The how and what of it.

A lovely permaculture garden

In March of 2010, my mom and I were watching t.v. and flipped to TVO where we caught the tail end of a program on permaculture. It was filmed in England and a farmer worked her land as her father did and was most curious about her neighbor's spectacular garden and had to check it out. She was amazed to find out that in this permaculture garden the yield far exceeded what she was able to produce with a fraction of the work. Mom and I were amazed too. It seemed too good to be true and I had to do some research because I'd never heard of permaculture.

I ordered three books from Amazon.ca:

• Gaia's Garden by Toby Hemenway, an excellent book and is my garden bible
• The Permaculture Home Garden by Linda Woodrow which although has some great ideas, is more appropriate for a hot climate (she's from Australia)
• The Basics of Permaculture Design by Ross Mars which I found mostly useless for my home garden purposes.

Permaculture is the harmonious integration of design and ecology. I decide I have to try it and this blog will be about my adventures in permaculture from the beginning and will follow it's placement and growth at my home with hopefully not too many disasters. I have no formal gardening training, just a love of good, healthy food and the desire to grow my own so those of you who are of the master gardener realm will have to bear with my simple explanations.