What is Permaculture?

What Is Permaculture?

Chances are, if you garden or farm organically you have come across someone using the word permaculture. Here in the Cincinnati region, we’re fortunate to have an active permaculture community.

When you look up the word permaculture, you will come across many different definitions.  

One definition that we resonate with is from one of our favorite authors on the subject, Toby Hemenway. He writes:

Permaculture is a design approach based in science and guided by ethics that uses nature as a model for decision making.

An Our Land Organics native landscape design and installation incorporating permaculture principles

A Permaculture Design Framework

Permaculture’s design framework can be applied to designing anything, from your yard to a business.

It is most widely known for its application towards developing landscapes and farms that are beautiful, need less inputs, and improve the ecological health of an area. Something our yards and farms very much need!

Permaculture incorporates insights from the disciplines of ecology, horticulture, biology, agriculture, architecture, appropriate technology, and more into its design approach. 

It uses nature as the scientific model for design choices. A mantra commonly used in permaculture is:

In meeting our needs, how can we work with nature, rather than against it?

An Our Land Organics native landscape design and installation that incorporates permaculture principles

Permaculture Principles

As with science, permaculture leans heavily on observing and testing hypotheses. 

The big-picture goal of permaculture is to meet human needs while preserving and increasing ecosystem health. It is well known that many of our pursuits to meet our human needs of food, energy, and shelter do not accomplish this.

Permaculture’s foundation is guided by three ethics and 10 design principles. These are the ground rules of permaculture.  

The three ethics are:

• Care of Earth

• Care of People

• Return of Surplus

Quite simply, do the actions you are pursuing help or hurt the earth, and do they help or hurt people?

Return of surplus simply means taking the output of the system you design and reinvesting it back into the earth, into people, and/or back into the system you are observing and interacting with.

Quickly summarized, the 10 permaculture design principles are:

1. Observe

2. Connect

3. Catch and Store Energy and Materials

4. Each Element Performs Multiple Functions

5. Each Function is Supported by Multiple Elements

6. Make the Least Change for the Greatest Effect

7. Use Small-Scale Intensive Systems

8. Optimize Edge

9. Collaborate with Succession

10. Use Biological and Renewable Resources

An Our Land Organics landscape design. Like all our designs, this one incorporates permaculture principles.

The History of Permaculture

Before we dive deeper into permaculture gardening, let’s take a look at its history.

Permaculture was inspired by indigenous land stewardship practices. The term was coined by two Australians, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, in the late 1970s. Bill was a professor at the University of Tasmania teaching biogeography. This is where he met David Holmgren, his student at the time. They worked together to develop what was to become the first book detailing the core values and principles of permaculture in 1978. The book was aptly titled Permaculture One.

Mollison was inspired to develop the concept of permaculture after spending decades in the rainforests and deserts of Australia studying ecosystems.

He observed that plants naturally group themselves in mutually beneficial communities. He used this idea to develop a different approach to agriculture, one that seeks to place the right elements together so they sustain and support each other.

Since then, permaculture has been a somewhat underground social and educational movement slowly spreading across the world.  

A Closer Look at Permaculture Design Principles

The following are Toby Hemenways’s explanations of the permaculture design principles. Click HERE to download these principles as a PDF.

Observe

Use protracted and thoughtful observation rather than prolonged and thoughtless action. Observe the site and its elements in all seasons. Design for specific sites, clients, and cultures.

Connect

Use relative location. Place elements in ways that create useful relationships and time-saving connections among all parts. The number of connections among elements creates a healthy, diverse ecosystem, not the number of elements.

Catch and store energy and materials

Identify, collect, and hold useful flows. Every cycle is an opportunity for yield, every gradient (in slope, charge, heat, etc.) can produce energy. Re-investing resources builds capacity to capture yet more resources. Capture resources when they’re in excess and release them from storage when needed. This recycling of resources produces more stable ecosystems.

Each element performs multiple functions

Choose and place each element in a system to perform as many functions as possible. Beneficial connections between diverse components create a stable whole. Stack elements in both space and time.

Each function is supported by multiple elements

Use multiple methods to achieve important functions and to create synergies. Redundancy protects when one or more elements fail.

Make the least change for the greatest effect

Find the “leverage points” in the system and intervene there, where the least work accomplishes the most change. “Thoughtful observation rather than thoughtless labor” -- Yeomans. Through observations, patterns and leverage points reveal themselves.

Use small-scale, intensive systems

Start at your doorstep with the smallest systems that will do the job, and build on your successes, with variations. Grow by chunking. Small-scale systems can be managed with fewer resources. Intensive systems yield maximum productivity from a smaller space.

Optimize edge  

The edge—the intersection of two environments—is the most diverse place in a system and is where energy and materials accumulate or are translated. Increase or decrease edge as appropriate.

Collaborate with succession

Living systems usually advance from immaturity to maturity, and if we accept this trend and align our designs with it instead of fighting it, we save work and energy. Mature ecosystems are more diverse and productive than young ones.

Use biological and renewable resources

Renewable resources (usually living beings and their products) reproduce and build up over time, store energy, assist yield and interact with other elements. Favor these over nonrenewable resources.

Moving Toward Permaculture Garden Design

Knowing these ethics and principles, we can begin to look at our own yards in a different way. A way that's much more interconnected! 

At Our Land Organics, we incorporate permaculture principles into all of our landscape designs and installations. We’ve found that doing so helps to create sustainable, functional, and healthy landscapes that boost biodiversity and enable people to maximize enjoyment of their yards.

Interested in how to use permaculture principles to create a healthier and lower maintenance yard, but not sure how to start? We offer consultations and landscape design and installation services and would be happy to learn more about your project. We hope you’ll get in touch!