an article about permaculture (landscape) design approach

interesting, and I'm sure a lot of permaculture designs fail simply cause the property owner really doesn't plan to do anything

Yeah I thought that was a great point too. I guess if you "get" or understand permaculture then you'd know that its a life style thing. Not just a rearranged landscape design that you can show off. You the human are a part of the system. Our society is big on supporting things, bringing awarness to things, funding things, but not actually building or doing things. It's cool that there is potentially permaculture businesses that might turn down clients that don't understand that commitment is part of it. However, I guess it's better to design for people and have them pay you to maintain it than simply not spreading the ideal. Also thought, 85% of small business fails within first six months, usually because of poor planning, heart not really in it. I'd suspect that permaculture designs that are paid for, not started more organically like progressing from container patio garden to an permaculture acreage over years of effort i.e. top down fertilizing vs letting the plants root system figure it out, will have a similiar failure rate, above 80%.

So I guess one would offer a maintenance plan that included some lifestyle changes. Maybe explain that permaculture is all inclusive, meaning that you the human must participate aswell or it's not permaculture.

I had two thoughts. One is that the presentation says little to nothing about the actual biology of a food forest. The interactions between species, the ecology. A nice looking CAD design could, potentially, fail miserably if the wrong species were chosen or not placed in the right relationships. An ecologist needs to be brought into this too. Second thought, if the design is quite good, ecologically speaking, after installation the maintenance should be less and less as time passes. The forest itself is supposed to take over that role. How well this is achieved is dependent on how skillfully the designer "sets up" the ecology. Dave Jacke explains this in Edible Forest Gardens, where he states that if it's done well, the gardener will eventually only need to do a little tweeking here and there to help guide the evolution of the garden. So, the quality of a food forest design won't really be known until years after installation, but it is true that some potentially critical maintenance may be need in the early stages.