Ice Age 2

Okay, so Ice Age = cold. When the ice sheet retreated, the beginnings of today's agriculture started in the river valleys where Earthworms still lived: Tigris, Euphrates, Nile. It spread out into Europe, which used the quick turn-around of yearly cropping to grow enough food in the summer to live through the winter. This enabled farther and farther expansion into the colder latitudes. Yeay for yearly cropping.

What about agriculture in areas that don't get winter cold?

These places don't need to crop yearly. They can plant something delicate and it will last for years. This process retains soil and fertility better than yearly cropping if properly managed. It also requires less human work hours, because it uses natural cycles instead of fighting against them. This is permaculture gardening.

Here is what it can look like.

You've eaten plants that are permaculture candidates. Asparagus, rhubarb, artichokes, olive oil, fruits, nuts, and a bunch of others. Permaculture is less about how to work the soil than it is how to pay attention to what's going on around you, so that you can use existing processes to do the work for you.

Here's an example. There's a bunch of caterpillars, freshly hatched, chowing down on the Parsnip flowers. What to do, what to do? Well, there's a little nest of paper wasps I saw up on the eaves, and I do nothing. I watch. The very next day, there are many fewer caterpillars. There are none on the third day. They're all carved up and used by the paper wasps to make more paper wasps, which increases the pest-controlling ability of my garden with no effort on my part. Observation, education, judicious (in)action. Yeay!

Fun fact for this post: An acre of permaculture food forest can feed 10 people...

• A balanced diet
• Sustainably
• Forever
• Increasing the cloudcover (-global warming)
• Increasing the rainfall (-droughts)
• No petrochemicals needed

An acre of wheat produces enough calories to feed 4.8 people, and none of the above points are true of that acre. The fact is, permaculture ROCKS.