Perma-culture and Designing the Homestead

Permaculture is an approach to designing human settlements and agricultural systems that mimic the relationships found in natural ecologies.

Permaculture is sustainable land use design. This is based on ecological and biological principles, often using patterns that occur in nature to maximise effect and minimise work. Permaculture aims to create stable, productive systems that provide for human needs, harmoniously integrating the land with its inhabitants. The ecological processes of plants, animals, their nutrient cycles, climatic factors and weather cycles are all part of the picture. Inhabitants’ needs are provided for using proven technologies for food, energy, shelter and infrastructure. Elements in a system are viewed in relationship to other elements, where the outputs of one element become the inputs of another. Within a Permaculture system, work is minimised, “wastes” become resources, productivity and yields increase, and environments are restored. Permaculture principles can be applied to any environment, at any scale from dense urban settlements to individual homes, from farms to entire regions.

Prevailing on any site are powerful energies, both potentially beneficial and destructive: wild energies such as wind, sun, fire, water and even wild animal flows and views potentially impact your property.

Permaculture landscape design takes account of these through sector analysis. Once they are accounted for, with proper placement of design components they can be channeled for special uses, encouraged, minimized, blocked or deflected to conserve site energy, aesthetics and resources.

How do you account for site energies?

The key is observation! “The traditional Irish cottage was always placed in a perma culture sector and zone considerate way. The front of house always faced the rising sun so as to warm it in the morning and the back door was to the south east so as to get the early morning breeze which would air the building. The front door was of course used for threshing which made good use of a breeze ,and from it came the word threshold”.

In most cases such energies will not be fully appreciated on a single visit to the site. A full year or more of information will be needed, as well as delving into longer time frame data and the memory of long term residents of the area.

The best way towards gathering and collating your information from your site information is to draw a circle and divide it into sectors and zones, placing the house at the centre. The sectors are the compass directions and the impacts of natural forces within these sectors ,ie ;sun summer winter,wind, fire hazzards ie brush and wildlife

The aesthetic of the site are the net factor.An appropriate placement pattern locates your components in efficient energetic relationship within prescribed zones with respect to frequency of use, access and time.

The more frequent the visits, the closer the component needs to be to your site’s main activity centre. The number of visits will depend on how often the component needs your attention, in addition to how often you need to visit it to access its yields.

Aesthetics
Aesthetic enjoyment of your property is an important objective for sustainable living.

• Wanted views out
• Unwanted views out
• Unwanted views in

Water Energy
Catchments both within and beyond your property divert water through your site as storm watersheds, permanent brooks and swamplands. Capturing the energy of water to increase water storage on your site both in the form of plants and animals, soil and in dams is an important goal of your design as it is a direct determinant of potential property yield. High storages represent an energy storage in the form of gravity, that can be used to gravity feed water to site elements without energy inputs.

Site all Design Components to Manage Incoming Energies
The basic energy conserving rule in Permaculture landscape design is to place every element in your system so that serves more than one function, and have more than one element in place to serve each important function (e.g fire protection, water collection).

One Zero: The Home
Frequent daily visits - The innermost circle, or Zone 0, represents the focal point of activity in the system. In a small farm this is usually the home. It is the “hottest” area of human activity, symbolized in our diagram by the color red!

If we are going to achieve energy efficiencies it makes sense to place those elements of our system that must be visited the most often within Zone 0: the house, attached glasshouse or shadehouse, as well as house integrated living components such as pergola-trained vines,or similar potted plants and companion animals.

Zone One: The Home Garden
Regular daily visits - Within 6 meters (20 feet) or so of the house, in Zone 1, should be placed those elements that require close observation, frequent visiting, high work input or continual complex techniques.

The aim of Zone 1 is to yield household self-sufficiency and climate control for the home. Zone 1 is also the first Zone that should be developed on your site:

Start at the back door and work out from there!

Once you have Zone 1 fenced and under control you will be providing much of your needs, as well as having established a pleasant living environment for yourself and your family.

And so, elements such as rainwater tanks, the lemon tree, other dwarf or espalier-grown multi-graft fruit trees, chicken laying boxes, small ponds, culinary herbs, worm farm for recycling of household wastes, intensive, fully mulched vegetable beds of quick growing annuals, seedling raising areas, and small, quiet domestic animals like fish, rabbits and pigeons can be kept very close at hand within the home garden.

Zone Two: The Home Orchard
Attended every few days - Zone 2 is a little less intensively managed. Suitable elements to place here are spot mulched home orchards, longer cycle vegetables, main crop beds (for trading), and forage ranges for closely managed livestock such as poultry and milking goats or cows. Since they are visited daily for milking, feeding and supervising, the livestock and poultry shelters of Zone 2 often adjoin Zone 1. This Zone may be extended along frequently used paths through more outlying zones.

Zone Three: The Farm
Attended weekly to monthly - Broader scale commercial crops, and animals raised for trade, along with natural trees, dams, windbreaks and barns belong. This area is managed with soil conditioning, green manure crops and manure from Zone 2.

Zone Four: Managed Foreste
Attended infrequently - Hardy, self-care forests and woodlots that are visited infrequently for wood collection, log harvest and wild harvest belong in far flung corners of the property, and can act as buffers to protect Zone 5 wilderness areas. It may also be used occasionally to pasture animals.

Zone Five: Wilderness
Visited occasionally for recreation and appreciation - This is the component of the site left for nature. It comprises natural forest and native remnant and rehabilitated flora and fauna and can be linked to the home garden by a wildlife corridor extension.permaculture landscape design

The Zone concept can be applied equally well for the planning of neighborhoods, farming communities, schools and institutions; in fact, any human system. permaculture landscape design

Permaculture landscape design for sustainable living achieves resource and energy efficiency through such zone analysis to conserve internal energies, combined with a optimization of external energies using zone and sector analysis.

So with this in mind, you can use your sector/zone diagram to plan your site.

For example, you’ll want to facilitate the capture of winter sun and cooling summer breeze energies into your home (Zone 0) and home garden (Zone 1).

So site elements such as tall evergreen trees and large sheds planned for Zones 2 or 3 will need to be sited so that they do not block the winter sun sector from Zone 0 and 1.

The winter sun sector, instead, would be more ideally suited a deciduous home fruit orchard because it allows in winter sun and provides summer shade, while being of low flammability.

Hedgerows and windbreaks (that might also function as food or fuel for animals and you) can be placed so that they divert cooling summer breezes toward your house, but block damaging hot summer and cold winter winds. permaculture landscape design

Placement of a small structure such as a poultry shed would be bordering Zone 1, away from the fire sector, adjacent to the annual garden (for easy use of manure and the tilling, fertilizing and weeding work they do for you), backing onto a forage area, and form part of a windbreak system. permaculture l Great small farm or property design results from the following

• Element placement in accord with properly analyzed sectors, and

• Optimized slope and sun aspect benefits.

Even if you are a novice, by following a commonsense Permaculture landscape design approach, a successful plan for sustainable living will be achieved.

Indeed, you can not fail to do better than those who overlook such essential factors to planning for sustainable living!

Traditional Irish Cottages owners placed their settlements on the inflection point of change in slope profile, shown below as the “key point”. Above the key point, the slope is concave, below it, it is convex.

Such placement with respect to slope enabled traditional cultures to draw resources from the different ecosystems existing up and down slope. The junction of different ecosystems always offer access to greater biodiversity, ecological niches and yield than either alone.

Michael P Holmes
Mayo Thatch

Contact us
Michael and Angela Holmes
Daubworks
Culmore
Foxford
Co Mayo

www.heritagenaturalbuilding.eu