Stuff You Should Know - What's permaculture all about?

Episode Date: November 9, 2017

Permaculture is a growing trend in the world of farming and home landscaping. It's basically a design principle that emphasizes sustainability and the would-be, natural ecosystem of an area. Simple concepts like planting downhill from a pond and using gravity to feed plants to planting native plants and vegetation that work well together are hallmarks of permaculture. Learn all about this eco-friendly trend today. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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That's a lot over today. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chipper, Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry Rowland, and we're all in great moods, everybody, because it's Stuff You Should Know time. Everything else just falls to the wayside when we record Stuff You Should Know. It's just, it's the reason we love doing it still after 1,000 episodes. You realize every single listener right now is thinking, why are they in a bad mood, and

why is Josh being so weird? I don't think I'm being weird, am I overselling it? I think so. Oh, oh, sorry. It makes it sound like we all three were in a big fist fight, and then Jerry had recorded. She's like, just jammed a Kleenex up her nose to staunch the bleeding. I am recovering a bit, because we just got back from New York City. Dude, it has been a week.

I know. So we did, we did show a show Sunday, a show Monday, and a show Tuesday, all sold out at the bell house. Uh-huh. Traveled home Wednesday, and are recording today, Thursday. Yes, and I just want to say, there's no way that people will ever hear Tuesday's episode, because it was the filthiest thing we've ever done on stage. It was.

Seriously, man. I don't know what got into us. I think it was night three of three. So that is for the 350 people in that room. Yeah. I hope they enjoyed it. It was fun. It was fun.

And come on out. Whenever we do a live show, you never know if we're just going to be like, this one's not getting released. Let's just go crazy. Uh-huh. You know? Especially, it was a 21 and up show, which is really well. Well, that's why we, for sure, why we did it.

Yeah. That's what took the feedback off, you know? Uh-huh. And that is saying. I think so. Put the feedback on, take it off. Yeah, I guess so. I guess so.

It's not really, but we'll just press forward. How about that? Let's do. So, Chuck, I know that you know this, but not everybody knows this. I had a personal conversation with one Charles C. Mann, who wrote my favorite book of all time, 1491. That is correct. And I was talking to Mr. Mann, and he has a, I was talking to him, I've got a show coming

out on existential risks eventually, but, and he's going to be in it, and it's just like interviewed for it. But he has a book coming out this January, and it's called The Wizard and the Prophet. Have you heard of it? No. Do you just say that he's going to be a part of existential risks? Yeah, he's an interviewee. Oh, that's fantastic.

Yeah, it's going to be pretty, I was really psyched to just be able to talk to him, and even better than that, like, you know, we were kind of rapping for a few minutes beforehand. Sure. And it was just as calm and casual as I had always, like, envisioned talking to him would be. That's amazing. Yeah, it was a really, really neat conversation. But he was telling me about the book he has coming out, The Wizard and the Prophet.

And it's basically about him trying to find out how we can possibly, or even if it is possible, sustain 10 billion people on planet Earth. Yeah. And not just sustain, meaning, like, you know, keeping them alive, but how could we do it sustainably? And he goes back and starts digging in and finds that there's this long standing headbutt between the techno optimists, the people who are like, well, we humans are smart enough to invent our way out of any problem.

And the people who are like, no, we need to really, like, mitigate a lot of things that we're doing right now to make sure that we actually can keep doing this for the foreseeable future. And part of it is on Norman Borlaug. Is he The Wizard? He is The Wizard. That's actually absolutely right. The Prophet is a guy named William Vogt, V-O-G-T, I believe his name.

And he, I don't know nearly as much about him as Norman Borlaug, which is, say, I know basically zero about him, but he's The Prophet. So I will know all about him when the book comes out in January. I'm psyched about it. But as I was researching this permaculture article, I was like, you can really see that same headbutt, that same push and pull between people who are saying, we need sustainability. And other people are like, we need to feed, you know, billions and billions of people. And that really comes together in the debate over permaculture and whether it works or

whether it is just a pie in the sky kind of idea. Well, I have a little something to say. I am a bit of an urban, well, not a bit, I'm an urban permaculturist. That's awesome. We have not me as like, I don't know much, well, I do know about this stuff now after researching it, but we are redoing our front and backyards and we hired a permaculture company to do so. Really?

The permaculture pros? That's not their name, but maybe it should be. Yeah. Yeah. So we are like right in the middle of making our small little piece of Atlanta a permaculture urban permaculture. I know. It's hard to say now that I'm saying it out loud.

An urban perm habitat, if you will. Urban perm. That's right. So I'll be peppering little things here and there. I think that would help a lot. Because permaculture, as it turns out, and I didn't know really anything about it until we started researching this, it is a wooly idea. It's tough to pin down, which is really weird because it's actually a set of design principles

meant to grow food for people in a way that's sustainable and not harmful. And it basically stands in contradiction of what you would consider like big modern agriculture, which is we grow one kind of food and we squeeze as much as we possibly can out of it from the ground we have using as much artificial resources as we possibly need to increase our yield. Yeah, and that's like people throw around the word sustainable or unsustainable. And maybe people, sometimes folks don't even stop to think about what that means, sustainable or I guess we'll start with unsustainable.

That means that you are depleting resources around you and you are depending very much on bringing in different resources to make that thing work. Like you're not just using what's available, like that's what sustainable would be. You're using what's available at all works together to ideally sustain itself without saying well now I need to bring in this thing from way over here to make these 300 acres of corn grow. Yeah, I've got to go burn a bunch of fossil fuels to create nitrogen based fertilizer and it's not going to attach to the soil very well so a lot of it will run off and be wasted

and even worse it will end up in a pond which will create an algae bloom which sucks up all of the dissolved oxygen which creates a fish kill. That's unsustainable. And it's weird because I hadn't really thought about that either Chuck but growing up as like kids who were sentient in the 90s you hear unsustainable and it's just basically in your mind equated with evil, like almost intentionally malicious acts against the earth. And that's just not necessarily the case and that's another thing about like Norman Borlaug, the wizard.

He had the greatest of intentions but you can also lay at his feet a lot of the ecological problems we're facing right now because of agriculture and the agricultural practices he helped pioneer in order to feed a bunch of people. So there's this tension between unsustainability and sustainability but it's also a tension between what's realistic and what's not. Yeah, it's definitely a little sticky. It is a little sticky. But permaculture basically is trying to create like a harmonious holistic approach to farming

and whether it be a large farm or like in my case like an urban, small urban plot. And like I said, we'll kind of go over both of those through my lens and then through the larger ideas of the farm. And it's not like Robert Lam wrote this article from Stuff to Play Your Mind, he did a good job with it. Always does. But he does point out that you shouldn't, it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to go back to caveman days and like you have to live like tuk-tuk and scavenge the earth.

He said to think of it in terms of a river like you're a boat floating down a river and you're sustained by that river but you're also navigating it as well with your rudder. And if you have to pee right now, it just increased tenfold. That's right. So yeah, it's not like just passively taking from the land what it has to offer. There's still management of it. Oh yeah. But the idea behind that management of it is managing the land in a way that the land

is happy with. Yeah, kind of working with what you got. Like you can walk past a dog that's just sitting there looking at you and maybe give it like a wink or something like that and keep walking. That's passive. But if you stop and scratch it behind the ear, you're managing that dog in a way, something like that. You're at least interacting with it more and the dog likes it.

You could also walk past the dog and like poke it in the ribs. That's interacting with it in a way that the dog wouldn't like. Permaculture's the middle one, right? Sure. So you're saying, hey, I want to get something out of you like a good feeling so I'm going to scratch you behind the ear, earth. And again, like you said, you're doing that by trying to create a system, whether it's your little plot of land or a full-scale industrial-sized farm in a way that it's sustainable, meaning

it requires as few external inputs as possible. That's right. But sorry, I just need to point it again. It's still being managed. It's still being managed by you, just in a harmonious way. Yeah. I think there's a word for the other thing where you just let everything do its thing, right?

Yeah. That's nature maybe? Is that like wilding or something, or rewilding? Have we talked about that? No. We never did. I'm probably wrong anyway. Although we also thought we didn't do a cat episode, so who knows if we've talked about

it before or not. All right. So this all goes back to Australia and see you in September of next year, Australia. Yep. Right? Yep. Get excited. Oh man, you just sold us a million tickets with that accent, buddy.

And New Zealand. You've got to take it better than that. Well, no. I'm super excited about going to New Zealand because I didn't want to not mention that. You say, and New Zealand. And New Zealand. So in Australia, in the 1970s, there were a couple of dudes named Bill Mullison and David Holmgren.

And I imagine they were sitting around smoking a joint one night in the version that I have in my head. Oh yeah. When they dreamed up the word permaculture in 1978, which is basically what we've been talking about. This is just put a word on it. Actually two words, permanent and agriculture, right? Yeah.

Good point. And they said, let's join those up. And he said, right. And that was it. That's how it went down. And it's a self-sustaining alternative to like what you were talking about, which is mass production of a single crop. And there are three basic ethics to the permaculture movement.

Yeah. Care for the earth, care for the people, and then setting limits on population and consumption. Right. And so Mullison, I believe, was a professor at the time. And Holmgren was a student. And they split within a few years. They had creative differences, I guess you could kind of call it. They both like pursued permaculture, but through different ways.

So Mullison is frequently accused, or was. I think he may have passed, accused of being kind of a dogmatic charismatic egomaniac, maybe. Where it was like, it's my way, you're the highway. And that extended to even principles of permaculture, right? Like if he said it, it was just, that was just true. Whereas Holmgren apparently took a little more of a pragmatic approach to studying it, finding out the best practices, discarding the ones that didn't work, even if they were like precious to everybody, including the entire permaculture movement.

And movement is actually the right word, because there is like this definite, well, like Mullison put the cult in permaculture, you know what I'm saying? Like there's definitely an adherency to it that's kind of fervent, you know, that the whole movement gets criticized for rightfully or wrongly. But they're both kind of, I think the fact that they did split probably added to this field even more, because there's two different courses of study, or of thinking about it at least, that were able to develop in tandem. Yeah, and this stuff is nothing new.

They didn't invent this idea, because Tuk Tuk and the gang way back in the ancient days did things like this. They worked with what they had. They didn't have 400 acres of corn. And they had, they did forest farming. They had crop rotation. They composted. They had multiple crops.

And they were not just out to be leading pioneers in environmentalism. They were, that was just the way you worked the earth back then. And that's a lot of what permaculture is all about is returning to this idea of just sort of doing it the smart right way. And again, this is probably not going to be the thing that feeds the world. But that's not to say you can't have a permaculture movement in farms, in urban permaculture going on. Well, that's one of the things that it gets criticized about is that people who are big

time adherents of permaculture do tend to say like, yeah, this is what we need to feed the world. And if we don't do this, then there's not going to be people around to feed because we're going to wreck the earth and die from climate change. Yeah, I get that, but I think I come from the like reality camp and you're not going to undo conventional modern farming. You're not going to just completely supplant that anymore. It's kind of too late.

I agree with you. I'm of the same mindset. I do think though that these practices or most of them should be incorporated as best as possible. Sure. That'd be great. And then between big time monoculture, agriculture, and pure permaculture just because they're both probably unsustainable for what we need, which is to feed a bunch of people in a way

that doesn't wreck the earth. Agreed. Yeah, I'm with you, man. Should we take a break? Sure. All right, we're going to take a little pause for the cause and then come back. That was so corny. That sounded like a radio DJ.

It was great. And then come back and talk about design principles of permaculture right after this. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

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Okay you're back. We're back. Are we back? I'm back. Okay. I'm back too. Jerry, you're back? She's back.

She's back. So like I said early on, Chuck, the permaculture is a little, it's a woolly idea. There's so many different definitions of it and as a result, its image kind of suffers in the mind of rational skeptics, right? Yes. But I did find one definition of it that I thought really got the whole point across. The conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive systems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems.

That's a big one. There's a second half even. It is the harmonious integration of the landscape with people providing their food, energy, shelter, and other material and non-material needs in a sustainable way. That is a great definition. I agree wholeheartedly and I'm not sure who the actual person who said or wrote it was because it was misattributed to at least three different people but regardless it's a great definition.

We should just throw your name in there too. Sure. We'll say I said it. So you brought up the three basic ethics, the care for earth, care for people, and setting limits on population. Correct. I feel like we should kind of go over those a little in depth, don't you think? Yeah.

Care for earth is, it's not just, like a lot of this is about plants of course, but it's also animals and insects and how the air moves through the area and minerals in the earth. It's basically respecting all of the things within the ecosystem. Right. How's that? I think that's great. What about people? What about care for people, right?

So basically that's saying like that there's an importance to community. Every person isn't just an island, right? And that this is a big one too. That access to resources is a human right. And it's easy to take that for granted, you know, where in places where you have easy access to land or water or something like that, but in places as diverse as Flint, Michigan, or Central America, the access to good stuff like water is highly restricted or the water is just not good.

So the idea that everybody should have easy, cheap, if not free access to something like clean water is, that's a big one. That's kind of radical in a weird way these days. Yeah. And as far as limits on population and consumption, Robert puts it as recognizing how you have to reinvest money and surplus labor and energy into caring for the planet. Like it takes work. Right.

So those are like the three ethics. That's not how you go permaculture. That's just kind of the basis for the designs to permaculture, right? Correct. And I think you said that this is not new, right? This is something that's been around for a very long time or some of these ideas or the sustainable practices are adopted from like generations and generations of proven techniques, right?

Yes. Which is pretty interesting if you ask me. That's another thing too. If you have not read, have you read 1491 yet? Nope. Oh, man. You have to read it. It talks about this kind of stuff where like they, from just looking into it, they've found

that there's always sophisticated land management techniques that were just totally lost to time until archaeologists started discovering them. And at first they didn't even realize what they were looking at. And they'd be like, well, there's a lot of kind of weird hills in this area, it's otherwise pretty flat. And then they realized, oh wait, this entire system of berms that used to be planted and in between the berms were aquaculture ponds where they raised fish and they were just doing all the sophisticated stuff that no one had any idea.

That book is just all about chasing that stuff down and figuring it out. So good, Chuck. One day you'll read it, right? Of course. Yeah. So before the break, I promised some design principles and there are, I believe, like 10 of these in our article and it breaks down like this. And this is talking about a farm, but we have incorporated, and this company that's come

in is incorporating most of these same principles within places as small as our backyard. For instance, zones. We have divided our yard up into zones now. And basically in the case of a farm, it's a little bit different. They divide areas into zones based on, based on the, in all this stuff, it's just sort of makes sense and it's all, seems like it would be intuitive and how Tuk Tuk would have done it. So it divides into zones based on like how much attention certain things need on the

farm and what does it require out of people in the different areas. And so if you think of it as a circle, you got your farm in the center. So obviously the stuff that needed the most attention would be closest to the center where the people are. And then as you go out and out, the activity decreases like the human activity and things are allowed, like maybe trees to grow a little more wildly. Right. Yeah.

So like the zone is kind of like ripples in a pond or something, right? They're concentric circles, radiating from the center. And I guess the center is the actual farmer, in this case your house. Yeah. Okay. So that's understandable enough. And then you look into something called sectors and that's kind of similar, it seems like, but it's actually not with sectors.

Again, the center of the whole, the whole permaculture land or whatever is the farm where the people live or whatever. And then the zone, the sectors radiate outwards. So the whole thing is one big circle around the center. But this time it's sliced into like, like pizza slices basically. All right. I'm hungry enough. Okay.

So, but with that, so that doesn't mean like you do sectors or zones. These are two different ways of looking at the land that will overlay one another, right? And I've seen a couple of places that recommend if you're setting up a permaculture farm, you want to spend basically an entire year doing nothing but observing. Don't plant anything, don't cut anything down, don't dig a pond, don't do anything like that. Just observe, figure out where the sun is at different parts of the year. Where does the wind come from? Where does the water go?

Are there pollutants that come onto the property that you need to manage? Where do the animals, like if there's deer that come in and eat the garden, like where would they be coming from? And so that's what you base the sectors on. And then that creates kind of like this underlying map beneath the zones. Does that make sense? Yes. Okay.

And I got that one, right? Yeah, I think so. Okay. So a permaculture expert would say, oh, boys, right? Relative locations, another important part of permaculture, that is basically designing things and again, in a way that makes sense relative to one another. So the great example that Robert gives is, is planning a crop downhill from a pond. That way, it's downhill, you don't need to install a pump system.

The whole idea is sustainability. And so if you can have the stuff you need to water downhill from your water, then you have just created a sustainable environment. Right. And that one is, there's a, it's an actual design principle, like David Holmgren came up with 12 of them. One of them was called integrate rather than segregate. And that one's definitely part of that.

That's right. There's also having single elements with multiple functions, right? Yes. So going back to that, like a pond example, a pond also not only serves as a source for irrigation, but it's also a water source for your livestock. And depending on where you put it, it also acts as a barrier between your livestock and the edge of your property. Yeah.

So you don't even need a fence because cows aren't going to swim across the pond. No. You try to find one doing it. They won't do it. They're lazy. Or a hedge, a lovely hedge can act as a wind block, things like that. Right. And it can also like produce seeds that your chickens eat, right?

Right. Or shade if you need shade. Right. And so all that, I mean, that just makes like total sense. Of course you want to do that. But when you stop and think about the fact that they don't do this on big modern farms, like this stuff is not, that's just wasted area where you could be planting more corn. You know what I mean?

Yeah. Most people don't think about this when they're designing their home backyards either. They want, they just say, this looks pretty, that looks pretty, and it may be laid out in such a way that it's completely unharmonious and working against each other at times. Right. Why is that thing dying? It's so pretty. It's like, well, it's not where it should be.

Another permaculture principle that stands in stark opposition to monoculture is having a single thing have just one function or have, okay, a bunch of different things serving as fail safes to one another. See what I'm saying? Right. So like that pond can also provide water, right? So it's a water reservoir, but you may also have rain barrels on site as well. So you have all these different things serving multiple functions, but also serving backups

to the functions that they share with one another. Right. And again, this is the idea that you're doing this if you take the time to diversify. This is where the idea that you shouldn't put all of your eggs in one basket, it came from the farm. And this is, like some of these principles are just getting back to that very simple maximum, which is you have to diversify. And the more you diversify, the better off you're going to be if something befalls like

if an avian flu wipes out your chicken flock. Well, if all you do is raise chickens, you're ruined. Your family's going to starve. You're going to lose all of your money and the farm's going to be taken from you. If chickens are just one part of a larger holistic farm you have going on, then you lose your chickens and that's awful, but you still have, you know, you can cut off a cow's foot and chew on that for the winter. You know where the chicken and the eggs in the basket comes from, right?

Where? That little Bobby Joe going out to get the chicken eggs one morning and taking one basket. He says, Pa, I got them. Don't fret. And then he trips on the way back and breaks all his eggs and Pa says, put all the chicken eggs in one basket. Now he ain't got no eggs. And then Bobby Joe says, well then Pa, have more kids or get more baskets.

That's right. And that happened in December of 1842 in Georgia. That's right. Those were my relatives. That was great. Were they chalk tall? No. No.

No. This is from the other side of the family. The other side, okay. Yes. That's good to say. The red next side. Energy efficiency is a big deal using energy efficient designs whether or not you are straight up using like wind power or solar or you can just simply, like I said, build things in

a way where you have natural wind breaks built in or places to allow the wind to come through and spread seed and stuff like that. Right. My favorite dude of all is the biological resources. Let's hear it. So it's just basically using nature to help solve the problems that you have, right? So, Mollison, one of the creators of it, what is his first name again? Bill.

Bill Mollison. He had a saying, you don't have a snail problem. You have a duct efficiency, which is to say that. That was a great t-shirt too. It was for a little while. It was almost outsold, gas grass or, you know. Yeah. No one wants for free.

Right. But the premise of it is that if you are overrun with snails, get more ducts because the ducts are going to eat the snails and it's fine. It's good to have ducts because they do other stuff too. Like they walk around and poop all over your property and fertilizing it as they're doing it, right? So just to kind of take a step back and look at it like, okay, just say like, what would nature do?

Yeah. That's a great way to solve your problems through permaculture. Another one is using pigs or chickens to till the ground and to actually rotate where you plant crops every year. And so this year's pig pen is next year's cropland because you can move the pigs on to another area and they'll turn it all muddy and turn it up and get it ready for planting just like they did for this year's cropland that you're using now. Pretty great.

Insects too. Yeah. Very big thing to bring in the right kinds of plants to attract the right kinds of insects to take care of the wrong kinds of insects. Right. But. But great. I love it.

This raises an issue though too. One of the criticisms of permaculture is it's like, well, where are you going to bring in those insects from, right? So for example, if you order ladybugs online, it can actually be really bad for the ladybugs that live in your area because if they are lab raised or farm raised ladybugs, they very frequently carry a parasite that you're bringing now into your neighborhood and you can wipe out the existing native ladybug population. So what do you do?

Well, the permaculture way would be to say, I need to attract more native ladybugs because I got aphids on my lemon trees. So how do I do that? Well, you just plant more high pollinating plants like sunflowers and voila, native ladybugs parasite free. Love it. I didn't know people bought ladybugs online. Yeah.

That's a thing. I know that because I've had aphids before I looked into it. You said, doc, I got aphids in my lemon tree. He said, come here. One in a million shot. Plant succession is another design principle. If you think about how land was before people were messing around with it in a natural scene, things would just sort of grow and develop as nature intended and fields might be barren

and then grow into weeds and that might eventually grow into plants that may eventually grow into trees. And then what do you know? You have a forest. Right. So Robert makes the case like that's apparently the natural progression of a temperate area that if you leave it alone for long enough, it's going to turn into a forest. I didn't realize that.

I guess it makes sense. So this is basically saying, well, how can we do that? If that's the way the area wants to be, how can we accommodate that while also getting food staples from that too? Right. So there's also nutrient recycling, which is basically composting. And I was thinking the other day, I don't answer enough when asked what my favorite episode is.

Composting is definitely up there. Oh, yeah? That was a great one. All right. If you're digging this episode at all, go listen to composting if you haven't already. It's a good one. Yeah. And finally, diversity, raising multiple crops, having different kinds of animals.

Like we said, we've kind of been beaten up on corn, but the idea is to not have a thousand acres of a thing and have many different things. So like you said, the benefits there, if something comes along that is an illness to a crop, you're not wiped out completely. Right. So speaking of wiping out, let's take a break for a second, okay? Are you wiped out? I'm a little wiped.

I need to regenerate here. Okay. Okay. Okay, we're back. I'm feeling restored, Chuck. Good. Well, you took a nap on my shoulder and that always helps. I know.

I got a little drool on your sleeve. I'm sorry. No big deal. Okay, so when you're talking about this, like design principles are great and good and they are really interesting to me. I think ecology is incredibly fascinating. But to actually feed people, you have to take them into action and like do something. And people have been trying this, right, to varying degrees of success.

And more importantly, to varying degrees of scientific study. I ran across a professor in, I believe, the UK at a place called Schumacher College. Her name is Bethan Stagg and she, I get the impression Schumacher College is a little crunchy. Sure. I think they're the fighting granola. A little hippie-dippy. Just a tad.

But one of the things they teach is permaculture. And so Bethan Stagg, one of the professors there, basically studied this permaculture next to traditional, like, gardening plots that are the same size. They're like everything's the same, the amount of wind and rain and sun they're getting. The difference is one is cultivated through permaculture methods. The other one's more just like traditional gardening, like go-by fertilizer and stuff like that. Who won?

Who won? It depends on your definition of won. Well which one was lying dead in a field afterward? The regular gardener or the other person? They both got a couple of good licks in on one another. Ultimately, I think most people would say that the traditional gardening or the normal modern gardening method won. The reason why it won was because for every 100 square meters of land, it yielded 13 kilograms

of edible food. The permaculture one yielded 2.3 kilograms per 100 meters. So far, far, far less food was grown. But there's a couple of things you got to point out here. There was also far, far, far less time put into the permaculture plot because that's one of the tenets of permaculture is just like plant this stuff and then just forget about it. You're not ever supposed to mess with it again except to harvest stuff.

There's an emphasis on perennials rather than annuals. There's far less inputs that are meant to be made into it. It's just supposed to be like a little engine you build and then start and it just keeps going forever. So far less time and far less effort on the permaculture side. So it kind of wins in that respect, right? But then also, there was over this three-year study, there were also at least one year where the weather was really bad.

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And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Find the Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And so the normal modern gardening suffered as a result, whereas the permaculture one, which was more diversified, had about the same yield as the other years. So they both won. They're all winners.

It's like a soccer game. Yeah. And I think the idea too is it's not like that's the kind of test that should be carried out over 100 years almost. Yes. And the whole point is though, still, that permaculture is not like they're not saying we shall create more yield than any other farm. That's not the whole point.

Again, though, it depends on who you talk to. There are definitely permaculture adherents out there who think that anyone who doesn't use permaculture is an idiot who's ruining the planet and this is the way. No, I'm not saying that, but are they saying that they can provide more yield than conventional farming? If you backed them into a corner, they would probably hedge that. But I think that when they're amongst themselves, they may. Yes.

Okay. Do you like it? You guys totally know. We can't. Yeah. Okay. We just won't talk about it. Shut up, Simon.

So there are people doing this to varying degrees all over the world whether or not is if you have a full-scale permaculture farm, then you are almost 100% likely to be a permaculture activist or an educator. It's not something you're doing lightly. You may also be someone who's like, well, you know, part of my farm here I'm doing in such a manner. Part of it I'm not. But there are things that you can do even at your own home, like a forest garden.

Well, that's like what permaculture seems to really be best at is backyard gardening. Yeah. So tell them about the forest garden because I found this fascinating, man. Yeah. I mean, if you've got a, if you have a back lawn that is just a big grass lawn and you know, during our grass episode, we didn't get preachy, but a lot of people will say like, that's the worst thing you can do is just to have a huge, flat thing of grass as far as what's good for the earth.

And that's a total, I mean, once in that, I think I remember we talked about that literally being just like an American creation in the 50s or something. No, it was even more than that. Yeah. But yeah, I'm pretty sure it was pretty American. Yeah. Maybe English. So a forest garden is a food garden that you build or plant and you build it out of wood

and iron in your backyard to that imitates a natural forest. So you're trying to sort of replicate what you might find in that natural setting in your yard. And this is going to, like you said, make things a little easier on you because you're not going to have to rotate crops or till like you normally would. And everything's just sort of working together and Robert has sort of a four-part example for layers, if you will, starting with trees, which are going to, obviously the biggest thing in that forest garden, they're going to eat most of that sunlight, but they're

also going to let dappled light through, which can be great growing conditions for certain things. Right. So you're going to grow things like blackberries or leaf lettuce or strawberries, any vines that are shade-loving that produce food. But the point of this is the tree isn't just like, well, here's a tree, isn't that great? It's like the tree also provides stability for the vine to climb up, right? Like you said, it provides shade for these shade-loving plants.

And I guess the point, and I didn't really see anywhere, explained why people do this. I know it's like an ancient technique from South America, I believe, like in the Brazilian rainforest that's used to great impact. What, the trees? Yeah, agroforestry basically is what it's called, but I didn't really see what the benefits of it are, especially if it limits you to shade-loving food plants, right? Because there's plenty of food plants out there that don't love shade, isn't that correct? Yeah, well, I guess let me talk about what we're doing.

So this lady came in and she's a company owner and she takes a look at our yard and she's basically instead of saying, hey, let's plant a tree that will take 20 years to grow to provide whatever shade and then go, she's like, let's look at what you got now. Because Atlanta is an urban forest on its own, as you know, and there are trees everywhere. So we had existing trees and stuff, and she basically just sort of looks at everything, draws up a design, and then comes back to us and said, here's what we're going to do. And she's working mainly with Emily because this was sort of her initiative and she knew more about it than I did, and Emily is more of the gardener in the family.

Way to go, Emily. Yeah, but I was on board, you know, and I was sitting in on these meetings going, this sounds great, this sounds great. So she would say, all right, you got shade over here. So why don't we think about this here, like blueberry bushes. This is where you might want to think about putting your herbs and downwind from there because of how the wind blows through your yard, you might want to think about this there. And we can move, like we had certain things that we wanted to keep, like some azaleas

and some roses and things, and she was like, we got to move those because they're not in the right place. So we'll put that over here, move this over there, and then before you know it, she's drawn a schematic for a sustainable backyard that all works together and the insects from the one plant are close to where they need to be to help kill insects that affect the other plant. Right. And I wish, well, it's probably great to get too wonky over my yard, but it just all works

together in harmony, and we're doing it in stages. The main thing, big, big change that we've done aside from rearranging and planting new things is we got a cistern finally. So we have a big, huge, jeez, I don't even know how many gallons. I want to say like 500 gallon. No. It's large. Wow.

I mean, it's as big as... That's a above ground swimming pool, I think you're describing. Is it? Is it too many gallons? 500. That's a lot. I don't know. It's as big as a...

It's like half as big as a Volkswagen Beetle. Wow. It's large. So this is under our deck, so it's not an ice or anything. All the gutters in the house, all the water that falls onto our roof is fed into the cistern. And then that cistern has pipes that they trenched, and they go all underground throughout the whole yard and just sort of leech water where it needs to be. And then there's also a couple of pumps.

We didn't have spigots in our backyard. We still don't. It's been awful. We've had to run like hundreds of feet of hose every time we wanted to water anything, and it just feels wasteful anyway. And so we didn't have backyard spigots, and now we have these two posts with the little pumps, and it's sort of gravity fed in a way, like if the cistern is full and you turn that pump on, water will flow some.

But then we have an actual pump installed on the cistern to where we can actually use a sprinkler if we want to. But the pump is squirrel run by a hamster wheel, right? I wish. And it's located in the chestnut tree, so it's going to attract the squirrels anyway. Now, sadly, it does run on electricity. I wish it was hooked up to solar, but we're not that far along yet. That's pretty cool, though, man.

That's a neat plan you got going. It is pretty awesome. And guess what? We have a swale. Oh, I was hoping we were going to be able to talk about swales. I love swales. Yeah, Robert didn't include this in his article, but I sent you a thing on swales. And we have a swale, which is to say, in the back right corner of our yard now, we have

a tiny pond. It's only about five feet across by five feet across, and it is round, and it has a like a round berm around it, so it's like a little hill, and a swale, the definition of a swale, it is a level ditch that is dug across whatever site you're in with the purpose of stopping the flow of water in order to make the water slowly filter into the land instead of rushing over it. And the idea there is is that most people design their yards so water won't accumulate and it will run, it's graded in such a way that rainwater will just run off of it as

quickly as possible. And that's very wasteful, and that's not how the ground, the ground is supposed to accept the water. I know that sounds so hippy, but in an ideal situation, the ground accepts the water into it, and it's not dry a day later. It is actually feeding the ground. And so this swale now has a runoff from the cistern, so when the cistern gets too full, the water will then run out into the swale and just sort of slowly leach into the ground

around it, or if we get just tons and tons of rain, obviously the swale will collect it and the water will leach into the ground around it. That is very cool. That is swale. It is super swale. But it was an important part, like when this lady came over, she's like, we got to have a swale. Yeah.

She's like, swales are my biggest seller. And right now, it's not the most attractive thing in the world, but over time, we're planning instead of grass in between everything, or even mulch, we're doing ground cover. I can't remember the specific variety, but ground cover or mulch are the two most sustainable ways to treat your yard, period. Yeah, that makes sense because the mulch will break down, right, to create and become nutrients. Yeah, so it's pretty neat.

Like we've got a good scene. It's going to be years in the making. Well that's another thing too. I mean, like you've got to be very patient with this kind of stuff. Yeah, but we're in though. That's great, man. Congratulations. We're not going anywhere.

There are, and I'm wondering, you seem to have a pretty realistic approach to permaculture though, like you're not going to save the world with your backyard, it sounds like, but it's certainly not hurting some of the issues that the world is facing, right? No, we're just trying to create our own little sustainable habitat. So there are, we should mention, some criticisms of permaculture, a lot of criticisms of permaculture, we should say, but they, you know, we've kind of hit on a couple of them, but the big one probably is that it's not rigorously tested scientifically enough, that it's just kind of taken like, oh yeah, that would work intuitively, and then it's just left at that in a lot

of ways. So there are people like Beth and Stagg who I mentioned and other people around the world who are starting to apply science to these things to say, this one works, let's keep at it, this one works better if you do it this way, or this one doesn't work at all, don't waste your time. And as long as they're doing that, permaculture deserves any respect it can get, because it really is, again, intuitively, it makes a lot of sense, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's true in fact, which is why you got to study that kind of thing.

Yeah, and the other thing that I saw in the Roberts article that did make sense to me was, one of the criticisms was to Mollison himself, because he apparently had a stress on bringing in exotic plants, and that goes counter to everything that our lady for her company talked about, she was all about native plants, like only native plants. And Mollison's response was, well, we've already screwed up the earth so bad that we're not trying to preserve ecosystems as they are specifically, we're trying to make them better through management. And it's like, actually just contradicted everything you said back in 1978.

And I think that's a pretty good example of from what I understand of that guy, he's like, well, this is what I'm saying now. So this is true. Gotcha. You know what I mean? That's just, and I've never met him, never heard him speak anything like that. Just from reading about him, that's the impression that I have. Gotcha.

So, to the Mollison family, sorry, if that's not right. You got anything else? Got nothing else. You'll have to come over in two years. I'll take you upon that. I don't want you to see it now. I've been waiting for this invitation for 10 years. Well, it's going to be 12 total.

12 total. All right. If you want to know more about permaculture, you can type that word into the search bar how stuff works, and since I said search bar, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this harrowing story from a fashion design intern. Yeah. That's a good one. And I got her permission.

Hey, guys. Listen to internships. I wanted to say thanks for addressing this issue. When I was in college, I wanted to work in the fashion industry, and the internship process was very difficult and exploitive. I managed to somehow get an internship without any connections, which felt nearly impossible and worked my first gig for a top designer. She did not name the designer in a follow-up email.

She did, but then said, maybe don't read it, but it's a top designer. Not only was the internship unpaid in one of the most expensive cities in the world, but I was also expected to wear an all-black fashionable wardrobe at all times. So I had to find housing in New York by all new clothes. Luckily, my parents were able to help me out there, but I hated how prohibitive the whole thing was. While I was with that designer, the Condon Ass lawsuits were going on, and I remember people saying the lawsuit was just another example of stereotypical millennial entitlement.

That's obviously not the case, because as you mentioned, it's a social issue. Because of my internship, I was able to get more experiences in the fashion industry and eventually a full-time job in New York after I graduated. Everyone I work with now had unpaid fashion internships, and almost everyone I work with is white, upper-class, and from a good school. Unpaid internships have led to bigger problems and diversity that I think really have hurt the fashion industry. You always hear about how retail and department stores are dying.

Well, all the companies are run by old, white, straight dudes, and we lack a variety of perspectives which prevents innovation. I'm glad I had internships, and I learned a lot, but I think the internship market really needs to change. So thanks again for addressing this. Hope a lot of people listen to your podcast and re-evaluate how they do things at their own companies. And that is from Gail.

Thanks a lot. Gail, nice one. Yeah, it was a really good one, actually. If you want to get in touch with us, like Gail did, you can tweet to us. I'm at SYSK Podcast or at Josh M. Clark, Chuck's at Charles W. Chuck Bryant on Facebook, and at Stuff You Should Know on Facebook. I'm on there too somewhere, although I'm not sure where. You can send us all an email, including Jerry, J-E-R-I, to StuffPodcast at HowStuffWorks.com.

And in the meantime, hang out with us at our home on the web, StuffYouShouldKnow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. I'm Munga Shatikler, and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find in major league baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me, and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes, because I think your ideas

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