Turtles-Paradise

I remember when I first heard about permaculture. I was at The Big Green Gathering – a festival about green living and sustainability – and I walked into a talk on Permaculture almost by accident. Luckily, the three speakers completely captivated me, with their discussion of reclaiming urban wasteland, community allotments, and agricultural reformation in the middle of deserts and other unfriendly places.

Core Values

The core values of permaculture are generally considered to be:

• Caring for the earth – live in a sustainable fashion, so that we don’t exhaust our resources
• Caring for other people – help people to prosper
• Fairshare – share our surplus, improve the quality of life for all, not just a few

I think most people would recognise these values as a pretty good foundation for living, and living in a sustainable fashion is a key part of minimalism as well.

Principles of Permaculture

The principles of permaculture were developed by David Holmgren, and can be read about in full at Permaculture Principles. Rather than re-hash them, I just wanted to pull out a couple that are appropriate to the ideas of simplicity and minimalism.

Principle number six – produce no waste – is central to sustainability and minimalism. By ensuring we use everything we buy, we reduce our need to buy more. By not ‘saving’ precious things, but instead enjoying them in a timely fashion, we don’t have clutter building up. By getting full usage out of something – re-purposing things to new uses, for example, we minimise our need to buy multiple things.

Principle number nine – use small and slow solutions – is another important one. This is what minimalism is all about. Instead of needing three gadgets to solve a problem, you use one, or you just decide it was never a problem and use none. For example, the problem might be that you need to talk to people long-distance. You might have a landline, a cellphone, and a skype account. The minimalist approach would be to consolidate all of those things, or to just stop making calls and visit in person instead.

Small, slow, tiny, simple. These are all words that get tossed around a lot in these philosophies. As life speeds up, as we try and cram more and more work, life, travel, learning, productivity, development into every waking moment the slower, gentler ways start to look better.

When we watch a plant grow from a seedling into a fully-fledged plant, or a tree, we realise that nature works at it’s own pace. We can force it to work faster, but that comes at a cost.

What is minimalist permaculture?

To me, minimalist permaculture means the following:

• Starting small, with the individual. Having container food gardens on balconies and patios. Having small communal allotments where everyone helps out, and everyone benefits.
• Ensuring that everything we own and most of what we do has multiple functions and benefits. Don’t exercise for the sake of counting calories – build a more active lifestyle, combine exercising with socialising, slow down and make a richer experience of it.
• Integrate with the community. It’s so easy to live in a little modern bubble, where we talk only to our immediate family and our work colleagues. Share child-care, share food, share resources.

Ultimately, the aim is to live a slow, rich, satisfying life in a sustainable manner.

This weekend has been the first weekend of the year with some real sunshine. It’s amazing how much happier everyone seems when they get out and about in the sunshine and fresh air.

Since the demise of my container vegetable garden last year (three weeks of snow killed most of what I planted, and my planting things too close together didn’t help them achieve hardy growth) I’ve been impatient for the spring.

So far my garden consists of:

• 1 mint plant (survived the entire winter in my conservatory, and has been replanted outside)
• 1 parsley plant
• 1 rosemary plant (replaced a slug-destroyed basil plant)
• 1 coriander plant (cilantro, for anyone across the pond)
• 3 seedling pots of thyme (seeds donated via my local council)
• 1 strawberry plant
• and some pansies

I have dreams of a thriving food garden built along permaculture principles. However, like Chris at Tiny Simplicity suggests, it’s better to start small.

I felt a bit strange planting pansies – I like everything I own to be functional as well as pretty! But they were extremely beautiful, and I’ve always loved pansies.

Since planting, however, I’ve discovered they make a medicinal tea that can be used to help allieve allergies – which probably goes to show that everything is useful in some way!