A 10-Acre Permaculture Project
One of my pet peeves about
the permaculture world is that we all read the same books and then we
regurgitate the information. After you see the same idea in print
five times, you assume it works...even if no one's really tried it.
Sara McDonald's A
10-Acre Permaculture Project: Site planning in the humid subtropics begins to fill that
gap. This design plan presents several good ideas for working
around a high water table and producing an interwined permaculture
farm. I particularly enjoyed the beautifully drawn diagrams and
the year-by-year implementation information --- I could have saved a
lot of money and heartache if I'd planted my garden in cover crops for
soil building from year one and waited to plant fruit trees until year
three.
Of course, what I really
want to see is before and after photos taken every year for the next
decade with information on which parts succeeded and failed --- I'll
look forward to buying that followup ebook in 2021. In the
meantime, I hope other non-big-name permaculture practitioners will
self-publish their own plans and followups. I promise, it's very
easy to put an ebook up on Amazon, and if you tell me about your plan,
I'll buy it and review it.
Or explore more posts by date or by subject.
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.
Want to be notified when new comments are posted on this page? Click on the RSS button after you add a comment to subscribe to the comment feed, or simply check the box beside "email replies to me" while writing your comment.
Ashaldaron --- Thanks for trying out Microbusiness Independence! There's a real paucity of books for temperature climate permaculture, but you might try Creating a Forest Garden if you're specifically interested in forest garden. It's set in the UK, but at least that's not tropical....
Sepp Holzer's Permaculture has a lot of interesting stuff too, but it's really more helpful for big scale farmers than for backyard folks. Also, it's about Austria.
It's not out yet, but I've got high hopes for Paradise Lot, set in Massachusetts.
Alshadaron, you should check out http://www.beaverstatepermaculture.com/.
There are lots and lots of resources for the PNW, and as the name suggests, the site is based in Oregon. My permaculture teacher is in Oregon, and that's his site. He often posts examples of his designs and he's very nice and would probably share some other resources with you. His name is Andrew Millison.
@anna - I read Sepp's book, it was really interesting, but maddeningly lacking in detail. He is awesome for big picture, but not so good at filling in the blanks. At least not to me. Forest gardens do interest me, so I will check that one out, I will also keep my eyes out for Paradise Lot to launch.
@sara - I will check out Beaver State. Thanks for the heads up.
Asha-- I thought it might be better to include a direct link to Andrew's page. He's got quite a few albums of his designs, including photos from his projects, available on this page: http://www.beaverstatepermaculture.com/profile/AndrewMillison?xg_source=profiles_memberList