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Stop Wasting Time and Money on Replacing Broken Ecosystem Functions
As I walk dogs through urban/suburban neighborhoods, I notice a lot of things that come down to one theme: disrupting ecosystem functions and then spending a lot of time and money to replace them artificially. Here are some examples (not an exhaustive list): The list goes on and on. I am continually seeing people disturbing…
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Can an edible plant be too aggressive? A thought experiment.
The Thought Experiment Imagine you are currently unemployed and seeking yet another job. You live with your parents and they help you out financially, but it doesn’t feel great. You’ve cycled through a lot of jobs in the past, trying to find something worth the effort. They pay a barely livable wage, but they are…
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Plants That Want to Grow: Your Key to Low-Maintenance Gardening
If you want to have a low-maintenance, restorative landscape, it is key to choose plants that want to grow on your landscape. Every geographic area hosts its own special kinds of ecosystems. Each of these areas is home to plants that have evolved over millions of years to thrive in their ecosystems. We can take…
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Ecosystem Mimicking: The Key to Easy Gardening
If you want low-maintenance, sustainable landscaping, your ultimate goal should be to try to create an ecosystem. Nature is the ultimate low-maintenance gardener. In natural ecosystems, humans are not needed to keep things alive (regardless of what some humans think). Nature knows everything, and all we need to do to learn is observe. ABO —…
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Rock Mulch: Why You Shouldn’t Choose It and What to Do Instead
A newly married house-shopping couple, my husband and I chose our current home in large part because everything was already done for us. It was not a fixer-upper, the paint colors were chosen and done, the curtains were left for us, and the landscaping was already done. We are not handy people and I, at…
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Guilds: Plant Communities That Do the Work For You
To increase productivity the natural way, permaculturists often create guilds. A guild is a group of plants that perform many different functions and work together to help out not only each other but also usually a central performer (normally fruit trees). Three sisters guild A popular very simple guild is the Native American three sisters…