“I deeply believe that people are the only critical resource needed by people. We ourselves, if we organise our talents, are sufficient to each other. What is more, we will either survive together or none of us will survive.” - Bill Mollison

I’m autistic and highly introverted. I manage to spend time at home with my wife, and I visit my Dad every now and then, and beyond that I really struggle to socialise. It’s not that I’m terribly bad at it, but it takes up all my energy. Too much socialising leaves me tired, stressed and overwhelmed.

A lot of permaculture writing (such as the quote above) focuses on community being critical to a healthy permaculture system. Care of People is one of the core principles.

I know the theory around permaculture is not some heavenly scripture to be followed by everyone in the same way, and it’s ok to pick and choose the values that work for us each as individuals, but the value of community really does resonate with me, both in terms of teaching and learning from others, building a movement to move the world to more sustainable practices, and the practical side involving barter systems that promote resilience (e.g. via crop diversity across different people within a community, sharing of specialist skills, mutual labour etc).

So in theory I value and want to be involved in a local community - one that’s bigger than just me, my wife and my dad - but in practice it just feels like it’s against my nature and I’m forcing something that’s painful for me.

I’m interested to hear from other introverts involved in permaculture. How do you think about community? Have you found manageable ways to incorporate community into your practise, that you find less exhausting? Do you just do the community stuff even though it wears you out? Or do you have your own more isolationist value system that’s compatible with your personality?

tried searching but could not find much about it

wondering how to prevent roots from cloging the system

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thanks

I know this has been talked about in circles, but I'm really struggling with committing to a decision. I'm zone 4b in WI USA. Roughly 34" rain/per year and about 48" snow/ year, but lately more like 30 to 40" of snow. We commonly experience much less rain in in El Nino years. Experienced a severe drought last season. I have 2 acres of pasture on a north facing majority 10% slope. Loamy silt soil. We are a cut flower farm. And I want to start expanding into woody ornamentals. I'd like to establish an agriforestry system using a diversity of shrubs and trees and herbaceous layers for both harvesting production and for ecological benefits. I'd do alley grazing between plantings on contour.

I'm struggling with whether it's worth putting the time and resources into swales in this context. We do get a fair amount of precipitation most years and it a north slope. But I'm concerned about resilience in the ocassionally very dry years. Throwing this out there to see if anyone has something else worth considering to help me make a decision.

I have not had much joy through this forum, my posts either dissapear or are removed for failing some of the rules. Why cant we link to our own content? anyways.. i keep trying, do get in touch if any of this is of interest...

I am based at Treflach farm on the Welsh / England, Powys/ Shop border. It is a regenerative farm where we have been teaching permaculture and offering horticultural therapy for many years. My involvement sas always been a bit off and on, but i really want to build it into something much stronger, the potential is here, the farm has great infrastructure, good location and they are very cool people. With some help i think we can go much further .. it is such a great opportunity. The farmers family are fully stretched basically but if i can bring in more people/ energy/ resoures then the potentials is there for so much more.

I am planning to run a PDC there in Sept/ Oct also, this should give us something to build on. since 2020 I have been building a garden there, and it is starting to look really great.. there are classroom space,s social spaces and parking and camping.. so please reach out to me if any of this is of interest, i love to collaborate with the right people.

i dont live at the farm, but in a nearby village, where i am slo involved in housing co-operatives and am active in the local community. I also teach permaculture in East Africa with links to farmers, teacehr and refugees there, it all links together is some wider way!

Hello, I am a student preparing a presentation on permaculture. I was wondering if 'companion plants' could be made artificially. is there anyone who knows about this?? I am quite desperate

Libro had a BOGO sale recently and I picked up Silent Spring and The Secret Life of Trees. I had already read about half of Silent Spring but tailed off at the end. I’m re”reading” it now and it struck me how much of the 2nd chapter sounds like it comes from a permaculture book. I’m pretty sure I could copy edit it down to be the first chapter to one.

Silent Spring is over 60 years old, and it blew up at the time. The permaculture book turns 50 this year, and I can’t help wonder how many of the seeds of permaculture were planted in Bill and David’s fertile minds by reading her book.

If I understand the no-till motivation correctly, the concern is that that tilling exposes raw soil to the sun and too much oxygen, which kills critical soil life.

Would tilling but then immediately covering with compost and then mulch mitigate that downside? Would that protect the soil life? If so, you'd be able to get the short term benefits of tilling without the long term damage it causes.

For reference this would be on something like a 15x20 garden bed, not as it pertains to massive monoculture farming or whatever.

Of course I could be missing something obvious. Thanks!

What is the permaculture way of dealing with anthracnose specifically on mango trees? All solutions I've been told so far involve chemical spraying. Is there a natural effective way to deal with it?

First time posting in this subreddit, thanks for hearing me out. I have 11 acres i am working on. Much of it is in an eroded and degraded state. Lots of gullying, hardpan clay, invaded heavily with sumac and red cedars. Like most land around here there are tons of deer but no keystone herd ruminants or large predators to maintain a healthy prairie, so i anticipate that left alone it would only continue to degrade. However, i have been there two years and every time i go out i also find several new species of natives. Many of which are diminutive and of little use to me, but interesting and kind of unique. I have dug several swales and started introducing shrubby legumes, key native pollinators, and the like, taken out much of the sumac and an increasing number of cedars, and more. I recognize that typically the next step is to increase the number of cover crops and chop and drop biomass accumulators, bring in large amounts of compost and/or mulch, or bring in grazers like goats. I'm hesitating over disrupting the unique flora i keep finding on the site. I know it's probably sentimental, the land will only degrade further without intervention, and move towards the woodland state that has already taken over the lower half of the property, shading those species out, and what's even the point of doing this if i don't make the big moves needed to bring in the fruits, nuts and vegetables that make permaculture so useful and exciting. Yet, once i pull the trigger there's no going back. Has anyone here wrestled with this? Is there an elegant solution to preserve the soil seedbank, or do i just need to bite the bullet and let it go, leaving the matter of natives to the large acrage dedicated preserves?

Looking to learn more about and possibly join a active community if that's a thing. New Yorker here.

Hi everyone, I’ll be starting my PDC this coming Fall, and I can hardly wait!

As we all know, Mollison’s Design Manual is pretty thick. I like to listen to books; I find it more relaxing, and it helps me avoid eye strain.

Unfortunately my iOS won’t do Voiceover for the chapters of the PDM that I’ve downloaded to my kindle. The newer iOS has another “speak screen” function and that doesn’t work either.

I can’t find any YouTube videos of it being read aloud either.

Would anyone happen to have any resources? I’d love to relax on my porch and just listen to the text.

Thank you in advance!

Gophers here on the farm in Oregon are a major issue, causing damage to fruit trees. What are some methods y’all are using to limit & manage your gopher population? Thanks in advance for any help!:)

bananas get too big, and spiders love them. i dont want banana plants so close (20 meters) from the house

faitly low volume of grey water, around 60 litres of grey water daily, twice a week when using the washing machine it goes up to 100~110, and on some weekends (family visiting) the daily gray water use can go up to 300 for two or three days

so as the idea is to use plants to filter the water,

so instead of using bananas can i simply use other broad leaf plants like Xanthosoma sagittifolium, yam, philodendron undulatum, colocasia esculenta etc.

yes i understand bananas soak tons of water, but as there isnt really that much, these other plants ought to be enough?

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Having grown fruit and veggies in homemade raised beds and being thrilled about the results, I'm now looking to eliminate all non-edibles from my yard if possible.

I have a small place (~1/10 acre including the house) so it's like...a fairly brief area. Enough for a few raised beds, and a strip along the front of the house that I'm putting herbs in because while ground cover flowers are pretty, I'm hooked on functionality (and couldn't find creeping thyme at the store lol). I think now that growing zones shifted, I'm technically in 7, but I'm along the Mass east coast, not far from the shore. Not right on it, so we're not getting ocean spray, but near.

My yard is an unholy abomination of weeds. Grass has been half-outcompeted, and what remains is scraggly and mixed. I tried to overseed with clover to keep the weeds down, and that did exactly nothing. I get that dandelions are edible, but a lot of what's out there isn't, and want to rip the whole thing out and replace with things we can eat. I'd rather something that doesn't spoil immediately, so while I do have some raspberries, I don't want everything to be so ephemeral. Right now I have: beets, potatoes, tomatoes, raspberries we have to fight to keep under control, a couple blueberry bushes, and some mint I'm trying to wrangle (mint was a mistake, wow).

I have prolific rabbit compost from when we kept rabbits in years past, and I've used that in my yard. So the soil is pretty fertile despite being an utter travesty above ground.

So I have questions, as a total amateur.

1. What else can I plant? I've tried onion. They never, ever come up. I tried celeriac, nothing grew. I don't understand why they won't cooperate...

1a. Why are onions such a failure? The one time they did come up, they were tiny.

2. I'm trying to avoid my yard becoming a hellhole of mosquitoes. When the grass grows long, we can't walk outside without getting eaten. I know a lot of "pest repellant" crops aren't actually effective and are just urban legend. Does permaculture tend to allow mosquitoes too many hiding places? We've painstakingly eliminated standing water, but I can't control my neighbors next door if they leave out a bucket or something. We also have wild bunnies and slugs that love cabbage.

3. I don't eat greens much. It's cabbage and really nothing else. Most are too bitter for me. My husband will eat some, but I'd rather not have an entire plot of spinach. Root veggies rule, though, and tomatoes and such. What is good to plant that isn't just "salad leaves"?

4. I'm hoping for perennials, though I know most crops are annuals. Is that reasonable? What things will actually reseed for next year?

5. How to keep the damn weeds out? The instant I clear an area, they're already sprouting. I'm dead set against using herbicides, even though I've heard glyphosate breaks down fast in soil. Picking every single weed seedling will eat up every moment of time I have.

6. How to make raspberries not suck so much to harvest? Right now I feel like I have to wear kevlar to get in there. I keep wanting to prune them back but the berries are so far out on the canes that it feels impossible without sacrificing the harvest. Should I just tear them out and replace with a thornless variety?

7. What can I overwinter?

8. What's good for a walking path among all this, that won't become a weed pit? Gravel?

9. What's the easiest way to rip up grass?

Hello, recently I've gotten into gardening with sustainable and permaculture ideas in mind. However, on the land where I'm farming there is a japanese knotweed infestation. I live in Poland, zone 6b. Since I started battling with it, I've managed to
a. cut it down using massive scissors and mow over it, which blended everything ground up
b. educate myself about how hard is it to get rid of it
c. strain my back pulling out roots
Meanwhile, a month later it regrew to knee height . So, I've came up with 3 options

1. Get some men to help and dig it all out, making sure to get rid of the rhizomes and feel the soil back in
2. Test it for heavy metals and, if low, give up on eradicating it and start eating. I've heard the stalks taste like rhubarb, and I've made a tea out of the leaves before cutting it a month ago, I'd say it was quite tasty with a caramel-like flavor, the only drawback seems to be the fact that it tends to accumulate heavy metals, so perhaps I should try to work with it, instead of against it? And considering that it grows like crazy I could be having like 5 harvests a year.
3. Keep collecting it in a barrel with water and molasses and fermenting it into DIY fertilizer with other weeds (don't know if it won't spread it tho..)

While looking up for solutions I've heard someone suggest planting sunchokes near it, since they spread like crazy (that's also true for Poland) and may outcompete it. Someone else said to do squash to shade the ground, but I don't know if squash is "aggressive" enough. I think mulching it won't help either since the stalks will pierce the mulch layer and won't be choked out by it.

I wouldn't like to do glyphosate since I'm afraid it will hurt local plants, polinators and perhaps even myself (I already have gut problems from ASD)

So, could anyone give me some feedback on these ideas?

I want to do some planting around my city, but I’m hesitant to mess up anything. I know willow is off the table. I notice some kinship between willows and the dogwood. Do their roots have the same invasive tendencies?

As per the topic, has anyone tried using used coffee sacks for weed matting, and have views about how effective or non-effective it was? I've got a reasonably good supply of them, and I'm pretty sure theyre just jute, arent they?