A little bit about permaculture.

So by now you know I'm a software guy. But what makes me an ecosystem guy? Back in 2020 the pandemic closed down our physical office and made it possible to make my partner's and my long-time dream of living in the mountains a reality. Whether this particular place will be my forever home, or whether we eventually move to a different mountain, there's one thing that I will always practice, and that is permaculture.

“Permaculture is the conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems which have the diversity, stability and resilience of natural ecosystems."

— Bill Mollison

I don't know if you garden. I try. I am terrible at it. My tomatoes are ravaged by bugs. My peppers are ripped out of the ground whole by groundhogs. My corn is choked with jimsonweed.

Gardening requires reliable constant input, and as a software executive who travels, who sits in weeklong meetings, who gets sick from sitting in airports next to someone with a hacking cough, I simply can't do that. But I love growing things.

So I discovered permaculture. At first I struggled to understand how you did "agriculture" that way. My family were farmers for generations and that's part of what I was moving to the mountains for – to connect to my roots – but "farming" to me meant livestock or vegetables or both. It turns out that's not the only way.

I started with mushrooms. When I was growing up, my dad had a colleague that grew shiitakes, so I knew at least what to look for online. I got a ton of help from my local mushroom club as well, and attended a few talks by a local mushroom farmer. Then (like I do) I dove in. My friend Trevor and I got out on one cold day in March and felled three stringy tulip poplars that were being crowded out by stronger trees. We chopped them into four foot segments, and we waited.

There's a lot of waiting in mushrooms. Against the frenetic pace of helming a venture-funded, growth-oriented tech organization, the waiting is a welcome thing, let me tell you. The first thing you have to wait for is for the tree to die and for the weather to warm up a bit. You want to fell the tree while it's dormant, but you want to inoculate it with mushrooms when the weather is just starting to turn warm. I bought some oyster and wine-cap spawn from Field & Forest and a couple of tools and got to it.

I guess the other thing that is needed in abundance with growing mushrooms is trust. There's a process. You follow it. If you follow it, the majority of the time you'll get mushrooms. Eventually. But there's a long waiting period where you have no idea if you'll get anything. Months for oysters and wine-caps. A year or more for shiitakes. Longer for some of the harder to grow exotic varieties. They will fruit when they fruit, or they will fail silently.

The zen of mushroom farming is that you make peace with it. You spend a day or two inoculating. You stack the logs. You've put your work in the hands of the workers, the hyphae that will colonize the log and produce gourmet mushrooms. And you trust them to do their job for six months while you move on to the next thing.

That teaches you a lot. That productivity happens with or without status updates. That life happens at its own pace. It also teaches you how to use your sudden, unexpected flush of 10 pounds of gourmet mushrooms before they turn into a stinky brown mess.

Okay, but why is that permaculture? By itself, it's really not. You can destroy a lot of wood with mushrooms, but to be permaculture you have to give back. I started a wine-cap bed under the big cherry tree. They're huge brick-red mushrooms that quickly digest wood chips and turn them to mulch. They're not as amazingly tasty as the oysters, but they're still excellent. And what I was amazed by was how quickly the cherry tree responded to the change. The year we moved in it was buggy and the cherries were tiny and few. The year after the wine-cap bed fruited, most of the leaves were whole and the cherries were much larger.

These were fresh chips. Ordinary mulch wouldn't have done that. But the mix did. And so I started to read up on permaculture and how to get things to work together. Now I grow fruit tree guilds, with berries, and I've started hazelnuts, I grow more mushrooms, and I tap trees in the winter. I work with the ecosystem that's determined to be there with or without me, and I've found that working with it is so much more satisfying than the toil.

I'm still not great at it. I'm only five years in really. And I've probably screwed up as much as I've gotten right or perhaps considerably more. I can't do as much as someone who does it full time, but if I head to the office for a week-long planning session, the mushrooms abide. The berries grow and ripen. The hazelnuts and walnuts swell.

I do take these lessons from permaculture into software. I delve into a market segment and I see what people are doing. What the ecosystem looks like now. I assess how to create software that makes that ecosystem work better. I think closely about the connections between people and between systems. The parameters and functions that define the relationships. How do you strengthen them? How do you become essential to the niche? What are the survival and thriving qualities that software and products need to operate in that "biome?" And then I try to work with people to foster that.

I really do think that living this close in tune with the ecology of where I am makes me better at my job. Yes, because it is a relaxing and interesting outlet for all my non-software energy, but also just because really it's not so different.