Permaculture, urban gardening, and urban agriculture

Permaculture

The simulation of natural ecosystems, both in agriculture and social design, has the potential to help reduce man’s carbon footprint on the earth. In working to maintain permanent agriculture and permanent culture similarly there is progress toward the sustainable goals created in many cities worldwide. Some fields of permaculture and urban gardening include Ecological Design, Ecological Engineering, Environmental Design, Integrated Water Resource Management and Sustainable Architecture. All of these professions work with nature rather than against; working toward the goal of sustaining both nature and society for future generations.

The depletion of the earth's resources due to the processes of mass production and consumption, inefficient waste management, and the destruction wrought on nature due to fossil fuel infrastructure development are reasons for the need of permaculture and urban gardening techniques in agriculture. The need to work with existing resources in order to save the environment, and people alike, is a goal that has many nations working toward carbon neutrality in agriculture, as well as eco-conscious techniques in agriculture to preserve biodiversity. Chemical fertilizers and other environmentally hazardous methods like pesticides, are the way of the past in agriculture. The future of gardening/ agriculture lies in sustainable methods like urban gardening (techniques that can easily be applied to larger scale agriculture/ farms).

Urban gardening

There are so many questions that may arise when there is the desire or need to plant a garden for a home or business, but limited space is available. The website Ecolife highlights the following major areas of focus in urban gardening:

• "Container gardening: Common for people with small patios, yards, or balconies. Container gardening makes use of a variety of containers – buckets, old tires, raised beds, windowboxes, kiddie pools, barrels, shoes, and watering cans – for growing all manner of plants for food or beauty.

• Indoor gardening: When no patios, decks, yards, or balconies are available, indoor gardening can also be an effective urban gardening method. Plants can be grown in containers similar to those in container gardening, as well as in indoor greenhouses or solariums (sunrooms).

• Community gardening: This is a method of using outdoor public or private spaces to cultivate gardens for food or pleasure as a group and is a great choice for those with no yard or outdoor space.

• Guerilla gardening: A more subversive form of urban gardening, guerilla gardening is a way of adding plants to public spaces that don’t technically belong to the gardener such as a vacant lot, median, beside a highway, or in little strips of dirt.

• Greenroofs: Roofs designed with a growing medium for the purpose of cultivating plants are also a form of urban gardening and can be used to grow food, trees, and many other types of plants."

 
Please also see: "Green Building" on the Green City Times website

For more on sustainable agriculture, please see: https://greencitytimes.blogspot.com/2018/03/sustainable-agriculture-and-carbon.html