Permaculture is a nature-based design system that regenerates the land and its ecosystem while also providing for human, wildlife and community needs. Through the use of Permaculture’s intelligent design principles, healthy relationships are fostered between plants, climate, land, wildlife and humans, and each relationship in the system nurtures and sustains each other and the whole.
Practical ways of using these principles within your property are countless. Some examples are:
• Observing rainfall, drainage and erosion patterns and building earthen structures (swales, berms, one rock dams, etc.) that channel water towards planted areas, ponds or storage containers, preventing erosion and utilizing a valuable resource purposefully.
• Creating fruit and nut tree “guilds”, with perennial flowers and edible berries. A guild is a designed, natural ‘community’ that multiplies the production of a location by integrating diverse components. In this example a guild could have: an apple tree with comfrey, borage, daffodils, tulips, strawberries and rhubarb planted below it. Other plants that provide built-in organic mulch, or are nitrogen fixers and insect attractors, could also be included. The edibles provide human nourishment, the insect attractors bring pollinators to help produce fruit, the tree provides shade and protection for the plants below, etc. Each component fills a niche in the system and sustains the guild as a whole. What looks like a well-tended fruit tree orchard or landscaped yard, is actually an intelligently designed self-sustainable food forest garden.
• A small flock of chickens can multi-task a variety of useful functions: produce eggs, turn the soil, fertilize it, provide pest control and act as composters as they eat food scrap waste.
Depending on a property’s needs and the owner’s desires, permaculture has a limitless set of solutions, ideas and design principles to take you closer to a self-sustaining ecosystem on your land. Visit our Permaculture Design page for more information or contact us for a free consultation.