Arwen Hutchings wrote:Hi everyone, I’m a total newbie to permaculture though I’ve been trying to garden and produce food mindfully and in partnership with nature for many years. I’d love to have a rural homestead but for now I’m a wage slave in a suburban house, blessed with a large garden. I’m interested in ideas for adapting my approach in my existing garden set-up to incorporate permie principles - can that be done, or would I need to start again from scratch? How do I start? At the moment I’m a bit overwhelmed with information and find myself doing a lot of reading but not a lot of doing (I appreciate that might say more about me than anything else!)
Hi Arwen, I agree with the other posts about chucking in useful plants and creating a load of organic matter can't go far wrong with that, however the overwhelm of plenty of choices and plenty of reading can really benefit from observation and applying the design process.
First, observation: There are many gadgets and data sources to give us observed information, however, there is an incredibly sensitive, highly calibrated instrument available to us all. It has evolved over millennia to sense and feedback environmental conditions. Everyone has access to it, at all times, and with no financial cost or strange buttons to master. This tool is the body, our Bodyometer, and our most intimately inhabited landscape. Going into observation mode when you're pottering around and also having a regular sit spot where you every day just look and listen is a great practice, it educates you about the natural processes at work and guides your thinking later towards the tendency of the existing natural system.
Developing sensory or embodied awareness of place, mentors us back into alignment with our indigenous ancestry, making us less likely to impose top down ideas from our brains on to the
land / garden /
project. At the heart of
permaculture is finding the most appropriate location for our design ideas, creating efficiency and resilience by harnessing
energy inherent in the landscape. Our bodyometer, attuned to environment, is a valuable resource in placing elements, such as gardens, ponds and buildings in relation to landform, soil, water, and sun, thereby reducing energy inputs.
Second, design process: Complexity can lead to overwhelm, which tends towards skipping steps or blocking out pertinent issues to make life easier. The beauty of a design process is that it frees us from this pressure through a step by step approach, giving our brains space to assimilate dense information. A design process reduces complexity into manageable chunks and our super computer brains do unseen work, effortlessly, leading us to sound choices. We know we’ve done our best given the resources available and space is created for deepened insight. 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?
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