The ethics of permaculture at Slow Blooms

The name Slow Blooms is a play on the Slow Foods and Slow Flowers movement, which is all about getting your produce local and in season, and taking your time with it.  

Today I want to talk a bit more about the ethics of permaculture, and how they apply to my business. I've been studying horticulture and permaculture through books and Polytech and workshops over the past five years or so. But by far the most useful thing I've done, was going for a Permaculture Design Certificate with Trish Allan and Guenther Andraschko at Rainbow Valley Farm, here in Matakana.

I'm quite aware that a lot of people are travelling from much further afield to get to these courses, so I feel very lucky to have one just up the road, with some of the most renowned teachers in the world.

I started my Permaculture Design Certificate at the beginning of 2020, and signed the lease for this piece of land in August. The certificate course has theoretical and practical elements in itself, but I have a  been very lucky to also be learning and working through the practical sides of building up a permaculture business, at the same time.

Permaculture can be a lot of different things to different people. But one pretty simple way that my teacher Trish Allan describes it, is that permaculture is a design system which helps us live our lives in such way, that we leave the planet better than we found it.

Permaculturists are a pretty diverse bunch of people with VERY diverse views. But there are three fundamental permaculture ethics which everyone who does permaculture sort of agrees on in everything that we do, and these are earth care, people care and fair share.

These ethics are very much connected, and they are basically the foundation of my business here at Slow Blooms.

So to put it simply - I'm creating this little piece of paradise, full of flowers that are beautiful and smell amazing. I'm creating it with care for the land, in a way which will make it better, more diverse and full of life - and then I share it with people!

I have visitors of all ages coming with their friends, with their children, or their partner, or just to have a mindful moment alone. Some people will pick for themselves, and some will pick for a special occasion or for somebody they care about.

This is just our first season, and I can already see how much joy this is bringing to people, for some it's how certain flowers bring back memories, and for some it's about creating new memories.

My visitors, or pickers, or Slow Bloomers as I like to call them, get to borrow a basket or a bucket with water, and a pair of snips. I try to avoid plastics and single use products as much as possible.

I love to be able to welcome people here at almost any time that they like. If I'm not here, we work on an honesty system - so I just let my slow bloomers pick whatever they like, and take their harvest into Charlies, the Gelato shop next door, and pay for them there.

So going back to the permaculture ethics of care and fair share - I'm sure there are a lot of flower farms that are more productive and looks more tidy than Slow Blooms, and that grows straighter flowers - with a lot less weeds in between them!

But we don't just look at productivity, or in taking as much as possible out of the land as possible.

The way we see it it's as much about giving back to the land and all the beings on it - from the birds to the bees to the earthworms and soil microorganisms. And again, leaving that piece of the earth a bit better for coming generations.

So looking at some concrete examples of that, for example, I like to leave some old spent sunflower heads around for the birds to eat the seeds, even if some visitors might think it looks messy.

I encourage bees and butterflies, even though they ultimately shorten the sellable flower life. Once flowers has been pollinated they kind of give up their reason to live - but I'm okay with that! So I would never use nasty sprays on my plants, that could harm our pollinators, or the living things in the ground which helps build up our soil.

Also in terms of people care, we grow a wide variety of healing herbs at Slow Blooms. Our whole top row is dedicated to plants that have known healing or culinary properties. So we have everything from your herbal tea classics, like chamomile and jasmine and peppermint, to your echinacea and feverfew, which are used traditionally for treating colds and flus, to lots of other plants that has traditional uses for aches and pains. I'm still studying to learn more about this, and eventually hope to be able to offer workshops.

We have also planted a large amount of traditional kitchen garden herbs, for people who like to pick their own spray-free produce for cooking. So up the top we've got parsley, oregano, thyme, lemon grass, vietnamese mint, and so on.

Personally, maybe I shouldn't say this, but I actually prefer black Earl Grey tea over herbal. So we have also planted 20 or so of the Camellia Sinensis, the traditional tea bush, which eventually we hope to harvest our own tea from to enjoy - and maybe even being able to provide our locals with some black tea as well, grown here in Matakana.

Over all, my vision with Slow Blooms, apart from creating a lovely space that makes people happy, is also to show people that growing and harvesting produce that is grown in a natural way, in its natural season, and as close as possible to the buyer, is a good thing.

At some point in time, there used to be a certain sense of status and pride in being able to get produce out of season, because it was so expensive. But I think as a society, we're moving away from that, and realising that it's not sustainable to fly fresh produce across the globe just because we want something all-year round. So buying local and in season is more and more becoming the thing that makes us feel proud of ourselves instead. 

The way I look at it is one end of the scale, we have roses mass-produced in a greenhouse in India or Colombia, being grown with all sorts of pesticides and herbicides - grown by people, who might not have much choice but to work in greenhouses filled with those chemicals sprays - and then packaged in plastics and flown to New Zealand, where again it gets sprayed at the border, and then shipped in chilled containers to its destinations around the country.

So you end up with a flower that's not in season, already up to a week old once you get it home, produced somewhere far away with no awareness of how those growers are treated, and transported to the other side of the world at great cost to the environment.

And then, on the other end of that scale, I'd like to think that we sit with Slow Blooms.

We follow the permaculture ethics, so we get flowers grown in a natural way, by people who love their work and becomes healthier and happier from doing it.

We get flowers  grown with no nasty sprays or plastic packaging, in their natural season for our local area, and that are freshly picked within minutes of bringing them home.  

At Slow Blooms, we like to say that our flowers are grown - not flown.