7/6/2010 2:43:00 PM Permaculture Monroe farms offers vision for the future of farming
Jason Knight stands near a tree in a "food forest" at Mornoe's Alderleaf Farm. The trees form the top canopy of an orchard that includes shrubs and ground covers of other productive plants, maximizing the use of space and nutrients. It's one of many permaculture techniques that focus on working closely with nature to achieve sustainable, productive farms.
Photo by Polly Keary
Chickens peck through chicken wire at plants grown specifically alongside the fence for chicken food. The chicken run surrounds a garden and forms a barrier that deer will not jump. Chickens also keep garden pests down while enriching the soil, and the chicken coop keeps the greenhouse warm. Meat and eggs are merely a bonus.
This chicken coop keeps deer out of the garden, turns weeds into food, keeps the greenhouse warm, the plants fertilized and keeps slugs and bugs down.
And it's just one of the nature-based, multi-tasking innovations at Monroe's Alderleaf Farm.
The entire farm is devoted to the emerging practice called permaculture, in which natural systems are employed to create efficient, productive and sustainable farms that cost nearly nothing to run and leave the land richer than it was before.
Alderleaf Farm may go further than that; it is now serving as a school for those who want to learn how to do permaculture, as well as a showcase for the land-use approach.
"In permaculture, you are striving to work with nature," said Jason Knight, who started Alderleaf Farm with his wife Kerry in 2008. "There are three main principles; care for the earth, care for people, and sharing the surplus."
Caring for the earth often means working with it, not against it, Knight said. A good example is addressing the problem of deer.
"How do you keep deer from eating the plants?" he said. "There's different ways, like dogs, and bigger fences. Some of them work. But we get a lot of deer here."
So rather than put up a single fence of eight feet high, the Knights built two fences four feet high each and four feet apart and formed a corridor around the garden. Deer will not leap over it, and it forms a perfect chicken run.
The chickens also address a much smaller enemy of gardens; the slug. And as the residents of the school weed their individual pea patches, the weeds tossed into the run make great chicken food.
The chickens also eat directly from chicken food plants grown along the wire fence. And the chicken manure enriches the garden compost.
A greenhouse attached to the chicken house stays warm on cold days thanks to the chickens, and the black-painted greenhouse water barrels contribute the sun's warmth back to the chicken house at night.
And of course, the chickens themselves provide eggs and meat for the residents of the farm.
Everywhere around the 15-acre farm, symbiotic systems like that get the most out of the land and everything on it.
A "food forest" near the entry road off of Cedar Ponds Road is like an orchard, but where mow-able grass would be in a traditional orchard, there is a complex understory of shrubs.
"We are trying to get rid of grass," said Knight. Grass uses water and nutrients and gives nothing back, but the plants below Alderleaf's fruit and nut trees are bountiful.
Some, like comfrey, draw minerals to the surface through their long tap roots, enriching the top soil. Many others produce food and put nitrogen in the soil. Others just yield enormous amounts of edible fruits and vegetables.
A food forest makes it possible to become very self sufficient with a very small amount of space, said Knight.
"The average person eats 350 pounds of produce in a year," he said. "One hundred square feet can produce 350 pounds."
That makes permaculture principles doable even to people who live in the suburbs, or in apartments, said Kerry, who paused from preparing a piece of land to become a paddock for sheep which will soon join the other animals on the farm.
"I had a potted tree on my apartment deck," she said. "You can grow your salad under your tree. You can have your strawberries falling over the edge."
The Knights are now adding ponds for aquaculture, and Albert Postema of Maltby, who is doing the excavating, is himself a permaculture expert who is careful to preserve and replace topsoil during excavation.
The soil from the pond site will also go in bags, which will be used to create a root cellar for storing crops.
Permaculture, a condensation of the words permanent agriculture, is a fairly new concept; it was developed in Austria in the 1960s and disseminated in the 1970s.
The Pacific Northwest was one of the first places to catch on, and Bullocks Farms on Orcas Island is the longest-running permaculture site in the nation.
The concept truly began to spread in the 1980s, when many students of the originators themselves became instructors, and a system of rapid teacher training was developed that allowed people to learn and spread permaculture techniques quickly.
Both Kerry and Jason Knight are certified, in addition to having ecology-related degrees from Evergreen College in Tacoma. And now Alderleaf Farm is a licensed vocational school that offers certification to others who wish to learn or teach the principles and techniques.
That is only a sixth of the education offered at Alderleaf; Jason Knight is a certified animal tracker who has studied with African trackers and who teaches tracking, wilderness survival, ethnobotany (eating and using wild plants), ecology and more.
But permaculture remains one of their most popular educational courses, and taht interest seems to be reflected in building patterns, said Albert Postema, who specializes in doing excavation for permaculture sites.
"It's probably double what it was two years ago," he said. "And what is interesting is it has not diminished in the housing crash. In fact, it has increased."
The practice is an interesting evolution in ecological land use philosophy, said Debbie Copple, Director of the Sky Valley Chamber of Commerce and a long-time advocate for farmers and farming.
"They integrate all these techniques with nature," she said. "It's very reasonable. Instead of being people who say you have to eat pine nuts and weeds and not interfere with nature but just look at it, they are more practical."
Indeed, permaculture need not be adversarial to traditional farming, the Knights said. Rather, it can offer new and useful ways to augment and improve those practices.
"I think we can be an example of what people can do, even with small acreage," said Jason Knight. "It is all based on nature and having respect for it."
To learn more about Alderleaf Farm and to see what classes are upcoming, visit www.wildernesscollege.com. Tuesdays are project days at the farm, so volunteers are welcome to come, pitch in, and learn more, too, said Jason.
