why perennials?

"there is no such thing as a post-agricultural society."
timothy weiskel

"none of our technologies can do better than nature's renewability powers. to believe otherwise is to cultivate an illusion based on a lack of acknowledgment of our scaffolding-developed during the industrial era- is wearing out. much of it will need high-quality energy for repair, the kind we have burned to build it, and it won't be around."

"...essentially all of nature's land-based ecosystems feature perennials. this has to do with the fact that only twenty-some elements...go into all of earth's organisms. and importantly only four of those building blocks circulate in the atmospheric commons. the rest are in the soil and they are water-soluable. managing these elements and water is accomplished by a diversity of roots below the surface. this management scheme occurs in millimeters and minutes."
wes jackson form "consulting the genius of the place."

"ultimately the system could not withstand the clash between environmental and technological limitations of agricultural production and the political demands for surplus."
peter christensen from "the decline of iranshahr.

industrial agriculture is skewed toward annual cereals as feedstock for processed foods and is heavily dependent on petrochemicals in the form of fertilizers, pesticides , and herbicides. tilling used to artificially disrupt the soil to provide the environment the annuals require leads to soil erosion and water quality issues through a lack of an ecosytem containig deeply rooted perennials that manage both the runoff of water and obviate the need for "chemotheraphy for the land" [jackson] perennial staples would reduce agriculture's dependence on oil and help to both reduce erosion and the degredation of rivers and estuaries with agrucultural runoffs ( the gulf of mexico was a chemical sump long before deepwater horizon). this runs counter to the "political demands for surplus" that, in the modern era, began in the 1950s as part of a world bank/imf assault on traditional agriculture through the export model and the questionable concept of "competitive advantage"...in an era of declining energy availability coupled with inflated ( artificially or not) costs a local and traditional agriculture would seem to represent a much more stable form of food securtity than a world dependent on import/export models that allow commodity speculation and unwaranted manipulation of food pricing...perennials lead to a more locally robust agriculture and a healthier environment...i'm not interested in hot pockets or macdonald's.

the top photo is of the chinese yams finally out of dormancy...a rootstock perennial that expands its root system every year it will be a binding force on the soil in the garden as it moves towards a permaculture existence after the annuals growing this season as a comparison to last year's perennial tubers are gone...they had me worried...particularly the one that had been damaged by moles and i am relieved to see them up and running ( plus the vines on a trellis look really neat as the summer progresses)...the eastern gamagrass, another rootstock perennial, has greened-up nicely and will do well this season...the botton photo is of a "ferned" asparagus spear working on feeding the roots...aparagus is a rootstock perennial as well ( as opposed to the jerusalem artichokes which are tuberous perennials that set tubers to reproduce rather than growing from the same roots year after year)...all three ( along with the intermediate wheat grass, yet another rootstock perennial) will serve to caputre the nutients that leach down through the soil form the organic processes going on in the upper layers and to sequester carbon dioxide in the roots in the form of carbohydrates for the next year's growth...a garden eventually intended to be skewed towards perennials as a rational response to an artificially manipulated annual system.