Permaculture

We first encountered the term while driving past the Permaculture Skills Center in Sebastopol, CA in 2014 en route to Guerneville. In March 2016, we returned to Sebastopol — which is also partly responsible for our interest in beekeeping (thanks BeeKind!) — and took a tour of the facility and grounds, where we were introduced to some of the design philosophy's basic fundamentals.

Later that summer, Mike earned a Permaculture Design Certificate from Midwest Permaculture in Stelle, IL. In advance of the course, he immersed in the core principles and fundamentals of Permaculture, a philosophy and set of principles for creating an abundant world focused on care of earth, care of people and fair share. During that week, he participated in learning a range of concepts and applicable skills and practices aimed at equipping him to design sustainable landscapes.

I still remember receiving his excited call on my cell phone when he gushed about all the things he and his newfound friends had learned: the critical importance of capturing and holding water, how plant guilds work, and all of Permaculture's social aspects, as well as the activities he'd enjoyed, ranging from making cobb bricks, finding a contour line, and grafting apple trees to conducting a soil percolation test, making a rocket stove, and building a Hugelkultur mound. His week-long intensive also was a reminder and reinforcement of the core influences in his life including his soil scientist father and all the work he had done at Virginia Tech's agronomy farm, turf grass center, and soils lab. The week culminated in each student presenting their first permaculture design; Mike had essentially designed our Happy Boolo edible landscape even before we had fully committed to renovating our home.

Fortunately, there's an active Meet Up group in Chicago that practices the principles learned from the PDC via "blitzes" (showing up at a site to convert the landscape according to a pre-determined plan) and various workshops. We're looking forward to post-pandemic blitzes that may involve our landscape!