Farming
We had a wonderful young man named Gary come over to our property and help us with our plans for permaculture.
The three core tenets of permaculture are:
- Care for the earth: Provision for all life systems to continue and multiply. This is the first principle, because without a healthy earth, humans cannot flourish.
- Care for the people: Provision for people to access those resources necessary for their existence.
- Setting limits to population and consumption: By governing our own needs, we can set resources aside to further the above principles. This includes returning waste back into the system to recycle into usefulness. The third ethic is sometimes referred to as Fair Share, which reflects that each of us should take no more than what we need before we reinvest the surplus.
Instead of having flat rows of many varieties of food; the vegetables, plants, trees and fruits all work in harmony with each other; to create a synergy of support for each other. So you might have fruit trees next to the broccoli and nut trees against the tomato plants.
We have one acre of natural desert landscaping with a hundred pine trees spread throughout. By growing more green plants, fruit and nut trees, vegetables and herbs, we can reduce our personal carbon footprint. At the top of our lot sits our house. We plan to terrace and build water channels to capture water during our rainy season. From June 15th to September 1st is called the monsoon season. We get ninety per cent of our rain in this ten week period. It is incumbent upon us to collect and store as much as we can. We get about eighteen inches of rain and each inch is about 28,000 gallons per acre. We will be working hard to capture as much as we can.
Ultimately, we want to create enough organic produce to give most of it away, to food banks and those with not enough to eat. If any of you want to join in the fun, please let us know! Our farming is part of our overall plan that we call Enriching Life Forever or ELF! I am sure that Lou Ann will be enlisting the little people to help us grow our garden. I encourage everyone to plant as much as you can of organic food to supplement your personal health. From my healthy heart to yours, Thomas