Unleash Your Creativity with Permaculture Design Principles

By creating a wide variety of different plant species on your property, pests have a harder time navigating to your precious fruits and vegetables. It's this diversity that makes untouched ecosystems so stable. It produces a more extensive selection of food and habitat for living things. Animals, like us, have preferences, and when your yard is a smorgasbord of plant growth, it naturally attracts plenty of beneficial visitors.

How do you achieve diversity in your design? Try to find local food crops that produce at different weeks during the growing season. Doing this puts your household on a seasonal diet, reducing your grocery bill, and cutting down on the emissions it took to transport food to the store. Aim to have flowers blooming every week; this entices beneficial pollinators and shows them that your yard has a steady stream of food. Also, be sure to add lots of native support species. These are species that aid in plant growth, including nitrogen fixers such as beans, peas, clover, and lupine.

We can also value diversity in our community by preserving traditional knowledge. This includes things that used to be common knowledge, like knowing what a bird's call means; when specific bugs arrive and leave each season; or even which plants will grow in your plant hardiness zone. In permaculture, we learn to value the traditional knowledge of others, because people are the heart of permaculture design. We are the providers and caretakers of this planet, and by valuing the labor of people over the convenience of machinery, we benefit all those who work with us.

Permaculture Principle #11: Use Edges and Value the Marginal

Taking advantage of edges and limited space is another fundamental principle of permaculture. Edges of systems have the potential to become the most productive places in your yard. When we imagine the edges of natural landscapes—where the forest meets a meadow or where a lake first touches land—they often have the greatest diversity of species with access to both habitats. Sustainable Mini Wetlands are a great example of taking advantage of the edge for runoff, filtration, and carbon sequestration.

One of the most common edges a homeowner will encounter is your property boundary. Before replacing the older fence that separates your backyard from next door, consider creating a living fence to make the most use of that edge. Living fences are great for providing food, herbal medicines, and even fodder to keep wildlife out of your garden. Choosing something like a living fence over a constructed boundary increases the productiveness of your edge and as it matures, and provides a better habitat for other plants, animals, and insects.