Hello amazing permie people!
I am a long time permie who started his life-long pursuit in permaculture at a Skillshare presentation in 2012 leading to the online Geoff Lawton PDC in 2013. I ran across so much knowledge, and so much excitement. I did feel more hopeful. I loved it so much when I came across Paul's podcasts. He's great to listen to. I've contributed to every Kickstarter that he's had. Then covid happened. I wanted to do some things that I've wanted to do for a long time; take Elaine Ingham course and take classes out of the Monroe Institute. I'm so glad I did both! Elaine is awesome. I went through the foundation series and went on to become a soil lab-tech. I also took Helen Athowe's master gardeners' course here on permies. Wow! Holy cow. A huge data dump. She is freaking awesome. I read her book after the course. In my mind, Helen and Elaine are at the top of my list because I jive well with them. Then we get to what I use to tie them together.
I read the
Building Your Permaculture Property book. This book and the lessons in it complete the circle of everything I've looked at. The first thing they recommend is to have an accountability partner (who can't be my wife lol). I really want someone in the interwebs to be like, "Oh! He's doing interesting things. I'd like to be an accountability partner with him and I have this project that I'm working on that I could use help with." If these posts grab someones attention, great! But I feel I'm not holding someone on to that. My plan is to use this thread as an accountability partner. Throw my ideas on here. The other purpose is to rekindle all the info I've gathered since starting the journey with the lessons with Helen and Elaine through the lense of the BYOPP book. I'll start with each chapter and its questions to see where I can go with it.
With that said, I have big ideas. Ideas that can't come to fruition until I get me ducks in a row. We want a garden now. We want to fight off the deer. We want to have fresh eggs. We have to deal with the here and now while I'm planning these ideas and how to do them.
Big ideas:
1. Put in a Helen style garden with mowable middles.
2. In the mowable middles, put in inoculated logs (variation of hugelkultur)
-inoculation with biocomplete compost tea
3. Mowable middles will have at least 5 strata layers of plants (including inoculated legumes to fixate nitrogen)
4. Add biocomplete compost and extract to the soil
5. Add an animal system for nitrogen addition
6. Add a coppice system for carbon addition
7. Work the whole plan into a cookbook recipe for any property to become carbon negative (through the lense of midwest hard wood forests which can lead to other ecosystem recipes)
8. Add on a tree soil log system using the same mowable middle system around it.
Here is the entry way to the garden area
Out into the open!
To the left! Solar panels! Make that power.
To the right!
Looking at the soil I'm working on.
Further south: the old garden used for potatoes, garlic, and strawberries