getting started with permaculture

If you could give only one piece of advice to someone looking to get started with permaculture, what would you tell them?

Okay, that's a tough one, since I love to give advice and it's hard to stop at just one piece.

I'd say, start at your doorstep. That means start small and close in, get successful in a small space where you can really focus your efforts, and then repeat those successes at larger scale and with variations. That would include (see, I can't stop) building up the soil with compost and mulch until it's so rich that plants explode out of it; stacking lots of plants into a small space, and putting the things you love, whether veggies, fruits, flowers, herbs, medicinal plants, or whatever, into that small space. That way you'll reward yourself for your efforts. Put your garden where you'll see it and where it's easy to take care of.

The next thing to do would be to find other people doing permaculture and learn from them. Permaculture is about relationships and connections, and that very much includes connections with other people. Permaculture is as much a point of view as it is a set of principles and techniques, and in a culture that focuses mostly on things instead of processes and relationships, it can sometimes be hard to wrap your mind around the interconnections that permaculture makes. Being with others who get it really helps.

That sounds like two pieces of advice , but thank you for the reply.

Toby Hemenway wrote:

"That would include (see, I can't stop) building up the soil with compost and mulch until it's so rich that plants explode out of it; stacking lots of plants into a small space, and putting the things you love, whether veggies, fruits, flowers, herbs, medicinal plants, or whatever, into that small space. "

So would that theory exclude the making of raised beds?  I am working at improving the soil here in suburban STL, but it's pretty miserable.  So where I've had the best luck is in making raised beds and enriching the heck out of them.

I'm awaiting the arrival of a recycled black (to help warm) plastic raised bed from gardeners.com, but feel it may arrive at this rate sometime in the summer, which is not so great for my little garden which is, at the moment, in containers.

Any suggestions specifically for the new self-sustaining gardener of a raised bed?

Best,

Stacey

Stacey: I'm a big fan of raised beds. They are a great way to keep track of a lot of plants in a small space; things have a tendency to get lost if I don't define the edges of my beds somehow (sometimes that's fine; they just go to seed and surprise me the next year, or I discover something great underneath another plant). And as you say, you can really focus on enriching the soil.

I'm wondering if, while you are waiting for the raised bed material to arrive, you could create a smaller bed in the spot you have selected for it, with just soil for the border, and then build the raised bed around it, and add more soil to fill it out to the edges. Maybe that's impractical, but it would be a way to use the space and get things growing.

I would suggest starting with just a few cultivars known for their growing ease in your climate. It is really easy to get caught up in wanting to grow fancy new speciman plants, or plant alot of varieties all with such different needs that you become overwhelmed trying to create the neccessary growing conditions for each one or frustrated because your yeilds are sparse.  Also a garden often looks small when the ground is freshly worked and there are just a few seedlings poking their heads up, but by the time a few months have passed it may appear more as a monstrous weed bed with a few vegies in it. Start small and work up to what you are comfortable with. Add a few items each season, pick one new "special" variety to try each year (if that interests you) so you don't end up wasting much of your garden space on possible complete failures. welcome and good luck!

This is a fun (and so difficult!) question to answer...

I think I would suggest looking at resources - what do you have in abundance, and think what could you do with it to be productive? Permaculture is not just about growing plants

Ben Falk said something like how he wished he’d learned to forage before he learned to garden, because it gives us such an essential perspective on ecology, the way the local ecosystem works, and the hardy wild plants who we can encourage and give thanks to. I remember it was a video and he was showing some students lamb’s quarters. I have much the same perspective. There is so much you can learn by foraging and if you understand the ecosystem then you can work in partnership and unity with it, instead of trying to work against the natural tendencies.

One notices that fertility is a good indicator of abundance—thus you realize, if you make a compost pile or pile together some rotting wood then lots of edible species will thrive around its edges. Or a midden. Or if you dig swales, like you see in the forest where an ancient tree fell in a windstorm, water will soak in better and bring more thriving life. And so on.

If I were to define permaculture for myself it would be nourishing the whole ecosystem. When the whole ecosystem is thriving then we are also thriving as natural human beings.

Jeanne Boyarsky wrote:If you could give only one piece of advice to someone looking to get started with permaculture, what would you tell them?

I admit, the first thing I think of in the face of this question is growing food. And so my knee-jerk answer is plant a fruit tree today. You may still have to wait 2-10 years for your yield to start kicking in, but that's better than waiting 2-10 years from next year or five years from now.

But if I want to broaden my thinking, I guess I'd suggest you find a waste channel and figure out a way to make it a resource. Maybe that's collecting rainwater from your roof, or composting your waste, or sheet-mulching all those Amazon boxes, or filling the space between timbers in a wall with all your wine bottles -- there are a million variations, but turning waste into gold is as good as growing your own food.

Observation!  Before building garden beds observe what happens when it rains.

My garden beds are only a few feet from where our land floods when it rains.  We were lucky not to have placed them there.

While that sounds like a good place for a garden some plants don't like wet feet.