Permaculture Gardening on a Shoestring Budget

Chapter 1: Backstory

        My story seems like a common story about gardening and how we are to inquire from others about an autonomous lifestyle. With food prices getting higher (mainly on fruits, vegetables, dairy, and meats), people are concerned about how they are going to eat their next meal. For people living in the suburbs or in the countryside, this is a big concern because in this current generation, we were told to get a job, budget our money, pay our bills, and go grocery shopping once a month. Unfortunately, the times for many people living in the suburbs and countryside are getting worse. Gas prices are high, too many regulations when you drive, $100 can only fill up 1/3 of a grocery cart. What does that mean? If you live in the countryside, you have to find innovative ways to put food on your table because one job isn't enough to pay bills and feed families anymore. What can you do in this situation?

        It all begin in Spring 1991 when I was 4 years old. An elder of mine taught me the basics of gardening like pulling weeds, planting seeds, and harvesting. It was a great time in my youth because when foods were ready for harvest, I was able to eat well and stay in shape. I remember planting lettuce, cucumbers, and other vegetables that I cannot remember off of the top of my head. Then things changed as I got older through no fault of my own (because children do not know better). I did not garden for a long time because I was into video games, television, going out to a picture show occasionally, etc.

        The elder in question told me that when the soil was prepared, she would cover up the soil with pine needles to hold moisture and provide minerals for the garden. She would also gather wood ashes from her burn pile to fertilize the plants every couple of days or one week. That was how I managed to eat nutritious foods in my youth. But by1992, I started doing other things being influenced by city folk.

        I did not start gardening on my own until 2011 due to insanely cold weather the nation experienced during the Winter months. During the months of January and February of 2011, the temperatures were incredibly cold here in America. So cold that the temperatures affected the crops in Mexico, damaging the supply of goods. It was clearly evident when I went to a supermarket during the winter of 2011 that tomatoes were $3.50a pound. Celery was over $3 a bunch. I've never spent so much money just to make a simple meal before. Because of the incredibly cold weather, the economy suffered and people were fed up with high prices. This is why I was motivated to plant a garden.

        During late Winter 2011, I bought the materials necessary to make a greenhouse. Those materials cost me around $90. Then I spent money on Miracle Gro garden soil, cost me perhaps $10. Then I bought seeds for around $10, then Miracle Gro fertilizer for$6. While I was growing crops inside the greenhouse, I decided to invest in orange trees as a navel orange and clementine orange tree. Both trees cost me $76 combined. Then I bought a muscadine grapevine for $10.

        Did I make mistakes in my first year of gardening in 2011? Oh you better believe. How so? First off, I was taught that bugs are bad for plants and that using a greenhouse will keep the bugs away. Are bugs really bad? It can be, but if you observe nature, when you see things grow, they grow very well either with very little bug bites or no bug bites at all. The soil quality will often dictate if a plant is stressed and dehydrated. Bugs in nature work to defoliate a stressed out and dehydrated plant. That was my first mistake. Another mistake is that I didn't realize that greenhouses are used as a filter.

         What do I mean by filter? The greenhouse disrupts the photosynthesis process by filtering out the vitamins and phytochemicals. That's right, the direct sunlight provides plants with all vitamins. Variable B vitamins, Vitamin A, Vitamin C, and of course Vitamin K. The direct sunlight also provides a variable for phytochemicals necessary for optimal health. You can obtain antioxidants from your fruits and vegetables while growing in a greenhouse, but you cannot get the phytochemicals necessary for the antioxidants to work effectively in your body. Plants need direct sunlight whether the plants require full sun or partial shade. When I realized that I was disrupting nature with a greenhouse, I realized that I wasted $90 on something totally unnecessary.

         Another mistake I made was investing in quality soil and using the fertilizer both from Scott's Miracle Gro. Sure, there are more minerals in Miracle Gro than your traditional chemical fertilizer, but neither of them corrected all the nutritional deficiencies brought on by gardening. If you summed up exactly on how much money I spent on fertilizer, garden soil, a greenhouse, two orange trees, and a muscadine grapevine, I spent over $200 in the first year of gardening. Not relying on anyone with gardening experience, I am ashamed that I wasted that much money in one year.

         What other mistake did I make? Not putting peas on a trellis since peas are a traditionally a climbing plant. The timing of growing those peas was another mistake. By the time harvest season rolled around the corner, it was too late. Even if the peas flowered, the bees would not have been able to access the flowers of those peas to pollinate.

         The biggest mistake that I made during the summer of 2011 was not reading labels for the appropriate times to plant. Being inexperienced in gardening, I did not know about the times it takes for seeds to germinate, the time it takes for harvesting plants, etc. Those were my mistakes during the year 2011. How did the garden turn out? Well, I did harvest tomatoes successfully despite the 105 degree weather in June 2011. I also harvested lettuce, basil, and other foods. I did not harvest peas obviously.

         Through the years, I decided to do a traditional garden and ran into some major problems. Poor irrigation in the native soil, constant weeding, chemical fertilizing, bugs attacking my plants, and not being able to yield certain plants. The stress of gardening overwhelmed me. Constant rain storms did not help in these situations, causing me to give up until the next season. After 2017, I thought about giving up gardening altogether after a series of floods discouraged me from working the garden. Hurricane Harvey was the worst flood event in Texas, causing me not to garden for quite a while.

         As I began to give up hope, I discovered videos on how mulching can ease the burden of caring for a garden regularly. I saw a documentary of Paul Gautschi's permaculture garden called "Back to Eden Gardening." It blew me away because all the years that I worked to grow my own food failed. How come? Because I had no knowledge on how to grow food without having to kill myself weeding out the garden. When I learned about this, I was motivated to buy me some mulch and start gardening again. While I did not completely cover the garden with mulch, I did see results with my strawberries, pepper plants, among other plants in the garden.

         In order for me to truly understand permaculture gardening, I had to go beyond Paul Gautschi's "Back to Eden Gardening" to understand how to make a quality garden the right way. This led to me watching videos from Geoff Lawton, James Prigioni, and people living in third world countries. That was when I knew what I needed to do from there on, inspiring me to do a permaculture garden. While the first permaculture experiment I did was a costly one and there were mistakes involved, when you learn from them, you benefit from a permaculture garden. In the words of Paul Gautschi, the issue is simple. It's all about cover.