Permaculture Gardening Can Save Humanity =)

 The actual term permaculture is derived from two other phrases, permanent and agriculture. The idea of being a system set up that maintains itself and does not require annual inputs to the degree we would think of in a normal agricultural system. Permaculture is design science. It provides a framework to meet our needs by following natural patterns in decision making and planning.

 If you think of a forest and you go for a walk there, in the fall, it’s an oak forest. If you go for a walk in the woods, it’s a huge acorn mass. Acorns everywhere on the ground. You can barely walk without walking on just tons of them. And nobody maintains that. Nobody planted those acorns. It’s a natural system. And it works very, very well. It works perfectly. We can mimic those patterns that we see in nature to meet our needs. By using natural patterns, we are consciously designing and maintaining productive systems that have the versatility and the stability and the resilience of natural ecosystems. The oak forest is going to continue to grow and continue to produce tons of acorns every year without inputs.

If we use that type of patterns for growing things ourselves, then we can have that same resilience. We can mimic that. Then, if you think in a system, a piece of property, a homestead, or someone has some sort of vacation property. Or perhaps they are looking at it as a retreat property. And so, typically, people don’t eat acorns. So that example may not fit. But they might eat pecans or they might eat chestnuts.
If you look at how an acorn, an oak forest grows up, when an acorn shoots down a shoot into the ground, when it sprouts, the young acorn sprout is surrounded by other vegetation. Ground vegetation like poison ivy and different weeds. And as it gets taller it gets protected from the wind.
In mountain ranges, it gradually gets stronger and stronger and higher and higher to where it’s still being protected by things like redbud or dogwood or smaller maples. But eventually, it gets big enough where it’s able to get to the light in the upper canopy and it becomes a huge tree that’s producing its own acorns.

 We can mimic that by planting your apple tree or pecan tree, or whatever tree you are interested in as far as food production, and you plant things around it that will mimic what we see in nature.

You might plant around it something like black locust or autumn olive, which are both nitrogen fixers. They pull nitrogen from the air and accumulate it in their leaves. And when they shed their leaves, the ground around your tree becomes very fertile. And each year, you might go out and chop back those nurse plants and the tree that you are trying to grow, let’s say it’s an apple, it becomes very strong. It’s loving the nutrient-rich soil that you are producing for it with these other trees around it. And eventually gets big enough that, and if you continue to chop back the other trees, they die off. And the tree that you have planted is very successful because of that. It’s a natural pattern.
You might plant things around the base of it like comfrey, or strawberries or things that will continue to put nutrients into the soil and keep the grass from robbing the nutrients from the soil or moisture from rain.

Permaculture Design

1. Take into consideration the solar aspect, the way that the sun crosses a property.
2. The way that water moves through the property and the wind and things. Take into consideration all these inputs, then design systems in a way that are mimicking what we see in nature. That way it’s more successful.
3. There’s also an emphasis on perennials. Anyone likes a good tomato as well as anyone, but if you focus more on perennial crops and perennial plantings, you do less work and eventually, you don’t have to do anything but harvest if the system is sustainable.

 
Focus on the permanent and perpetual type of design, rather than an annual. Plant corn, and it’s going to turn the energy from the sun into food over a 4 month period. And then, it’s going to die. And then the next year you're going to have to plant it again and nurture it or whatever. Whereas if you plant something like a chestnut, which can produce the same type of carbohydrate and chestnut flour can make flatbreads and things like that, once it’s up and growing, you don’t have to do anything.
There’s a chestnut growing on Mount Etna in Italy. It’s actually growing on a volcano. Its 4000 years old. It’s been producing bushels of chestnuts for 4000 years. And you compare that with broccoli or something that you plant and grows, and of course when it dies off, you have to go to Lowes the next year and buy seeds and plant them all out again. We try to focus on more perennial production and more sustainable production that require less work and fewer inputs. The forest as an example is great. In the Pacific Northwest and Washington State in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains, there are lots of evergreen forests. Not so many oaks, but there are chestnuts that grow here filbert and hazelnut. Talking about the trees, there are so many orchards that people cultivated all around the US with blueberries and raspberries and all of that. They bear fruits every year with minimal work, just prune so that you get a larger crop from most of the fruit-bearing bushes and trees.

If you are doing annual planning, it's very popular with permaculture practitioners is sheet mulching. You can sheet mulch an area that perhaps needs to be rejuvenated with various kinds of mulch. It might be wood mulch and leaves and layers of cardboard and straw and things like that, to create new soil. And then plant down through that and allow the plant to come up through the mulch. We’re still following natural patterns. The trees mulch the ground themselves so we basically copy what the trees do in our gardens and food forests. If you use those natural systems and you have an annual garden, and you mulch it heavily every year, your soil will become more and more rich because of that mulch. And that’s a natural system.

 Evaluate the space for your space for permaculture design. One of the first things to do is find the highest point on the property, and see how water moves across the property. What to do is try to get water to stay on the property as long as possible. Because anything that you plant that you are going to produce for your needs is going to require water. And water hits the ground and it moves at right angles to slope. Which is just a fancy way of saying if you have a drop of water and it lands on a plate, and you tilt the plate, it’s going to move directly away from the slope. It’s going to move down. And water moves across your property that way.
What you want to do is take advantage of the way that water moves across the property. But the simple thing to do is for people to actually go out and spend some time walking around their property. And looking at how things grow. And looking how, in the natural setting, what does well there? From there on, look at the property and mimic what nature does by planting the right plants and trees in the right places.
You don't need much work for permaculture design, the nature of the forest will feed the plants for them to grow. They may need some compost and water from time to time. Turn what's left over to compost and use it again in your gardens and food forests. Plants and trees love compost that is made from other plants and leaves.