Observation and Interaction

The consensus among Permaculture gurus is that one should spend a year observing one's environment before attempting to make any changes to it. On a site, those observations would include noting down climate things such as minimum and maximum temperatures, hours of sunshine, rainfall, snowfall (if it's applicable to your area), predominant wind direction, wind speed, fog. It would also include soil type, the slope of the ground, where water runs to, where the runoff accumulates and a whole lot of other small measurements. That makes Permaculture a very scientific approach to farming/gardening and explains part of my personal definition of Permaculture as well:

Permaculture is what happens when an engineer and a hippy decide to farm!

My biggest problem at the moment is that I do not have property of my own that I can observe. My apartment building is mostly paving and tile, with no green in sight besides what I can grow in pots and tin cans (and the Body Corporate has issues with that!). I have more vegetables and herbs growing at work, but that's also not the most ideal of situations.

My ultimate goal is to create a large enough alternative income that I can leave my job and move to a different part of the country, where I could spend more time writing and gardening and crafting and generally just being ME.

That brings me to another part of Permaculture that will be addressed in more detail later and that is the "zoning" of the area. Different Permaculture practitioners define zones differently. To me, Zone 0 will always be ME, the individual in the middle of all the changes that will be happening around me. Whether it's my body, mind or spirit doesn't really matter. The point is that I am a zone, too, and therefore also need careful observation.

I need to know what I would be bringing to the table, what my personal strengths and weaknesses are, where I am coming from, where I am going to, what makes me laugh, what makes me cry, what turns me on, what turns me off. In short, I need to know what makes me tick! Once I know how I'll be contributing to the bigger picture, I can start planning my environment to suit those strengths and mitigate any weaknesses.

If I know what skills I lack, for instance, I can take action to gain those skills, or at least find someone who does possess those skills to help me to do whatever needs to be done.

The year 2020 is going to be a skill-building year for me. I am going to:

• learn to keep bees

• learn to design and implement an aquaponics system

• take my writing seriously and actually publish those stories!

• learn to do basic metalwork and welding

• learn about herbs and essential oils

• make soap and cheese and salves and tinctures!

I wanted to include a Permaculture Design Certificate in this list, but decided against it for now. A PDC will only make sense once I have a project to work on. I don't. Not yet, anyway. Once I go that route, though, I'll have to know for certain that Permaculture is no longer simply a head thing, but a body and spirit thing as well (The hippy part!) and a serious lifestyle choice. It shouldn't be a matter of simply exchanging one box for another.

After all, I am going to be ME!