Permaculture Design Course Day 3

So the 2nd weekend of my PDC which was held in Trumpigton pavilion on the outskirts of Cambridge where we were hosted by the Cambridge transition group who were all lovely!

In this weekend we started to look at the actual design process and a couple of design tools.

So there is the 12 step design process:

1. Preparation - gathering yourself and your equipment... surprisingly

2. Observation - When designing a garden using permaculture it is advised to observe the space for a full year in order to fully understand the space)

3. Client Interview - Talking to anyone who will be using the land whether that be a customer in a professional capacity or yourself and your family for your own garden

4. Functions - Identify Functions needed (ie food production, play space, view from house etc.)

5. Systems - Identify possible systems to fulfil these functions (A good time for a brainstorm)

6. Analysis - A cost/benefit analysis and a chance to consider the constraints on the systems in stage 5

7. Integration - See what elements are already present in your site and how they interact. Consider if they are permanent, can be moved or should be moved

8. Placement - Consider the placement of the elements in your design, the zones of your design (see my previous blog about the course), the sectors (previous blog), and the systems you wish to put in place. This is a good time to use a base map with overlays (a map drawn on opaque paper with various elements on their own transparent/translucent sheets) or McHargs exclusion process.

9. Working Design - Your are now ready to design your space to fulfil your needs, but this design should never be a final and definitive form. Your needs will change, the environment will change and things keep growing, seeding, dying so your design will be subject to change with time.

10. Implementation - this is fairly self explanatory, you have to plant your trees, lay your paths and form your beds etc.

11. Maintenance - as things keep growing dying seeding, they need pruning, composting mulching transplanting etc.

12. Feedback - This is actually present at all stages of the process, getting more information from the land, the client, your yields etc. This also allows you to tweak the design which can be seen as maintenance or continuing design or both.

So that's the basic process, we looked at a couple of other ways to express that including the greatly simplified action learning cycle:

-Observe

-Think

-Design

-Do

-Go back to the beginning.

We then looked at a number of design tools that could be used in this process. Categorizing your plants animals, structures, tools, systems, features, zones and sectors into 'positive', 'negative' and 'interesting, or 'strengths', 'weaknesses', 'opportunities' and 'challenges' and these can all be incorporated into a base map with overlays.

Another of the most interesting design tools was the web of life. This involves taking all your elements and looking at their inputs and outputs and see how they can be/are intrinsically linked into all the other elements.

Stay tuned for day 4 (to follow soon) where we looked at soil! Which is fundamental in any sustainable growing system.