Journaling my polyculture journey

A few years ago, I lived in town, in the shade, and most of what I grew was chiles in containers. But I wanted to move back to land and got re-interested in permaculture (mostly the 'growie' stuff) and started reading about and watching videos on guilds and milpa/three sisters and root-diversity in pasture and on and on. If you're here, you know the drill. Somewhere along the way, my wife got interested in Square Foot Gardening, which is also a polyculture practice even if it isn't permie. Anyway, I started doing experiments in my limited capacity and then we did move to land and I broadened what I was trying. I want to document that while I can still remember what I was doing and dig through old photos to link stuff up. So that's what I'll be doing below.

When I first started, I was only growing chiles on my deck and driveway. It was the only corner of my north-facing property that would get any sun. I'd start the chiles indoors and transplant to containers. After a couple years of weeding the containers, I started sowing clover onto the surface of the pots once the pepper plants had a little height. Then I'd let the clover grow and also whatever weeds came up, as long as they'd remain in the understory position. I was intent on testing their thievery of water and nutrients, but wasn't up for letting them steal sunlight, so I'd snip and pull things that got out of hand, but mostly I didn't need to. And y'know, I didn't have any stunning findings either way. There wasn't a dramatic-enough difference in the yield or the health of the chiles to say anything one way or the other, but I came away from that experience feeling promising about the idea. These are crammed into a tiny greenhouse to survive a frost in Sept of 2019, but it's the only image I found showing weedy pepper plants.

Along around that same time, I'd been reading about hugelmounds and wanted to try one. I didn't really have a great place to work with, but I threw down five or six small logs as well as a bunch of underbrush and punky stuff scavenged from the perimeter of the yard, and then covered it in soil from elsewhere in the yard mixed with bag soil from Home Depot. I then planted it out with ALL THE SEEDS. I see corn and sunflower and thistle and squash and strawberries and creeping Charlie and I know there was lettuce and chiles and various other stuff that we had lying around. It was too shady, chipmunks made a wonderful burrow the whole length of it, and we moved away before being able to test it for water-holding benefits, but I sort of loved the riot of abundance.

When we moved to our current place, we bought the house and started performing renovations on it, coming up every weekend, but not living there for the first 9-10 months. Some of the renovation included getting an asparagus patch going and putting in some fruit trees. But I also mounded up some compost on top of cardboard and planted corn, pole-beans, and squash, three-sisters style. I did that for two years before reclaiming their mounds for other stuff. They produced some stuff -- corn and beans mostly, but it didn't feel like a real success. I think the cardboard blocked roots and there was not enough soil on top of it and not enough mulch on top of that and we were not there every day to baby them during a hot dry summer (their first year) and it was just a little unimpressive. But I also don't think that was a fair trial. I've mostly stopped that in order to move on to other experiments.