Jim Garlits

The requirements for successfully completing this badge bit:

* Plant at least 12 species of flowering plant. I planted a mix of 19, which I bought from Outsidepride, their Midwestern Wildflower Mix.


Baby's breath, Siberian wallflower, blue cornflower, lance-leaved coreopsis, purple coneflower, blue flax, perennial lupine, sweet William, rocket larkspur, blanketflower, Indian blanket, poppy, dwarf evening primrose, catchfly, clasping coneflower, plains coreopsis, prairie coneflower, black-eyed Susan, New England aster

* Two must bloom in spring, two in summer, and two in the fall. List at least two that bloom in each season:

Wallflower, lupine and sweet William bloom in spring. Cornflower, coreopsis, and Indian blanket in summer, and primrose, black-eyed Susan and New England asters bloom in the fall

* Plant and show a picture of at least 200 seeds


* Inc;ude a short video of around two minutes long showing the seeds being planted.

I also show them being raked and watered in for a better guarantee of germination. Here's the video:

Here I am in May of 2026 asking "are you still giving away packets of seeds?" because I completed BB20 back in 2024 and "I ain't get no seeds."

It's probably a done deal from days gone by. But I am picking up where I left off and walking wide-eyed into that bright PEP1 future...

Jim

A couple of years ago I bought and assembled a martin house. Concreted the main post in the ground, raised the birdhouse to its place in the sky. And I got house sparrows. I have lots of birdhouses for sparrows. So after two years, I took the martin house down and in its place strung lightweight aircraft cable from the four corners of the backyard, crossing in the middle on the top of the martin house pole.

For those of you who have built dragonfly perches before, what do you think? Is this mad genius? Was the aircraft cable (or the martin house for that matter) a waste of good money?

What should I expect this summer, dragonfly-wise?

Jim

I'm planning on continuing my journey to PEP1 and beyond. I also do a bit of YouTube posting. Since the road to PEP1 is littered with documentation requirements, I figured, "why not do it with some panache if I have to do it?" So I created a channel to document my continuing journey. Once I document my requirements, I'll put everything into a short, snappy video.

Since this is going to take some thought and planning, I may put other videos on the channel of interviews with people I learned from, videos I watched, books I read, and spirit animals I channeled to get the experience needed for the badge bit.

There are no videos posted yet, but that will quickly change.

Let me know what you think of this idea as a way to spread the permaculture bug to unsuspecting hosts.

https://youtube.com/@permaculturepexerience?si=_d2sazcW--5KEiE4

Jim

Just to make sure I cover all the bases, to show that I have completed this Badge Bit, I must:
- post a picture of the materials for the watering station
- post a picture of the watering station under construction
- post a picture of the completed bee/insect watering station with water

See pics below with descriptions.

Thanks!

Jim

Welcome, Joel.

So, you're sort of like the bumper stickers that say, "I wasn't born in Texas, but I got here as fast as I could!" Just replace Texas with Permies. We're glad you're here.

If you have a permaculture question, the forums here are so deep and stretch back so long, your head is going to bust from all of the knowledge your brain is feeding on. What I love about the site is that once you've exhausted those threads, you start a thread and ask a question and people here are pretty good at responding, "oh, yeah! here's how that works..."

Probably the neatest thing I've discovered here is the SKIP program (scroll down the forum buttons on the left (if you're on a computer) and check it out. It is possible to get credentialed in permaculture and homesteading. Get far enough along, and you might just find yourself talking to some elderly gentleman who is looking for someone to take over the work he devoted his life to instead of letting his kids sell it to a developer.

The nifty badges below my signature show how far I've come with earning badges.

Anyhow, see you around the site!

Jim

Welcome to Permies, Stephen. Aloha!

Jim

That's great, Joao.

I'm a tactile person, so I lean toward paper. But I've been around enough to know the power spreadsheets, WIKIs, etc. play in the business of keeping everything straight.

Your program reminded me of a joke I heard years ago about the chicken farmer who sent his son to college. He majored in business and when he came home to visit he told his dad he was going to organize his business so he could enter everything into a computer and print reports to keep everything straight, he'd know how much of which supplies to purchase, how productive the chickens were being, and ensure deliveries to customers were on time. "What are you going to call this thing?" Dad asked his son. "Egg Inventory and Orders Input and Output" the son said with a smile.

EIEIO for short...

Jim

Joao Winckler wrote:This is basically what got me started building a digital version of the same thing. I kept losing track of what I planted where, when things fruited, which varieties did well in which spots. A physical binder is great for the history and maps side of it, but for the ongoing tracking stuff (pruning dates, harvest notes, what failed and why) I found I needed something I could update on my phone while I was actually out there. Ended up building leaftide.com for exactly that. The combination of both might actually be the sweet spot though, binder for the big picture and reference material, app for the day to day notes you'd forget otherwise.

Outstanding. That's a consideration that wasn't even on my radar. I think binders like this could prove to have a lot of value.

Jim

Daniel Andy wrote:I have a similar project but for my biomes. If im going to build a native food forest I need to know all the native plants and what they're good for, both to other plants and to me.

So ill be listing native plants, whats edible, whats a source of weaving fiber, what fixes nitrogen, what supplies shade, what lives at the ground, what lives as a bush, what becomes a tree, what is good companion planting, what is fire tolerant, etc.

Then i do the same with native and current animals.

Then i draw out on your printed GIS maps where they live and what changes I need to make.

If I'm going to own a forest, I'd better know the forest.

This started with some recent things ive learned about fire and how in my area, the douglas fir forests i thought were natural are actually highly unnatural biomes built by our human need to suppress fires. As a result i need to know which trees should be there and how to thin the fir trees the way a fire would, or else I end up with a broken ecosystem that endangers me and the plants i rely on to live.

Here are the first few pages I included, after a brief history of the property.

Jim