Some Permaculture Thoughts

Last fall, I went to a basic permaculture training. It was two weeks in New York state. I loved it. It is time for me to revisit some of the ideas I learned and I thought I would do that through this blog so I could share the thoughts and information. This is the first installment.

First of all, there is a lot of misconception about what permaculture is. Most people conjure up images of fanciful gardens and maybe a composting toilet when they hear the word permaculture. And although these may be part of a permaculture design, they in no way encompass it. Permaculture is a design system. A way of looking at something, thinking about something and planning something. It is applicable to anything that you design. And we are arranging and planning things all the time. You could apply permaculture principles to arranging your desk, planning how your kitchen is set up or use it to design an intentional living community. Only your imagination limits the ways to use design principles of permaculture.


There are a couple of questions that should be asked when planning a system. The first of which is, is what we're doing something that cares for the earth? Permaculture is designed to help you create systems that are not only sustainable but that aim to be regenerative. If you are planning a garden, your goal will be to actually help to restore the soil and ecosystem. This will become more clear as we discuss the principles in more depth. A second question that needs to be asked is, will this design care for people? Again, in permaculture, ethics is an important consideration when designing a system. It is imperative if we are to create sustainable caring communities that we consider how we are impacting both the earth and other people. Currently the way most systems are designed, they are created without these two concepts in mind. Think of your local grocery store, it is not set up in a way to care for the earth or people. It is designed to illicit a shopping response and to manipulate the way you shop. It's goal is to get you to buy more groceries. Think about how local communities are planned. Again, it becomes pretty clear, pretty fast that these systems are not designed with people or the planet in mind. I think this will be a necessary shift in focus for us to create the kind of place where most of us would want to live if we were to have a choice. It will also be a necessary shift as we move towards sustainability and not the plunder of people and the earth.

Tree Grafting and Factor E Farm

Wow, what a cool way to spend a Saturday afternoon. I mean, yes, it was cold, but oh so cool. Lisa and I drove up to Maysville, Missouri from Kansas City for a plant propagation workshop at The Factor E Farm. Here is the group of us, Marcin Jakubowski, the founder, took the picture. They are working on creating a self sustainable reproducible village, with all designs for equipment, techniques and knowledge gained being shared with the world in an open source way. That means no barriers or restrictions to access the information. First Marcin gave us a tour of the farm and showed us a cordwood building, an earthbag building, and a couple of other types of shelters they are experimenting with. Check out the videos . They have chickens and goats on their farm. The focus of the workshop was plant propagation using grafting. Splicing one kind of tree onto another type of tree rootstock. Marcin was a gracious host and a wonderful and knowledgeable instructor. Using a grafting tool, we learned how to join together two varieties of apple, peach, and plum trees. The purpose is to basically "clone" the tree that provides the fruit specimens that you desire. By taking cuttings of small one year old branches, you can duplicate the variety by grafting them onto inexpensive root stocks you can buy, or cut your own from the varieties already growing on your land. The workshop was documented and can be accessed here.

Participants came from Prairie Village (Kansas), Kansas City (Missouri), and Tom, who was on a business trip in St. Louis, made the detour to attend. He lives in West Virginia. People from all over the world are interested in the eco village model, and people from all over the world have expressed interest in coming to live and work on the farm. We were very excited about the Farm and plan on volunteering in the coming months.

Marcin designed and built a diesel tractor that runs on veggie oil. It's plans and design are readily availible. It's low cost and easy to build. They also have a truck they power with veggie oil as well. If you are interested in becoming sustainable, you have got to check out their website. Look for upcoming information on what's going on. We are going up the end of this month to help out for a couple of days. We'll tell you all about it.