Salpichroa origanifolia (pampas lily-of-the-valley) has a stronghold across my backyard as well as neighbours yards. It’s considered a highly invasive species here. While we’ve ripped up a chunk of it and regularly mow the above ground portion, there are so many underground rhizomes/runners and seed-bank creating new plants…

I’ve been in the property for less than 6 months so don’t know when it was established, however seeing how overrun the neighbours yards are on both sides with it I figure it’s been here a fair while and crept across properties

I’d love to take a “work with nature” approach and plant something that could outcompete it, or create conditions to halt it in its track.

Suburban block in Melbourne, australia, dry sandy soil, growing in both sunny and shady spots, in a patchy weedy lawn.

Any ideas? 🙏

Edit: rest assured I am working on swapping the suburban lawn for a more diverse and permaculture informed garden 😀

I did my best to find an answer online but couldn’t land on one. I have 2 paws paws, 2 apples, 2 peaches, 1 American persimmon, and 1 pomegranate bare root tree coming in and I was wondering if I should grow all of these trees in pots and plant in 2025 fall to strengthen them or should I pot them temporarily and plant them after the lost frost in spring of this year? I’m in zone 7a and our last frost here is between april 21-april 30th

So ideally I would get a heat pump but that requires a big investment. So I am heating with wood as I prefer that to oil. Here are the non heating related uses that I am doing or plan on doing:

- stove top cooking… really good at low temp cooking if you use a metal burner

- baking…. My stove has an oven. It does things like cookies really well. And the wood stove pizza is marvelous

- wood ash for lye for soap making, other uses

- wood ash for compost and gardening

- along with a large drying rack, the wood stove is my cloths dryer in the winter

- assuming you have to process the wood, the saw Dust can be used for compost and mulch. I am also going to test it as cat litter

Does anyone have other uses for their wood stove?

I know weird post but im gonna have about 150$ store card with best buy and im looking to find something that would help with my garden.

Couldnt find any suitable grow lights or any items that can help with composting.

What would you get if you were in my position?

I recently moved to denmark with a bare 1 hectare piece of land. I want to build a food forest but wonder where I should start? I have read a lot about it and know what steps I should take but, I am on a serious budget so i thought I'd start this year with tilling the soil because it has previously been used for hay and the soil is clay. So i thought a ground cover and also some fruit trees to start with? Should i do clusters immediately or should I start with only ground cover and trees to "fix" the soil? The previous owner has used pesticides🥲

Happy New Year from all of us at The People's Land Cooperative! I hope you had a good Christmas and you're as excited for spring as we are. Winter is a rough season for any gardening business, and as an ethical worker's cooperative we aren't ashamed to ask for support.

In 2025 we hope to expand the range of community work that we do: this might look like supporting existing or new community allotments; setting up a compost collection service amongst local businesses; taking on a local young person as an apprentice; or even offering free gardening services to the elderly and vulnerable.

To do any of this however, we need to raise £1000 to buy an electric wheel for our cargo bike, as our van has packed it in. We are gratefully accepting donations through our website, but rather than just ask for money we wanted to give something back as well, so...

We have partnered with local artist Mike Sprout, who has designed us a stunning art poster which we are selling to raise the money to keep up our work. I highly recommend checking it out on our website - if only because it is so absolutely beautiful. It's available framed or unframed in A3 and A2, and is a high quality giclée print, which apparently will last for 100 years!

Thank you so much. I hope 2025 is a fantastic year for you and yours, that your garden blooms, and your veggies thrive.

Al the best, Patrick The People's Land Cooperative 🌱

Link to check out our posters: Peopleslandcoop.co.uk Follow us on Facebook and Instagram: @peoples.land.coop

I've known about permaculture for decades and read a couple of books on it, but I'm very much a beginner /novice - please be tolerant if i have got anything wrong.

I have a very small garden (yard) and there are loads of brilliant online and print resources for how to plan and maintain this according to permaculture principles (currently in a composting rabbithole, I am revamping our system of worm bin + cold composting to worm bin + hot composting...)

However, due to the realities of my home, my 'zone 0' - my house - is far bigger than my garden, and I think there is more scope for me to apply permaculture principles inside. It's a big rambling old 1850s house with lots of twists and turns and a big cellar. However, I am struggling to find thoughtful resources on applying permaculture ideas to the home - they usually stop at, 'grow some herbs and make sure you are energy efficient'. Or they focus on self build or designing a home from scratch.

Surely there are so many more ways permaculture principles could inform the way a house /home is organised and maintained, routines around cooking, cleaning, waste management.... there's so much to say! Can anyone reccomend permaculture resources that focus on 'zone 0' and give it the same depth of thought as the outside?

I live on a nice wooded lot in a neighborhood. I have about 1.5 acres and what I really really want is to develop the space into a permaculture oasis. I have a large 30x30 garden space, a large coop with some chickens and ducks. I have plans to install a pond and plant several food trees, berry bushes and some herbal medicines, etc. My problem is that while I love the idea of permaculture...my understanding of it isn't great. I don't understand how to plan out where everything should go and where to start. I have some books..but to be honest those are very intimidating...I always get frustrated while reading them. I'm more of a visual learner. What is some advice or resources you guys would recommend for someone starting on this journey?

Hi all! I’m looking for some advice and ideas about converting this old orchard into a food forest in Victoria, Australia (zone 6- mild temperate). I will be moving here in 12-18 months, but am very familiar with the property and have observed it over several years. It is flat, I have access to two large rainwater tanks as well as mains water. The southernmost section has some huge neighbouring gum trees, so the soil is a lot dryer but still unshaded (great for natives and dry-soil-preferring herbs?). 

My vision is to incorporate a variety of edible and otherwise beneficial plants (I’ve started a huge list), both native to Australia and non-native, recommendations are very welcome! I want to attract and support native birds and bugs to enjoy this space so also plan to plant flowering natives for the purpose. I envision paths winding between and around, stepping stones, insect homes, a pond?… this is a long term project that I am very much in the planning phase of and would love suggestions. My initial ideas are in pencil on one of the drawings.  The area has a green shadehouse, some concrete edging and garden sheds which will all be staying where they are. In a separate area are some raised garden beds where I can grow annuals.

1. My first question is around what steps I can take between now and moving in (e.g. mulching) and when would be best to do that. I am visiting in April, July, October and December this year for 1-2 weeks each time. What would you use this time for each season? I want to remove the low hedges, prune, mulch… is there anything else you would do, and when would you do these jobs? No one will be watering/weeding/maintaining (except for me when I visit) until I move in. 
2. Most of the trees are 20-30 years old and are still vigorously fruiting- there are a few that are unhealthy/don’t produce which will be removed. All of the trees have not been cared for very well in the past 5+ years, so I have started the pruning process (no questions around pruning yet though!). As you can see in the photos they are planted in three rows with grass in between. What would you plant around these trees? Are there any problems or considerations I should be aware of with these trees being so established (eg. Disrupting their roots)? 
3. Finally, I have done a huge amount of internet scouring, reddit and blog reading, YouTube watching. How on earth do you decide which plants to incorporate into guild for specific trees? Do you have any suggestions for what might work well for these trees? The two biggest pest issues at the moment are cherry slug (on the plum, nectarine and cherry trees) and codling moth (on some but not all of the apple trees), what would you recommend for supporting these trees and surrounding soil to thrive?

TLDR; Help me convert this space into a food forest: plant suggestions, layout suggestions, jobs to do for the next 12 months until I move in, amazing resources. 

The orchard

List of potential plants

How the orchard currently looks, I have only included trees that are staying

In pencil, some ideas of layout. In pen, things that must stay.

Photo including the hedges I want to get rid of! This grass will mostly become a driveway

The shadehouse, and a chicken coup that will be removed (my dog is too tempted by chickens)

As the title says I was wondering if red mulberries need another tree so it can produce fruit. I keep getting conflicting answers online so I thought I’d ask here. I’d also like to ask where you guys buy your grafts of red mulberries as I’m not really willing to wait 5yrs for mulberries

Are there potato varieties where the tubers can be harvested IN the vegetative stage of the plant?

Of course there’s the practice of new potatoes. But those get harvested in the flowering stage of the potato lifecycle. As far as I know, the vegetative growth of the part of the plant above ground is arrested when flowering starts.

I have the idea for an infinite potato tower, where you have modular cylindrical sections that are stackable. When the potatoes are ready to harvest, you would remove the lowest section to harvest and in time stacke another section on top, which would fill with soil.

If there were potato cultivars where the plant doesn’t die off then that idea could be viable.

Hence the question.

Have a nice day, everybody!

I once heard Geoff mention that buying a piece of land and developing it would be a lucrative business. Does anyone in this community do permaculture land development? If so let's us know what your experience has been!

Hi all,

Looking for some guidance on the farm pond we have to started to great. We intend to you use this pond for irrigation. The farm is located in africa where there is a rainy and dry season and thus we are hoping to store water during the rainy season to take us through the dry season.

The goal is for it to hold around ~1,500,000 gallons

https://imgur.com/a/hpo2M8x

I have a large supply of fresh water on top of a hill. I have a fish pond at the bottom of the hill. The overflow of my fresh water supply goes down a pipe to replenish the fish pond. I would love to pump pond water back uphill to water my garden. Every ram pump I have seen is a closed system. Is there a way to introduce fluid from a different source to pump back up?

Hello, I'm very new to gardening and even newer to permaculture and I'm looking to learn what I can do to enhance my growing experience.

I'm in the piedmont of NC (7b/8a) and I've got a honeycrisp apple tree and a granny smith that I planted about two years ago about 10-15 feet apart from each other. I would say they are about 5-6 feet tall now but still quite thin and immature. At the time I planted them, I figured for pollination the two varieties would be enough but I've since realized they could use some support from helper plants and that's part of what I'm trying to figure out now.

The soil its planted in is classic NC soil, pretty dense and clayey. Originally I had maybe a foot radius clearing around the tree and used black mulch because we had some laying around until I realized that was a no no. Switched to aromatic cedar mulch and cleared more space around the tree and will likely have to clear more, as the grass is fighting back.

During the warmer months, I water the soil and I spray the trees with a homemade neem oil mix and cedar oil mix every week or two to keep pests away, mainly japanese beetles which have absolutely destroyed the trees' foliage in the first year. This with a mix of hand harvesting the beetles reduced the damage to the trees significantly for the second year but it's still a problem. I've heard marigolds are good to keep them away but pretty much open to trying anything.

I feel I've been a bit lazy with my care of the trees (especially since they are planted at a relatives' 30 mins away), so my goal now is to have a plan before it gets warm again to make these trees sustainable and pest resistant. I plan to travel in the future and be away for larger periods of time so I want these trees to hold up because I know my relative isn't gonna do jack lol. Thank you!

We live in the tropics with heavy rains during the wet season. Our road is quite steep and we've dug a gutter next to it to allow the water to run off. The usual way to line gutters here is with half-open concrete tubes, which works really well. We however have lots of big rocks scattered around which have been dug up by the previous owner. Would that suffice to slow the water and stop the soil from eroding? And would it be beneficial to plant species that control erosion (deep roots, such as canna indica) in the gutter or better to plant them on the banks?

Any advice appreciated!

I went to Santorini a few years ago and they talked about how planting their tomatoes in the mineral rich lava rock helps add flavor and helps retain water since they hold water in their pores. They get little rain and the rock holds water. They often find the roots wrapped tightly around rock which helps break it down as well. Has anyone added lava rock not specifically for drainage or weed/pest control and more to add minerals or help with water retention during a drought?

Not sure if anyone has done this or posted about this but I had a thought that I am not sure will even work. Has anyone attempted to integrate an Ondol or radiant heat type system with a rocket mass heater? My thought would be to have the exhaust from the stove wind throughout the concrete foundation of the house (with clean out ports at a few ends of the house), then go up the side through a tall chimney. This might be a far fetched idea, but to use the whole foundation of the house as the mass I feel like would be very effective.

I regularly get about 1000# of onions. Is there a better use than composting them?

Edit: these are from a local grocery store chain. I pick up what the food pantry doesn't want. I already gave a couple hundred pounds to my closest food bank.

Edit 2: I've freeze dried enough for now. I get these 1-2 times a month.

I love picking fruits and berries in the summer, but it's just mostly gorging myself in the moment, but I do bake some desserts (blackcurrant pie is to die for) and do stuff some in the freezer. I have been thinking a bit on how how to preserve my goodies through the year, and I keep coming back to jams, jellies and cordials, all of it stuffed with sugars. And that just isn't healthy.

How do you preserve fruits and berries without using sugar? I do know that the traditional method was often cider making and other alcohol production, but besides that and deep freezing. That is my question.