October 1, 2023

Hey everyone. I wanted to share some Permaculture Advice I found online. This is not a summary, rather a list of things that I thought were useful. Would love to know if anyone has put any of these into practice & what your experience was! Cheers.
Chapter 1 - Permaculture Principles
• Use a natural plant succession to establish favorable sites/soils (opposed to buying soil, compost, additives, chemicals) – plan/strategize in stages
• Leverage things like elevation when capturing water and let gravity move the water opposed to pumps
• Consider every input, output, and behavior when adding an element to your site (be it a plant, livestock, or something else)
• A chicken house adjoined with a green house is very favorable (heat, carbon dioxide, etc.)
• Zone things so that those which require the most intensity/effort are closest, and those that use the least are furthest (but also consider local factors like access, slope, climate quirks, etc.)
• Use zone wedges (think pizza slice) if you want to expand the effect of a zone on others (like wild animals/birds)
• Use grey water (not black water) on gardens – implies grey & black water are separated (and grey water doesn’t have ingredients unfriendly to plants)
• Pay attention to elevation/water – use dry country plants on high/rocky areas vs high water requirement plants in lower spots
• Putting mulch production areas (like forests or livestock areas) higher elevation makes getting the mulch down to the garden area easier
• How to know if a component is placed well: maximizes site resources, external energies, and slope/elevation
• Use thought and management to maintain property over machines or brute force
• There is a line between helpful and harmful when it comes to livestock grazing – pay attention to it
• Earthworms are important for pumping air into soils (wonder if this has any implication with compacting soil when planting)
• Deep rooted species help mine nutrients that normally would not be available to other plants
• Leguminous trees & plants are essential and raise crop yield by about 80%
o Legumes cut or pruned before flowering release nitrogen into the soil via roots
• Spiny plants are great for fencing
• Allelopathic plants are great at suppressing weed growth
• Effective management sometimes requires appropriate timing
• Don’t use chickens on a mulched garden or orchard (they disturb the mulch when foraging)
• Use treated sewage to produce fertilizer (curious about how)
• Goal of permaculture is to catch, store, recycle, use, and increase energy
• If you can’t improve a system, leave it alone
• Start small, closest to your house, increase outwards only if you don’t sacrifice the ability to manage what is closest. Intensity > quantity
• Most Philippines houses use about 12 square meters and produce most food for the family
• Plant stacking (vertically) increases total yields
• Temperate orchard trees need air movement to reduce fungal problems
• Use time stacking to sequence – can plant the next crop before the last is finished
• It is natural for the ecosystem to change over time

• Use what is already growing instead of fighting it
o Sheet mulch soft weeds
• Don’t dig up annual weeds, produces more sprouts (seeds in soil are activated by light & water)
• Use Comfrey to combat weeds (comes up through weeds)
• Don’t confuse order and tidiness – tidiness is a compulsive activity, opposed to thoughtful creativity
• Sum of yields > individual yields, helps reduce impact of environmental anomalies (like ill-timed frost)
• Leverage self-storing species (like tubers, bard seeds, nuts, or rhizomes) for on-demand needs
• Diversity alone isn’t enough, need to understand when things are cooperative or not. Functional connections between elements > # of elements in a system
• Guilds are elements that work harmoniously together
• Almost all cultivated fruit trees thrive in herbal ground coverage, not grasses (like Comfrey or Spring Bulbs)
• Trap Crops – want to know more… Like venus fly trap? What are some practical applications?
• Scattering plants makes it hard for pests to jump from one to another
• An edge is an interface between to mediums, and generally increase productivity (resources from 2 systems are available)
• We can settle on edges or establish our own
• Edges often trap materials that can be leveraged
• Spiral patterns that also increase in elevation provide many micro-climates for sun or shade loving species
• Lobe patterns are great for protecting a species from animals and winds
• Ditch & bank configurations (chinampa) are highly productive, muck can be brought up in buckets to increase fertility
• Zig Zag patterns are stronger than straight vs winds
• Everything works both ways, take for instance wind – harms growing crops but can be leveraged for wind power. Find the uses of everything and exploit them
• Permaculture is information & imaginative intensive (work smarter not harder)
• Maximize or minimize effects to achieve desired outcomes
Use trap crops - Some commonly used trap crops are nasturtium for aphids and Hubbard squash for squash bugs. Purple Bok Choy for brassica pests. They zero in on the purple Bok Choi and leave his other brassica alone.

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Decolonizing Permaculture: Very informative insights here....
https://santacruzpermaculture.com/2021/04/decolonizing-permaculture/