Permaculture - an invitation

Each month in 2013 I reviewed a principle from David Holmgren's Permaculture: Principles and Pathways beyond Sustainability. If you missed them, here they all are:

Observe and Interact
Catch and Store Energy
Obtain a Yield
Apply Self-Regulation and Accept Feedback
Use and Value Renewable Resources
Produce no Waste
Design from Patterns to Details
Integrate, Rather than Segregate
Use Small and Slow Solutions
Use and Value Diversity
Use edges and value the marginal
Creatively Use and Respond to Change

Reading the book, one chapter at a time, over a whole year, really made me think about each principle. Not just the practical aspects, but the wider social implications. I had some great discussions with readers along the way, and I think that really deepened my understanding of permaculture.

Now I want to turn it over to you readers. I think everyone has their own version of permaculture and their own thoughts to add, so I'm hoping to get some volunteers to write some guests posts about permaculture. Most of all, I want you to make your posts accessible to new permies, tell them what permaculture means to you, how you discovered it, and how you use it every day. Tell them how they can learn more about permaculture too.

If you're interested, please send me an email on eight.acres.liz at gmail dot com and I'll send you some more details. I'm going to publish whatever you send me, so don't be shy, let's share the permaculture knowledge with everyone!

Who's keen to share?

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What to do with eight acres

Behind the scenes of my blog I can see the search terms that led people to find my blog. It can be quite interesting to look through them occasionally and see what people are looking for. Most of them involve chicken tractors, but another question that comes up regularly is “what can you do with eight acres?” or “how much land is eight acres?”. Today I will try to answer this question.

Of course it is a very broad question, there are lots and lots of things you can do with eight acres, but I’m going to assume that you want to live there, feed your family and maybe make a little extra money. I make that assumption because that’s what I know about, if you want to do something else with your eight acres, you will need to look somewhere else.

If you haven’t chosen your land yet, here a few things to look for. Focus on the things you can’t change and try to choose the best property you can find in your price range. Look for clean water in dams, bores or wells, either on the property …

Growing and eating chokos (chayotes)

Cooking chokos (not be confused with another post about cooking chooks) has been the subject of a few questions on my blog lately, so here's some more information for you.
Chokos - also known as Chayote, christophene or christophine, cho-cho, mirliton or merleton, chuchu, Cidra, Guatila, Centinarja, Pipinola, pear squash, vegetable pear, chouchoute, güisquil, Labu Siam, Ishkus or Chowchow, Pataste, Tayota, Sayote - is a vine belonging to the Cucurbitaceae family, along with pumpkins, squash and melons, with the botanical name Sechium edule.

The choko contains a large seed, like a mango, but if you pick them small enough it is soft enough to eat. If you leave the choko for long enough it will sprout from one end and start to grow a vine. To grow the choko, just plant the sprouted choko and give the vine a structure to climb over. In summer, the vine will produce tiny flowers that will eventually swell into choko fruit. The vine doesn't like hot dry weather. And it doesn&#…

Native bee hotel

Like I wrote back here, native pollinators are as important (if not more important) than honey bees for pollinating crops and native plants. There are a few things you can do to attract native pollinators to your garden:

Grow flowers and let your veges flower to feed the pollinators all yearHave a source of insect-friendly water in the garden (shallow dishes are best)Provide somewhere for them to live/nest/lay eggs - a bee hotel! In Australia, our native pollinators consist of both stingless native bees, which live in a colony like honey bees, and lots of solitary bees and wasps. These solitary insects are just looking for a suitable hole to lay their eggs. You may be familiar with these in sub-tropical and tropical areas, in summer you will find any and all holes, pipes and tubes around the house plugged with mud by what we call "mud daubers". These area a real nuisance, so I'd rather provide some custom holes near the garden where they can live instead, so I don'…

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