It’s always a pleasure to find ways to increase your garden yield while reducing your labor, time, and cost outputs. Luckily, guilds are another great way to do this – providing you with high-quality, diverse yields – with less work. By planting in patterns to benefit from companion planting and forest gardening, guilds use plants … Read more
When you’re researching permaculture techniques, swales often rise to the top of the pile. Simply put, swales are rainwater harvesting devices that work by shaping the earth. The word ‘swale’ has often been used to talk about a diversion channel for water. In permaculture, the term ‘swale’ is used to refer to both on-contour swales … Read more
A herb spiral is one of the most clever permaculture techniques for utilizing space and allowing plants to work together in the garden. Usually located just outside the kitchen door, a herb spiral provides a menagerie of culinary and medicinal herbs, while saving space and helping with pest management in the garden. Easy to build … Read more
The concept of a permaculture garden is to provide long-term solutions that maximize outputs and minimize inputs, while cycling energy and resources through the system. This creates closed-loop efficiency within your system and prevents excess waste. In fact, one of permaculture’s most favored sayings is ‘there’s no such thing as waste, just things in the … Read more
Companion planting brassicas helps to save space, prevent disease and pests, and keep weeds at bay, while improving the taste and flavor of your crops. Generally considered cool weather crops, brassicas – such as cabbages, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, kohlrabi, Swiss chard, turnips, and Brussels sprouts – serve as pretty easy going companions to most plants. … Read more
Companion planting is one of the best ways to make use of space and improve the health of your tomatoes. Like good friends, companions to tomatoes boost their productivity and ward away negative energies that affect growth. While some companions keep away pests, others encourage beneficial insects for pollination and their predatory capacities. Equally, some … Read more
When we build diverse gardens, we can enjoy the myriad of wildlife that visit the flowers and plants that congregate there. Instead of being mauled by roving bugs, ravaging our crops, diversity in the garden brings natural forms of pest control and increased pollination for higher yields from wildlife such as bats and wild birds. … Read more
Companion planting is the conscious act of pairing plants together to form guilds of crops that support each other. By purposefully choosing certain plants to sit next to each other in the soil, you’re able to create more resilient systems in your garden that lead to more fruitful crops, with higher yields and better quality … Read more
Super high in vitamin A and various antioxidants, carrots are a great vegetable to have in abundance in your garden and fridge. Like other root vegetables or rhizomes, carrots utilize the underground space, giving your permaculture garden a 3 dimensional pattern that takes advantage of all the room available. But like any crop, carrots like … Read more
Growing strawberries gives you a beautiful supply of the fresh summer fruit right at your fingertips. Lovers of full sunshine, strawberries are relatively easy to grow in looser soils – in fact, they can be a little aggressive if you’re not careful. In this respect, when planting companions to strawberries, you have to consider both … Read more
When we design solutions in permaculture, we’re looking to solve more than one issue at once, so that all our elements in the wider system of our permaculture garden become multifunctional tools. This increases efficiency as two problems are solved at the same time leading to higher yields with lower outputs of energy. This article … Read more
For the permaculture gardener, spring is a time of preparation and planting for the year ahead. Thanks to a the techniques used in permaculture management, permaculturists can get slightly ahead of the curve compared to other horticulture types. Employing a few season extension techniques and soil conditioning, we find that we can get our garden … Read more
You probably heard of the permaculture technique known as ‘sheet mulching’. An on-the-spot composting solution, sheet mulching seems like a convenient way to compost without as much hard labor as building compost piles. However, there are some key differences between sheet mulching and composting that make them equally as good as each other and suitable … Read more
As a homesteader, you need to understand what the world has to offer on its abundant plate. As ignorant tourists on the planet, it seems that we turn our noses up at the good free food the Earth has to provide; instead opting for sawdust-filled hamburgers and uranium-colored candy bars. As a seasoned forager, you … Read more
As we come out of the summer months, we start to see the productivity of our gardens greatly reduced. We also see the fervent nature of our own lifestyles retreat inward as the weather becomes colder and we slow down for winter. As the seasons turn, so does our activity and the way we live … Read more
One of the key concepts in permaculture is the idea of energy efficient planning. In order to create the maximum effects with the minimum amount of work, energy efficient planning is key. This enables you to work more effectively as a person, utilizing all the energies that pass through and occur within your site to … Read more