Welcome to Tactical permaculture Episode Number One. This is Introduction to Permaculture Design.
It was originally recorded in 2017. Who here has heard the word permaculture before?
Okay, it's about a little over half, so does anyone wanna talk about what comes to mind when they hear that word or say that word?
Anyone? It is that exactly other definitions, key words, thoughts feelings?
So it's actually a contraction. It's permanent culture, permanent agriculture. Those are two different interchangeable sort of ways of looking at it.
The founder came up with back in the early the mid seventies in Australia.
I’ll talk a little bit about the origins. So there was a beautiful man whose name was BM.
He passed away not too long ago. And so let’s have a moment of silence to thank him for putting this body work together.
May he rest in peace, but not for too long, because we need to come back in the next life.
So there are many things to say about BM. A lot of people would say he was a prickly pair.
He liked to push people's buttons and get under their skin and really agitate people's assumptions about everything about the way we grow food, the way we relate to the land, the way we use resources and build physical structures and economic systems, political systems.
He was very critical, and he earned that, I'd say, he earned the right to be very critical because he works.
He was a logger, so he spent a lot of time destroying the forest and got to be intimately aware of how destructive that that practice was.
And he worked as a naturalist. He was a professor, that's just tip of the iceberg.
His level of meticulous study of the natural world is really unmatched, I think, by almost anyone else.
So he definitely has put in the hours to have these strong opinions.
Without going too much into his personal life story, the real take home about his life's work that led to the development of this teaching program called Permaculture Design.
It was really his understanding that the simplest, most glaring, most disastrous, sort of inescapable fact of what's wrong with just the food system, agricultural food system...
I'm gonna guide us to that realization, the same realization that he came to, that he has popularized through his works.
It's nice to take this journey in a form of a meditation.
So if you close your eyes and just drop into your body a bit and take some deep breaths into the nose, out through the mouth, taking your time feeling the breath go deep into the the belly.
You can even put your hand on on your belly to feel the belly expand as the the deeper breaths get, as far in as they can.
And just anchor yourself into your observation, into the smells, the sounds, of the environment that we're surrounded by, and even internal sensations, intuitions, visions.
There are so many different bits of information that we could pay attention to, it helps to drop into this meditative state, to be able to start to explore the inner and outer environments.
This is one of the key instruments in the permaculture design system, to enter a meditative state to observe.
And we'll talk more about that later. But what I wanna set up in your imagination, in your mind's eye, is a juxtaposition of imagery.
On one side, you can pick the side, doesn't matter which side.
But on one side of your cinematic display, your theater of imagination, conjure the images of modern industrial agriculture, factory farm, cafo operations, mass fields of just one single crop being grown for one cycle of production and replanting on an annual basis.
You have this very highly program systematized, mechanized, chemicalized, human engineered system that is our modern, so called conventional, ie, not traditional and not organic.
The conventional way of farming in the modern world, based on chemical fertilizers, chemical pesticides, herbicides and machine and animal labor, mostly, and also slave labor.
That's a really desolate landscape. A degrading landscape is constantly being depleted and is ultimately turn into a sterile, functionally sterile desert.
That is the non-regenerative, unsustainable and very recent, very patriarchal pattern of forcing the will of mechanized production onto a landscape with a certain set of intentions that we’ll ponder the intentions later.
But for now, it's just really to sink into the imagery of this.
Mechanized control, where everything originally on the landscape is displaced. There's no competition allowed.
There can be no other forms of life on this entire agricultural landscape that aren’t allowed.
So there's fences up, there's poisons, there's traps. There's just thoughtless, careless destruction of all life and habitat by trucks and airplanes and machines.
And even the sound pollution.
All the different machines at work creating this hellish environment. That's where our food comes from.
And if you look at the esoteric side of that, or the so-called spiritual side of that, there are also the implications of those vibrations of pain and suffering, how those affect the atomic structures, the quantum building blocks of the food that we consume.
So I invite you to breathe that out. That's a really, kind of polluted, gnarly, funky vibe, to hold your mind's eye and just sort of exhale that out, exhale that toxic experience out, and now turn to the opposite side in your mind’s eye, and we're going to be like Bob R.
And we're gonna paint a natural landscape where we're gonna discover a few things together, some happy trees.
I'm so glad this isn't skipping a generation. You're getting this means so much to me.
I want us to live in ecological landscapes that Bob R himself, bless his dear heart, would have rendered for us as the landscape design architect.
So if we look at a natural ecosystem on the land, let's say where there's a bit of grass, some open prairie type land, some ponds and lakes and streams and rivers, and just zoom out as far as you have to in your mind's eye to be able to get a really good picture of mountains and valleys and river deltas and all these different, unique, overlapping systems within systems, all functioning without any human intervention, or perhaps with indigenous, traditional human intervention that's almost invisible.
You wouldn't even know that it's being tended to like a garden because it looks so wild and so natural and so unordered, so unprogrammed and so wild and free and resilient.
So if we kind of zoom in now from having taken in that larger expanse of a snapshot of nature functioning on its own, we can observe a number of very important, functional system elements that we can start to apply to the damaged landscapes that we're inheriting in the modern world of post industrial chemical agriculture.
We can actually start taking that brush and paint some of those systems back onto and graft and borrow from the functioning natural systems.
Borrow the engineering principles and some of the seeds, some of the wild craft, herbs and whatnot.
But, but we wanna leave wild nature and indigenous maintained wild natural lands as intact as possible.
But we can just understand it, spend time studying it, and we can actually begin to repair what once on the other side.
Does anyone want to describe what some of the things that come into the mind's eye when you look at, when you zoom into the point where a grassland or a prairie begins to transition into a woodland or a forest, what does that look like in your mind's eye?
The magic word that was spoken, and thank you for all those who spoke, the magic word that was spoken, one of the most important keywords in the permaculture design system is that word “edge”.
In this context, it's used to draw attention to that point of transition between two different types of ecosystems.
Sometimes you'll hear this called biomes, or eco-tones. There's different ecology, or ecological scientific terms, that are used, I won't get too much into detail on those.
But the more broad concept is that, as a rule, as a constant in nature, you’re pretty much always guaranteed to see a higher density of life forms mostly cooperating together to create conditions conducive to more. So life's mission statement is exemplified in these edge zones, where you see a maximum density of beneficial interrelationships, where some species that require shade are being shaded by species that have broader leaves, let's say.
So there's also species that require certain elements to be in the soil that can't get by any other means, they have to cuddle up to species that would provide that.
And also all the different dynamics within the soil and the dynamics of pest and predator and prey, producers, consumers, and decomposes.
And more of those relationships are happening where that grassland meets the forest, and you have a sort of diagonal tapering gradient effect going from the ground up to the trees.
And so now I wanna zoom in even closer and say there's an opportunity, or eco-niches that cluster at these edge zones, vines can grow up.
There's still sunlight hitting that outer edge of the forest. But once you get into that forest, it's mostly shaded out, so there's very little growing on the forest floor, because the taller upper canopy of the trees is pretty much consuming all the sunlight.
And you occasionally see little glades openings in forest systems where you'll see light coming in.
And life starting over a new little system of edges is coming together.
So next time you're out in the wilderness and you see what looks like to be a cluster of life standing out in a landscape. It could be a low point in a valley, a low point in a canyon, where you see, wow, it's totally green.
There it’s all lush, where there's this trickle of water that’s sustained year round.
There's lots of that around Southern California. And you can see that there's an opportunity for infinite potential.
Diverse interactions among species that are meeting at these edges.
So that's the polar opposite of what we have become accustomed to in the industrial agricultural model.
And if we put our inquisitive, curious minds to it, we might actually shed the blind assumptions in this sort of zombie like acceptance of, well, anything technological is better, anything human engineered is superior.
Whatever “the man” says is the way it's gotta be.
You know, we just in this state of meditation, find it easier to just question, gently, question, what's wrong with this picture?
What's wrong with how the commercialized agricultural industries have completely lost the ability to understand how biological production happens on Earth.
So here’s a simpler way to kind of make a joke out of it, so does the forest need people to come out and fertilize it? No right? Somehow, it fertilizes itself.
Does it need people to come out and water it with irrigation?
Or does it somehow manage and maintain moisture levels sufficient to stay hydrated and grow tons of life?
I mean, very dense, high, productive life. No fertilizer, no irrigation.
Does it need people to come out and plant it, to constantly manage it, to pull weeds, and to make sure that everything grows by standing over it and fighting off all the birds and all the critters to keep them from eating the seeds and from ruining your garden or attacking your basil or whatever.
No, it’s just magically the essence of the forest building nature of our planet.
That foresting nature of our planet figured out how to intelligently, dare I say, consciously pull from these abundant resources, sunlight, moisture, the minerals in the soil, the decaying organic material in the soil, to create a symphony an orchestra of potentially infinite, stacked layers of species, all ultimately creating a balance.
An analogy is used, riding a bike, it’s resilient, it's constantly responding to weather changes and droughts and floods and all these different changing parameters.
But on the whole, it's very resilient. And of course, if we were to measure what's called biomass, measure the weight of the biomass of the wild forest ecosystem, and compare it to a corn field, which is gonna win? Which is gonna be heavier in production, it's the natural ecosystem.
But part of the reason for that, I'll just list a few points of why.
Why? How is that possible? Why is that? Well, the forest is stacking layers vertically.
It's not just one single tree crop. It's not an orchard.
It's not an orchard of just one single type of tree.
It's not a field of one bean or grain or seed.
It's not a patch of a certain type of lettuce that is only one species in an entire massive ecosystem which has, the potential to capture all the sunlight.
The way that nature makes use of the aspect of how the sun comes down, how it hits the ground.
It, consumes light, it will eat up and consume as much of that sunlight as it possibly can.
And it will grow on top of and and intertwined and entangle and build this stairway to heaven together in this beautiful orchestra and symphony of cooperation in order to maximize the potential for life.
So the vertical aspect is important. The other another aspect is that it's not just producing one vegetable or fruit or seed, etc. product one time in a year to then be tilled in.
There's so many different interlocking layers. They're producing all of those things staggered at different times throughout the year.
So you have multiple yields. This is another key word in permaculture.
One of the goals is to always obtain a yield. So the yield, the weight of one annual production of, let's say, corn from a mono culture.
Mono culture, meaning one plant on the landscape being planted.
It has very little weight because it's only happening once a year.
It's only one story high, and it's only one plant which makes it susceptible to pests, makes it an easy target, and pests can invade with no obstruction from other plants that provide shelter for other beneficial natural predators that would be the natural predators of the pest, so that they will be kept in balance.
So when you strip away all of those layers of natural wisdom in the forest ecosystem, you have this prison camp for life that is very unsustainable.
It's not resilient. It does not produce high yields. It’s only really successful at one thing.
And I'll ask for your help to to figure out what that thing is.
So if a forest production system is producing all of this abundant diversity for everybody, all life who joins, in the party, in a potluck of playing their part doing their role doing the work they need to do.
Worms are turning the soil over in a very elegant, very energy efficient manner.
Humans can be scattering seeds when they eat something, and then they do their thing, a little further down, always extending the forest.
Birds are dropping phosphorus at key locations where they post up and so on and so on.
Everyone has a duty, plays a role, and gets plenty in most cases.
And if there is a shift in the climate, shifts in the weather, shifts in the level of moisture, it's adaptable because there's so much flexibility in that system.
If you will, nature's intention is to create free food for everything.
Everyone who pulls their weight gets to be fed. In the commercialized industrial food system that we were exploring earlier, what's the intention of that system?
To be able to limit access and stack up profits, to be able to have private, proprietary ownership and to deprive human beings of free access to food, to deprive all life from nature's ever productive abundance that's free, or it comes at a price that's affordable in an average four hour a day, maximum. The typical gather hunter way of living on the landscape.
The horticultural societies that are growing food. They're not toiling to do it.
They're working with the natural systems. In a lot of those cultures.
You can't even tell, it doesn't look like what we think of as a farm.
It's not a grid. It's more of a jungle. And we're just adding to the natural system, and we're nudging it along, and we're choosing the species in our gardens that favor us, but don't disrupt or fundamentally undermine the wisdom of how these systems work, how they have been optimized for three and a half at least billion years of life, figuring out how to make the best use of the minerals, the sun, the water, etc.
What permaculture design offers us, and bring it back to the founder, BM and his assistant DH.
They put forth a thesis in the 1970s, after doing rigorous research and study, this simple, aha moment of revelation, that, in a word, what we need to be doing if we want to reverse engineer the abundance of that wild ecosystem...
Of course, we need to change our politics and our economics so that we’ll have an equitable food supply and food security.
You have to shift the social structures. There’s a lot of people are working on those kind of movements.
But there's a scientific, mechanical, technical, subtlety that a lot of people trying to change the world have overlooked which is this sort of secret.
How do they keep the secret from us? It's such a no-brainer.
So the word, the secret, magic word, is perennial. Does anyone know what that word means compared to what you know, if you go to the garden center, you got annuals and perennials sections, right?
What does annual mean?
So perennial, even if you’ve never heard the word before, what could that possibly be?
It produces more than one yield. Typically, it's used to describe plants that you are going to plant once and they're going to stay alive and just keep cranking and keep cranking and keep cranking for decades, if not hundreds, if not thousands of years, depending on the species.
So that's the sweet spot. That's what I wanna really set up as the introduction to what permaculture is, really the foundation of it.
The core of it, from which so many more layers of revelation have grown out of.
It's ridiculous to think of it as a discovery, because you can see it everywhere.
I mean, we're surrounded by perennials. We just have been fooled and then duped us to not put two and two together and connect the dots and say, hey, if we want free food for everybody forever, we don't need giant properties to grow giant fields to feed ourselves.
And this isn’t a left red communist kind of hammer and sickle... we don't need to control nature with tools and machines to that extent.
So the proletarian revolution can happen. Not to get too political, but for me, the reason I bring that up is it’s taking a step back from mechanized agricultural thinking.
We can actually say, you know what? With this sort of ecological origami that a forest does, we can fold the entire forest ecosystem into a backyard.
And now would be a good time to open your eyes and see, we have just the beginning of, this is the sort of scaffolding for a food forest that we're gonna be building here, where we have all the different elements.
This is a warm compost. The beginnings of it, it will have a more ornate, more down to earth clay pot that we’ll drain the water through so we can so we can harvest the fertility from it.
This has been going for quite a while already, so it's already pretty much ready to use.
We're gonna start putting our food scraps into the system.
They don't like the light, so I'm not gonna bother too much.
But these are red wiggler worms. They're often used as fish bait.
They do the work of breaking down all of our food scraps from the kitchen.
They do it in a very fast and efficient manner, and they produce a compost product that's the most nutrient dense of almost all compost products and you don't have to turn a pile for days and days and days by hand.
It's a good workout, but they'll do that work for you while you sleep.
So, again, leveraging the intelligence of nature. So we're just gonna start that up.
So, I wanna map and speak through what we've got going on here and how to be able to merge those systems.
We wanna, live in an abundance, in a wild, natural ecosystem that produces free food for everybody all the time, so that we can spend more time swinging in hammocks and writing music and singing songs and dancing and enjoying the stars and building beautiful cultures and living beautifully.
So now that we have that power, we're reclaiming the land, and we're starting this. This is what I do for a living, for my day job.
I'm actually doing lawn makeovers, front and backyard lawn makeovers almost every day of the week.
It's a struggle to get people to want to grow mostly food.
But at least they're planting native plants, and they're getting more drought tolerant plants.
But the first step to this makeover of reclaiming the power of the forest is to block out the weeds.
It's not too bad right here, but you'll see over there.
I mean, most of bBermuda grass is like this. It's almost like ecological barb wire. Most of my work comes from removing this stuff.
And I know it has its place perfectly nestled into a natural system somewhere. But in order to actually accelerate the forest building process, we have to block out these unsustainable, unnatural...it's a mono culture.
I mean, a grass. A lawn is a mono culture like any other.
It could be a cornfield. It's actually a lot of grasses that we've gone overboard with, um.
But you can have a lawn with multiple species clover and all kinds of different, beneficial, diverse, low growing vegetation that you can walk on and you can play games on and, it'll grow back even strawberries. So this could all be strawberries. And we got some over there actually.
So, from the ground up…
What this mulch is doing is actually mimicking the natural leaf litter and dead limbs dropping from a forest.
If we had the right size chipper, we could be actually repurposing these branches that we pruned back recently. We would be mulching that up. And actually, this is like scab material. There's nowhere in nature unless it is a desert naturally, where you're gonna see bare soil.
It's always got stuff growing wherever there's any potential for it.
So we're helping it along. We're borrowing some of the forest vegetation so we can mimic this effect and actually do what the forest does, which is retain moisture.
BM said once that every 3" of forest floor retains 1" of water. So basically it's suspended in this sponge. This is such a spongy material.
Look at all of that moisture that's staying I mean, it's ridiculous.
That's how a forest does this.
You know, you could have one rain get into a little pocket of this kind of mulch, and months later it can grow seeds out of it, because it has this storage tank of water just suspended in these fine, carbonacious materials that have dropped from above.
So what do they do on agricultural farms? When they take the crop, they take the vegetable, or the whatever the product is that they want to sell, and then they take everything out.
They don't return. There's a law of returns. You have to return the stocks of the plants back.
You have to compost it in place. You have to let this scab, they're making a gash, they're making an open wound, and then they're taking away all the scab materials.
So that's why the conventional farming system can only go for so long before they've completely destroyed the capacity of that soil to give life.
It goes from being soil which is moist and full of life to dirt which is dead.
But we can bring it back. We're rehabilitating the system now, with a simple kind of schematic that you can take away.
This was my favorite, learning about it this way.
This is what did it for me, because, actually, I took workshops where we did sheet mulching, and I learned about what they call natural accelerated succession.
Succession is just the cycle of a forest doing its thing.
But we can apply our intelligence to speed up that process.
Nature will make compost, but it takes a lot longer just sitting in place, getting moist and rotting and breaking down.
We can speed up the process by concentrating the efforts of nature without harming them.
We're making environments for life that are at least as good, if not better, than the wild state that they're in.
I like to design habitat for life where it is in paradise. It's not in a cage. It's not feeling limited.
And I feel like it's mixing a zoo with a farm. Give plenty of space to everything, you have a more ethical way of tending the wild.
The Permaculture Designers manual. It’s the main textbook for the permaculture design course, which is a 72 hour course.
When DH and BM really dialed in this thesis about perennial agriculture, where we should be thinking about growing plants that are producing frequently more than once a year at a time, where we can let nature just drop and drop and drop and just build up.
So every year of a forest soil ecosystem, year soil gets better on its own.
So we shouldn't have to be putting in mined minerals and pulling oil out of the ground, creating fossil fuel, petrochemical based fertilizers.
When, if we just grew tree crops, or even had alleys or rows of, let's say, fruit or nut trees staggered in between our annual crops, which we're still gonna grow annuals, there's nothing wrong with them, but intermingling, polyculture is another keyword.
So how do we go from mono culture to poly culture, understand perennials, and bring it all together in a designer system?
There's so much science and technical minutia about it, but the easiest way to say, from this point on, that you can see somebody at a bus stop and walk them through how we can save the world together, in the park right behind you...
It's easy things to point out. So there's seven layers, vertical layers, in a natural force ecosystem. There's more granularity if you add aquatic systems.
We’ll stick to the seven layers for the purpose of this conversation.
Can anyone think of a few types of food that grow underground?
Potatoes, radishes, carrots, right? You got it so underground.
If we can make it productive, edible or otherwise useful to us, to feed animals or to feed ourselves, we would consider that a root crop and the root layer of the system.
So that's the very bottom below the surface of the ground.
And then what are some plants that grow horizontally across the flat surface of the ground?
Let's think of things that are more kind of clustering.
There you go, strawberries,
And basically there are, you would call them creepers or prostrate plants.
There, there species that are going to grow low lying and just cover, kind of carpeting the surface.
Creeping thyme, is a great example.
So if you were designing a garden, and you wanted to fill up space...
Mint is a good example, things that will just grow across.
It's non-woody plants that grow out sideways,
Then there are herbaceous plants that grow above ground but aren’t woody and don’t grow climbing vines.
Then you have the shrub layer, which is that would actually be more like blueberries.
They grow kind of a woody stem, but they're not giant trees, just more like bushes.
There's all kinds, a lot of the berries grow like that.
So you've got that layer, the layer of shrubs, and up from that, you've got the lower canopy, which is, let's say, up there.
But those giant palm trees, they're the top, they're the, the tallest ones in this whole system.
So these would be the lower canopy trees, which these could all be, we're gonna add more in here, but we'll have lower canopy fruit trees, citrus, nuts.
Mulberries, avocados, all those kind of trees, some of those, will, in certain systems, go very high up.
But that's where you really get to put on your designer’s hat, to study and know what food crops that we like to eat that are beneficial to the ecosystem, that are appropriate for the climate, require minimal effort to sustain...
How can we fill in all these vertical niche?
There’s also the vining layer, which is those species that will tend to spiral and grow up things.
Cucurbits, those are the pumpkins, squashes, cucumbers, zucchinis, all those in that family.
So now, if you can just, close your eyes again or leave them open, either way is fine.
But now, when you're at the grocery store from now on, you can actually ask yourself, which of those seven layers does this food crop occupy?
And you can already start designing in your head.
There's a lot of stuff from the store that you can just plant, right?
It's cheaper to buy your plant stock from a grocery store than it is to buy from a nursery.
Green onions, potatoes, carrots, if there’s still a living root ball on it...and they're starting to sell herbs with living roots on them.
So you can just cut the tops off and plant them. They'll do better if you cut the greens off and then plant them, and then you can already start.
There are very unique, complex relationships, invisible, microscopic relationships in the soil that make all this possible.
That's a whole other chapter, that's a whole study. There's people who devote their entire lives. They're only just beginning to scratch the surface of what's going on in the soil, the density of microbial life in one drop of water.
It's astounding. And you should look it up online, just see pictures of it.
That's where it all begins. So you can zoom in to any of these elements of a forest system and and just make a life study out of it.
But what's so elegant about the permaculture system? And again, I'm only just trying to get you excited about the idea that we can heal the planet.
We can take a snapshot of any forest system and say, hey, you know what?
If we had a magic wand, or could snap our fingers and fill up all of these vertical spaces with food crops that we enjoy, how much will we be feeding the neighborhood out of his backyard, just with what's here.
If everything that you see here that is green and alive was an edible food crop, we would stop working on the treadmill, the hamster wheel.
We would be spending our time together creating beautiful, elaborate meals and having potlucks and sharing.
And if one person's house had a better solar aspect, than another than one, if you get more shady areas, you grow mushrooms.
If you got more sun, grow citrus. It's an interconnected web of social interactions.
And that's a whole other sub science within permaculture, social permaculture, where we look at how we can design beneficial guilds.
Another keyword, guilds meaning conscious groupings of mutually beneficial, synergistic relationships between species, or people and species, or, it's really infinitely scalable, these different modules of thinking and methodology.
I think that is a good place to come to a stop.
Let me just take a breath and see if there is anything else that will be good to close with on this little wrap.
Just back to the word, the word itself, permanent culture, permanent agriculture, kind of use interchangeably the ideas that nature has been foresting.
The earth has been foresting so much longer than we've been here.
And if we step back and get out of the way, it will consume everything we've built with forest.
So we can get on our surf board and surf the wave of rewilding that's just always happening all the time.
Or we can waste all of our energy and kill ourselves with fossil fuel poison. Why live in a nice area if all you hear is the buzzing of machines hacking it, all the life around you and blowing the leaves and just poisoning everything.
That's not a high quality of life. If you let the wave come and just consume you, and it's like a tidal wave of wild nature coming at us all the time.
And all we gotta do is, put a bunch of seed in our pocket and run and just throw them in, and then we’ll be completely enveloped by it, and we'll be back in the garden. It’s just pounding on our door.
And we're putting in all this fossil fuel effort, all these machines to fight it back, so that people can make that proprietary, closed source...
And that's where you get into genetic modification, patenting life, all those things.
How can you take this beautiful monstrosity of life on Earth and control it and limit access to it?
It takes a lot of energy and we're getting close to the point where it's not gonna be as easy to tap those energy reserves. It’s gonna get more difficult, and we're gonna see more resistance, hopefully, and rebellion, as people wake up.
That was it, my non-comprehensive introduction of permaculture. And now I'm open for questions.