Your Tropical Garden Could Be Eden—Or a Wasteland in 3 Years The tropics are the most potent growing environment on Earth—and the most fragile. Like a drag racing car, they deliver extraordinary performance, but only when handled with precision, intelligence, and respect for their delicate engineering. When you are in the tropics, surrounded by explosive green growth, and year-round warmth, the biggest mistake is to buy into the promise of endless harvests. "Everything grows here," the locals...
10 days ago • 6 min read
Mastering Arid Landscapes: Irrigation, Traps, and Your Complete Checklist- Desert Garden Part 4 We've dealt with the fundamentals in deserts—the Oasis Flywheel, planting techniques, vines, fences, soil, and mulch. After reading part 1, part 2, and part 3 you understand why desert gardens work and how to build them. But here's what separates gardens that just manage to keep going from those that create permanent sustainable gardens: knowing what to do and what not to do. Good design isn't just...
17 days ago • 7 min read
Desert Gardening Secrets: Vines, Fences, Soil & Mulch Explained- Desert Garden Part 3 Your desert garden isn't about fighting constraints—it's about mastering the specific techniques that turn scarcity into abundance. We have already covered in part 1 the root cause of desert gardening challenges, and how to reverse it. In part 2, we covered how to plant vegetables and perennials, and how to attain a foundation of diversified stable food that gives calories and vitamins. In this edition, we...
24 days ago • 8 min read
How to Plant Vegetables and Perennials in a Desert– Desert Garden (Part 2) In Part 1, we diagnosed the root cause of desert gardening challenges: evaporation without transpiration. We saw how establishing trees triggers a cascade that reverses salt accumulation, stabilizes pH, and transforms hostile soil into productive ground. Now comes the question every high-agency gardener asks: "How Am I supposed to actually build this?" Desert gardens demand bed-by-bed planning where companion plants,...
about 1 month ago • 8 min read
A year of becoming high-agency gardeners (+ what's next) As we head into the final week of 2025, we wanted to pause and say that this will be our last Thistle Thorn newsletter of the year. And we're feeling incredibly grateful for you. This community is full of the best kind of gardeners — the ones who see opportunities where others see obstacles, who turn "problems" into elegant solutions, and who are building regenerative systems instead of just buying inputs. Whether you've implemented a...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Desert Garden – The Oasis Opportunity Part 1 Deserts are deadly. That's the first thing most people think when they imagine gardening in arid regions. Evaporation exceeds rainfall. Annual precipitation averages below 80 cm—sometimes as low as 1 cm. Wind erosion strips topsoil. Salt accumulates. Animals browse and eat all the accumulated organic matter.. The list of obstacles is long enough to convince most people it's impossible. But here's what high-agency gardeners see instead: a design...
about 2 months ago • 6 min read
Stop Pushing Your Garden Forward—Make It Spin Instead Most gardeners see their backyard the same way a factory manager sees an assembly line. You push it forward with work. You add inputs at one end—fertilizer, water, amendments, pest control products, your time, your back, your weekends. You get outputs at the other end—tomatoes, lettuce, maybe some satisfaction mixed with exhaustion. Then the line stops. The season ends. Everything resets to zero. Next spring, you start pushing again. This...
about 2 months ago • 7 min read
Why We, as a Couple, Care About Permaculture (A Two Physicians' Perspective) We don’t believe we would care so much about Permaculture if we hadn’t studied medicine. Imagine being told that your existence is nothing more than a cosmic accident - that you, your loved ones, and everything you care about are simply random assemblies of atoms and molecules bouncing around in a meaningless void. This is the mechanistic worldview that dominates our culture, from university classrooms to hospital...
2 months ago • 7 min read
Miniature Worlds: The Adult Playground for Ecological Thinking Remember when you were a child, building entire worlds in sandbox corners or arranging elaborate action figure (or dollhouse) scenes? Your childlike creative spark never left you. It just went underground, waiting for the right moment to resurface. What if I told you that spark could build real worlds now? Not imaginary ones, but actual living ecosystems that sustain themselves, teach you profound ecological principles, and fit...
2 months ago • 6 min read