Using Permaculture Thinking to Keep our New Year Resolutions

"Traditional for this time of year is the New Year resolutions, a time when we set ourselves new goals and make plans for change in our personal lives. Almost as traditional is the breaking of these new resolutions. There is more to it then just having the desire, obviously. How can we use permaculture design to help us embed new patterns in our lives?"

Full article by Looby Macnamara here - Using Permaculture Thinking to Keep our New Year Resolutions

"The first thing is to survey our patterns – which ones are regenerative i.e. bring us benefits, and which ones are degenerative..."

My degenerative patterns of 2021:

buying preprepared foods

too much packaging coming into the house

junk sitting around everywhere

(many more, and will work on them...)

My Regenerative patterns of 2021:

composting

mowing only twice yearly

growing salad greens and berries

growing flowers for pollinators

teaching online

"We can use zoning as a way of helping us create or break patterns as described in the following activity....Now, think about what you would like to encourage in your life, reading, playing music or eating healthy snacks. Where can you place these so you can visit them more easily?"

Thinking ahead for 2022

moving keyboard to living room once we take Christmas tree down

placing bookcase or small shelf beside exercise bike

"decorating" dining room table with fresh fruit

boxes in every room for collecting stuff to donate

"With improved patterns we open up alternative ways of seeing and being in the world." Yes, that's exciting--and I will keep brainstorming!

"slow and steady wins the race"

Rachel Lindsay wrote:"The first thing is to survey our patterns – which ones are regenerative i.e. bring us benefits, and which ones are degenerative..."

My degenerative patterns of 2021:

buying preprepared foods

too much packaging coming into the house

junk sitting around everywhere

(many more, and will work on them...)

My Regenerative patterns of 2021:

composting

mowing only twice yearly

growing salad greens and berries

growing flowers for pollinators

teaching online

"We can use zoning as a way of helping us create or break patterns as described in the following activity....Now, think about what you would like to encourage in your life, reading, playing music or eating healthy snacks. Where can you place these so you can visit them more easily?"

Thinking ahead for 2022

moving keyboard to living room once we take Christmas tree down

placing bookcase or small shelf beside exercise bike

"decorating" dining room table with fresh fruit

boxes in every room for collecting stuff to donate

"With improved patterns we open up alternative ways of seeing and being in the world." Yes, that's exciting--and I will keep brainstorming!

Your "degenerative patterns" match mine too. My resolutions that I've been thinking of for the last few months are reducing my plastic waste by reducing the amount of packaging I bring into the house. I can reduce that by buying less packaged foods=grow more food at home year round and cooking/baking more from scratch.

I totally relate to this issue, too, too much prepackaged foods. Leads to less healthy eating and so much plastic waste. Yes, it goes in the recycling bin, but how much really gets recycled? Better not to bring it into the house at all. So my biggie for 2022 is to cook from scratch more.

I've never been a fan of resolutions because they seem too rigid by definition. Instead, I set goals. To me, goals seem more flexible and adjustable. With a resolution, I feel like I only have two options: succeed or fail. With goals, I have the flexibility to analyze and adjust them as I gain new knowledge and get into the nitty-gritty of it. There's no shame in changing or abandoning goals if I figure out they aren't working out as I hoped. Neither do they have to be accomplished within the same calendar year. As with so many permaculture projects, they are often ongoing.

That being said, here are our goals for the upcoming year:

planning and digging swales

establish a forest garden

finishing the exterior of our old house. We have only one small exterior wall left and to this, we want to attach a greenhouse. This goal will require a lot of planning and research, so I'm not sure how far we'll get on it this year, but we want to make a start.

replace our woodstove with a batch box masonry heater (a summer project)

Similar to Leigh's goals, I have always used New Years Resolutions to learn something new.

And picking only one makes this an easy way not to break the resolutions.

I didn't make any New Years Resolutions last year and have not really thought about if I want to do something for 2022.

My theme for the last several years has been to learn more about permaculture, learn about the plants that grow on our property, and learn about the wildlife.

Here is a thread from last year that everyone might enjoy:

https://permies.com/t/164819/Learning-Skills-Year

Hi all,

That link is now dead. Here's the new one at Looby's blog:
https://loobymacnamara.com/creating-new-patterns-for-the-new-year/

I'm just settling in to read all the posts on this topic. The first one is excellent!

Julie Johnston wrote:Hi all,

That link is now dead. Here's the new one at Looby's blog:
https://loobymacnamara.com/creating-new-patterns-for-the-new-year/

I'm just settling in to read all the posts on this topic. The first one is excellent!

Thanks for the updated link...that's one of the challenges of some of these older posts.

The concept of reflecting on and writing about the permaculture principles reminded me of Charlie Mgee of Formidable Vegetable Sound System - he wrote a song to remember the permaculture principles when he took a PDC.

The more I think about it, the less I like using the calendar year as a basis for resolutions or goal setting.  As a society, we have become somewhat disconnected from the patterns and timing of natural systems.  We have the day / night cycle and our bodies align to that with circadian rhythm, but then we artificially mess that up with daylight savings time.  We have an annual cycle with four seasons, which works out to be about 13 lunar cycles, but then we go and artificially divide that into twelve months with a varying number of days.

Rant aside, using permaculture inspired practices to design and develop our acreage is on a much longer cycle to see results.  Trees take years to grow and create the yield(s) they were planted for.  Improving our soil takes time, especially if it was particularly degraded before we started working on it.  There is no such thing as an average weather year, although we can use long term average weather information to inform our planning and implementation.  That's one of the reasons we plant a diversity of crops that prefer different conditions - if we have a tough weather year, we should still get a yield from the garden.

That said, I think there are probably a variety of ways we can use permaculture to inform our goal setting.  One consideration could be function stacking or a needs and yields analysis to consider what we want to take on.  Can learning something or developing a new skill help us improve life for ourselves or others, ideally in more than one way?  Perhaps learning something can lead us to divert waste from the typical wastestream while producing something valuable, for ourselves, for gifting, or for trade/barter/monies.

For example, I've recently been thinking about the woodpile we've accumulated at our acreage - as trees and large branches have died and been removed or fallen, the pile has been growing faster than we've been using it.  We don't have wood heat, just a firepit, which is more about pleasure than creating useful heat.  I've been thinking about getting a froe and some basic carving tools and turning some of that wood (mostly ash) into wooden spoons.  This would take a few logs from the pile, I'd learn a skill, I'd be doing something physical, I could earn a Badge Bit, and I could add to our kitchen utensil arsenal.  If She Who Must Be Obeyed feels snowed under, some could be gifted (building social capital) or it could turn into a means to pay for the investment in a few tools.  

That isn't necessarily a great example, but in the last few years, since I've engaged with the realm of permaculture, we've significantly expanded our gardening, others in the household have taken up working with sourdough, we've processed a lot more fruit and vegetables, and I've started fermenting.  With some of the woodpile, I intend to build a hugelkultur bed in the spring - the intention is to participate in GAMCOD 2025, which may turn into a few monies, add a new food-producing bed on the property, add some visual privacy (but no, it won't be massive like a Wheaton Labs hugel), act as something of a windbreak, and a bit of a dust barrier from the road.  

I guess the trick is to align the things we want to accomplish with permaculture principles.  Learning new things and acquiring new skills can certainly align.  Improving our health by making changes to our diet to be less processed, more organic, perhaps more local, etc. can certainly be in alignment.  Resolving to move more could involve using hand tools rather than power tools, which can reduce the external energy we rely on.  The more I think about it, the more I think this is certainly an achievable concept.  Now I just want to think through what we want to accomplish and break that down into what needs to be done and who we need to become to achieve what needs to be done.

I didn’t make any direct goal for 2024, since I started the year in the hospital with a septic infection. It didn’t change the fact that I have a 5 year plan. My only goal for 2024 was to get over the damage the infection had done, continue  to build up our food production and test out grain production.
According to my 5 year plan, I should double the calorie production (from 175k to 350k) of produce, nuts and seeds, and add raising meat birds to what we do. Then in 2025, I wanted to grow at least 1 metric ton of vegetables, fruits, berries, nuts, grains and seeds and increase our meat production. I also wanted to see if it will be possible to produce everything I need for bread making.
Now, here is the problem with 5 year plans. This year I accomplished nearly all of my 2025 goals. We grew over 22k pounds of produce, nuts, seeds and grains aka 1 metric ton. These gave us 560k calories. We raised 8 ducks and 10 meat chickens, plus 8 laying hens. Including meat, we produces 870k calories. I also started adding mushrooms to our homestead (my 2026 goal), not just for mushroom production but to improve soil quality and nutrition. Since we grow food all year round, garden beds quickly gets emptied of nutrients so it’s an ongoing job to produce high quality compost quickly. Adding mushroom grain sparns helps a lot breaking down uncomposted bits and increase nitrogen in the soil. The only thing I didn’t accomplish completely was the bread part.
This means that I have started revising my goals and plans. In 2025 I want to focus on getting better at composting. I need to double our production of compost to meet our needs. Since the grains sparn experiment has gone a lot better than I thought (the produce in those beds have doubles their grow rate), I want to add grains sparns to the rest of my raised beds. Since we grew two years worth of pumpkins and squash, I am going to focus more on grains in 2025. I am also going to try doing a bed with the three sisters. The reason being that I want to grow more of our animal feed. Feeds are getting more and more expensive, plus I want them to get a better nutritional diet.
I am also going to work toward my 2026 goals (a year early) of adding more perineal vegetables and fruits to the forest garden, and propagate mulberry cuttings, to get more mulberry trees. Right now I have 6 artichoke plants growing in my grow room, together with 2 coffee trees, 30 cassava plants/trees (for cassava flour) and about 200 basil plants, which I don’t know why I started those in November. No sane person starts 200 basil plants in November, but for some unknown reason I did. My neighbors are loving me now, since I am giving away free basil plants 😂. I also want to get better at starting peppers, onions and leeks from seeds. It’s a hole in my gardening knowledge I want to plug. I am also going to find a way to add pineapple plants to the forest garden, since it’s a request from my kids. Last I want to continue to add art and more plants to the forest garden, and finish the meditation deck. I also have to figure out what to do with the old orange tree we had in our garden. It died, and I want to use the space, I just don’t know for what.
Last I want to do more garden tours for people in our area, to encourage others to transition from lawns to either native plants and or food, and teach them about permaculture and how to grow in a way that gives back to earth instead of draining it. I want them to learn how to work with nature, animals, insects and reptiles instead of working against them. If I get the time and energy I also want to start giving free food preservation classes, something my neighbors has asked for. Especially fermentation, is something many want to learn.
Personally, I want to work on taking time for me. Listen to my heart and accept what I feel. Time to relax, and to accept that the world don’t need me to be an overachiever, and not to panic, if I don’t get things done on time. I want to work of slowing down, and take time for some of my hobbies like sowing and writing. Plus probably also to feel the combination of happiness and grieve of the first of our children leaving home. My youngest daughter got into southern Oregon university with a $14k scholarship, which is great but also a little sad, since it’s 16 hours away from us.
It’s a lot, and life is unpredictable, but the unpredictability is also what makes life interesting. Right now I am writing in bed, because Gawain (our now semi feral cat night guard), got into a fight with probably a possum and are spending his healing time indoors. He doesn’t feel safe enough to sleep unless one of us watches over him. He is very frustrated and bored, over not being able to work, so he naturally takes it out on us. We all understand and take turns taking care of him.
I hope you all have had a good year, and that next year will bless you with natures abundance. I have added a few pictures from this year.

------->     Ulla Bisgaard WOW !!!

Kw Velasco wrote:------->     Ulla Bisgaard WOW !!!

Thank you