How Joe Hollis, founder of Mountain Gardens, Is Providing an Oasis of Regenerative Agriculture Education in Western North Carolina.
Deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina, Mountain Gardens provides people of all levels in agricultural education the opportunity to pursue the centuries old tenants of permaculture, horticulture, herbology and regenerative agriculture. From yert building, to mountain side green house building, to growing food crops, Chinese herbs, medicinal herbs, and perennial growing. More specifically, the perennial growing project in mountain gardens revolves specifically around the aim to promote soil restoration in order to create more biodiversity and prevent tilling methods. Perennial plantings also serve as viable means for carbon sequestration meaning that carbon can be stored in the soil thus strengthening soil quality whereas when carbon is released upon the tilling of annual plantings. Furthermore, the use of cover crop in tandem with perennial plantings provides an important model for agriculturalists to follow in pursuit of regenerative agriculture. Implementing cover crop into practice can help prevent the degradation of soil fertility while also helping promote the growth. Embracing the importance of healthy soil combined with reorienting our practices as agriculturalists will help us curb the release of carbon into our atmosphere and in the process, we can aim to empower more people into taking control of the means through which they consume the food grown and produced around them. When people go to mountain gardens it is typically in an aim to learn more about the dynamic processes that make up Eastern herbology, and the practices of permaculture operations. There is no better environment to learn this I want, we all want, to step out the door into an environment which lifts us out of our petty concerns and reminds us that we are a part of the huge, beautiful world. The garden (meaning, basically, your entire property) should be the place you’d rather be than anywhere else. And this is entirely possible. It’s what our hunter/gatherer ancestors had; they lived in awe of, and thanksgiving for, their environment; they ‘walked in beauty’. Can we get it back?
