Nicolas🌱

Projet de vie en #permaculture dans le Sud Ouest

  • Indigenous Management
    http://www.perennialsolutions.org/indigenous-management-organic-perennial-gardening-permaculture-u

    Regenerative Harvest: The timing, intensity, frequency, and long term patterning of harvest can have a positive or effect on plants. Native people developed harvest techniques to maximize health and yields of their crop plants. Root crops like camas (Camassia quamash) and sunchoke (Helianthus tuberosus) are examples. Other plants were harvested only once every few years to allow the stands to recuperate.

    Horticultural Practices: “Wild” and cultivated plant populations were managed with burning, irrigation, weeding, tilling, pruning, and coppicing (pruning back to the ground) to maintain healthy and productive stands. Chokecherries and hazels were both fire-pruned to improve fruiting and quality of craft materials.

    Propagation: Plant populations were increased by sowing seed, transplanting, and transporting species or superior varieties to new locations, sometimes far outside of their natural range. Examples include sowing edible grass seeds onto newly burned areas, and the spread by Native people of species like native lotus (Nelumbo lutea) and improved clones of agave (Agave spp.) to new areas.

    Ecosystem Management: Native practices, especially burning, maintained a productive landscape mosaic of desired ecosystems and habitats. The largest scale example is the fire-management of the prairies, large portions of which would have reverted to shrubland, savannah or forest without indigenous burning.

    Cultivation and Domestication: Some crops were taken into active cultivation, sown in settlements or farm fields. Many of these species experienced the increased yields and dependence on humans that we call domestication. Sunflowers (Helianthus annuus), devil’s claw (Proboscidia spp.), and a number of grasses are examples.

    #peuples_tribaux #agriculture #horticulture #permaculture