I am not a permaculture teacher. I haven’t taken a PDC. I’m DIY learning as I go in public.

My second Skillathon 2024 project was to develop an initial permaculture master plan for the family land here in the Southern Sierras. I didn’t get as far with the design as I’d intended due to another opportunity popping up that I pivoted my attention to.

However, I did study most of the Mollison Permaculture Manual and began a design document. I am posting it and will update it as I develop it further.

Overview

Philosophy and Ethics of Design

The purpose of permaculture is to design and maintain sustainable human settlements and to develop practices of preserving and rehabilitating natural systems, in a manner that benefits all life.

At its core, permaculture collapses to one ethic, one executive directive: Care of the Earth. The second and third ethics of People Care and Fair Share derive from Earthcare.

The practices of permaculture spring from the Earth Care ethic: they are the 'how to' abide by the ethic, and as such they are guidelines, suggestions, and recommendations, not rules.

If complex and tightly coupled systems result in unavoidable catastrophes that cannot be designed around and de-evolution and cascading failures of complex systems is the likely future trend, the individual and small community scale adaptation strategy is to decouple from the services of industrial society and learn to serve our own needs for food, energy, water, shelter, etc.

An aim (the aim?) of permaculture design is to satisfy the needs of a system from within the system itself. Control volume flows are primarily solar income, atmospheric mass exchange, water mass exchange (the hydrological cycle), etc.

"Permaculture design is a system of assembling conceptual, material, and strategic components in a pattern which functions to benefit life in all its forms." - Bill Mollison

The purpose of this Plan is to identify an initial starting point for creating and operating a permaculture based life support system at Quail Haven. I understand design to be a constant, iterative, evolutionary process that continues as long as the System does.

"I sometimes think that the only real purpose of an initial design is to evolve some sort of plan to get one started in an otherwise confusing and complex situation. If so, a design has a value for this reason alone, for as soon as we decide to start doing, we learn how to proceed." -Bill Mollison

The purpose of the System is to provide as many of the needs of the humans on site as possible using resources from within the System itself, in as compact a footprint as possible, and to provide for the care and rehabilitation of local natural systems as much as possible.

Vision

I envision Quail Haven as something between a makerbase and an ecovillage. A space where people can come for a weekend or a decade, slip out of the flow of industrial civilization for a bit, and work on their own systems or the QH System or just Be for a bit.

I want resilience. I don’t want to rely entirely on industrial consumer logistics networks for food, water, fuel, energy, shelter, etc. As much as possible I want to have buffers and flows of human needs decoupled from industrial society flows. I want to live off of solar and rain income.

I want healthy abundance. I want to eat tomatoes that taste like fucking tomatoes. I want kale and spinach that is actually full of nutrients. I want to eat potatoes that are full of flavor like the potatoes I ate in France.

I want to live in a biodiverse garden. I want to hear birds and insects zooming around. I want to see bunnies and critters coming and going, feeding off the surplus abundance of the system here. I want to read a book in a hammock strung between two trees I planted, shaded by the overstory of the food forest, comfortably cooled by a breeze despite it being August in the Mojave.

I want to feel deeply connected to the land. I want the land to claim me. I want to be an integral part of this ecosystem, to be enfolded in the web of life here. I want to have my time here serve to benefit all life.

I want to create one more nucleus of biodiverse abundance for others to see, learn from, and go create their own nuclei.

I want to attract the kind of people I want to hang out with to come here and stay a while. I want to be able to host multiple people to work on my projects, their projects, the lifeboat flotilla, to just be.

I want a resilient homestead, not a farm. I’m not interested in making a living from selling yield.

Inspiration/Reference:

makerbases
eco-anarchy
Ted Trainer
The New Alchemy Institute
solarpunk + wildpunk
Rewilding
Ecovillages
Doocracy
Burning Man
Slab City
Cory Doctorow
Lynx Vilden
Fablabs
Greening the Desert
Dune

Things I Don’t Want:

To be a market farm
To be socially isolated

Articulation of the Vision

I want QH to be a place where people can come and stay short or long term and work on their own projects, QH projects, or to simply be.
I want to produce 95% of fruits and vegetables and a majority of calories consumed on site.
I want to run off of rain income.
I want to run off of solar income.
I want no fossil fuels to be consumed onsite for operational activities.
I want the majority of construction materials to be natural on site or salvage.
I want the place to look and feel like Myst, the aesthetics of almost Victorian steam/solarpunk but not over the top.
I want the pace of work to be deliberate and centered around craft.
I want the space around my compound to be composed like a Japanese garden. Wabi sabi, natural, intensely designed and meticulously crafted.
I want there to be ample space for at least a half dozen guests to stay here comfortably.

Fundamental Ideas and Memes

The aim of permaculture analysis is to place components such that their inputs and outputs connect.
Permaculture design is about the relationships between components.
Ethical resource management is critical to balance out the pathologies of famine and obesity (oversupply of a resource is a form of pollution).
The fundamental act of permaculture design is the production of yield via erection of compound interception nets that ultimately give back to the natural system what they take.
Yield is surplus energy/resources after the needs of the generative system have been met.
The easiest way to generate yield is to be conservative in resource use (this is true as applied to personal finance as well: it is far easier to generate savings via expense reduction rather than income expansion).
Engage in protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless action.
Guilds are harmonious assemblies of species that interact to benefit each other.

Design

Methods

Needs and Yields Analysis, listing the characteristics of components. (wl6)
Observation (of a site, and expand on those observations. e.g. note when something is or isn't working and tweak it)
Deduction from nature (adopting lessons learned from natural systems)
Options and decisions, a selection of options or pathways based on decisions.
Data overlay map overlays
Random assembly, novel creation generator
Flow diagrams relevant to workplaces
Zone and sector analysis, application of master pattern.

Needs and Yields Analysis

Observation

What wants to live here? What does this land want? What is the natural energy of the site flowing towards? What sorts of things are orthogonal to what this land wants? (for example: rice)

Wind Fire Soil Species Water Light Temperature Society Structures Local Patterns History

Local Pattern Observations:

Verdant pockets in wind and sun shelter (north slopes, north side of trees, canyons with shelter from evening sun, etc).
Most precipitation falls in winter and spring.
Winter solstice sunset is 1500.

Deduction from Nature

Options and Decisions

Data Overlay

Random Assembly

Flow Diagrams

Zone and Sector Analysis

Pattern Index

Outdoor kitchen
Living in the garden
Ramada / shade
Garden courtyard
Sheltered workshop
Hugelpit
Food forest
Outdoor bathroom in a garden
Outdoor summer sleeping
Rainwater collection
Earthsheltered living spaces
Verdant riparian canyon microsystem
Passive solar earthsheltered greenhouse
Species for habitat
Wicking beds
Sealed greywater planters with sumps
Cold Frames
Landrace
First plant water, then plant trees and plants
Keyhole gardening
Guzzlers
Mulch (including rock mulch)
Sunken beds, not raised beds
Sub irrigation grow (rain gutter irrigation system)
Water repellent topmulch (if it’s water absorbent it will sponge up the water just to evaporate it. Topmulch’s job in the desert is to keep sunshine and wind away from moist elements.
Windwalls
Shade from west
Deep mulch. Plants in the desert go deep for water.
Waste water recirculation
Mulch basins
Dappled shade
North wall garden (for leafy greens)
Start with water.
Native wildflowers
Ground cover plants as soil shield (mulch?)

Species list

Moringa
date palms
figs
mulberries
pomegranates
carob
olives
avocados
citrus if there's enough water for it
Grapes??
Pecans??
Rabbits

Mar 3 Quail Haven Permaculture Master Plan WIP