Water

Fresh clean water is an important component to life.    Americans take it for granted, though other parts of the world aren’t so lucky.   The average U.S. household uses 100 to 160 gallons a day (versus 2 to 5 gallons for the rest of the world) with agriculture using the most.  In my bioregion (Northeastern Ohio), I’m less than 50 miles away from the Great Lakes, one of the biggest freshwater bodies in the world.   Because of this abundance, other parts of the country are eyeing this grand resource (like California, which is in the middle of a deep drought).

One of the tenets of permaculture is the conserving and storing of resources, including water.  Household water has several categories , including fresh, grey, and black.  Fresh is obviously used for drinking, cooking, and cleaning.  Grey is water that was previously used for cleaning (think shower or kitchen) that can be repurposed (like flushing toilets or watering non-edible plants).  Black water is fecal matter, though urine can be considered grey (though it’s yellow) as it’s used as crop fertilizer in some countries like China.  Separating water use instead of putting it into one system like current conventional engineering is a big step towards having enough water for everyone in the future.

Permaculture design works to store and release water so it’s available when it’s needed.  Soil building helps by adding water holding compost and biomatter.  Drip irrigation puts crop water where it’s needed, right at the plant roots.  Maintaining leaky old infrastructure (pipes, etc) reduces waste to a minimum.  Reforestation of barren land keeps water from running off unprotected soils, saving both water and topsoil.   Swales (water harvesting ditches on contour) slow water down, allowing it to seep into to ground instead of running quickly over sloped land.  Keyline plowing (first perfected in Australia) uses deeply plowed groves on the contours of a agricultural field to accomplish the same goal as swales.

Patterns in Nature

Permaculture design uses patterns in nature to achieve its goals. We discussed the “Flower of Life“, “a geometrical shape composed of multiple evenly-spaced, overlapping circles arranged in a flower like pattern with six fold symmetry like a hexagon.”  Many of the patterns that form here are also seen in nature.

Observation of nature’s patterns is important to permaculture, especially edges. Many of the techniques employed are about maximizing edges such as the herb spiral, forest gardening, intercropping, chinampas, and edge gardening.

The Snarky Gardener is learning something new.

The Snarky Gardener saw a Facebook posting for a 12 week permaculture college class and decided to just jump in. The course costs $10 for materials and will have “get your hands dirty” training. It’s being held in Oberlin (about an hour or so from my house) at a local farm. Not a bad drive unless it’s snowing (which it has been a lot this winter). The SG is probably the oldest person in the class (including the instructor) but what I lack in youth I gain in snarkiness. It’s nice to see a room full of undergrads so excited about such a transformative subject as permaculture.

In case you are wondering what permaculture is, I’ll give it the old college try (pun intended) to explain it. Permaculture is an ecological design framework that strives to use natural processes to produce human needed resources. The question I ask myself to get into right frame of mind is “What would society look like if gasoline cost double, triple, or even quadruple of today’s prices?” Shipping anything would be a lot more expensive so we would need to have systems that were local and sustainable without much (if any) oil. So we’d want to be able to provide for our needs from our own area as much as possible (think fruit trees, perennial gardens, chickens, and bicycles for example).

What really attracts me to this discipline is its systems design approach. Professionally I’m a software developer, so I think of systems and design every day. I’ve tried to incorporate some permaculture concepts into my garden and yard (like perennial food plants, no tilling, rain barrels, and using my dog River to dig planting holes) but I want to understand it on a deeper level. I’ve read quite a few books on the subject, but nothing beats instructor-lead hands-on learning.

So every week over the next few months, I will be writing about my experiences at this permaculture farm. Hopefully I don’t pull a back muscle or fall on my face (I’m not the most graceful person).