Outwit, Outlast, Outplay

BTW -- here are the results from our backyard plants' own little game of survivor:

Survivors: wood sorrel, sword fern, huckleberry, wintergreen, woodland strawberry, gooseberry, wild ginger. (Interesting to note that all of these are natives).

Don't know yet: trillium, serviceberry, vine maple, red-twig dogwood, fennel, yarrow, bleeding heart. (Most of these natives, too).

Didn't make it: red flowering currant, shamrock, foamflower, eggplant, clover, mint, penstamon, green beans, salmonberry, mountain hemlock, wax myrtle, persimmon, runner beans, corn, squash, salal (because the neighbor destroyed it).

Re-energizing

Ok, I'm over my meltdown/tantrum.
I still don't know what I'm doing, but a few things have made me feel better lately:

1. I figured out why my plan to replace the weeds with clover failed. (Yes, it failed. All the clover died and the weeds replaced it, undoing pretty much everything we did in the last two years -- this succession causing my aforementioned sustainable tantrum). We used an anual clover (crimson) instead of a perennial (dutch white). Also while learning this, I learned it's not good to monocrop your clover anyway -- best to add some grasses (oat grass seems to work for us) and some yarrow to balance out the minerals in the system. Now I just have to find someone who is willing to replace a 35x35 weed garden with a ground cover as described above. Know anyone? I'm willing to pay and I make really good iced tea.
2. Don't believe everything your permaculture teacher tells you. Here are a couple of permaculture myths (in my opinion) to be disregard in favor of your sanity and blood pressure:
• Myth: Permaculture gardens don't require much work. They take care of themselves. Reality: Maybe if you are a superhero gardener with nothing but time on your hands, you can set up a permaculture garden with minimal effort. My experience and that of everyone I know personally is that it takes a lot of work to plan the system and to get it set up. My major failure last year was water, despite my copious water-saving, nitrogen-fixing ground cover. I just didn't have time to water as much as needed. Plus we had 107 degrees for a week -- not exactly weather characteristic of our zone.
• Myth: You can create a self-sustaining system that eliminates your need to get food from other resources. Reality: I banged my figurative head against the figurative wall for months trying to figure out how I could possibly design for this in my yard. Earlier in the blog, you'll see the quantities we get from our fruit trees and how long they last. I thought I must be stupid because I couldn't figure out how it was possible to create enough food in our yard for us to subsist on year-long, let alone thrive on. And we have a sizable yard.
  
  Then I found a blog article on Toby Hemenway's site on this topic where he basically says the same thing -- that utter self-sustainability is an absurd goal (I'm editorially paraphrasing). First I felt tremendous relief, and then I felt deeply annoyed that I had spent so much time trying to make this work. So if you're not a superhero, die-hard gardener, save yourself some time and aggravation by not worrying so much about this.
  
  The approach we've decided to take is to plant a more of the kinds of things that we know we can grow (not monocropped, just more), that we like, and that we know that others like too. That way we can trade blueberries for squash or tomatoes.

So my next task, not un-daunting, is to find that dutch white clover/oat grass/yarrow ground cover mix, and find someone to plant it. I'll let you know how it goes. If it doesn't go, there might not be much more for me to say here...