BITE ME!

Permaculture, direct experimentation, and citizen plant breeders.

“You can’t grow an orchard here. It’s too wet.”

I believed the naysayers for 8 years. I focused on raising livestock and finding the best animals for our seasonally wet pastures. But after almost a decade, I decided I wasn’t going anywhere. If I wanted an orchard, I had to plant one here.

I turned to Permaculture for inspiration, and tried all kinds of experimental techniques. I learned to graft so I could choose my own rootstocks. I grafted domestic apples onto native Pacific Crabapple, Malus fusca, a tree who evolved to grow in my wet seasonal clay soil. I dug swales by hand with a shovel, and built mounds to plant into so the trees could grow slightly above the spring floods.

I did everything except give up.

When 90% of my hedgerow died from under-watering the first summer, I replanted and installed irrigation.

When 100% of the apricots died from bacterial canker, I replaced them with pear trees.

When a plant did well in a mound, I tried planting them in an unmounded area to see if they could handle even more water. Some did well, and some died. A 1-foot-high mound often meant the difference between life and death.

Some trees listed as “wet-soil tolerant,” like our native Blue Elderberry, died.

Other plants believed to need well-drained soil, like yarrow and grapes, grew fine.

I really didn’t know what would happen until I tried. One of my Permaculture mentors, Heiko Koester, told me “Nobody knows the answers to the questions you’re asking, Kara, so keep good records. We all want to know what you find out.”

Several years later, Heiko said, “You are now our region’s local expert in wetlands Permaculture, Kara. You have to learn how to teach.”

That’s very flattering—and a bit scary. More people should be increasing ecological resources. It’s survival-level work that helps us increase our communities’ resilience during big societal transitions. What’s more, it’s accessible labor that can be learned by anyone, and practiced by people who have access to even a little bit of land (like my friend who breeds figs in a downtown city backyard).

To comfort myself (and inspire you), I remember that I’m not alone. One tree does what one tree can do to make a forest—and a forest is not made up of a single tree.

Steven Edholm does similar work in a totally different microclimate in Northern California. He challenges naysayers, and uses Permaculture and related techniques to increase the resources and skill-levels of his bioregional community. Through direct participation in nature and the reclaiming of ancestral skills, he has succeeded in breeding apples who are well-adapted to his bioregion.

I met Steven two decades ago at an Ancestral Skills Gathering. I am sure he doesn’t remember me, but I remember him. I’ve followed his work and been inspired by his website. I bought several pamphlets and a book that he co-wrote with Tamara Wilder.

You can follow the hyperlinks in the paragraph above to learn more about Steven’s work. And enjoy this video, where he encourages citizen plant breeders to get our hands in the dirt and try things—even when we’ve been told they won’t work. In this case, he challenges the myth that one has to plant 1,000 apple seedlings to find a single tree bearing good-quality apples.