Permaculture and Barrack's Lane Community Garden

I've started to think about ways of writing about permaculture without being too earnest  - it's the sort of topic that can inspire a lot of worthiness! It's also an idea which most people have heard of, but few can nail down - myself included. I'm not sure it can be defined neatly, but after attending Phil Pritchard's  Introduction to Permaculture Design course at Barrack's Lane Community Garden this summer I came away with a much clearer idea of what it was all about. Not a definition, but a set of principles, a way of seeing, and a way of doing. What really impressed me was the emphasis on intelligent observation - looking closely over time at the way in which natural ecosystems work, and designing ways of emulating these. I also like the emphasis on inputs and outputs, yields and effort - observing the ways in which ecosystems produce maximum effect for minimum input.

The classic permaculture system is the forest - it was observation of the forests and their productivity which inspired the two 'founders' of the Permaculture movement, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren to begin a scientific exploration and development of permaculture principles and methods. Observing the way that the plants in the forest grew together to get the maximum yield from the available resources inspired the classic permaculture design principles of stacking, layering, succession, companion planting, intercropping, and encouraging biodiversity.

Over the years these principles have been extended from horticultural and agricultural applications ways of designing all aspects of human settlement - from land-use design to community relations.

As well as the Introduction to Permaculture Design course at Barrack's Lane Community Garden, Phil also runs a year-long Permaculture Course Design course at the garden. The students on this course have used the garden as a testing ground for many of the ideas and principles they have been learning about.

They've come up with some really innovative ideas to improve various aspects of the garden - grouping them under headings such as Visual Impact, Signage, Waste, Infrastructure, Fun/Interactive, Growing, Outreach, and Water.

What I'm going to do in this series of Permaculture blogs is write about some of these ideas, and how we are trying to implement them. The first post in this series will be on Rainwater Harvesting at the garden.