Lasagna Gardening

Lasagna Gardening: "If someone told me years ago that he or she had found a way to do an end run around the sweat equity of traditional gardening, a way around digging, weeding, and rototilling, a way to produce more regardless of time constraints, physical limitations, or power-tool ineptness... well, I would have checked that person for a head injury. Yet such a system is actually possible, though I never would have believed it if I hadn't stumbled upon the basics myself."

Tiny Farm Blog | organic gardening: vegetables, herbs, flowers – growing local food

Tiny Farm Blog | organic gardening: vegetables, herbs, flowers – growing local food:

"For tomorrow’s farmers’ market, Lynn, Andie and Jordan harvested more of this year’s Jerusalem artichoke. The tubers have gotten noticeably bigger since pulling some just a couple of weeks ago… Chokes are a really simple, satisfying harvest, at least, when you pull up the plants in their first year. These guys are spaced at 12″ (30cm), so we just grab the usually multiple stems at each spot and tug. The main root ball is shallow and contains most of the tubers: pull ‘em off, and bang the root clump a bit to get at the ones in the middle. You also have to scrabble around for maybe a hand’s width or two past the little root crater to find a few extra outlying tubers—guess that’s where the “invasive” part of choke lore begins, they do try to spread. Overall, though, it’s quick and easy, especially when the fall weather is mild like today. Nice!"

How Systemic Collapse unfolds

Oil depletion is the most critical aspect in the systemic collapse of modern civilization, but altogether this collapse has about 10 principal parts, each with a vaguely causal relationship to the next. Oil, metals, and electricity are a tightly-knit group, as we shall see, and no industrial civilization can have one without the others.
As those 3 disappear, food and fresh water become scarce (fish and grain supplies per capita have been declining for years, water tables are falling everywhere, rivers are not reaching the sea). These 5 can largely be considered as resource depletion, and the converse of resource depletion is environmental destruction.
Disruption of ecosystems in turn leads to epidemics. Matters of infrastructure then follow: transportation and communication. Social structure is next to fail: without roads and telephones, there can be no government, no education, no large-scale division of labor. After the above 10 aspects of systemic collapse, there is another layer, in some respects more psychological or sociological, that we might call “the 4 Cs.”
The first 3 are crime (war and crime will be indistinguishable, as Robert D. Kaplan explains), cults, and craziness — the breakdown of traditional law, the tendency toward anti-intellectualism, the inability to distinguish mental health from mental illness. After that there is a more general one that is simple chaos, which results in the pervasive sense that “nothing works any more.”
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