4/8/09 It's no secret that I'm not an expert gardener. I'm just a guy trying to get my veggies, flowers and other plants to grow. I just thought it would be nice to share my exploits and some tips, tricks and other helpful information that I "discover" along the way.

I keep coming across this word "permaculture" all over the Internet, so when I found someone who seemed to know about it, Chad Hellwinckel, I asked him to write a guest blog post explaining it.

Here goes:

Permaculture is a design philosophy for creating systems that produce bountifully, enhance the health of the soil, use few inputs and produce no waste. It can be applied anywhere, rural or urban. It is based on a few guiding principles such as, using nature as an image in our designed systems, problems can be part of the solution, make the least change for the greatest effect, everything gardens, start small, make small mistakes to learn from, edges are important, work creates work, use intuition….ok that’s enough for now. The best way to understand permaculture is to see it hopping.

I visited a friend’s small 1 acre house and yard last summer. They had a greenhouse on the side of their house built of cob (mud), with greywater from their house (the water initially came from the roof and into their cistern) feeding the plants growing within. The water then went into an outdoor wetland that cleaned the water, which then emptied into a pond. Ducks swam in the pond. Down the hill, overflow from the pond irrigated an edible forest of apples, pears, gooseberries, jujubes, goumiberries, and other trees. There were groundcovers of chicory and white clover. They didn’t mow the forest/orchard. It mostly took care of itself (the ducks took care of the bugs). My friend said he dredged the pond yearly to amend his no-till garden. Over to the side he had curved rows on a hillside with many vegetables growing, all densely packed in, with no row a monoculture. These beds had never been tilled. Reaching down, I grabbed a handful of soil rich in worms. The front of the yard was a small pasture with chickens in a mobile pen, mowing the yard and fertilizing at the same time. So what my friend’s small farm is doing is using some lessons from observing how nature works, and putting that wisdom to work for producing food and cleaning water for him. All without a lot of backbreaking work, without chemicals and without fertilizers. Instead of pushing against nature, nature is helping pull.

There are examples of these types of systems all over the world, some new, and some old. What my line of work (investigating energy issues and agriculture at UT) has taught me is that we really need propagate well designed systems. The three biggies…peak oil, climate change and soil depletion will make it imperative that more of our food is grown close to home. What permaculture really communicates is that this transition that humanity must make in the next 50 to 100 years does not need to be a drag, it can be really a lot of fun, you can work your body and mind, you can meet your neighbors, you can reduce your expenses, and you can eat good healthy food.

I hope you can join us at a 'Fundamentals of Permaculture' Workshop at The Birdhouse May 2nd where we can go alittle deeper into an explanation of permaculture and its principles. For more info and to sign-up go to: www.KnoxvillePermacultureGuild.org.