Food Security In Action: Our Permaculture Project and How to Do It Yourself

An example of a mature permaculture garden. Every plant has a purpose, from pollination, to pest control, to food production. Image Source: Permaculture Gardening – A Step-by-Step Guide for Beginners

Permaculture of the Past

For a people that live in the land, permaculture is not a new idea. Lost long ago, locations such as "Indian Gardens" near Rathwell were once areas where the Ojibwe used their traditional plant knowledge to grow useful plants in permanent settlements. As opposed to the more nomadic tribal groupings, these stationary settlements grew medicines, food crops, and maintained animals and healthy ecosystems around them. Using principles that modern day permaculture tries to emulate, the Ojibwe of these settlements and many others were a key part of the greater tribe system.

Many different Indigenous peoples used these principles before it had the name "permaculture". Control burns, plant partnering, water capture, and much more were key components of these methods. Each garden would be carefully tailored to the ecosystem it was in, partnering with as many aspects of nature around it as possible.

Permaculture and the Swan Lake First Nation Community

Food security has become a major concern for many of the traditional Ojibwe community members of SLFN. As the local environment continues to deteriorate from a usability standpoint, unhealthy and expensive foods from the surrounding villages has become the only option for many. The lake itself has been deemed a dead lake, with fish showing up with cysts during die-offs in the summer. A lack of clean water on the land in general has many concerned, as drought-like conditions have impacted the local ecosystems consistently. Wild game meat is a declining option, as elk and moose no longer are in our area and deer are showing up with green flesh and cysts from their food sources.

It is obvious why people who used to be able to depend on these resources are concerned. Dependency on outside food sources has long impacted Indigenous peoples, often leading to a decline in traditional culture. In the past, starvation through limiting usage of the land has historically been used as a tool of colonialism and pacification on the Ojibwe and other peoples. Whether or not it is intentional, disconnection from the land today has a strong impact on the traditional way of life.

While there is much in the way of declining healthy habitats in the SLFN area, there are still traditional community members who protect and use their natural areas. David Scott has fought to maintain the forested areas of the reserve, and there are still many areas that are quite healthy. Likewise, his sister Elaine has been teaching many of the community members and their kids at school through land-based events. They both hold an immense amount of traditional knowledge on plants and our local ecosystems, and are some of the last Old Ojibwe speakers in SLFN. They, along with many of their family members including me, Finn Rachul, are pushing to use this knowledge through creating permaculture gardens to alleviate food insecurity in the reserve and bring back a disappearing part of Ojibwe tradition.

Our Project - Year One

Before I outline the project, I have to note that we are not "professionals" in the permaculture sphere. I started this project with relatively basic permaculture knowledge, so I leaned heavily into the traditional knowledge Dave and Elaine have been teaching me for this project. We've all learned a lot as the project has progressed, especially about the unique struggles this climate faces for projects like these. Likewise, climate change, increased heat, and drought have all been aspects we've had to learn to work with.

This project began at Elaine's yard and is in it's second year. The first year yielded little progress as a normal row garden, so we tilled everything under and started fresh. In the next few weeks, we will be hosting tutorials for the local community, as word about food security and permaculture has spread quickly across the reserve and we're getting lots of questions on how people can do this themselves.

Early view of the area we are working with. Due to being so thick with weeds and other debris, we decided to till the area whole and reclaim it from there. Roughly 120x120 feet, the initial size was a bit ambitious. We've since managed to begin reclaiming the whole area with trees, shrubs, and straw.

As you can see in the above photo, much of what we started with was bare, dry, rock hard soil. While it is definitely possible to start smaller or avoid tilling completely, we were eager to claim a large area and start fighting back the weeds.

As we learned quickly, quack grass is our main enemy in gardening. Due to the fact that its long, segmented root system puts out compounds toxic to other plants, it can quickly take over an area and render it useless for growing shallow rooted plants. Likewise, each segment underneath the soil contains enough roots and nutrients to grow its own plant, making it quite the job to hold it off.

Along with quack grass, our other main struggle was the dryness. The drought-like conditions, extreme heat, and thoroughly tilled soil made for a harsh environment for seedlings. Many of our freshly seeded plants such as tomatoes and cabbages never broke through the soil, instead quickly drying up under the extreme heat. As time has gone on, the soil has become hard and compacted, making for an even more difficult growing environment.

Despite these struggles, however, we have managed to establish a substantial garden. See the photos and descriptions below for more.

A satellite capture of what we started with at Elaine's yard in 2024.

A view of the garden from the entrance. This is our shadiest area, with thriving first and second year berry bushes and rich soil shaded by towering poplar.

Our first solution was to establish border zones or "battle lines" as we nicknamed them. These are areas where the garden is thoroughly established to provide easy control of the ever-encroaching quack grass roots. As you can see in the photo above, we used berry bushes surrounded by a till zone covered in black fabric. This area seemed like the logical starting point for our first battle line, as it is well shaded and the soil holds more moisture, making it far easier to maintain throughout the heat of the summer. We've created battle lines all the way around the garden with tilled ditches, beneficial ground cover plants, thick layers of straw, and black garden fabric.

Our early row garden beds. This area suffered under the extreme heat of the passed few weeks and has failed to grow much other than onions.

Reclaiming the soil has been another large push for us lately. Due to a lack of organic matter, any water we add to the soil evaporates within hours. The most obvious solution in our minds was to increase the organic matter and water holding potential of the soil using large amounts of straw and peat moss. While we might not grow much this season in areas like these, we plant to continue adding compostable materials to the soil throughout the year and plant nursery vegetables where we can give them a fighting chance.

Our intro to companion planting. The picture above is our potato rows interplanted with marigold flowers we got from a local nursery. While fairly basic compared to how diversly you can plant your beds using permaculture principles, the simple marigold-potato combination is a good start. This area will hopefully have no problems with potato bugs due to the marigold flower's potent smell.

Our patch of native trees moved in spring. You can move most native fruit trees before their leaves begin budding as long as they have a decent amount of root hairs and musty smelling soil surrounding them. So far we have lost very few of the roughly 30 plants we moved.

The food forest. A large area complete with fruit trees, pollinators, bird attractors, shrubs, coverage, and more.

Long term planning has proved to be key for us with such a large area. With evaporation from heat and wind being a major concern, we decided to spend a larger portion of our funding on trees. Since a large annual garden harvest seems unlikely due to the soil conditions, we plant to focus most of our energy this year and next spring on establishing our food forest to solve the evaporation problems for future seasons. As summer comes to a close and temperatures cool, we will begin moving in companion plants for the fruit trees such as perennial flowers and fragrant plants. Likewise, we plan to continue using hay and peat moss to improve the soil and maintain moisture. The west side of the food forest is sheltered by newly planted quick-growing poplars, which will provide shade and wind coverage as they grow.

As everything is now, the garden is firmly established for next year against weeds, dry soil, and healthy planting areas. Other than that, we have purchased seedlings from the local Hutterite colony greenhouse, and expect to have a decent harvest of cabbage, cauliflower, onions, potatoes, goose berries, strawberries, carrots, swiss chard, flowers, and more. We will be working at establishing more and will come out with a progress update at the end of the growing season.

Thanks for reading!