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  • From: "Sharon Gordon" <gordonse@one.net>
  • To: "permaculture" <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: RE: [permaculture] absolute basics
  • Date: Mon, 14 Jul 2003 21:26:08 -0400

A few more suggestions to add to all the wonderful ones you have already
gotten:

1) If you are in housing without land get a German community
garden/allotment plot or two and experiment with gardening. Otherwise try
some in whatever land you have or in pots on patios or balconies.

2) Take an English language Permaculture course. Easiest to get to would
probably be in England, but sometimes you might find one in France or Spain.
See http://www.permaculture.org.uk/pcasite/ or
http://www.permacultureactivist.net for course listings.

3) See if friends will bring you the English language books when they come
to visit along with continuing to improve your german reading ability so you
would have access to the german ones as well.

4) Videos about the Holzer's work in Austria might be useful to you. See
bottom of the page at
http://www.permacultureactivist.net/booksvid/BooksnVid.htm#videos

5) In addition to getting the 6th edition of Jeavons's book mentioned by
others, a companion book by David Duhon called One Circle: How to Grow a
complete diet in less than 1000 square feet is very helpful. One place I
can reliably find this is http://www.bountifulgardens.org .

6) The Woodland Way by Ben Law, about a third of the way down the page at
http://www.permacultureactivist.net/booksvid/BooksnVid.htm#plants , might be
helpful as well. If you can catch the TV show they did on his house when
that repeats, that might be useful too. Info at
http://www.permaculture.co.uk/info/Grand%20Designs.html .


7) As to how much land you need, part of it depends on the percent of what
you want to grow that you need. If you just want to grow 90% of your food
and your fuel, that would take a certain amount of land. If you'd like to
grow medicinal herbs, fiber for clothing, and fiber for paper that would
take a bit more. If you'd like to grow some grain for chickens for eggs,
that would add to your total. If you are planning for the long term and
want to grow timber for furniture for your great and great-great
grandchildren and to replace what you used, that would be more land.
Growing compost to maintain soil fertility can come partly from the uneaten
parts of some plants, but it can also help to have some areas with nonedible
soil improving plants.

Going back to just the food issue, if you are growing the food in Germany,
you need more land than if you are growing in Provence or California due to
the differences in the length of the growing season. To some degree you can
get around this by using Four Season harvest techniques. See Four Season
Harvest by Eliot Coleman for lots of helpful info.

One way you could approach this would be to work out how much you need of
various things per year and then find out how much land it would take to
grow that much of the item. At the same time look for ways to reduce usage
of items. For instance, if you use cloth napkins instead of paper, you will
need to grow less fiber. If you use a rocket stove or solar oven, you need
less cooking fuel.

8) One way to look at the land issue is from the perspective of how much is
each person's fair share of the planet. This turns out to be 5-6 acres per
person, leaving nothing for other animals. If other wildlife is taken into
account, it's about an acre a person for active use of the land. There are
people working at it from the perspective of trying to grow everything they
need on their one acre. And here you can see that if you worked with
another or several other people, it might be easier to organize the land.
People from the Global Living Project are studying and experimenting with
this. They have some info at http://www.globallivingproject.org and a book
with more details coming out in September.

9) Another thing to be sure about is where you would like to live. As much
as you can, go the area for periods of time at different times of the year,
to be sure you like it in all seasons. And then go ahead and get the land,
plan the design of it and get the food, fuel, basketry,and timber trees, and
fruit and nut shrubs planted as soon as you can.

10)Make a list of the skills you'd like to add to the ones you already have,
and look for the ways to learn them and start using them now as well.
Besides gardening, perhaps orchard care, grafting, bees, chickens, natural
house building, vineyards, soap making, fiber into cloth and paper, grain
threshing, bicycled powered appliances, fish farming, net making.

Sharon
gordonse@one.net






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