A
second look at perennial vegetables.



 



 In
providing partial answers to the inquiry about perennial vegetables for the
Miami area, I failed to question the question itself. Why perennial?  Why
vegetables?  Is this just a knee-jerk response to the common misconception
that permaculture is about growing food in ‘permanent’ plantings, or are there
reasoned considerations behind the interest.



 



Mollison
makes a good case against tillage of soil, though stopping short of ruling it
out as an absolute crime against nature in all cases. It has been the standard
mode of food production for centuries.  If it iscno good, why?



 



Tillage
and agriculture are twins.  The



revolution
in provisioning of food that enabled such abominations as urban



society,
large scale warfare, and wholesale ecological destruction was enabled by the
coupling of the plow and the draft animal.  Slaves were also used to pull
plows, but less efficiently. Turning the soil eliminated weeds and enabled
rapid establishment of annual grasses such as wheat, that in turn provided food
for far more people than needed to produce it.



 



In
home gardens, tillage proved better suited to cool and cold temperate climates,
where people’s access to traditional forest systems was curtailed by church and
government institutions. One could at least have a small garden on a patch of
land, sometimes. Turning the soil over in spring hastened warming, destroyed
perennial and biennial weeds, and enabled rapid planting of the entire garden,



quite
advantageous in a short growing season.  In arid and semiarid areas, clean
cultivation of various



sorts
eliminates moisture competition. 



As in
tropical and subtropical situations, tree crops often best suit to



these
areas, if the is a more or less steady supply of deep moisture.  Wide
spacing of plants diminishes



moisture
competition.



 



Traditional
gardening in moist warm climates has always been forest gardening.  Where
cultivation is practiced, it is generally a case of following the wrong
model.  While one can get away with cultivating soils in a cool climate,
where organic inputs break down slowly, turning soil in warm moist



climates
can destroy fertility quickly. Organic matter breaks down rapidly



enough
in these climates, and when additional air is mixed into the soil, it



almost
evaporates.  No longer bound



in
organic compounds, the resulting fertility minerals leach away from the



surface
feeder roots, ending up for the most part in the aquifer. Perennials,



and
woody plants in particular, may pump nutrients from deeper soil than



normally
mined by feeder roots. (An excellent tree for this is Inga edulis.)  Some do; some don’t.
Other woody plants may have a fibrous root system.  For example,
citrus or sabal palm.  These intercept nutrients efficiently before they
leach.  Citrus, for example, can take up large quantities of



nutrients
quickly, as available, and store them in the leaves.  (Defoliate a citrus
tree and you get no fruit!) Trees that have a natural preference for river
banks that flood, for example, are a good bet for such an ability, as the flood
waters drop rich sediments around them, but the nutrients can be leached by
rainfall and/or subsequent flooding.  So it is



catch
as catch can. I’ve not looked into this, but I would say that mangoes are



a
good bet for adventitious nutrient capture, judging from where I’ve seen them
growing, both planted and more or less unattended in places such as Mexico,
Paraguay, and the Philippines.



 



OK,
we want to conserve soil nutrients, take up nutrients quickly when they are
available (to avoid leaching), and produce useful products, including
food.  If perennial vegetables help with this,



fine. 
Though specifying vegetables



may
channel a mindset of single use, a mindset that we avoid in



permaculture. 




 



Since
the question pertained to the Miami region of Florida, cursed with soils that
both are coarse (leach rapidly) and intensely calcareous (developed from
coral), we have additional concerns. We want plants that tolerate extremes of
moisture and drought, and that tolerate a high soil pH with excessive soil
calcium. LOL



 



The
problem is not a shortage of books!  One could fill a good size library
with books that deal with tropical food plants,



or
just with books that deal with food plants for tropical islands, which



commonly
have nearly identical soil conditions to Miami’s. 



 



A
permaculturist might hunt down some of these books. But not as a first course



of
action!  One needs to shut off



the
computer, get off his/her ass, and get out and walk around.  What is
growing in the area already? Do



we really
know all its uses?  Is it



edible?
Is it a nutrient pump?  Is



it a
nutrient net?  What are its



multiple
functions? How much work is required to keep it growing and producing?  Does it depend upon external inputs? If
so, to what degree?



 



South
Florida has some of the best warm-climate botanical gardens I know about. 
Probably no one person is familiar with all of the plants in any of them.  There is a botanical garden
specifically aimed at fruit and spice plants in the nearby Homestead area
(which has quite different soils from the Miami area). There is an amazing
variety of food presented in open air markets and ethnic markets in the
area.  Often, a grocery purchase nets seeds as well as food.  



 



The
first principle of permaculture design is conservation. A core concept derived
from this principle is Mollison’s dictum, ‘Seek the most benefit from the least
change.’  This translates, in part,



to
“Use what you’ve got.”  To do that, you have to know what you’ve got, what
is growing right around you. For example, I was amazed in a visit to Miami to
see a mulberry tree producing



prolifically.
It tolerated the heat. 



It
tolerated the calcareous soil. And it produced despite competition



from
a lawn!  (I took cuttings, but



it
was the absolute worst time to take cuttings and only two made it.  One I
donated to a permaculture



demonstration
design by some of my students at New College at Sarasota.  Maybe you can
get permission for some



cuttings
of your own at the right time, in about a month.)  Mulberry is more
than a tree fruit.  It is shade, firewood,



cover
and forage for poultry, and a vegetable.  Cooked mulberry leaves
taste fine.  (I wouldn’t eat them raw, as they contain a latex). OK, a
bearing mulberry tree wasn’t hard to recognize. 



 



So
you have more plants than you can deal with now, you just have to get your
people out checking on them, looking them up in Facciola, etc. Talking to folks
in ethnic neighborhoods will save a lot of time, and watching what the kids
forage



helps. 
In Massachusetts, I was helping to set up a little demo at a college in Roxbury
and noticed, again, some



mulberry
trees.  This was early



spring
and they hadn’t even leafed-out yet.  Some kids were watching us. 
“Hey, kid, which of these trees has the best mulberries?”  “I don’ know
about no



mulberries,
mister.”  “Don’t worry.  We want
you to eat them. I just need to know which is best so we can grow more of
them.”  “Yeah.  That one over there is pretty good.”  How do you
get that kind of information from a book?



 



OK,
why vegetables? Why not fruits and vegetables, as they are nutritionally
interchangeable?  Moreover, many



fruits
are used as vegetables too, either the leaves, as with mulberry or



papaya,
or the immature fruit, e.g., mango and papaya again.  And, besides the
obvious vegetable, plantain, you have green bananas, essentially a different
variety of the same crop, used the same way. No family can use up all the ripe
bananas from one plant before they go bad.  So one starts with the green
bananas, cooked.  (And there are strategies for hastening or, alternately,
delaying ripening to spread the period of ripe fruit over a longer, and
therefore more useful, interval.) And why do we call banana a fruit
anyway?  It is interchangeable nutritionally with potato. We call a tomato
a vegetable, but it is a fruit, botanically. Why not banana?  There just
isn’t a reason.  We draw the line arbitrarily, by custom, not reason. 



 



While
I am aware that the common misconception is that permaculture is a system of
growing food.  We should not support that fiction. So we want plants that
fulfill our need for fruits/vegetables and that have multiple functions. 



Yesterday,
I mentioned chayote as a vegetable with several edible



parts. 
I first encountered chayote



in
1984, teaching a permaculture design course in a little village, Otates, in



the
highlands of Veracruz near Jalapa. In checking out the area, I encountered



chayote
plantations all trellised like commercial grapes and over bare soil



cultivation.
This was winter, relatively cool and dry in that region. My first



thought
was that they could get a crop of winter wheat out between the chayotes. 
Harvest would be slightly awkward, but manageable. Then I thought, why not run
chickens under the vines on a rotational basis, harvesting wheat, wheat grass,
weeds, and insects. The chickens would need very little purchased feed. No
fertilizer would be bought, only chicken feed. What the chickens passed would
become fertilizer. If one grows broilers in batches, chickens could be marketed
before the spring flush of shoots, which would be vulnerable to pecking and



scratching,
and a new batch introduced when all was safe.  I didn’t work out the
summer cover crop, but it might be evident from among the weeds. Or legume
cover crop such as cowpea might be grown.  Running trellis wires between
rows would create an arbor effect, making better use of sunlight, and providing
shade for chickens or maybe turkeys would be a better summer crop. Mob stocking
could create more or less bare soil just before reseeding, or one could use a
Fukuoka-type system of planting through the previous crop (after removing the
birds!).  So we go from a simplistic concept of perennial vegetable to a
system of multiple plant species, animal species, greater yield of our



primary
crop, a second highly profitable crop, and less expense for labor and



fertilizer.
That is how a permaculturist looks at a ‘perennial vegetable.’



 



Finally,
it seems that we are overlooking a lot of obvious options.  For example,
no on has mentioned bamboo



shoots.
I’ve already cited plantain above. Cassava is a plant native to nearby regions
of the Caribbean, with both edible leaves and root. Palm hearts are fine food,
though a little labor intensive to harvest.  Where one needs to cut a
sabal palm anyway (the Florida state tree), you might as well harvest the
heart. The tender portions are surrounded by fibrous but also starchy material
that is good feed for ruminants and especially rabbits. (And it is one of the
most weedy plants at our site and very difficult to suppress once germinated.)
You can get lists of palms with multiple stems for palm heart gardening. 
Some of these also bear useful fruit (and terrifying thorns!). 



 



Good
luck!  And productive observations!



 



 



 



Dan



Hemenway



 



Barking



Frogs
Permaculture Center



 



www.barkingfrogspermaculture.org



 



PS  There are excellent USDA agricultural
stations in Puerto Rico and Hawaii with many useful publications. 



There
are also university publications from each.  Also in English are good publications from the
Philippines, 



Australia
(which has a large subtropical to tropical zone), and probably from the
American territories in the Pacific (e.g. American Samoa). Many African
countries are former English colonies and have
English as one of their official languages.  For example, in Kenya, ICRAF publishes in English. In Miami,
you should be able to find permaculture-oriented folks fluent in Spanish, which
opens up papers and books published from Mexico 



to
Argentina for you to mine.  For example,
someone should run down the library of INEREB, long since defunded, but doing
exactly the sort of research that pertains to your
needs. (Disregard their paper on chinampas, which is wrongheaded.) There are
permaculture movements in these countries, as well as Brazil
where many permacultrists speak English fluently. So information exchange can
help develop your info base. 



But
knowing about a useful plant is of no value if you don't have a way to get it.
Using what already grows around you avoids that problem.



 



PSS  I forgot to mention that we always
encourage someone in a region to develop a permaculture nursery.  If someone already has a



nursery
and is interested in permaculture, that is way better because you don't learn
nursery operations overnight.