John Oden
"People may doubt what you say, but they will believe what you do."
I am currently reading your articles and the responses (counter articles) and enjoying them. I do have a question. Could you please elaborate on this? "I can grow a significant portion of my food in a window that takes four square feet of space."? The reason I ask is because these are the exact type statements that, in my mind, set the permaculture movement backwards. I obviously don't need to be convinced that permaculture is a good thing. It is the over-blown claims made by permaculturists that turn many people away, and I can't see how that statement can be anywhere near true.
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forest gardens, like everything else, depends upon where
just because they "work" in Atlanta doesn't mean they will
be useful other places
butnot everyone wants to drop everything and move to the woods with a composting toilet
one of permaculture's problems is this bi-polar vision of wanting to change the world by making
everyone "off grid homesteaders"
If you or others ... want to actually make a difference, you have to take permaculture mainstream.
This requires accepting criticism as a way to get better,
rejecting any information that is either oversold or not true
AND separating actual functional practices from woowoo
John Oden
On the "hippie connection"... I'm conflicted because I want to network together the hippies and the more typical people into an effective coalition. However, I'm repeatedly observing that permaculture is perceived as a hippie movement when first encountered and that this is causing friction for more mainstream people to take it seriously. I would welcome any thoughts as to how we pro-actively deal with that branding issue as permaculture expands.
3. The hippie connection: If the authors have ever watched one of Paul's talks, they will know right away that many of us are not exactly kumbaya type people. Most of us have our heads down looking at the earth, not up in the clouds.
"We're all just walking each other home." -Ram Dass
"Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder."-Rumi
"It's all one song!" -Neil Young
On the "hippie connection"... I'm conflicted because I want to network together the hippies and the more typical people into an effective coalition. However, I'm repeatedly observing that permaculture is perceived as a hippie movement when first encountered and that this is causing friction for more mainstream people to take it seriously. I would welcome any thoughts as to how we pro-actively deal with that branding issue as permaculture expands.
3. The hippie connection: If the authors have ever watched one of Paul's talks, they will know right away that many of us are not exactly kumbaya type people. Most of us have our heads down looking at the earth, not up in the clouds.
This comes up so often....I think, maybe, that folks who let a stereotype keep them from a movement, or from even learning a bit about it, aren't anywhere near ready to learn something new.
I think it's a mistake to continue to use a stereotype to discuss and to put the blame for why permaculture doesn't take off.
duane hennon wrote:
On the "hippie connection"... I'm conflicted because I want to network together the hippies and the more typical people into an effective coalition. However, I'm repeatedly observing that permaculture is perceived as a hippie movement when first encountered and that this is causing friction for more mainstream people to take it seriously. I would welcome any thoughts as to how we pro-actively deal with that branding issue as permaculture expands.
3. The hippie connection: If the authors have ever watched one of Paul's talks, they will know right away that many of us are not exactly kumbaya type people. Most of us have our heads down looking at the earth, not up in the clouds.
This comes up so often....I think, maybe, that folks who let a stereotype keep them from a movement, or from even learning a bit about it, aren't anywhere near ready to learn something new.
I think it's a mistake to continue to use a stereotype to discuss and to put the blame for why permaculture doesn't take off.
so why doesn't "permaculture take off" ?
in the world of sales
it is the one doing the selling that has the problem
blaming people (customers) for having a bad perception of permaculture
is a sure way to keep it small.
it is not the people's (customers) problem if they are turned off
by a gruff man in sops constantly swearing
they can (and do) just go somewhere else to spend their
time and money
also this might be of help
https://www.enchantingmarketing.com/features-and-benefits/
features and benefits
"We're all just walking each other home." -Ram Dass
"Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder."-Rumi
"It's all one song!" -Neil Young
John Oden wrote:
Todd,
I've given a lot of thought to that sentence in light of your comment:
1) I'm thinking it would be helpful for me to write a stand-alone article which analyzes in a rigorous way what the potential yields are that can be achieved with permaculture at various land scales. I'll get started documenting that immediately, so if anyone has a property on which they have been measuring their yields, please get in touch with me. I have some good data points from my own experiments since my primary focus until now has been pushing how intensive I can get my urban production going.
2) I agree that the sentence came off as unnecessarily hyperbolic. I have updated the paragraph to the following:
The basic argument here is that it’s hard to measure the agricultural efficiency of a dense food forest compared to a mono-cropped field. Do we honestly think this is a problem at all? I can grow a noticeable portion of my food in a window. We have previously documented an Urban Food Wall concept that takes 11 square feet of growing space. We then open-sourced our design, free to everyone, in our article “How to Grow Your Own Food When You Have Limited Space”. We are actively pushing ourselves to develop more and more advanced urban agricultural technologies. Also, I think it’s helpful to note that in these examples, all of these spaces had zero agricultural productivity before. With permaculture we have access to far more land because we can use small bits which are considered unusable via conventional thinking.
3) To directly answer your question, when I originally made the statement I was thinking of our bookshelf garden. It's a book-shelf with 4 growing areas, each of which are just under four feet wide by one feet in depth. So the trick is using the vertical space with the small square footage. In light of your comment, though, I remeasured and had forgotten that the water reservoir at the bottom was more than 1 foot in depth (let's call it two feet by four feet). As such, the proper dimensions are closer to eight square feet in total, which is still a very efficient use of space. Here is a video of 1/8 of that garden - the back half of one of the four shelves:
From this garden, we were able to produce enough micro greens for two people to eat 1/2 a bowl of micro greens in a salad every single day. We got continuous production by rotating where we were harvesting inside the garden and from replanting when we harvested. We are in the middle of rebuilding the system to increase efficiencies in our version 2. We theorize that adding climbers, runners, and tubers would be possible with zero additional space. I'm looking forward to reporting the results of that experiment in about a month when the results are evident.
"People may doubt what you say, but they will believe what you do."
John Oden
I agree. Here's the link: https://woodheat.net |