Get a Yield & Redundancy

Peter Bane in his new book, The Permaculture Handbook, includes "redundancy" as an element of "getting a yield."  I found this to be particularly pertinent when I noticed some of my collard plants this past week completely infested with aphids.  One grouping of plants were pretty much all eaten up by them- or at least, about to be eaten up by them, seeing as the leaves looked fuzzy with their little powdery bodies piled upon one another.

So, to get a yield, I harvested the collard plants, and brought them right over to the chicken coop, where the protein packed plants were quickly picked apart by very happy chickens.  The chickens were so excited to have such a nice little protein snack, along side the dark leafy greens.  And I was happy to clear out a large population of aphids.

That being said, the redundancy factor came into play for "get a yield" by the fact that the collard grouping I had harvested was not the only one out there.  With two other groupings of collard plants, we still have a steady supply, and the aphid supply has been brought in check (at least for now!) much thanks to the chickens.  In this case, "get a yield" and "redundancy" were too principles that were quite intertwined.  {}