Posted in 2010 Permaculture Garden Workshop Series, GANG Garden 2010, Green Acres Neighborhood Garden (GANG), Urban Farmstead | June 30th, 2010 by Ann

 

For this all-day workshop, conducted by permaculture teacher Rhonda Baird

on yet another in a row of humid 95° June days,

puppy Emma was grateful for the pond and we humans grateful that we would be in the garden only for a short while, to walk around and — the first principle of permaculture — observe. Observe the flows. Air, water, invisible energy, how much and how complexly does this garden catch, hold, and recycle flows? And, what else is going on? What is problematic?

Newly initiated permaculture gardens benefit from constant revaluation, and this is only the second year of the GANG. The design as a whole and every part of it, at every scale, can use continuous improvement in our quest to, as Mark, one of the eight participants in this workshop, put it, “conspire with nature rather than work against her.” What a great definition of permaculture!  To con-spire, to breath with, to enter into communion with nature’s endlessly regenerative cyclic processes.

Here’s a partial list of our observations of and in the GANG garden. BTW: Cynthia, our note-taker, wrote a note to herself on the same page that our observations kept shading into critique — and those critiques, I note here now, kept being defensively countered by me!

 Need something on fence. Espalier? Bushes? Bamboo vertical structures are cool! What to do about the Berlin Wall?


No path on west side. Crowded near mulberry and bushes. Love the lamb’s quarters. Soil crumbly in some places, but mostly too dry, not enough mulch or poop.Plants need labels for visitors. Entry? Pond is low. Except for interior of cold frame, huge spaces between plants.

 

 

Feels nurturing near driveway entrance to pond and picnic area.


 

Work table area cluttered.

 

Back to the drawing board.

 

Now we started to brainstorm. Rhonda guided us to focus especially on water/soil, entry, flow, borders, and work areas, and the ideas flew thick and fast. How would we ever decide which ones to pursue? Yet I personally felt immensely  grateful for the brainstorming session. Our collective visioning blasted my imagination open. I had been stuck on two problems with the garden, and especially one of them: what to do with that Berlin Wall.

 In our brainstorming session we started by talking abstractly, about how the garden could be re-designed to spiral. Which way does it (almost) spiral now — counterclockwise or counterclockwise? Polarized opinions seemed to depend on which garden gate one approached it from. But only one entry was obvious, the one in Ann’s (my) driveway,  a private entrance! Why weren’t the other entrances more obvious? Because, I confessed, I am ambivalent. Until I get adequate insurance coverage for the garden, I don’t want to advertise it. That’s why there isn’t yet a sign up announcing that this is a neighborhood garden. . . .

I see the garden as a template for a new kind of private/public partnership, and would like the city to take liability for these kinds of projects, since we all know that if the city did do this, there would be many more people volunteering their land for use as a public commons.

 So it was good that my ambivalence got aired during our wild and wooly brainstorming session.

 Then we broke for a potluck lunch featuring stir-fried greens from the garden and other delectables.

 In the afternoon, Rhonda took us through an exercise that did wonders to help us focus our attention on what we needed to accomplish in our re-design. This was to write out the “Problem” as specifically and exactly as possible, and then, according to another famous permaculture principle, the problem would then be seen as (part of) the “Solution.”

 

In case you can’t read it:

Problem: The flow of energy and attention goes down through the garden and down the street. People access the garden through a private space and on a very limited flow pattern. There are several undeveloped, under-utilized, half-neglected “places” in the garden. Involvement in the garden and flow is thwarted by ambivalence. Because of this, the garden is not interfacing with the neighborhood effectively, growing as much food as it could, or optimizing its other functions.

Solution: We will create a community garden that receives, cycles, and absorbs energy and attention and releases it enhanced for further good. We will create a garden with clear boundaries and inviting access. We will create strong energy centers and will enhance paths between them. When invisible core problems are resolved the interface with the neighborhood will grow more food and optimize functions. This will jumpstart the garden.

That process, surprisingly, only took about an hour. From there, we went outside one more time to look at generating specific solutions to various identified aspects of the problem.

Should we put a cob oven in this SW corner of the garden? (Will we have to move the fruit tree to do it? What about seating area in a semi-circle around it . . .)


Then we reconvened for a final session, and in an astonishingly short time, came into agreement on how to re-design the garden.

Re-design includes the following:

 • Make a clear path down the west side and cut at least one more passage through long garden bed rows so that a person can wander the garden almost like a labyrinth, either clockwise or counterclockwise.

• Move the four bush berry and gooseberry bushes to outside the fence.

 • Center the garden with some kind of slightly-off center feature: sundial?

 • Remove cluttered work station and create a vertical trellis against the entire west side of the house. Create a greenhouse (as a SPEA workshop) on south side of house between porch and garden that enters into garden and put work station inside.

 • Add or redesign gates to make garden more welcoming.

 • Create three distinct places for humans to gather in the garden:

1.  NW corner is somewhat “wild”: keep it that way, since permaculture gardens feature a place for wild plants and critters. Add wind chimes and bird houses. Clean-up picnic area and include more comfortable seating. Keep the west part of this corner as a work/compost space as well, since this is the most convenient gate for people from outside to drop off materials. 

2.  SW corner, aka Berlin Wall area. Big changes here. Add a main gate, arched with wooden posts, adjacent to the west side of the wall. Design and construct cob benches on either side of the outside of the gate. (SPEA class cob workshop?) Place the sign, “Green Acres Neighborhood Garden,” on the west side of the wall with bulletin board beneath for messages and notices. On south wall, finish the rust color of the wall to match the west side, and then do a tile mosaic mural on the wall via a workshop with homeschooled children and children from a nearby elementary school. On inside of the corner created by the wall, create a plant and bench sanctuary for one person to sit in meditation. Cover the wall with some sort of roof  that protects and further identifies the meditation area (also a workshop of some kind).

 3.  SE corner. Cob oven with semi-circular bench seating (again, a workshop). This a more formal public area than the more private meditation and picnic areas. Re-arrange garden beds to have them nestle against the back wall of the benches. Create another unobtrusive gate on the south side with a path leading into it.

So we begin, in our minds, to manifest the reality we desire.

But first, there’s the little matter of liability insurance — so that we can put up the sign; so that the garden will attract more attention, so that more people will start to come through its gates — to stimulate increased interaction with nature, and through nature, with each other. So that we begin to create the world we want to see and live in. So that when our great granchildren ask us, still full of wonder and awe, “How did you start to turn the collapse of western civilization around?” we can sing to them, with joy, what will have become the new stories — of beauty, of connection, of regeneration.

So that . . .

Will make those insurance calls today. 


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1 Comment »

One Response to “Workshop #3, 2010: How’s It Going? Problem Solving and Re-Design”

  1. Saralin Milone Says:
    July 10th, 2010 at 1:35 pm

    Wow! I am extremely grateful to all the Bloomington permaculture community who helped this process be known! I have been in a similar situation for a year, not wanting to do anything with the private lot I bought (in Springfield, IL) to turn into a community perma-garden b/c of confusion on liability and not really knowing what it takes to actualize the space. This is a great map, and I love maps!

    With Gratitude,

    Saralin

    P.S. I’d love to know how it worked out with the idea about getting the city involved!

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