NEW YORK—Claudia Joseph is a permaculture gardener and instructor. Together with volunteers, local school children, and her permaculture students, she designed and built the gardens around the Old Stone House in Brooklyn, a reconstructed 1699 Dutch farmhouse.
The Epoch Times: What is the difference between permaculture and regular organic farming?
Ms. Claudia Joseph: Permaculture works more with perennials. Farm agriculture is about annual crops. You plant one; you harvest, and plant again. The idea of permaculture is to always have the land covered.
What we have here is a unique model because I am doing this forest garden style. Everything I plant is useful, and it is mostly plants that come back year after year. And they work in guilds, so each plant helps the other. You can have more plants in a small area and get more yield when you work in a forest garden.
We worked with the Parks Department, to get native plants that relate to the history of the site. We are not trying to return it to what is was, because it was a swamp. This house was an oyster farm. The estuary came up until Fourth Avenue.
Epoch Times: Who consumes the produce from the garden?
Ms. Joseph: Right now the volunteers consume it. I’m thinking we will be so abundant we can give it to the food pantry pretty soon. They especially like to get herbs, because that is expensive.
Epoch Times: What is the relationship with the school, Middle School 51?
Ms. joseph: We have a very strong partnership with the school. One of the reasons that the school relationship started is because 600 children fled into the park during lunchtime. They literally were tearing the park apart, so I came out and supervised. They know me well by now. We garden the whole side of the school, too, with the children.
The kids absolutely love it. They are so happy to get out of the classroom on a nice spring day. They are overjoyed and the energy is huge. I am very happy to do that with them. Almost everything they plant grows.
Epoch Times: How did you get started with Old Stone House?
I am originally from Virginia. I think that is why I understood that a historic house deserves a landscape to match it.
I came here with my daughter when she was 2 years old. I would look at these neglected gardens, there was one garden that was planted but was neglected and full of weeds. I thought, ‘Isn’t that a shame, why isn’t anyone taking care of this?
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