Nydia Needham - Creating Your Permaculture Heaven: How to Design and Create Your Own Backyard Food Forest

Copyright 2021 by Nydia Needham

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, or through any information browsing, storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Contents

In the Action Plan for Permaculture Newbies, you ll learn:

How to start thinking like a permaculturist

An easy to follow mini guide to creating your permaculture heaven

The 7 mistakes newbies make and how to avoid them

Some mini projects to get you going

Scan the QR code below to be taken straight to your free copy!

I remember the first time one of my friends helped me out in the garden. Everything was getting along fine, we had a lovely harvest of strawberries for later; then suddenly I heard her scream as if shed been attacked by a lion. Well, there are no lions in my garden, I promise!

So I looked around. There she was, standing, really pale and scared. And on the ground in front of her was a life-threatening , dangerous, poisonous earthworm!

I laughed. Dont you know how useful those are? I asked her. Theyre a real gardeners friend; they improve the soil and help incorporate organic matter into it.

But theyre horrible!

I sighed. Its not always easy to introduce people to per maculture.

A lot of us arent brought up to get our hands dirty. We know about lawn mowing and decking and landscaping not soil and worms and composting. We want a sanitized garden; we use pesticides and fertilizers and gas-guzzling ride-on lawnmowers to get them that way.

And big agricultureconvention al, large- scale commercial farminguses even more pesticides and more fertilizers and is actually pretty destructive of natural resources.

So imagine that you could use your garden to create a wildlife refuge for birds, butterflies and bees, to provide yourself with fresh fruit and vegetables and even craft materials for basketry and dyeing, to present you with a sun-trap for catching a few rays, a shaded area for when its just too hot, the beautiful colors of a host of different flowers all year round... while also helping t he planet?

Permaculture lets yo u do that.

It does so by basing itself on natural systems, just like one Ive seen developing over the last few years. Theres a little piece of woodland near us. Ten years ago, the owners cut down some of the trees for timber. They left the ground bare. The first year, there were grasses and a wonderful display of grassland flowers. The second year, a few shrubs began to grow, and now, there are a few trees just beginning to emerge from the shrub cover, but some of those pretty flowers have gone. On the other hand, theres a big blackberry bush that I have my eye on for making jam this fall

Permacultures basic idea is that if you look at these natural processes and try to copy them, youre going with the grain of nature instead of against it, and by doing so, youll get a garden (or even a farm) that looks aft er itself.

Not everyones a fan. Some people associate permaculture with gardens that look messy and wild. Its true, they dont have the classical appeal of a nicely trimmed lawn and neat herbaceous borders. But you can have an attractive garden and still use permaculture principles; its all in the design. Permie pioneers were after food, not flowers, but your priorities might be different. You can set up your own systems to provide the things that you want to get out of them, whether thats food, fuel, building materials, flowers for the house, or a home for a wide array of wildlife. In fact, if you want, you can have all of these things at once!

Some people think you have to have a lot of land to use permaculture. Inspiring pictures of forest farmssome guy who bought forty acres of land for a few bucksdont help when youre starting with a tiny back yard, with a load of concrete left by the last owner, or a damp and overgrown garden with a lawn that ran wild and that has no shade and just claggy clay for soil. Actually, you can do permaculture on a balcony. Or you can start with that backyard and its poor conditions and transform it, bit by bit, into a productive and beautif ul haven.

You dont have to be a shaggy hippy to adopt permaculture. You dont have to be a mountain man or an Earth mother. You can be a soccer mom or a fashionista (warning; you may get your nail varnish chipped) or a nerdy guy who works in software, or just a young parent who wants to do something for the planet and give the kids a place they can explore and learn, not just a patch of grass and a padd ling pool.

You dont have to do everything. You can have a forest garden or just a single tree. If you have a balcony, you may not even have the tree. You can have a full-on wildlife garden, or you can run a normal looking garden but with a permaculture p hilosophy.

Permaculture is a philosophy and a practice. So this book will talk a bit about the philosophy and also about the science behind it.

But Im a practical kind of person and so this is also going to be a practical kind of a book. Im going to show you how to go from concrete desert to fruitful forest or as far along that path as you want to go. One thing I want you to realize from the beginning is that none of this has to be dauntingyou can start as small as you like and you can move at a pace that suits you. Dont feel you have to learn everything in one go and rush out to transform a whole wilderness in a year. Just deal in manageable chunks and youll do j ust fine.

In this book, you ll learn:

how to plan a garden that makes the best of the site, drainage and soil,

how to improve the soil and make your plants much more productive,

which plants to choose (by function and interaction with other plants),

and best of all, how doing less work can get you more fruit, flowers and greenery.

I grew up in the country and that had a couple of different impacts on my life. First of all, I learned to love nature, to enjoy the great outdoors, hiking or watching birds, or just watching the clouds sail past. But I also learned how modern agriculture can destroy a rivers natural life by pesticides leaching into it from the soil. I was shocked just how much artificial fertilizer the prettiest garden in our village used, despite the fact that there were a stables producing loads of manure just down the road.

I got interested in ecological agriculture and the green movement, one thing led to another and I ended up learning about permaculture as a way of creating a sustainable system of food production. But it wasnt easytheres a lot of science to learn. Some of the early writers on permaculture are ninety percent science and only ten percent practical gardening. In this book, I want to do things the other way round, only giving you the science you absolutely needand Ill explain it very simplybut sharing a lot of advice on practical issues like designing your garden, choosing plants and improving your soil for bette r returns.