Nicole Faires

It’s already the 13th of May! Some of you picked a permaculture project and many more of you have been lurking and waiting for more information. Before we talk about today’s topic, the Zones, I want to show you how my own project is going. Remember my sad duck area? Significant progress has been made.

First there was cleanup and some dirt moved around the bathtub:

Then today we began building the duck house:

Looks better already! The next step is to finish the duck house, and then I’m going to create some very small hugelkultur beds around the perimeter to grow flowers and plants to attract bugs for the ducks to eat. Then I’ll introduce duckweed to the bathtub and it should be pretty much ready for ducks.

So let’s get down to the topic of the day - Zones. In permaculture design, zones are the key to being organized. Basically, your property is divided into areas based on how often you have to go and work there, and partly based on topography. In a sustainable lifestyle, you have to do a lot more work. It’s inevitably less convenient to grow your own food and make the things you need, creating more labor for you and taking up your time. When you start to do it, you begin to realize that you can save SO much time and work by finding little ways to be more efficient. For example, we have plastic covers over our 14 low tunnels held down with hundreds of sandbags. Every time we water they have to be moved to the side which takes FOREVER. Originally we uncovered one row at a time, but we realized that we could uncover two at a time if we uncoverd them facing each other. This cut our time down by half. We later found that because of the volume of PVC we ended up buying over the long term, we could have afforded full greenhouses which don’t need to be uncovered. This was a design flaw on our part that has used up hundreds of hours of time and worn us out.

So, zones help you prevent design flaws like this and make being sustainable and self-sufficient dramatically easier. Here are the five zones:

Zone 0 - the house. This is where you spend the most time, so it includes the greenhouse attached to your house and the shade patio/outdoor kitchen.

Zone 1 - the garden right by the house and other things you use daily. This is the garden where you will spend the bulk of your time, and it should be right outside your door so you can pick from it all the time. This zone might also have a tool shed, small pond and some fruit trees depending on how big your property is. Water collection would help facilitate watering the garden.

Zone 2 - this is the area just beyond the perimeter of your kitchen garden. It is where you would keep your compost, and grow staples like potatoes or grains. You would keep chickens or ducks here. In the city this is probably as far as your property would extend.

Zone 3 - this is the area that you don’t have to go quite as often because it’s further away. The gardens here would be perennials, living mulches, windbreaks and firebreaks. You might keep some goats out here, and beehives. If you are growing a cash crop, this is where you would do it. It’s an area that you grow stuff in, but only stuff that uses up lots of space and takes less daily attention.

Zone 4 - this is your rural woodlot, edible forest garden, pig foraging, large pond area. This is where you can develop large tree plantings and long term projects.

Zone 5 - this is the wilderness. Even a small property should have a Zone 5, a small area that you simply allow to return to its natural state. It’s difficult to just not mess with it, but that’s the goal. This area helps you by attracting beneficial insects and allowing wild creatures a safe harbor rather than foraging in your garden.

Some people are a little confused about the difference between Zone 1 and 2. Zone 1 is really the perimeter of your house and only spans the space it takes to throw on some flip flops and meander through in five minutes. It should be as packed with edible plants as possible, and the more your grow here in every spare inch, the more time and effort you will save. This garden should be well mulched between plants and on pathways. Zone 2 is where the stinky stuff goes. On a small lot, you would grow some fruit trees here, possibly a hedge, and some edible shrubs like raspberries. This area would be mulched too, but everything is bigger and more spread out so it takes less attention to detail.

So that’s it. The Zones. It’s a struggle for me to do things efficiently because my food is grown on a completely different property right now, but it is also a cash crop. I treat the barn like Zone 1, and the small pond is right by it. The ducks will utilize that and provide me with compost. The compost pile is on the other side of the barn, but we got an old fridge that will act as a large insulated vermicomposting bin inside the barn. The barn also has the one water source so everything branches off from that. Even though I don’t own it and have to drive there, I still find that having an understanding of the zones is so valuable.

How many people have a little greenhouse at the back end of the property where it gets all forgotten, stinky compost by their back door, and an apple tree causing problems against the side of the house? These are terrible design flaws that can be easily fixed if the simple zone system is followed.

So now that you understand the zones, how does that affect your project or inspire a new one?

Topic:  The Permaculture Principles

Ok it’s the 2nd of May and not the 1st.  But it’s not my fault!  Tumblr was down yesterday for me and I’m sorry about that.  Here we go!

I think the first thing we should talk about is The Permaculture Principles.  Normally there are 12 of them, and they can be a little confusing.  Fortunately for you, I have created my own set of Permaculture principles.  I call them Permaculture Lets Impalas Make Pudding, or P.L.I.M.P.  There will be a lot of acronyms in this study group, most of them nonsense.

My version has condensed the 12 principles down to 7.  They mean the same thing, but they are just…well…easier:  

1. Every thing is connected to and supported by everything else.

2. Every thing, or element, should serve many functions. Students of design usually learn to make things look nice and be functional at the same time, but permaculture focuses on function alone.

3. Functional design is sustainable and provides a useful product or surplus. If it doesn’t, it creates pollution and work. Pollution is an overabundance of a resource, or something that is simply not used. Work results when one element doesn’t help another element.

4. Permaculture maximizes the useful energy in any system (or, put another way, decreases the waste of energy).

5. Successful design serves the needs of people and provides many useful connections between elements, or diversity.

6. If there is pollution, then the system goes into chaos.

7. Societies, systems, and human lives are wasted in disorder and opposition. To stop this vicious cycle, we only use what we can return to the soil and build harmony (cooperation) into the functional organization of a system.

(From The Ultimate Guide to Permaculture)

As we go through this month and do our projects, we will come back to these 7 principles and measure ourselves up to them.  Today, we are focusing on Principle 1: Everything is connected.  That’s where you come in, and that means homework.  

The first thing you’ll need to think about is your project.  Look around your environment, and think about one aspect of it that maybe doesn’t measure up to the 7 principles.  Sometimes it’s difficult to know where to start, but you can start out by analyzing the basic elements: air, water, food, electricity, heat, etc.  Are you wasting a lot of water?  What kind of electricity do you rely on?  How is your home heated?  How do you cook?  If you don’t have a lot of time, make sure you don’t start out focusing on something big that would require you to remodel your entire house.  Target it down to something small.  Once you target something that could be improved, we need to translate it into a project.  Don’t worry if you can’t figure out what you want to do - ask for help!

If you are a super go-getter and already know what you want to do, grab your camera and take a picture of the thing you want to make better.  Submit your project idea with the photo and description and press the Submit button at the top of the page.  Keep in mind that we are skipping a LOT of permaculture information at this moment.  The idea is to launch into a project and talk about how we can use permaculture principles as we design it and go along so we can learn hands-on.  So don’t worry if you feel like you don’t know what you are doing.  Just pick a small problem and we’ll figure out how to fix it later.

I also have some questions for you to answer, which you can do really quickly so there’s no excuses:

1. Do you feel connected to everything else?  If not, why do you think that is?

2. What is biggest creator of pollution and work in your own life right now?

3.  Would you state any of these 7 principles a different way?  If so, how would you say it?

Leave a comment here on this post or on Facebook and answer them!

Let me show you my project for the month.  Here’s this space I have that I think might be good for ducks:

Doesn’t it look awful?  It’s muddy, there’s not much dirt there, and nothing much grows there.  We’ve been throwing rocks around that bathtub with the idea that ducks will go there in the future, but it’s still not something I would feel happy putting a duck in.

If this were to be a duck home that follows permaculture principles, it would be able to grow food for the ducks to decrease the work.  The duck waste would be able to be used in some way.  As it stands, I think duck poop would just make that bathtub hideous.  This system would just create pollution and work for me.  I’ve targeted a problem, so now I have to design a solution.

Feel free to comment on my horrible duck home and make suggestions as well.  I’m excited to see all of the ideas all y’all think up. :)  Let’s get connected!

May 6th is International Permaculture Day, and I want to celebrate.  Most people who want to learn Permaculture do so by earning a Permaculture Design Certificate.  This piece of paper is really great, but also really expensive ($1500 to $3000). Guess what?  You don’t need a PDC to learn permaculture and implement the principles into your own life.  So we’re going to have…

a VIRTUAL PERMACULTURE STUDY GROUP. For FREE.  It’s as cool as the study group on Community, except that we won’t build pillow forts.  Or we could…hmm.

The No PDC Needed Study Group will start May 1st and last through the whole month of May.  It’s informal, but it does have homework.  As part of this study group, you will:

1. Talk to others who are interested in permaculture via comments on this site as well as on Facebook.  

2. Learn the basic principles of permaculture and how to begin analyzing your own living space to make it sustainable and self-sufficient.

3.  Complete one permaculture project which you will share with the group. 

I will facilitate this group, but learning will be in a true permaculture-style: student led and flowing with the natural discussions that come up.  

To be part of this, you will need to have access to a camera.  Your project will be shared and discussed here, and we will need to see pictures of its progress.  There is also some recommended reading which will be posted at the start.  

You will also need to like my Facebook page in order to be part of a lively discussion.  

What we will do is talk about the permaculture principles and how they apply to specific projects that we can build into our lifestyle.  To do this we’ll share pictures here and talk about them.  We can ask questions on how to do something, or how to do it better.

This is going to be a low-key, super-convenient way to get into permaculture, and I swear you’ll be addicted.  

My project is going to be a duck garden.  What’s yours?  If you don’t have any ideas, don’t worry!  I’ll be posting a list of great, easy projects to help inspire you.

Don’t forget to share this with your friends. The more the merrier.

I knew how important it is, but I didn’t truly realize HOW IMPORTANT IT IS.  I have really gotten into cultivating bacteria and it’s so much fun.  It’s also made me realize how crucial bacteria is for the existence of all life.  Without it, everything would die.  

The picture above is today’s batch of kefir fermenting.  Kefir is a slightly mysterious fermented dairy product made from kefir ‘grains’. They aren’t really grain - they are just conglomerated proteins and yeasts that clump into a glob.  You can buy kefir but most people I know are gifted kefir from a friend, and the kefir culture just keeps on living and growing.  Since I’m lactose intolerant, I can use it to make milk I can drink.  It smells like yeast and tastes like plain yogurt or sour cream.  I even made kefir cheese the other day.

Then I’ve got this in the house.  The other day I posted about my worm bin, and here’s what it looks like inside now.  As long as I keep the lid on, you can’t smell all of the magical bacterial processes going on inside.  I’ve got thousands of happy worms breaking down our waste vegetable matter at an incredibly fast rate.  Ok, it’s not overnight, but in comparison to my huge compost pile at the farm, it’s far quicker.  This is partly due to the worms and partly due to the bacteria helping to break everything down.  

Then there’s my kelp tea.  Rather than buying expensive bottles of kelp tea for my greens growing under lights, I buy large bags of kelp meal, and soak some of it in water.  Although the fermentation process is very mild, bacteria helps nutrients leech into the water faster to be soaked up by the plants.  I don’t soak it very long but it gives the plants the kick they need.

This is simple stuff, and helps keep us healthy and happy.  :)