Going beyond the garden

When I started practicing Permaculture, I wasn’t that worried about food. I lived in a household with two middle-class incomes. Rent wasn’t yet completely crazy in early 2010s Durham.

I grew food in a Permaculture way mostly because it felt like the right thing to do. I wasn’t OK with the way most agriculture affected the land and the workers. I didn’t want to give over something important to corporations driven only by profit interest. I wanted the joy of eating the freshest and healthiest food I could ever hope to have a few steps away from my door.

Here in 2026, buying food is rough and buying healthy food is rougher. I flinch at each grocery purchase. Healthy food for my family is a need that feels non-negotiable and all of it is calling me to think seriously again about how to get a lot more of our food free from our land and community.

Starting Over In the Garden

We moved locations in 2024 and so started over with our gardens. The work of the past two years on our land has mostly been around creating our new off-grid small home, setting up systems like water and solar, and building small additions as time and money allows.

I’m restlessly awaiting the thawing of the ice and snow so I can build a small attached greenhouse to start seeds (and contain a shower and greywater filter system!). I’ve got a little nursery garden in the shade for the stalwart transplanted perennials from our last forest garden to live until I can give them a better home.

Yet even if I had abundant time to grow food all day, our land has some opinions about what to plant here that I know I’d better respect. The same is true for every site. So many sites I visit just aren’t that appropriate for a garden; or, sometimes they’re perfect for a garden, but the people don’t enjoy gardening! And that’s fine, because finding your own food is not just about gardening.

Expanding Our Imagination Around Food

Following Permaculture, we expand our imagination around what it looks like to provide our own food. Whether the image in your mind of how to produce food is a garden or a farm, Permaculture gives paths to something much more diverse and alive.

This can be a big help if we’re bumping our head against a wall trying to figure out where to have the time or space for a garden, or how to possibly meet our needs through just one method that we don’t want or don’t feel able to do.

It also helps us have a much more resilient approach to food. Seeing food more like ancestor cultures, who knew how to relate to the whole of the wild as a place that can give nourishment and didn’t confine themselves only to small gardens or big fields, opens up a rooted sense of food security that a lot of us would benefit from having right now.

Learning about the lifeways of ancient (and some current) humans, we see that there were many cultures who were not farmers or gardeners or hunter-gatherers, but all of the above. Many of our ancestors foraged, fished, tended seeds, transplanted cuttings, raised animals, hunted and shaped the wild to provide its own food – and often did all of these things side-by-side in one place. Thinking only about gardening, raising animals, or farming may be way too narrow an approach!

As I’ve written about in other posts, there are ways that the land can hold us even when we’re too busy to have a garden. If we let go of our images of growing food and open to a more holistic way of seeing, we suddenly see that there is food all around us, whether or not we’re gardeners or farmers.

I created this diagram (… of course, WITHOUT AI! :)) to illustrate a more holistic approach to food.

Feel free to download and print it! It might make a nice poster.

I’m using it myself as a reminder before I go and throw all my energy into trying to expand a garden that is, right now, still mostly surrounded by big pine trees I’m hesitant to cut.

It does feel urgent to focus more on food this year, and it’s enough to just focus on one or two of these areas. Having this flexible view of it shows me that if I want to reduce our family’s food spending, I’ve got options. Why not pick the ones I enjoy most?

Any of these 10 areas, practiced and learned well, is a path towards having more free food. And if you can get together a community of family and friends, each specializing in one of these and sharing the surplus…

I hope you find this helpful! And if you like it, please come to one of our 2026 Permaculture workshops where we’ll be going deeper into the how of Permaculture approaches to food.