Why Edible Landscaping? Top 30 Plants

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Would you like to turn your lawn or garden into an abundant edible oasis? The following slideshow will offer you the basic reasoning, principles, and plants to transform your home or workplace. AppleSeed Permaculture is also available for consulting so that you can choose the appropriate plants and plant communities for your particular site.

Ethan Roland of AppleSeed Permaculture presented this slideshow in September 2010 for two incredible organizations: The Kismet Rock Foundation in North Conway, NH and The Alchemy Juice Bar & Mama-lution in West Hartford CT. Both organizations are doing excellent social and ecological world-change work, and we highly recommended that you support their projects… Continue reading →

Regenerative Design & Edible Landscaping Presentation September 5th

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AppleSeed Permaculture is excited to announce our sponsorship of the Kismet Rock Foundation through an upcoming presentation and full permaculture design donation. Read on for details!

Kismet Rock Foundation invites the public to a FREE presentation by permaculture designer and teacher Ethan Roland of AppleSeed Permaculture on Sunday, September 5th from 6 to 8pm in the Legends Room at Eastern Slope Inn Resort, 2760 Main Street, North Conway, NH. Drawing from direct connection with nature, Permaculture gives us a set of principles and patterns for designing homes, businesses, and gardens that increase the health of the local ecosystem. Please join us for this introductory presentation on the abundant world of edible landscaping – from basic permaculture practices to specific fruits, berries, vegetables, and flowers that you can grow at your home. Join us to envision a low-maintenance landscape full of delicious food, and learn the first steps to creating it in your community.

Permaculture Design for abundant edible landscape.

An AppleSeed Permaculture Plan for Sustainability will be a featured silent auction item at Caliente!: An Evening of Dancing to Benefit Kismet Rock Foundation.

For more information, Continue reading →

Permaculture for Farmers: Crops, Patterns, Polycultures

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Every time Benneth Phelps (Mosaic Farm) and I prepare to give this talk (this time at the 2010 Northeastern Organic Farm Association Summer Conference) we end up tearing it apart and redesigning it completely. Here’s a sample polyculture from the talk:

This time, Benneth drew on her recent experience creating a complete business plan for her venture Mosaic Farm in the Connecticut River Valley of western Massachussets. We articulated a new design permaculture process for farmers, who need to focus on specific marketable crops along with the larger landscape patterns necessary to support and maintain them.

For a summary of our new design process, Continue reading →

Permaculture Design Firms Around the World

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[guest post from Roots to Fruits blogger Mark Angelini]
Are you looking for a permaculture designer to transform your home, business, or institution into a thriving oasis of sustainability? I’ve assembled an initial list of all the permaculture design firms in the world (that I could quickly and easily find online). The graphic was created using VUE Mindmapping software. I’ve compiled these from one hours worth of research, so if you know of any firms missing from this list, please add your business name and website link in the comments!
Don’t see your permaculture design firm listed? Add the name and website link in the comments!

Permaculture Pancake Polyculture

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A PERMACULTURE PANCAKE POLYCULTURE

Updated at the Mosaic Farm Perennial Plan Design Charette in Easthampton, MA; originially composed at a Permaculture Design course in Vermont!

Here’s the species – function list :

Long-term overstory
• sugar maple (Acer saccharum) – syrup
• black walnut (Juglans nigra) – nuts, syrup
• shagbark hickory (Carya ovata) – nuts, syrup
• black birch (Betula lenta) – syrup, tea
• sweet-acorn oaks (Quercus spp.) – acorn flour for pancakes!
• chestnut (Castanea spp) – chestnut flour for pancakes! (see www.oikostreecrops.com for a great selection)

Selected Understory
• pawpaw (Asimina triloba) – banana custard-flavored fruit, shade tolerant
• gooseberry (Ribes uva-crispa) – tasty tart fruit, shade tolerant
• currant (Ribes spp.) – tasty tart fruit, shade tolerant
• thimbleberry (Rubus parviflorus) – tasty tart fruit, shade tolerant

Selected Animals
• chicken (Gallus domesticus) – eggs (for the pancake batter!)
• pig (Sos scrufula) – bacon! And fat for frying the pancakes!

This arose from our discussion of mixed-species sugar-bushes. My research & experimentation this spring shpowed that black walnut (Juglans nigra) trees can be tapped and boiled for a DELICIOUS syrup, and friends inform me that Hickories (Carya spp.) can also be tapped. Add these to the traditional sugar maple (Acer saccharum), other maple species (Acer spp.), and birch (Betula spp., especially B. lenta), and we’re looking at a significantly more diverse stand of locally-appropriate sugar production!

Add in the acorns and chestnuts for a delicious and sweet perennial starch, mixed with eggs from chickens free-ranging in the understory, and your batter is coming together. Then you can use bacon fat from the acorn & chestnut-finished pigs to oil the pan and fry your pancakes. Topped off with sauces from your understory fruit production (pawpaws, gooseberries, currants, thimbleberries), this is an incredible perennial meal.

Let’s step beyond the relative monoculture of sugar maples! And go even farther for some delicious perennial permaculture pancakes.

Forest Gardening: Vision & Pattern Language

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Forest Gardening: Vision & Pattern Language

We’re in the middle of the Design & Theory weekend of the 2010 Forest Garden Immersion Series. This 4-weekend series, one per month, immerses participants in the practice and culture of forest gardening. A few spots are still open for the upcomingweekends:

  • Install & Establish (May 28-30)
  • Caretake & Tend (June 18-20)
  • Food & Medicine (July 16-18)             …Sign up now at http://tiny.cc/fgis2010!

We’re compressing the entire Edible Forest Gardens design process (EFG Volume II, Chapter 3 & 4) articulated by Dave Jacke and Eric Toensmeier into a single weekend – so our teaching team needed to get creative. Rather than uber-detailing each stage of the design process, we decided to trial a Pattern Language approach.

Pattern Languages, named and articulated by architect Christopher Alexander et. al in the 70′s, are one of the most powerful design tools that exist in the world. Patterns are defined as “solutions to problems across contexts”, which can be strung together to form complete designs for towns, buildings, and more… Since their original proposed use for architecture and planning, Pattern languages have been used in realms from medical training, software design, to the compositiong of zoning laws. An excellent resource is the collaboratively co-created “Liberating Voices: A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution” published by MIT press.

Dave Jacke & Eric Toensmeier created the first draft of a Forest Garden Pattern Language in Edible Forest Gardens Volume II, which Connor Stedman of Turkey Tail Permaculture concept-mapped last year:

EFG_FG_PL_2009

Connor and I also typed up the Name, Problem Statement, and Solution Statement for all of the 57 patterns in Edible Forest Gardens — you can download a PDF of these statements here. As I looked through the patterns in preparation for our course, I realized that I and other designers have been using patterns in my forest garden design work that were not included in the first draft. So, drawing on our collective experience (especially the brilliant pattern-articulators Dave Jacke, Eric Toensmeier, Jonathan Bates, Dyami Nason-Regan, and Christopher Alexander et. al), I’ve gathered 14 patterns and proposed 23 new ones for the language. I also re-arranged the patterns into a new six-step forest garden design process, which is laid out  as a Flower Petal Bed (pattern #46) in the following diagram. To design a forest garden (after articulating goals and analyzing the site), simply choose 1 or 2 patterns from each “pattern bed” and connect them together into a design. You can download the map by clicking on it.

The Apios Institute for Regenerative Perennial Agriculture (which I’m on the board of) has just released a very exciting new co-creative resource: the Edible Forest Garden Wiki. The wiki itself is an ecosystem of information, automatically inter-linking useful forest garden Species Pages to mutually supportive Polycultures to fully designed Forest Gardens – much like the Internet Movie Database connects actors, films, and production companies. Wiki-members (subscription is about $2 per month) can add their own experiences growing 700 forest garden species, add new polycultures and forest gardens, and comment on other people’s designs. Check out the free content and become a wiki member!

Part of my longer term vision is develop the Forest Garden Pattern Language through a similar co-creative online space, where we can all propose patterns and try them out in our designs. The patterns that work across contexts will emerge through our collective research and experimentation. Sound like fun? Want to play? Let me know in the comments!

Natural Swimming Pools

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Natural Swimming Pools:

Multifunctional Tools for a Permaculture Landscape?

In Bill Mollison’s Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual, he says something along the lines of, “While we’re not using Chlorine to make mustard gas and poison our drinking water, we fill our pools with it and have a great time swimming around. Why would I want to immerse myself in a liquid that no other living thing can survive in?”

Natural swimming pools provide a completely biological method to create clean, clear swimming pools. They can be designed and built on nearly any scale, from small backyard pools to huge public swimming areas. Used extensively in Europe (especially Germany), they have yet to really take off in the US. Today I attended a seminar by James Robyn of BioNova Natural Swimming Pools, who gave a 400-slide overview of the systems and offered some basic design principles and guidelines. My complete set of notes from the day is available for free download here: Natural_Swimming_Pool_notes.

Basically, Natural Swimming Pools (NSPs) are just like normal pools or ponds that pump water slowly through “Regeneration Zones” – which are simply Constructed Wetlands. Using a gravel substrate 3 feet deep, a diversity of locally-adapted aquatic plants (including submerged, emergent, and floating plants) are planted at a density of 2-5 plants per square foot. Water should flow through the pools at a rate of 26 gallons per square foot of per day. Costs for constructing Natural Swimming Pools are roughly $100 per square foot – which apparently is similar to the cost of a conventional chemical pool.

From my perspective, a simple permaculture-inspired earth pond with a constructed wetland would serve exactly the same purpose. Especially if the pond was being used for multiple functions – agricultural irrigation, aquaculture & food production, light reflection, microclimate, etc.

That said, if you have a design client dead-set on a pool, the comparable pricing and straightforward biological technology of Natural Swimming Pools is an attractive alternative to yet another unnatural chlorine-poisoned turquoise blotch on the landscape. Furthermore, NSPs offer the chance to add habitat diversity and plant species diversity — another way that ecological design can potentially enhance ecosystem health while meeting our human needs.

If you would like a Natural Swimming Pool consultation and feasibility assessment for your home or business from AppleSeed Permaculture LLC, please contact ethan[at]appleseedpermaculture.com.

Plants for Natural Swimming Pools

Note that I was quickly copying these off of slides in the presentation, so many spelling may be wrong. For some interesting tidbits about planting and substrates, you can download my complete notes from the talk here. You can also read Wikipedia’s “Organisms used in water purification” for some ideas.

Do you know any good books on Natural Swimming Pools? Can you correct any errors in these plant lists? Let us know in the comments.
Emergent Plants

  • Typha spp. (cattail)
  • Iris spp. (good for P uptake)
  • Lythrum salicaria (Purple loosestrife)
  • Eleocharis (spike rushes)
  • Butomus umbellatus (flowering rushes)
  • Baldellia ranunculoides (lesser waterplantain)
  • Acorus spp. (blueflag)
  • Caltha spp. (marsh marigold)
  • Swamp hibiscus
  • Myosotus spp. (?)

Deep Water Zone Plants

  • Ranunculus spp.
  • Myriophyllum verticillatum, spp.
  • Elodea canadensis
  • Potamogeton lucens
  • Chara aspera
  • Ceratophyllum spp.

Floating Plants

  • Water lillies
  • Nymphoides pletata
  • Ptamogeton natans (?)

References

Carbon Farming: Concepts, Tools & Markets

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Carbon Farming: Concepts, Tools & Markets

Here we are in winter farming conference season – I presented this talk at the 2010 Northeast Organic Farming Association’s  Winter Conference (Massachusetts), and got some great feedback on the idea of local carbon markets. I’ll be presenting again next weekend (January 23rd) at the NOFA NY conference – you can learn more and register here: www.nofany.org. Scroll down below the slideshow to download the handouts.

Anyone interested in starting a local carbon market? Let me know in the comments.

[slideshare id=2935355&doc=carbonfarmingpermacultureforfarmers201-100117110433-phpapp01]

handout

Carbon Farming: Concepts, Tools & Markets Handout

Young Farmers Conference 2009 – Permaculture for Farmers & Ecosystem Investing

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Young Farmers Conference 2009:

Permaculture for Farmers & Ecosystem Investing

Below are the slideshows and handouts for the two workshops I presented last week at the Young Farmers Conference, held at the incredible Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture. Let me know what you think in the comments – and Enjoy!

Permaculture for Farmers

[slideshare id=2669780&doc=pcforfarmersslideshow09-091207175232-phpapp02]

Download the handout by clicking on the image below.

Permaculture for Farmers Handout

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Ecosystem Investing

Download the handout by clicking on the image below.

Ecosystem Investing Handout