Exploring the principles

[neckie]

I'd like to see a new topic area to look at the principles and perhaps give some new examples. I still talk about the greenhouse on the side of a chicken shed as the classic example of relative location! I think it would be good to use this forum to explore and share knowledge about the roots of permaculture.
to set the ball rolling heres a good example of "the problem contains the solution. "
My mate works with kids on a community orchard. they recently took on a new garden that was very steep and covered in Japanese knotweed. Its like a mountain he thought and would need a rope to safely get from the bottom to the top. and a mountain is now what it is and the kids love it. He reckons its the most popular part of the orchard and is ideal for inner city kids to explore something thats wild and a catalyst for their imaginations. so instead of days of digging out a pernicious weed and putting in terracing all he had to do was slash his way to the top and attach a rope!
OK so theres no food grown there but where else can inner city kids climb a mountain in a jungle!!

[JohnB]

I'm a bit reluctant to add new sections until things get more active. It's not that long since I reduced the number. I agree that examples are a good idea though.

A friend showed me their bedroom the other day. It's also used for some simple music recording, and space is a bit tight. I took one look at it and suggested building a new bed over a cut down chimney with storage underneath, and using the space where the bed is now for the recording equipment. My friend has spent years living in vans, with limited space, but was amazed and really excited by my simple suggestion. I may even end up helping with designing and building it!

How many chicken houses are there attached to greenhouses?

[neckie]

"how many chicken houses are there attached to greenhouses?"
Probably not many and I think thats a problem with permaculture-that we all still use Bills examples and don't think of relevant ones for ourselves!!
Which is why it would be great to see this forum more widely used!

[JohnB]

Which is why it would be great to see this forum more widely used!

It could happen. There are plans, but I don't know when.

To me, the big thing about permaculture is the different way of thinking, where you do what's appropriate for your location and the needs of the people there. The big problem is getting the message through to people who don't think that way. If there were too many chicken houses attached to greenhouses, someone would start making a mass produced building that would be appearing in everyone's garden, whether it was appropriate or not. I'm just curious to know if it really works.

[neckie]

To me, the big thing about permaculture is the different way of thinking, where you do what's appropriate for your location and the needs of the people there

Exactly which is why I like the japanese knotweed example. Its totally appropriate for the needs of that project. And certainly not replicable!! I always think of permaculture as an imagination intensive thing but that makes it hard to explain sometimes, to the point where I often don't use the word when showing people around our community garden. I feel one of the drawbacks of permaculture education is that people do a design course and then don't find people who "talk the language" to debate with when they return to "normal life"
Lets hope this forum changes that!

[neckie]

[quote]To me, the big thing about permaculture is the different way of thinking, where you do what's appropriate for your location and the needs of the people there

Exactly which is why I like the japanese knotweed example. Its totally appropriate for the needs of that project. And certainly not replicable!! I always think of permaculture as an imagination intensive thing but that makes it hard to explain sometimes, to the point where I often don't use the word when showing people around our community garden. I feel one of the drawbacks of permaculture education is that people do a design course and then don't find people who "talk the language" to debate with when they return to "normal life"
Lets hope this forum changes that!

[Steve Pritchard]

Hi Neckie,

'The problem is the solution' is wonderful. It amuses me to think that had a permaculture designer been on the Titanic that every one would have got onto the iceberg built a windbreak from ice and partied on.

We moved to a new garden this summer and I have never seen so many ants nests. Both red and black, we could hardly sit down for them. I was thinking their presence is useful as an indicator ...of something.
Now we are about to create a chicken forage system and backyard aquaculture and suddenly this mass of nests is a great free biological resource.

Steve

[JohnB]

Now we are about to create a chicken forage system and backyard aquaculture and suddenly this mass of nests is a great free biological resource.
Steve

Are you going to farm ants to keep the system going, otherwise what will you do when Peak Ant occurs?

[Steve Pritchard]

Great wit and good point

Both poultry and fish will be introduced at low numbers and neither system would cover all the garden.

With the birds there is the possibility of rotation into different areas. We would monitor the effects of the birds on the ecology.

I imagine we might feed ants to the fish and have immediate control.
Maybe we could also design some ecological trap to allow the fish limited access to the ants automatically.

Also as a back-up we might find ourselves farming ants! Strangely, when my dad died I found a large book about the biology and life cycle of British ants amongst his things. It is obviously is meant to happen.

Steve

[pixie]

How many chicken houses are there attached to greenhouses?...I'm just curious to know if it really works.

I used to have one! It was one of the first things I did years'n'years ago when I started on the permie trail...Don't know what difference it made to the greenhouse but the chickens enjoyed it! Think human houses attached to glasshouses have taken over commercially tho...

Like the idea of space for good ideas - so here's one from an inventive friend of mine:

He's upended a chunky old radiator and attached it half way up the wall near the wood-burning stove where it does not 1, not 2 but 3 things...as well as heating the room, it collects air out of the system and is also a plate warming rack. Some would say its also a artistic installation and its definitely a conversation piece so that's 5 uses!

[neckie]

heres an example of how not to turn a problem into a solution. I spotted this while walking in North Yorkshire. The smallholder obviously had some spare asbestos sheets and decided they would make an excellent path between the track and his field.....

asbestos path.JPG (46.63 KiB) Viewed 190 times

[neckie]

Now we have a few more forum users I wondered if anyone might want to explore a few more principles.
Has any one "designed from patterns to details"? What did ya design, was it succesful, what was the pattern?

[gunther]

Now we have a few more forum users I wondered if anyone might want to explore a few more principles.
Has any one "designed from patterns to details"? What did ya design, was it succesful, what was the pattern?

aehm. i must admit, i'm a fan of natural farming a la fukuoka.(do little or nothing)
i'm still at a loss, what principles, designs, patterns are
no machinery or (hardly any) tools are needed
i grow potatoes (lazy beds) followed by broad beans or peas, then courgettes a. pumpkins.(planting stick)
and then there's lots of buckwheat. (broadcast)
a brilliant variety of kale (old crofters, hard as nails, selfseeding)
for the rest i've identified at least a dozen of wild greens for spinach
and there are mediteranian kitchenherbs.

then there are the 2 bee-hives.(no interference, honey harvest, if any in winter)
at the moment i tend to go vegean, but i used to have a handfull of "wild " chickens, that needed hardly feeding.(elevated hen-house, roll away nest boxes)

on my 2 acres all the crops are shifted around, so the ground gets a rest in between.

there are fruit trees and soft fruits, that need no care.

with all the wild growth, i could keep 1 or 2 goats, but they would need herding.
anyway, with so many hazelnuts spreading , i might be able to do without them.
after 8 years, i hope to live very soon entirely of my land, and not use any money
(very, very basic a bit like paleo life-style )

there are small issues, like the buckwheat needs protecting against deer
i use electric fencing for a few weeks.
that could be powered by a waterwheel, since there is a small brook. (yet to be organized)

now i hope this is not totally OT in this forum

all the best gunther

PS: i feel most important is a kind of spiritual attitude: nothing fails like success,
failure is always a blessing in disguise.

[tinamou]

I like your thinking, gunther.

The way I see it, illustrated by this nicely written quote from The Archdruid, permaculture is about constructing traps, to catch and hold the flow of energy...

A garden bed, to begin with, is a device for collecting energy from the sun by way of the elegant biochemical dance of photosynthesis. Follow a ray of sunlight from the thermonuclear cauldron of the sun, across 93 million miles of hard vacuum and a few dozen miles of atmosphere, until it falls on the garden bed. Around half the sunlight reflects off the plants, which is why the leaves look bright green to you instead of flat black; most of the rest is used by the plants to draw water up from the ground into their stems and leaves, and expel it into the air; a few per cent is caught by chloroplasts – tiny green disks inside the cells of every green plant, descended from blue-green algae that were engulfed but not destroyed by some ancestral single-celled plant maybe two billion years ago – and used to turn water and carbon dioxide into sugars, which are rich in chemical energy and power the complex cascade of processes we call life.

Most of those sugars are used up keeping the plant alive. The rest are stored up until some animal eats the plant. Most of the energy in the plants the animal eats gets used up keeping the animal alive; the rest get stored up, until another animal eats the first animal, and the process repeats. Sooner or later an animal manages to die without ending up in somebody else’s stomach, and its body becomes a lunch counter for all the creatures – and there are a lot of them – that make their livings by cleaning up dead things. By the time they’re finished with their work, the last of the energy from the original beam of sunlight that fell on the garden bed is gone.

Where does it go? Diffuse background heat. That’s the elephant’s graveyard of thermodynamics, the place energy goes to die. Most often, when you do anything with energy – concentrate it, move it, change its form – the price for that gets paid in low-grade heat. All along the chain from the sunlight first hitting the leaf to the last bacterium munching on the last scrap of dead coyote, what isn’t passed onward in the form of stored chemical energy is turned directly or indirectly into heat so diffuse that it can’t be made to do any work other than jiggling molecules a little. The metabolism of the plant generates a trickle of heat; the friction of the beetle’s legs on the leaf generates a tiny pulse of heat; the mouse, the snake, and the coyote all turn most of the energy they take in into heat, and all that heat radiates out into the great outdoors, warming the atmosphere by a tiny fraction of a degree, and slowly spreading up and out into the ultimate heat sink of deep space.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/ ... force.html

[gunther]

hi tinamou

i've just read the 2nd reply to the green wizards post, that you quoted:

ne of the unfortunate effects of the lack in our language of a specific word for chi, "the force," etc. is that we have chosen to apply the term "energy" to that phenomenon as well. We've talked about this before, that metaphysical "energy" and real physical energy are not at all the same phenomenon. Yet, in newage-y general discourse the two are widely confused, and physical terminology is wrongly applied to metaphysical concepts. They are not the same, they come from very different conceptual formulations, they are not interchangeable, they do not have the same properties or obey the same laws, they aren't really even good metaphors for each other. I think it is very important for one to be clear on this distinction if one's intent is results in the physical world. You can raise all the "energy" you want through meditation, ceremonial magic, skillfully placed crystals, and inspired use of language, but that will still avail you nothing if your plants just are not getting enough sunlight (physical energy)! Of course one can argue the converse, that you can give your garden all the sunlight it could use but if the chi is wrong it will still not flourish. Two different things, neither will substitute for the other.

Just important to keep in mind. If your house is cold (the temperature is low), look to the thermodynamics; if your house is cold (uninviting, sad, off-putting) look to the feng shui.

regards gunther