Comments

Episode-259- Learning to Harness Permaculture Zones and Layers — 6 Comments

  1. Great show! Thanks for all the permaculture information. Love these ‘growing stuff’ shows.

  2. I’ve not had a chance yet to listen to this episode; but the same question came to mind about a good book to start with as a tome/bible for Permaculture; what would be your preference when comparing Bill Mollison’s book “Permaculture One” to “Getting Started with Permaculture” to “Gaia’s Garden, Second Edition: A Guide To Home-Scale Permaculture”? I am just curious as I want one that not only gives the basics and the theory; but is also timeless and versatile for any area.

  3. Gaia’s garden is on my wishlist. Seek out many of the mollison videos online via youtube and other video sharing sights, while his core principles are excellent – not knowing any of the plants he is using, nor being able to grow most of them in my climate is not very helpful.

    I paged through _The Backyard Homestead_ by Carleen Madigan at a local bookstore and it looked excellent and more US based. It is on my wishlist too.

    Searching for nitrogen fixers has been challenging. Many of them that grow in my area are not native and are classified as invasive. I don’t want to introduce something that will take over my production plants. The advanced search here: http://plants.usda.gov/adv_search.html has been excellent. I use it to drill down to the plants that fit my need, then search my county extension office website (which is outstanding) to see if it is a good candidate here.

    Keep in mind plants that are not invasive in one area may be so in another — for example a plant that can not handle hot dry summers without irrigation in Texas will never take over there. Put that plant in Minnesota and it goes nuts and crowds out natives and food producing plants.