It took me a few designs to grasp how I could incorporate the permaculture principles and ethics into my design process other than by just giving a list of a few examples of how they would be used. It wasn’t until design five “kitchen garden reloaded” that I started to look at them differently. This is when I came to regard the permaculture principles and ethics as anchor points. Short phrases to keep my designs present in the here and now of what permaculture design is about.

In the design frameworks, CEAP and FORAGE there is a whole section to just apply the principles and ethics. This helped my designs by giving me the freedom to riff on them for longer. As this design is using the FORAGE framework, I’ll start my riff and take a learning journey through each of the principles and conclude with the ethics and see if there has been a pathway to this diploma.

 

 

 

OBSERVE & INTERACT

Welcome to Fight Club. The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club.

-Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

If permaculture had rules the above quote would read, Welcome to permaculture. The first rule of permaculture is: that you do nothing but observe for the first year.  

With an unspoken rule like this anybody taking the diploma in applied permaculture is in for the long haul. Whether you relate to this as a rule or the Prime Directive of permaculture, “to observe is a guiding principle of permaculture that prohibits its designers from interfering with the natural development of unfamiliar environments. The Prime Directive protects unprepared environments from the dangerous tendency of well-intentioned permaculture designers to introduce advanced technology, knowledge, and values before they are ready.” From Star Trek to permaculture designers, there is a responsibility to take our time with our projects. I feel confident that I have conformed to this principle, a little over six years of working on this diploma I’m sure my medal awaits me.  

Writing this I now find myself observing the time between sending my first ten potential designs over to Wilf and the here and now of writing these words. The first insight that jumps out from these past six years is how much I thought I understood the process of permaculture design when I first started my diploma compared to now. It's only when you get to experience something from the inside out that you realise the vastness of the whole reality. Permaculture design is one reality that has a certain limitlessness to it.

Early on with my designs, I would include everything that needed to be done in one design. My kitchen garden design is a good example of this. When I came to redesign it last year, I choose to remove two areas of the garden and create separate designs for them. This allowed the kitchen garden reloaded design to focus on the layout of the garden, leaving both the rainwater harvesting and composting systems to go into individual designs.

This separation of elements has also become apparent in other areas of my thinking. Through the process of writing up my designs, I’m reflecting on and observing the things I’ve done and why. This has led to the insight of not needing to do everything at once. It has been quite a challenge for me and one that will be taken on beyond the conclusion of my diploma as I continue my permaculture learning pathway. This can be observed in my mental health design. The example of allowing myself to step back before rushing in and interacting with every thought that comes into my mind that I believed I needed to do, allowed the final solution to develop organically over time.  

The principle of “observe and interact” has come to represent that space between my thoughts that I often jump over to get on with the next thing. This was the permaculture principle I felt most confident with whilst at the same time, taking little notice of it. Now I feel that it will be a guiding principle for what comes next along my journey. 

 

CATCH & STORE ENERGY

From the outside in, this is a very practical principle and one that I’ve found hard to expound upon through each of my designs. It wasn’t until I got to my eighth design Richmond Permaculture Network, that I had to flip how I was looking at it. From the inside out the principle takes on a new meaning for me. It helped me to realise there are so many areas in my life where I’ve been losing my energy. This is probably the same insight from the “observe and interact” principle, understanding that I’m not allowing myself the time to step back and think about what I’m doing but just pressing forwards continuously.

Being aware of the need to catch and store the energy that surrounds us will enable a whole system to function sustainably. If that system is using more energy than it is generating it becomes unsustainable and relies on constant external support to operate. Using myself as the example of the system I’ve spent my whole life running unsustainably. There will always come a point when a system will collapse when the external resources needed to operate the system run out. I’ve experienced this with my body and my mind many times in my life when something breaks down.

Catching and storing energy now represents for me finding out where in the system changes need to be made to hold onto that which is flowing out of the system and preventing it from escaping, along with absorbing any extra energy into the system so that it can be used to prevent breakdowns at a later date.     

   

OBTAIN A YIELD

For some reason, this principle gives me a feeling that I can only describe as fun. It’s the treasure hunt principle. I don’t know about you, but I like to have my eyes on the prize. Perhaps it’s just me but I doubt it, I do like to receive a reward for all my efforts. Obtaining a yield allows even permaculture designs to spin that wheel of fortune, the chance to win Bully’s star prize, to play your cards right. 8os gameshow nostalgia aside, without obtaining a yield there is a good chance that there is a bug in your design that needs picking off.

Obtaining a yield is something we are always working toward with each permaculture design. It’s the purpose of creating the design. Each design needs to have an outcome, in what form this presents itself is limitless. A recent example is the cherry tree I planted a couple of years ago in my back garden. Both myself and a blackbird have dedicated ourselves to observing each of the cherries as they got redder and redder with each passing day. As the days went on, I would notice a small peck mark in a cherry, I would eat a whole cherry, but both the blackbird and I would then leave well alone until the next day and perform the ritual once again. At 5:22 am, it was time, the blackbird had a look in her eye that signalled these are all mine. As much as I love blackbirds I love cherries much more, out I went and filled my bowl with the cherries whilst all the time the bird sat nearby, watching me remove her cherries. Her glower got the better of me in the end and I left a dozen cherries on the tree and went to work. When I returned, she had left me a single cherry.

As I eat my cherries, savouring the sweet juice the whole forage garden design process has been focused on this very moment and it was all worth it. I guess the blackbird thought the same as she also has been busy working in the garden helping with pest control and fertility. We have our eyes on the prize and with a successful design, we receive it.  

Yields are not always as sweet and juicy and as obvious as plump dark red cherries that take you to levels of higher consciousness when eaten. More subtle yields run through all my designs. My permaculture learning pathway has been a time of reconnecting with who I am, with that which brings joy into my life and not just the short-lived dopamine hit from cherry eating.

My greatest yield has been allowing myself the time to step back and observe my life. My permaculture learning journey has provided me with new skills helping me to design sustainable systems, it has also shown me my place in these systems and provided insights to ponder upon.    

 

APPLY SELF-REGULATION & ACCEPT FEEDBACK

Self-regulation may not be my best quality, if I like something I will either do it constantly or eat it all at once. At the beginning of my diploma, I was here there and everywhere both physically and mentally. Six years and counting into my diploma journey I’m trying to be mostly in the here and now.

These past six years have seen some of the largest changes in my life, mainly buying a house. This worked out well for the diploma as it gave me many of my now completed design projects. The common theme in most of my designs when I step back and evaluate how the design process went was that I took too much on and ended up burning out. It’s only with the later designs that I’ve tried to prevent this from happening. Richmond permaculture network is a good example of this. I’ve wanted to set up a local network but lacked the time and energy to do so. With the final design for the network, I have concluded that I can’t do both the diploma and set up a network at the same time along with doing everything else I would like to do.

At times things need to give and I need to realise as much as people expect me to be at their beckon call, I also need to be able to say no. As somebody helpful towards others, I tend to get requests to do things. This is all well and good but when you have a few people needing something done at the same time, or the expectation that you will just do something straight way when asked many of my weekends have just gone and I’ve not been able to do anything that I had planned to do. The diploma is a great example of this, the number of times that I planned on having a weekend writing up designs to find it was Sunday evening and I was burnt out from making sure everyone else or everything that needed to be done was complete and I never even had a moment to myself, never mind work on the diploma.

This has been my biggest failure throughout the diploma, everyone and everything else came before what I wanted to do. People tell you they don’t expect you to drop everything to help them but then moan when you don’t do exactly what they just said not to do.

From the biggest failure to the biggest lesson, applying self-regulation and accepting feedback will be the principle that will have had the greatest impact on this diploma journey. Due to the diploma, I’ve been allowed to evaluate myself in each of my designs and many patterns have jumped out.

 

USE & VALUE RENEWABLE RESOURCES & SERVICES

For many years I’ve worked towards the directive of this principle, it’s probably one of the reasons I’ve been drawn toward permaculture design. Wind and solar are always first to come to mind when somebody mentions renewable resources. Pondering over this principle in my designs has allowed me to expand upon what this principle is trying to encapsulate in my mind. 

The research I put into my rainwater harvesting design brought with it a realisation of how much of the countryside we take for granted didn’t look like it does today in the past. Humanity has been busy redesigning large parts of our landscapes making them unrecognisable to our ancestors. This principle had led me to see the impact we can have on our environment when we design systems void of permaculture ethics.  

 

PRODUCE NO WASTE

On one level I’ve worked towards this principle throughout my life whilst on another level I have been oblivious to it. A case in point is how much energy I’ve wasted on doing things that didn’t serve my greater good. This is another one of those obvious ones when somebody points it out to you which is all well and good but at the same time, it's an insight that needs to be felt.

The permaculture design process has allowed me the time to evaluate my designs and to highlight the areas in a system that are leaking resources, and once again I get to see the common denominator is me.

Produce no waste has always been a principle external to me. I’ve viewed it as setting up composting systems, using what I have available to me, sharing any excess yields or the conscious buying of products. Up until writing this, I’ve never even considered myself as a part of a system that through my actions is producing waste. When evaluating my designs, I talk about becoming burnt out, but I supposed this was a consequence of the design process and not a failure of the system. Figuring this out would have been helpful earlier, but then this was the whole point of turning my permaculture learning pathway into a discovery design instead of just writing a report of my journey.

Produce no waste, like all the other permaculture principles, is a goldmine of information once you take the time to contemplate the meaning from different angles. This is the reason why I like to read so many books, they help me view myself from other perspectives just like writing up designs helps to uncover new insights.       

 

DESIGN FROM PATTERNS TO DETAILS

Just pondering the permaculture principles certainly highlights how this principle has had an impact on my design process, often subconsciously.

What has once again become apparent in my designs throughout this diploma learning pathway is how each design has taken the negative aspects of the previous design and tried to improve on them. The pattern in my designs that is creating the most chaos is myself most of the time. I seem to like nothing better than proclaiming I’m going to do all these things and then run out of steam.

The last two designs have brought this pattern to the forefront, the Richmond permaculture network and the Forage design. In these, I’ve finally acknowledged that I can’t do everything myself at once. This is where the details take on meaning.

Through the improvement of the details, the visible patterns become less and less, and the design is improved. Spiritual teachings often talk about becoming at one with the universe. Consider a permaculture design as a form of mediation. We begin by observing and interacting with our environment, we are catching and storing the energy inside of our system to allow us to obtain a yield. We take this knowledge and apply self-regulation and accept feedback. Through using and valuing renewable resources and services we produce no waste by designing from patterns to details letting us integrate rather than segregate all that is. Using small and slow solutions allows us to use and value diversity whilst at the same time using the edges and valuing the marginal we can creatively use and respond to change.

Permaculture design is pattern design, nature is pattern design which is permaculture design. Nature by its very essence is an expression of the whole. Once you become part of the whole the design process is complete and nature no longer exists due to there being nothing left needing to be done, all thoughts become one and silence prevails.

Good luck to the first permaculture designer to accomplish the above.  

 

INTEGRATE RATHER THAN SEGREGATE

Climbing back down from the mountain the lower you get you to start to encounter other people. A lone person here and there, lower still small groups sit around small fires on the hillside chatting and cooking. Further down still small houses appear with people chatting outside and enjoying the evening air. Soon you enter the outskirts of the town, dirt paths become paved walkways that become streets surrounded by houses with locked doors. The further into the town you go the less interaction you have with the people you meet. Cars become the means of transport taking on the right of way. Houses become shops and the warm glow from the cooking fire is replaced by the cold neon light outside of the restaurant. They call this place the plaza, the heart of the town. It is the place where the important people like to be seen. My feeling of being integrated with the whole universe whilst at the top of the mountain has been replaced with a feeling of segregation now that I’m in the town amongst the people.

Whether designing communities of companion plants in a forest garden or designing a local permaculture network this is a principle that can be communicated on many levels. At the beginning of my permaculture learning pathway, my life was all over the place, my first list of ten designs had little to no direction. I was running wild between my thoughts. My ten final designs represent how permaculture design has integrated all aspects of my life to help enable a more whole system of living. 

I view this principle as finding balance in all that we do. The permaculture ethics, earth care, people care, and fair share are about creating balance. If we have, observe, and interact as the prime directive of permaculture, then, “Integrate rather than segregate,” is the truth that holds the system together in equilibrium.   

The example of the town given above represents the opposite of what you would expect, even in a small town like Richmond segregation rules. This once again highlights of importance of creating local permaculture networks.

 

USE SMALL & SLOW SOLUTIONS

From one permaculture insight to the next, as a guiding principle, to “use small and slow solutions” expresses an archaic knowledge held by the wisdom keepers of old passed between teachers to initiate through a timeless expanse of stories told. The more I contemplate the meaning behind each principle the larger each principle becomes. They twist and turn from one metaphor to the next seamlessly weaving layer upon layer to form a magical carpet that will take you on a journey through your thoughts. 

My permaculture learning pathway is represented inside this principle. It’s taken over six years to complete. I’ve spent most of this time researching many of my designs along with implementing them as I’ve gone along, the exception being the allotment design. The allotment design is the very first permaculture design I made and provides the starting point. From listening to what everybody else was saying about what permaculture was to how I now use permaculture design to improve my life. In this first design, I threw in everything that would fit into the design from all the things I had learned from books, videos, talks and podcasts. Now, I would like to be able to say I’ve reduced and slowed my thoughts down and these are represented in my final few designs.

Using small and slow solutions has started to improve my life, as much as I keep saying it this is another key principle that will be guiding the continuation of my permaculture journey.

 

USE & VALUE DIVERSITY

The more diversity that is designed into a system the less chance the system has to fail. Like all the permaculture principles none of them stands alone. They are a whole system in their own right, open to interpretation for each specific design requirement. There is no right or wrong way to use them, their value is in their diversity.

The permaculture design process is about using diversity, this is seen in the many different frameworks and design tools that have been gathered and continue to be gathered under the umbrella term permaculture.

From the perspective of the permaculture design process, these past six years have encouraged me to find solutions to problems from as many different and diverse perspectives as I can comprehend in one design. It’s taken me a while to grasp all of this and the importance of these very permaculture principles, that said if I knew all of this at the start of my diploma it would not have been a learning pathway just a box-ticking exercise.

On one level, permaculture design is obvious, and I find it somewhat frustrating that when I talk to some people about what permaculture is they tell me, “Oh yeah, I do all of that anyway.” It’s at these times I get that feeling I might as well have just been talking to a tree. Over fifteen years of studying permaculture, taking my PDC working through my diploma and in a moment, I’m left looking into space speechless.

As I stand motionless, I tell myself to use and value diversity.

 

USE EDGES & VALUE THE MARGINAL

One of the things I struggled with living in the thriving metropolis that is Richmond North Yorkshire has been the sheer lack of local people who have heard of the word permaculture, let alone anybody practising it.

After six years I now have found a friend Steve, who I got to know these past couple of years through chatting to him whilst working in my back garden. Steve, it turns out is willing to be involved with forming a local permaculture network as proposed in design eight. It goes to show that everything has a beginning and thoughts can become reality. To make this more pertinent, as I was writing this an email arrived from Steve providing me with a short bio to add to the Richmond permaculture network website.

From a small garden on a housing estate, conversations have grown into friendships, leading to the doubling of the interest in permaculture in Richmond. Could this be the start of the marginal becoming something productive? The edge is certainly where it’s at.

Taking the diploma has certainly proved to have pushed me even further to the edge of society than anything else I’ve done. I don’t think I’ve met anybody yet who has truly encouraged me to complete my diploma outside of the permaculture community. When I mention I’m doing a diploma people are very interested until I say it is in permaculture design followed by the usual explanation of what is permaculture and the next moment, I feel like I’m on the Mary Celest. Outside of the permaculture community, my friend circle has increased by one thanks to talking about permaculture. I’ve spent month upon month writing up designs, lately, I’ve been getting up at 3 am to try and complete writing up my final few designs.

I’ve done all this because Marie sowed the seed as to why I would not go on and take the diploma in applied permaculture design after completing my permaculture design certificate. This seed sprouted into a voice in my head that drove me toward writing this concluding design of my diploma. “Use edges and value the marginal,” the voice in my head tells me it’s all going to turn out fine.

 

CREATIVELY USE & RESPOND TO CHANGE

When I signed up for my diploma, I had no direction other than a calling to do it. In the intervening years, sustainably has gone from just another hippy philosophy mocked by most to go on to become the main decision-making criteria for governments around the world and global corporations. Sustainability has also become the latest buzzword for pop culture personalities to be associated with, we even have a head of sustainability where I work. Times have certainly changed in six years.

The cynic in me questions the sustainability of this new sustainability movement, I’m not seeing many sustainable solutions just lots of rhetoric and standing on orange crates in the market squares around the world.

At least with permaculture, we are designing solution-based systems that are implemented without the need to fly around the world in private jets to have a conference about reducing carbon emissions. The offsetting of carbon by planting trees after these people fly home seems a bit like closing the stable door after the horse has already bolted. But of course, this is just the cynic in me, time will tell where all this ends up, but constant finger-pointing is not a sustainable solution.

“Creatively use and respond to change,” this principle is the heart of permaculture the one which pumps the fluid of each design. Every day when I spend a little time in my garden there are always changes that need to be made, the rest of my life is no different. My permaculture learning pathway these past six years has helped me to find more creative ways to many of the problems I’ve encountered. It’s been a long process in some respects, but I can confidently say it has been a learning pathway and one that has added value to who I may be.

It is with this principle that I now raise my hands to the sky and proclaim, “I’m ready”.   

 

Yesterday evening I was busy picking blackcurrants, the heat of the hottest day of the year so far was not doing them very much good, in the end, I had to abandon picking due to the aggressiveness of the ants which have been farming a few small colonies of aphids living on the plants. This morning at first light around 4:15 I’ve been back out to finish picking ripe currents on two more bushes that I never managed to get to last night. I’ll be repeating the same process this evening and tomorrow morning picking chuckleberries.   

I now have the problem everybody wants, so far, I have a total of ten kilogrammes of berries. Looking at the bushes I'd say I have at least eight kilograms left. My freezer is full so it’s time to share the rest of my hoard with friends and neighbours.  

The back garden has become a bit of a novelty for people walking past, in a sea of cut garden lawns to the unknowing eye my garden is a wilderness. Surprisingly more and more people are seeing that it’s a garden of food and I often get my ego massaged by passers-by telling me how much they like it.  I don’t care what you may think of me, but I do enjoy positive feedback about my garden, it makes all the ant bites worthwhile as I stand in the glory for a few moments of applause as I read my acceptance speech to the invisible audience of gnomes and fairies who inhabit the garden. 

The permaculture ethics, earth care, people care, and fair share are the foundation of permaculture. By default, they have also been the very foundation for each of my diploma designs. They are not difficult to understand, I’ve been living most of my life by them even long before I discovered the word permaculture so they kind of automatically appeared in my designs. As I’ve progressed through my diploma, like the permaculture principles I’ve found it easier to describe their influences when it’s come to writing up designs. This is partially due to gaining a better sense of how to write up a design along with having greater confidence in expressing myself when writing up a design.

As I’m coming towards the end of my diploma and I’m looking toward future projects, these ethics will continue to drive my decision-making. In this design, they represent the trinity that has guided my permaculture learning pathway. By acknowledging them in each design their presents influence the outcome. For myself, it’s the simplicity of that which they symbolise which draws me closer to them. They embody the greater whole, that which brings balance to a system. Remove any one side of the triangle of earth care, people care and fair share the harmony of a system or design begins to fail. It’s through their inclusion a design becomes whole. If nothing else my permaculture learning pathway has taught me that to have balance in my life, I need these three ethics.