Hello Annie!! Good to see you here, permies is a treasure trove of support and information, I hope you enjoy it...
I'd love to follow the principles more closely myself - some I follow already, but need a deeper understanding to bring my growing towards a higher level of self sustainability, whilst retaining and enhancing the 'feel' of our, until recently, untouched patch.
Hopefully I'll be one of the lucky winners of your book
Some thoughts...spending time on a walk or in a favourite sitting spot in your garden, musing on how the
permaculture principles are at work in natural systems, is a good way in to deeper understanding.. I found through running so many courses etc that this practice goes a long way and so I weaved these type of activites through the whole book (
Permaculture Design Companion www.beingsomewhere.net). If you don't win a copy, pop it on the christmas list, now half the price of when I self published it!
From another angle, it feels an impotant time to be effective in our projects, conserve our personal
energy, and step up our agency. Following a design process is a powerful tool to achieve these outcomes. We can see
permaculture offers us a creative route out of the challenges we face, a systematic map to go beyond survival and create 'thrival' on this earth. After doing a design course or reading a permaculture book, most people are inspired and duly set about doing their best to apply what they learnt in their own lives. Many people report confusion at this point, of how to go beyond the permaculture principles and the practical techniques they've picked up. This is where you need to find a design process, a framework to follow and to hold you steady.
Within the stages of a design process, we are observing, surveying, analysing, designing, implementing a plan and then evaluating over time. There are a number of design process frameworks in permaculture
books, or you can create your own. Within each stage you’ll employ design tools e.g. the survey stage may include quantifying physical data, interviewing people and research. Design tools can be applied in many diverse ways and in different sequences, because like nature, design is cyclical and its quality is more holographic than linear. However take care to apply a tool that suits the design process step you are working on. Like with any craft, select the right tool for the job. The key is to consider, what is the purpose and the effect of the thinking I am doing, and what does it reveal?
So we have our design process to keep us on track and various design tools along the way to glean appropriate information. The permaculture principles can be used at each stage of a design process, navigating our observations towards outcomes that model the processes of wild thriving ecosystems and cultures that live in balance with their resources and landscape. With these frameworks in place our work is coherent and steadily progressing, creating space to develop a deeper sense of ourselves as part of nature.
I hope that's helpful? I also firmly believe the bottom line is checking in with our body, our inner responses to our site and noticing our own reactions and combining this with respect and curiosity for what is the essence of the place we steward. Together, we navigate the complexity. for fun and old times sake, here is some photos of our place you saw transform between 2009 and 2017. Thank you for all that veg before we got our food gardens goping xx
Like Annie says, with a simple design, attention to biodiversity and useful quick growing resilient species, a bare or denuded place is quick to regenerate, filled with birds and insects and repaired soil within about 3 years.
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