History of permaculture
Although
permaculture-like systems have been around for centuries, the name
didn't come about until the 1970s when David Holmgren and Bill
Mollison, the fathers of permaculture, met in Tasmania,
Australia. Holmgren was a student working on his thesis and
Mollison was a professor at a nearby university.
The result of their collaboration was permaculture, which they later
defined as "consciously designed landscapes
which mimic the patterns and relationships found in nature, while
yielding an abundance of food, fibre and energy for provision of local
needs." The embedded video is part of a television series
starring Bill
Mollison that helped spread the concept of permaculture around the
world in
1991. (If you like it, you can find a lot of other portions of
the series on youtube as well.)
Chicken tractors are a great example of
permaculture in action.
Since some of the fertility in many natural ecosystems comes from
animal excrement, adding animals back into our gardens reduces the need
for chemical fertilizers. Check out our permaculture
lunchtime series for
examples of other permaculture features of our farm.
| This post is part of our History of Permaculture lunchtime series.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Anna,
Yep messy and disorganized. But that doesn't mean it doesn't work! I'll have to come and check out your forest garden sometime so you can prove me wrong. :P