Permaculture In Your Backyard!

Permaculture is the act of designing and producing human settlements and agricultural systems through farming strategies and crop and resource choices that mimic the relationships found in natural ecologies around the world.Permaculture is revered for it’s emphasis on sustainable land use design the concept is based on ecological and biological principles, regularly using patterns that occur in nature as ideal examples in order to maximise effect and minimise work and the need for outside resources. The practice of permaculture strives to create stable, productive and self reliant ecosystems that provide crops and other valuable resources for human needs while at the same time integrating the land with its inhabitants without conflict. The ecological processes of plants, animals, their nutrient cycles, climatic factors and weather cycles are all variables that are accounted for when utilizing the technique.
Elements in a permaculture based system are viewed in relationship to other elements, where the outputs of one element become the inputs of another, otherwise stated; waste created by one plant, crop or resource becomes the food, shelter, fertilizer for another . Within a permaculture system, work is reduced, “wastes” become resources, productivity and yields increase, environments are restored and the resources provided to us are done so in the least most destructive manner upon the environment.
The theory behind the process is that, by training individuals to utilize local resources, encourage crop and plant/tree growth, those individuals can design their own environments and build increasingly self-sufficient human settlements, that decrease society's dependence on industrial systems of production and distribution that is fundamentally and systematically destroying Earth's valuable and irreplaceable ecosystems.
We have begun to utilize several of these permaculture based ideas in our own home as well as two other family homes within close proximity. As a family we have experimented with different types of fruit bearing trees and vegetable producing crops, we have attempted to see which crops grow well in the same proximity and which of these crops grow best during certain seasons.
We have found that crops that need shade and grow well in moist and predominantly sandy soil yield the most product when grown beneath larger fruit bearing trees such as plantains, papayas and avocado trees. Herbs such as rosemary and basil tend to flourish when grown alongside a sturdier larger plant or tree, most likely due to the protection the larger plant serves to the herbs in cooler parts of the season and shade it provides during summer. Also, all sorts of peppers tend to grow faster and produce more crops when they are grown together, regardless of the species, growing the peppers together sometimes causes cross-pollinating but the consequences are generally tasty and unique. Squash and cassava plants also flourish when grown in the same vicinity.
Our family has chosen to embrace the idea of home gardens and small scale farming, by each household farming a different crop and animal and supplying all other homes with the surplus of that resource we are all able to cut the cost of produce, chicken and lamb considerably. Though we are far from being completely self sustainable we could most definitely argue that a good 20% of our daily food consumption is raised/grown by one of the three households.