What is Permaculture ?

Permaculture was coined by Bill Mollison  in 1959. It is a combination of the words Permanent and Agriculture. It is a mixture of principles and practices of ecological design of properties, not just gardens. It was created in Australia, but is now world wide. The same principles were used by North and South American Natives, Aborigines and even some Northern European countries.

Several good books about permaculture are: One Straw Revolution, Introduction to Permaculture, Sepp Holzer's Permaculture and Gaia's Garden. Much of my knowledge of Permaculture was gotten from these books.

David Holmgren wrote several early books on Permaculture, Permaculture: A Designer's Manual, is a good one for you to read.

The plan observes nature and tries to maintain any property is principles that are as close to nature as possible. The 14 permaculture principles are: Observe, Connect, Catch and Store Energy, Multiple Functons, Multiple Elements, Least change for greatest effect, small scale intensive systems, Optimize Edges, Succession, Use biological and renewable resources, Turn problems into solutions, Get a Yield, Limit to abundance is creativity and Mistakes are tools for learning.

Youi observe your property site in all seasons before making any changes, that way you are familiar with what you already have. Try to find the most number of connections possible and connect systems with systems. Catch and store all the energy and materials that come onto your property is the best ways possible. This includes things like water, sunshine, wind, windblown leaves, down wood, etc. Have each element perform as many multiple functions as possible and stack elements in space and time. A small example is how many functions would a grape vine on a trellis have? Food, shade, bird habitat, etc. Multiple elements or redundancy. If you have a cornfield and corn fails you are out, but if you have apples and cherries and pears in a strip of land beside the cornfield, you have redundancy, and something to eat and sell when there is one crop failure.

Make the least change for greatest effect, intervene where you can do the best good with the least change. Use Small Scale and Intensive systems, Intensive gardening is one of those intensive syssems, but all systems can be optimized and proper arrangements and zones are used to make best use of systems. Like have the chicken coop near the compost pile, next to the garden, etc.

Optimize edges. Edges can be any edge, the bottom of a hill, above it is the edge of the drainfield in the back yard at our house. The edge of a pond, the edge of a field, the edge of the woods, the edge of the beds, the edge of your yard, the ditch along the edge of the road. Edges are great places for growin food forests, and other types of gardening. The wind will blow things like soil and leaves and seeds that will catch in edges of woods or along fences, etc. Any edge is the intersection of two diverse elements. Around your house is an edge between the house and the property. Energy and materials accumulate on edges, and sun is reflected off of buildings and trees to make microclimates around houses, fences, ditches, etc.

Collaberate with succession. I discussed this a little in the food forest post. Succession is what happens when a field or lawn isn't mowed. First some non grass plants will blow in, birds will poop out tree seeds and bush seeds and little seedlings will begin to grow. And this will all eventually build up into old fields and then young forests (we'll talk more on those later). You can work ahead of succession, by planting somewhat mature baby trees, bushes and perennials as described in the food forest post.You can BEAT THE WEEDS. Use biological and renewable resources. Yes you could put down plastic mulch, but organic mulch will allow rain through, feed your plants and worms .
Use biological and renewable resources, this one is pretty self explainitary. Try not to bring things onto your property that will have to be hauled to the landfill. Use organic mulches and practices when you can.
Turn problems into solutions, such as the fence above that I put in 20 plus years ago when the trees were babies to protect from the critters. Now that the trees have grown it is being removed and used in another area

Get a Yield. You plant fruits, vegetables and nuts to get a yield. There is no reason to plant these items if you don't intend to use them.
I find that a canner and or a freezer are essential when you have a large garden so that you can put your garden produce up for later use. Or you may be planning on giving it away or sellling it. Still you want to optimise your yield.

Be creative. You may need to use some nature foolers in some areas to get that yield. Above are April photographs 2018 of my tiny little greenhouse. You can also use hot caps, cold frames, row cover, etc to help your plants along in the really cold areas. In the desert you may need shade and irrigation ditches to be able to grow anything at all.

Mistakes are a tool for learning. All people make mistakes at some time or other. Use them to learn. Better to do some reading and studying before doing, and planning ahead but we all have some plant failure or really big stupid mistakes. Use them as an opportunity to learn.These are the design principles of Permaculture, but it is much more than this. You may be able to find more information by googling Permaculture, food forest gardening, edible forests, etc.