Permaculture Design Principles

My goal in life has never been to strike it rich. My goal has always been to just need less money.

In my studies I've learned a bit about permaculture design and I'll use this blog to explain some basics.
The main idea behind permaculture design, or sustainability design, is to eliminate waste and work by observing the events that happen in a naturally occurring system and redirecting them to do the work for you that would eliminate you having to feed energy into your own personal system.

In layman's terms - take the stuff that already happens in nature, and make it work for you.

Most civilized folks are pretty blind to all the stuff that goes on around them. Here's an example: When we were planning to buy cheap land in Maine we started reading the Bangor Daily News.

One of the stories described a power outage that was caused by a severe ice storm they were having. One of the victims of the outage that they interviewed was complaining that all the food in their freezer was going bad because the electricity had been out for weeks.

If you see my point, you're more aware than those folks :-)
If you don't know what I'm talking about right now, re-read the last paragraph until you do.

Unfortunately, permaculture design doesn't have a cut and dried instruction book. You can apply a technique to one yard and it'll work, but it may not work in another. It's like the meaning of life - you have to figure it out on your own.

Fortunately, there are design principles that are fairly universal.

So here are some things I learned.

Components of permaculture design

All of the elements listed below have properties that can be manipulated in some way to do work for you, at little or no cost.  I'll post another blog later, breaking them down if I get time.

These are the toys you have to work with.

• Sun
• Rainwater
• Dew, mist and/or fog
• wind
• condensation
• evaporation
• reflection
• thermal mass
• decomposition
• indigenous plants
• garden plants
• mushrooms
• insects,arachnids
• wild animals (birds, rodents, reptiles)
• domestic animals (fish, chickens, goats)
• stone, soil, clay
• straw, mulch, fallen leaves and sticks, sawdust
• seasons
• terrain
• structures you build to house you and your critters
• things that can contain components (like water, stone, soil)
• trash, things people give away on Craigslist, things you find that no one wants.
• yard sale items, flea market items, things you can buy for next to nothing
• colors, paints, dyes
• daily habits

Whenever you look at your property, you should first look at where the sun hits throughout the day and year, from which direction the prevailing wind comes, and where water flows on your land (where is uphill and where is downhill). These set the main variables that affect where you need to go with your particular design. Once you determine this, you need to figure out how to slow the flow of sun and water through your land so you can gain the most use from them both.

Find out where energy hits your property and figure out how to 'catch' it.
Examples:

The Sun.
Gobs of sunlight hits your land every day. You can 'catch' it by planting food in every square foot of your property that gets sunlight - even partial sunlight. You can put big windows on the side of your house that gets the most sun and let it hit a stone, dark-stained floor that will absorb its heat and slowly release it when the room temperature cools. You can reflect and diffuse it to light up your rooms.

Rain:
Everything that can collect rain should collect rain. You can do this by digging swales at various altitudes along the contour of your land (that means perfectly horizontal) to stop runoff and allow rain to slowly soak into the soil, digging drains to direct that runoff, and ponds to hold that runoff At the fastest, water should flow through your property no faster than a slow stroll. You can collect rainwater from the roof of every building on your property and direct it into barrels, cisterns, indoor and outdoor ponds and aquariums, old bathtubs or jacuzzis, whatever will hold water, and store it for times when there is no rain. The more you can store, the longer you can hold out in a drought.

Now you can combine these two elements by directing some of that water right into a dark painted storage container, like a barrel, that's exposed to direct sunlight but also kept from the cold, like inside a window in your bathroom,. The sun gets absorbed by the dark painted container and heats the water it's holding. Now you've just cut back on whatever fuel you need to burn to heat your water, and whatever work you would have done chopping and hauling wood and building a fire, or working a job to buy whatever petroleum product you need to burn, by not having to raise the temperature of your water nearly as much as you'd have to by heating up cold water. Sometimes you wouldn't have to heat the water at all.

See what I mean?

Another trick is to take the fire you use to cook with and direct it through a water storage tank to heat the water you'll need to use to wash the dishes from that meal. A really good designer can find 4 or 5 uses for each thing  (s)he designs.

For example, you can catch water in a pond, run a small canal under your wall and into an indoor waterway where your fish can come in out of the cold in the winter time and swim around the perimeter of your living area. The pond and waterway both can serve as an environment to grow water-loving crops, while sustaining frogs and dragonflies outside that eat up mosquitos, and where geese and ducks come to poop and fertilize the food growing around the pond. The water containing the poop from the fish can be moved with solar pumps into an indoor aquaponic system, fertilizing the food crops growing indoors, which cleans the water and sends it back to the pond/aquarium waterway. The sun can shine on the waterway as it travels along your kitchen and dining room window, creating an aesthetic, peaceful atmosphere as its reflected sunlight dances across your ceiling, all the while heating the water in winter (when the sun is low) or cooling it when the sun is high and shaded by the house's overhanging roof, regulating your living area's temperature and humidity while increasing the biodiversity along the waterway. Watercress and other salad edibles can grow along the banks of your indoor waterway, supplying you with fresh salads for dinner. You can scrape off your dinner plates into the waterway where the fish from outside can come and eat your food scraps, saving you a walk to the compost bin outside in the snow and saving you from having to buy so much fish food.

Now how many uses can you find for that system?

Here are a few simpler tricks I picked up from seasoned permaculturalists.

• Herb spirals are hills, 6ft wide and 3ft high. You can plant various herbs that each require a different type of environment because by creating a hill, you've created various micro-climates. The north face doesn't get as much sun and is cooler, so plant herbs there that like partial shade. The south face gets full sun and is warmer. The higher south face is dry, while the lower can drop into a pond and create a more warm, humid environment for planting more tropical herbs. The east gets morning sun, the west gets afternoon sun. See what I mean?
• Plant in circles instead of rows. If you plant in rows, you have to find a way to get water all down the rows. But if you plant in circles, you can catch water in a barrel in the middle of that circle and let it out gradually, and the water source is equidistant from all the plants.
• Create 'Keyhole' gardens. Either raise beds or dig ditches for walking on so you never have to step into your garden and you can garden til you're too old to stoop down. A keyhole garden is shaped just so - a path going into a circle. You can bring in your garden tools, plant all down both sides of the path and all around the circle without having to pick up all your stuff and move it down the row, like you would in a conventional garden. If you put a roof over the keyhole circle, you can catch the rainwater from it and use it to irrigate the plants from the center, just like the circle garden method mentioned above, and it also lets you garden or harvest in inclement weather. If you put your path leading into the circle on the uphill side of the circle, whatever rainwater runs off from uphill can be halted by the circle and fed under the garden beds to feed the plants around it. Now you've cut back on the work it would have taken to water the plants there too.
• Timing can also be worked in as a design. Plant 3 or 4 crops all at once, fast growing plants like radishes along with leafy plants along with root plants that reach maturity in longer periods of time. One planting, 4 harvests.
• Plant before you harvest the previous crop. Masanobu Fukuoka (the father of permaculture) would walk out into a field of one crop that was ready to harvest soon, then start seeding before he harvested the original crop. The original crop would protect the seeds from the eyes of flying critters, and from harsh sunlight that could overheat the soil (seeds don't need sun til they germinate). It would also keep moisture in the soil by creating a moist micro-climate, keeping water from evaporating away too quickly. Then when it came time to harvest the original crop, he'd just leave the rest of the plant to drop over the germinated seedlings, acting like a mulch to keep weeds from competing with the new seeds. Now he just saved all that time he otherwise would have spent dragging the old crop leftovers out of the garden, plowing, furrowing and laying down weed blocking stuff (like cardboard and newspaper, see later) and irrigating, and in doing so created a better environment for growing the new seedlings.
• Before you plant the very first garden, layer newspaper and old plant waste and mulch in several layers like lasagna (they call it 'Lasagna Gardening'). The worms will eat the bottom layers and create wonderfully rich soil for the roots of your plants, and the layers will stop weeds before they beak the surface. It'll also hold in tons of moisture to eliminate most of your need to irrigate or water.
• Making money and spending money uses way more time than saving money and trading. When you make money, you earn a certain amount, then you give 13.58% to the federal government for Income Tax, then when you spend it, you give an additional 6.75% (depending on where you live) to the government again in the form of Sales Tax. Using permaculture design always results in surplus food. If you grow your own food, you can trade your surplus for things you might otherwise buy. It's surplus so it didn't cost any more than the cost of the initial seeds and equipment. You'll already be benefiting from that the first year. So you trade surplus for, say, a rake. You're paying no tax for the food you traded, nor are you paying sales tax for the rake.
• Use heirloom seeds and save your seeds. After you pull your first harvest you can save your seeds, replant them - even double your re-planting - and likely still have seeds left to swap for new varieties with other seed savers. Now you've saved all the money you would have spent on seeds for the next 100 years. Never buy seed again.
• Plant in 'guilds' under trees. Guilds are plants that help each other to grow in some way. The 'three sisters' is the most famous guild - corn, beans and squash. the squash shades the ground and holds in the moisture, the corn provides a structure for the beans to climb, and the beans add nitrogen to the soil. When it rains on trees, the rain that rolls off, and through, the leaves is called 'throughfall'. Throughfall is the tree's bathwater. It's packed with nutrients absorbed from the leaves. The soil under the tree holds lots of water, too, which breeds lots of aquatic organisms, eating, pooping and fortifying the soil with even more nutrients. Planting under a tree feeds your garden like no other fertilizer. Trees create small micro-climates, cooling the air and preventing evaporation. Plant away from the trunk - out where the roots stretch to the edges of the leaves. Under your fruit or (some) nut trees, you can plant bushes, then on the south face of those bushes plant tall plants, then shorter then shorter, maybe adding a few flowers to bring in pollinators. You can drape string from the lower branches to support climbing plants. Another benefit of the trees is that it slows the flow of water from your land, holding water in the soil to be taken up by all your garden, and if you're lucky, over time they may even create a spring at the bottom of your hill.
• Keep your chickens in a movable coop and set them in places you plan to plant a new garden in the spring. They'll plow up your dirt eating all the bugs and weed seed, then fertilize it with poop. Move them to the next area while you plant that one.
• Let your goats graze near where you'd like to clear out some bramble. Goats can eat through stickers and poison ivy, and it's a lot easier than trying to cut that all up yourself. Be sure to keep them away from blackberry and black raspberry bushes. You can weave those along a line to create a natural fence around your property or garden.
• Bury your ugly rotten logs in old leaves and dirt into big mounds and plant in them. The decomposition of all the wood matter under the ground breeds gobs of worms and mushrooms, which fertilizes the soil. It also holds in moisture, so you almost never have to water it. They call this method of gardening "Hugelkultur"

There are lots more and I'll probably blog them as I hear them. Feel free to add any you can think of in a comment.

6/12/2015 Update: Found a website specifically outlining Permaculture Design Principles:
http://permacultureprinciples.com/principles/