When you’re just beginning to design your permaculture property, the first question you’re likely to ask is “What to put where?” Should the compost be conveniently close to the house, or near the market garden to catch the waste? Should the chickens be housed near the kitchen garden, or in a chicken tractor out in the field?
Whoa – stop right there! These are all important questions, but they are actually a small part of the holistic process of your property design. To get the greatest productivity with the least labour, it’s crucial to understand and apply the concept of permaculture zones. We teach a proven process on how to use permaculture zones, sectors, and design layers to organise your property for maximum efficiency and productivity.
What Is Your Vision?
Before anything else, the #1 question you need to answer is — what is your vision?
- What goals and activities are most important to you, will most enrich your life on this property?
- What do you do (or want to do) every day, where do you spend your energy (or want to spend it)?
- How much attention do each of these goals and activities require, and what do they yield in return?
Designing in Layers
After you know what you want from your property, you can give it shape through a six-layered site design:
- Water
- Zones
- Sectors
- Needs and Yields
- Orientation
- Slope and Aspect
Example of a real property report used as a base map with zones identified using color.
#1 Source Your Water
What does water have to do with your site design, you may wonder? Simple: it’s the master element that can make your property lush and fertile if properly managed, or a dangerous mess if mishandled. Everything else is considered in relation to water.
So your first priority is to find the water sources on your land and determine the direction of their flow with the help of a contour map. Those sources are likely to be roof runoff, stormwater runoff, and possibly groundwater or waterways.
After you know the high and low ground on your property, you can plan your access points: driveways, sidewalks, and possibly trails. These need to be placed on higher ground and on a slight slant, so water naturally runs off them rather than pooling and creating a hazard. After your access points, you’ll plan your structures – house, barn, greenhouse, shed, chicken coop, etc. — which also need to be on higher ground to avoid flooding.
Rob Avis explains the concept of Mainframe Design, and the mantra of “Water, Access, Structures.”
All of this presupposes that you’re starting fresh on a brand-new property, building your own home, barn, greenhouse, etc. If you’re navigating around existing structures, you’ll integrate your water sources as part of the next steps, your zone and sector analyses.
#2 Identify Your Permaculture Zones
Permaculture pioneer Bill Mollison developed the system of zones for practical and efficient property design.
For an idea of how this approach works, let’s borrow a concept from interior design: the kitchen work triangle. To save steps, you’d want the refrigerator near the sink, where you could easily move food to be washed, with a workspace between the sink and the stove for easy prepping before cooking.
Permaculture zones use the same principle: organizing your property based on use, placing the most frequently used areas closer to the house for efficiency, convenience, and most important, productivity.
So the question becomes – how much productivity can you set up, close to your home?
It’s easiest to concentrate functions on an urban property, of course, as your space is more constrained; you don’t have the luxury of spreading out across several acres. But even on a rural property, it’s useful to focus your greatest productivity close at hand, and then work out from there, putting the areas where you spend the least time farthest away.
Mollison’s system offers six zones, numbered from 0 to 5, to organize your property. While you might see diagrams of the zones as concentric circles, they’re usually dictated by other factors: the contours of the land, available sunlight through the day, your relationship with your neighbors, etc. Most often, they flow organically, with boundaries often overlapping.
Permaculture zones, in concept and reality.
Zone 0: Home Base
Your home is the 24/7 hub of activity: you start out here and return here. Zone 0 includes your house, its porch and/or deck, and any additions such as an attached greenhouse or root cellar.
These are the spaces where you spend the most time or visit most frequently – so think of how you can build enjoyment as well as productivity and efficiency into your design! For example, the warmth of your passive solar greenhouse addition can transfer to your home, reducing your heating bill effortlessly through the winter. So take advantage of that warmth, and set up a verdant nook in the greenhouse with chairs for dining and socialising, or a hot tub for luxuriating in tropical comfort while snow blows outside.
See related: Rob Avis lists five ways in which his family’s passive solar greenhouse adds efficiency and luxury to their lives.
Zone 1: No Dew on Your Slippers
Bill Mollison wrote: When you get up in the morning and the dew is on the ground, put on your woolly bathrobe and your fuzzy slippers. Then walk outside to cut some chives and other herbs for your omelette. When you get back inside, if your slippers are wet, your herbs are too far away.
That’s the idea of Zone 1: it’s the area immediately around your house where you put the elements you visit daily or several times a day, such as your kitchen garden with herbs, salad greens, and maybe your favourite annual vegetables. If you’re living on a small property, you might train dwarf fruit trees to espalier against the walls of your house, giving a crop just outside your door. A secure shelter for small livestock like rabbits or guinea pigs could be placed in this zone.
To catch roof runoff from your house, you’ll want to place water harvesting systems in Zone 1 as well: rain barrels, cisterns, or maybe a small pond. Swale trails can convey water into your gardens in Zones 1 and 2.
If your family likes to cook dinners outside during the summer, you might have your outdoor kitchen or grill space in Zone 1; or if you like to go outside with your computer to work within WIFI range, you might include a shady grotto with a table and chairs. This is the area where living space and garden overlap.
Zone 2: Convenient Production, Close at Hand
Just beyond your living space/garden is Zone 2, where you move into areas that require somewhat less attention. This would be where you’d place your compost bins close to your chicken coop, so you can toss kitchen snips into the compost and let the hens mix them in with their scratching while you gather their eggs.
Higher-production vegetable beds such as your canning garden would go in your Zone 2, or fruit trees, berry bushes, and perennial veggies, with your beehives nearby for easy pollination. If you have a well, it would be likely to be in your Zone 2.
You might add a standalone greenhouse in your Zone 2 for starting seeds, or a shed for your garden tools. If you are raising large livestock on a rural property, your barn would be here as well.
Note: If you have an urban property, zones 3-5 are less likely to apply to you.
Rob describes a gravity chicken run driven by the interaction of chickens with compost, and the effect of gravity on nutrients.
Zone 3: Less-Demanding, Large-Scale Production
Cash crops, pasture, and orchard: these are the elements you’d be likeliest to place in your Zone 3, where you visit occasionally for tending and maintenance.
If you’re growing corn, wheat, or other grains – or vegetables – on a commercial basis, your fields would be here, along with your grain and feed storage structures.
If you’re willing to practise rotational grazing, your Zone 3 can function as a silvopasture orchard, with your livestock foraging among tall, unpruned fruit and nut trees such as pawpaw or walnut. Or you could simply let your pastures run riot with a “salad bar” mix of grasses to give your cows, sheep, and goats a well-rounded diet: Joel Salatin recommends a natural biodiversity such as timothy, bluegrass, switchgrass, plantain, alfalfa, johnsongrass, and red and white clover. There’s not too much effort involved, he says, as birds and animals bring in the seeds in their feathers, fur, and droppings! A groundwater-fed pond or bore can water your livestock here, with swales to irrigate crops.
Zone 4: The Farm-Wilderness Overlap
In Zone 4, you’re allowing nature to take the lead with little management. If you have a good solar exposure or a stiff, steady breeze on your property, this might be the place for a solar array or a small turbine for wind energy…or both, to ensure steady off-grid energy production through the year.
Zone 4 might also function as a windbreak or shelterbelt, where you and your livestock can forage for wild foods, and where you might hunt or selectively harvest timber and firewood. If you are near a city or industrial area, your Zone 4 could be a wooded buffer against light, noise, and pollution. In all cases, this is an area you would visit only occasionally, with functions needing little intervention.
If you have water in Zone 4, it’s naturally occurring through groundwater, wetland, waterway, or lake. You may choose to use small-scale hydropower here, or use a renewably-powered pump or swales to convey water to other areas.
Rob demonstrates how to build a dam and ram-pump to supply water for livestock on the Avis farm.
Zone 5: Wilderness for Habitat and Observation
Finally, we come to Zone 5: untouched wilderness, whether woodland, wetland, or native prairie, populated by wildlife and native plants. Bill Mollison described this zone best:
Every property needs a Zone 5…. Whether it’s a corner of an urban lot dedicated to a wildlife thicket and a few rustling birch trees, or a nature preserve on the back forty, it is where we are visitors, not managers. We design the other four zones, but we enter Zone 5 to learn from it. There we observe, we play, we meditate, and we let the land be. Zone 5 is the instruction manual for the ecological garden and for keeping our lives in tune with nature.
Rob describes the pleasures of woods-walking and observation in Zone 5 with his children.
#3 Identify Your Sectors
Permaculture sectors allow you to organise your property based on the energy flows of things you can’t control, such as water, sun, shade, wind, rain, livestock, and wildlife. Wildfire, neighbours’ pesticide drift, auto and pedestrian traffic, even a spectacular view might be noted as sectors.
While your zones are organically placed on your property based on use, sectors are laid out like wedges in a circle, with your home at the centre. Permaculture originator Bill Mollison writes:
Energies from outside can be thought of as so many arrows winging their way towards the home, carrying both destructive and beneficial energies; we need to erect shields, deflectors, or collectors.
For example:
- Collection: If you get heavy rainstorms from the southwest, leading to roof runoff flooding your kitchen garden, you could set up a water-harvesting system with swales on that side of your home to capture, store, and sink the water.
- Collection: If you’re looking to install a solar array for year-round renewable energy, you’ll want to plot your property’s summer and winter solar arcs and the shade paths of nearby trees or buildings. Where the arcs intersect, and where the shade paths do not, is the best location for your array.
- Shielding: If your property is on the high prairie with a steady wind coming from the north, you could plant a fast-growing shelterbelt of trees in that sector to act as a windbreak.
- Deflection: If you have deer coming from a neighboring forest to munch on your orchard or vegetable garden, you’ll want to put fencing, buffered by trees and brush, along the edge of your property.
#4 Consider Needs and Yields
Where the previous steps may have seemed like a Tetris game or jigsaw puzzle, in this step you look at the elements of your property as a community of subjects rather than a collection of objects.
Each element brings its own needs and yields, and when you line these up in relation to each other, you can begin matching them with one another, connecting elements and stacking functions – increasing productivity and efficiency and saving yourself labor in the process.
Bill Mollison lays down the basic energy-conserving rules:
- Every element (plant, animal, or structure) must be placed so that it serves at least two or more functions.
- Every function (e.g., water collection, fire protection) is served in two or more ways.
Comparison of the needs and yields of a chicken with those of a compost heap. To learn more, see Rob’s video HERE.
For example, the image above illustrates how the needs and yields of a chicken match up with those of a compost heap. With its scratching and digging, the chicken provides the compost with labour and aeration (O2), as well as nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and microbes in its manure. Meanwhile, the compost provides the chicken with warmth and food (vegetable scraps and bugs), as well as satisfying exercise.
#5 Calculate Orientation
When you’re designing a high-efficiency, high-productivity property, orientation is a key factor: not only where a building or garden is placed, but also the direction it faces. This determines its solar exposure, and therefore both the amount of light and the amount of heat it receives from the sun.
Orientation involves not only the compass direction but also the solar arc over your property: a long arc marking where the sun appears to rise and set in the summer, versus a shorter arc in winter.
Former Verge teaching assistant Jen Nobel explains the principles and tools to use in calculating the solar arc for a cold-climate net-zero home in this video.
If you also consider your rain, shade, and wind sectors in calculating orientation, you can optimise your water harvesting, place gardens based on the needs of their plants, prevent damage from a wind tunnel or prevailing wind, and more.
#6 Take Advantage of Slope
Where badly managed slopes can yield erosion, flooding, and landslides, a well-managed slope can capture and transport water safely throughout your property when you apply keyline design, swales, terraces, and other permaculture tactics.
Not only this! Strategically placing your home on a slope yields a wealth of advantages. Many new property owners place their houses at the top of a ridge or hill — exposing them to cold winter winds and blazing summer sun, driving up the cost in labour and money to keep them warm or cool. Others choose to build their home in the valley, on the other hand, leaving themselves vulnerable to floods and erosion.
However, placing your home midway down the slope, says Mollison, allows a variety of aspects, exposures, insolation (solar radiation), and shelter for people to manage. Midslope is our easiest environment, the shelter of forests at our back, the view over lake and plain, and the sun striking in on tiers of productive trees above and below.
The wisdom of building at the midpoint of a slope, from Permaculture: A Design Manual by Bill Mollison.
When you combine slope with orientation – the direction the slope is facing – you have aspect. The aspect of a particular spot, the way sunlight, shadow, wind, and rain fall on it, may give you a unique microclimate, allowing specialised uses.
Putting It All Together
Zones, sectors, needs and yields, orientation, and slope – this sounds like a lot to integrate, yes? And yes – a lot of thought, observation, and strategy goes into the design of a permaculture property. On average, a permaculture designer will put in 100 hours of thinking to every 1 hour of doing.
Permaculture pioneer David Holmgren wrote: Traditional agriculture was labour intensive, industrial agriculture is energy intensive, and permaculture-designed systems are information and design intensive.
If this sounds daunting, the real question is – where do you want to put your work?
One of Rob Avis’ favourite sayings is “Work is a failure in design.” When you set up your property to sustain itself, with your animals and plants doing much of the work for you simply in their ordinary, natural habits, while you do minor maintenance and reap the harvests, the hours of preliminary research and design pay for themselves exponentially over time. Your lifestyle becomes one of harmony and enjoyment, rather than stress and drudgery.
So Where Do You Go From Here?
Feels like a lot to take in? This post about the Three Simple Steps to Overcome Permaculture Design Overwhelm might help.
If reducing hours and years of work through this bare-bones-basic permaculture design process is something you’d like to try, here’s where you can find out more:
To learn more about zones, see the Intro to Permaculture by Rob Avis (video).
To learn more about sectors and slope, see this follow-up video.
