- 19 minutes ago
What if your garden could need less watering, weeding, and fertilizer simply by working with nature? This practical, story-rich gardening guide explores low-maintenance, self-sufficient garden ideas inspired by traditional growing methods and the three sisters: corn, beans, and squash planted together to share space and support one another.
Learn how companion planting can confuse pests, why thick leaf mulch helps suppress weeds and hold soil moisture, and how chop-and-drop weeds, composting, frogs, and birds can contribute to a healthier garden. The tour also covers bushy tomato plants, sunflower helpers, and a living grapevine fence. For beginner gardeners, homesteaders, and anyone seeking sustainable vegetable gardening, natural pest control, soil-building, and water-wise gardening techniques, this is a useful guide to growing more with less effort.
Learn how companion planting can confuse pests, why thick leaf mulch helps suppress weeds and hold soil moisture, and how chop-and-drop weeds, composting, frogs, and birds can contribute to a healthier garden. The tour also covers bushy tomato plants, sunflower helpers, and a living grapevine fence. For beginner gardeners, homesteaders, and anyone seeking sustainable vegetable gardening, natural pest control, soil-building, and water-wise gardening techniques, this is a useful guide to growing more with less effort.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00Picture a garden that waters itself, weeds itself, and feeds itself, and fights off its own pests
00:06besides, so that you do little more than walk through it of a morning and gather your supper.
00:11That is not a dream, and it is not a thing for rich folk with hired hands. It is the
00:17oldest way
00:17there is, the way a garden was kept before a man could drive to the store and buy a bottle
00:23for
00:23every trouble, and it rests on one idea so simple you will wonder you never saw it. You stop fighting
00:29nature, and you set your garden up so that nature does the work for you. Today, I am going to
00:35walk
00:36you through such a garden, mine, and show you the half-dozen plain tricks that make it run near on
00:42its own. Stay with me, for the last of them, the living fence the birds built for me without my
00:48lifting a finger, is the one you will not believe. Here is the whole principle first, for everything
00:54else hangs off it. Most folk garden by fighting. They fight the weeds with the hoe and the poison,
01:00they fight the bugs with the spray, they fight the dry with the hoes, they fight the poor soil with
01:06the bagged fertilizer, and it is war from spring to fall, and they are tired, and their wallet is empty.
01:13But nature grew a thick green world for an age of the world, with no man hoeing or spraying a
01:19thing.
01:19So the old way, the wise way, is not to fight nature, but to copy her, to set your plants
01:26together
01:26the way she sets hers, all mixed and crowded and helping one another, so the garden holds its own
01:32moisture and feeds its own soil and hides its own plants from the bugs. You do the setting up,
01:38once, and then you step back and let it run. It is the difference between pushing a cart uphill all
01:45day and giving it a push downhill and watching it roll. I gathered the whole of it into a book
01:51at
01:52EliasYoder.com. The book is the long version. If you want it, it is there. I will not mention it
01:58again.
01:59Start with the three sisters, the oldest partnership in all of gardening, the corn and the beans and the
02:05squash grown together in one patch. The corn stands tall and gives the bean a pole to climb, so you
02:12need
02:12cut no stakes. The bean climbs the corn and does a quiet thing besides, for the bean feeds the soil
02:19with a goodness it pulls down out of the very air, feeding the hungry corn for free. And the squash
02:25sprawls low and broad over all the ground between, its great leaves shading the soil so the weeds
02:31cannot get light to grow, and the moisture cannot burn off in the sun. Three plants in the space of
02:37one, each doing a job for the others. No stakes, no weeding, no bare dry ground. That is nature's own
02:45design, and the old folk knew it long before any of us. Now here is a clever turn on it
02:51that will save
02:51your corn. You do not fence the deer and the raccoon out and go to war with them. You plant
02:57them their own
02:57patch, a second three sisters outside your fence, a little convenience store for the wild things, set right in
03:04their path before ever they reach your good garden. They come in the night and take the corn from that
03:10outside patch, which you have made easy for them, and being fed, they trouble your real garden far less.
03:17And here is the thrift of it. When a deer takes the top off a corn stalk, you do not
03:22pull the whole
03:23plant, for the corn throws up a side shoot to replace it, going back to its work as if nothing
03:28happened, and you may yet get an ear off it. Feed the wild things a little on purpose, and they
03:34rob
03:35you less by accident. That is not weakness, that is sense. Now the pests, the bugs, and here is the
03:42trick that keeps my cabbages whole and pretty while my neighbors are lace. I do not spray them, I hide
03:49them. A bug finds your cabbage by its smell, nosing through the air for it, and so if you plant
03:56your cabbage
03:56all alone in a tidy row, you have rung the dinner bell and set out a sign. But if you
04:01plant it in
04:02among a crowd of strong-smelling things, the onions and the garlic, the marigold and the yarrow, the sage
04:09and the mint, all of them throwing off their sharp and pungent smells, the bug's nose is swamped and
04:16confused, and he cannot find your cabbage in the reek of it all. You hide the one plant in the
04:23smell of
04:24the others. And those stinky helpers feed you too, the onions and the herbs, so nothing is wasted on
04:31mere defense. But mind the one catch, for it is all in the timing. Those strong companions can grow up
04:40and smother your young cabbage as surely as any weed, so when you set your cabbage in small, you cut
04:48the
04:48companions back hard, down low, to give everyone a fair and even start. Cut them level, plant your crop,
04:57and let them all rise together. And a word on a flower that earns its place three times over,
05:05the sunflower, which I let grow up tall at the edges. It feeds the bees and the good bugs with
05:12its blooms.
05:13Its seeds, come fall, draw the squirrels off, for a squirrel would far rather raid a sunflower head
05:21than wrestle an ear of corn, so you give him the easy meal and save the hard one. And its
05:28lower leaves,
05:29stripped off, I lay down as a mulch to feed the soil. A flower that guards your corn, feeds your
05:37bees,
05:37and mulches your beds, and sows itself for free year on year. That is a plant pulling its weight.
05:47Now the tomatoes, and here I will tell you a thing that will sound backward until you hear the reason.
05:54I do not prune my tomatoes, and I do not tie them up tight. Folk prune a tomato hard to
06:02get a few big
06:03fruit, but I would rather have many fruit than a few fat ones, so I let it grow bushy and
06:10wild,
06:11and only prop it up loose with a bit of wood as it leans. And here is the hidden reason,
06:18the clever one.
06:19The worst pest of the tomato is the great green hornworm, and he can strip a bare pruned plant to
06:28sticks in a day while your back is turned. But a big bushy, unpruned plant has leaves to spare,
06:36so that when the hornworm comes and eats his fill, he has only thinned the plant a little, done it
06:43no
06:43real harm, and you come along and find him fat and slow and easy to spot against all that green,
06:51and you pluck him off. The extra leaves are the plant's own insurance against the very bug that
06:59hunts it. And that hornworm I do not crush, for he becomes a fine moth and has his place, so
07:07I carry
07:07him off to the wild weeds at the edge where he can eat his fill and harm nothing of mine.
07:15Now the heart of it all, the soil, and the one free thing that feeds my whole garden and spares
07:22me
07:22near every other labor, leaves. In the fall, when the whole town rakes its leaves into bags and sets
07:31them at the curb to be hauled away, I gather them up, the free riches of the whole neighborhood,
07:38and lay them thick over every bed, a good half a foot deep, a heavy blanket over the resting garden.
07:46And that blanket does four jobs at once. It smothers the weeds, so they never get the light to sprout,
07:54and I am spared the hoeing. It holds the moisture in the soil beneath, so I water far less.
08:01It draws the worms up to feed on it, and the worms pull it down and work it into the
08:08earth, tilling my
08:09soil for me, so that come spring I need turn no spade, only sweep the leaves aside to find the
08:17ground
08:17beneath soft and black and ready as if it had been dug. And the leftover leaves I heap over my
08:25potatoes,
08:26where they keep the spuds down in the dark so they do not green in the sun, sparing me the
08:32old labor of
08:33hilling them up with earth. One free thing, the leaf the town throws away, and it weeds and waters and
08:42tills and fertilizes and hills my potatoes, all while I sit by the fire. That is the whole secret of
08:52an easy
08:52garden in one word, and the word is leaves. And the same thrift runs through everything. The weeds I
09:02pull I do not cart away. I drop them right there at the foot of the plants, where they wilt
09:08and rot and
09:09feed the soil and shade it moist, a thing the old folk called chop and drop, for a weed is
09:15only a plant
09:16in the wrong place, and its goodness may as well go back into your ground. The comfrey, that great coarse
09:24plant that grows back near as fast as you cut it, I crop again and again and lay about my
09:30berries as a
09:31rich green mulch. Nothing leaves the garden, it all goes back in. Now I have spoken of hiding your plants
09:40from the bugs, but there is a better guard still, and it is a living one, an army of little
09:46hunters
09:46you invite in, and then never pay nor feed, for they feed themselves on the very pests that trouble you.
09:54The frogs and the toads are the first of them, and they are the sworn enemy of the slug and
09:59the snail,
10:00and will eat them by the score in a night. To bring them in, you need only give them what
10:06they want,
10:06a cool, damp place to hide by day, so I lay old logs and boards about the edges of the
10:13garden,
10:14rotting and mossy, and under them the frogs take up their lodging and come out at dusk to hunt my
10:20beds
10:21clean. And the birds are the second army, and they eat the bugs by the beak full all day long,
10:28but a bird
10:28will not come down to hunt where he feels naked to the hawk. So I give him high, safe perches,
10:35the corn stalks and the bean poles and the trellises, and from those lookouts he drops down to take a
10:42bug
10:42and darts back up to safety, and he clears my garden of the small pests while he is at it.
10:49You do not buy these helpers, and you do not command them. You only build them a frog's damp
10:55hideaway and a bird's high perch, and they come on their own and work for nothing.
11:01And now the thing I promised you at the start, the fence the birds built me. When first I kept
11:08the
11:08deer out, I strung up a tall mesh, but it caught the birds and the frogs and did more harm
11:14than good,
11:14so I tore it down and put up only a low fence, too low to stop a deer at all.
11:20And the birds,
11:21I like to think in thanks, repaid me. For they had eaten wild grapes and carried the seeds and
11:28dropped them along my fence line, and up came grape vines I never planted, a whole row of them,
11:35climbing the low fence on their own. And as they rose, I guided them along the top, and in a
11:41season
11:42or two they had grown up into a tall living wall of vine, high enough that the deer would not
11:48leap it,
11:48for a deer likes to see where he is landing, and will not jump a wall he cannot see past.
11:54So the birds planted me a deer fence for free, out of the very grapes they came to eat, and
12:00now that
12:01fence feeds me besides, for we fill half a freezer with those grapes and their juice each fall. A fence
12:08that grows itself stops the deer and feeds you. That is nature doing your work, if only you let her.
12:17My grandfather kept a garden like this, though he never had a fine word like permaculture for it,
12:23he just called it keeping a garden properly. It was a crowded, jumbled, humming place, flowers
12:30tangled in among the vegetables, herbs everywhere, frogs under the boards, and birds forever on the
12:36bean poles. And it looked untidy to my young eye next to the neat, bare rows the English kept down
12:43the road. I asked him once why his garden was such a glorious mess, while theirs was so neat. He
12:50said,
12:50Boy, their neat rows cost them their whole summer of sweat, and my mess costs me near nothing,
12:57for I have set it up so the frogs eat my slugs, and the birds eat my bugs, and the
13:02leaves feed my soil,
13:04and the plants mind one another, and I am free to sit and watch it grow. A tidy garden is
13:11a garden that
13:11fights itself. Let it be a little wild, and it will keep itself. I did not understand him as a
13:18boy. I
13:18understand him now. So let me say plainly, who gains by you believing a garden must be a season-long
13:25war of
13:26sprays and bags and bottles. The store gains and gains all summer, selling you the weed poison and the
13:33bug spray and the bagged fertilizer and the new plants when the old ones fail, a fresh bottle for
13:40every trouble. It is not that anyone schemed it so. It is only that a garden at war needs a
13:47hundred things
13:48bought and bought again, and a garden set up to keep itself needs almost nothing. So the war is sold
13:55to
13:55you, and the old peaceable way is quietly let slip. But the peaceable garden was always the richer one,
14:04and the easier, and the cheaper by far. Now tell me this in the comments. What is the one chore
14:11in your
14:12garden that wears you out the most? The weeding, or the watering, or the bugs? For whichever it is,
14:20there is an old way here to set it up so the garden does it for you. And tell me
14:26as well, do you garden
14:28on wet ground or dry? For that changes everything about how you lay it out, and I would know what
14:34you
14:35are working with. Next time I will show you what to do with a wet, boggy corner where the water
14:42sits for
14:42weeks and nothing will grow. How the old folk turned that very curse into the richest, most alive part of
14:50the whole garden with a thing called a rain garden. But for now, stop fighting your garden. Crowd it,
14:59mix it, mulch it thick with leaves, and let the frogs and the birds and the worms come to work
15:06for you.
15:06The people who built this country with their hands knew that, and we are only just starting to remember it.