How to Create a Permaculture Design!

hi Geoff Lawton here and I'm in Minnesota and I was on this site in 2006 and we ran a practical workshop where we installed swales and a dam and started a food forest planet and we ran of course while we would do it now eight years later it's quite something and Dan house II has completely changed his career from being a commercial photographer to a full-time permaculture designer consultant and teacher he teaches from this site because he'd learned so many tricks and so many interesting design elements that is applied to make this system successful and we work hand in glove together extending permaculture across North America [Music] eight years ago I was here in Minnesota a prior lake and there was nothing here but a lawn and this guy dan hell's he got me to do a design exercise with a set of students over a weekend here he is here I'm gonna take you to meet Dan housing I don't hate you I'll see you again things they have changed yeah look at that they've grown up don't lace looks like the tropics well cold climate and all this has come up yeah it's a great food forest we start in 2006 everything's filled in quite well even though it's filled in there's still spaces that I'd like to play with and add more plants it looks pretty full you better show there's a few things right now I'll bet you've learned a few tricks on this one sure well I have to show you right off the bat comfrey a friend of mine Bruce Blair gave me six plants algae maybe six or seven years ago we first got started and it's very prolific but this is a dynamic accumulator and it's our green manure of choice it's fantastic it's a mines it's got a big tap root it brings up all these minerals and nutrients and we chop and drop it underneath all of our fruit trees huh look I know you're gonna you've got all this stuff what's this thing on your back what we're doing here right lewis of spraying but it's good spring so what you'll see on some of these leaves still is and we had a heavy rain so most of it's gone and I have to respray is kaolin clay it's actually a dietary supplement for humans but it's very big deterrent for insects they don't like it they get into their soft soft chewy parts of their mouths it deters them from eating the leaves and miners any kind of flies and things on the fruit so we cover the trees with kale and clay it kind of looks like Christmas here when we get it done and it really just stops them dead in their tracks it's totally organic it's a very highly fine deck then we came here eight years ago there was nothing but lawn and now you've got a whole education system design system garden right it was actually I think the ecology leveraged me because we put in the system we put an invitation out the nature and nature said you want to play let's have some fun and basically it changed me as much as I changed the landscape I can happen anybody and we've got it quiet section but this is a really busy road you've got some exposure here right we have a major freeway out in front of our house here and as we've built our system we're always building buffering berlin's we have an earthen wall at the far end here it's quite noisy here but once you get down by the house you can barely hear anything but it also means that we have resources from this freeway anything I put down by the freeway as you might imagine disappears you know if that recyclables if I have an old Pontiac rear-end that I find in the woods I put it at the end of the freeway but I also if I need wood chips if I need cut grass I need clean Phil I put a sign into my driveway and by this time the community knows I'm the guy who's looking for stuff you know and they get all my wood chips dumped here all that kind of material it's really great so as much as it's kind of an annoyance it also is my connection with the community the problem is a solution can be [Music] [Applause] because we have deep snow the balls the mice were verbal the young trees and so we have to put the tree wrapper on all the trees easy call tree - this one is a spiral kinda but easily wraps around the tree you still get ventilation it doesn't hurt the tree as it grows but in the winter time as the snow comes up the mice can't get at the trees and this one over here yeah this is a major major one there's lots of different kinds this is basically just drain tile and you can see it goes way into the ground and so we sliced drain tile and we put that around the tree and that's kind of our first defense but when we get three feet of snow there's the mice and the voles that just go on top of the snow and they just eat it up so we've added an extension on this because in these heavy snows built actually strip the bark up all the way up the tree or where they can get at it so the higher you can go the better and you're confident all the way through that's to catch for it right this toka plum here the fruit on that is only the best when it falls off the tree you don't harvest it from the tree so we put tarps out here and we put blankets whatever we can find because when those things fall off the tree they're like the juiciest sweetest of fruit you've ever had here's a traditional unglazed clay pot and it's a low fire temperature unglazed pots and the water weeps roof and it's the most efficient watering system known to man the water in here is actually cool so the evaporation on the outside allows you to actually cool a water bottle inside so while even the garden you could have a nice refreshing cool drink here's that little unglazed pot demonstration well it's got to be kept full plants can be planted within two-foot around this pot and the roots will move towards that very slow-moving water now if this ground air is already wet the water will not leak because osmosis or hold it back this is an extremely efficient system now that's evaporative cooling keeps it a little bit cool but if you want thermal mass to keep it a bit warmer especially as your temperatures cool down in these really cold climates you can pull it in and it'd be better if you played with this black so it held heat over a reservoir now this would a jug here holds the water because there's an airlock here so that border with a black tin over the top will make it nice and warm water is a great thermal mass so you'll have warm water going down into the ground take it off you're gonna fool unglazed pot there and a full jug of water here just like a water drink dispenser and just put it on there what a great way to keep the temperature in the ground just had little bit warmer so then we've got an earth man behind us as a sound barrier but what have we got here what's this this is what we call a puggle culture you've heard of a hugo culture when we cleaned out our pond of all the pond my six years of coypu and everything it was really great rich material we built a berm out of it and that's where now we're growing this year's Tomatoes so it's fish poo oh and super super heavy clay which is actually great and a lot of people don't like planting tomatoes in clay but we water it once a week and that clay is like a battery we water it once a week really heavily and that's all we got to do and we have really great production so it's a pond Pogo culture Mound there you go that's a new one ah so geodesic dome it's a great shape but I have to actually tell you that this is it may look like a geodesic dome but it's actually a trellis everything that every structure we have in the garden is a trellis this thing that goes around that keeps the animals out you might call it something else but it's actually a trellis and that works very well with municipalities with cities because they don't like that F word fences so everything that we build is a trellis and if everything on the design is called a trellis they're very happy whatever it needs more than one function and it keeps people happy that's great yeah so beans squash pumpkins cover this thing it's it's actually very sturdy so for little garden swells on contour just picking up the runoff from that driveway yeah exactly we were losing all that water to a culvert that's at the bottom and instead we're able to make this now a productive area and even when it hasn't rained for weeks the water is stored in the ground and we've all got all sorts of comfrey and we're basically building the soil up from this heavy clay and as we go along we'll start adding more fruit trees more quite a diversity of fruit trees and they're looking good right we have nanny berry and hi bush cranberry mostly for wildlife but we also have service berry for us and sooner or later we'll start to bring in more of the fruit trees the apple trees maybe a few cherry trees and right up on the next whale up here we actually have two Korean nut pines so in long term over story I'm hoping those net pines will come through [Music] nice [ __ ] solid and very sharp so Alex what do you use a size instead of a motorized machine you would be amazed the time it takes me to you say a mower to mow either the orchard areas or grassipat and graft paths I can do it faster with a sight I don't have to maintain it it's not as loud this is actually more of a Zen motion when I'm doing it there's no maintenance to this except as you're using it and you get to use it to sharpen that so it's quiet I know it's going to work and I just get better at it as I use it and I can actually get closer to the trees I can get closer to the fragile plants with this and with one little pull pull all the weeds out the thistle or whatever might be there I love embodied energy Oh exactly right and it's not an energy it's not a a muscle thing right it's just a technique and it's finesse and all that has to do is run that that weed across this blade just a little bit and it slices right through [Music] there you did some great permaculture design work and you put out a new book recently can you give us an idea how you approach this on cuz you do teach people design and get them familiar with expert design how do you go about the process absolutely some years ago I spent quite a bit of time trying to develop a process a stepped process or a progression of how I can design this inhale all the information I need at each point to not waste time and to answer all the questions as they need to and really what I start with in my process and as they teach people to is start with the most basic thing and that's what I start with is just basically scratch paper I'll take a piece of grid paper go up in the back or wherever and this is basically a small backyard measure things it doesn't have to be accurate it's full of mistakes but as long as they have my measurements you know I go outside and they mark where things are then I come inside and I grab a nice piece of vellum graph paper and I measure everything out with a ruler and with really good pencils and get all of my measurements correct that's my base map so this is a sort of rough grid graph paper exactly oh well grid paper right and then this is more accurate graph paper so you go from here to here great way to get from there well once I have my base map then I start playing with bum wad or tracing paper and I can use the but the base map underneath and start playing with positions of plants I'd really don't know what species of plants I just know I want fruit trees in here somewhere there's gonna be some shrubs in here and some perennials so I build the structure of this planting area before I know what even the plants are so I filled the space with trees and shrubs and perennials and basically just using a little stencil little green stencil so you're saying that you just say I don't you're not thinking about the species of trees you say I want a large tree they're evergreen or deciduous on a small bush they're on a little and just moving in sizes of circles exactly right um why because it confuses you you think confuses if you start thinking about plastic if you start if you start putting in the species there's so much bias and why are you wanted and how you want it that you really get off the ecological functions of the plant what we're trying to build is structure right we're listening to nature we're letting nature tell us how things should be which way is north where is the water that's gonna tell us where the trees are right and we put the biggest tree I could possibly fit in this space are a number of trees and once my trees are set then I look for where the shrubs that I can put in and then the perennials that surround that so it's the structure using a stencil or even free-handing to kind of see what is the best shape and I'll do four or five of these you know really to kind of play with it well what if the tree was over here or what if the I'm using the shrubs in this sort of way or if it's that sort of pattern then that's what the tracing paper is for once you get a really nice structure that you think you like I even have my swales drawn in here I have my access drawn in here so I know how many good get in and out of the garden and how my water is gonna move in the garden once I'm happy with that then I take the bum line onto my I put it actually underneath another drawing so I trace that and I trace my final design onto a new piece of vellum or a new piece of paper and that's my design I've got all my trees in I've got my shrubs there and you can tell it's a lot cleaner than the other design but that's the point of in your final design it needs to be easily read so everybody understands where things go so do you then start to look at trees exactly and do you give options you could give options for each one of these numbers oh you know and really if this backyard appeared in Tucson or in Portland or here in Minneapolis the same shape would just be a different species of tree or shrub because it's still facing is still getting the same sunlight or maybe the same water but it's gonna change based on the climate at that point I go to the plant database or I go to my favorite database and I find the plants that fit this space and I start listing them all and picking what I want in this case I decided I wanted an apple tree in the middle and three Bali cherry trees because I really like Bali so those are my main trees the sized right inferred Dwarfs and then I started surrounding them with nitrogen fixers and nutrient cumulate errs so I have my main anchor plants I call them or diva plants and they surrounded them with nitrogen fixers dynamic accumulators and then we just went out from there and even with a design like this there's a little sidewalk here we put our smaller plants right by the sidewalk so that's all strawberries but as you're building the structure of your design your access to all these plants is also very important so trees are in back and these smaller shrubs are in front so I can see what's going on and it can also get access so anywhere within say a temperate climate that's gonna fit if you got a tropics or desert you're gonna have different Sun requirements but within a climate now you have what's this database you've got financial database for the cold climates we have an online plant database and it's a relational beta database is called the natural capital plant database and you put into it your site conditions there growing zone the type of soil you have and then you search for you want fruit trees or you're looking for some kind of ecological service and it outputs a database spreadsheet that opens up in Excel and right there you have all the plants listed by scientific name their height and their width and that's the list you use to go find the plants that fit the structure of your space so that's the natural capital plant database that's online it's very much tailored towards designers so each other our initial rough we go through all these bits of paper we use a circle template we've got that database right all right well in some cases and this is this is on vellum this was done in Costa Rica and in that case this is the base map we did down there this is done with a compass and a 300 foot tape trying to find a base map so that we can just basically find what are the functional spaces things like that once we have our base map drawn we bring it or we take a picture of it or we have it scanned at an office supply store and we bring it into Adobe Illustrator and once it's in Adobe Illustrator now we're free to do a lot of great work Adobe Illustrator and a lot of the vector design software packages you can build your plant symbols you can size them up correctly you build your plant symbol list and you have your structure already and then it's time to really start playing with how things are going to fit and you have a chance to look at it and since it's on the computer it's easy to manipulate it's easy to move things around and especially when you're working with clients and you bring this big design they're gonna change their mind or something or something's going to change you can't get a certain plant it's easy to change there is kind of a steep learning curve with using these software packages you really have to get fast especially if you're doing this professionally time is money so to do it well and in our case we like to be very clean there's a lot of white space there's the symbols it's very easily read but once you do this in Adobe Illustrator or something else it's easy to change and then all these you still got numbers here but they relate to a cake that's how it works right so all the plan symbols are related to a plant key and so if you're looking for number eight whatever that might Beit you'd be baroque if you're looking for you're number seven that's black locust so and that kind of after why you kind of get to know the numbers on this but one thing I should really mention is when you're working in these software packages everything is in layers you'll see the contour lines in here that's a layer that we could turn off and turn on when we need it the soil map which you don't see here that helps us find out what the soils are that's another layer we have so a project like this might have seventeen twenty five different layers of information for us to use to decide what plants were going to put in what will work there and also what the shape of the property well there you go just goes to show what happens when you apply permaculture to your own landscape and you learn from it so you can teach other people Dan house II is now a permaculture full-time practitioner he's changed his careers is even written a book and teachers design himself to other people this is something any of us can engage in a complete change of career so that you can take up this meaningful occupation and help other people to do the same thing you

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Length: 20min 19sec (1219 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 19 2017