Relational Gardening
Exploration in Ecology for Children and Their Adults
Note: For now, this blog is a serialization of a book titled Field Trips for All of Us: Transformative Adventures for Children and Their Adults. Here is the preface. The first field trip is Taking Education Outside.
Introduction
In, Observing Relationships in Nature, we mention using mutualistic relationships as a resource in ecologically designed systems. We recommended that your family explore mutualistic relationships by observing how they work in unplanned physical groupings of organisms in nature. Now it’s time to take a look at using mutualistic relationships as a resource in your garden. The benefit of relational gardening is that we get to help the Earth provide food for us in a way that helps restore and regenerate food and habitat for other travelers on spaceship Earth. This is a huge topic that lies at the intersection of food production and habitat regeneration and is fundamental to permaculture, regenerative farming, food forests, and ecological living in general. Our goal here is to provide a broad overview, some vocabulary and concepts, and some specific projects to help you take your first steps into this field. The good news is that there are no mines in this field. In fact, there are really no mistakes you can make when you start focusing on mutual aid/mutualistic relationships. The worst thing that can happen is you’ll make a discovery about a relationship that is not mutualistic and therefore to be avoided in the future.
Activity
Try a weed garden. In his book, The Beginner's Landscape Manual (2023), our friend Mike Hoag describes how to grow a weed garden. The basic idea is that you create a space to see what comes up out of your soil if you bare its surface. He suggests clearing a few square feet of lawn, watering it weekly if you don’t get rain and see what happens. If you don’t have a lawn you can dry this in a container inside or outside. The basic idea is to observe the polyculture that emerges from your soil. Polyculture simply means different kinds of plants grown together as distinct from factory-farm monoculture, field wide plantings of a single variety of plant. The next several steps will help your family prepare for more planned out polyculture.
Generate a list of plants your children like to eat. The first thing you need to think about is what you’d like to grow. We suggest starting by talking with the kids in your care about what fruits and vegetables they like to eat or use (i.e. have positive relationships with). This can include your favorite smells, colors, or plants that have special meaning to your family. Here’s the start of such a list for Peter’s household: lettuce, carrots, kale, asparagus, beans (including soybeans), onions, potatoes, rice, garlic, mushrooms, black berries, raspberries, strawberries, grapes, apples, cherries, chestnuts, mint, ginger, turmeric, cilantro, hot peppers. Here is the list for Nicolette’s family. Nicolette lives 3 stories up and gardens in a balcony: green onions, yarrow, mint, passion fruit vine, golden currant, sages, tomatoes, aloe vera, basil, marigolds, calendula, chamomile. Don’t worry if your list is long, we'll be trimming it soon.
Generate a list of native plants that attract and/or benefit pollinators and other wildlife in your local ecosystem. Make sure to include your favorite natives as they certainly provide some benefit for your local ecosystem else they wouldn’t be there. Coming up with this list may be as easy as taking note of the plants that attract bees and butterflies and those bring you joy when you're out for a saunter or, if you live in a highly developed urban or suburban area, may require some research into plants that once were native to your area. Some states have entire websites that solely focus on native plants endemic regions! Look up native nurseries in your area and they will eagerly share their passions and advice with you. If you only have big box stores, ask for them to bring in natives- I (Nicolette) have had luck requesting plants every time I went and eventually, I finally saw some!
Consider specific non-native contributors to your garden’s ecology. Mutualistic communities are powered by diversity. For example, some plants are known as nitrogen fixing plants (more on this later) because they indirectly increase soil nitrogen. Legumes and clovers are two groups of plants that play this role. Others are known as good ground covers as they help prevent runoff and the leaching of miners and valuable organic matter from soil. Squashes, clovers, and strawberries and many other low growing plants make good ground covers. Dynamic accumulators like comfrey, dandelions, and docs concentrate nutrients from the soil and release those nutrients back into the soil when they decompose. If you don’t already have a nitrogen fixing plant, a ground cover, and a dynamic accumulator on your list, consider adding a couple of each of these to your list if you have the space for it.
Prune your list using each plant's relationship to the climate where you live. Now that you have a list of plants including ones you like to eat and habitat builders it’s time to trim your list down. First, use the internet or ask some local gardeners what USDA hardiness zone you live in. Next check each plant on your list to see if it will grow in your zone. You want to get as close to your address as possible since zones can differ even within the same city.
Group your plants using their recommended planting times. Different plants have different ideal planting times in different climates. For example, leafy greens like it cool and are great for planting early in the spring. While, flowers can be planted in autumn for extra time to grow roots and leaves and prep their buds before spring.
Experiment with a Scatter Sown Polyculture. Depending on where you live and the time of year when you're reading this it may be a good time to plant one of your groups of seeds. If it is a good time, I’d recommend that your first foray into relational gardening be what Mike Hoag calls a scatter polyculture. You create a scatter polyculture by scattering your seed collection in an area that you’ve cleared of grass or in a raised-bed or other container. Unlike with a weed garden, with a scatter sown polyculture, you plan what you’ll grow. Like with a weed garden, the physical and material exchange relationships emerge.
Consider spatial relationships and sunlights needs. Different plants have different needs in terms of how much space they need around them (usually way overstated in planting instructions) and how much sunlight they need, which determines whether they will do well growing under shade producing plants or if they are the ones providing the shade. Even people who plant in single species rows consider spatial and temporal relationships between their plantings. Relationships like: (a) planting taller plants on the north side of a garden so they don’t shade shorter plants, (b) rotating species to take advantage of their different nutritional needs and contributions, (c) companion planting (i.e., planting two or three species near each other to use their mutualistic relationships as a resource), and (d) planting cover crops to prevent erosion and nutrient leaching and to build soil.
We recommend that if you do decide to do some planned relational gardening, that you support your children:
verbally describing and/or pictorially representing where you are going to plant your plants in relationship to each other, and
explaining their planned arrangement of plants in terms of the relationships among those plants and the plants’ needs for water and sunlight.
All children old enough to handle a crayon can participate in representing your design. Older children will be most able to plan and explain the design.
The next steps into relational gardening all involve planting specific plants in specific mutually beneficial spatial and material exchange relationships with each other. In addition to the two great books we reference below, there is a massive amount of information on this topic available on the Internet including plenty of lists of good plants to grow together in guilds. For now, we’ll just introduce you to the language and set you loose to research and experiment.
Herb Spirals: I (Peter) love growing herbs at home. Nothing beats cooking with fresh herbs. They tend to be pricey at stores. And, many of them don’t keep well. Because I use them so frequently, I like my herbs to be very close to my house (if you’re not already familiar with the idea of permaculture zones, you might want to research this very useful concept). In the Patterns that Connect field trip, we talked a little bit about spirals in nature. The herb spiral is a useful design technique because it is very compact and the relative placement of plants in the spiral provides for many microclimates. Both Toby and Mike’s books referenced at the end of this blog contain great information on herb spirals.
The Three Sisters+ Guild: The three sisters is a specific guild developed by northeastern First Nations people of Haudenosaunee (“People of the Longhouse '') and their women gardeners about 3,000 years ago. It is believed that the earth began when Sky Woman peered through a hole in the sky and fell through to an endless sea. The animals saw her coming, so they took the soil from the bottom of the sea and spread it onto the back of a giant turtle to provide a safe place for her to land. Thus, creating Turtle Island. Sky woman had become pregnant before she fell. When she landed, she gave birth to a daughter. When the daughter grew into a young woman, she also became pregnant (by the West wind). She died while giving birth to twin boys. Sky Woman buried her daughter in the “new earth.” From her grave grew three sacred plants—corn, beans, and squash. These plants provided food for her sons, symbolizing all of humanity. These plants were gifts from their Sky Woman that ensured the survival of their people.
The squash has leaves that make a great ground cover that hold moisture in the soil and prevent other plants from growing too close. The beans attract nitrogen fixing bacteria, which the corn relies on for amino acids, protein, and chlorophyll production. While the corn provides a structure for the beans to climb. Toby’s book contains great information on growing the three sisters. The Haudenosaunee believed these Sisters should live together, so we encourage you to find recipes that include all three!
Tree Guilds and Food Forests: Extending the methods of relational gardening, ecological garden designers also consider two levels of integration among their plants: guilds and food forests. Tree guilds are multilayered groups of companion plants often organized around a large tree.
We discuss layers as a pattern that connects in the field trip of that name: Patterns that Connects and the importance of spatial relationships in Observing Relationships in Nature.
Food forests are groups of multi-layered guilds. Robert Hart’s seven-layer model for food forests includes:
A canopy layer that consists of tall fruit and nut trees.
A lower tree layer of dwarf fruit and nut trees.
A shrub layer of fruit bushes.
An herbaceous layer of culinary and medicinal herbs, companion plants, and plants that pollinators love.
A ground cover of edible plants that function as a living mulch.
A rhizosphere layer of root crops.
A vertical layer of vines and climbers.
Others have added a mycelial layer and we agree that this is a critical consideration. We say more about this in the Some Nature Science section of this field trip.
In addition to including one or more plants at each layer, ecological garden designers consider the various roles each plant plays (or niches each plant occupies). For example, members of the legume and ceanothus families form associations with nitrogen-fixing bacteria and, when the plant is harvested leaving their roots in place, return that nitrogen to the soil. As we know, squashes provide excellent ground cover providing a living mulch that limits evaporation and erosion. Comfrey, artichoke, radishes (especially daikon radishes), mustard, parsnip, root celery, horseradish, docks, parsley, dandelion, turnip, and poppy are all dynamic accumulators that mine nutrients via tap roots and bring those minerals to the surface where they are returned to the soil when the roots of those plants decay. This is one of the reasons we should almost never harvest plants by pulling their roots out of the ground. Various plants also attract pollinators (e.g., Phacelia, Clarkia, Ceanothus) and some also repel pests (e.g., garlic, basil, mint).
We’ve provided the above information to help you start thinking about how to use relationships in your garden as a resource. We also highly recommend the two books referenced below and the wealth of information about permaculture available on the web. For Indigenous resources, we highly recommend the folks at North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems and their Indigenous Food Lab and the International Institute of Indigenous Science’s Indigenous Permaculture program. Also, remember that experimenting is part of the process. Successful natural plant groups, like the ones you may have observed in Observing Relationships in Nature, arise from natural experiments (i.e., evolution through natural selection).
Some Nature Science Stuff
Nitrogen fixing is a biochemical process that takes nitrogen from the atmosphere, splits the very tight triple bond that keeps atmospheric nitrogen atoms clinging to each other as pairs, and joins them to hydrogen or oxygen atoms rendering them usable by living organisms.
We all find our poetry in different places. One place I (Peter) find mine is in the rhizosphere. Where roots, tiny crystals, grubs, bacteria, fungi, nematodes, worms, poop, pee, decaying parts of bodies and exudates all gather and make beautiful biological music together. What I remember from school was a description of how plants extract raw materials from the soil and atmosphere much like humans do. What a sad individualistic story. The truth is more of a 24/7 flow of gifts between three types of contributors.
To start with plants, animals, and fungi all need water, simple nitrogen-based molecules, sugars and minerals, to continually rebuild themselves.
Plants, as we’ve all been told, pull carbon dioxide from the air and with the energetic help from the sun, creates sugar for itself through a process called photosynthesis.They can’t make their own simple nitrogenous molecules though.
Nitrogen-fixing bacteria are great at, well, fixing nitrogen. That means they can make simple nitrogenous molecules like ammonia (NH4) nitrates and nitrites (salts containing NO3- and NO2- respectively) from atmospheric nitrogen. These molecules are critical intermediaries used by the bacteria (and the rest of us) to build proteins, DNA, RNA and other biomolecules. Neither fungi nor plants can do this. Bacteria can’t, however, synthesize sugars.
Mycorrhizal fungi (fungi that dance with the roots of plants), with their vast webs of mycelial fibers, are great at gathering water and minerals they and other beings need. However, they can’t synthesize sugars nor the simple nitrogenous molecules they and other beings also need.
So, how do our players use their gifts together?
Our mycorrhizal fungi and nitrogen-fixing bacterial friends are both drawn to plant roots hairs by the plant's gift to the team—sugary exudates the plant generously leaks from its roots. Some of the bacteria gather close to the roots, stimulating the plant to grow tiny (but often visible) root nodule homes for their microbial friends. There, they drink in the plant's sticky gift and do their nitrogen fixing things, their residual nitrogenous compounds becoming gifts for the plant. The mycorrhizal fungi either wrap their delicate mycelial filaments around, or gently enter, equally delicate root hairs. There, they exchange minerals and water they have gathered, for sugar synthesized by the root’s plant. This is not about factory-like extraction but instead is a microcosm of the forest above. A full-time dance of interdependence!
The thing that is most amazing about these relationships is that they are absolutely non-transactional. There is no quid pro quo in the rhizosphere! Materials and energy are passively and actively transferred across the fuzzy edges between species from areas of higher concentration to areas of lower concentration. That, in and of itself, seems unremarkable. What is remarkable is that the result of this bi-directional flow is the kind of relationship that Karl Marx recommended in 1875 when he said, “from each according to his (sic.) ability, to each according to his need.” The other amazing thing about this bi-directional flow of resources is that giving leads to getting, and giving more, leads to getting more (up to a point, of course). Wouldn’t it be wonderful if people related to each other and the rest of the natural world in a way that resulted in the relatively equal distribution of resources and increasing abundance.
Educational Tip
When it’s my (Peter’s) turn during Opening Circle and Check-In, my request of the universe is typically something like, “I wish that more people would recognize that if we all care for each other and the planet our lives can be so much richer”. Helping people learn about the role of mutually beneficial relationships in nature is certainly part of the process. And, even more importantly, we do our best to nurture communities of caring among the participants in our educational activities. This starts with how we, as guides, relate to the kids in our care. We do our best to listen to, and respect them. We treat them as valued contributors. We offer and accept help. Our general approach is to nurture learning environments and communities that are more like forests and less like factories. Our goal is to help children form deep relationships with themselves, other humans, and the rest of the natural world. We teach nature-based science, nature skills, and communication skills to support children in forming these kinds of deep relationships. We also give them a lot of free time to support them in forming these kinds of deep relationships.
Wrap-Up
Yes, there’s a lot to learn about permaculture and relational gardening. You could spend years researching and planning; an entire lifetime, but don’t forget to get your hands in the dirt! Remember that mutually beneficial relationships arise on their own in nature and wherever living beings bump into each other so the beginning of the process is just planting things together and seeing what emerges. The worst mistake Peter has made in relational gardening was planting potatoes with their asparagus before realizing that harvesting their potatoes would mess up their asparagus root systems. So, now I have an unharvestable self-regenerating patch of potatoes in with my asparagus that accumulates nutrients and brings carbon and adds organic matter into the soil around them!
References/Suggested Readings
Anderson, K. (2005). Tending the Wild. University of California Press.
Hemenway, T. (2009). Gaia’s Garden. Chelsey Green Publishing Company.
Salmon, E. (2020). Iwígara: American Indian Ethnobotanical Traditions and Science. Timber Press.
Braden, D. (2022). Cook What You Grow: A Cookbook for Living a Connected Life. The Living Systems Institute.
Hoag, M. (2023). The Beginner's Landscape Manual. Transformative Adventures.