Yeehaw! Working with permaculture water-harvesting principles, we dug a small pond and connected it to more than 400ft of rain-capturing-forest-garden-watering contour swales. I worked with Tristan Vis (a past PDC student of Geoff Lawton‘s and mine) and a local earthmover Dick Stokes for 8 hours yesterday to get everything in the ground, cleaned up, and seeded with a mix of nitrogen-fixing groundcovers.

Dick skillfully operated an 8-ton CAT D4C Bulldozer in concert with a 4-ton excavator to dig the swales and excavate the pond. We calculated the water catchment on top of the ridge to be approximately 19,000 gallons per month (average), and the 400ft of swales (3 ft wide at the base, 4 ft wide at a height of 1.5 ft) have capacity to catch and infiltrate approximately 18,000 gallons into the ground when full.

We seeded the swales with red clover (Trifolium pratense)& Alfalfa/lucerne (Medicago sativa).

Here’s Tristan & I in front of the lower swale.

Interested in permaculture earthworks for your property? Contact me over at www.appleseedpermaculture.com

So what’s the role of architects in all of this?

Architects often become the de-facto landscape designers, because the majority of money in any development budget is spent on the buildings. Any landscapes design, much less integrated landscape design, is a often a tired afterthought. To go beyond sustainability, we need to step past this paradigm! The following notes are from a talk I gave at the University of Massachusetts in September 2008

As architects for a resilient & thriving future, here are your tasks:

• OBSERVE – prolonged at thoughtful observation instead of protracted and thoughtless action

• DESIGN the simplest, most functional, and most vital built ‘environments’ possible.

• INTEGRATE your buildings with the landscape so that they functionally interconnect with as many living systems as possible

• REGENERATE openly seek out and heal the damage and oppression done to living systems — both internally and externally.

• LEVERAGE your work to do the greatest good for the greatest number of beings for the longest amount of time by EMPOWERING people to design with you. Spread your energy and knowledge and excitement through the networks as fast as possible.

Ask yourself:
– What is the simplest solution? what’s the most functional? and what will serve the interests of all life-giving forces on the planet and meet their needs in the most harmonious way?

Whad’ya all think? Do these directives resonate with any of you architects out there?

I get this question all the time:

“What are the computer programs you use every day? What are the most useful for your work as a permaculture designer?”

So, here we go…

EVERY-DAY USE
• Omnioutliner Pro – incredible note-taking and organize-everything software. The program I use most.
• Omnifocus – the omnigroup’s implementation of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) system. beautifully simple and powerful.
• Microsoft Excel – iWork Numbers would work as well, I just haven’t switched over yet.
• Mozilla Firefox 3.0 – advanced web browsing
• Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) – powerful cross-platform mind-mapping; a little quirky at times but really excellent.

WEB APPLICATIONS
• WordPress – powers my website & blogs
• Doodle – best web app for organizing meetings
• Gmail – rocks. best email ever.
• Google Docs – realtime collaborative editing.

DESIGN & MAP TOOLS
• Vectorworks – $1800 professional Computer-Aided Drafting (CAD) software. Awesome, and a steep learning curve.
• Google Earth – free and versatile. combines beautifully with…
• Google SketchUp – free 3D modeling – quick and easy to use

OTHER PROGRAMS
• Adobe CS – especially acrobat, photoshop & indesign
• Preview (Mac OSX) – quick and functional image & pdf editing
• Quickbooks – bookkeeping & invoicing
• Keynote (Mac OSX) – way, way better than powerpoint. seriously.
• Quicktime Pro – most of my video editing here, final touch-ups with iMovie.

AWESOME. Enjoy geekin’ it out.