80-20 Gardening | Checkdam.org

This is a draft field note for feedback. Photos from my own garden will come later, once the next green flush comes through.

Permaculture garden with mixed planting

I am starting to think of my garden as an 80-20 garden.

Not because I have some grand theory nailed down. More because a few things seem to be working, and the things that work seem to have a pattern.

You can get 80% of a job done in 20% of the time. In a house, that can mean a job looks unfinished. In a garden, it can mean the opposite. The final 20% is often the tidy bit: the repeated mowing, the strimming, the clearing, the bagging, the compost turning, the carrying things from one place to another, the slightly anxious desire to make the garden look as if a human is fully in charge.

But nature is not fully in charge in that way either.

Nature is not tidy. It is not static. It is not finished. It is always growing, falling, rotting, seeding, shading, climbing, smothering, opening, closing, feeding, recovering.

My garden seems happiest when I stop trying to finish it.

Well, that’s my excuse anyway :)

My Context

My soil is heavy clay.

Before this experiment, the garden did not seem to want to do very much except brambles and bindweed. It was not a blank canvas. It was more like a stubborn old system with a few very successful plants that knew exactly how to survive there.

Then I got an excavator in to build a pond.

That changed everything.

Topsoil was moved out of the way, the pond was dug, and the soil was put back later. It was a massive disturbance. Not a delicate garden intervention. More like a small geological event.

After that, I threw out seeds and walked away.

I had been to a farm seed supplier and bought a pasture mix because it was diverse and affordable. Then I topped it up with cover crop seeds, also cheap compared with little packets from garden centres. Since then, whenever things look a bit slow and rain is forecast, I go out with a bowlful of seed and throw it around.

That is about as technical as it gets.

The stomping often happens by accident while I do this.

And now, in places, it is a jungle of vibrant life.

Nature Does Not Cut

Permaculture garden with fruit tree, herbs, flowers, vegetables and hay mulch

One idea I keep coming back to is that nature does not really do cutting.

A mower cuts. A strimmer cuts. A tidy human cuts.

Nature grazes, browses, breaks, snaps, tramples, shades, dries, rots, burns, floods, freezes, and lets things fall over.

That feels different.

When I cut something and carry it away, I am removing the plant from the place where it grew. When I stomp it down or chop and drop it, most of the plant stays where it belongs. The stems lie down. The leaves shade the soil. The roots stay in the ground. The soil organisms get fed from both ends.

There is also something about senescence here: the old plant is not just rubbish. It is a stage. It has grown, flowered, seeded, toughened, browned, collapsed, and become food and cover. If I interrupt that whole sequence too early, I get tidiness, but I may also be stealing part of the process.

So I am trying to disturb things more like an animal and less like a machine.

Stomp. Chop and drop. Seed. Leave.

That is the pattern.

Children are extremely useful here, because children love being invited to destroy things. A patch of tall stems that feels like a chore to an adult can be a free afternoon of glorious sanctioned chaos for a child. The garden gets disturbance. The child gets permission. Everybody wins.

Humans Are Animals Too

I briefly jumped too quickly into thinking about using animals to create disturbance.

That may still be interesting one day, but I probably overcomplicated it. My garden is not massive. I do not need a herd.

Also, humans are animals too.

We disturb things pretty well. We are up there with elephants in our ability to knock things over, reshape ground, break branches, make paths, and generally arrive in a place with consequences.

So the question becomes: can I make my disturbance useful?

Not constant. Not fussy. Not a weekly punishment.

Just enough.

A burst of pressure, then rest.

That is the bit I take from grazing systems. The Savory Institute talks about Holistic Planned Grazing as a planning process built around timing, recovery, context, and plant recovery, not simply “lots of animals in a field”. I am not running cattle through my garden, but the shape of the idea feels useful: disturbance is not the enemy; disturbance without recovery is the problem.

The Cats Designed The Paths

I did not plan the paths properly.

That was probably a mistake, but it has also been interesting.

The neighbourhood cats have been showing me the routes.

They pick the sensible lines through the growth. They know where the gaps are, where the ground is easiest, where the plants naturally part. I have started to notice those routes and respect them. The cats are doing a little bit of design work for free.

This feels like a very permaculture thing, although I did not plan it that way.

Observe first. Intervene later.

The garden is already telling me where it wants the paths.

Living Roots Matter

Permaculture garden

The strongest idea underneath all of this is simple: living roots matter.

Christine Jones’ work is often discussed through the “liquid carbon pathway”: living plants photosynthesise, send sugars down through their roots, and feed microbial life in the soil.

That idea has changed how I look at a messy patch.

Bare soil now looks like a leak.

A living plant is not just the bit above ground. It is a pump, a bridge, a host, a sugar factory, a soil engineer. Roots hold the ground, open the ground, feed the underground life, and keep the system awake.

Even weeds look different through that lens.

A weed may be annoying. Bindweed is still bindweed. Brambles are still brambles. But a pioneer plant is often doing a repair job. It is covering exposed soil, mining, shading, armouring, feeding, and changing the conditions that allowed it to dominate in the first place.

The more useful question is not always “how do I kill this?”

Sometimes it is:

What job is this plant doing?
What condition invited it?
What plant community could make it less dominant?

That is a gentler question, but not a weaker one.

The Bowl Of Seed

The most practical bit of this whole experiment is the bowl of seed.

I keep seed around. Pasture mix. Cover crop mix. Odds and ends. Cheap bulk seed, not precious tiny packets.

When a patch looks tired, I throw seed.

When rain is forecast, I throw seed.

When I have just stomped something down, I throw seed.

The seed is not a perfect design. It is more like offering the garden options.

Some things fail. Some things vanish. Some things appear months later like they have been waiting for their moment. Some things explode into life and make me look clever when I was mostly just lazy.

That is a good bargain.

Senescence And The Next Flush

There is a rhythm I am starting to see.

A patch grows tall and a bit stale. It flowers. It sets seed. It starts to yellow, toughen, collapse. That is senescence: not death as failure, but ageing as part of the cycle.

Then I disturb it.

I stomp it down. I throw seed. Rain comes.

For a while it looks worse.

Then the next flush comes through. Fresh green pushes up through the flattened stems. The old growth becomes shade and mulch. The new growth rises through it.

That is the photo I want to take next: not the tidy “after” photo, but the moment where the garden looks green and happy after being knocked down.

That is the bit that feels alive.

Succession, Not Instant Orchard

I also think I have been impatient about productive plants.

It is tempting to plant the apple tree, the fruit bushes, the useful things, and expect them to perform. But on heavy clay, after disturbance, in a patch that mostly knew bramble and bindweed, that may be asking too much too soon.

Nature does succession.

Pioneers first. Tough plants first. Soil cover first. Roots first. Shade, shelter, fungi, insects, litter, loosened ground, better structure.

Then the production plants have somewhere to arrive.

Do not plant the apple tree into a desert and then blame the apple tree for struggling.

Build the world it wants to live in.

Or, more accurately in my case, throw a lot of seed around, stop mowing everything to death, and let the world begin building itself.

Good, Fast, Easy

The old saying is: good, fast, easy, pick two.

In this garden I am picking good and easy.

I am sacrificing fast.

That suits me.

Fast gardening seems to involve spending money, importing fertility, buying materials, clearing, tidying, forcing, watering, replacing, and then maintaining the forced result.

Easy gardening is slower. It asks for patience and a tolerance for the awkward middle stage. It asks me not to panic when things look messy. It asks me to notice when a plant is doing a job, even if I did not invite it.

The reward is that the garden starts to feel less like an outdoor room I have to manage and more like a living thing I am in conversation with.

80-20, For Now

So this is where I have got to.

I am not saying this is the correct way to garden.

I am saying that, in my context, on heavy clay, after a pond dig, with cheap seed mixes and a willingness to let things look wild, it seems to be working.

The work is rough.

The results are not instant.

But the garden feels more alive every year.

And the strangest thing is that the lazier I become about controlling it, the more generous it seems to become in return.

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Tags: eco-tourism gardening regenerative