superbum) 'Becky' - nectary
-Fig 'Chicago Hardy' - edible, medicinal
-Hyssop (Agastache) - Invertebrate shelter, nectary, medicinal, aromatic confuser
-Joe Pye Weed (Eupatorium dubium) 'Baby Joe' - nectary, medicinal
-Phlox (Phlox paniculata) - nectary
-Purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea) - tea, medicinal, invertebrate shelter, nectary
-Rhubarb - edible, medicinal
-Rosemary - edible, tea, medicinal, nectary, aromatic confuser, invertebrate shelter, wildlife
-Russian Sage (Perovskia atriplicifolia) - edible flowers, possibly medicinal
-Salvia 'May Night' - nectary
-Sedum 'Autumn Joy' - nectary
-Wild Bergamot (Monarda fistulosa) - culinary, tea, medicinal, wildlife, invertebrate shelter, nectary, aromatic confuser
-Yarrow (Achillea millefolium) - medicinal, invertebrate shelter, nectary, dynamic accumulator, ground cover, aromatic confuser

*Functions taken from Edible Forest Gardens, Volume 2 by Jacke and Toensmeier

The future

This is definitely a work in progress. I looking forward to watching all the tiny plants fill in and to add more to the border next year. I am particularly interested in more perennial vegetables and greens. I want to add more ground cover-type plants and dynamic accumulators as well. I also plan to plant some saffron crocus bulbs. It is a bit too cold up on our windy hill to grow saffron, but I'd like to try it in the warm south-facing border.

What is Permaculture? Our Farm Goals

I've always been interested in homesteading. I'm sure it is partly the result of reading Laura Ingalls Wilder's books over and over as a child. Milk a cow? Preserve jam? Make cheese? Yep, that sounded like fun to me from a young age. I clipped articles out of magazines on growing citrus trees in pots and sighed over the descriptions of the heady scent of old-fashioned roses that I read about in library books.

And now that I am an adult with a few acres of my own to play with, I've already made quite a few of those childhood fantasies come true. The plan our permaculture designer (Steve Moring of Vajra Land Management) came up with will take us to the next level.

Some readers might be unfamiliar with permaculture and I think the easiest way for me to explain it will be to list the farm goals Lee and I gave Steve as we started the design process. Permaculture will make all of these possible.

GUST FRONT FARM'S GOALS: 

- To create a resilient, food productive landscape. We know that through good design it is possible to work smarter, not harder. We want to use our land to the utmost, especially from the standpoint of water conservation. With the climate growing hotter and drier, we believe this is critical.

Our current kitchen garden is composed of raised beds surrounded by chicken runs. The chickens
really help keep bugs down and they benefit by the close proximity by getting lots of garden goodies. 

 - To create a more sustainable system that utilizes our poultry. Currently we are buying lots of inputs (poultry feed, fertilizers, compost, etc.) We'd like plants we could use as forage for poultry (and possibly the cattle we are getting in the future). Once we sort out fencing arrangements we plan on allowing our geese to free-range full time and our other birds (ducks and chickens) part-time. Since we breed several rare varieties some birds will unfortunately will not be able to free range (I refuse to allow coyotes to eat expensive birds), but most should get at least some range time.

The barn we built in 2014. The breeding pen fencing will also serve as a trellis for
grapes. The grapevines will provide summer shade and of course food.  

 -To create pond area for the waterfowl.

There will be a small pond that will be fed via a swale system through the orchard.

 - Going along with the idea of working smarter, not harder: to create areas for perennial vegetables as well as more areas for annual vegetables, compost crops, etc.

Geese in the garden eating weeds

 - To continue to develop our orchard, adding both more of the types of trees we have now as well as new varieties. I have been following the spray protocol established in The Holistic Orchardby Michael Phillips.

Spring-time cherry blossoms

 -While we'd like to have a long harvest season, I'd prefer plants that yield their harvest all at once. For example, everbearing strawberries drive me crazy; a summer of harvesting a handful of strawberries every week is not my idea of fun. I much prefer June bearing strawberries. I can, freeze, and dehydrate the surplus before moving on to the next berry, fruit, etc. that is ripe.

Cucumbers, carrots, zucchini, and cabbage from our kitchen garden

 -To provide habitat for beneficial/predatory insects and pollinators. We hope to keep bees in the next year or two.

We had five of these spiders take up residence in our raspberry patch last year. They definitely kept bug damage to the
fruit to a minimum and helped me work through my arachnophobia. 

-To minimize the effects of wind and our colder microclimate. We don't have the time or desire to cosset plants that are not hardy.

- We confess that we both like plants in straight lines and everything looking neat and tidy and that sometimes permaculture landscapes look rather unkempt to us. I would like the plantings to be neater and with a bit of an eye towards ornamentals close up to the house and driveway.

Borage planted with tomatoes is beautiful and useful. Bees love it and it is a truly effective
repellent for tomato hornworms.

Our farm goals encompass the ethos of permaculture: using land in a way that is productive, good for the earth, and good for the inhabitants.

A gorgeous summer evening

I will share the plan Steve Moring came up with in detail in a future blog post. In the meantime, here are some resources that I have found helpful as we go through this process:



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