What are your favorite permaculture practices?
What are your favorite permaculture practices?
Hello! Thank you for creating this community. I hope these sort of text discussion posts are okay.
I'd like to know - how do people here practice permaculture? What sort of habits have you created? What sources do you learn from?
I'm a suburb-bound person who is constantly trying to bring more permaculture practices into my life, and spaces that show me what others are doing really help.
I also have a small patch to work with and it is so rewarding. I started reading about permaculture because I hated the idea of added npk fertilizers to make plants grow. It felt so unintuitive and daunting to me.
The moment I read about dynamic accumulation, soil life cycles and guilds it was like a bomb went off in my head. I was so excited I had to read everything I could. I love the idea of a mostly closed cycle and reusing as much of what the garden and my kitchen waste could provide.
Same with me! Project Gutenberg has so many gardening e-books about closed cycle farming, they just called it something else in the 1860s🤯
I thought I would respond with my own - I've been trying to design some low energy indoor gardens from recycled materials. I think that's permaculture?
Of course I make it sound much fancier than it is. I just keep old containers, fill them with water, and then stick old aerogarden seed planters in the top and grow them hydroponically. I've had some luck growing jalapeno peppers and just recently tried cherry tomatoes. I got a few tiny ones :)
I think I'd maybe like to scale up to a hydroponic tower type setup, I'm not sure. Looking for ideas.
We do the same with old containers.
We also have our own compost. Started from some fishing worms and kitchen scraps. Black gold has helped out with pots and gardening.
I've definitely tried to compost and failed. I think I tried to go too big and I think maybe I didn't account enough for the dry air in the sonoran desert. Whats your compost process like? Does it take much watering?
I do have a local worm farm that lets me pick up compost for super cheap, which is nice - but I'd still like to make better use of my kitchen scraps.
That's the essence of permaculture, right there with what you're doing. I wish I could help, my hydroponics experience is limited to putting flower cuttings in rainwater and watching them die!
I haven't checked it out yet, but you might be interested in Tody Hemenway's "Permaculture City" https://tobyhemenway.com/book/the-permaculture-city/
oo neat, I will have to see if I can get this onto my kindle!
Subscribed! I use a milpa/food jungle/ drought friendly/chop and drop method for vegetable gardening in zone 6b. I learned about chop and drop/drought friendly from "David The Good" at www.survivalgardener.com. I ended up buying all his books and they helped me to reduce my water waste, reduce weeding and have more fun out there.
I also live in the suburbs. I have a very small garden where I initially took the stone coverage away, added some compost to mostly sand, and then planted out a number of species from a local permahero. Now it mostly lives by itself, with a lot of cool insects in it. I also have a small raised bed where I put some wood, charcoal and compost, and now plant stuff with varying success. But the birds love the living soil. Am dreaming of buying more land one day.
I've been stealthily replacing the ornamental plants in my gated community here with edible plants of similar size so noone notices. Pineapple tops, pomegranate bushes, strawberry groundcovering, papaya stalks, bananas, baby orange and mandarin trees, etc. Moringa is great too, but I know the drumsticks on those things will litter the property, so I had to plant those just outside the property so nobody gets ticked off at the mess.
I'm currently living in an apartment, so I'm very limited in what I can do. Nonetheless, I have a number of potted plants on my balcony. I first tried growing food lile tomatoes, but it was too much effort for too little payoff. This summer I'm just growing low-maintenance native and naturalized plants that can thrive on neglect: purple prairie clover (for nitrogen fixation), some dandelions that have colonized my pots despite being on a 4th-floor balcony, Utah sweetvetch (also for nitrogen fixation), wild bergamot (for pollinators), and several other unidentified plants that have managed to colonize my pots.
In the near-term future I want to buy some land outside of the city to build a permaculture fish pond, chinampas, and silvopasture.