Rental Permaculture: How to Fill the Void
Community Projects, Food Forests, Food Plants - Annual, Food Plants - Perennial, Nurseries & Propogation, Plant Systems, Seeds, Society, Trees, Urban Projects, Village Development — by Bob Nekrasov January 6, 2012
by Bob Nekrasov
I hear you comrade. ‘I want those acres and to start my food forest and have a permaculture demonstration Eden – but alas, I am a humble renter with big bloody dreams and typically uncreative landlords’.
As us ‘renters’ forlornly scan open fields and acres — seeing real estate listings of eroded soils sitting below beautiful key points — we are designing lush, abundant landscape in our minds and whinging about the price and how we could easily ‘turn this place into a self-sustaining paradise’. Well, at least I am! But, we can get caught in the dream trap — thinking we will start the big permaculture project when we get that dream plot of land. But it is really a void that needs to be filled. When you know how much good you can do you do feel a little crippled by renting a place where you feel you cannot do much. Having this deluded mindset a few years back I set out to figure out what I can do. Hooray!
Comments (21)Hugelkultur: Composting Whole Trees With Ease
Compost, Conservation, Food Forests, Food Plants - Annual, Food Plants - Perennial, Fungi, Irrigation, Land, Plant Systems, Rehabilitation, Soil Biology, Soil Composition, Soil Conservation, Structure, Trees, Waste Systems & Recycling, Water Harvesting — by Mark Feineigle January 4, 2012
What is it?
Hugelkultur is a composting method that uses large pieces of rotting wood as the centerpiece for long term humus building decomposition. The decomposition process takes place below the ground, while at the same time allowing you to cultivate the raised, or sunken, hugelkultur bed. This allows the plants to take advantage of nutrients released during decomposition. Hugelkultur, in its infinite variations, has been developed and practiced by key permaculture proponents such as Sepp Holzer and Masanobu Fukuoka for decades.
Edible Forest Gardens: Dave Jacke Interview with Jill Cloutier of Sustainable World Radio
Food Forests, Food Plants - Perennial, Plant Systems — by Wes Roe December 3, 2011
Edible Forest Gardens! This powerful concept of perennial polyculture design is finally gaining wide recognition, thanks in part to people like Dave Jacke, author of Edible Forest Gardens, Volumes I & II.
Dave Jacke was in Santa Barbara recently for a program sponsored by the SBCC Center for Sustainability as a benefit for Mesa Harmony Gardens, a food forest in the making. If you missed Dave’s talk, or just want a review all the great material he shared with us, the interview is now available to listen to.
Dave Jacke is a longtime permaculture teacher and designer. In this interview, he talks about the history of forest gardening, its many benefits, and how gardening like a forest can enrich your life. — Sustainable World Radio
Click play to hear the talk!
Edible Forest Gardens: Dave Jacke Interview with Jill Cloutier of Sustainable World Radio Comments (0)Greening the Desert Video – now also with French Subtitles
Aid Projects, Community Projects, Compost, Conservation, Demonstration Sites, Education Centres, Food Forests, Fungi, Irrigation, Plant Systems, Rehabilitation, Salination, Soil Biology, Soil Conservation, Swales, Urban Projects, Village Development, Water Harvesting — by Craig Mackintosh PRI Editor December 2, 2011
Many thanks to Jeremy, Christina, Erik, Lamia and Kristen for all the work that went into creating the French translation subtitle file for both Parts I & II of the Greening the Desert video below. As a result, I’ve been able to upload a version suitable for your French-speaking friends and family, should you have some.
After clicking play, click on the ‘CC’ button at bottom
of the video to enable the French subtitles
And, a big thanks must also go to Frank Gapinski for the Greening the Desert Part I video that has turned so many on to permaculture concepts. It’s amazing the impact a few minutes of video can have on the world!
P.S. Because of the hard-coded English subtitles in the original version of the video embedded above, English speakers would be better to watch it instead.
Comments (1)Companion Planting Information and Chart
Food Forests, Food Plants - Annual, Food Plants - Perennial, Plant Systems, Trees — by Stephanie Ladwig-Cooper
An updated chart of basic companion plants we’ve grown successfully over the years
We recently received an e-mail from a gentleman in China looking for…
… what plants you may have in your garden that you can transplant next to your rose or your apple tree to see how they nurture each other over time.
As a result I thought I would post our own updated list of companion plants for him and anyone else interested. While I would love to say this plant or that plant are "best" I feel I must remind folks to keep in mind your climate, soil and many, many other factors that determine how well these plants cooperate together. Trial and error is the best choice to begin companion planting but the chart below should lead you in the right direction….
Comments (4)Food Forests, Part 1: Ronald Reagan’s Day Off
Consumerism, Economics, Food Forests, Food Plants - Perennial, Health & Disease, Society, Trees — by Chris McLeod November 24, 2011
Save Ferris! Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was a 1986 movie about a teenager, his girlfriend and best mate — all of whom were just about to finish high school and enter the adult world. It represented for them a moment in time; a very hedonistic look into their lives for just one day, where responsibility and long term planning were dismissed. I’ve always felt that it captured the spirit of the times of 1986, which also, by a strange coincidence, was the time of Morning in America, Ronald Reagan and the return of cheap energy for industrial countries. The question that I would like to know, whilst hedonism is fun, is it responsible and sustainable?
As a bit of background, I was born in the early 1970s and during the first two decades of my life, fruit tasted, well, like fruit, regardless of where it was purchased. However, slowly things started to change. Supermarket fruit stopped tasting like fruit should and started tasting like water. At about this time, I stopped buying fruit at the supermarket and moved onto the city markets. Melbourne is lucky to have the Queen Victoria Market just on the edge of its CBD (as well as a few other inner city markets) which sell fresh fruit and vegetables. Nice. It was all sorted, fruit tasted like fruit should again. However, it was not to be that way for long!
Over time the market fruit also started to taste bland and I started to get desperate for tasty fruit. I began visiting and purchasing direct from commercial orchards on the eastern edge of the city. The joke was on me because these were the same people who were selling to the wholesale markets who then on-sold that same fruit to the retail markets! It was the same fruit! I was simply cutting out the middle men. This is when I started to understand that the change was because of economics, as fruit was paid for by weight and not by quality.
So, what the heck, I gave up and started growing my own fruit.
Comments (8)What is a Refractometer and Why Do I Need One?
Food Forests, Food Plants - Annual, Food Plants - Perennial, For Sale, Medicinal Plants — by Bonnie Freibergs
Refractometers are used for quite a lot of things — drug diagnosis, gemology, veterinary medicine, aquarium upkeep and farming.
In gardens and farming it is an all-in-one tool that can be used to test the health of your crops, via a brix rating system. A refractometer uses refractive light passing through plant sap or fruit or vegetable juice to take a reading of nutrient levels. A high rating is good news for your crops — they should be healthy, disease and pest resistant, high in nutritional value and you’re likely to have a good harvest. A low rating means that your crop will not grow to its potential due to some external limiting factor, such as: a dilution of its nutrients due to high nitrate content, a mineral imbalance in the soil allowing weeds to flourish and take from your harvest, a low calcium content in the soil or a low/steady boron reading indicating an issue with the translocation of sugars within the plant.
Comments (11)Guerilla Gardening with Rob Avis
Community Projects, Food Forests, Food Plants - Perennial, Nurseries & Propogation, Trees, Urban Projects — by Luke Kimmel November 19, 2011
In this video Rob Avis from Verge Permaculture discusses his philosophy and main reasons for guerilla gardening, then dives into techniques, and strategies, and finally lets us watch him guerilla-plant an apple tree in the park near his home, despite a quick pass-over by a police helicopter.
Comments (8)FRESH – World’s Wildest Supermarket
Commercial Farm Projects, Community Projects, Food Forests, Food Plants - Annual, Food Plants - Perennial, Fungi, Markets & Outlets, Medicinal Plants, Plant Systems, Rehabilitation, Soil Biology, Soil Composition, Structure, Trees, Urban Projects, Village Development — by Kenneth Gronbjerg November 17, 2011
A holistic and most outrageous concept being turned into reality in Denmark.
From: Sepp Holzer’s Permakultur, Leopold Stocker Verlag, 2008
Fresh is the concept for an organic, living supermarket in cities and villages, where instead of taking the items off the shelf, the customer harvests the produce directly from raised beds!
It is a system that works with nature rather than against it.
By harvesting, the customer contributes to the work of producing to such a large extent that the produce can be offered at a never before seen quality and price. It’s almost for free. This is what you may call a win win win situation!
Comments (7)Why Food Forests?
Conservation, Deforestation, Food Forests, Food Plants - Annual, Food Plants - Perennial, Food Shortages, Health & Disease, Medicinal Plants, Plant Systems, Rehabilitation, Soil Biology, Soil Composition, Soil Conservation, Structure, Trees — by Angelo Eliades October 21, 2011
We’re all familiar with the concept of forests — lush, abundant expanses of pristine wilderness, teeming with life, a richness of biodiversity and awe-inspiring to behold. Trees and plants intertwined, filling every possible space, the very well-spring of life itself!
Forests exist fine on their own. There’s no mowing, weeding, spraying, or digging required. No pesticides, fertilisers, herbicides or nasty chemicals. No work and no people either. They somehow do very well, thank you.
Now, imagine if everything in this lush, abundant, spectacular forest was edible!
Comments (36)Maarten Stapper: “Agricultural Science and Technology is Stuck in a Rut” (IPC10 Presentation Video)
Commercial Farm Projects, Community Projects, Compost, Conferences, Courses/Workshops, Economics, Food Forests, Food Plants - Annual, Food Plants - Perennial, Plant Systems, Rehabilitation, Society, Soil Biology, Soil Composition, Soil Conservation, Soil Erosion & Contamination, Structure, Trees, Water Contaminaton & Loss — by Craig Mackintosh PRI Editor October 20, 2011
I’ve been a fan of Maarten Stapper’s work for a while now. In fact, further below you’ll find an article I wrote, way back in 2007, about his experiences at the hands of his former employer — Australia’s publicly funded CSIRO agricultural research body. I’d recommend you read the article before watching Maarten’s IPC10 Convergence presentation, as it’ll give you a good backgrounder on his valuable work and his commendable ethics. I say ethics because instead of compromising his principles so as to retain favour with those putting bread on his table, he stood his ground… and got sacked instead.
Comments (0)Review of Geoff Lawton’s Food Forest DVD, by Paul Wheaton and Helen Atthowe
Compost, DVDs/Books, Dams, Food Forests, Food Plants - Annual, Food Plants - Perennial, Fungi, Land, Medicinal Plants, Plant Systems, Rehabilitation, Seeds, Soil Biology, Soil Composition, Soil Conservation, Structure, Swales, Trees — by Paul Wheaton October 8, 2011
Click play to hear the talk!
Review of Geoff Lawton's Food Forest DVD, by Paul Wheaton and Helen Atthowe
Paul Wheaton and Helen Atthowe (www.veganicpermaculture.com) watch Geoff Lawton‘s Food Forest video and Helen really loved it. It shows a food forest as they start it, at 6 months, a year, 3 years, 10 years.
Paul thinks it is one of the best permaculture videos. Lawton starts by talking about three concepts: the layering of systems (there are 7-10 layers of a forest), succession of systems (how nature repairs itself), and time (working with different events — eg: sun, shade, flood over time). Paul shares Helen’s hesitancy using the word “permaculture.” They also talk about the word “science” and “studies.” Lawton has 1st, 2nd, and 3rd recovery plants. The first are: annuals, nitrogen fixers, ground covers and leguminous shrubs. The second are medium size nitrogen fixing trees (later to be chopped at head height in order to nurture the longer term trees). The third are longer term nitrogen fixing trees.
Comments (1)Tony Rinaudo: “Against the odds: Reversing desertification in arid and semi arid lands” (IPC Presentation – Video)
Aid Projects, Animal Forage, Biodiversity, Community Projects, Conferences, Deforestation, Food Forests, Food Plants - Annual, Food Plants - Perennial, Food Shortages, Global Warming/Climate Change, Health & Disease, Land, Medicinal Plants, Nurseries & Propogation, Plant Systems, Presentations/Demonstrations, Regional Water Cycle, Rehabilitation, Seeds, Trees — by Craig Mackintosh PRI Editor October 3, 2011
Tony Rinaudo’s IPC10 conference presentation was one of the highlights of the event for three good reasons — 1) because of the scale of impact his Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR) work has achieved (more than 30,000 km² of re-greened, regenerated land to date); 2) the utter simplicity — and thus doability — of this work (it requires no financial investment or out-of-reach technologies, only a little educational guidance and community collaboration), and 3) the speed at which this regeneration can occur and lives can improve.
We’ve brought people’s attention to FMNR before…
… and now I have the great pleasure of being able to share Tony’s IPC10 conference talk in high definition video (at top). Note: If you want to see the slides in higher quality, you can download Tony’s presentation (9mb Powerpoint) and click through it in a different window as Tony talks if you like.
Readers can also download:
Comments (3)The Underground Forest: Using Biodiversity to Help People
Aid Projects, Animal Forage, Community Projects, Deforestation, Food Forests, Food Plants - Annual, Food Plants - Perennial, Land, Medicinal Plants, Nurseries & Propogation, Plant Systems, Rehabilitation, Seeds, Trees — by Harry Byrne Wykman
One of the highlights of the tenth International Permaculture Convergence was meeting Tony Rinaudo of World Vision Australia. Tony is a living example of the posture required for the development of truly regenerative systems. Tony has come to see patterns of people, plants and landscape which allow deserts to grow trees again. He does this by opening himself to the voice of the land.
While working in Niger, Tony noticed that what appeared to be small shrubs were in fact trees which had been coppiced by continuous grazing pressure, firewood harvesting and the impulse of farmers to keep crop land free of trees. Tony calls these trees ‘the underground forest.’
Comments (0)From the Mara Soil – a Film About Simple and Natural Solutions to Poverty, Hunger and Disease
Aid Projects, Building, Community Projects, Demonstration Sites, Energy Systems, Food Forests, Food Shortages, Health & Disease, Land, Medicinal Plants, Rehabilitation, Society, Village Development, Waste Systems & Recycling — by Craig Mackintosh PRI Editor September 29, 2011
What if global hunger, poverty and disease could be solved with resources already at our disposal?
A film directed by Steve Schrenzel
It was a pleasure to meet Tara Blasco and Lyn Hebenstreit at the Tenth International Permaculture Conference (IPC10) in Jordan this month. Tara and Lyn have been deeply involved in a Tanzanian success story that you’ll quickly become immersed in via the excellent new documentary above.
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