An attempt to explain permaculture to a mainstream audience...

I've been slowly introducing my mainstream blog audience to permaculture over the past few years but haven't really set out to define it until now:

https://www.catintheflock.com/2021/03/what-is-permaculture-.html



I decided to concentrate on three main topic areas:

1) Soil
2) Native Plants (this is my particular bias, toward 'native plant permaculture'
3) Canopy Layers and Polyculture Guilds



For me, these seem like the top entry points for anyone just getting into permaculture for the first time. Also, I (and I suspect, many of my readers) have a few limiting factors: I'm literally pushing 50, I garden on 1/4-acre in suburbia, I can only devote eves and weekends to this stuff.

So, how did I do? Where would you go next? I'm thinking about energy efficiency in the home, especially since something simple that everyone did back in the 70s like just wrapping your water pipes can make a huge difference, yet no one's doing it anymore.

The broad definition of permaculture is:
--designing for permanence, with ethics.

The ethics part is simple: care for the body, care for other people, care for the Nature. In other words, whatever you achieve must not happen at the cost of damaging one of the other things.

The design part is tricky. At first, you'd think that this involves designing farms and gardens, since the word seems to come from permanent agriculture. But it could as well be permanent culture. This is, a way to do things that can be sustained forever.
For example, you could design a cloth factory with permaculture principles. The point is that everything in the factory should be sustainable, and work with Nature. Maybe it's not evident, but the way people relate to each other can be forced by the system or natural, the natural way being less taxing but if we leave Nature to its own the result might be too wild. So when you design a labor place, you consider what each worker wants to do on his own and try to use it to the factory's benefit, not just everyone doing what they want.
If you look at the earthworms in a compost bin, you could think of them as your workers: they are building rich compost for you! Before designing your compost bin, you study the earthworms behaviour; you learn what the like to eat, how they move, how they reproduce, how they like the medium; then you apply your knowledge to a compost bin design that let the worms do most of the work because they want to, for their own benefit, but at the same time they are giving you a produce (which is a waste for them), with the minimum effort on your part. You can apply this same technique with anything: factory workers, children, neighbours, you name it.

Permaculture is not about building an earthworm bin, it's about designing it. A permaculturist is someone who makes such designs. However, to make sure that the design works, the permaculturist has to use the hands and test the design, see what works and what doesn't and make changes in the design as needed.
Well, then, I could be a gardener that simply uses a permaculture design someone else did for my garden.

However, these designs are so local, that you can't just copy what's working for other people. You can't watch a YouTube video on a permaculture farm in California and copy the method to your farm/garden and expect the same results. Whilst there are some general principles that apply to every farm or garden, most of them are local solutions for local problems. If you are managing it, eventually you'll have to learn how to modify your design, apply the changes and get feedback, even if the permaculture system has been designed for you by other people. I'm talking systems here, not just farms or gardens.

It's very misleading to search for permaculture on YouTube and just be offered farms and gardens videos. These are things that can be done with permaculture, but permaculture is much more than this.

Lisa, this is a great topic and I like that you are concentrating on soil and native plants first.  

So many folks would concentrate on the polyculture guilds first.  

I am not sure about the canopy layers.  I feel it is great that you want to offer an explanation. Does this focus on forest gardens or food forests? Or does this apply to polycultures?

 

What you wrote in your blog is fine for a first approach. I know the difficulty of talking to a broad audience, especially to those that are not sold on the ecological side.

One thing I think you could use is the holistic approach. In permaculture you don't think of your garden as separate parts: everything is linked to something. If you grow a grape vine, that vine requires water, nutrients, a specific climate, something to hang over, but it also gives shades, humidity, it creates a microclimate allowing other species to grow nearby. and offers protection to animals which, in sufficient variety, will help with pest control. Follow some of its links. Water will take you to ponds or other water retention structures, and the plants and animals that will support that pond; ground covers that will help the rainwater to infiltrate; earthworks that will slow down runoff water. Nutrients will take you to companion species, beans for nitrogen, dinamic accumulators for minerals; composting is good for increasing microorganisms in the soil, which will help plants to acquaire nutrients (and a safe way to get rid of your kitchen waste). Microclimates will take you to where to plant trees, how to use walls, enclosures, stones for heat storage, irrigation, ... The thing the vine hangs over could be a wall, could be a small tree, a pergola; such elements in return might be used for something else. The shade the vine casts can be useful to grow lettuces, if given a proper slope. We're using here the reductionistic approach.

It is just a single element in your system, and you see how many links it has with the other elements. Now, if you want to think holistically, try to see the whole picture. Instead of thinking of the vine and its relationships, see the whole garden at once. Does it look healthy or anemic? Do you sense harmony or imbalance? How does it smell as you walk through it? Can you feel any emotion from the garden? Are there signs of stress somewhere? Find the source of whatever goes wrong. Is it an effect of a recent change you made? Changes take time to be fully integrated in your system, typically seven years. This is why permaculture reccomends small and slow changes, so you are able to see how these changes propagate in your system, learn how it works, how the other elements adapt, so you develop an intuition. If you make too many changes and too fast, you may end up with secondary effects you dislike, and you won't be able to figure how to solve it.


Another thing to consider is resilience. It might not be evident at first, but if you think about it, you'll notice several threats for your garden sustainability. Do you depend on external inputs? Fertlizer, seeds or seedlings, water, chemicals, tools, plastics, how confident are you that they will be still available in the near future? In a few decades? The next generation? If you want something that is permanent, it should be able to stand at least seven generations. Look again at your inputs. Heirloom seeds are hard to find now, since most of what you can purchase in stores are hybrid or GMO ones. Fertilizers and plastics depend on oil, which is a fossil fuel. Maybe the water you are using is fossil water, this is, coming from an acquifer that takes centuries to be filled. High tech tools comes from a highly complex society, which may not pass the test of time, it's ok to use some of these technologies as long as you don't depend on them. Also, an uncomfortable question, does your garden depend on you? If you had to flee from your home, had you return a few years later, what would you find?


If you've read Sepp Holzer's Permaculture, the main theme of this book is 'Working with Nature, instead of against it'. This is another big topic of permaculture. If you want something to be permanent, let us do it the natural way, which is proven to be permanent. For example, if Nature is constantly growing herbs in your ground, instead of cutting them forever, try growing herbs you might like. If your soil is too compacted, maybe you can use earthworms to build galleries for you, just give them some food to come to the place. Water flows naturally from above to below, so retention water structures are best located in higher altitudes. If your garden is fine but a plant isn't thriving where you planted it, let it die (or cut it) and try another species. If you give enough flowers, bees will settle and help you pollinize, providing a honeycomb box will allow you to collect some honey as a plus. If you leave your land completely to nature's will, only local wild plants would grow, so if you want it to grow something different, you have to create microclimates and introduce species adapted to those microclimates. How to create microclimates is another topic which gives stuff for a book.

Abraham Palma wrote:
However, these designs are so local, that you can't just copy what's working for other people. You can't watch a YouTube video on a permaculture farm in California and copy the method to your farm/garden and expect the same results. Whilst there are some general principles that apply to every farm or garden, most of them are local solutions for local problems. If you are managing it, eventually you'll have to learn how to modify your design, apply the changes and get feedback, even if the permaculture system has been designed for you by other people. I'm talking systems here, not just farms or gardens.

It's very misleading to search for permaculture on YouTube and just be offered farms and gardens videos. These are things that can be done with permaculture, but permaculture is much more than this.

I totally agree, Abraham. I find this to be both the challenge and the gift of permaculture. It's interesting because once you are seen as someone who knows about gardening, people will seek you out for advice. I often meet their questions with more questions: What do you want to grow that you will use? Why are straight lines important to you? Do you want to encourage more birds to visit your garden?

Anne Miller wrote:Lisa, this is a great topic and I like that you are concentrating on soil and native plants first.  

So many folks would concentrate on the polyculture guilds first.  

I am not sure about the canopy layers.  I feel it is great that you want to offer an explanation. Does this focus on forest gardens or food forests? Or does this apply to polycultures?

 

Thanks, Anne! Yes, native plants not only are easy to grow but are best for encouraging beneficial pollinators and other insects. And to me, soil is everything: it's the full cycle of life in one go, from birth to life and excretions to death and decay.

The canopy layers seem to me to be the first step toward the other things you mention - polycultures, forest gardens, food forests. Our garden just received platinum certification as a conservation habitat, and one of the criteria was to have plants in all canopy layers. Most suburban gardens are lucky to have upper canopy trees, and only if they inherited them from previous generations, and then most people only think about what's around waist-level. Ground cover is usually relegated to grass you have to mow. I think a healthy system is a layered one.

Lisa said "Our garden just received platinum certification as a conservation habitat, and one of the criteria was to have plants in all canopy layers.

Congratulations on a great honor!

Abraham Palma wrote:
One thing I think you could use is the holistic approach.

Abraham Palma wrote:
Another thing to consider is resilience.

Those are both wonderful philosophies within permaculture, and many of the books out there speak to them. But if permaculture is to move from fringe to mainstream, it has to take the average suburban gardener into consideration: A person who might have a postage-stamp-sized property of green lawn and not much time and attention for earthworks, water systems, and the like. I prefer not to make the perfect the enemy of the good.

Abraham Palma wrote:
If you've read Sepp Holzer's Permaculture, the main theme of this book is 'Working with Nature, instead of against it'.

Yes, absolutely! That's why Holzer's book is the best one I've ever read on permaculture, and I suspect it's also why it's so popular here on Permies. His arguments just make so much logical sense. I'm always looking at how to do things with the grain of nature instead of against it. The lazy gardener is the wise gardener, no? Rather than fight native violets in your yard, suppress the grass and let the violets take over. They provide fritillary butterfly habitat, and the flowers and leaves can be used for medicine, tea, and food.

Anne Miller wrote:

Lisa said "Our garden just received platinum certification as a conservation habitat, and one of the criteria was to have plants in all canopy layers.

Congratulations on a great honor!

Thank you! It was a lot of work, but well worth it.