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My name is Jeremy Lynch, and I'm a local business owner here
in town.
And for a time, I worked for USU as a permaculture intern,
helping to develop out this garden
space, which is a project of USU Extension Sustainability.
It was designed by Jason Gerhardt of Real Earth Design,
and the project has come to fruition over the first three
years of its growth.
And so we're standing in the north garden
right now, which is one of many different sections
in the garden as a whole.
Permaculture is a whole systems approach to design,
taking ecological principles as the foundation for developing
new spaces and managing resources.
Whether that's plants in a garden
or strategic planning for an organization,
it's an approach to creating something new out
of the resources that presently exist.
One of the major features of this landscape
is water harvesting, and we can do
that in many different ways, one of which is passive.
So when we have surfaces around a landscape that are
impermeable and they cannot infiltrate water,
like a road or a metal roof, that water collects,
and we can direct it into the garden to help grow plants
and establish healthier soils.
So what we have here is a downspout
that feeds directly into the garden
into a swale, which is a depression in the landscape
that collects and sinks water.
One of the features of typical gardening
is often monoculture planting.
So we'll have one species throughout an entire garden
or landscape, and that limits the diversity
and the resilience of the system.
The more diverse plantings we have,
the more functions they have and the more resilient
they are against disease and traumatic events,
like erosive storms.
And so what we have here is the original design
for this landscape, which is a series of juniper shrubs, which
provide basic benefits to the landscape,
but not a diverse palette of landscapes.
And as we can see, the water that could, in this case,
be a resource is just flowing right on past the landscape
and not infiltrating into the soil, not helping
these plants grow, so we see a dissociation
of the different resources in the landscape.
So in addition to harvesting water off
of impermeable surfaces like roofs,
we can do it right off the ground, which, in this case,
would be storm water.
And one of the opportunities and the strategies we use here
are curb cuts, and so what that allows us to do
is create openings in your typical curb that move water
into a system and allow it to soak into the soil
where plant roots, in this case in the middle of a parking lot,
can access it and grow up providing
shade for surrounding vehicles, for people in the space,
and multiple other uses.
In this case, we're growing some golden currants here for food.
So one of the things we're trying to do with permaculture
is set the foundational conditions
that allow plants to thrive, and so we're
looking at managing water, improving soil health,
and establishing new plantings.
One of the things we did in this part of the garden
is plant different species along the edge
and allow them to walk into the garden
into the lower parts themselves.
So over the course of two seasons,
all of these gaillardia, these blanket flower, the bee balm,
Russian sage, and numerous other plants
have receded and established themselves
within the conditions that they most thrive.
So we use a number of strategies to improve soil health.
One, of course, is bringing water into the system.
The water is flowing from the rooftop
of the building behind us, down out through this downspout,
and into the garden where the swale is lined with rocks
to prevent erosion and where seeds
were placed to allow plants to grow up and to move into.
In addition to that, we've covered the remaining surface
with a thick, hearty, woody mulch, which
is a byproduct of tree trimming industries around the area,
and that allows us to maintain and retain soil moisture
throughout the garden so that whenever water does enter
the system, it has maximum amount of accessibility
to plant roots beneath the soil.
So what we have here is a diverse palette, everything
from grasses, to small forbs, to shrubs, to trees,
and, in this case, several fruit trees,
and we have plants that have specific functions
within the garden.
In particular, we have this false indigo here
and a few other plants, including the Apache plume,
which are nitrogen fixers, and what
they do is they take atmospheric nitrogen
and move it through their plant bodies, into their roots,
into the soil, making it accessible for trees,
such as plum trees, and cherry trees, and Asian pear trees,
and everything else that we've planted in here,
to produce food.
The cisterns just behind us here are connected to this system
by a series of pipes that run underground,
and they come to this point right here
where we have a ball valve that allows
us to open up the water and gravity feed it
into the garden.
So as you'll see in just a moment,
water will begin to flow from the tanks, which
was harvested from the roof nearby, into the garden space.
And this is one of the ways in which we supplement rainwater
into the garden using still harvested rainwater.
So we're bringing a lot of water into this garden space,
and one thing we want to make sure we're accounting for
is where it overflows if it overflows.
And so we have different strategies for that.
In this case, we've used a grinder
to lower this curb so that this is the lowest point,
and when water fills up within the garden itself,
it'll overflow right here and then
connect with local storm water infrastructure.
But ideally, we're taking in as much water
as we can before we burden the storm water system with it,
and ultimately, what this is it alleviates the storm water
system.
We were talking about resiliency in terms of plants.
We also have to consider resiliency in terms of water.
And in this case, we live in a place
where a few months out of the year,
we don't get very much, if any, rain at all,
and so storing some of that rain for the dry season
is essential.
We have here six different cisterns or tanks
which store rainwater and hold it for when we want to use it.
In this case, each of these tanks
holds 530 gallons of water, which
accumulates to 22,500 gallons of water per nine inches of rain
a year.
We could also think about it in terms of a one-inch rainstorm.
That means for every one inch rainstorm,
we collect 2,500 gallons of water, which we then
have set up such that we can gravity feed it
through a little one-inch pipe into the various garden spaces
throughout the landscape.
One of the main things to know about cisterns
is that we want to filter the water before we put them
into the tanks.
We're only storing them for, generally speaking,
a few months at a time, but we want that water
to be as clean as possible.
And so we have multiple levels of filtration starting
with a filter right where the downspout
meets what's called the rain head right here.
There are actually two filtering screens
on this part of the system as well as
one once this pipe reaches the tank itself.
And so we try to remove as much organic matter as possible,
one, to prevent clogging, and, two,
just to keep the water as clean as possible for later use.
So just like with the garden spaces
themselves and the passive earthworks,
or swales in this case, that allow us to move water directly
into the garden and give it a place to overflow,
with active water harvesting, which is moving the water
and storing it in tanks, we also want
to have an overflow in the event that these tanks fill up.
And so pipes coming out of the top of the tank
allow water to overflow into these additional permeable
garden spaces back here, which, themselves,
are slowly growing to incorporate
native plants into the mix.
We've been talking a lot about resilience
through the interaction of water, soil, and plants
in the garden, and one key component of that
is how we design through time.
And part of that is knowing what we're
going to harvest, what we're going to take,
and what we're going to put into this garden in the long term.
Every plant in this garden serves a function
beyond itself, whether that's for medicine, or food,
or habitat.
And when planting for people, we often like to plant for fruit.
And so in this case, we're already, even early
in the season, harvesting cherries.
Permaculture is much more than gardens.
It's the people behind the gardens as well.
And this garden in particular, USU's Permaculture Gardens,
are part of a larger network of community-landscaped spaces
developed by the Bee Inspired Gardens Group,
which is represented by the various blue signs you'll see
around Moab and Castle Valley.
And these are a series of gardens
that attempt to integrate the use of water, food production,
and pollinator habitat to solve a series of issues
through integrated design.
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