Self-Sufficiency Made Easier Using These 12 Principles!

[Music] foreign welcome back to the Garden this year I want to talk and focus more on permaculture you hear me talk about it a lot and I thought maybe make a playlist about it so it's kind of gonna be a nice introduction for for you guys to learn about it I thought the best way to get started is to go over the 12 principles of permaculture and use it kind of in the context of a vegetable garden so that's what we're going to do today just a really quick backstory about permaculture it was started around the 1970s by two Australians David Holmgren and Bill Mollison and the two in permaculture kind of derived from the idea of joining the words permanent and agriculture together permaculture is a design approach that seeks to create sustainable and self-sufficient systems by mimicking the patterns and relationships found in natural ecosystems it is based on a set of principles which can be applied when designing Gardens Farms even entire neighborhoods it's really important to note that permaculture it's not a set of rules instead it's a design approach that can be used universally and part of this design toolkit are the 12 permaculture principles which we should use as a guideline almost as like filters and questions when we're creating a new system be it in a garden or being the way that we perhaps want to lead our lives so let's explore these 12 principles and as I said because this is a gardening Channel these 12 principles I'm going to kind of speak through the the mouthpiece of a guardian context however these principles can be adapted for almost anything that you want to do and so we'll start off with the first permaculture principle it's one of my favorites and it is to observe and interact so this means taking the time to really get to know your garden and the patterns and The rhythms of the natural environment so this might involve keeping a journal paying attention to the movements of the Sun and also noticing which plants thrive in different parts of your garden by observing and then interacting with your garden you can best get to know the areas which perhaps perform better for certain groups of plants or you might be able to notice potential like behind the camera there is a roof and I'm just having a look at it and I think well perhaps we could put a rainwater catchment system if we just spend a bit of time to take a break to sit back and look what's happening we can then think of ways that we might want to make adjustments and to interact so a real simple example could be there's a plant but it's not really thriving because it's in a fairly shaded area so you end up moving that plant to a sunnier spot to give it a better chance the second permaculture principle is to catch and store energy this is really about being able to understand how you can capture and store and use the local resources around you rather than becoming dependent on external inputs a really simple example of this is as I mentioned before rain water rain water captures a perfect example rather than relying on municipal or means water by being able to set up a DIY rainwater system you can then capture that energy I.E in the form of water store it in a tank and use it and this massively increases the resilience of a garden adding organic matter to the soil is another form of capturing and storing energy because what you're doing is you're using things for example leaves or grass clippings you're breaking them down or you're applying them as a much to the Garden that improves the permeability of your soil allowing it to better capture rain water and the highest soil organic matter means that it can hold on to that moisture for a longer period of time another example could be you might be pruning your apple trees or something and you instead of say burning the prunings what you do instead is you turn them into wood chip and then you could either compost that or use that in the path the third principle of permaculture is to obtain a yield this doesn't mean just harvesting crops but also considering the other ways that your garden can provide for you your family and your local community for example a garden yes it's going to provide food for you but can you turn it into like a space for recreation could it also could a yield also be a chance for you to spend some time in nature some time for yourself sitting by a fire for example another thing you can do is grow a load of ornamentals so the yields can be an aesthetic yield that you can get whenever you come up to the Garden or you can take some of those flowers down to the house and enjoy it there think about who else and what else can obtain a yield from the garden could you say start off a load of seedlings or take a load of cuttings and give these to other individuals to help them grow their own food at home or could you dedicate even more space for pollinators so they can enjoy their yields in the form of pollen and nectar the fourth principle of permaculture is to apply self-regulation and accept feedback in a sense this is about taking responsibility and knowing what your kind of your thoughts and beliefs are and understanding how this is going to have an impact on your garden but also on your community as well what are the things that you really believe in and what steps can you take in your own space to help that belief maybe there's something you want to change well you can you can do that starting off in a garden there's a a great permaculture quote that I love by Jeff Lawton as something along the lines of you can solve all the world's problems in a garden this is also about being open and accepting that we're going to make mistakes if I make a mistake in the garden it just means that I just have to make an adjustment and it's a constant learning process we can get so caught up in the growing season but the whole idea with this principle is to just occasionally take a step back for a minute and look at the whole picture look at the whole perspective and the the impact that that's having and how that relates to what your goals are the fifth permaculture principle is to use and value renewable resources and services in the kitchen Garden this could mean creating your own liquid fertilizers from plants like comfrey rather than buying synthetic feeds and planting crops such as perennials that come back year after year and it also means considering the value of kind of natural or ecosystem Services what happens in nature that we can really promote and build up in our own garden for example if we can create more space for pollinators or insects that provide natural pest control then in a way we're valuing that natural resource that natural service and we're helping the whole health of the garden and I'm constantly thinking especially in terms of pest control and also the pollinators and and Wildlife further afield what are the things that small things I can do in the garden that's going to enhance their populations and create more diversity but diversity is a different principle there's an example here you know I'm by a fire it's burning wood wood is a renewable resource this is a byproduct from regenerative management practices for example hedge laying and copacing so I'm valuing that byproduct from the prunings being able to turn it into heat that I can enjoy the sixth principle of permaculture is to produce no waste so this means ways of either reusing or recycling or repurposing any kind of resources that you have I.E in your house or in your garden and making sure that even at the end of its life it can still serve a purpose so instead of say there's a lot of wood off Cuts or something instead of just burning that yeah you could use the ash in the compost pile but what you could do instead is you could put it in a pile and let it break down but that creates a perfect habitat for bugs and insects the thing I love about Garden is that anything that comes out of the garden has multiple uses and so if you can think about areas where you're thinking hang on a minute I'm sure there's something I can do with that there will be and where we can find all of those little things that we can change and produce no waste instead see waste as an opportunity you're naturally going to create a a closed loop resilient system the seventh permaculture principle is to design from patterns to detail this means starting with a broad view of say the garden and then working down to all of the details that really make it work so when I'm creating a planting plant I firstly consider the overall layout and then I start to fill it in bit by bit with specific plants I want to grow and I'm constantly thinking about how the design will work as a complete and efficient system patterns are things like where do you usually find yourself walking the most in the garden for example for me it's going from the gate behind the camera up to the solar tunnel and that's where I'm spending a lot of my time so I can be quite clever about that with with the design of the planting plan if I actually plant all of my salads along this route that I'm taking because I can use salads almost every day during the growing season it means I'm going to save a lot of time if all of my salads are really easy and quick to get to rather than walking to the other end of the garden I can make it a lot more efficient and perhaps there's one area right at the end of the garden that you don't find yourself using that much and it's a little bit of perhaps a waste of space or just just turn that into an amazing place for biodiversity let nature take over and see what happens and probably the most basic example of a pattern that we can work from are the fourth Seasons each season has its own very specific effect and impact on the garden and so when we're designing we need to think about how the garden works with all four seasons and how that pattern continues on a yearly basis so we can start to think ahead about the long-term impacts the eighth principle of permaculture is to integrate rather than segregate so this means finding different ways that you can combine individual elements of a garden one example that Springs to mind is a compost pathway so I could have a separate compost space and I could have a separate pathway but if you use your path as a way of creating compost you're integrating two really important purposes in one so if you've got a really small space that you're trying to work with looking specifically at this principle has a lot of information online about it this is going to be a really important step for space saving think about how many purpose says and how many things you can bring together so your whole garden is working as one cohesive unit another common example that I use in this Garden is instead of just only growing vegetables in these raised beds and maybe keeping all of the flowers away to one side I'm actually integrating the flowers among the vegetables for many various reasons but the main one is pest control and also in terms of Aesthetics I guess a nice metaphor is looking at your garden as if all of the individual elements like players on a team so you got the undercover team you've got the polytime for example you've got the outside team you've got the containers you've got the kind of nutrition part of the team so the composting how can you find a way where all of the team members work together it just makes life much easier when things work together the ninth permaculture principle is to use small and slow Solutions this means if you're setting out a new Garden start small and gradually build up over the time rather than trying to do everything at once instead of creating loads of raised beds start out with one or two and as your confidence builds extend the garden over time it also means using techniques that are gentle and low impact rather than destructive and fast-paced no dig is a perfect example of this no dig is a nice Gentle Way of building soil Health we're just applying the organic matter as a layer over the soil rather than something destructive like forking it in mixing it in we just let nature do the incorporation the more that we can let nature do things for us in the garden the more time that we can spend enjoying it rather than complaining another example is you might have an end goal of storing a few thousand liters of rain water and you might be put off because that feels like a lot but instead just start off with one small tank and slowly build up over time we don't have to reach the goal we've got to enjoy the journey there the 10th principle of permaculture is to use and value diversity this means planting a variety of different crops and different varieties of those specific crops and using different techniques within the garden rather than just relying on one technique so real simple example is undercover growing is a different technique to growing in raised beds which is a different technique to growing in hot Beds which is a different technique to growing in containers you have that diversity there's benefits for all of them diversity is something I talk a lot about on this channel and I'm not going to go into too much detail for this video but you want to just think about a diversity of say traditional and Innovative gardening techniques but also things like a diversity of Textures in terms of how the garden looks of of color A diversity of flavors how can you get a diversity of pollinators how can you bring in a diversity of yields that you can get from the garden you see with permaculture and the principles the thing that works really nice nicely is a lot of these the principles overlap with one another and the more principles that you use that overlap with one another I believe the more resilient and the more kind of self-sufficient that system becomes the 11th principle of permaculture is to use edges and value the marginal so in terms of the marginal that might be something like the back of the polytunnel it's a bit of an awkward space you never really know what to do with that as you think about well what could I use it so for the back of the polycrub we ended up turning that into our fermentation station so you could do a lot of different jadam and natural farming ferments find ways that we can use underused space and create a really useful meaning from that space or a really useful purpose another example in terms of edges there's the whole idea of the edge effect often the most biodiverse places in nature is an edge between two ecosystems so the edge between a wildflower Meadow and a forest for example that edge there's a lot of biodiversity we can do the same thing in a garden so we're putting up lots of kind of semi-permanent trellising so we can increase the amount of vertical area that we have to grow and that also coincides with creating a more sheltered space for the garden another example of kind of valuing and using the edge is the edge of raised beds I love raised beds with size for multiple reasons but one of my favorite things is being able to grow plants over the edge for example nasturtiums so instead of them kind of taking up bed space I can grow things over to maximize the amount of stuff that I can grow inside I can also use the side of a bed to say attach a trellis to or even sit down on the 12th and final permaculture principle is to creatively use and respond to change this means being flexible and adaptable and instead of seeing something as a like a Potential Threat how can you see it as an opportunity so there's an example where I remember getting almost a whole potato crop destroyed by blight and I thought I don't I never want to have this again the first thing was there wasn't enough diversity in the groin of the potatoes they were all just in raised beds and so what I've done instead is in terms of trying to respond to that for my main crop I grow sarpo mirror which is this amazing blight resistant variety I can grow it in beds but I usually grow that in containers then I grow new potatoes because new potatoes I can Harvest before the blight season starts so just being able to look at something that's happened think about ways to reduce the impact so even if black did happen again I'm not going to get that affected by it and I can still enjoy the crop another example of being able to adapt to change was last year when we had the drought and the heat what I did was set up a load of Gardena soaker hoses so I could water more efficiently and then I decided to munch a lot of my more sensitive crops with grass clippings to help keep the soil nice and cool to help retain the moisture so just being able to be kind of nimble and be able to adapt to things nice and quickly is going to me you're naturally going to reduce a lot of potential failures or massive challenges it's better to kind of nip things in the buds when they first appear the best bit of advice I can give to anyone starting off with permaculture apart from don't use it as a rule book just because it works for one person it's not a copy and paste system it's just kind of like a mindset toolkit and these principles are really exciting they can help us fully optimize the potential of a space in whatever that whatever we want to optimize it for but just like the uh slow and small Solutions principle maybe pick two or three of these principles that I've mentioned that really speak to you and start with that rather than trying to use all of them all at once and become overwhelmed think about what the two or three that excite you the most and how can you start to build that into your planting plan and if you haven't yet created a planting plan for 2023 well you're in luck because this video over here gives you my 10 steps simple steps that anyone can take to create a really nice productive planting plan so your garden can be as successful and enjoyable as possible

Channel: Huw Richards

Views: 838,910

Keywords: permaculture, permaculture gardening, permaculture homestead, permaculture design, permaculture principles

Id: acjpwIxZzlA

Length: 19min 21sec (1161 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 28 2023