Any of these sound familiar?
“We essentially have a blank canvas that we want to optimize, to the best of our abilities, as this is our forever home.”
“I need a good, broad-stroke food plan for what is now a blank slate.”
“I have a lot of ideas of what I would like to do on this land but I am confronted with the proverbial ‘blank canvas’ and want to make as few mistakes as possible.”
If providing your family’s food needs is a top priority, you’ll need to create multiple permaculture systems on your “blank slate” to help you achieve that.
From a permaculture design perspective, there has to be a synergy between infrastructure, water systems, and living systems (soil + food-producing plants and animals)…
The problem?
When designing their properties, most people get lost in minute details instead of thinking of the big picture.
The questions that occupy their mind usually are – should I use swales or not? How do I fix my clayey soil? Should I plant chestnut or hickory? Should I get chickens or rabbits…
Don’t get me wrong, these are all valid questions but not appropriate ones to ask early in the design process when you are staring at your blank canvas.
Then the main question should be: how do I create an interconnected, energy-efficient, and resilient (eco)system that will produce an abundance of food and resources?
Or in Plain English: Where do I put all the components so that everything works together?
Phrasing it this way might sound intimidating to someone who has just started to grapple with the permaculture design of their property, but it’s quite easy once you understand the framework.
The best way to approach this challenge is to create a whole farm layout – an outline of the main systems of your permaculture property – infrastructure, water, and land use areas.
Once you do this, you can focus your attention on the details, fully knowing that you’ve designed your property top-down, avoiding expensive mistakes while applying the ‘all-mighty’ permaculture principles.
So how do you do this?
Let me showcase how by featuring a design from one of my PFDC students from Vermont.
Her ‘black canvas’ was not exactly blank as she already had infrastructure components on the land, plus some living systems in the form of pastures and a forest, but it had nothing permaculture going for it.
So the first thing we did after we established her design goals and a thorough site assessment was to define what are built permanent structures we’ll be working around.
This ended up being house, barns, and smaller various purpose sheds. Some other buildings were too old and would be taken down, so they were not relevant to the design.
After that, we defined access points around the property. Some were already there, but at this point, we also added ones that are the usual design suspects – along the edges of the existing vegetation areas and property.
This was an initial brainstorm about access points, and once you start adding systems, others start to reveal themselves, and you can pencil them in (see below).
Remember, all these components are connected, so you never actually look at one in isolation without simultaneously considering the others.
We then moved to the water systems of the property.
Water is always a huge subject, and J. wanted water resilience despite having sufficient and predictable rainfall, so we added water storage in the form of tanks (blue squares on the map) catching roof rainwater and a pond (blue circle on the map) that will help her combat the potential drought in the best suitable place we could find in the empty pasture area.
We then designed harvesting drains to fill the pond up, utilizing both the main road and driveway runoff and a pond overflow to drain the surplus water safely into the creek at the bottom of the property.
Now we were ready to tackle where to place the living systems she wanted to have on the property.
Given her needs and wants and paying attention to zoning and sectors, we determined what food-producing systems to put where. We defined areas for a food forest, pastures, gardens, medicinal herbs, and nut/timber area…
Lastly, we filled in the missing infrastructure pieces, fences, gates, and access points (on a contour), dividing the big pasture area.
At this stage, she had something that she could further develop into finer details, confident that she had created a permaculture system without any major design flaws or type #1 errors that could set her back.
Of course, a lot of thought went into all these design decisions, but we worked within my framework and had access to a host of best-practices to choose from, which made the design process more effective.
If you are currently looking at your blank canvas and wondering how to ‘skin this cat’, I’m confident it will help you overcome the overwhelm in the same way it helped this PFDC student.
You can learn more about my Permaculture Farm Design course here.
Talk soon,
– William
