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.

Clay Ponds and Puddling

One of the really good outcomes of the Introduction to Permaculture Design course I went to at Barrack's Lane Community Garden this summer was meeting a group of like-minded local people, who wanted to explore and use the principles of permaculture in their day-to-day lives.  Eka Morgan was on the course, and wanted to build a natural clay pond in her garden - she had the bright (and very permaculture)  idea of turning this into an opportunity for a group of people to learn about this old but largely neglected technique for creating ponds. Clive Leeke led the course. We'd Clive met on the permaculture course, he has been building clay ponds for decades, and is one of the few people who knows enough about this technique to teach it. Four of us shared the cost of his time for a day, and on Sunday we turned up at Eka's garden with spades, gloves, wellington boots, and a lot of energy. The spades, gloves, wellingtons were fine - the energy was just enough, this is tough work!

We started with Clive giving us a brief overview of the essentials - siting the pond, its aspect, depths and levels that are wildlife- and plant-friendly, and most importantly, types and sources of clay which are suitable for this technique.

However, Clive's a man for action, so we didn't spend too much time on the preliminaries, and were soon (and literally) knee-deep in the practicalities. Eka showed us the site she'd chosen and started to excavate. It was a good choice, so two of us set about deepening and widening the excavation. The other two started digging and barrow- ing the tonne of  clay which Eka had delivered to the front of her terrace house. This is the stuff you make pots from - more or less. It's just as gloopy and hard to manipulate, but probably has more mineral impurities than the average potter would tolerate. But not easy to dig from a bulk-bag into wheel-barrow.

Then the exciting stuff began - Clive showed us how to  'puddle' 'tiles' from the sticky grey mass in front of us - break a bit off, about the size of tennis ball, or two, and tread it with boots to a irregular but roughly circular tile about 2 or 3 cm thick. As you can see from this description, this is not a precise art, but a craft - you try, see what works, judge , and adjust.

We had a couple of tile makers up top, and a couple of tilers in the excavation. The tilers were hammering (with fists and boots) the clay tiles into the bare earth of the excavation, literally plastering  the tiles  by their own stickiness to the soil. Our aim was to build a solid and impenetrable first layer of overlapping tiles over the soil of the initial excavation.

This took a long time - almost two hours later, and several wheel-barrow loads of clay later,  we were finishing the first layer. It was 1pm, how were we going get another two layers done before it got dark?

Amazingly, we'd done the tough part. The next two layers went like a dream, either we'd got more skilled, or the job got easier with extra layers. We did a quick measure with spirit levels to make sure we'd got the edges correct, and trimmed the clay precisely. By 3.30 we were ready to fill our new pond.  But how disaster can strike !

We were filling from the water butt attached to Eka's shed - and suddenly the whole lot collapsed - not quite the shed, but the plinth, the butt, and the pipes. Oh those cute foxes, what damage they can do with their underground tunnels and earths. All of a sudden our work-force of four was halved, as two people had to prop up the water butt, whilst the other two tried to empty its contents via the hose into the pond, before the butt collapsed into the (surprisingly) deep fox-created hole underneath its plinth.

We survived and so did the pond. We're  not sure what the foxes are adding yet, though we very much hope they're not eating the frogs!