Permaculture Priorities in East Tennessee
by Chad Hellwinckel
After practicing permaculture in Knoxville for a decade, I’ve learned to prioritize a few things. This is my list:
Make a water plan, and plan on too much! We can get a lot of rain in East Tennessee. Step out in the yard during an inundation and look at where the water is going. Do you see any water running on the surface? If so, create a plan to ‘slow it, spread it, and sink it’. If you dig swales, make sure you plan for overflow when they get full. Where will the water go after that? The main point here is that with our slopes, water running down a hill can, very quickly, wash away nutrients you may have worked hard to build up. So think like a beaver!
Build Soil. We have very clayey soils. Water tends to run off of clay quickly and not absorb too well. Its best to build organic matter up. Organic matter can act like a sponge; absorbing excess water and releasing it to plants when needed. Organic matter can also absorb excess nutrients. I build soil through composting, using vast amounts of woodchips and straw as mulch, and using chickens to turn woodchips into soil.
Go easy on the annual vegetable garden and plant more bushes and trees. Developing a good plot of fine soil for vegetable gardening can take a lot of time and resources. With our humid summers, there are a myriad of ways your vegetables can meet their demise…slugs, mildew, aphids, fungus. I leave most of it to my CSA farmer, and instead concentrate on bushes and trees. Clay soils aren’t as much of a problem for bushes and trees, though I still increase the organic matter content around them through mulching, companion planting, and cover-cropping.
Winter annual gardening is great! I always plant a fall/winter garden, and I derive much joy from it. With colder temperatures, summer plant-predators go away, and gardening becomes a breeze. I just keep my winter greens under some old windows that act as a greenhouse, and they produce well throughout the winter.