DAYTON – Looking at a piece of her property that she called the “dead zone,” Katharina Hirsch arrived at an unlikely conclusion. She decided she would give life to this arid, mostly barren land. She would restore its energy. But even if deciding her intentions was easy, Hirsch understood that executing them was a bit trickier.
Hirsch, who travels the world to teach BodyTalk and Qui Gong, met up with Sepp Holzer in Austria and began to see how her vision could take shape. Holzer is a pioneer in permaculture, a system of ecological design that promotes self-sustaining agriculture using no fertilizers, pesticides, tilling or irrigation.
Hirsch invited Holzer to check out her property and, to her surprise, word quickly spread throughout the permaculture community. Suddenly, Hirsch found herself hosting a seminar with close to 100 fee-paying attendees, including many who traveled great distances for the chance to learn from and work with Holzer for nearly two weeks in May.
The seminar set the stage for establishing a permaculture operation on Hirsch’s property that is thought to be one of the biggest of its kind in the nation.
“I had no idea Sepp is the Dalai Lama of permaculture,” Hirsch said recently from her Dayton farm. “For him, this is his pilot project in the U.S.”
On a late August day months after the seminar, Hirsch pointed to multitudes of veggies and fruits growing on raised “hugelkultur” beds, with many of the plants having already gone to seed. The seeding, Hirsch and her cohorts on the farm hope, will lay the foundation for an even more fruitful growing season next year and in future years.
“This area you see that has all of this abundance was a dead zone before,” Hirsch said. “You could see how it was a dead zone on Google Earth. I really felt this place needed to be energized and it has been.”
Permaculture challenges and in some cases directly contradicts most people’s notion of agriculture. The idea is to set up a system that coexists harmoniously with its natural surroundings to the point that it is ultimately self-sustaining. In other words, once the system is established the farmer has to do very little to maintain it.
Holzer, who has been branded a “rebel farmer,” grows wheat, eucalyptus, peaches, mushrooms, apricots, figs, kiwis, oranges and all sorts of things one wouldn’t expect to find in the Austrian mountains, as well as animals like pigs and chickens. With the system long established, he says the plants and animals largely take care of themselves.
Rather than employing monoculture, where one single crop dominates a landscape, permaculture promotes diversity, with the goal of not robbing soil of its nutrients. Microclimates are established in which humans, plants and animals coexist.
Hirsch’s Place of Gathering hasn’t gotten to the point of self-sustainment yet. In these early stages it actually requires a lot of human attention. Transforming mostly barren, knapweed-riddled land into a fruitful utopia takes work up front. But if successful, Hirsch said the final result will achieve a greater and vital balance between human and nature.
The Place of Gathering’s mission statement says permaculture is a “way of participating in the landscape that acknowledges that nature is the master and we are the stewards. It is a question of how to manage a landscape where the answer is found in the observation of nature.”
Initial efforts included deepening existing waterways so that water in the area could make its way throughout the growing areas and develop ponds – part of the permaculture notion of “working with what’s there,” Hirsch said. Raised “hugelkultur” beds were formed with woody debris foundations on which soil is laid and a wide variety of plants grow.
The absorbent foundations utilize water from the nearby canals and ponds and encourage natural irrigation through “capillary action,” according to Michael Billington, who has taken the lead role in establishing and running Hirsch’s permaculture operation.
Other features of the operation include a “mushroom forest” and “food forests” where varieties of trees will grow, producing fruit and serving functions in maintaining the self-sustaining landscape. Medicinal plants also grow at the Place of Gathering.
The Place of Gathering operates under the premise that if given the chance, and observed carefully to see what is needed, nature will tend toward abundance with man’s help rather than interference.
“I would say the natural disposition of things is to thrive,” Billington said.
Billington and Hirsch remind that growing food is only one aspect of the Place of Gathering’s philosophy. The overarching goal is to live more harmoniously with nature.
“We have reshaped this land,” the Place of Gathering’s mission statement says, “not to tame or control her, but to facilitate a natural progression back towards harmony and abundance.”
For more information on the Place of Gathering, including contact information to schedule a tour, visit www.placeofgathering.com.