What is permaculture?

[Snippy]

What is permaculture? I have an idea that it has to do with organic gardening. It's ironic but I grew up with organic gardening. My mother used to save all the peelings etc. but she didn't put them on the garden; they were thrown over the fence. I wasn't interested in gardening at the time so I don't remember if she used the compost. We had clay and she loved to garden but had a difficult time with the soil. No spray was ever used on our food.
I know someone who digs a hole in her garden and puts fresh peelings etc. in her flower bed. I've done that too but I don't wish to feed the skunks.
In our area, we used to be able to purchase the plastic bins for composting; I think I would prefer homemade bins but I am worried about an odour. Any suggestions? I wish to keep our neighours friendly.

[webmaster]

Perhaps the Sticky thread at the top of this forum category may be of help to you.

https://www.helpfulgardener.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7049

All the best,


webmaster

[rainbowgardener]

You asked a couple questions really, the one in the title and one about composting. There's a whole separate topic on Compost with tons of good stuff in it, including some specific to bins and how to do it. Browse around and come back if you have a specific question. Suffice it to say that a well managed compost pile has no odor.

Re permaculture, I'm not an expert, so I'll give the two sentence introduction and let others add on. There's a nice article in Wikipedia that's a good introduction to the topic. Permaculture is not just organic gardening, it's organic gardening done consciously for sustainability ("permanent agriculture"). So it's gardening based on natural principles of self-sustaining eco-systems, where your garden community provides all the inputs needed to sustain itself and produces no waste (because it's all used). It's the opposite of mono-culture crop farming with synthetic fertilizers and gigantic machinery run on gasoline power.

[Snippy]

Thanks! I got a little sidetracked and I should have narrowed my question to one thing. I haven't been on the threads for some time; I'm excited about the season that is opening up and stayed up late to catch up on all the news!

[paul wheaton]

If you ask a dozen permies you will get a dozen different answers.

I like things along the lines of "systems feeding systems feeding systems" or "full farm ecosystem". Diversity often plays a big role. And there are usually lots of trees. Orchards are out - food forests are in. Stuff is rarely planted in rows.

Irrigation or fertilization might be used to get things started, but the idea is to end up where you don't do so much work (read, irrigation/fetilization is eliminated eventually)

Does this help?