We learnt loads of really interesting permaculture concepts in Bogata Suma, and we want to share with you some of them. But first, here’s what permaculture is all about:

- Caring for the people.

- Caring for the Earth.

- Sharing the surplus.

And with all this in mind you can accomplish a lot!! Now here are the concepts that we really liked in permaculture:

Mulching

If you have not done so yet, please check our post on mulching. This is something many people already know, but it is part of a bigger picture, so it is still super important.

Zones

Permaculture is all about being efficiently lazy. Why bother working extra when there is no need? You don’t put your poultry 2 km away from your home and your wood fire forest next to your home! That sounds obvious, but here are some details. The zones system is all about having the areas where you often need to go to as close as possible, and vice-versa.

- Zone 0 is your home. It is the centre of activities, it needs a lot of energy (water and electricity for instance) and produces a lot of waste.

- Zone 1 is the closest area to your home, easy to access, where you need to go everyday (herbs for cooking, vegetable garden, animals to feed, workshop, outdoor kitchen, small trees providing fruits). It requires regular work on it (observation, maintenance, harvest).

- Zone 2 is your orchard, perennials and vegetables with a long growing season (from planting to harvesting), animals that have larger enclosures, compost bins, ponds… Basically items that require frequent attention but not daily (except for animals). Plants and trees are mulched and irrigated.

- Zone 3 gathers the food forest (could be zone 2 as well), self-sufficient animals, seasonal crops requiring large spaces (corn, wheat, rice…), orchards of larger trees, dams to store water… Here the mulch comes from green manure, which is basically live small plants that cover the ground and will eventually die, providing nutrients for the soil. There is no irrigation system.

- Zone 4 can be made of a forest for fire wood, wild and native trees, and can be somehow controlled by using animals to selectively remove some plants (like goats, sheep and pigs)

- Zone 5 is nature with endogenous plants, a place that you do not touch. The idea is to preserve biodiversity and give a shelter for animals. This is a space where the whole ecosystem is natural, free from human intervention, and you can learn a lot from it by observation.

Ideally, zones are circles around your house, but of course it depends of your space! That’s why every permaculture place is different!

In Bogata Suma we were of course surrounded by those zones: the vegetable garden, a plum orchard, the poultry, a food savannah with shrubs, a lot of nut trees, a food forest and a wild forest as zone 5.

Beds

Why planting salads in a row next to your tomatoes and behind your beans??? Would there be a better place for hungry slugs to have snack??? One of the most important permaculture principles is the cultivation of plants in beds. Why this? Because everything in nature is about interaction between all living beings. Your basil is profitable to your tomatoes, beans build a very rich soil, some plants are pest-repellents, others are pollinator-attractors… A bed is a delimited space where you use all these interactions to have the best yields with as little work as possible. Tip of the day: your creeping butternut gives perfect shade to your parsley! There is no need to dig the soil when a bed is established. When you rotate crops within a bed, you do not plow, you just feed the soil for some time and mulch the naked area (otherwise this is just a call for weed invasion!). It is important to preserve the soil as it is, hence the little pathways that you can make in the middle or the bed so that you can still weed, plant, harvest or just hang out without damaging anything.

Food forest

Next time you go to a forest, try to pay attention to the diversity of plants that live there. Plants have their specific location, but without organisation, so it looks like chaos.

A food forest has 8 layers of plants and the idea is to produce food on one or more of those layers, using the interaction of these layers:

- Deep root: bring nutrients from the depth of the soil.

- Fungi: transport water and nutrients.

- Ground cover: green manure that provides live mulch for the soil.

- Herbacious: vegetables, plants providing leaves you eat.

- Shrubs: van act as windscreen (Hazel, elderberry…).

- Small fruit trees.

- Canopy trees: provide lots of protection and shade, not too many of these trees because you want sunlight.

- Climbers: plants that grow on other trees.

As an example, in an established forest you can produce :

Potatoes, mushrooms, wild strawberries, lemon balm, hazelnuts, apples, chestnuts, chayotes. 🙂

Permaculture as a lifestyle

In « permaculture », there is -culture of course, but it does not mean that the concept is restricted to culture! Indeed, you can apply the 3 basic concepts of permaculture to your whole life. Our idea of self-sustainability also encompasses more than just providing food. We want to gather wood for the winter heating, and also to make furniture or constructions in the garden. We want to eat sheep, and also use their wool in order to make pull-overs or felt it to make a variety of things (bags, boxes etc.). We want to eat berries in summer, and also use the stems for basketry purposes. We can use lavender as a pollinator-attractor, and also make scented cushions out of the flowers. We want to be able to use all parts of what we grow in a way or another so that we do not waste much and we do not need to buy too many extra things. Also, we want to use wood, metal, glass, rather than plastic or materials that imply a lot of energy and long production lines. Of course, sometimes it is inevitable, but as long as we can avoid it we will!

All pictures starting with Bogata_Suma are courtesy of Bogata Šuma, all the others are taken by us!

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