Hemenway, T. (2009). Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, 2nd Edition (2nd ed.). Chelsea Green Publishing.

Summary

The first edition of Gaia’s Garden sparked the imagination of America’s home gardeners, introducing permaculture’s central message: Working with Nature, not against her, results in more beautiful, abundant, and forgiving gardens. This extensively revised and expanded second edition broadens the reach and depth of the permaculture approach for urban and suburban growers.

Notes

L.341 - "Weeds are simply pioneer plants, molded by billions of years of evolution to quickly cover disturbed, open ground."

L.568 - "She pointed out a ... Penstemon barbatus that looked unhappy in the deep shade. 'Things change so fast here, ... this was in full sun two years ago. Now it's completely shaded out, and I think it might be rotting from the soil staying too wet.'"

L.1439 - The Zone System: Functions and Contents

L.1643 - Bringing the Soil to Life

L.3142 - "Weeds are supremely multifunctional plants. They are the pioneers, covering, protecting, and fertilizing bare soil, preparing it for others. Many weeds are superb nutrient accumulators—in fact, that is often their primary role, pulling widely scattered nutrients from deep in the earth and concentrating them in the surface soil."

L.3977 - "Here’s one useful quality: Ecosystems are fundamentally cooperative places. Yes, there is plenty of competition, but the underlying dynamic is one of mutual aid. In an ecosystem, microbes build soil, soil nourishes plants, plants feed animals, and animals disperse seed and leave their waste and corpses to be transformed by microbes into soil. Here spins a cycle of mutual interdependence, rich with many specific partnerships."

L.4180 - Designing Garden Guilds

L.4605 - "At the Bullock brothers’ several-acre food forest on Orcas Island, Doug Bullock listed some other access benefits of forest gardening. “Sheer biodiversity is part of it,” he told me. “We get birds and other animals here that no one else has seen for years. But the best part is the food—it’s unreal!” We stood beneath a plum tree bent nearly double with fruit, and I nodded as Doug continued. “Every summer we have about twenty students here for three weeks. And there’s enough fruit right here to feed them. Think about it: Twenty people grazing for weeks on plums, peaches, and berries, and when they’re gone there’s still tons of fruit on the trees for us.”"

L.4706 - Seven Story Garden

L.5008 - "We've seen in Chapter 3 and elsewhere that understanding and working with edges in the permaculture sense - the boundary between two environments - lets us create microclimates, increase yields and biodiversity, and better manage our landscapes. Viewing the urban environment from the perspective of its edges gives us a powerful tool for adapting our gardens to these challenging places."

L.5497 - "Although city yards are still influenced by sun and wind just as wild land is, their design and function is also shaped by children, pets, local ordinances, your social life, traffic noise, easements, the neighbors’ comments, and a host of other forces not felt in any native forest."

L.5735 - "This garden is hard to damage. A new species may appear from the wild or the nursery, but rarely will it become invasive. The odds are high that it will find fertile soil and the right conditions to grow. But with so many other species present—potential competitors—it’s not likely to find enough unused food or space to become a pest. If it spreads too fast, it becomes a delicious and abundant food source for one of the thousands of species of insects, soil fungi, or other consumers that will keep it in check."