Gardening with Oklahoma Native Plants: Steve Owens, Bustani Plant Farm

Soil preparation is not as important for native plants: they like the soil the way it is! Some even like to be stressed. Try growing them in cracks between landscape elements.

Wildflower meadow gardens are great for pollinator habitat, but study your site first. Consider microclimate and choose plants accordingly. Contrasting white flowers can help break up the uniformity of a meadow garden.

Here are the slides for the presentation I'm giving this afternoon at the Oklahoma Native Plant Society's Indoor Outing:

I'm a big fan of the late Toby Hemenway's book, Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture. I own both editions, and for many years I used it as the curriculum for the intro permaculture courses I taught. In my opinion it's a classic right up there with Mollison's big black book.

Presented at Flint Hills Technical College

Part 1: March 2, 2016

Glossary of terms

Audio recording

Notes from a talk at Nebraska Sustainable Agriculture Society, January 29, 2016.

People often ask me what I think about greenhouses, as a permaculture designer. I've been meaning to write this article for so long that I was beaten to it; Kris de Decker wrote an excellent article, Fruit Walls: Urban Farming in the 1600s followed by Reinventing the Greenhouse.

[Revised 1/9/16 to add November and December income]

When people ask about our tenth of an acre, I frequently say, "We call it an urban farm, but it's more of a market garden." That's because for the last six years (2009-2015), we've brought essentially all of our produce to the farmers' market. What doesn't sell, we eat ourselves or preserve. We're going to try a different strategy in 2016, for a number of reasons, and I feel we owe our customers an explanation.

August 25-26, 2015, Emporia, Kansas

Watch a demonstration of a model of this system on YouTube!

When people here in Emporia learn that I'm into ecological gardening, they often ask me to install rain barrels for them. I'm resistent to doing this for a number of reasons, all of which have to do with limitations in how rain barrels are usually built and connected. I think I've finally cracked the problem, so here's my modest proposal for how to do it right. But first...

[Notes on a speech given October 26, 2014 at the Mother Earth News Fair, Topeka KS.]

Neighbors of Polyface Farm are not supportive, call names when interviewed.
Tension of heresy and orthodoxy is hardly a new thing, just gets applied to different things. Within living memory it was USDA policy to feed dead cows to cows. Orthodoxy today is that GMOs are great and will save the world.