Growing food, gardening, nourishing an ecosystem: it’s not about how well you can care for individual plants (although that can certainly help). Maybe you feel there are too many obstacles. Maybe you forgot to water your plants, your peppers got devoured by aphids, or you went on vacation and returned to find a graveyard of brittle carbon structures, and swore off plants forever. I have also felt those moments of laziness or forgetfulness, where caring for a plant felt like a chore I could not accomplish. I too have felt the feeling of failure despite my best efforts to care for a plant. So, I quickly learned how best to manage that and create a system that allows more flexibility. Success in gardening arises from proper knowledge and design. Create a garden that mostly cares for itself, and you’ll have much more flexibility for those slip-ups of human nature. Gardening won’t be a stressful disappointment, but an enjoyable pastime. Your hard work will be rewarded, creating a positive experience for yourself, and your mistakes less punished. Designed properly, a garden can be very forgiving because at the end of the day, Nature knows best.

Now, this isn’t to say there’s no work involved at all! But the work is fun! First you learn: reading, watching, listening. Whatever works best for you. Then you do. Design, implement, and then maintain, although these phases can overlap, with more and more emphasis on maintenance as time goes on. For us, design has meant thinking about what foods we want to grow and eat, what plants actually do well in our area and climate, about each plant’s specific requirements and growth habit, about what the food forest should look like in 10+ years, about the flow of water on our landscape, including spaces for walkways and sitting areas, and about which native plants to add for pollinators, among other considerations. Implementing has meant planting all those trees, shrubs, and nitrogen-fixing ground covers or perennials we researched in the design phase, installing raised beds, creating areas for composting, bringing in mulch from outside sources if necessary. Maintenance involves regular composting, pruning shrubs and trees, mowing grassy walkways, or regularly planting annual vegetables. For us, other than a few months in the summer when the weather’s hot and the grass grows annoyingly fast, or a particular day of heavy pruning, maintenance largely involves walking around with a coffee and looking at plants, maybe watering in dry months (though that can be automated too), and harvesting! Pretty stress-free, huh?

But before you get to the maintenance phase of the doing, you have to learn. So for those like myself that love reading books, here is a list of them which Tyler and I have greatly benefited from. (I am not sponsored or paid for any of these book recommendations.) Learning about all these topics is like putting all the tools you’ll need in your toolbelt. Then, you’ll be able to design, implement, and maintain a beautiful garden or food forest with all the confidence of an experienced gardener. Understanding the basic facts of each plant, of soil food webs, of composting, of hydrology, of weather and climate, of native flora and fauna, means you can do anything in your specific context. It’s not only about what to do when one pepper gets aphids, it’s about everything missing in your “toolbelt” and garden that allowed your pepper to get such unchecked aphids in the first place. You have to think like a systems designer and look at the whole big picture of nature’s complex and infinite cycle. Enjoy!