What does Permaculture mean to you?

Discussion in 'Designing, building, making and powering your life' started by -, Oct 15, 2007.

  1. JoanVL

    JoanVL Junior Member

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    To me it is growing food, and using what is around - not expending unnecessary resources.

    I think it involves some reciprocity too. Three families, (friend, son and next-doors) give me their veggie scraps, most of which go to the chooks, some direct to the compost bin. I give spare produce to them, and bones to next-door's dog. I let their children play in our back yard - it has trees, overgrowth and interesting corners which they love. Their Dad helps my husband, who has arthritis, with any jobs involving a ladder. Oh yes, he gave me two new polystyrene boxes the other day as I use them to grow herbs.

    I also do a bit of scavenging, or recycling if I want to be posh: nothing gets wasted.
     
  2. CRTreeDude

    CRTreeDude Junior Member

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    For me, permaculture is the natural reaction of seeing waste products as resources and figuring out how to use them.

    For example - we have a reforestation company, with chickens (for food), ponds, sheep, horses, and a furniture shop. My job? It is really simple - I walk into one area and think - hmmm, this big pile of waste - where can I use it?

    For example - a furniture shop is really just expensive equipment for making sawdust as far as the people who handle are sheep and chickens are concerned. :lol: They use the shavings for bedding for the sheep and chickens.

    As far as the nursery and garden people are concerned - there is no purpose to the chicken and sheep besides to produce fertilizer. :lol: Of course, because they used the sawdust from the shop, it is premixed.

    We eat the chicken and sheep - but the sheep and horses provide another service - they eat the grass between the trees we are growing. And the horse provide animal power for transportation and also for hauling all the waste around. (I haven't eaten a horse yet - but there been a couple that were trying my patience...)

    The trees, as they get bigger, provide the raw material for the woodshop - and the bark and waste from processing the logs makes really good mulch for the seedlings when they are planted and material as well for bat houses.

    I could go on - but the key is to interconnect the systems so that they feed each other - and by so doing, you can start to approach that thing that they say is impossible - a perpetual motion machine. :D Of course, the sun has its part in all of this - of which we are grateful.

    So, the goal is the waste from one system feeds into another. One man's trash is another man's treasure - and if you own it all, boy does it cut down on costs!

    I am actually really surprised just how good we are doing at this - and how much fun we are having. Someone was wondering if anyone was making money at Permaculture - yeah, that would be us.
     
  3. grease

    grease Junior Member

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    Permaculture isn't about redesigning the wheel. The natural world worked pretty darn well before we stuffed it and will probably work quite well long after we're gone.
    So Permaculture is about getting back to nature and not twisting and contorting it to our own designs, fight with it not against it. Not for (monetory) profit.
     
  4. CRTreeDude

    CRTreeDude Junior Member

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    Profit is merely a system running more with less costs than expenses. The goals perhaps is not make as much money as you can (though with us, extra profit goes into extra land for reforestation) - that can be self defeating.

    I am not sure the nature mode is permaculture, in fact, I am almost certain it isn't. If you watch animals - they move from place to place seeking resources. They don't stay in one place making things better so they don't have to wander.

    The whole system of the Earth is like permaculture but a passive one. It works because if a system becomes degraded, the land will go fallow for years - perhaps centuries. The animals that were they that caused the degradation will either go to another area or die off.

    What we are attempting is to stay in one place - that means deal with your waste and don't strip the land.
     
  5. sunnyslopes

    sunnyslopes Junior Member

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    Re: What does Permaculture mean to you?

    Using appropriate technology to create sustainable or eco-friendly results. By "sustainable" I mean the output benefit over time is much greater than the energy input. For example using a diesel smog-spewing tractor to dig a dam or swale which over time creates a huge positive impact on the environment. Or something as simple as a solar clothes dryer, aka clothes line. :axe:
     

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