Perma-huh?

When Chris and I made the decision to leave the city and head to the farm, we only had a vague idea of what that would entail. We knew we wanted to grow and raise more of our own food.  We knew we wanted to do so with more organic and less conventional methods. But that's about it.

Then Chris discovered permaculture, which is a method of sustainable agriculture, derived from two root words: permanent and agriculture. According to wiki, permaculture is an integrated system of design ... that encompasses not only agriculture, horticulture, architecture and ecology, but also economic systems, land access strategies and legal systems for businesses and communities.

The basic tenants of permaculture are care of the earth, care of people, and return of surplus. You can read more about these at this permaculture ethics website, but in a nutshell, it's using the land in a manner that conserves rather than destroys, growing things in a responsible manner so that it is helpful and not harmful to people, and sharing the excess by returning nutrient to the soil and allowing livestock to graze surplus edibles in planted areas. 

Swale and Berm

Some of the practical applications we will include on our property are water catchment, swales and berms, and high density cropping systems. We live in an area that gets approximately 44 inches of rain annually. With the addition of gutters on buildings, tanks, and gravity fed irrigation hoses, we can water our crops with rain water, which will reduce the amount of water we draw from the well, and the amount of elecricity we use. Also, our orchard will be planted in berms with swales uphill of each. This design allows for maximum retention of water around the plants, thus reducing the amount of watering needed overall. High density cropping systems mandate planting other crops between the main crops. For example, in our orchard, we will have fruit trees, and between them, edible bushes, nitrogen fixers, herbs, and cover crops. This results in creating a challenging environment that uses competitive interactions and will increase greatly the suppression of weeds by the desired crop; the benefit to the permaculture farmer is less weeding and more harvesting in the same area through over planting desirables.  Of course, these are just a few examples of the numerous ways in which permaculture is beneficial. 

Many of these principals have been in use around the world for hundreds of years. Permaculture is the study and implementation of these practices. According to Bill Mollison, the father of permaculture,  "Permaculture is a philosophy of working with, rather than against nature; of protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless labor; and of looking at plants and animals in all their functions, rather than treating any area as a single product system."

I am extremely proud of Chris, because in addition to working full time he has completed the Permaculture Designer Certificate course with Geoff Lawton, and is nearly finished with his second, Permaethos under Josiah Wallingford, Jack Spirko, and Nick Ferguson. These consisted of a minimum of 72 hours of instruction time for each course, and many more hours of study and work. 

We look forward to sharing with you the design principals we incorporate into our permaculture farmstead going forward.