Polyculture integrates several species into a unified system
It has yet to take hold in the home garden though, so by applying these principles you will become one of the Pioneers of truly sustainable Eco-gardening. In its simplest sense, this is really just the opposite of Monoculture, so really any organic vegetable garden where more than one thing grows at a time could be called a Polyculture system. However, I prefer to take things a step or two further. The first step in getting your head around this concept is to start looking at what plants grow together in nature, or in traditional farming systems. An example of this is the old South American practice of growing Corn and Beans together. Beans fix atmospheric Nitrogen which helps to support the growth of the Corn, while the tall growing Corn serves as a windbreak, sheltering the beans.
Aquaponics
is perhaps the ultimate expression of this style of production, as my own system demonstrates: Fish produce waste nutrients that must be removed from the water. Water fern on the surface does some of this and its excess growth contributes to my compost supply. I get additional bio-filtering capacity by
growing Wasabi
in a trough next to the fish tank. Organic sediments are removed by Yabbies and freshwater Clams and the only two inputs supporting all this are air and fish food.The problem is that there is so little information and the possibilities for developing all sorts of systems are nearly endless. I will add information here as it comes to hand - both from general research and my own projects , but if you are interested in this topic, why not compare notes on my PhotoBlog.
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