The method, in 21 pages

Start here

Start here: the whole method on one page

Observe, read the site, place water, then soil, then plants. Build small.

Permaculture is a design method, not a style of gardening. The method is short. Everything else in this library is detail you pull in when a step needs it.

The order of work

1. Observe before you act. Walk the land in every season you can, and at least once in a storm and once at dawn. Where does water run and where does it sit? Where does the snow melt first? Where is it windy? The app's layers (terrain, wetness, sun, wind) are a season of observation compressed into a minute, but they are the map, not the territory. → Observe first
2. Read the site. Run Analyze my site. You get slope, aspect, where water gathers, soil drainage and pH, hardiness zone, frost dates, rain against evaporation, and the sun's path. Write down the three facts that surprise you.
3. Sectors, then zones. Sectors are what comes in from outside: winter sun, summer sun, cold wind, hot wind, fire, flood, noise, views, wildlife. Zones are how often you visit a spot: zone 1 is what you touch daily, zone 5 you leave alone. Draw both before placing anything. → Sectors and zones
4. Water first. Water is the element you can least afford to get wrong and the hardest to move later. Catch it on the highest useful ground, spread it along contours, sink it, and only then store it. → Water
5. Access and structures. Paths, the driveway, the house or shed. Yeomans' scale of permanence — climate, landform, water, access, trees, structures, fences, soil — orders things by how hard they are to change. Decide the permanent things first.
6. Soil. Now that you know where water goes and where you walk, feed the soil where the plants will be. Mulch, compost, cover crops, no bare ground. → Soil
7. Plants, as guilds. Trees first, then their companions: each tree with its nitrogen fixer, nectary, mulch maker, aromatic, ground cover and root miner. The plant finder is filtered to your zone. → Plants and guilds
8. Animals and the rest once the plants are in. Chickens, ducks, bees, fish. → Animals
9. Start small. One zone-1 bed, one rain barrel, one guild. Observe a year. Expand what worked. → Start small

The three questions to ask of every element

• What does it need? Water, sun, nutrients, care, protection.
• What does it give? Food, shade, mulch, habitat, income, beauty, a lesson.
• What does it do that something else needs?

Place things so that the outputs of one meet the needs of another: chickens under the mulberry, comfrey under the apple, the pond upslope of the garden, the woodpile in the cold-wind sector. Mollison called this relative location, and it is most of the craft.

Two tests for a finished design

• Every important function is supported by at least two elements. Water from the roof and the pond. Fertility from the compost and the nitrogen fixers and the animals.
• Every element serves at least three functions. A pond stores water, softens frost, reflects light onto the greenhouse, raises ducks and fish, and is a fire break.

The Design tab scores your plan against both.

What to skip

• Buying tools or plants before observing.
• Earthworks in year one, unless you have a level, a plan and a clear reading of the water. A swale in the wrong place is worse than no swale.
• The reputation. This is engineering with living parts; the accountability is yours and the results are measurable in yields, in inputs you stopped buying, and in what the land looks like after a storm.

Sources. Bill Mollison, Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapters 1–3. David Holmgren, Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability (2002). P. A. Yeomans, Water for Every Farm (1965) for the scale of permanence. Toby Hemenway, Gaia's Garden (2nd ed., 2009) for the home scale.

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Start here

What permaculture is (and isn't)

The ethics, the design principles, and the scale of permanence, without the jargon.

Bill Mollison and David Holmgren coined the word in 1978 from permanent agriculture, later widened to permanent culture. The claim: a designed landscape can meet human needs the way a forest meets its own — without imported inputs, without waste, without an annual restart. It is a design discipline that borrows from ecology, indigenous land management, keyline agriculture, systems thinking and plain observation.

The ethics

• Earth care. Rebuild the soil, water and living systems you depend on.
• People care. Meet real needs: food, shelter, work, belonging.
• Fair share. Return the surplus to the first two; set limits on consumption.

These decide the tradeoffs. A design that yields well while eroding the hillside fails the first. One that only a full-time gardener can maintain fails the second.

Holmgren's twelve principles, in working language

The scale of permanence

P. A. Yeomans ranked the parts of a farm by how hard they are to change. Design in this order and you rarely have to undo work:

1. Climate
2. Landform
3. Water supply
4. Roads and access
5. Trees
6. Permanent buildings
7. Subdivision fences
8. Soil

Climate you accept. Landform you barely alter. Water you shape once, so shape it right. Roads follow the water lines; trees follow the roads; buildings go where water and access allow; fences last; soil, the most changeable, is built continuously.

Mollison's design methods, briefly

• Analysis of elements: list each element's needs, products and characteristics; connect outputs to needs.
• Zones: placement by how often you visit.
• Sectors: placement by the energies arriving from outside.
• Slope: put storage high and heavy work low; let gravity move water.
• Orientation: to sun and wind.
• Random assembly and options: shuffle elements on paper until relationships appear.
• Data overlay: map layers — which is what this app does.

What it isn't

• Not a set of techniques. Swales, hugelkultur, herb spirals and food forests are tools that fit some sites. A swale on clay in a flat frost pocket is permaculture-flavoured, not permaculture.
• Not "no work." It front-loads the work into design and establishment, then the system does more of its own maintenance. Years one to three are real labour.
• Not anti-evidence. Where a claim in the literature is weak — "dynamic accumulators", most companion-planting folklore — this library says so. Test it on your own ground and keep notes.
• Not a badge. The measure is yield, resilience, and how many inputs you stopped buying.

Sources. Mollison, Designers' Manual, chapters 1–3. Holmgren, Principles and Pathways. Yeomans, Water for Every Farm, on the scale of permanence. Mollison and Holmgren, Permaculture One (1978).

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Start here

Tiny to enormous: designing at every scale

A balcony, a yard, an acre, a farm, a valley. What changes and what doesn't.

The method is the same at every size. What changes is which data matter, what the limiting factor is, and what the first move should be.

A balcony, patio or a few beds (under 100 m² / 1,000 ft²)

• What matters: sun hours, wind exposure, carrying water, weight limits, and frost — an exposed balcony is colder than the ground below it.
• What the app gives you: climate, sun angles and frost dates. The terrain and soil layers cannot resolve anything this small; skip them.
• The limiting factor: light and your daily attention. Everything is zone 1.
• Design moves: containers big enough not to dry out daily (40 L / 10 gal or more); a self-watering reservoir; herbs and salad within reach; one dwarf fruit tree in a half barrel; vertical space for peas, beans and hops; a worm bin for scraps. South and west walls store a day's heat.
• What to grow: whatever costs most fresh — herbs, greens, strawberries, cherry tomatoes. Not staple calories.

A city or suburban lot (100–1,000 m² / up to a quarter acre)

• What matters: the sun sector (neighbours' trees and buildings), door-to-garden distance, water from the roof, soil history (test for lead near old paint and busy roads), and the rules: setbacks, fence height, whether chickens are allowed.
• What the app gives you: 1 m terrain shows real drainage lines even in a yard; the soil survey is coarse at this scale (do the jar test and a lab test instead); sun and wind sectors are exactly what you need.
• Design moves: zone 1 wraps the kitchen door; the roof feeds a tank that feeds the beds by gravity; one or two fruit trees on dwarfing rootstock as guild anchors; a hedge on the cold-wind side; the lawn shrinks to the piece you use. A 400 m² garden can grow a household's vegetables and much of its fruit.

A large lot to a couple of acres (up to about 1 ha)

• What matters: contours and where water gathers, whether a pond is possible, a real windbreak, small animals, and an access path for a wheelbarrow or small tractor.
• What the app gives you: all of it. Soil polygons start to mean something; wet spots locate the pond; contours locate swales.
• Design moves: water on the high side; a food forest of 20–60 trees with guilds; chickens rotated through it; a windbreak on the winter-wind sector, 15–20 m from the house; annual beds in zone 1; a coppice block in zone 4.

A homestead (2–20 ha / 5–50 acres)

• What matters: water and access decide everything — the house site, the driveway, the tanks and the main pond. Then the enterprise (what will pay?), fencing and animals. Fire, in dry climates.
• What the app gives you: the analysis grid is capped at about 400 cells on a side, so at this size each cell is 5–10 m. Use the whole-property run for climate and soils, then draw sub-areas and analyze each for contour detail.
• Design moves: a keyline layout (Water); a chain of ponds; rotational grazing paddocks with tree lines on contour; a proper woodlot; zone 5 left alone on the steepest and wettest ground. A homestead is a small farm plus a big garden — keep the garden near the door.

A farm (20–200 ha)

• What matters: enterprise budgets, machinery access, water rights, the scale of earthworks (survey and often permits), labour.
• What the app gives you: the strategic layer — slope classes, aspect, where water gathers, soil units and their capability class. Detailed contour work needs a survey-grade DEM or a real survey.
• Design moves: Yeomans' keyline plan for the whole catchment; silvopasture (widely spaced trees in pasture); alley cropping; hedgerows as windbreaks and habitat; the Mark Shepard model — chestnut, hazel and apple in a savanna pattern with grazing between — if you want tree crops at scale in the upper Midwest.

A landscape, a valley, a commons

Too big to design as one thing. Design the water and access skeleton, then treat each sub-catchment as its own project. The community pages matter more than the plant pages here.

The constant

At every scale the first move is the same: find where the water goes, put the things you visit daily nearest the door, and shelter from the cold wind. Then build one piece and watch it.

Sources. Hemenway, Gaia's Garden (home scale). Mollison, Designers' Manual, chapter 3 (zones by scale). Mark Shepard, Restoration Agriculture (2013) for farm-scale tree crops in a cold climate. Ben Falk, The Resilient Farm and Homestead (2013) for the 2–10 ha northern homestead.

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Read the land

Observe first: reading a piece of land

What to look for on foot, what the app's layers tell you, and what neither can.

A year of observation is the traditional advice. Few people wait a year. This page is what to look at, in what order, so that a few walks plus the app's layers get you most of the value.

Walk it in these conditions

• In heavy rain, or right after. Where does water run? Where does it pool? Where does it come onto the property from? This is the single most valuable walk you will take.
• At dawn on a still, clear morning in spring or fall. Frost lies in the low spots and on the flats; the slopes above are clear. That is your frost-pocket map.
• In a wind. Where it is strong, where it is calm, where snow drifts and where it scours bare.
• In February and July, at noon. Where is the sun actually reaching? Which walls are warm to the touch?
• In a drought. What stays green — a spring, a seep, deep soil? What browns first — thin soil over rock, south slopes?

What to record

Keep one site notebook, or a folder of dated photos from fixed points (a fence post, a doorstep). Note:

• Water: flow lines, pools, springs and seeps, gullies, culverts, the neighbour's drainage.
• Soil: colour (dark means organic matter), texture by feel, where it is compacted (puddles, moss), where earthworms are, where nothing grows.
• Plants already there — they are indicators. Sedges and rushes mean wet. Nettles mean nitrogen. Moss and horsetail mean poor drainage. Lichen on rock means thin soil. Volunteer fruit trees show what this land wants to grow.
• Animals: deer trails, vole runs under the snow, where birds nest, where the frogs are.
• People: sight lines from the road, the neighbours' windows, the noise sector, where visitors park, where you actually walk (the desire lines in the snow).
• The old hands: talk to whoever farmed it before. They know where the wet spot is and which corner froze the apples.

What the app's layers are, and are not

Use the layers to know where to look. Then look.

The cheap tools that beat the data

• A hose level (bunyip): two clear tubes on a garden hose, filled with water. Finds true contour on the ground to a centimetre. Essential before any swale.
• An A-frame level: three sticks and a plumb bob; the traditional contour tool.
• A soil probe or a length of rebar: pushed in every 10 m along the planned orchard row, it finds the bedrock and hardpan the survey only estimates.
• A jar: soil, water, a shake, a day. Sand settles in a minute, silt in hours, clay by tomorrow. Read the proportions. (Soil)
• A soil test from the state lab — in Minnesota, the University of Minnesota soil testing laboratory — for pH, organic matter, phosphorus, potassium, and lead if you ask. Around $20–30.
• Two min–max thermometers: one at the proposed orchard site, one by the house. A winter of readings tells you more about your microclimate than any map.

Then draw

Trace the property on the map, drop a Note element on each thing you saw, and only then begin sectors and zones.

Sources. Mollison, Designers' Manual, chapter 3 (methods of design). Hemenway, Gaia's Garden, chapter 2. Ben Falk, The Resilient Farm and Homestead (2013), on reading a cold-climate site. Brad Lancaster, Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, volume 1, on the walk in the rain.

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Read the land

Sectors and zones

Sun, wind, water, fire, view: what comes in from outside. Then how often you walk somewhere.

Two overlays, drawn before anything is placed. Sectors are about energy arriving from outside the boundary. Zones are about your own energy: how often you walk somewhere.

Sectors: what comes in

Draw each as a wedge from the centre of activity (usually the house) toward where the energy comes from. The app draws the sun and wind wedges from your data; add the rest by eye with the Sector tool.

Sectors are mostly a list of what to block, filter, or open on each side. The design of the property edges falls out of this table.

Zones: where you actually walk

Zones are drawn around the centre of activity by frequency of visits, not by distance. A path you walk daily is zone 1 the whole way out.

Two rules that make zones work:

1. Put the thing where you will actually see it. A chicken house you pass on the way to the car gets cleaned. One at the back of the lot does not. The compost goes on the path to the garden, not behind the garage.
2. Zone 1 is small. On most properties it is the space within 10–15 m of the kitchen door plus the paths you walk daily. Resist making it bigger; the rest of the land will still be there.

Drawing them

1. In the Design tab, use Zone to draw zone 1 as a tight polygon around the door and the daily paths, then 2, 3 and 4. Zone 5 is what is left.
2. Use Sector to draw the cold-wind, fire, flood, noise and view wedges; the app already draws sun and wind from the data.
3. Look at the overlap. Zone 1 should sit in the winter-sun sector and out of the cold-wind sector. If it does not, move the door, the greenhouse, or your idea of where the garden goes.

Slope, the third overlay

Storage goes high (tanks, ponds, the woodpile that gravity will help you move), heavy daily work goes near the house, and anything that needs frost protection goes on the upper third of a slope with an open run-out below it. Steep ground (over 15–20%) stays in trees.

Sources. Mollison, Designers' Manual, chapter 3 (zones, sectors, slope). Hemenway, Gaia's Garden, chapter 3. Holmgren, Principles and Pathways, principle 7.

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Read the land

Windbreaks, snow and microclimate

Frost pockets, sun traps, thermal mass, and how a row of trees changes the weather on your side of it.

The climate card gives you the regional numbers. Microclimate is what you build on top of them, and on a cold site it is the difference between a zone-4 and a zone-5 garden — half a zone of warmth from a wall, a windbreak, a slope, a pond.

What makes a warm spot

• A south-facing slope receives more sun per square metre; a 10% slope facing south is like moving 100 km south. A north slope is the reverse, and useful for delaying bloom on early-flowering fruit (apricot, plum) past the frosts.
• Thermal mass: a stone or brick wall, a pond, a big rock, a water tank. Warm all day, they give heat back at night. The classic is the fruit tree trained on a south wall, or a bed at the foot of it.
• Shelter from the cold wind. Wind is the biggest thief of heat and moisture on an open site. A sheltered spot can be several degrees warmer on a windy day and lose half the water to evaporation.
• Cold-air drainage. Cold air is a fluid. It runs downhill at night and pools where a hedge, wall, or hollow stops it. The upper third of a slope with an open run-out below it frosts last; the bottom of a bowl frosts first. The wetness layer is close to a frost-pocket map.
• Reflected light off a pond or a white wall onto a greenhouse: real gains in spring.
• Open sky. Frost is radiation loss to a clear sky. A tree canopy or even a lattice over a bed cuts radiative frost by a couple of degrees.

Windbreaks

A windbreak changes the weather downwind of it for a distance of 10–30 times its height. The arithmetic (Tools tab):

• Best shelter (wind speed cut by half or more) from 2 to 5 heights downwind.
• Useful shelter to about 10–15 heights.
• Density matters more than width. A dense wall of spruce stops the wind hard and dumps it back down in turbulence 3–5 heights behind, with a snowdrift right there. A medium break (50–60% density: two or three rows, conifer and deciduous mixed) lets some wind through, protects further, and drops the snow more evenly. Open breaks (40%) protect a long way but only gently.
• Length: at least 10 times the height, or wind wraps around the ends and the middle gets little benefit.
• Distance from what it protects: buildings and driveways sit 2–5 heights downwind (out of the snow drop zone, inside the shelter). Leave 1.5–2 heights between a break and a driveway or the snow lands on the road.
• Snow trap: a dense single row placed 1.5–2 heights upwind of where you want the snow (a pond, an orchard that needs insulation) collects it there. A well-placed break is worth a snow fence every winter.

A standard cold-climate break, from the windward side: a row of shrubs (Nanking cherry, Siberian peashrub, buffaloberry, hazel, lilac) that fills the bottom; a row of tall deciduous (bur oak, hackberry, basswood, black locust); a row of conifers (white spruce, red cedar; white pine as the tall row). Rows 4–6 m apart, plants 2–4 m apart in the row. The shrub row on the outside is what stops wind and snow at ground level. Fruit and nuts in the break (hazel, chokecherry, plum, serviceberry) make it a crop, and a hedge on the road side is also the noise, dust and privacy sector solved.

Snow

In a snow climate, snow is stored water and the best insulation there is: a 30 cm blanket keeps soil at about 0 °C while air is at −30. Design for it:

• Put the things that need insulation (strawberries, half-high blueberries, garlic, the lowest branches of a marginal tree) where snow drifts and stays — the lee of a break.
• Keep it off the driveway with the break placement above.
• Snowmelt is the year's biggest single runoff event; the swales and the pond fill in April. Roofs shed it in a few days.
• Plants that get snow cover survive a zone colder than the label. Plants on a windswept knoll, a zone warmer.

Greenhouses, cold frames, walls

• A south wall of the house is the best greenhouse site on any property: the wall is mass, the house leaks heat into it, and it is zone 1 by definition.
• A cold frame or a low tunnel adds 4–8 weeks to each end of the season for the cost of a few hoops and plastic. That is a third more growing season in Duluth.
• Site glass out of the winter shadow of anything tall. The shadow calculator gives the length: at 47°N a 10 m tree throws a 28 m shadow at winter noon.
• Deciduous vines (hops, grapes, hardy kiwi) on a south or west wall: shade in July, bare in January.

What the numbers say for a northern site

Look at the climate card for: the cold-wind direction (the break goes there); the deficit months (May–August in most of the upper Midwest, so storage and mulch); days below −30 °C (the line for many fruit trees; shelter and snow cover move it); and the winter noon sun altitude (how far tall things must stay from your glass).

Sources. Mollison, Designers' Manual, chapter 5 (climatic factors) and chapter 10 (cool climates). USDA National Agroforestry Center, Windbreaks working-trees series (free). Ben Falk, The Resilient Farm and Homestead, on cold-climate microclimate. Eliot Coleman, The Winter Harvest Handbook, on season extension. University of Minnesota Extension, Windbreaks for Minnesota.

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Water

Water: contour, keyline, swales, ponds

Slow it, spread it, sink it, store it. When a swale is right and when it is wrong.

Water is the first thing to design because it is the hardest to move afterwards and everything else depends on it. The whole strategy fits in four words, in order: slow it, spread it, sink it, store it. Start at the top of the property and work down.

Read the water first

Run the terrain card. Three layers tell you nearly everything:

• Contours — lines of equal height. Water crosses them at right angles; anything built along one holds water level.
• Water flow — where runoff concentrates. The dark lines are the drainage lines; the pale ground between them is the ridges.
• Wetness (topographic wetness index) — where water and cold air collect: flat ground with a lot of land draining into it. The blue dots are the highest-scoring spots. The highest of them on the slope is the first place to look for a pond or a swale; the lowest is a frost pocket.

Then go out with a hose level in the rain and check it.

Contour: the tool for everything

A line of true contour is a line where water does not flow. Paths on contour do not erode. Beds on contour hold their mulch. A swale on contour spreads runoff along its whole length instead of letting it gather. Find contour with the app (the Swale on contour tool draws the line through any point you click), then confirm on the ground with an A-frame or hose level before you dig — the elevation model is accurate to decimetres, not centimetres.

Swales

A swale is a ditch on contour with the spoil piled on the downhill side as a berm. Runoff fills the ditch, stops, and soaks in; the berm, planted with trees, gets the water. It is an infiltration device, not a drain.

Where they work: slopes of roughly 3–15%, in soils that let water in (hydrologic groups A, B, C in the soil card), where there is runoff worth catching and something planted downhill to use it.

Where they are wrong:

• Clay or a high water table (group D, "poorly drained"): the swale becomes a linear bog and the berm slumps. Use a pond or a diversion drain instead.
• Slopes over about 15–20%: the berm is unstable and a full swale that overtops can start a landslide. Use terraces, or narrow "trenches" with heavy planting.
• Sandy fast-draining soil (group A): water already sinks; the swale adds little. Build organic matter instead.
• Within about 10 m upslope of a building or a septic field, unless you like wet basements.
• Under a frost pocket: a swale stores cold air as well as water.

Sizing: the Tools tab does the arithmetic. Rules of thumb: top width 1–3 m, depth 0.3–0.6 m, triangular or trapezoidal, berm about as wide as the ditch. Every swale needs a level-sill spillway — a wide, low, armoured point where overflow leaves on contour to the next swale or a safe run-out. Spacing: on a 5% slope roughly every 15–20 m; steeper, closer.

Planting: trees on the berm (their roots stabilise it and drink the water), nitrogen fixers between, deep-rooted grasses or ground cover on the berm face. Nothing on the ditch bottom for the first year while it settles.

Keyline

P. A. Yeomans' method for reading and working a whole slope. Each valley has a keypoint: the place on the valley floor where the slope changes from steep (convex above) to gentle (concave below). The contour through the keypoint is the keyline. Yeomans' insight: plough or rip parallel to the keyline — not on true contour — and the furrows drift water from the valleys, where it collects, out onto the ridges, where it is short. Above the keyline, furrows parallel to it fall gently toward the ridges; below it, they rise. A subsoiler on that pattern, done two or three times over a few seasons with pasture and animals, builds soil fast without earthworks.

The app shows you the landform to find keypoints (look for where the flow lines change from steep to flat) and draws the contour through any point. Yeomans' books are the source; Darren Doherty's Regrarians material updates them.

Ponds and dams

A pond is stored water, thermal mass, fire break, habitat, protein and a mirror for the greenhouse. It is also the biggest earthwork most people ever do.

• Siting: where the wetness layer says water already collects, on a soil that will hold it (clay; "poorly drained" here is good news), high enough that gravity can move the water to where you need it. A pond at the keypoint irrigates everything below by gravity.
• Catchment: the water-flow layer shows what drains to a point; a pond needs roughly 5–10 times its surface area in catchment in a 750 mm (30 in) rainfall climate. Too little catchment and it never fills; too much and the spillway must handle a storm.
• Holding water: clay compacted in layers (a sheepsfoot roller, or livestock and time — Sepp Holzer's pigs), bentonite, or a liner. Sandy or gravelly soil will not hold water without one.
• The spillway is the most important part and the one people skimp. It must pass the biggest storm you can imagine without the water going over the dam wall. Wide, armoured, on undisturbed ground, not on the fill.
• Permits: dams above a certain height or volume, and anything touching a wetland or a stream, need permits nearly everywhere. In Minnesota: DNR public-waters rules and the Wetland Conservation Act; federally, Clean Water Act section 404. Find out before the excavator arrives.
• Depth: in a cold climate, at least 2.5–3 m in part so fish survive the winter under the ice.

Roofs and tanks

Roof water is the cleanest, most reliable water on the property and it arrives at the house. See Rainwater and greywater and the roof calculator under Tools.

The order

1. Confirm the contours on the ground.
2. Diversion drains to steer runoff away from buildings and toward storage.
3. The highest pond or swale first — it protects everything below.
4. Swales downslope, each with a spillway to the next.
5. Roof catchment and tanks.
6. Plant the berms the same season, or they wash.

Sources. P. A. Yeomans, Water for Every Farm (1965) and The Keyline Plan (1954). Brad Lancaster, Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, vol. 2 (earthworks). Mollison, Designers' Manual, chapter 7 (water) and chapter 9 (earthworks). Sepp Holzer, Sepp Holzer's Permaculture (2011), on ponds and terraces. Darren Doherty and Lisa Heenan, Regrarians Handbook (keyline updated).

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Water

Rainwater harvesting and greywater

Roofs, tanks, first flush, and putting household water back to work.

What a roof gives you

Every millimetre of rain on a square metre of roof is a litre; every inch on a square foot is 0.62 gallons. Losses (evaporation, splash, the first flush) take 10–20%. A 110 m² (1,200 ft²) roof in a 750 mm (30 in) climate catches roughly 70,000 litres (18,000 gallons) a year. The roof calculator under Tools uses your own rainfall.

That is more than a household garden uses. The design question is not whether to catch it but how much to store and where to put the rest — usually into the ground, on contour, near the trees.

The system, from the roof down

1. Roof. Metal is cleanest; asphalt shingle is fine for irrigation, less so for drinking. Avoid lead flashing and treated wood shakes for anything you will drink.
2. Gutters and a leaf screen. Slope 1:200 toward the downspout; screen the downspout.
3. First-flush diverter. The first 10–40 litres of a storm carry the dust, pollen and bird droppings. A capped standpipe that fills first and drains slowly does it. Size: about 0.5 L per m² of roof (0.01 gal per ft²).
4. Tank. Opaque (light grows algae), screened (mosquitoes), with an overflow as big as the inlet, on a firm level base — a full 5,000 L tank weighs five tonnes. Above ground and uphill of the garden means gravity irrigation; a tank on a 1 m stand gives about 0.1 bar, enough for drip.
5. Overflow. Never to the foundation. To a swale, a rain garden, a pond, or the next tank.
6. Cold-climate detail. Drain the tank or keep it in a frost-free space through winter, or use an underground cistern below frost depth (1.5–2 m in Duluth). Snowmelt off a roof in March is a real catchment — a heated or buried line makes it usable.

Sizing the tank

Size for the dry spell, not the wet season. The Tools tab does it: daily use × days to bridge. A vegetable garden of 100 m² wants 300–600 L on a hot dry day; a household of two uses 50–100 L a day for the garden in summer. Three weeks of dry weather is a reasonable design spell in the upper Midwest — the climate card shows a May–August water deficit even in a 30-inch climate. A tank that overflows into a swale loses nothing, so err small and sink the rest.

Rain gardens

A shallow planted basin (150–300 mm deep) that takes a downspout or a driveway's runoff and soaks it in within a day. Size about 20–30% of the roof or paved area draining into it, in soil that drains at least 25 mm per hour (dig a hole, fill it, time it). Plant it with things that take wet feet and dry spells: aronia, elderberry, red-osier dogwood, sedges, blue flag iris, swamp milkweed. It is a swale for a yard.

Drinking rainwater

Possible and common, with a proper filter (sediment, then carbon, then UV or a ceramic candle) and a first-flush diverter. Check local rules; some jurisdictions restrict potable use. Test yearly.

Greywater

Greywater is everything from the house except the toilet: shower, bath, bathroom sink, laundry. Kitchen sink water is "dark grey" (grease, food) and is usually treated as blackwater or handled separately. A household produces 100–200 litres of greywater per person per day: a second irrigation supply that arrives daily, all year.

Rules that keep it safe and legal

• Greywater goes to the soil, never to the surface and never to storage (it turns septic in 24 hours). Mulch basins around trees and shrubs are the standard delivery: a sub-surface outlet into a basin filled with wood chips, one basin per plant, sized to the flow.
• No contact with edible parts: fruit trees and shrubs, yes; lettuce, no.
• Plant-friendly soap: no boron, no sodium-heavy powders, no bleach to the garden line. Liquid detergents made for greywater exist.
• A three-way valve so the flow can go to the sewer or septic when someone is sick, when it is frozen, or when the basins are saturated.
• Legal status varies: many US states permit simple laundry-to-landscape systems without a permit and require permits for anything plumbed. Minnesota treats greywater under the subsurface sewage treatment rules; a laundry-to-landscape system in a rural setting is generally tolerated, a plumbed system is not without a permit. Check before you cut a pipe.

The simplest system that works: laundry to landscape. The washing machine's own pump pushes water through a 1-inch line to a series of mulch basins; a three-way valve at the machine sends it to the sewer when needed. No filter, no tank, no pump, about $200 in parts. Art Ludwig's design.

In a cold climate: the line must drain fully after each cycle or run indoors to a greenhouse bed in winter. A greenhouse bed fed by greywater is a good winter use of the heat and nutrients.

Humanure and composting toilets

Closing the last loop. A composting toilet or a two-bucket sawdust system with a dedicated hot compost, kept a full year after the last addition, produces safe compost for trees and ornamentals. Joseph Jenkins' Humanure Handbook is the reference. Rules vary; in many places a composting toilet is legal alongside a conventional system, not instead of one.

Sources. Brad Lancaster, Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, vols. 1–2. Art Ludwig, Create an Oasis with Greywater (6th ed.) and Water Storage. Joseph Jenkins, The Humanure Handbook (4th ed.). Texas Water Development Board, The Texas Manual on Rainwater Harvesting (free, sizing tables).

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Soil

Soil: reading the survey and building fertility

What the USDA numbers mean, the jar test, the soil food web, and the one investment that always pays.

Soil is last on the scale of permanence because it is the thing you can change most. It is also the thing that changes slowest by neglect and fastest by attention. Everything below aims at one goal: cover it, feed it, stop disturbing it.

Reading the soil card

The soil survey (USDA SSURGO, the data behind Web Soil Survey) maps map units: a named mix of soil types — "Rock outcrop-Mesaba-Barto complex, 18 to 60 percent slopes" — each with layers (horizons) that carry texture, pH, organic matter, water capacity and depth. It was mapped at 1:12,000 to 1:24,000 from pits and air photos. Trust it for the pattern, not for one square metre.

Confirm it with three cheap tests

1. The jar test. A cup of soil in a straight-sided jar, water, a drop of dish soap, shake, let stand. Sand settles in a minute, silt in two hours, clay overnight. Measure the bands: that is your texture. Under 10% clay is sand; 10–30% with sand under 50% is a loam; over 40% is clay.
2. The slake test. Drop a dry clod in water. Soil with good structure holds; poor soil dissolves into mud in a minute. Structure is what organic matter and fungi build.
3. The lab test. The state lab (in Minnesota, the University of Minnesota) for pH, organic matter, phosphorus, potassium, and lead where there was paint, a road or a dump. Lime and sulfur doses come from this, not from guessing.

And the free one: dig a hole where the trees will go. Colour, roots, worms, the depth at which it changes, whether water stands in it a day after rain.

How soil actually gets fertile

The soil food web — bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes, arthropods, worms — turns dead things and rock into what plants eat, and plants pay for it with sugar pumped out of their roots. The practical consequences:

• Roots feed soil. Living roots all year, cover crops through winter, perennials wherever you can. Bare soil is a starving soil.
• Fungi run the perennial system. Trees and shrubs are fungal-dominated; annual vegetables lean bacterial. Woody mulch, no tilling and no fungicides grow the fungal side. Mycorrhizal fungi extend a root's reach a hundredfold and trade phosphorus and water for sugar.
• Tilling is a fire. It burns organic matter, breaks the fungal network and the structure, and gives you a flush of nutrients followed by a hangover. Till once to break sod if you must; then never again.
• Compaction is the common disease. Wheels, feet and wet working. Permanent beds with permanent paths; wide beds you never step in; daikon and alfalfa to drill it open.
• Nitrogen comes from the air through legumes and actinorhizal plants (alder, sea buckthorn, bayberry, sweetfern) and from animals; phosphorus and potassium from rock, mined by roots and fungi and cycled through mulch and compost. Bought fertiliser is a loan against soil life.

The one investment: organic matter

Everything else — water holding, drainage, pH buffering, nutrient supply, structure, workability — improves with organic matter. Ways to raise it, cheapest first:

1. Stop losing it. No tilling, no bare ground, no burning.
2. Mulch. Wood chips (arborists give them away) under trees and shrubs, 10–15 cm; straw or leaves on annual beds. Mulch is slow compost in place.
3. Cover crops. Rye and vetch over winter, buckwheat in summer gaps, clover under the trees. See compost, mulch, cover crops.
4. Chop and drop. Comfrey, nettle, the prunings, the spent crop: cut and leave where it falls.
5. Animals. Chickens on the beds in autumn, sheep or geese in the orchard, worms in the kitchen bin.
6. Compost for the seedbed and the transplants, where concentration matters.
7. Biochar, charged with compost or urine first, for sand and for holding nutrients long-term. Not a fertiliser, a sponge.

A realistic target is 0.1–0.5% a year. It compounds.

Fixing pH

• Acid soil (most of the Canadian Shield and Duluth's rock-derived soils): agricultural lime, dosed from the lab test — a rough figure is 5 kg per 100 m² to move a sandy loam half a point, more on clay. Wood ash works but is strong and potassium-heavy; a light dusting. Or plant to the acidity: blueberries, cranberries, lingonberries, currants, conifers, rhododendrons, potatoes.
• Alkaline soil: elemental sulfur (slow, months), pine needle and oak leaf mulch, peat in the planting hole for acid lovers. Or choose lime-tolerant plants and stop fighting.

Remediating problems

• Lead (old paint, old roads): raised beds with imported soil for anything eaten raw; fruit trees are fine; keep pH near 7 and organic matter high, which locks lead up; wash produce. Above about 400 ppm, stop growing root crops in it.
• Compaction and hardpan: daikon and alfalfa; a broadfork; a keyline subsoiler at scale; then never drive on it wet.
• Salt (road edges): gypsum, flushing, salt-tolerant hedge (bayberry, rugosa rose, sea buckthorn).
• Fill and rubble (urban lots): hügelkultur beds (buried wood) and raised beds on top, rather than fighting what is under.

Sources. Jeff Lowenfels and Wayne Lewis, Teaming with Microbes (2010). USDA NRCS, Soil Quality Indicators and the Web Soil Survey user guide (free). Elaine Ingham's soil food web material. Mollison, Designers' Manual, chapter 8 (soils). Masanobu Fukuoka, The One-Straw Revolution (no-till in practice). Gabe Brown, Dirt to Soil (2018), the five principles at farm scale.

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Soil

Compost, mulch, cover crops, humanure

The carbon-to-nitrogen arithmetic, sheet mulch, chop and drop, Jean Pain heat, and closing the loop.

Four ways to move carbon and nitrogen into the soil. Choose by how much work you want to do and how fast you need the result.

Mulch: the least work

Mulch is compost that composts itself in place. It shades out weeds, stops evaporation (a 10 cm layer halves summer water loss), keeps the soil cool in July and unfrozen longer in November, and feeds the fungal side of the food web.

• Wood chips (arborist chips, with leaves and twigs mixed in) for trees, shrubs, paths and the food forest floor: 10–15 cm, kept 10 cm off the trunk. They do not rob nitrogen from a tree; they do from a seedbed if dug in. Wine cap mushrooms grow in them.
• Straw (not hay, which is seed) for annual beds: 15 cm, applied after the soil has warmed. Potatoes grown under 30 cm of straw on unbroken sod is the classic way to start a bed.
• Leaves, whole or shredded, on everything in autumn. Free, and the best soil food there is.
• Living mulch: white clover, creeping thyme, strawberries, sweet alyssum — ground covers that do the mulch's job and produce something.
• Sheet mulch (lasagna) to start a bed on lawn without digging: cardboard on the grass (overlapped, wetted), then 5 cm of compost or manure, then 15–20 cm of straw or leaves or chips. Plant through it next season, or through holes cut now with a handful of compost in each.

Cold-climate cautions: mulch keeps soil cold in spring; pull it back from annual beds in April to let the sun in, and push it back in June. Mulch is also vole habitat; keep it away from young tree trunks over winter and use a hardware-cloth guard.

Compost: for the seedbed and the transplants

Compost is concentrated, sieved, stable organic matter for where it matters most: seed starting, the planting hole, the salad bed. You do not need it under mulched trees.

The arithmetic (Tools tab): browns (leaves, straw, chips, cardboard, about 40–80:1 carbon to nitrogen) and greens (grass, kitchen scraps, manure, coffee grounds, about 15–25:1). Mix by volume roughly 2–3 parts brown to 1 green for a finished ratio near 25–30:1. Too brown: cold and slow. Too green: slimy and ammonia.

Hot compost (a cubic metre or more, built in a day, kept as wet as a wrung-out sponge, turned when it cools below 55 °C): finished in 4–8 weeks, kills weed seeds and pathogens. Cold compost (added to as you go): 6–18 months, does not kill seeds, no work. Both are fine; know which you are doing.

What not to put in a small pile: meat and dairy (rats), diseased brassicas and tomatoes, black walnut leaves, rhizomatous weeds (quackgrass, bindweed), dog and cat waste, glossy paper. Weed seeds and pernicious roots go in a hot pile or the drowning bucket.

Worm bin for a kitchen: red wigglers, a bin of shredded paper and scraps, castings in three months. Indoors in winter.

Compost tea is oversold as a fertiliser; as a microbial inoculant on a new bed it may help. Compost itself is the reliable product.

Jean Pain: heat from the pile

Jean Pain, in Provence in the 1970s, ran his house and truck on brushwood compost. A 50-tonne pile of chipped brush, wetted and wrapped with 200 m of water pipe, ran at 60 °C for 18 months and gave hot water and methane. Small versions — a few tonnes of arborist chips with a coil of PEX — heat a greenhouse, a hot tub or a workshop through a northern winter, and leave finished compost. The three rules: fresh green chips (not sawdust), soaked before building, and enough mass (at least 10–15 m³) to hold heat.

Cover crops: the roots do the work

A cover crop is a crop grown for the soil. It holds the ground through winter, feeds the food web with living roots, fixes nitrogen if it is a legume, and leaves a mulch when killed.

Kill without tilling: mow at flowering (the plant has spent itself and will not regrow), crimp with a board, or cover with a tarp for three weeks. Plant transplants through the residue.

Chop and drop

Comfrey, nettle, borage, lovage, the tops of the sunchokes, prunings, the spent cover crop: cut them and leave them where they fall, or throw them under the nearest tree. Three cuts of a comfrey ring a summer put more organic matter under a tree than a wheelbarrow of compost, for no carrying.

Animals as composters

Chickens turn a compost pile for you and eat the flies; a chicken tractor moved across a bed in autumn cleans it, manures it and scratches the mulch in. Ducks eat slugs. Pigs turn a stump field into a garden. Every animal is a compost accelerator on legs, and they are in the Animals page.

Humanure

The last loop. A sawdust bucket toilet and a dedicated hot compost with a year's curing after the last addition gives safe finished compost; the reference is Joseph Jenkins' Humanure Handbook. Urine, diluted 1:10, is a complete nitrogen fertiliser used fresh on non-edible parts or the compost pile. Legality varies by place; most allow a composting toilet in addition to, not instead of, a permitted system.

Sources. Joseph Jenkins, The Humanure Handbook. Jean Pain and Ida Pain, Another Kind of Garden (1972). SARE, Managing Cover Crops Profitably (3rd ed., free PDF). Toby Hemenway, Gaia's Garden, chapter 4 (sheet mulch). Rodale Institute cover-crop trials. University of Minnesota Extension, Composting in home gardens.

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Plants & animals

Plants, layers and guilds

Seven layers, the jobs a guild has to fill, and how to place a tree so it is still right in twenty years.

A forest has no gardener, no fertiliser, no irrigation, and yields more biomass per acre than any field. A food forest copies its structure with plants that feed you. The two ideas are layers (the vertical structure) and guilds (the working group around each tree).

The layers

You do not need all nine on every square metre. A young food forest is mostly canopy and sub-canopy trees with a herb and ground layer; the shrub layer fills in as the canopy rises. Plant to the mature spread — the plant finder lists it — and accept that year three looks sparse.

Spacing and light

In a cold climate, light is the limiting factor and the canopy must be more open than in the tropics. Space canopy trees at their full mature spread or wider (the spacing calculator gives trees per acre), orient rows east–west so the low winter sun reaches under, and put the tallest things on the north side. A "savanna" of widely spaced trees with sun between them outyields a closed canopy at 47° north.

The guild

A guild is the group of plants (and animals and structures) assembled around one anchor — usually a fruit or nut tree — so that the anchor's needs are met by its neighbours. The roles, and why each matters:

The guild builder under Plants fills each role from plants that fit your zone and the anchor's shade and moisture. Then adjust by what you can get and what you like to eat.

A note on "dynamic accumulators." The permaculture literature lists plants said to mine specific minerals (comfrey for potassium, yarrow for phosphorus). The evidence is thin, and Robert Kourik, who published the original tables, has said so. Comfrey is still a superb mulch plant because it grows a lot of leaf from a deep root; treat the mineral claims as unproven.

Laying out a guild

1. Mark the tree's mature dripline (the app draws the circle when you choose a species).
2. Nitrogen fixers and the berry shrubs just outside the dripline, 2–3 per tree, on the sunny side.
3. Comfrey and the other mulch makers in a ring at the dripline.
4. Nectary and aromatic herbs in the sunny half inside the ring; ground cover and shade-tolerant herbs in the north half.
5. Bulbs and garlic in a ring right around the trunk zone to hold back grass.
6. Mulch everything 10 cm deep the first three years. Grass is the young tree's worst enemy.

Two trees 8 m apart share the guild between them; five trees make a small food forest with paths on contour between.

Succession: design in time

Year 1–3: pioneers and support species do the work — nitrogen fixers, fast shade (pin cherry, birch, black locust at the edge), annual cover crops, mulch. Year 3–8: the shrubs and small fruit yield; the canopy trees establish. Year 8+: the canopy yields; support species are cut back or removed as they are shaded out. Plan to remove things. A design that only adds becomes a thicket.

Choosing what to plant

Filter the plant finder to your zone first. Then, for each candidate: three functions or more; a pollination partner if it needs one; a job for the surplus (the mulberry over the chicken run; the sea buckthorn in the windbreak); and something that yields in year two (haskap, currants, raspberries, strawberries, rhubarb, asparagus) so you are eating while the trees grow.

Buy from a nursery in your zone or colder. A zone-5 apple grown in Oregon and shipped to Duluth is not the same plant as one grown in Minnesota.

Sources. Dave Jacke with Eric Toensmeier, Edible Forest Gardens, vols. 1–2 (2005) — the reference, with the guild and layer method and the plant matrices. Toby Hemenway, Gaia's Garden, chapters 6–10. Martin Crawford, Creating a Forest Garden (2010). Robert Kourik, Designing and Maintaining Your Edible Landscape Naturally (1986) and his later retraction on accumulators. Mollison, Designers' Manual, chapter 3 (guilds).

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Plants & animals

Cold-climate plants that actually work (zones 2 to 5)

What fruits, nuts and perennials survive a Duluth or a Prairie winter, and the ones that will not.

Most permaculture writing comes from Australia, the Pacific Northwest and the mid-Atlantic. Much of it dies in Duluth. This page is what survives a −30 °C (−22 °F) winter and a 120–160 day season, and the traps that catch people who read the other books.

The traps

• Zone on the label is not zone in the ground. Labels are the wood's hardiness; flower buds are usually less hardy than wood (apricot, sweet cherry, peach). Snow cover adds a zone; a windy knoll takes one away. Buy from a nursery in your zone or colder.
• Bloom date matters more than hardiness. Manchurian apricot survives −40 and blooms in April, into the frosts. Plant early bloomers on a north slope or the north side of a building to delay them, or accept a crop every third year.
• Rootstock is the plant. An apple on M9 dies where the same cultivar on Antonovka, Bud 118 or Dolgo seedling thrives. Ask what it is grafted on.
• Season length. Your frost-free days (climate card) against days to maturity: sweet corn wants 80–100 days and 1,400+ GDD; a 120-day season fits it once, no margin. The growing-season check under Tools does this arithmetic.
• Winter sun scald and rodents. Painted or wrapped trunks on young trees; hardware-cloth guards against voles under the snow and rabbits above it; deer fence at 2.4 m (8 ft).

Fruit that works

Not for zone 3–4: sweet cherry, peach (5a with luck), most blackberries, figs in the ground, persimmon north of 4b, pawpaw north of 5, most chestnuts (some hybrids in shelter), English walnut, filbert-type European hazels (use the hybrids).

Nuts

Hazel (American, beaked and the Upper Midwest hybrids), butternut (with canker-resistant stock), black walnut in zone 4, bur oak acorns, Korean nut pine (zone 3, patient). Chestnut is a zone-5 crop; some hybrids in shelter make it in 4b.

Perennial vegetables and staples

Asparagus, rhubarb, sunchoke, horseradish, sorrel, Good King Henry, walking onion, chives and garlic chives, sea kale (5), skirret, groundnut, hosta shoots, ostrich fern fiddleheads, ramps, daylily buds, nettles. Plus the annual staples that carry a northern household: potatoes, winter squash, dry beans, flint corn (80-day types), cabbage and roots for the cellar, garlic planted in October.

Support species for the north

Nitrogen: Siberian peashrub (windbreak; watch it near prairie), sea buckthorn, buffaloberry, bayberry, sweetfern, alder on wet ground, false indigo, leadplant, white and red clover, alfalfa. Windbreak: white spruce, white pine, red cedar, bur oak, hackberry, Nanking cherry, chokecherry, lilac. Mulch: comfrey, nettle, rhubarb. Nectary: anise hyssop, yarrow, goldenrod, aster, bee balm.

Season extension

A cold frame or low tunnel adds 4–8 weeks at each end. An unheated high tunnel grows spinach, kale and carrots through a Duluth winter under a second cover (Eliot Coleman's method, worked out in Maine). A root cellar at 0–4 °C and 90% humidity keeps potatoes, roots, cabbage and apples to April — the most important "structure" on a northern homestead after the house.

Reading the climate card for this

• Days at or below −30 °C: if it is more than one or two a year, stay with the zone-3 list.
• Frost-free days under 130: transplants, early varieties, tunnels; put annual beds in the warmest microclimate you have.
• Snow over 100 cm: treat the ground under drifts as a zone warmer; keep tree guards tall.
• Growing-season rain under 350 mm: irrigate the annuals; mulch everything.

Sources. University of Minnesota Extension fruit and cold-hardy plant guides; the University of Saskatchewan fruit program (haskap, dwarf sour cherries); Lee Reich, Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden (2004); Eliot Coleman, The Winter Harvest Handbook (2009); Ben Falk, The Resilient Farm and Homestead (2013); Mark Shepard, Restoration Agriculture (2013); Mollison, Designers' Manual, chapter 10 (cool climates); Bernie Nikolai and Bob Osborne, Hardy Apples (2022).

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Plants & animals

Animals in the system

Chickens, ducks, bees, rotational grazing, fish. Every animal is a worker with a job description.

An animal in a permaculture design has a job description. It eats something you have too much of, produces something you need, and does work you would otherwise do — while living well. Before any animal, answer three things: what will it eat from the site, what will it produce, and who feeds it when you are away.

Chickens

The gateway animal, and the most useful one at garden scale.

• Jobs: eggs; insect and slug control; tillage and cleanup of spent beds; compost turning; manure (hot — compost it); fallen-fruit cleanup in the orchard, which breaks the codling moth and apple maggot cycle.
• Feed from the site: kitchen scraps, garden waste, dropped fruit (mulberry over the run, sunchoke tops, Siberian peashrub seed, comfrey), insects. Grain still needed in a northern winter, roughly 100–120 g a bird a day.
• Housing: 0.3–0.4 m² inside per bird, 1 m² outside minimum; a movable tractor across the beds; a deep-litter house (30 cm of chips, added to all winter, composted in spring) that stays warm from its own decay. Insulation and a wind-free house matter more than heat; hardy breeds (Chantecler, Wyandotte, Buckeye, Orpington) handle −30 with a dry house and small combs.
• Rules: most cities allow hens (not roosters) with limits; Duluth permits backyard chickens under an ordinance with a permit. Check the number and setback.
• Zone: 1–2. A coop you pass daily gets tended.

Ducks

Eat slugs and snails without scratching up the beds (chickens destroy mulch). Khaki Campbell and Indian Runner lay as well as hens. They need water to dip their heads — a tub, not a pond, will do — and they turn a small pond into fertiliser. Muscovies are quiet, fly-catching, and hardy. Pair them with the orchard and the pond edge.

Geese

Grazers: they weed an orchard or a strawberry bed of grass (not broadleaf weeds) and guard the yard. Loud. Christmas dinner.

Bees

Pollination of everything and a saleable product. A hive on the sunny side of a windbreak, out of the cold-wind sector, facing east or south-east, with water nearby. Feed: willow, dandelion and maple in April; fruit bloom in May; basswood, clover and anise hyssop in July; goldenrod and aster in September. A northern hive needs 30–40 kg of stored honey and a wrap to winter. Alternatively, mason and leafcutter bees in a drilled block: no honey, no management, excellent orchard pollination.

Rabbits

The most efficient meat animal per square metre of housing; manure that goes straight on the beds (cold, no composting needed). Feed from the site: grass, comfrey, tree hay, garden trimmings. A hutch over a worm bin is a classic stack.

Pigs

Land clearers. A pig will turn a bramble patch or a stump field into tillable ground in a season, seal a pond by puddling the clay (Sepp Holzer's method), and finish on windfall apples, acorns and Jerusalem artichokes. Fencing (electric, and they respect it once trained) and a wallow. Seasonal — a spring piglet is a fall freezer.

Sheep and goats

Sheep graze (grass, clover) and are the cheapest way to keep an orchard floor mowed and fertilised; hair breeds (Katahdin) need no shearing. Goats browse (brush, bark — including your trees) and escape; they clear brush, and they need real fencing. Both want rotation.

Cattle

At farm scale only. The keyline and holistic-management approach — Allan Savory's rotational grazing, tall grass, long rest — builds soil faster than anything else and is the model for silvopasture.

Fish and the pond

A 2.5–3 m deep pond overwinters fish under ice in zone 3–4 if it has enough volume and, ideally, an aerator or an inflow. Yellow perch, bluegill and largemouth bass are the pond fish of the upper Midwest; trout need cold flowing water. Ducks, crayfish, and the pond edge plants (cattail, arrowhead, watercress) share it. Stocking is regulated in Minnesota — a private pond with no outlet to public waters can be stocked with a DNR permit from a licensed supplier.

Wildlife as workers

Bats (a box: 3,000 mosquitoes a night), swallows, wrens and bluebirds (boxes at the orchard edge), predatory wasps and hoverflies (the nectary plants), frogs and toads (the pond, a log pile), snakes (a rock pile: voles). Leave the dead wood, the brush pile and the water; the workers show up.

Rotation: the pattern that makes it work

Animals in one place forever create bare ground, parasites and smell. Moving them — a chicken tractor down the beds, sheep through the orchard paddocks, pigs through the coppice — spreads the manure, breaks the parasite cycle and gives each area rest. Electric net fencing makes a paddock in ten minutes. Plan the paddocks on the map (the Animals element) with water reachable from each.

Feed from the property: a checklist

Mulberry, honey locust pods, Siberian peashrub seed, acorns, apples (windfalls), sunchoke, comfrey, tree hay (willow, poplar, basswood cut in summer and dried), pumpkins for winter chicken feed, alfalfa, clover, the grain corner. Every one of these is also a plant with three other jobs.

Sources. Harvey Ussery, The Small-Scale Poultry Flock (2011). Joel Salatin, Pastured Poultry Profits and Salad Bar Beef. Allan Savory, Holistic Management (3rd ed. 2016). Sepp Holzer, Sepp Holzer's Permaculture. Carol Deppe, The Resilient Gardener (ducks and staples). Mollison, Designers' Manual, chapter 13 (aquaculture) and the animal sections of chapter 10.

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Plants & animals

Pest and disease management

The IPM ladder, habitat for the things that eat pests, and the big three: deer, voles, fungus.

Nearly every pest problem in a young permaculture system is a symptom: a stressed plant, a missing predator, a monoculture, bare soil. The method is integrated pest management (IPM) — a ladder you climb one rung at a time, spending the least effort and the least poison that solves the problem.

The ladder

1. Observe and identify. Most damage is cosmetic and needs nothing. Know the insect before you act: half the bugs on a plant are eating the other half. A hand lens and the state extension's photo guides.
2. Set a threshold. Ten aphids on a bean is nothing; a curled tip on every shoot is something. Decide what damage you accept before you see it.
3. Cultural control. The design itself: the right plant in the right place, healthy soil, mulch, spacing for airflow, resistant varieties, timing (plant after the flea beetles' first flush; harvest before the second-generation moth), sanitation (drop fruit and diseased leaves to the chickens or the hot compost), crop rotation for annuals, no bare soil.
4. Biological control. Habitat for the predators: nectary plants (yarrow, dill, alyssum, anise hyssop, goldenrod) in every bed; a pond for frogs and dragonflies; bird boxes; a bat house; log and rock piles for snakes and ground beetles; chickens through the orchard in autumn. Buying ladybirds is theatre; growing the flowers that keep their offspring is not.
5. Mechanical and physical. Row cover over brassicas and squash until flowering; netting on cherries and haskap; hand-picking potato beetles into soapy water; traps (yellow sticky, codling-moth pheromone, apple-maggot red spheres); tree guards; the 2.4 m deer fence.
6. Least-toxic sprays, last. Insecticidal soap, horticultural oil, kaolin clay (Surround) on apples, Bt for caterpillars, spinosad for beetles and thrips. Even these kill beneficials; spray at dusk, only the plant that needs it. Broad-spectrum insecticides have no place; they reset the system to zero.

The big three in the north

Deer. Nothing else destroys as much. A 2.4 m (8 ft) woven-wire fence around the garden and young orchard, or two shorter fences 1.2 m apart (deer will not jump into a narrow space), or a slanted electric fence. Individual tree cages of 1.5 m welded wire for the first five years. Repellents work for weeks, not seasons. Sacrificial planting on the deer trail (a chokecherry hedge) helps at the margin.

Voles and rabbits. Under the snow, voles girdle young trees; above it, rabbits. Hardware-cloth cylinders (6 mm mesh, 45 cm tall, pushed 5 cm into the soil) on every tree under 10 years; mulch pulled back 15 cm from the trunk in autumn; mown ground around the orchard in fall so there is no cover; a rock pile for the snakes and a perch pole for the hawks and owls.

Fungal disease in a wet spring. Apple scab, cedar-apple rust, fire blight on pear, black knot on plum and cherry, powdery mildew on squash, late blight on potatoes. Answers, in order: resistant varieties (Liberty, Freedom, Redfree, Prairie Magic for scab; Haralson is scab-prone); airflow (space, prune to an open centre, east-facing sites that dry the dew fast); sanitation (rake or chicken the leaves, cut black knot 15 cm below the swelling in winter); no junipers within a few hundred metres of apples if rust is the problem; sulfur or copper only for a bad case, early.

Common problems and the design answer

Diversity is the pesticide

Twelve species mixed in a food forest have no monoculture for a pest to run through. A pest that kills one tree in twenty is a nuisance; one that kills twenty of twenty is a disaster. Native plants (the aster and goldenrod strip, the hazel hedge, the oak) carry the predator populations through the year. Hedgerows and the pond edge are where the balance is kept.

Keep records

Which bed, which week, which pest, what you did, what happened. Most pests are on a calendar; after two years you will know the week to put on the row cover and the week to walk the apples with a bucket. The site notebook is the most effective pest-control tool you own.

Sources. Michael Phillips, The Holistic Orchard (2011) — the northern organic orchard reference. Jessica Walliser, Attracting Beneficial Bugs to Your Garden (2014). University of Minnesota Extension, Insects and Plant diseases pages (free, photo-keyed). Mollison, Designers' Manual, chapter 3 on pest ecology. Eric Toensmeier and Jonathan Bates, Paradise Lot (2013), for a real small-lot food forest's pest history.

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Plants & animals

Mushrooms and the fungal layer

Log and wood-chip cultivation, mycorrhizae, and why the soil food web is mostly fungal.

Fungi are half the soil food web and the part a perennial system runs on. They are also a crop: the shady, wet, north-facing corners that grow nothing else grow mushrooms, and a pile of firewood or a load of arborist chips is the raw material.

Why fungi matter to the design

• Mycorrhizae link the roots of most trees, shrubs and perennials into a network that trades water and phosphorus for sugar and extends a root's reach a hundredfold. They need undisturbed soil, living roots, and no fungicides or heavy phosphate. Wood-chip mulch and no-till are the way you grow them; inoculant products are optional and mostly unnecessary where trees already grow.
• Saprophytes (the decomposers) turn wood and straw into soil. Wine cap in the chip mulch does in one season what would take three.
• The fungal-to-bacterial ratio tracks succession: annual beds bacterial, orchards fungal, forest very fungal. Feed the fungi (wood, leaves) under the perennials, the bacteria (green material, compost) in the annual beds.

Growing mushrooms outdoors

Log culture (shiitake, lion's mane, oyster)

1. Cut fresh hardwood logs in late winter or early spring, before bud break — oak, sugar maple and ironwood for shiitake; oak or maple for lion's mane; poplar, box elder, willow for oyster. 10–20 cm diameter, 1 m long. Use within six weeks of cutting.
2. Drill 8 mm holes in a diamond pattern every 15 cm along the log and 5 cm around it; hammer in plug spawn (or inject sawdust spawn); seal with cheese wax.
3. Stack in deep shade — the north side of a building, under conifers, in the food forest — off the ground, and keep them damp. A sprinkler line in a dry spell.
4. Shiitake fruits in 6–18 months and then two or three flushes a year for 4–6 years. Soak a colonised log in cold water for 24 hours to force a flush. Cold-weather strains (WR46, Snowcap) fruit in a northern spring and fall.

One hundred logs is a serious hobby; five hundred is a small business. Shiitake sells for $20–30 a kilo at a farmers' market.

Chip beds (wine cap / king stropharia)

The easiest of all and the most useful in a garden. Spread wine cap spawn in fresh hardwood chips 10–15 cm deep, on the garden paths, under the fruit trees, in the shade of the raspberries. Keep it damp. Fist-sized mushrooms in the second season; a spadeful of colonised chips starts a new bed. The bed becomes soil in two years, so re-chip.

Straw (oyster)

Pasteurised straw (an hour at 65–70 °C in a barrel of hot water) in a bag or a bucket with holes, spawned with oyster; fruits in weeks. A fast indoor or porch crop in the shoulder seasons.

Totems and stumps

Fresh stumps of poplar, elm or maple inoculated with oyster spawn under a disc cut off the top (a "totem"); the stump fruits and rots faster.

The wild harvest

Morels (May, under dying elms and old apple orchards), chanterelles (July–August, oak and pine), chicken-of-the-woods, hen-of-the-woods (September at the foot of oaks), lobster mushrooms, black trumpets, boletes under pine. Learn from a person and a regional guide, never an app alone, and never eat a mushroom you cannot name with certainty. The Minnesota Mycological Society runs forays.

Fungi as soil medicine

• Mycoremediation: oyster mushrooms break down petroleum hydrocarbons; a chip berm inoculated with oyster or wine cap filters runoff from a driveway before it reaches the pond (Paul Stamets' mycofiltration).
• Rotting stumps with fungi instead of pulling them.
• Hügelkultur: buried logs are a fungal reactor that holds water for years; a hügel bed is a mushroom bed you grow vegetables on.

Sourcing

Spawn from Field & Forest Products (Wisconsin), North Spore (Maine), Fungi Perfecti (Washington). Plugs for logs, sawdust spawn for chips and totems. Keep spawn refrigerated and use it within a few months.

Sources. Paul Stamets, Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms (3rd ed. 2000) and Mycelium Running (2005). Tradd Cotter, Organic Mushroom Farming and Mycoremediation (2014). Cornell Small Farms Program, Best Management Practices for Log-Based Shiitake Cultivation (free PDF).

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Structures & energy

Buildings, energy, appropriate technology

Siting for the winter sun, root cellars, greenhouses, wood heat, and solar sized from your own numbers.

Structures are sixth on the scale of permanence: after water, access and trees, before fences and soil. A building placed by the sun and wind data, on well-drained ground, uphill of nothing it can flood, with the garden at its door, does half the work of the design by itself.

Siting a building

• The sun sector. The long axis east–west, glass on the south (northern hemisphere), tall things kept out of the winter-sun wedge by at least 2–3× their height (the shadow calculator). Overhangs sized to shade the summer sun (66° noon altitude at Duluth in June) and admit the winter sun (20°): roughly 0.6 m of overhang per 2 m of south glass at this latitude.
• The cold-wind sector. The windbreak, the garage, the woodshed and the mudroom on that side; the door and the glass on the other. An earth berm on the north side is a windbreak and insulation in one.
• Drainage. Never in a wet spot or a frost pocket (the wetness layer shows both); a slight rise with a clear run-out for cold air and surface water; a diversion swale above it on a slope. Basements in the Shield's rock-and-clay soils are wet basements; build on a slab or a crawl space unless the soil card says "well drained" and the water table is deep.
• Access. Where the driveway can meet the road safely and the snowplow can turn; on the sunny side of the windbreak so it melts.
• Zone 1 at the door. The kitchen faces the garden; the greenhouse attaches to the south wall; the water tank is uphill of both.

Passive solar in a cold climate

Glass, mass, insulation, in that order of thought and the reverse order of money. South glass equal to 7–12% of the floor area; thermal mass (a slab, a masonry wall, water barrels) inside the glass to hold the day's heat; insulation and air-tightness everywhere else — a superinsulated envelope (R-40 walls, R-60 roof, triple glazing) is what makes a −30 winter cheap, and it costs less than the heating system it replaces. An attached greenhouse on the south wall heats the house on sunny winter days and must be closable at night.

Root cellar

The most valuable structure on a northern homestead after the house: 0–4 °C and 85–95% humidity from October to April, for free. Into a north-facing bank, or under an unheated porch, or a buried culvert; earth on three sides and the roof, a door on the north, two vents (cold air in low, warm air out high), a dirt or gravel floor for humidity. Potatoes, carrots, beets, cabbage, apples, squash (drier and warmer, 10–15 °C), canned goods, the cider. Mike and Nancy Bubel's Root Cellaring is the reference.

Greenhouse and high tunnel

Season extension is the highest-return structure for food. A high tunnel (a hoop house with roll-up sides, no heat) adds two months of season and grows greens through the winter under a second layer of cover; a 30 × 96 ft tunnel is a market-garden standard and the NRCS cost-shares them (the EQIP high tunnel initiative). A small attached greenhouse is for starting transplants and for the tomatoes and peppers a 130-day season cannot ripen outdoors. Site it in the winter sun, out of the cold wind, with water and power and a path from the kitchen. A compost or Jean Pain pile against the north wall, or a rocket mass heater, keeps it above freezing.

Heat

• Wood is the renewable heat of the north, and a coppice block (black locust, willow, hybrid poplar, or the thinnings of the woodlot) grows it on the property. A household burns 4–8 full cords a year in a leaky house, 1–2 in a superinsulated one. A rocket mass heater (a super-efficient combustion chamber heating a masonry bench) burns a quarter of the wood of a stove; a masonry heater does the same at higher cost and finish. Both are documented in the appropriate-technology literature.
• Solar hot water works even here for eight months; a drainback system handles the winter.
• Compost heat (Jean Pain) for a greenhouse or a workshop.
• Heat pumps (cold-climate air-source, rated to −25 °C) are the practical electric answer, with wood for the coldest week.

Electricity

The climate card gives solar radiation in kWh per square metre per day — about 3.8 average at Duluth, 6+ in June, just over 1 in December. A 1 kW array yields roughly 1,100–1,300 kWh a year in Minnesota; sizing off-grid means sizing for December, which is why most people stay grid-tied and net-metered and keep a small battery for outages. Panels on a south roof at about the latitude angle (45°) — or steeper, to shed snow. Wind pays only on an exposed site with a 10 m tower and a measured average above 5 m/s; most homesteads are not that site. Micro-hydro, where there is a year-round stream with head, is the best of all and the rarest.

Water and waste

Rain tanks and greywater are on their own page (Rainwater and greywater); the composting toilet and the constructed wetland for greywater or a septic outflow belong here as structures: a reed bed (bulrush, cattail, iris) sized at 2–5 m² per person cleans household water to irrigation quality in most climates and freezes to a standstill in ours, so it works from April to November and the septic takes the winter.

Appropriate technology

The principle: the simplest tool that does the job, built from what is at hand, repairable by the user. Hand pumps, treadle pumps, ram pumps (a stream lifts its own water uphill with no power), solar dryers, evaporative coolers, rocket stoves, bicycle-powered grinders, the scythe, the broadfork.

Materials from the site

Coppice poles for fences, trellises and hoop frames; round timber for outbuildings; straw bale walls (R-30, a Minnesota tradition since the 1990s); cob and earthbag for thermal mass in a greenhouse; stone from the field clearing for the root cellar and the heat wall; woodchips for paths. A building that came off the land is one the land can take back.

Sources. Mollison, Designers' Manual, chapter 10 (cool-climate house and garden). Mike and Nancy Bubel, Root Cellaring (1979/1991). Ianto Evans and Leslie Jackson, Rocket Mass Heaters (3rd ed.). Eliot Coleman, The Winter Harvest Handbook. Ben Falk, The Resilient Farm and Homestead, on wood heat and the northern homestead. NRCS EQIP high-tunnel initiative pages.

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People & money

Community: co-ops, commons, governance

Social permaculture: how groups decide, share land and work, and stay friends.

Mollison's third ethic and Holmgren's "integrate rather than segregate" apply to people as much as plants. The design principles work on a group: observe first, design from patterns to details, small and slow solutions, use edges, catch and store energy (goodwill is energy). This page is the social layer: how a group holds land, decides, works, and stays friends. It is called social permaculture in the literature, and it is where most land projects actually fail.

Forms of holding land together

Ostrom's rules for a commons that lasts

Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel for showing that shared resources are not doomed if eight things are true. They are a checklist for any shared garden, woodlot or building:

1. Clear boundaries — who is a member, what is the resource.
2. Rules that fit the local conditions (not copied from elsewhere).
3. The people affected by the rules help make them.
4. Monitoring, by members or people accountable to them.
5. Graduated sanctions — a warning before a fine before expulsion.
6. Cheap, quick conflict resolution.
7. The right to organise is recognised by the outside authority.
8. Nested layers for big systems.

Deciding things

The land project's real design problem. Options, from fastest to most robust:

• Benevolent dictator — fast, and it works until the founder burns out or dies. Most farms.
• Majority vote — clear, and it produces a losing minority every time.
• Consensus — everyone must agree; slow, and one person can stop everything. Works in small trusting groups; fails at scale.
• Consent (sociocracy) — a proposal passes unless someone has a reasoned, paramount objection, which is then worked into the proposal. Circles with defined domains, double-linked; roles chosen by discussion, not campaigning; every decision has a review date. Faster than consensus, fairer than voting; the method most working cohousing and ecovillages have settled on.
• Advice process — anyone can decide anything in their domain after seeking advice from those affected and those with expertise. Scales; needs trust and a written record.

Whatever the method: write it down before the first conflict, define who decides what (money above a threshold, land use, membership), and put a review date on every big decision.

The work

• Work parties move mountains and make friends: a set day, a set job, food, a start and a finish time. Six people for four hours on a Saturday is a swale.
• Labour tracking breeds resentment when it is detailed and breeds freeloading when it is absent. Sociocracy's answer: roles with clear expectations, reviewed; not hours.
• Skill sharing is the yield of a community that a farm cannot produce alone: the welder, the tax person, the herbalist, the carpenter. A skills inventory is worth doing on day one.
• Money — dues, rents, budgets, reserves — has its own page (Money). The single most common cause of a co-op failure is deferred maintenance from an under-funded reserve.

Conflict

It arrives; design for it. A conflict process agreed in calm times (a first conversation, a facilitated one, mediation, then the governance body), a culture of raising things early, and meetings that begin with a check-in and end with a review. Most conflict in land groups is about cleanliness, noise, dogs, money and who is doing the work, in that order; agreements on each written before move-in save years.

Educational design

A site that teaches — tours, workshops, a PDC, a school garden, apprentices — is a site with income, labour and allies. Design for it: a route through the property that tells the story, a shelter to teach under, a demonstration of each system small enough to see at once, signage, and a safety plan.

What to do first

Before land, before money: three or four people who have worked together on something hard and still like each other. A shared vision written in a page, a decision method, a conflict process, a budget with a reserve, and a way out for anyone who wants to leave. Then the land.

Sources. Diana Leafe Christian, Creating a Life Together (2003) — the standard on why 90% of intentional communities fail and what the 10% did. Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons (1990). Sociocracy for All (free materials); Ted Rau and Jerry Koch-Gonzalez, Many Voices One Song (2018). Looby Macnamara, People and Permaculture (2012). Starhawk, The Empowerment Manual (2011).

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People & money

Money: enterprise, grants, legal

Enterprise budgets, what pays in a cold climate, cost-share programs, and the rules about water and wetlands.

"Obtain a yield" includes the bank balance. A design that loses money every year is not permanent. This page covers what pays on small cold-climate land, the programs that pay you to do the right things, and the rules you must know before you dig.

What pays at small scale

Honest rules of thumb from people who have done it (Fortier, Stone, Shepard, Falk, the SARE case studies):

• High-value annuals on a small area: salad greens, herbs, microgreens, garlic, cut flowers, tomatoes in a tunnel. A well-run 0.5 ha (1.25 acre) market garden grosses $50,000–100,000 with one or two people, direct to customers. Labour-intensive; needs a market within an hour.
• Season extension is where the margin is in the north: greens in April and November sell at a premium and the tunnels are cost-shared.
• Perennial crops with a wait: haskap, currants, aronia, hazelnuts, elderberry, sour cherries, apples for cider. Three to six years to income; low labour after; the market often has to be built (u-pick, value-added, restaurants). Aronia and elderberry have oversupplied; haskap and hazels are still short.
• Value-added: cider, jam, dried mushrooms, tinctures, honey, syrup. Regulated (cottage food laws, licensed kitchens) but the margins are triple the raw product.
• Mushrooms: shiitake logs — a few hundred logs, $20–30 a kilo, a shady corner nobody else can use.
• Eggs and meat birds: direct sales, modest margins, steady customers; the rules on processing are the constraint.
• Nursery stock: propagating what grows well for you (comfrey, currants, hazels, sea buckthorn) sells to the neighbours starting the same journey.
• Services: design, consulting, workshops, tours, a PDC, land care for people who own land and cannot manage it. In a cold climate this is often the largest income line of a permaculture site. It fits a life-admin or property-care business exactly.
• Timber and firewood from a managed woodlot, long-term and reliable.

What generally does not pay: commodity grain or hay at small scale, most livestock without land you already own, anything you have to sell through a middleman at wholesale.

Enterprise budgets

Before planting a crop for sale, write the budget: establishment cost, years to yield, yield per plant, price, labour hours, marketing, losses. University extension publishes enterprise budgets for most crops. Run the numbers for three crops; pick the one whose worst case you can live with.

Programs that pay you

• NRCS EQIP (Environmental Quality Incentives Program): cost-share for high tunnels, cover crops, windbreaks, fencing for rotational grazing, pollinator plantings, water systems, and more. Apply at the county NRCS office; you need a farm number from FSA (free) and a conservation plan they help write.
• NRCS CSP (Conservation Stewardship Program): annual payments for keeping and improving conservation practices on working land.
• SARE Farmer/Rancher grants (North Central region for Minnesota): a few thousand to $30,000 for on-farm research and demonstration. Permaculture trials fit.
• Minnesota Department of Agriculture: AGRI grants (value-added, livestock investment, beginning farmer), the Beginning Farmer Tax Credit, the MDA "Emerging Farmers" office.
• Soil and Water Conservation Districts (county level): cost-share for rain gardens, shoreline buffers, erosion control, native plantings; free technical help.
• Tree programs: state nursery seedlings at low cost; county SWCD tree sales every spring (bundles of 25 for a few dollars a tree).
• Utilities: rebates on heat pumps, solar, efficiency.
• USDA FSA microloans up to $50,000 for beginning farmers; the Farm Storage Facility Loan for cold storage and tunnels.

The pattern: the conservation practices permaculture wants — cover crops, windbreaks, grazing rotation, pollinator strips, water storage — are exactly what these programs fund. Go to the NRCS office with the site analysis printed out.

Legal: know before you dig

• Wetlands. Soil rated hydric, standing water, wetland plants: filling, draining or excavating may need a permit — in Minnesota under the Wetland Conservation Act (through the county or SWCD) and federally under Clean Water Act section 404 (Army Corps). The soil card flags hydric units. Fines are serious; ask first.
• Public waters and dams. Altering a stream, lake shore or a mapped public water, and dams above certain heights, need a DNR permit. Ponds in upland with no outlet to public waters are generally the owner's business, subject to local ordinance.
• Water rights and wells. Minnesota requires a permit for appropriations over 10,000 gallons a day or a million a year; below that, no permit. Wells are licensed contractors and recorded. Rain catchment is legal.
• Zoning and setbacks. Accessory buildings, greenhouses over a certain size, fences over a height, animals (number, species, setbacks), home businesses, farm stands, and whether you can live in an outbuilding. The county or city zoning office; get it in writing.
• Shoreland and floodplain ordinances restrict what can be built or cut near lakes and rivers (buffers, impervious limits).
• Food sales. Cottage food registration (Minnesota allows up to a sales cap for shelf-stable products made at home); eggs and honey have their own rules; meat and dairy need licensed processing. Farmers' market rules vary.
• Liability. Visitors, u-pick, workshops: farm liability insurance, waivers, and an LLC between the enterprise and the house.
• Taxes. Agricultural classification (Green Acres, Rural Preserve in Minnesota) cuts property tax on working land above a size threshold; a farm number and Schedule F open deductions. A co-op or LCA has its own filing.
• Neighbours. Right-to-farm laws protect established practices; they do not protect a new smell next to an old house. Talk first.

Keeping score

Track cash, hours and yields by enterprise from the first season. The site notebook that records pests also records what sold. After two years the numbers, not the ideology, decide what grows.

Sources. Jean-Martin Fortier, The Market Gardener (2014). Curtis Stone, The Urban Farmer (2015). Mark Shepard, Restoration Agriculture (2013), on tree-crop economics. Richard Wiswall, The Organic Farmer's Business Handbook (2009). SARE, Building a Sustainable Business (free). NRCS and Minnesota Department of Agriculture program pages (check yearly; programs change).

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Method

Integration: the web of functions

Relative location, multiple functions, redundancy, edges, succession. How the parts become a system.

A pile of good techniques is not a design. The design is the relationships: which element's output feeds which element's need, so that the whole needs less from outside and gives more. This page is the method for turning a list of parts into a system, and it is what the Design tab's function web scores.

Relative location

Put things where their outputs meet needs. The examples are the whole method in miniature:

• Chickens under the mulberry and in the orchard: dropped fruit → chicken feed; chickens → pest control (codling moth larvae in the drops) and manure; the tree → shade and hawk cover for the birds.
• The pond upslope of the garden: gravity irrigation; the pond → frost moderation and reflected light onto the greenhouse below it; the greenhouse → warm water and fish food (worms, greens) back to the pond.
• The woodpile in the cold-wind sector: shelter for the house; close to the door on the lee side; dry because the wind that cools the house dries the wood.
• The compost on the path to the garden: scraps go out daily; the finished compost is where it is used; the heat warms a cold frame built against it.
• Comfrey around the apple: mulch at the dripline; a grass barrier; bee forage under the tree; a place to drop the prunings.
• The greenhouse on the south wall of the house: the house heats the greenhouse at night; the greenhouse heats the house on sunny winter days; the kitchen is one step from the greens.
• The windbreak of nut and fruit shrubs on the road side: wind, noise, dust, privacy, snow, wildlife, a crop.

The exercise: list every element's needs and yields (a page each), then draw lines. Where a need has no line, you are buying something. Where a yield has no line, you are wasting something. Move things until the lines are short.

The two tests

Mollison's two rules for redundancy and efficiency:

1. Each important function is supported by several elements. Water: the roof, the pond, the swales, the well. Fertility: the compost, the nitrogen fixers, the animals, the mulch. Heat: the sun, the wood, the mass. If one fails — a dry year, a fox, an illness — the function holds.
2. Each element performs several functions. A fence that is also a windbreak, a trellis and a hedge. A pond that is water storage, fire break, heat sink, duck yard, fish tank and reflector. Three functions is the floor; the good elements do five.

The Design tab counts both across your placed elements. A "△" is not a failure; it is a question — can this element do more, or does this need want a second source?

Edges

Where two systems meet, both are present and something new appears: the pond edge grows more than the pond or the field; the hedgerow holds more birds than the wood or the pasture. Design for more edge: a pond with a crenellated shore, a keyhole bed, a spiral, a path that meanders along the contour, a forest edge that is a shrub layer rather than a wall. But not infinite edge: edges are also where the work is (mowing along the fence, weeding along the bed).

Stacking

In space: the layers of the food forest. In time: succession — the pioneers that shelter and feed the canopy, then are removed; the annuals between young trees; the strawberries under the young apple that the mature apple will shade out. A design has a year-1 plan, a year-5 plan and a year-20 plan; the elements change, the functions stay.

Energy flows and sinks

Sun, rain, wind, gravity and the road (what you carry in) are the incoming energies. Each is caught as many times as possible before it leaves: rain on the roof → tank → garden → swale → pond → aquifer. Heat from the sun → greenhouse → mass → house → cellar. Nutrients → kitchen → compost → bed → chicken → compost. Every time an energy leaves the property unused (runoff, a bonfire, a trash bag, heat out a leaky wall), that is the leak to plug next.

The plan on paper before the shovel

1. Lists: needs and yields for every element you intend.
2. Sectors and zones drawn.
3. Elements placed by zone (frequency), then adjusted by sector (energy), then by relative location (connections).
4. Water lines drawn: where it falls, where it is caught, where it goes.
5. Access drawn: paths on contour, the daily loop from the door.
6. The function web checked.
7. Succession: what comes out in year 5, what goes in.
8. One piece built. Then the plan corrected by what happened.

Signs of integration

You stop buying fertiliser. The compost bin never fills because the chickens and the mulch take it. The pond is full in July. The greenhouse is above freezing on a February night with no heater. Weeding is an hour a week. The neighbours ask how the frost missed you. Those are the metrics.

Sources. Mollison, Designers' Manual, chapter 3 (the methods: analysis of elements, relative location, the two rules) and chapter 4 (pattern). Holmgren, Principles and Pathways, principles 7, 8, 11. Hemenway, Gaia's Garden, chapter 10 (the garden as ecosystem). Dave Jacke, Edible Forest Gardens, vol. 2 (design process).

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Method

Start small, observe a year

The first season plan that does not overwhelm, and how to keep records that improve the design.

The step everyone skips, and the one that decides whether the land is still a joy in year three. The permaculture principle is "small and slow solutions"; the accountability version is: do one thing well enough to learn from it.

The first-season plan

Whatever the size of the land, the first season is the same size:

1. One zone-1 bed by the kitchen door, 1.2 m wide and as long as you will actually weed — 4 m is plenty. Sheet-mulched on the lawn in autumn or spring: cardboard, compost, straw. Salad, herbs, a tomato, garlic in October.
2. One rain barrel or tank on the downspout nearest that bed, with an overflow to somewhere that wants water. You learn how much a roof gives, how fast a barrel empties, and where the overflow should really go.
3. One tree guild. One apple or plum or sour cherry on hardy rootstock, in the spot the sun and wind data agree on, with comfrey, chives, clover and a nitrogen fixer around it, mulched 10 cm deep, caged against voles and deer. You learn what a guild is by tending one.
4. A compost pile on the path between the door and the bed.
5. The site notebook. Started now, kept all year.

That is the whole build. Everything else this year is observation, reading, and small experiments: a cover crop on a patch, a few shiitake logs, a hose-level check of the contour the app drew, a min–max thermometer in the proposed orchard.

Why small

• A design is a hypothesis. A year of results corrects it cheaply. An acre of swales built on a hypothesis corrects it expensively.
• Skills compound. The person who has kept one bed weeded for a year can keep four. The person who planted forty trees in April and lost twenty to grass and voles by October has learned that lesson at forty times the price.
• Money and morale are the scarce inputs. A small success funds and fuels the next step; a large failure ends the project.
• The land tells you things only in time: the frost pocket you find in May, the wet corner in April, the wind in November, the place the deer walk.

What to observe, month by month (northern hemisphere, cold climate)

Write it down with a date. A phone note is fine; a photo from the same spot each month is better.

Records that improve the design

• Dates: frost, bloom, first harvest, first pest, first snow. Two years of these beat any climate model.
• Yields: rough is fine — a bucket, a basket, a dozen eggs. You will be surprised what produced most for least.
• Hours: where the time went. The bed you never visit is telling you about zones.
• Money: what you bought and what it replaced.
• What died and why. The most useful list of all.

Save a copy of the app's report each season with a note about what happened; the difference between plans is the design learning.

Growing the design

Year two: expand what worked (a second bed, three more trees in the pattern the first one taught you), fix what did not (move the compost, resite the barrel), and add the next system — chickens, a cover-crop rotation, the first swale if the contour checked out. Year three: the food forest proper, the windbreak, the pond if the year-one observations still say the same spot. The earthworks come when you know the water, not before.

The accountability

Nobody is coming to do this. The land is a mirror of attention: it shows exactly where you looked and where you did not. That is the pleasure of it. A small thing done with full attention is the whole method; scale is just more of that.

Sources. Holmgren, Principles and Pathways, principle 9. Hemenway, Gaia's Garden, chapter 11. Ben Falk, The Resilient Farm and Homestead, on starting a cold-climate site. Masanobu Fukuoka, The One-Straw Revolution — the case for doing less, well.

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Method

Sources and further reading

The books this library leans on, the free data behind the app, and how to find things in your own collection.

This library is a digest. These are the books it leans on, the public data behind the app, and how to find things in your own collection.

The core shelf

Where the library says the evidence is thin

Dynamic accumulators (the mineral-mining plant tables); most companion-planting folklore beyond trap crops and nectary plants; compost tea as fertiliser; biodynamic preparations; the claim that swales suit every slope; "no work" gardening. Where a page makes such a claim it says so. Test on your own ground; keep notes.

The data behind the app

All public, no accounts. Every result is cached on your machine; nothing about your land is stored anywhere else.

Free online

• University of Minnesota Extension (extension.umn.edu): fruit, vegetables, soils, insects, diseases, windbreaks, for exactly this climate.
• USDA NRCS Web Soil Survey and the Soil Quality series; the Plants Database (plants.usda.gov).
• SARE (sare.org): Managing Cover Crops Profitably, Building a Sustainable Business, grant case studies.
• Cornell Small Farms: shiitake, high tunnels, enterprise budgets.
• The Soil and Health Library (soilandhealth.org): Yeomans, Howard, Fukuoka and the classics, free.
• Permies.com forums; the Permaculture Research Institute; Regrarians (Darren Doherty's keyline material).
• USDA National Agroforestry Center: windbreak, silvopasture and alley-cropping guides.

Your own collection

The drive holds a permaculture library of about 8,900 documents in 34 topic folders, plus a 1,000-document appropriate-technology reference library and Mollison's Global Gardener films. Each page in this library lists the folders that bear on it, and the app shows the documents in them with an open button. To search by title from a terminal:

`` grep -i "yeomans" "E:\Domains\Permaculture\app\data\owned_library.tsv" ``

The index (owned_library.tsv) is titles only. Extracting the full text of the 6,900 PDFs is the same pipeline used on the alchemy corpus and is the next step if you want to search inside them; the 435 hours of video and podcast need transcription, which is the expensive step and should be done selectively, by question, never wholesale.

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