Design Elements

Composting
Composting is the transformation of organic waste materials into nutrient rich soil. By mixing your food scraps, fresh grass clippings, coffee grounds, and urine with dried leaves, hay, straw, sawdust, shredded paper, or dry grass clippings, you can easily turn your waste into nutrient rich, organic soil to be used in your garden. This can either be accomplished through conventional composting, or vermicomposting (using worms to recycle food scraps).

Plant Guilds & Companion Planting
Many plants have known beneficial or harmful interactions with other plants. These relationships can affect the flavor of neighboring plants, nitrogen levels in the soil (which each type of plant has preferences regarding), pest suppression (plants have the ability to deter pests that can be harmful to neighboring plants), insect hosting (plants can attract beneficial insects), provide protective shelter for neighboring plants, lure pests away from other plants, and due to the diversity inherent in companion planting, crops losses from pests and disease are reduced greatly as compared to monocultural crops (planting only one kind of plant in large scale). When these relationships are understood and incorporated into a garden design, it eliminates the need for pesticides, synthetic fertilizers, etc. It restores the natural balance and diversity of nature. Companion planting is one of the many integral aspects of intelligent design.

Food Forests
Forest gardening is a way of designing that mimics nature’s tendency to maximize space. This method utilizes the different structures of each plant by organizing them into layers both above and below ground. By understanding the purpose and diversity of plants’ root structures and heights, one can arrange them in a way that benefits the plants around them. For example, placing a plant with deep tap roots beside a plant with shallow roots can bring up nutrients from deep in the soil and make them accessible to the shallow roots of its neighbors. This plant dense design also shades the soil, minimizing moisture loss and putting all available sunlight to productive use. 

Rainwater catchment
In this dry climate of ours, rainwater harvesting is essential in any sustainable system. A suburban home could capture rainwater in several different ways: using rain barrels or storage tanks to capture the runoff from the roof, installing swales or rain gardens to give the water time to sink into the soil, building any number of ponds that can be attached to an irrigation system to deliver nutrient rich water for the garden, and other creative ways to help the water that falls on your land stay in your land.

Greywater
The ultimate example of resource management and water recycling. Using nutrient rich greywater to irrigate a garden is a no brainer, except when it comes to legal issues. Hopefully as awareness grows regarding the true value of water, local regulations will make it easier to have a legal greywater system without all of the expensive and unnecessary bells and whistles.