Five tips for beginner permaculturists

Posted on July 23, 2024

Interested in permaculture and not sure where to start? Permaculture practitioner, Maya Blackwell, has shared her top five tips for beginner permaculturists.

 

Observation is everything. The first design principle is ‘observe and interact’. Paying attention is the first step to making appropriate and useful interventions with the land.

Mistakes are essential. When designing in your garden the best way to learn is by trying stuff out and messing it up, that way you’ll know what works and what doesn’t.

Permaculture is ‘lazy gardening’. The point of permaculture is to create intuitive, well constructed systems that don’t need high energy input. If you are intentional and thoughtful from the start, you don’t need to break your back to obtain a yield.

Earth care, people care, fair share. Simplified, these guiding ethics stand for nature, people and justice. It’s integral not to separate land justice from social justice, and nature care from people care. Put simply, our approaches to land management can be applied to relationships and society and large.

Embrace change. One of the permaculture principles is to ‘creatively use and respond to change’. In permaculture, we accept the inevitability of change and embrace it – learning how we can be adaptable and respond in create and resilient ways. Change is information – whether its with potatoes or people.

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Maya Blackwell is a poet and author from Devon. She grew up in a woodland-based New Age traveller community and explores the themes she absorbed there—of community and nature—throughout her work. Her writing interests include permaculture, well-being, nature connection, grief, creativity, womanhood, and the ocean.

Permaculture: Planting the seeds of radical regeneration is available now!