Sami Grover
DCL
Let's continue our exploration of the design principles of permaculture. Often this stuff feels like an institutionalized form of common sense. Last week I wrote about sectors in permaculture - namely the design tool that allows us to conceptualize and make best use of energy or resource flows that run through our design, for example sunlight, prevailing wind, slope, even paths or soil types might be considered as sectors. The week before I explored permaculture zoning - or the placement of elements in relation to the home, or center of human activity. (A salad garden needs more attention than a fruit tree, so place it closer to your kitchen door.)
So now let's dive in to relative location - which in essence is the art of finding a balance between zones and sectors, and also making the most of the relationships between each element in a design. As with most things, it's often a case of compromise. For example, we've planted our medicinal herb bed right next tour our veggie garden (pictured). This wouldn't make sense from a zoning point of view - valerian needs very little love compared to a tomato plant - but it just so happens that most herbs we planted are also producers of abundant, showy flowers that beneficial insects go crazy for. So pulling pollinators into the garden, and giving our herbs a prime sunlight spot, took precedence over prime "zone 1" real estate.
Another example of relative location that is often cited is the compost heap. On the one hand, it might make sense from a zoning perspective to put compost by your back door. After all, if you eat vegetables like our household does, emptying the compost crock is a daily task. But then it also makes sense to place your compost next to the garden - because a barrow-load of compost is way heavier than a crock-full of slimy cucumber peelings. Similarly, if you have a hilly location, putting the compost at the top of the hill makes emptying and distributing the finished compost that much easier - and it also allows nutrients that leach from the compost to run back into the system.
We didn't have the option of placing our compost uphill from the garden, but it is right next to it. And I've also planted a comfrey bed next to it. Comfrey is what's known as a "bioaccumulator" - it's giant tap root goes deep and sucks up nutrients into its giant, deep green leaves. Those leaves make excellent plant food when rotted down or added to the compost heap - and they can also be eaten or used medicinally in compresses. (Comfrey was traditionally known as Knitbone in the UK, for its supposed ability to aid healing of fractures.) The idea of this relative placement is that the nutrients from the heap leach out and are sucked up by the comfrey, which is then picked and placed back in the heap.
As I said above - so much of permaculture is about common sense. But it's a form of ordering our common sense so we can take every aspect of our garden designs into consideration - aiming for the ultimate in healthy, sustainable and minimal work gardens for the benefit of ourselves and the planet.
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