What is permaculture design?
Permaculture Design is the design of permanent cultures, of regenerative systems. It’s an approach to land and community stewardship that adopts arrangements observed in flourishing natural ecosystems. Indigenous folk across the world built sustainable communities in the same way, by observing how nature does it. Some common permaculture techniques for land stewardship include:
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- shaping the earth to escort rainwater from your rooftop gutters into planted basins and swales (so you don’t have to irrigate your garden once it’s established),
- using deep layered mulches to create soil beds that naturally hold water and release nutrients (so your landscape is drought-tolerant and needs no fertilizer, and some of your vegetables will over-winter),
- planting layered gardens that incorporate different kinds of plants to create a balanced ecosystem (so your plants thrive),
- planting “food forests” that offer nourishment for humans and other species (so you can graze on berries alongside the songbirds).
The chard over-winters in its deep mulch bed.
