Free Plant Guilds E-Book from Midwest Permaculture

http://midwestpermaculture.com/

The team over at Midwest Permaculture has been doing some great work lately, and this free eBook on Plant Guilds is great! If you are unfamiliar with the concept of guilds, you can read my article on Permaculture Guilds.

This eBook is a great resource for Permaculture in a Temperate Climate... so, of course, I had to share it!

Download the eBook here!

A Mini Guild: Beans, Cucumbers, Bougainvillea, Stinging Nettle

Seedlings of Purple Podded Pole Bean (left) and Japanese Climbing Cucumber (right)

My boys (age 4 years and almost 5 years old) wanted to help me in the garden this weekend.  I decided to try a small experiment. I have a spot that gets a few hours of morning sun, and that is it. It is not an ideal location for typical garden vegetables, but I only have a couple of seedlings to lose if it doesn't work.

There was a mixed variety of plants growing under a rather old Bougainvillea: some perennial flowering bulbs that the landlord (or their gardener) planted years ago, a low-growing mat of wispy little-leaved plants, a few shoots of ferns, and a single, small Stinging Nettle. I cleared a spot, and my boys and I planted the seedlings. I left the bulbs and Stinging Nettle. I shredded the other unknown plant and used it as a mulch for the seedlings.

My thought is that if there is enough light there for these plants to survive, then we just created a mini-Permaculture Guild. The bean is a legume and is a nitrogen-fixing plant... it will provide nitrogen (not a lot, but some) for the fast growing cucumber. The cucumber and bean are both climbing plants. They can be trained to grow up the tall Bougainvillea, which will be putting out beautiful blooms later in the Summer close to when the cucumber and beans will be ready to harvest. The flowering bulbs are pretty and will provide a bit of ground cover until the seedlings are taller. The Stinging Nettle is small, but by cutting out the competing ground cover around it, I have given it room to grow. As it does, it will become a ground cover of its own with edible leaves. When the Stinging Nettle gets a bit too big, which they usually do in places you don't specifically want them, I will cut it back and use its leaves... young leaves to eat and old leaves as mulch. Since Stinging Nettle is a Dynamic Accumulator, its mulch is rich in nutrients, specifically potassium, calcium, sulfur, copper, iron, and sodium. 

Seedlings (left), Bougainvillea (back), Stinging Nettle (lower right)

This small patch of soil is now home to a small Permaculture Guild. Our yard is full of very pretty, but not very useful plants. However, this spot with a big, old Bougainvillea with its understory of flowering bulbs, when neglected for a few years so that a few "weeds" spring up, and with the addition of a few annual vegetables, now becomes a very productive spot that requires minimal maintenance. 

This is a tiny glimpse of home-scale Permaculture!

Permaculture Guilds

A Blacksmith Guild

http://www.traditioninaction.org/OrganicSociety/Images_1-100/A_023_Blacksmith.jpg

A guild, according to Webster's Dictionary, is an association of people with similar interests or pursuits, also, or more particularly, a guild is a medieval association of merchants or craftsmen.  The word guild comes from the Old English and means Payment or Tribute.

Historically, for example, a carpenter could pay tribute to join a carpenter's guild.  He would then be protected by the society of fellow carpenters... protected from price gouging, unfair trade, etc. and protected from others stealing their "secrets", i.e. skills or "tradesecrets".  This is where a lot of the secret societies were initially formed (like the Masons... initially, stonemasons).  That carpenter could then focus on being the best carpenter he could be while making a good living for himself and his family.  But enough of the history...

This term has been applied to Permaculture to describe a collection of plants (a polyculture) that individually could survive on their own, but perform much better when grouped together.

One of the first, and most well known, Permaculture Guilds... the Three Sisters.

http://api.ning.com/files/H5c*qJE70zhPQyH0YVPLwQTZm7xxzW5HhxqQf3ys9D5bzDh3u1xjKrMLIm1PFfQfidvTx9s5CF7cyNJ4onNzkzWx6ClHtR4q/3sistersmain_Full.jpg

The classic Permaculture Guild is called the "three sisters" named by the Iroquois (native American tribe).  The three sisters are corn, beans, and squash.  The corn provides support for the beans.  The bean is a legume and pulls nitrogen from the air and puts (fixes) it in the soil with the help of bacteria and fungi.  The nitrogen fertilizes the corn and squash.  The squash, with its large leaves, shades out weeds and prevents moisture evaporation, and has prickly leaves which deter animal pests.  Finally, squash, beans, and corn are nutritionally complementary.

Permaculture Guilds then are "groups of species that support each other in beneficial ways, aiding self-maintenance, and reducing the work required to maintain the system." - Martin Crawford (Creating a Forest Garden)

An Apple Guild design by Bill Mollison

http://www.labocacenter.org/Portals/3/Templates/IdealAppleGuild.jpg

Polycultures (as opposed to monocultures like a field of corn) offer many benefits according to Dave Jacke (Edible Forest Gardens):

• As a whole, yield more than comparable monocultures
• Require fewer labor, energy, and material inputs
• Minimize stress, competition, and herbivory
• Maximize harmony and cooperation
• Generate self-renewing fertility
• Live within a sustainable water budget
• Remain stable with little to no maintenance

Ideally, a Permaculture Guild will provide the following:

• Increase vital nutrients: mainly nitrogen with nitrogen fixing plants, but also phosphorus, potassium, calcium, and other minerals with mineral accumulating plants, and general fertility plants.
• Attract Beneficial Insects (like ladybugs, lacewings, mantises, predatory wasps, etc.) to reduce pests.
• Attract Bees (including honey bees) through the use of honey plants (nectar producing plants) to increase pollination.
• Confuse pests with strongly aromatic plants (so pest can't find the one plant they normally prey on).
• Give support to a diverse population of bacteria, fungi, insects, and animals which increases diversity.
• Contain plants with differing soil profiles (plants with different root patterns and systems, i.e. shallow vs tap roots... so the plants are not competing for the same soil space).
• Contain ground cover plants that suppress unwanted species, i.e. "weeds".
• Contain plants with the genetic diversity and/or selective breeding that resist pests and disease

A guild design by Toby Hemenway (Gaia's Garden).

http://smartpei.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451db7969e2011570d7df9a970b-800wi

There is so much to building and designing guilds, and so many benefits from them, that it is impossible to convey it all in one post.  I'll add more, a bit at a time, about constructing Permaculture Guilds and provide as many examples as I can.  I just wanted to introduce the concept in this post.