Restoring Nature
"It is about making oneself a citizen-atom: an atom whose movement, free from that point on, must produce a molecular energy. From that point one is able to decompose into free atoms the mass of 'fanatics of the corporation'. The people, free and citizens, can only be the reunion of incandescent atoms. It is not masses but atoms that enter into fusion."
Jacques Ranciere
Bountiful Backyards is an edible landscaping collective with a radical vision for the future. It starts with the attainable ideal of transforming the relationship that people have with food and their communities. From kitchen gardens and composting to neighborhood scale orchards bursting with useful plants, the collective works with all demographics and strives to impart as much learning and knowledge to their growing client and resource database.
It is no longer appropriate to rely on governments, multinational corporations, or technology to change our collective future. Our efforts and actions need to be localized, committed, and ever-expanding both within ourselves and the communities we live in.
Bountiful Backyards works with nature, not against it. We catalyze multi-functional mini-ecosystems that benefit soil microbes, insects, and fungi. Only when they are healthy can we create thriving polycultures of edibles, fruit trees, and insectary plants that create the balanced living systems which are possible in any amount of space, shade, or drought.
By conserving and catching rainwater, growing soil, and merging back in to the food production loop, we implicitly oppose our reckless political order, environmental destruction, and nourish ourselves and communities.
Not only has the capitalist model irrevocably failed, it is a way of life that is declining, imploding, and collapsing all at once with the acceleration of Peak Oil. The stakes are too high for this to lead to resigned passivity. Anyone in decent physical shape can grow at least some of their own food. If managed correctly, a 25 sq. ft. vegetable bed can grow 75 pounds of vegetables per year. A group of 10 people can plant in an orchard in a weekend that can nourish their communities for decades. And instead of paying $8 for a quart of Argentine blueberries or $5 for dried herbs at Whole Paycheck, why not take the easy step of growing it yourself?
As an edible landscaping collective we work both within and against the dominant paradigm. Within because we work for money, against by looking for all possible alternatives outside of the medium of exchange. Low-cost workshops, educational outreach, recycling organic community wastes like manures and food wastes, and bartering our labor when possible with our clients.
Who We Are
Bountiful Backyards is a working collective of committed gardeners with backgrounds, degrees and certificates in biology, literature, permaculture, forestry, green building , music, environmental science, economics, journalism, and organic farming.
We came together in the attempt to find meaningful, living wage work that would allow us to help restore our local environment and empower the Durham community. Rejecting our culture's obsession with the lawn, we have designed productive and beautiful 'edible' landscapes that have become permanent fixtures in our neighborhoods and communities.
How We Do It
Bountiful Backyards takes a three pronged approach to intelligent ecological design.
1. Restoring the soil to a living, thriving state through the use of organic soil amendments, composting, cover crops, and mulching.
2. Utilizing native and beneficial plants to create a micro-climate in which a healthy soil food web is reestablished, from worms and hummingbirds to bees and people.
3. Planting perennials, self-seeding annuals, fruit bushes, vegetables, herbs, wildflowers, medicinals, and native plants in permanent beds that complement each other and do not need the harmful input of chemical fertilizers or pesticides.
We build the infrastructure for a self-maintaining edible landscape. Throughout Durham we have incorporated these design elements with our clients for landscapes that thrive as nature intended.
“Nothing happens in living nature that is not in relation to the whole.”
Goethe
