A Girl and Her Weeds.

Permaculture is a sustainable garden design that allows balance between nature and our desire to cultivate a plot of land. (If this lands in your spam folder, transfer to inbox for photos to display.)

Ellen Ecker Ogden is the author of The New Heirloom Garden and other books featuring kitchen garden designs with recipes for cooks who love to garden. Each week, you’ll receive artful garden design ideas alternating with recipes. Follow the year-round progress of my kitchen garden on Instagram.

My kitchen garden last July. After initial weeding, the edible plants take up every spare space, and weeds can’t get a hold.

Hello Friends,

All week, I’ve been on my hands and knees weeding.  It’s how I spend most of the month of May, preparing the soil before planting the garden. I wish it were different, but they will quickly run to seed if I don’t catch the weeds now. During a single growing season, every weed that is allowed to go to seed can easily create thousands of new weed plants. That’s enough to keep me bent over all summer.

I curse the time I spend on this thankless task each spring, yet lately, my rules around a weed-free garden have begun to relax. Why am I working so hard to undo nature? I am beginning to question my sanity. Why I would spend whole days conquering an army of invasives, instead of inviting friends over for a lovely spring porch party.

“Gardens are the result of a collaboration between art and nature.” - Penelope Hobhouse, English garden designer

A spring salad with mixed greens includes small portions of bitter endives. Photo credit: Matthew Benson.

My first lesson as a new gardener was to learn the difference between a weed and a welcome garden plant. It has taken me years to identify each of the weeds I encounter, recognizing that each weed has its season. This month I am pulling up chickweed, goutweed, common burdock, and dandelion, next month it will be quack grass, garlic mustard, and pigweed. July brings wild parsnips, lamb’s quarters, and horsetail. But wait, some of these are delicious and nutritious greens.

This leads to also asking the question what is a weed and what deserves to stay in place? After all, aren’t gardens a way to tame nature, and keep a healthy balance between people and pollinators. Let’s start with wild milkweed, the most conspicuous native weed in every public and private garden I visited in 2020-2021, thanks in part to the Garden Club of America to promote pollinator plants.

While I didn’t intentionally plant it, a few appeared in my garden.  I followed the trend to support monarchs’ natural habitat and left the shoots, which look like lilies when young. Like mint, however, it has now invaded, sending underground roots everywhere, and continues to require careful editing.

Editing is the term used by those of us who are halfway between maintaining a tidy garden area and allowing parts to go a little wild. Finding a compromise between weeding and eating is my ultimate goal.

Surrounded by a bounty of spring lettuce in my kitchen garden. It helps to grow more lettuce than rabbits can devour.

Permaculture gardening allows a sustainable edible garden to thrive even though some of the plants are weeds.

A permaculture garden is as individual as the gardener. Learning more about your specific microclimate and existing native species that support wildlife habitats will involve taking time to observe before you begin to clear the land to make way for a garden. Once the garden is established, it is key to maintain a bit of wildness to invite pollinators to burrow into hollow plant stems and birds to eat seeds and berries.

The basic premise of a permaculture garden is to plant a wide range of food and flora, trees, shrubs, tubers, and vines that stimulate one another’s growth. Layering is also key, which starts by first assessing the existing landscape -- looking at patterns of sun, shade, and the geology under the soil.  

When you focus on perennial edibles that come back every year, it becomes beneficial to the landscape by not disturbing the soil: think rhubarb and asparagus, horseradish, and berries. Medicinal and culinary herbs, fruit and nut trees,

Layering in action, as seen in my kitchen garden. By late August, the plants have formed friendships, that help sustain and support each other.

Permaculture is inclusive and supportive of a diverse selection of plants that ultimately nourishes a whole ecosystem; The goal is to look at the long-term plan of your landscape, and create a healthy habitat for people and nature to exist.

Layering is key in permaculture design, using taller plants as a canopy, shrubs as mid-levels, and edibles for ground covers. The result is productivity and a balanced ecosystem. Catching weeds when the leaves are small makes it a little easier to pull the whole plant up by the roots, and fewer weeds will grow if I can catch them before they go to seeds.

Weeding is the flip side of gardening that I don’t much enjoy and requires a constant regiment of time every week. I’ve decided it’s okay to allow a little wild to stay, as a long-term investment in the natural ecosystem. Growing a semi-permaculture garden allows me to accept that nature will always win, and I will still feel like a winner.

Garden in good health,

Ellen O.

Paid subscribers will receive an illustrated plan with a planting guide for a Permaculture garden, an excerpt from my newest book, The New Heirloom Garden.