I’ve had a number of folks ask me to design in a firing range on their farm. Good idea for practice and especially if you have excess material you need to find something to do with. In the past, I’ve always just chosen what I considered a good location. I could not say I was […]
Here we’re sharing a cool resource from our colleagues at Wild Abundance. They run a school for permaculture, homesteading, and natural building in the southern Appalachian mountains, near Asheville, NC. Based on nearly 2 decades of experience living with the land and applying permaculture principles to a variety of sites and situations, they created this for […]
In this video I consult for Nicholas and his family about moving forward and taking the next steps to getting his hands in the dirt and moving forward with starting to enjoy life, not over think, and growing their own resources. If you have questions about permaculture consulting and or design, contact me through our […]
(A busted and breached pond/dam wall) TYPE ONE ERRORS are classified as errors/mistakes on a site which will either cost you or the client a lot of time, money, or energy to replace, redo, or clear out of a system if installed incorrectly. There are very few TYPE ONE ERRORS in permaculture design – […]
A year or so ago I consulted on a beautiful property (The Earthstead Farm) with Sam Dodson and Rebecca Visconti who are passionate about system change and moving towards a sustainable and regenerative future in homesteading. Listening back to this podcast goes to show me how we, as permaculturists and humans, never really stop learning. […]
The original Permaculture Design Course format was three weeks long. The first two weeks taught the bulk content of the course and the last week was filled with networking (this was even before fax). Since then the course has had many re-formats and in it’s most advertised form is held as a two week intensive […]
What is often left out in much of permaculture teaching is the “how to install the design”. And not only what that entails, but steps in how to do it. It is most manageable when the design is implemented in stages and each stage should build upon the previous (an the electrical system works better and installs […]
Permaculture really shines when it comes to the practical placement of elements in a holistic design. Permaculturists are taught a wide variety of methods of design, and utilized often, is zone planning. Zone planning makes the idea of time – and – arrangements of elements in your design make sense for use. Zoning starts from […]
In permaculture design we utilize a method of design called analysis. When designing a food forest it wise to analyze and think through as much of the succession as possible of your forest (click here to learn the 7 layers of a food forest). A good example of this can be seen by looking to the […]
Water is an exceptionally important design feature when designing permaculture sites. Where it comes from? how to store it? how to distribute it? and how will it exit a property? are just a few questions that arise in the design stage. Another question that arises frequently, especially on rural sites, is how much of the landscape should […]









