greenstorm (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
greenstorm) wrote2004-05-03 03:08 pm
greenstorm) wrote2004-05-03 03:08 pm
Argh, and Permaculture.
Week's just starting and I'm exhausted. Need to continue to spend time with friends + sleep, somehow.
I'm reading the book /Gaia's Garden/ which I've borrowed from _greenwitch_. It's an incredible book. There's something completely, utterly fascinating about the science of garden ecology, which may or may not exist under that name; something is done to the garden, generally for a particular purpose, and it has a number of effects including sometimes the desired one. Gardening ecology seems to only be beginning to become a science (ack, an evil sentence!), possibly because it's so very complicated and not necessarily intuitive. There are so many things that depend on so many other things that stack in huge chains and spirals of interdependency, and it's easy for us to miss those and do one thing or another thing without knowing how many of those chains we're impacting.
I'm not saying that all gardeners need to be scientists, or anything. I'm saying that it's much more interesting to me to know as much of what's going on in the garden as possible (what lives in the soil? Why? How does this or that plant or fertiliser effect those things? What to they do? What if I mulch with hay? What if I mulch with black plastic? How do different kinds of tree root in the soil, or uptake nutrients and water? How does that harmonize with different kinds of shrubs or plants? Etc, etc, etc).
I don't think it's great science not to know about these interdependencies, and I know that not nearly enough research has been done on the topic. Talk about an unexplored field! But, I'm rambling. Gaia's Garden, ignore the title, just read the book, _greenwitch_ has it as does the Vancouver public library. Ignore any of the moralising if you like, just pay attention to the ecology info.
Further: deep fried mars bars on the drive are wonderful. I can eat half of one per week. Anyone want the other half next week?
I'm reading the book /Gaia's Garden/ which I've borrowed from _greenwitch_. It's an incredible book. There's something completely, utterly fascinating about the science of garden ecology, which may or may not exist under that name; something is done to the garden, generally for a particular purpose, and it has a number of effects including sometimes the desired one. Gardening ecology seems to only be beginning to become a science (ack, an evil sentence!), possibly because it's so very complicated and not necessarily intuitive. There are so many things that depend on so many other things that stack in huge chains and spirals of interdependency, and it's easy for us to miss those and do one thing or another thing without knowing how many of those chains we're impacting.
I'm not saying that all gardeners need to be scientists, or anything. I'm saying that it's much more interesting to me to know as much of what's going on in the garden as possible (what lives in the soil? Why? How does this or that plant or fertiliser effect those things? What to they do? What if I mulch with hay? What if I mulch with black plastic? How do different kinds of tree root in the soil, or uptake nutrients and water? How does that harmonize with different kinds of shrubs or plants? Etc, etc, etc).
I don't think it's great science not to know about these interdependencies, and I know that not nearly enough research has been done on the topic. Talk about an unexplored field! But, I'm rambling. Gaia's Garden, ignore the title, just read the book, _greenwitch_ has it as does the Vancouver public library. Ignore any of the moralising if you like, just pay attention to the ecology info.
Further: deep fried mars bars on the drive are wonderful. I can eat half of one per week. Anyone want the other half next week?
no subject
Hubby came home and passed out for a couple of hours after sharing that thing with you. I fear it. I might go for a third, or a quarter, just out of sick curiosity.