Critical Path Gardening

I want to ask a question for anyone who considers themselves a gardening expert:

What is the critical path for gardening?

This would mean
1) What is essential to succeed at a basic level? (and no more - the idea is to avoid overwhelm)
2) What is the order / timing of activities?

I like this!

For me it was something like....

Just get out there to a spot and see whats growing there already...dig around a bit, examine the soil. Collect as much leaves, yard debris etc. and scatter around. Bring in some rocks for small walls and stepping stones and start thinking about the areas you will be walking the most. Get an idea of the topography for waterflow and try to add little berms and such to direct the water how you need it. Small changes make a big difference! Get a compost area set up to add your food scraps to other collected yard debris. Larger debris can be the base (hugelkulture) for raised beds.

Get some seeds, get some seedlings and put them in the best ground you can find with a couple handfuls of awesome soil you can hopefully find locally from a rotting tree trunk in the forest or something...But I bought a few bags of mix from a big box store to start! That little garden is now someone else's (I hope they kept it) when the house sold, but just being ok with weeds, and chipmunks taking bites out of your cherry tomatoes is a good start to having a non-overwhelming experience :)

Poking around with a heavy piece of metal like a spud bar can help you determine if underlying rocks need to be dug out, but with enough good stuff stuff piled on top most things will do well enough eventually.

Patience and trial and error, and resorting to calling your garden a "wildlife sanctuary weed patch" is always helpful if things aren't going well LOL.

Oops I got too excited, I'm definitely not a gardening expert - take the above advice with extreme caution !!!

To help us help you to better travel down the correct critical path, do you mean you have a garden and you need advice on how to get going with it?  Or you have a site and you want to establish a garden?

Kelly Mitchell wrote:
1) What is essential to succeed at a basic level? (and no more - the idea is to avoid overwhelm)
2) What is the order / timing of activities?

There are a million ways to grow plants, and every site is different, every species is different, every year brings different conditions, etc., so I would say there is no absolute critical path.

You need seeds or plants, but that's the only requirement. You don't need soil for soilless hydroponic gardening, and you don't need water for dryland farming. I don't wanna be totally close-minded and say you can't garden without plants.... but yeah, there pretty much needs to be plants of some kind.

A person could with much effort tend a weed free garden of perfectly straight rows and produce 1000 pounds of garden vegetables every year. Or a person could jab some walnuts into a vacant pasture, do little effort while waiting 10 or 15 years, and then harvest 1000 pounds of walnuts every year.  Same same, but very different.

There are also trade-offs to consider. Is a garden that produces copious amounts of vegetables still successful if you screw up your back and spend the rest of your life with back pain? Or if you value your time monetarily, is your crop still successful if you spent 25x the time/money to grow it than it would have cost to buy the same vegetables at the local farmers market?

Your question is a philosophical one. Success equals results minus expectations, however... a garden could be said to be successful if the gardener is happy with it, but if in so doing the gardener sprayed a bunch of toxic chemicals, destroyed the soil life, wasted a bunch of water, burned a bunch of gas, etc., the success of such a garden would not exist beyond the gardener's own personal happiness.

And then there are the haters out there. Even if you do your best and are happy with the results, people are still gonna say you're a failure because of something you didn't do, eg - hOw CaN yOu CaLl YoUrSeLf A sUcCeSsFuL gArDeNeR iF yOu DoN't HaVe MiLliOnS oF yOuTuBe FoLloWeRs?!?!?!

If I were you, I wouldn't focus on success, I'd just focus on keeping your soil healthy and your plants alive. And remember that it's OK to fail and that you can always try again.

I'm reviving a garden we let go the last 2 years. We were never super successful with it: meaning we got very little food and lot of plant failures.

There's a guy named Clint Locklear with some pretty good videos and podcasts out there on the internet under the channel name Regenerative Permaculture. One of his ideas he calls Caveman Gardening. It seems to fit your description of a minimalist approach. Basically, you find a spot with good sun exposure, lay down a decomposable barrier like cardboard, pile on whatever loose organic matter you have access to, dig down and plant your seeds or plants, then let them fend for themselves and harvest whatever you can off them. I suspect such a minimal input approach with only yield minimal output, but if that's what you're looking for it can definitely be done that way.

Here's a link to a podcast where Clint talks about Caveman Gardening.
https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/regenerative/simple-caveman-gardening-no-WIdRAYNDOZe/

Kelly Mitchell wrote:I want to ask a question for anyone who considers themselves a gardening expert:

What is the critical path for gardening?

This would mean
1) What is essential to succeed at a basic level? (and no more - the idea is to avoid overwhelm)
2) What is the order / timing of activities?

My response to number one:  It is essential to have and maintain healthy soil.  It is essential to comprehend that it takes a commitment to succeed.  If a person is not willing to seriously commit to the endeavor than I would suggest not even starting, because it will simply be a waste of time, effort, and money.  It is essential to comprehend that successful gardening requires hard work and the willingness to do that hard work.  It is essential to not go overboard and create too large a project than a person can realistically commit to for the entire length of the growing season.  

I have mentored people over the years, and I pay attention to various gardening efforts in my community.  I have found that not meeting these basic, primary requirements promotes failure, which leads to frustration, which creates loss of interest, which leads to abandonment of gardening every time.  

There was an obvious increase in interest in home gardening that occurred in 2020 due to all the pandemic upheaval.  I know of no beginners who started gardening that year who are still gardening.  Some simply quit when the panic and fear subsided but many of them failed, likey due to not meeting some or all of those basic requirements I listed.  I think fear, global and national instability, the threat of possible food supply issues, inflation, and high cost of living increases this year will create another burst of interest, and I suspect that most of these new beginners will fail as well.

My response to number two:  With respect, the question is vague and too broad.


My simple response to your post is that if at all possible beginners should seek out an experienced local gardener who is willing to mentor over the length of a gardening season.  I would consider mentoring a local again but I would trade garden help for knowledge.  It is the best way to learn, plus nothing of any value is free anymore...

Kelly Mitchell wrote:I'm reviving a garden we let go the last 2 years. We were never super successful with it: meaning we got very little food and lot of plant failures.

Nice, that sounds doable. My earlier reply was thinking you were just sort of asking the question in an abstract hypothetical sort of way.

First things first, get a soil and water test so you know what you're dealing with. Soil and water conditions can change year to year, which is something to be aware of.

For max food production, I would add as much compost as possible, and for the style of maintenance I would go with the Jean Martin Fortier market gardener route, and use black/white silage tarps to do a stale seed bedding method. Not very permacultury, but the tarps definitely make establishing a new garden way easier, and sets you up well for transitioning it over to a more permaculture style veggie garden in a few years.

Reviving an old garden, or starting a new garden from scratch on a lawn or pasture or whatever, I would spend money on three things:
- heavy duty black/white silage tarps. Make sure you get the UV stabilized kind.
- some good compost (if you can't make your own)
- a sprinkler timer

With the tarps, they are a lot easier to handle if you cut them into strips that are the width of 1 bed + 1 path (say 48 inches for a 30 inch bed and an 18 inch path), and then you can tarp/untarp individual beds super easily. The best thing I've found to hold down tarps is flat concrete paving stones: they are heavy enough to do the job in high winds, but they are unobtrusive enough that you can just leave them in place in the paths and still be able to drive the wheelbarrow over them.

Stale seed bedding can be summarized as follows:
- If the weeds are currently taking over, tarp for up to six months depending on how bad the weeds are and what kind they are (rhizomatous grasses take a while to kill). Then I would uncover, dig/loosen/prep my beds, add compost on top, then retarp for two weeks to kill off the seeds that germinated after you mixed up the beds. Then I would uncover for a week or two to let the light dependent germinators pop up, then retarp again for two weeks. Then plant.
- If the weeds aren't growing vigorously everywhere or they are just barely coming out of winter, go ahead and prep the beds now with compost on top and then tarp them for a few weeks to kill off the immediately germinating weed seeds, then uncover them for a week to let any light dependent seeds germinate, then tarp them again for two weeks. Then plant.
- After harvest, depending on what you're growing, you may be able to just replant the next crop. If not, tarp for a couple weeks to kill off any remnants of the old crop, then untarp and prep the beds, then retarp/untarp as above.
- Keep the beds tarped any time there's not a crop growing in them.
- After a few years of doing this (about the lifetime of the plastic tarps), you will have exhausted the entirety of the weed seeds lying dormant in the soil, at which point you can go forward with organic mulch and only have to deal with weed seeds brought in by wind or birds.

Once your plants are up and growing, weed them once really good and then mulch as heavily as possible with some straw or woodchips or leafy material. Any kind of mulch is better than nothing at all, even if just plain cardboard or old scraps of wood. Any weeds that do come up, deal with them before they go to seed. To avoid disturbing the soil/mulch by pulling weeds roots and all, taller growing plants can be clipped off just just below the root crown with an old set of clippers that you don't mind if they get a little dinged up.  

Figure out how much you need to water by checking the soil moisture everyday with your fingers, digging down into the soil 2 inches or so. Keep track of how many days you go between waterings, then set up your sprinkler timer for that interval, and remember that in the height of summer when it's real hot you will need to shorten your watering intervals and keep monitoring it closely.

I am certainly not an expert gardener though to me to be successful there are a few components.

Having the time to spend gardening which means planting and watering.

Spending some time checking daily to see if the new plants need water.

Also building up the soil year after year to replenish the nutrient lost each year.

Knowing about some tools that gardeners can use are things like compost, wood chip, mulch, and compost tea.

Best wishes for getting that garden in shape.

Where are you?  I've gardened in the PNW and in North Carolina and they were both zone 8 but required very different gardening techniques and I had quite a bit of failure while learning to grow in each place.  If you give you approximate location, you can get some more specific advice.

Tom Knippel wrote: I know of no beginners who started gardening that year who are still gardening.

I think the rest of your post addresses the root of the problem - motivation. Why are you gardening in the first place?

Gardening/Agriculture is either an economic necessity or a passionately pursued pastime with a possible economic payout. It's the same with learning languages. No one learns a foreign language unless there is a significant economic or personal reason to do so, or unless you are a language enthusiast. It's just too hard. It's too much work.

Anne Miller wrote:I am certainly not an expert gardener though to me to be successful there are a few components.

Having the time to spend gardening which means planting and watering.

Spending some time checking daily to see if the new plants need water.

Also building up the soil year after year to replenish the nutrient lost each year.

Knowing about some tools that gardeners can use are things like compost, wood chip, mulch, and compost tea.

Best wishes for getting that garden in shape.

Well put Anne!
I am also no expert, but my most successful gardening in terms of production has revolved around time and attention on task.

I actually started gardening in earnest because of my own individual financial crisis, but I continued because it soothed my soul, not because it fed my family.
As far as order of operations, I say the first thing to do is make certain plants are in the ground.
No gardening happens without that, so anything, including planning ,that stops that, stop success.
I've lost more garden productivity dithering on exactly what to plant where than I've ever have planting the wrong thing in the wrong place or at the wrong time.
The market gardeners I have learned from maximize their production by having seedlings ready to go in the ground as soon as the previous plants are spent.
No growing time or space is to be wasted.
When they have an unsuccessful crop, they try something else.
That commitment lets them get better.
They treat it like work that must happen right now.



I am not like those people.
I am into to growing perennial's, because they don't need my time and attention except for a few times year.
Even my annuals tend to be things that thrive on neglect.
Most of my gardening is dedicated to building beds, new gardeners and soil, because that's what I enjoy.
I play at feeding my people, but my family doesn't really want the plant based diet that I could grow.
Growing fruit and berries is a better investment of my energy, because the input are small compared to what I get back.
I treat it like play and I am pleasantly surprised when it produces more than joy.

Jenny Wright wrote:Where are you?  I've gardened in the PNW and in North Carolina and they were both zone 8 but required very different gardening techniques and I had quite a bit of failure while learning to grow in each place.  If you give you approximate location, you can get some more specific advice.

Yeah, sorry, should have said location. Relatively hard place - Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Zone 5b.
Quite short growing season, near the ocean, acidic soils, late freezes (mid-June all danger passed), but plants grow very rapidly. fairly long autumn for the zone.
very wet spring, and cool summers.

imo, getting soil warm quickly is a major difference because of the short growing season. It also mistakes fatal for the season - there's rarely enough time for a second planting of anything besides greens.
Also - constant winds and extremely high winds - like nothing you've ever seen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suetes.

thank you for all the answers to everyone!

Kelly Mitchell wrote: Relatively hard place - Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Zone 5b.
Quite short growing season, near the ocean, acidic soils, late freezes (mid-June all danger passed), but plants grow very rapidly. fairly long autumn for the zone.
very wet spring, and cool summers.

Nova Scotia! You would probably find the info in this book very useful! Permaculture for the Rest of Us: Abundant Living on Less Than An Acre by Jenni Blackmore, who "built her house on a rocky, windswept island off the coast of Nova Scotia almost 25 years ago". I enjoyed this book very much, you will probably like it even better!

Kelly Mitchell wrote:1) What is essential to succeed at a basic level? (and no more - the idea is to avoid overwhelm)
2) What is the order / timing of activities?

I would start with building the soil for two small garden plots: one for a perennial herb patch, like a potager, and one for annual fruits and vegetables that you like to eat. Maintining motivation, as others have pointed out before me, is critical to success. So set yourself up for success by having concentrated, easy-to-access gardening areas where you can grow the things you like to eat and use most. Gradually branch out from there as you develop skills and increase your knowledge.

Barabara Pleasant's Starter Vegetable Gardens: 24 No-Fail Plans for Small Organic Gardens is an incredible resource for starting small plots and increasing them over the years. If you like looking at garden maps and diagrams, and brainstorming how to tweak them for your situation, you will love that book too!

Not an expert by a longshot, but I started out with two badly neglected beds in 2020.  Because of the pandemic I was suddenly home all of the time and took a few days to really get those beds cleaned out.  After that I started building additional beds and scrounging whatever materials I could find the fill them.  I did have access to lots of leaves which I shredded and used to mulch all of the beds. Weeds can be your worst nightmare,  so mulch and keep on top of emerging weeds.

I've had my share of gardening mistakes too.  My beet harvest in 2020 was three measly beets, the corn grew 2' tall, worms decimated the cabbage... However I've learned something from each of my failures and am constantly experimenting and trying new things.  For instance I planted multi-sown beet transplants last year and had a bumper crop.

We are located on top of a hill and the garden gets quite a bit of wind.  Early in the season I try to alleviate the damaging effect of the wind by using old row cover attached to stakes, or large panes of old glass (scrounged some old windows that were nearly 1/2" thick).  I usually pound a couple of t-posts in the corn bed and run twine or wire around them to keep the corn standing.

I guess to answer your questions,  I'd have to say that to succeed at the basic level, get that garden in shape.  Perhaps do a soil test and add amendments as necessary.  Plant, and then mulch when the time is right. I'm assuming you're growing in the ground versus raised beds.  If so, cardboard can help by keeping weeds down in the paths. A big help to me has been keeping a garden journal as I can go back and see what worked and what didn't and make changes accordingly.

I know you don't want to get overwhelmed,  but getting a garden back in shape will take an initial time investment.   Mulching can help keep maintenance at a minimum.  I also keep a 55-gallon water barrel with a spigot outside of my garden fence.  Unfortunately I have to collect rainwater in buckets to fill it, but it's nice to have it nearby when watering new seedlings and transplants.

Good luck with your gardening journey and keep us posted!

1) Love for life and all its diversity. Something will find its ecological niche and thrive if we have diverse soil and seeds. I think an essential to designing an ecosystem—which a garden is—is to make the meeting of biological needs of each species beneficial to some other species. Biodiversity above and below ground is essential to this. No seed grows if its left in the packet.

2) Start with rebuilding soil biodiversity and biomass, and increased organic matter beneficial to virtually most plants will follow. This will make growing almost any kind of plant easier and less work. Fortunately, even weeds help build this biodiversity and biomass, so as long as we avoid poisons and tillage, soil will improve over time. Even dead plants we attempted to grow unsuccessfully will improve the soil (barring the use of biocides or tillage).

In my opinion permaculture gardening is about starting/continuing something for future generations to enjoy and perpetuate, so we have literally forever to work with.

I've been thinking a lot about this over the last few weeks and this is what I've come up with that is universal:

#1 Identify your goal(s). Why do you want to grow a garden? Having an end goal in mind will help you to keep going when you experience failures. Recognize those failures as learning what doesn't work and that failure puts you closer to learning what does work and closer to that goal. As part of your goal, identify how much money, space, and time you have to spend.

#2 Observe your site and draw a plan of the existing landscape and a second plan of what you would like it to look like in the future. Take note of what is already growing wild without human interference. What qualities do those wild plants have? What plant families do they belong to? (You might discover that some of those plants are edible and taste good!) Identify your soil type, consistent days over 40F (for cool weather crops) and consistent days over 70F (for heat loving crops), and how much rainfall each month. There are charts with this information online by zip code

#3 Make a list of what you eat daily, weekly, and monthly. Make a list of things you would like to eat but can't access easily at your local store.

#4 Compare your lists of foods to the info from step #2 and choose no more than a dozen kinds of plants to grow that fit within your growing conditions and space. Try to have a variety of plant families (brassicas, nightshade, allium, etc) so you can identify pest and disease pressures that first year. You don't want to plant all cucurbits and find out that you have some fungal disease or a bug that wipes out everything you plant. A variety will ensure that you will hopefully see at least one success.

#5 Get a calendar and write in pencil when you should start seeds or direct plant seeds based on your local weather and put in parenthesis the # of days to harvest and mark harvest days in pencil as well. Give your self manageable tasks daily or weekly. As you actually plant and harvest, mark what actually happens in pen on the calendar. Record any failures along with the cause or symptoms if the cause is unknown. You can buy fancy perpetual garden record books but a cheap $1 calendar works too. Keeping a record will help you identify patterns, remember your successes, and avoid repeating mistakes. If you want to go digital, I take a lot of photos on my phone and use the date/time stamp to help me record.

That is what I would recommend for anyone starting out. Basically you have to have a goal and a plan for that goal.

I want to ask a question for anyone who considers themselves a gardening expert:

What is the critical path for gardening?

This would mean
1) What is essential to succeed at a basic level? (and no more - the idea is to avoid overwhelm)
2) What is the order / timing of activities?

I'm a beginner, but I like to garden, and I like to learn, and I like to think in systems.  And since this thread needed more pictures, I drew a nerdy system diagram!

Now, on to your first question:  1) What is essential to succeed at a basic level?

Gardening, in my opinion, is the harmonious marriage between site conditions and plant conditions, in the context of the Gardener's goals and actions regarding both.  

I feel that all which is needed for gardening success is for the gardener's needs to be met, usually (but not strictly) via viable plants having their unique needs met by site conditions.  The gardener can effect change to the site, or they can effect change in the plant(s) present -- or they can do nothing at all, and still be successful!  But I feel the shortest answer to "what is essential to succeed at a basic level" is YOU.  The quickest critical path to gardening success, happens when the Designer/Gardener will simply acknowledge success as finding joyful satisfaction in being in their garden.  In that case, the critical path for this gardener is:

Step 1: Discover, adopt, maintain, or create a new garden.
Step 2: Appreciate all the amazing happenings of life and death and beauty and feedback* which you are now a part of.
Step 3: Smile, you are a successful gardener!
*Again, like others have alluded to, it's FEEDBACK, not failure!

Put a slightly different way, we can change the site or we can change the plant(s), but we can also change our own goals and preferences.  For example, some textbook "problem is the solution" answers:
-Learning about and eating the (safe) weeds that grew in our garden instead of what we hoped would grow.
-Trying a hardy, dispersive, native, or unusual-to-us plant rather than the standard big-box favorites.
-Feeding whatever did grow on the plot to something else, and then eating that (e.g. rabbit, deer, chicken)
-Taking satisfaction that while you personally didn't get much food, perhaps the soil may have been fed, getting a chance to rest and be fallow and maybe even teeming with microbes again?

Now, for the second question: 2) What is the order / timing of activities?

Because a garden is a living system, it operates in cycles and webs, and is subject to constant outside influences. So a single critical path is tougher to pin-point, in that you could start anywhere, jump in, and still be successful.  If I had to pick a path, it would be:

1 Site observation and analysis
   -What are the characteristics of the site?
   -What's happening or expected to happen there?
2 Personal analysis and goals
  -What do I desire, yield-wise? (e.g. Looking at awesome seed catalogues in winter and trying not to drool while going gaga over the beautiful photos of plants I haven't tried yet)
3 Plant understanding (research) and selection -
  -What plants will I attempt to grow, and in what quantity, given what I know about 1 and 2?  
  -What don't I know about these plants that I probably need to learn?
  -Wait, do I actually want to spend time learning or do I just want to stick seeds in the ground and see what happens, cause that is gardening, too!
4 Gap analysis of the site vs what do the plants need.
  -What can I do to mitigate this gap to reach my goals? (e.g. windbreak, compost, irrigation systems or watering, fencing, relay plantings, crop rotation planning)
  -Is reaching my goals impossible?  If it is impossible, will I try anyway because I'm a happy combination of hopeful, foolish, and fortunate?
5 Site design, improvements, preparations, mitigations, or garden activities.  
6 Viable plant material propagation, acquisition, storage, and/or transfer to the site.  (e.g. buying those seeds from the awesome catalogue, and eagerly planting some of them,...or letting one stick around over winter and seeing if it self-sows)

Hi Kelly, I just went through all the responses so far to your questions. Lots of experience and wisdom there. Almost overwhelming in itself.
I see you are in Nova Scotia. I gardened for 8 years in coastal Maine, and for 12 years in Ireland. Some parallels there to NS

Are you near the coast? Near enough to gather seaweed (if it's still permitted where you are).
Do you have access to hay?

I don't have time right now to forage a bunch of links for you, but you might want to research 'Lazy Bed Gardening'. I've done it often with spoiled hay bales that got rained on and were thus free for collecting, or sometimes delivered for a small price.

Basically, you lay out flattened cardboard boxes and thick pads of newspaper to cover the area you'll be gardening. Soak it well and walk over it to shape it to the soil below. Be sure you get a good 12" overlap between the pieces. You don't need to pull the weeds first; just whack them down and leave lying before topping with the paper.

Then line up you hay bales 'cheek by jowl', so they touch one another and soak them. If you go with seaweed, I'd pile it about 18" thick (note the seaweed needs to be rinsed of salt first. Collecting it after a storm will give larger amounts and rain will have at least begun the desalting). Seaweed collapses pretty quickly so you will probably need to top it up. And of course, you can mix materials according to what's available.

The west coast of Ireland grew /grows potatoes very well in lazy beds of just seaweed laid over stones. The small plots are kept over generations and of course, they improve with time. But I think in any contest for wind and rain between Nova Scotia and Ireland, western Ireland would probably win.

And that's precisely what I would plant the first year. Spuds. Let them provide a harvest while the soil improves and the weeds diminish.

MEANWHILE:

-Get some wind screening in the ground. You have options. Look around your area to see what is working and copy that. It can be living, constructed or a mix.

-Find a local organic market farm and volunteer. Become an apprentice. Make an agreement that exchanges your time and labor for a broad range of experiences on the farm. That's important to agree at the outset. You don't want to spend the whole season only cutting cabbages.

Kelly Mitchell wrote:I want to ask a question for anyone who considers themselves a gardening expert:

What is the critical path for gardening?

This would mean
1) What is essential to succeed at a basic level? (and no more - the idea is to avoid overwhelm)
2) What is the order / timing of activities?

Kelly Mitchell wrote:I want to ask a question for anyone who considers themselves a gardening expert:

What is the critical path for gardening?

This would mean
1) What is essential to succeed at a basic level? (and no more - the idea is to avoid overwhelm)
2) What is the order / timing of activities?

As I see it (but I am not an expert at all):
1. essential is to treat the soil in the right way (add organic matter so the 'soil life' can feed the soil and so the plants). And also essential is to get more knowledge (this is ongoing during the rest of your life).
2. The timing starts at the end of the calendar year (where I live it's in November, but it depends on where you live). That's when mulch (or compost from the compost heap) is spread over the soil. Then in early spring you start sewing seeds indoors and later in spring (when there's no more frost) you plant those small plants in the garden. Here March/April are the sewing-seeds-months and May/June are the planting months. Then there are a few growing months (July/August here). And then there's harvesting, but the first yield is already in June, or even end May.

There are a lot of good points above.  I'd like to share one of my favorite ways I've seen this answer described in Geoff Lawton's Q&A where he was asked:

What are the priorities for starting a permaculture food garden?



A quote from the description below the video:

Regardless of size, when starting a food garden, we start the same way. We have to consider aspect, noting particularly how much sunlight we get. We have to work with contour, which allows us to maximize our water efficiency. And, we have to size our beds (no more than double-reach) and paths appropriately.

Then, there are Geoff’s top six considerations:

6) Controlling the edges and ends of the beds with low-lying and/or perennial plants,
5) mixing annuals and perennials together,
4) cultivating diversity in size and shape and color to confuse pests and favor predators,
3) taking advantage of micro-climates in the design to extend the growing season,
2) utilize the increase of growing area with vertical spacing,
1) and cycling nutrients through the system via waste from the garden, house, and beyond

I don't know why it's numbered as a countdown. :-D

I've discovered some of these principles through trial and error over the years, and it was very helpful to see how Geoff Lawton described it.  I learned some great things that helped my methods, like where he describes in the video that they layer vertical (trellises and such) with many plants and it works well. That encouraged me to add more variety to our trellises.  

For example, this year on our 16' long garden trellis, one side has two grapes, peas, moonflowers, green beans, long beans, and a passionflower. The other side has peas, runner beans, hyacinth beans, green beans and later will hopefully have fruiting passionflower I'm starting from seed. And possibly Thunbergia for flowers.   Layering plants with this level of diversity is not something I've done before, though the beds below are very diverse.