I finally finished my herb garden this weekend. This ended up being about a 6 week, $400 project. Aesthetically I’m pretty happy with the result. See for yourself.

I did this all by hand which, for me, is always a good thing. I think people may think I’m crazy or stupid for doing it this way, but there are a couple of clear arguments:

1. human labor is very fuel efficient
2. power tools make a lot of noise
3. tools seem to intermediate, and the higher the technology, the more the intermediation

What I find myself doing is creating these things in the landscape from a semi-baked design and then looking for a permaculture justification after the fact. This is backwards, obviously, but I’m also trying to include visual aesthetics in the design, something Mollison eschews completely. Actually I think there is something in the Permaculture Designer’s Manual about creating a new aesthetics- a thought for future posts.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 9th, 2007 at 11:19 am and is filed under Food, Gardening, Permaculture, Energy, Food System. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.