Ever heard of Gall’s law?
Me neither, until recently, but Gall’s law is important to understand natural farming, evolution, and ecological succession, and many other things as well.
Gall’s law states:
“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.”
Or in short “Complexity evolves from simplicity”.
Many people get overwhelmed when they need to design a polyculture farming system.
And I agree that it is difficult…
With hundreds of thousands of plant and animals species to choose from, that all fit together in different ways it hard to know the right way.
My advice would be to start with something very simple like a monoculture and then let it gradually evolve into a complex polycultural system.
If you have a monoculture of cassava for example, you can easily swap out every other row for peanut. Then you have alternating rows of cassava and peanut.
You already doubled your biodiversity just by doing that.
Then add banana every 3rd or 5th row and now you got three different crops growing.
You can also stop weeding for a while and then see if there is any weed that works well and can be integrated into the system.
Then remove out all the other weeds, except the one you selected.
This way you can let nature help you decide what is best for you at that time.
Perhaps wild trees will start growing among the crops. Leave them be and let them keep growing.
As the trees grow older more shade will be cast and you find that you can incorporate different plants in the shade as compared to sunny locations.
Or you can use the trees as biomass to increase soil biodiversity and fertility.
Slowly biodiversity is increasing and the system becoming more complex.
Even by just planting a single tree. Birds will get attracted who will spread seeds of different plants.
So even if you do not understand anything about gardening or farming.
By just starting out simply with 1 or 2 plants, you will learn as you go, and with the helping hand of nature things will become more complex over time.
Start out simple and progress to complexity over time.
Let nature guide you and show you the way.
It is time to start sowing seeds!
