So, you might ask, what have I been working on? As I covered the many principles on this blog, I started to see some connections, areas where inputs and outputs could be combined, and pieces that naturally just fit well together. I came to the conclusion that a hybrid system could be created by utilizing and combining twelve different principles and methods of growing food, creating soil, and repairing the environment. These twelve are:
- Organic Gardening
- Aquaponics
- Hugelkultur
- Composting
- Mycotechnology
- Technology
- Integrated Pest Management
- Systems Thinking
- Environmental Engineering
- Ecosystem Design
- Intensive Agriculture
- Regenerative Agriculture
As you might have noticed from my previous blog posts, I originally thought of this as aquaponics with soil. As I refined and developed the method, I realized that it was more different than aquaponics than aquaponics is from hydroponics. At its core, this new method is a composting method. Over a period of years, I identified problems with the method and fixed them, I started to realize the immense potential of this new system. This new type of garden has several important features:
- It is highly productive
- It is very water efficient
- It needs NO daily maintenance. Honestly, it only takes a few hours a month to maintain.
- It needs NO chemical inputs. No pesticides, no herbicides, no fungicides, no fertilizer.
- It produces soil as an output.
- It has an integrated, low-maintenance compost bin
- It sequesters carbon
- It can grow plants at about 3x the density of a square foot garden
- And more...
The most interesting thing about this new method is that this combination of very productive, very low maintenance, and very sustainable has some pretty amazing implications for urban agriculture, especially the idea of bringing urban agriculture to many more back yards.
I call this new method a LEHR Garden. LEHR is an acronym for Linking Ecosystem & Hardware for Regeneration. This is a pretty good description of what sets the LEHR Garden apart. There are many, many people who have realized that our current system of agriculture is unsustainable and unhealthy and have endeavored to come up with something new and better. The vast majority of those systems either focus on the ecosystem and try to reduce the use of technology, or they focus on the technology and try to reduce the use of ecosystem. A LEHR Garden uses both to a very high level. The big difference is that instead of using the technology to replace ecosystem function, a LEHR Garden uses the technology to enhance and accelerate ecosystem function.
In terms of my personal journey, the potential of this new system has driven my life in a completely different direction. I've (temporarily) left my civil engineering career behind to start my own business whose purpose is to transform the ways we feed our urban populations.
For this blog, this is officially my closing post. I'll leave this blog up and active for as long as Blogger lets me, but if you're looking for more information on what I'm working on, please come check me out at my LEHR Gardens website. I have a blog there and will be continuing to post content.
