Daily? Wtf kind of plants are you growing. I use pots to get seeds and cuttings started before planting them outside, most I can leave for a week or more before looking at them again.
There’s still a lot of setup for an ecosystem. Choosing the right mulch (heat and ph leeching), irrigation, shading, and knowing your local soil is very important. It’s just front loaded because once you set it up, it’s kind of set and forget. Also nowadays many people don’t live in freestanding houses that they own, so they don’t even have access to a plot of dirt to mess around with
Yeah, if I were to take up gardening, that’s the kind of gardening I would want to do. My background is in software. Build something that can act on its own, then let it do the hard work while you kick back.
I find it interesting that western agriculture follows the potted plant philosophy. Lots and lots of work every year, maintaining plants with optimum yield. You get a high population doing that, but it’s so much fucking work.
Aboriginal agriculture follows the ecosystem philosophy. Before colonisation, Aboriginal people used cold fire to maintain ecosystems. They didn’t prune and water every plant individually like western farmers, they used a deep knowledge of the ecosystem to tweak things here and there. They let the plants and animals do most of the work. You can’t support a population of 20 million that way, but you do get a lot more time to sit around the fire and tell stories, discuss philosophy.
I’d prefer to live in an apartment, or in a house with native plants that produce useful food and medicine on their own. I don’t want to mow a fucking lawn!
I have an allotment in the UK and pretty much everything growing in it is perennial plants that should just keep growing from year to year. Finished my first year and most of this year has really been buying a few of each different thing I hear about and trying to see what works without too much effort.
Jerusalem artichokes are ready to start harvesting about now and should be fine in the ground all winter. Are they perennial? They certainly could be left alone to do their thing. But I do plan to dig up the whole plant and for each one put 2/3 tubers back in the ground because I only bought a few and the space I have could probably take more than I planted. But importantly they are harvested and planted again at the same time just by leaving a few behind.
Tree kale, grows for up to a decade or so, already more than doubled the number in 6 months and I only started with some cuttings bought online. Planning on growing about 12 and may take more cuttings at that point to give away.
Rhubarb, almost everyone grows this.
Perennial top setting onions, newest addition and I hope to use them mostly like spring onions but you can eat the bulbs too. Might use them in some dried seasoning salts too. Somewhat dependent on how well they grow though. Seem to be doing alright so far, will see what winter does.
Yeah lawns are an extremely weird concept in Australia that have become normalised somehow. Like oh yes, let’s just waste all this water, time, and energy growing an entire mat of weeds we don’t actually want. Then you have to use all this energy and tools to cut it back down every week or two. It’s crazy to me 😂. Also lawns are extremely unforgiving. They turn brown, patchy, thorn-ridden, and ugly easily, and don’t really provide much to the wildlife.
I always keep it simple because I have fatigue issues. Weed mat, a nice mulch top layer (very cheap from the gov), lots of compost for a few months to prepare the soil (the dirt around here is completely awful), a basic sprinkler irrigation backup if it refuses to rain for weeks, then just plant things which would naturally survive and look after themselves. Usually natives, but some native plants are too fragile. Usually flowering plants because I love flowers, and so do insects and birds.
Recently I went for Acacia Limelight, lavender, the tiny bush bottlebrush (forget the name), and some cute little grasses that make stunning blue flowers. The acacias drop millions of tiny thin leaves which gives a beautiful autumn floor look year-round. I like the subdued brown/purple/green profile with a bit of bright colours here and there. We had a lot of bird and pollinator activity too, which really brought it to life.
I am poor, but when I have money, if I decide to go with a house over an apartment, I’ll be planting grass trees. I’ll plant young cheap ones, but I’ll do research on the best place to put them, and what other species around will support them. And I want to plant a nice big canopy tree that grows medicine.
I don’t understand why anyone wants a plant in a pot that they have to care for daily, rather than an ecosystem in the yard that cares for itself.
Daily? Wtf kind of plants are you growing. I use pots to get seeds and cuttings started before planting them outside, most I can leave for a week or more before looking at them again.
There’s still a lot of setup for an ecosystem. Choosing the right mulch (heat and ph leeching), irrigation, shading, and knowing your local soil is very important. It’s just front loaded because once you set it up, it’s kind of set and forget. Also nowadays many people don’t live in freestanding houses that they own, so they don’t even have access to a plot of dirt to mess around with
Yeah, if I were to take up gardening, that’s the kind of gardening I would want to do. My background is in software. Build something that can act on its own, then let it do the hard work while you kick back.
I find it interesting that western agriculture follows the potted plant philosophy. Lots and lots of work every year, maintaining plants with optimum yield. You get a high population doing that, but it’s so much fucking work.
Aboriginal agriculture follows the ecosystem philosophy. Before colonisation, Aboriginal people used cold fire to maintain ecosystems. They didn’t prune and water every plant individually like western farmers, they used a deep knowledge of the ecosystem to tweak things here and there. They let the plants and animals do most of the work. You can’t support a population of 20 million that way, but you do get a lot more time to sit around the fire and tell stories, discuss philosophy.
I’d prefer to live in an apartment, or in a house with native plants that produce useful food and medicine on their own. I don’t want to mow a fucking lawn!
I have an allotment in the UK and pretty much everything growing in it is perennial plants that should just keep growing from year to year. Finished my first year and most of this year has really been buying a few of each different thing I hear about and trying to see what works without too much effort.
Jerusalem artichokes are ready to start harvesting about now and should be fine in the ground all winter. Are they perennial? They certainly could be left alone to do their thing. But I do plan to dig up the whole plant and for each one put 2/3 tubers back in the ground because I only bought a few and the space I have could probably take more than I planted. But importantly they are harvested and planted again at the same time just by leaving a few behind.
Tree kale, grows for up to a decade or so, already more than doubled the number in 6 months and I only started with some cuttings bought online. Planning on growing about 12 and may take more cuttings at that point to give away.
Rhubarb, almost everyone grows this.
Perennial top setting onions, newest addition and I hope to use them mostly like spring onions but you can eat the bulbs too. Might use them in some dried seasoning salts too. Somewhat dependent on how well they grow though. Seem to be doing alright so far, will see what winter does.
Yeah lawns are an extremely weird concept in Australia that have become normalised somehow. Like oh yes, let’s just waste all this water, time, and energy growing an entire mat of weeds we don’t actually want. Then you have to use all this energy and tools to cut it back down every week or two. It’s crazy to me 😂. Also lawns are extremely unforgiving. They turn brown, patchy, thorn-ridden, and ugly easily, and don’t really provide much to the wildlife.
I always keep it simple because I have fatigue issues. Weed mat, a nice mulch top layer (very cheap from the gov), lots of compost for a few months to prepare the soil (the dirt around here is completely awful), a basic sprinkler irrigation backup if it refuses to rain for weeks, then just plant things which would naturally survive and look after themselves. Usually natives, but some native plants are too fragile. Usually flowering plants because I love flowers, and so do insects and birds.
Recently I went for Acacia Limelight, lavender, the tiny bush bottlebrush (forget the name), and some cute little grasses that make stunning blue flowers. The acacias drop millions of tiny thin leaves which gives a beautiful autumn floor look year-round. I like the subdued brown/purple/green profile with a bit of bright colours here and there. We had a lot of bird and pollinator activity too, which really brought it to life.
I am poor, but when I have money, if I decide to go with a house over an apartment, I’ll be planting grass trees. I’ll plant young cheap ones, but I’ll do research on the best place to put them, and what other species around will support them. And I want to plant a nice big canopy tree that grows medicine.