Permaculture is coming to Iroquois Falls.
Town council has approved the use of part of DeMaricourt Park – across from Ecole Sts-Martyrs — for the gardening project headed up by Darcy Cybolsky. He describes it as a permanent agriculture system in which plants take care of each other.
“You’re putting plants in cooperatives that work together so nitrogen-fixing plants pull nitrogen out of the atmosphere and you have larger things like trees or tap roots that’ll pull nutrients from deeper in the soil and then things like mycelium mushrooms that’ll break down minerals in the soil,” he explains. “And they trade this all through the root system for kind of like a mutually-beneficial plant guild, they’re called.”
Once edible plants are ready to pick, they’ll be made available to anyone in the community.
Helping Cybolsky with the project are volunteers from the local horticultural society and the Garden Town of the North committee.
“And we want to build a compost as part of it,” says Cybolsky, “because council agreed that we should have a community compost program but nothing went through this year. This is kind of a stopgap where we can have some kind of place for people to put their organic waste and not just put it in the landfill.”
Council approved the plan Monday night. As a councillor, once Cybolsky presented the plan, he had to leave the council chamber and not participate in the vote.
