Salutations fellow permies! Here is my guide for getting help on
permaculture projects at permies.com.
1. Please specify how much you know about
permaculture. This will help us guide you to appropriate sources of information for your training and development. You, the person asking for help, are making the site. We may or may not be able to guide you through the entire process, and you will be the one living on the site not us. Therefore, it is in your own best interest to become as educated and informed as you possibly can about
permaculture and the design process. Here are some resources to get you started. Feel free to purple mooseage me if you need help finding some more resources; I want you all to be the smartest people around!!!
Paul Wheaton Permaculture Keynote (fantastic introduction to permaculture!)
Video & Audio:
Open Permaculture (wonderful entire free permacuture design course online; only have to pay to get certified)
Bill Mollison Lecture Series
The Global Gardener Series
Permaculture Design Course with Will Hooker
Jack Spirko's Permaculture Series and his great
Survival Podcast, too
Online & Offline Print Mediums:
Permaculture News
Tree Yo Permaculture (has a free
Walk Through of Permaculture: A Designer's Manual) (you can also talk with the website owner at permies:
Douglas Crouch)
Plant Guilds ebook by Midwest Permaculture
Open Library
Internet Archive
Practical Action
2. Please specify the amount of help you are looking for from us. We cannot effectively help you unless you specify in which ways help is needed. We are not mind-readers.
3. Please please, I am begging you to fill out
one or
two permaculture design client questionnaires. These are soooo sooo very useful!!! They are great for organizing your thoughts and finding out what information you need to collect and what information you already know. It also helps you and us figure out what you have available and what you will need to accomplish your goals for your site. Also, please upload the completed file for us to view.
4. Outline your goals! Be clear!
5. If you do need specific information about your site's weather, please visit these wonderful websites:
Weather Underground (wonderful daily and weekly information)
Weather Spark (amazing place to get graphs and annual/monthly data)
RSS Weather (great place to get climate graphs with temperature and rainfall)
6. Technical Data is a must for making a good design. Take the time to collect and process it, and you will more pleased with the progress you make. Here are more good resources to use:
Web Soil Survey
PDF Quads by Nat Geo
National Map Viewer You can also talk to your
local government
land offices to ask about elevation maps
If all else fails, you can create your own map by using a
bunyip or A-frame
Google Earth
Plants For a Future Database and
Wikipedia are great for finding plants that grow in your area and learning about their needs and usefulness. Also, never forget to get in touch with your local botanical gardens, forestry departments, etc.
Sun Position Calculator can give you the motions of the sun throughout the year in your area along with the azmith and
solar declinations. If you do not understand the data being given, they have tutorials that you can access by clinking the links on the left-hand sidebar of their website.
If you want to do it yourself through observation, a
clinometer is a great tool for finding the
solar declinations at your site.
If you are into doing your own experiments, you can conduct
do-it-yourself soil tests instead of going to a university or land office to find out more.
7. Choose a design style or permaculture leader(s) you are going to model your design thinking after. Here are some good people to to study:
The mighty, the glorious
Sepp Holzer
Bill Mollison
Masanobu
Fukuoka
Ruth Stout
Geoff Lawton and
his wonderful videos
Paul Wheaton (check out his
YouTube Channel,
Podcasts, and
Articles all for free!)
Ben Falk (check out his
website and
YouTube Channel)
Afforestt Technique (making forests super fast through dense plantings)
Garden Pools (very chill people!)
8. Setup an organized system for getting everything done. Google Drive is a great one. You can load all your files and collaborate with as many people as you want on it.
9. Begin the design process and post updates. Be clear about where you need help and where you are stuck. Also, local permie-ish people can be located through the
Permaculture Global and
Transition Networks. Also the
Ecovillage Community people are quite knowledgeable, too.
10. I have attached my first permaculture design to this post so you have an example of how to write design. My instructor told me he was impressed, so I guess it is a good design. At the end of the design, I mentioned Masanobu Fukuoka as my design leader which explains why I did not go into detail into wher all the plants
should be.I want the plants to figure it out for themselves, but I also gave general guidelines on how to coordinate plants with each other, too.