Gardening is one of the most beneficial hobbies one can develop. In addition to providing nutritious veggies and fruits for the entire family, and beautiful flowers to decorate the home, gardening is great for our health, the community, and the environment.
It boosts our strength, heals and empowers, improves mood and memory, lowers stress, and helps us fight diseases. The coronavirus pandemic has brought many concerns, and cut us off from social gatherings, so a lot of people started cultivating gardens.
This impulse is an amazing idea, but keep reading to discover a way to maximize your yields and minimize your efforts!
Have you ever asked yourself why some plants prosper better in forests, on their own, without any special care than in our gardens? For instance, no one trims, nourishes, or waters the wild veggies, and yet they grow better than our garden plants ever could if we weren’t so devoted to them.
It turns out, we may be doing things improperly. The diversity of the forest gives the plants the needed flexibility to deal with the harsh climate conditions and environmental factors that influence their growth.
It is one of the crucial factors in maintaining a productive ecosystem with natural stability.
The monoculture approach we take leaves the soil in a poor state for agricultural practices after only a few years. Namely, flatly planting the same crops in one garden drains the soil of some of the essential nutrients and creates additional compounds that might affect growth and production.
“What we think of as normal, in terms of food production is actually not normal at all. Annual plants are very rare in nature, yet most of our agricultural fields are filled with annual plants. It’s not normal. What’s normal is a more forested or semi-forested system.”
- directly useful plants, which include fruit trees, veggies, all types of nuts, tuber plants, timber, and logs on which mushrooms grow.
- indirectly useful plants, or system plants, which boost the function of the system, such as flowers that boost pollination, mineral-accumulating plants, and nitrogen-fixing plants
“With such a diverse system, whatever happens with the weather, most of your crops will probably do fine. Some may fail, some may do better. That’s very important going into the future because we don’t know exactly what’s going to happen to our weather. So by having a diverse system, it gives you maximum resilience.”
- Canopy trees,
- Smaller trees,
- Shrubs and bushes,
- Perennials,
- Groundcover layers,
- Root crops,
- Vines (climbers).
“It can seem overwhelming, there are so many species. You shouldn’t let that stop you from starting a project, because you don’t have to know everything, to begin with. Just start, plants some trees, and go from there.”