Richard Gorny

If I had to pick just one, that would be stinging nettle. When snow melts a tiny seedlings are pure vitamin bomb, so much needed after winter. I simmer them for 10 minutes usually and drink "nettle tea". Later, when nettles are a bit bigger, they are staple in my breakfasts, chopped and fried with eggs. They grow a bit bigger, and they are steamed as spinach. In the same time they go into buckets to turn into compost tea for a garden. I plant them in forest garden, to use as "chop & drop" mulch. They are the only food for some butterflies' caterpilars. Later in the season they go to seed, and the seeds have high nutritional profile as well. You can use nettles to make a strong cord, dye fabric or cure arthritis with their stings too if you are brave enough :)

Haha, the very first thing I thought about was felling a tree, too. Normally I would do that alone but this particular tree was difficult, so I have hired an experienced person to do that.
What supposed to be a quick half an hour job turned out to be four hours struggle, with a few near miss situations. We have managed to finish it in the end, but despite of frosty day we had sweat in out boots lol

Nancy Reading wrote:I'm still harvesting my potatoes! Luckily the slugs haven't had them all :)

Yikes! Awesome :) Here the ground is totally frozen and digging sunchokes would be comparable effort to mining coal :D ;)

Don't be shy, show your bounty ;)

I collect my own seeds and when I sow them next season, I give them no more than 7 days to germinate. If they don't - this is natural selection.
After few years of doing so all my seeds germinate very fast, sometimes even in 48 hours.
I germinate seeds on a moist paper towel, in warmest place in my house (close to hot water pipes, that gives them 24-28 degrees Celsius).
I plant germinated seeds in potting mix when their root is clearly visible. After planting, I move them away from warmest place to a normal room temperature. I have 100% success with this approach.

There is no better advertisement for gardening—no clearer proof, no more persuasive argument—than a basket of food grown with your own hands.

A glossy brochure can inspire. A well-written article can inform. But a bowl of sun-warmed tomatoes, a handful of freshly dug potatoes, a crooked carrot pulled from living soil—these speak for themselves. They say: this works. They say: this is real. They say: you can do this too.

The phrase comes from the Gospel of Matthew in the King James Version: “Ye shall know them by their fruits.” It was meant as a moral teaching, but gardeners understand it in a very earthy way. The health of the soil shows in the harvest. The care we give returns to us in abundance. The fruits are the evidence.

If you are new to gardening or permaculture, don’t wait until everything looks perfect. Don’t wait for the biggest pumpkin or the most photogenic basket. Share what you have. A single zucchini. A first handful of beans. A slightly misshapen apple. These are victories.

When beginners post photos of their harvests, something powerful happens. Others see possibility. Doubt turns into curiosity. Curiosity turns into action. One garden inspires another.

So here is a gentle challenge: post a picture of your harvest. Tell us what you grew. Tell us what surprised you. Tell us what you would do differently next time.

There is no better invitation to this way of living than showing what the soil has given back to you.

Ye shall know them by their fruits. And we would love to see yours.

I like Geoff Lawton's approach and his shortest answer - it is ethical design science.

That focuses on the three most important qualities that put together distinguish permaculture from other realms.

After saying that you can expand on ethics and on design.

I believe that in order to understand what permaculture is in its classic meaning, it is good to memorize a few first pages of the Big Black Book. It clearly says:

Permaculture (permanent agriculture) is the conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems.

Permaculture design is a system of assembling conceptual, material, and strategic components in a pattern which functions to benefit life in all its forms.


So basically, it is all about ethics and design. It surely expands, on topics far from agriculture. It will expand even further in a future. But where it loses ethics or design, it is no longer permaculture, it is something else.

Bob Tretick wrote:

Dorothy Pohorelow wrote:

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:This could be challenging in one regard. I think that the metal lids used for glass canning jars have an inside coating that appears to be plastic. Thoughts?

But the rubberized seal never touches the food.  It forms a seal with the glass jar.

The plastic overlaps both sides of the glass lip so it does contact the contents.

A good practice is to never fill the jar to the top, to leave some (at least 1/2 inch) of free space.
A good practice is to wipe a rim of the glass before sealing it to make sure that it is dry.
If your food is on the glass rim during sealing process, that increases risk of spoilage.
Unless you put jars upside-down for a period of cooling down, or shake them, there is no way food touches inside coating of the lid.

Best winter since 2013.