Permaculture gardening offers a holistic approach to managing your property, whether you aim to improve stormwater management, combat drought, or simply enhance ecological health.
But how do you get started… quickly, and with limited resources and knowledge? And, what does it mean to design a permaculture garden?
“Thinking like an ecosystem” is one answer: recognizing that the soil ecology, the plants, and the animals (including humans!) all work together interdependently to create a living system…and that you can make strategic choices to replicate such a system, or rebuild and support the ecosystem of the land you have.
In a nutshell, beginners who are getting started permaculture gardening, it’s important to identify your goals, observe your property’s characteristics, and prioritize features based on their use. From there, you can plan energy flows, manage water, build soil health, and create a resilient plant ecosystem that works harmoniously with nature.
This post is intended for pure beginners; however we have a more detailed guide on Permaculture garden design for those interested in the nitty gritty and taking permaculture gardening that step further.
How does Permaculture gardening differ from regular gardening?
Permaculture gardening is like nature’s version of a well-choreographed dance, where every plant, bug, and drop of water knows its steps. Imagine turning your garden into a mini-ecosystem that works as smoothly as a symphony—no wasted energy, no solo acts, just a harmonious system that thrives on balance. It’s like building a self-sustaining buffet for plants and critters, where everything from soil to sunlight gets recycled, reused, and respected. By working with nature instead of against it, permaculture gardening turns your backyard into a resilient, eco-friendly paradise that practically runs itself.
So here are seven steps for beginners to help you get started permaculture gardening:
1. Identify Your Goals
How do you want to use your property – producing food, growing flowers, raising livestock, or building an integrated ecosystem such as a forest garden? Are you planning to host garden parties or cook outdoors? Do your kids want a play space? List everything you want to do with the property! When you plan strategically, you can create space for a surprising number of features, even on a small plot…but the operative words are planning strategically.
2. Observe Your Property
The next question is how your goals fit in with the characteristics of your property – its strengths, weaknesses, assets and liabilities. Here are just a few of the points to consider:
- Is your land flat or hilly? A contour map helps here.
- Where does your water come from? For most urban/suburbanites, harvesting runoff from roofs or storm systems yields the most dependable source of natural water.
- Is the soil mainly sand, clay, silt, peat, or loam, eroded and compacted or rich and crumbly? Here’s a good baseline test to get you started; learn about the “jar test” to find your soil type HERE.
- What kind of plants are growing, and where? Don’t discount the “weeds” – they may be serving an important purpose in rebuilding poor soil. Identify the plants that are particularly prolific, and research them: how do they interact with the soil and with other plants?
Check out this video where Rob talks about transitioning from conventionally-managed soil to a permaculture garden.
3. Prioritize Your Features
Once you know the features you want for your property, you can decide: which will you use several times a day? Which are still important, but will be visited less often? Imagine you’re designing a kitchen, and set up the most important elements in your “work triangle,” with the less important ones a little farther away, and so forth. This is the system of permaculture zones, prioritizing elements by frequency of use:
Zone 0 is your home and its attachments, such as your deck or root cellar.- Zone 1 holds the most frequently visited elements, such as your outdoor kitchen, kitchen garden, water-harvesting system, and toolshed.
- Zone 2 has the important elements that are visited a little less often, such as your canning garden, compost bin, chicken coop and/or barn, or the children’s play space.
- Zone 3 is the place for elements you visit occasionally, such as commercial crops, orchard, or grazing land for livestock (Zones 3-5 are less likely to be used on sub/urban properties).
- Zone 4 is rarely visited, where you’d put elements like a solar array or windmill, or a shelterbelt for foraging, selective tree harvesting, or hunting.
- Zone 5 is pure wilderness, where you’d only go to observe, forest-bathe, or meditate, where you let nature be.
Learn more about permaculture zones.
4. Identify Your Energy Flows
Once you’ve prioritized your property’s features, it’s time to fine-tune their placement by identifying the flow of different forms of energy across your site. These are called sectors, and include sunlight, wind, rain, stormwater runoff, shade, animals, even people or pesticide drift: any outside element. You’ll want to chart the arc of the sun over your property in summer and winter, and track the prevailing winds, the usual approach of storms, the shade from trees, even the movement of animals and passersby, or pesticide drift from the street or a neighbor’s property.
Once you know the factors that affect each part of your property, you can begin to see the best place to put each feature. For example, you already know that you want your kitchen garden in Zone 1, but by using an app like Sun Calc to track the sun’s arc over your property in summer vs. winter, you’ll know that your garden will get more hours of sunlight in X location.
Tutorial screenshot of the Sun Calc app showing the summer and winter solar arcs over a property.
5. Plant the Water
Once you know where your water is coming from, how much water you’re getting, and what you want to put where, you can begin to incorporate features to harvest water for your gardens. These may be rain barrels, ponds, water tanks or cisterns, rain gardens, swales, hügelkultur berms…even terraced hillsides. The idea is to slow, sink, and store groundwater, stormwater and snowmelt to increase your property’s drought resistance. Verge’s Essential Rainwater Harvesting book and spreadsheet tool can help.
Also see: Rob looks at some approaches to managing water in your gardens in this video.
6. Build Your Soil Ecology
Remember checking the composition and condition of your soil back in Step 1? Depending on its condition, you may need to rebuild the soil ecology before you can begin to plant. The quickest way to create new soil for a garden is by sheet mulching (a.k.a. lasagna gardening), in which you remove your sod grass, aerate and water the ground well, then cover the soil with successive layers:
- Well-aged horse, cow, sheep, goat, or chicken manure
- A weed barrier such as layers of plain cardboard, newsprint, or kraft paper, with plenty of overlap between pieces
- Weed-free organic materials such as fresh-cut grass, non-woody garden trimmings, or compost
- Dry carbonaceous materials such as dried leaves or straw
- More manure, followed by cardboard, etc. The more layers you can add, the richer your soil will be.
Finally, be sure to keep your sheet mulch well watered. When you want to plant in the new garden, just cut through the layers of mulch, making sure you penetrate the soil at the base level.
Further Reading on Soil:
- Rob and Michelle Avis talk about how they transformed their first permaculture homestead
- 5th World Consulting’s soil expert, Luke, explains about the three levels of soil regeneration (video).
- What to do with the sod grass you remove before sheet mulching? Carmen Lamoureux displays her solution.
7. Create Your Plant Ecosystem
Where conventional gardens are often organized by the color of the blossoms or foliage or the relative height of the plants, in a permaculture garden the plants are selected and grouped by their contribution to the ecosystem. You’ll generally find at least the following five types of mutually supportive plants placed together. Special combinations called guilds are often planted to support particular fruit or nut tree(s): you can have an apple tree guild, a walnut tree guild, and so forth.
- Dynamic accumulators such as comfrey and Daikon radish, which have deep taproots that break up compacted soil, absorb minerals from different soil levels, and draw them up into their leaves. Chopped up as green mulch, they release the minerals to the soil.
- Insectaries such as bee balm, oregano, milkweed, and many more, offering pollinators and beneficial predators pollen, foliage for egg-laying, or shelter and food for larvae.
- Nitrogen fixers such as clover, lupines, beans, and peas absorb atmospheric nitrogen through their leaves, storing it in their tissues and nodules on their roots, then releasing it back to the soil when they’re chopped down as green mulch.
- Grass-suppressing bulbs such as chives, onions, iris, and violet multiply to crowd out sod grass, repel pests and wildlife, and protect against disease.
- Pest repellents such as marigolds, alliums, mints, and nasturtiums use taste and/or smell to discourage pests such as insects, moles, and deer.
Related Content / Further Reading
How to Build Your Own Permaculture Fruit Tree Guild
How to design your first food forest
