Zero weeds in this entire field and people are paying admission to walk it

Zero weeds in this entire field and people are paying admission to walk through it. We visited a tulip farm in New Jersey last weekend and as beautiful as it was something felt off the second we stepped onto the property. Then it clicked. Nothing was growing between the rows. Not a dandelion not a clover not a single blade of anything that wasn’t a tulip. That kind of sterility doesn’t happen by accident. It takes pre-emergent herbicide and synthetic fertilizer and fungicide and a whole spray program designed to kill everything except the one species you’re charging admission to see.

The bulbs come from Holland. Most of them get thrown out at the end of the season because they don’t reliably come back when you grow them this way. The soil between the rows was cracked and compacted with nothing alive in it. No mulch no cover crop no worms no fungi. Just dirt holding up a postcard.

This is what permaculture isn’t. We grow cut flowers at Run-a-Muck too. Cornflowers and zinnias and cosmos and sunflowers going in this season. But they get planted next to vegetables and fiber hemp and the young fruit and nut trees we’re establishing for the food forest. The whole point is that everything supports everything else.

Pollinators show up because there’s something for them to pollinate beyond a single bloom window. The soil stays alive because we feed it with KNF ferments made from our own waste streams instead of stripping it bare and pouring synthetics on top.

A field that looks like a postcard usually had to be killed to look that way. Beauty without life is just a showroom. Real abundance is messier and louder and full of things you didn’t plant on purpose and that’s exactly what makes it work.

#Permaculture #conventionalfarming #runamuckfarms #regenerativeagriculture