Creating Our Own Agroforesty Polyculture Farm for the Future
“An acre of diverse poly-culture would not only provide more calories,
but more nutrition than an acre of a single crop.“
The thing about Commonground is that if you put everything together you get a wide ranging social community that has a diverse interest in many things. This is what we want to achieve with our small agroforestry, poly-culture farm. It will have everything we have highlighted in this manifesto. As with the quote above our crop is not just about garden farming its everything, from developing a diverse of sustainable businesses to local social projects to creating a range learning hubs for the local area.
This essay is not complete so please forgive gaps
The Idea of Creating a Socially Diverse Farm.
At Commonground we have spent nearly ten years looking at sustainability and ecology in regards to getting active in solving our climate and biodiversity issues. This page is about how you can go about creating greener environments within varying demographic settlements. To do that we ultimately want to create our own community based sustainable farm.
“All good things are wild and free.”
Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau meant that true value, beauty, and authenticity come from nature and personal liberty, rather than from human rules, money, or society. After-all rules and justice can never be absolute, life itself is an exercise in exceptions. Its not just about blindly following a rule book
Our ultimate aim is tied up with our “Simply Show You” approach, this is core concept underpinning everything we do. We don’t follow the rule book we rather simply show you ways or alternatives to the solutions we need to solve our Planetary crises. There is no rule book to follow, in fact we need to go back to older bendy rules when we were more attune to nature.
Our Ultimate Space is not a Garden nor is it a Farm, it’s a Garden Farm
If you look at the definitions to your left,you will see there is a difference. Both definitions doing more of less the same thing, however there is difference between the two and that comes down to one word “Cultivated” or well cultivated. Taking time and effort in understanding how the soil and land works.
While modern farming may cultivate the land it’s main function is for pure profit and it does not have the best interests of nature and the land in mind. Our Garden Farm concept is will be designed around how to cultivate the land for the future. The quote below sums this up.
“A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit. or ever benefit from its fruit” …..
….. but future generations will benefit. This is the message we need to send to our children and our children’s children. Most of us won’t see this future but they will. This is the whole point of creating out Garden Farm, we need to leave a lasting positive message to for our children.
Join the movement! Reimagine communities, integrate nature, and build a sustainable future with us.
Garden Farming
It is probably important to note at this juncture that there is a difference between garden farming and wilderness (letting nature take back control of our land. Part of our learning process is how to do this while at the same time produce food. We will also be supporting separately support the growth of wilderness areas. If you think about its all about learning a new way to live.
Our Garden Farm wants look at how we can go about creating a garden farm for the future. One which is not reliant on processed fertilisers, pestcides etc and a move away from monoculture which has devastated our lands.
Basically we delve into three types of growing principles. Regenerative farming, Permaculture and Agroforestry are all about conservation and rehabilitation to how we grow food that focuses on restoring soil health, increasing biodiversity, and working in harmony with nature. All these three approaches are interlinked in some or another.
Local Urban Garden Farming
One aspect of our Garden Farm is to engage with everyone in the local area and this also includes in urban areas. For us it is important to remember that an urban garden farm is different form of a social interaction than our rural garden farm concept.
We had an epiphany of sorts when we looking at self sufficiency during the second world war, where people were people would adapt there gardens to produce there own food but also for the rest of the street they lived in. Sharing became a big thing. We though why can’t we adapt this concept for urban areas.
So in typical Commonground fashion we came up with a way that we could encourage people to grow more fruit and veg (& maybe earn some money). To set the scene take a walk around your local area bit during this walk take note of all the gardens and green areas.
Our idea is simple yet complex. Why not encourage people to grow fruit and veg for themselves while encouraging others in there street to grow different food stuffs. We can start to create coming together of people that will enhance the local community. Any surplus could be sold to us at the farm for a mutually agree price. The article below explains this is greater detail but we can only start to truly develop the concept when we realise our ultimate goal.
Creating a Garden Farm with a Social Connection
As we have said before we cannot solve our climate crisis without out some serious social connections. Currently we live in a insular world, where no-one really talks or engage with each other. In fact we would go so far as saying we can’t solve our planetary issues unless we create more community based social engagement.
This is what Al Gore was saying when we mentioned his quote on the home page. It needs to become a rallying cry. Imagine if you became engaged in acting and you encouraged others close to you and they then challenged others to act. As a result you start the ball rolling. Then in another street someone else wants to get involved, the ball starts gathering momentum. Then someone from a different place takes up the idea and the ball grows bigger.
Commonground ReWilding offers support to those people that act and demand change. Remember that far off person from a different place. They grow there own garden and the ball grows bigger again. This is how you start grow and change the attitudes to the world problems. This is how you create a meaningful Movement.
However There is Much More to This than Just Creating a Small Sustainable Garden Farm
Our main aim is to create spaces where people can come and learning our the issues facing our planet. For us to achieve that we need both social and business engagement. The idea is to use the spaces within the garden farm to create small business hubs. Each business has a strong sustainability and green ethos. Not only that we want to link to other businesses within our local community and support start-ups around our local area.
Here is a brief outline of how we want to grow this concept.
Not everything needs to be centre around the garden farm
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.
What is Lorem Ipsum?
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.