permaculture

[YankeePerm@aol.com]

In a message dated 10/29/97 6:24:20 AM, pakama@juno.com (patrice gros) wrote:

>hope this is not premature- just sent message to belong to your network.
>i am a small scale farmer in NW Arkansas- Ozark bioregion. need all the
>help i can find to start my garden, 1/2 acre of vegetable beds within a
>12 acre area. looking for ideas to incorporate in design,  plant line-up
>etc... also looking for cheap sources of shrubs/trees seedlings.  also
>more specifically looking for ways to go from fescue to  a perennial type
>of cover to surround my beds, unless fescue can be managed
>beneficially... 
>
>and how do we communicate here? these are my first steps being in a
>network.


Hi:  

It is good to hear from you.  First, it would be helpful if you have
either/or Mollison's bound books or his Permaculture Design Course Pamphlets.
 Bear in mind that in permaculture we do not design without spending time on
site.  You can get topics to consider, approaches to consider, on a mailing
list but you have to figure how well they suit your site and other
circumstances.  

Topics to consider are water supply and topography, first off, as if you are
doing market gardening you will want a supply of irrigation water to be sure
that you can meet commitments.  If the soil varies, you may want to look at
that.  You will want to look at the direction from which the drying winds of
summer hit YOUR SITE (this can vary within a region, particularly in hilly
country) and look to shelter belts.  You might want to consider making your
selter belts productive in various ways, since you are putting time and money
into establishing them.  Since you are only gardening 5 percent of the land,
the market garden represents 5 percent of considerations.  The area as a
whole, its uses, your goals, has to be considered.  After you have thought
about irrigation and shelter from your drying winds, you need to look at
access.  If you are hauling out vegetables, you need to get to the site with
paths/roads that serve other functions and do not promote erosion.  If you
are using livestock, you may wish to consider various options for
incorporating the livestock into the gardening operation.  Gardening
methodology affects many things, including siting.  If you use deep mulch,
you want to situate the garden where mulch can be grown close at hand.  You
may want to increase the garden by 50 percent and grow the mulch right within
the garden.  You can do so with fallow beds that you harvest for mulch,
rotating the bed uses annually.
If you are using a Fukuoka-type living mulch, you may want to locate poultry,
particularly ducks, and the garden adjacently.  In this way, you can keep
slugs under control with fallow rotations or grazing by poultry when the
garden is spent for the year through until the next year.  This has a number
of advantages.  

Etc., etc., etc.   


There are a number of us on this list who give workshops on invitation by
people who want design input for their places.  If you put that out, people
will respond.  This is extra work for you, but you get better input.  It is
like double digging--it seems like a lot of work at the time but the yields
are much greater per hour of hard work than with many other methods.

OK?  

For Mother Earth, Dan Hemenway, Yankee Permaculture Publications (since
1982), Elfin Permaculture workshops, lectures, Permaculture Design Courses,
consulting and permaculture designs (since 1981), and now correspondence
courses via email.  Next live training:  Paraguay, Sept. 1998. Internships
available. Copyright, 1997, Dan & Cynthia Hemenway, P.O. Box 52, Sparr FL
32192 USA  YankeePerm@aol.com  

We don't have time to rush.