What is up everyone? Welcome back to the Epic Gardening Podcast. We are continuing our week of

permaculture exploration with Nicki and Dave of Grow My Own Food.com. So like me, they focus on smaller own food.com. So like me they focus on smaller space food production but

specifically through the lens of permaculture and one of those tenets would

be this idea of of using one element in the garden, but getting multiple functions

or benefits out of it.

And so guys, I thought it might be good just to start with laying that philosophy out and then maybe we could talk about

some practical applications?

Sure.

So when you're designing with permaculture in mind, you're trying to stack functions as

much as possible.

This means that whatever the plant are feature in your garden,

you're always thinking about how you can use this for multiple purposes in a garden.

The simplest example of this is using a plant in your garden for one of the functions we had mentioned about earlier when we talked about gills, such as attracting pollinators or accumulating nutrients from deep in the subsoil with an edible harvest so that that thing provides that function but it also has something that you can eat from the plant.

So Echinacea is a good example of this.

It has wonderful flowers that attract bumble bees and other wild bees and butterflies.

It also has roots that after a year or two of growth can be dug up and made into a powerful tincture for pre-treating flu and other common winter months. and

made into a powerful tincture for pre-treating flu and other common winter maladies.

So that's a simple example of two functions that it's providing for us.

Other functions could be creating shade for microclimate in your garden or creating a wind break from an edible hedge.

When we're talking about functions, it's not just life forms that we're talking about.

It could be something like a garden wall or other man-made

feature that's in your garden.

...