Permaculture with Andrew

component in the restoration of the youth. And so I find it necessary that regardless of what direction your individual practice is going in, we're we're looking to specialize or whatever. Couldn't quoe specialize? I think it's still important to think about where food comes from and think about ways that we can enhanced and in large our food autonomy, especially considering the multi layering crises that you know compounding these days. Puma culture was first coined as a tomb by puma

culturist Bill Mollison. It's a portmanteau of permanent agriculture and permanent culture, and it's the conscious design and mainstance of agriculturally productive ecosystems which have a diversity, stability and resilience of natural ecosystems. It's a way of integrating landscape and people providing their food, energy, shelter, and other material and

other non material needs in a sustainable way. And just to be clear, the concepts, the ideas, the principles that make up Puma culture have existed long before Bill Mollison was born, have existed in cultures all over the world. Bill Molson is just someone who has, I guess given

it a spin for a modern audience. But these principles, these ideas are things that have been in practice for thousands of years, tens of thousands, even from the approach to land management and settlement designed to the whole systems thinking approach to nature which can be seen in a lot of animals practices. It has a long history and it's one that people who practice Fuma culture today research

Fuma culture will inevitably uncover in their learning process. However, Bill Morrison first coined in the nineties seventies as a response to the oil embargoes they were taking place at the time, by bringing together the traditional knowledge of a vastery of indigenous cultures and combining them with certain modern design and layouts. It created a movement that is now

um spreading across the world from every on every continent. Honestly, the way that Puma culture views UM the world views systems. It comes with an outlook that recognizes it all biological material is a potential energy source. The aim is to try to trap energy on your land and to use that energy the most efficient way before a degrede to

create circular economies and cycles of energy. That how for actual sustainable agricultural practice, which unfortunately has not been the aim of agriculture, especially industrial agriculture, and Superman culture represents a challenge to that status school. The ethics of Puma culture are primarily focused on care for the earth, that being all living and on living things, care for all people.

They're by promoting self alliance and community responsibility, the sort of we all have access to the resources necessary for existence and care for community in specifically community that allows us to be to think of an approach our society in a way that benefits all people in all life, recognizing the community is not just our neighbors, It's not just the people who live in our city or town.

It is all the living things that incorporate our surroundings and beyond the way that Puman culture approaches um design, it's a lot of his emphasis and mimicking how the natural world would attempt to stabilize. Of course, these systems take thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of years two fully develop and age and reach some

kind of stable state. But public culture seeks to learn from you know, these old growth forests and these healthily ecosystems, and accelerate that process to establish things that will last generations to established spaces that will provide for the needs of people hundreds of years down the line. When it comes to approaching pubical to design practically, first things first to recognize is that anybody can take part in Puma culture design. Anybody can take part in constructing these sources

of systems, and it can be established. The basic principles can be established regardless of your circumstances, your individual climate or biosphere, because the principles are based on following what nature was doing anyway. One of the first principles involves the recognition of the connections in a location, seeing that a web is stronger than a single string, meaning that

all of these different parts. The different moving parts coming together create something stronger than if each individual person, each individual creature trying to move by itself. It also looks at the connection between waste and resources. We all on the old adage just says, you know, one man's trash is another mantag of treasure, but when it comes to ecosystems, we should really be taking it quite literally, because the waste of one part of the system directly feeds into

the resource of another part. Decomposing plants and animals directly feed into the fungal networks and flourishing of the next generation of plants animals as and in that web, in that network. In those connections, we can also recognize for

principle too, that each element performs multiple functions. If we are, for example, keeping chickens, they can be a source of eggs and feathers and protein, of course, but they also produced mania, and their daily activity helps to aerate the soil, and they also provide insect control um allowing your plans to food the flourish banana trees. They provide bananas, of course, they provide fruit. They also provide starch and mulch, and

protection and shade and they hold water quite well. Actually, when I had taken a puma culture design course a couple of months ago, one of the things that I had learned from the guy who was running it was that he had told his story and he had done this this project in Barbarous and in Barbados he was called to restore sort of like an old sand mine, um, because you run out of sand. Well, it's close running

out of sand. And so the community that was reliant in that sand mine didn't really have any direction, um because their economy, their local economy, and so rely and on those jobs. When he came in, it's just like and you showed the pictures, it's just just very very very barren landscape, very dry, very dusty, And I was honestly in disbelief that something so dead, so destroyed, something so devolved, it could be as radically transformed as he

had transformed it. Unfortunately, this is a podcast, not a video, or otherwise I would show you the pictures. But the

transformation was stunning. I want of the elements that he had used to transform that dry landscape into a lush food forest was banana trees, because surprisingly, banana trees are very effective well Unsurprisingly, branana trees are very effective act, growing quickly and providing shade to other plants, and so as these other plants are growing up, they have the shaded banana tree to protect them from the harsh sun

and to the banana trees. While they may not be the top doors to the forest in the end, by the time the forest is fully established, because plant trees don't get that tall, they're still vital in that early stage in providing that function of shape that allows the rest of the forest to establish itself. That's really cool. It's very very very cool. I will all pictures after. It's like a place people could see them online like Instagram. They could look up or something. Yes, so um, if

you go on Wassamaki Puma culture dot org. I believe he has the pictures up there that will be w E S A M A k I Puma culture dot org. And if I remember correctly, he has the pictures on there. Yeah. Was it like a sand mine A four or something? Yeah, it was a sand mine. Yeah. Jeez, wow, it looks like there's no goodness in the soil. And the first one and then yeah yeah at the end to go back into the recording aspect. When it came to that project, A large part of it was just getting that life

in the soil. So they were taken. They were getting mulch and manua from wherever they could get it, just to give some life for that soil. They would grow sitting like hardy, fast growing plants and then chop them down after they had grew in sufficiently so they would die right where they lay and provide nutrients to the soil. And that process was what helps to build up that soil even before you started planting the bananas and other stuff.

And were they able like you're saying, they were getting some of that stuff wherever they could get it, like, and were they able to get that that was it like considered a waste product? I guess better people they got it from. And so like I know, I have chickens and they obviously produced like manure, and I'll put some of it in my like vegetables to the grad but I'll just give it to anyone else who wants it. It is that a thing that they were able to

do there. Yeah, I think people are donated um and I mean I would assume at least and turned I don't know what the case is in Barbados, but in turn that they are bush trucks which pass every once in a while to collect whatever, you know, branches and cut grass and whatever people have put out um from

their yard work or whatever. So I would assume that they would have asked the bush truck people to you know, bring some of that stuff to the site to help out, because a lot of people, you know, they just put that in front of the yard waiting for the bush struck to pass. And so a lot of very good potential sources of like UM ecosystem building, that sort of that so called waste really resources gets wasted when it could really see um, a lot of these kinds of projects. Yeah,

that's very cool. Yeah, yes, something that like I don't know if if you ever read UN documents about like stopping climate change, like they always have a giant section about circular about circular economy stuff, but about sort of I mean basically doing this stuff and then nothing ever happens and no one ever does it, and so yeah, it's it's really cool that like this is a place where those ideas which like are if there's if we are going to survive as a species with like most

of us alive and doing well, we're going to have to do exactly getting implemented. I'm I'm kind of reminded

just on this sort of topic. I've i in Rwanda and February, and one of the things that really struck me with this system of agriculture that they've devised where um, they have paddies that they grow rice right like submerged, and then in there there are living fish and then above them they are like little hutches with rabbits and so like the rabbit manure helps to fertilize what's growing beneath, and then like it's this kind of circular thing where I think they can feed some of the things that

they cut off the plant to the rabbits and it's sort of like and the fish will help keep the water clean. I think that like filter fish. I can't quite plant to keep it clean for the fish. It

was fascinating. I was like, this is amazing, Like they're not as opposed to I grew up on a farm and like I'm very familiar with some of the larger arable sort of grain like grains in the UK, and how you're relying on a ton of exogenous inputs, which I was just so impressed with the fact that they devised a system that didn't require those exactly exactly you really want to. Of course you might, we will have to get external sources, especially in the beginning as you're

trying to establish the system. But the aim is really to have this system continuously establishing itself and expanding itself and maintaining itself. Yeah, would it be a system that works mostly uh, with like a plant based food stuff? So I guess that seems generally most Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, manya, that's a really powerful source of fertilizer. And I think you can keep animals without you know, eating them or using them anyway, if you just want to, you know,

because they make good companions and stuff as well. Yeah, that's but yeah, yeah, I would say a plant focused system could definitely. But and to sort of rhyme or align with principle too, which said that each element performs multiple functions. It's also important to have each function supported by multiple elements, right, So you don't want to get all your food from one source. You want to have a mix of trees and roots and short crops and cultivates.

I mean having all your food coming from one source is basically what we do now with you know, these mono cultures, with these this industrial farming that has these fields and fields and fields that are so susceptible to pests and disease that we have to basically drenched them with chemicals just a lot and to survive. Because and the same guy who did the course, he explains it

me like this. He said that when there's a system in nature and it's not in balance, they basically send out a signal saying, eight, this is not in balance, come and fix it. And so these so called pests, these bugs and stuff, they come to these aberrations, these freaks of nature, these massive fields of crops, and recognizing that this is not sustainable um establishments in the landscape, they try to try to optimize. Right, he calls them.

He doesn't call them pests. He calls them optimizers. So if you have, for example, uh, excessive amount of a certain test in your system, something's wrong with that system because those so called pests, those optimizers are only able to flood your system because they don't have the mechanism. System doesn't have the mechanisms in place to keep them in check. So you don't have the fauna, the larger insects and stuff in your system that will keep those

pests in check. There's an imbalance in place, and that's something that needs to be rectified, and there are different ways to rectify depend on this situation. Another example, and this isn't um from the pooma culture pom culture course.

Another example was the this I believe someone was talking about the presence of wolves in some of the parks in in the US and how reintroducing those wolves did so much to regulate the rest of the ecosystem, the ripple effects that had an the rest of the ecosystem um stabilizing the day of populations, and stabilizing um the beaver populations, and stabilizing all these other different plants and animal species that you would think are not even connected

to the wolves, but still their presence played in a significant rule in maintaining that balance. Yeah. Go go watch how wolves change rivers. It's literally five minutes and it rules. Yeah, it's amazing. It's just like the concept of rewilding. Is

that what would that be a similar thing? Yeah? Yeah, rewilding is basically it's Puma culture had to be more focused on sustaining human communities in you know, in a balance with the rest of the natural world, whereas Rewilding is more focused on helping to rebuild ecosystems outside of the human sphere. He says, I understand it. Yeah, yeah, that makes me no sense to me. So with principle three, which was three or trate, was that each function should

be supported by multiple elements. You don't want to get all your food from one source. You just want to grow like rows and rows of trees or rows and rows of corn. You want to grow a mix of trees and roots and short crops and cultivars and all these different species and variations that would make up like an actual forest. The food forest is approach that a

lot of prima culturists would advocate. And within a food forest, you would have I believe, seven major groups, this sort of seven levels that creator sort of a beneficial system. On the top layer, you have the canopy, which consists of large fruits and nut trees. They provide the most shade and they keep the whole area will climb into the area stable. On that second layer, you're gonna have the low tree layer, which has the dwarf fruit trees.

The smaller fruit trees would fall under the canopy. On the third layer, you would have the shrub layer where would grow you know, your berries and other small you know plants. And below that you have the hoobeceous layer where you would grow different houbs and spices and things

like that. And then below that you have your root vegetables, and below that you have well, you can't really go below the root vegetables, but next to those three vegetables you would want to grow your soil surface crops, your ground cover, um like they're certain running beans and stuff that would help to create a groundcover which protects the soil and prevents the establishment of undesirable plants which we

quote wheats. And then finally, the seventh layer is the vertical layer, which consists of the climb us and vines. It would establish themselves on the low tree layer and the canopy. So if you have that sort of food forest system in place, with all those seven layers, you're not getting each function supported by one element to getting it supported by many elements. The same goal is for water.

You want to get all your water source coming from just like the pipes and whatever water the government sends you. You want to have water coming from the rain if possible. You might want to tap into the water table, or you might want to depend on your situation, you might have extreme or you might be on a hill, in which case you'd have water flowing down and you want to find ways to trap that water and to conserve that water so that is distributed throughout your system. Unlike

regular home garden. Part of the aim of a puma culture um system is that it just like in nature, waters itself. It takes care of itself, and so you're going to have to want You're gonna want to have all sources of different sources of water elements in place to provide that water. The same goes for energy. You would want to get all the energy from one source. You want to combine you know, human power, animal power, hydro electricity if possible, soul of power if possible. Basically,

redundancy is very important. Redundancy is very important, and I'll see it again for emphasis. Redundancy is very important. The next principle, principle number four is if you want to approach puma culture with energy efficiency in mind, particularly your own energy. So on the more practical side of things, if you you might want to do what my mentor my guide had done, which was a zone and sector analysis. So basically, you draw like a map of your space.

You outline your daily patterns and the energies that come from outside your site, like wind and rain and flood and fire and pollution and noise and smells and all these different things. You want to look at how you move through your space. You want to look at how

the sunshine passes over your space. You want to look at the view, and you want to try to harness those good energies, whether it be the rain or wind or whatever it maybe the sun and plant Accordingly, you don't want to have sun sensitive plants on like the south side of your property, of your space wherever the spaces, and you wouldn't want to have plants that need a lot of sun in the shade. You also want to

divvy up your your space. Once you've done that map of your space, you want to divvy it up into zoons. So right first zone not be your immediate live in space. The second zone would have an intensive kitchen garden start first Soon it would be a place of consumption and processing of whatever it is that your system is producing. It doesn't necessarily have to be a house. It could be uh community kitchen, or it can be uh campus clubhouse. I don't know. It could be any space that you're

using for consumption and processing. The next zone is going to be intensive kitchen garden. It's a place where you would want to grow the plants that cycle through more quickly, UM, the spices and the herbs and the different things that you would use on a regular basis. The next zone would want to have its focus on local support, community support, and surplus. So this zone UM, the first zone is

actually technically zone zero. The second zoneer zone one as a Zone two, which is that sort of local support space that orchard is. We want to grow um, your fruit trees, your ornamentals, UM, I want to raise raise animals there, and you basically wanted to be a space where you can provide for the local community, separate and apart from your own produce. Zone three would also have the emphasis on production. Zone three probably the space where you have your main crops, the crops you spend a

lot of time focusing on. Zone four would also have a lot of investment in establishing a sustainable sort of life cycle um for more long term plants, and Zone five would be a space of wilderness, of forest of wildlife corridors that allow species of free wilding even within your mall constructed site. Having your system split into zones helps you to reduce the amount of work that you put in, the amount of resources use, the amount of maintenance you'll need, and it also helps you to boost

to yields and to recycle resources most effectively. The fifth principle is the use of biological resources natural insecticides, timber, nitrogen fixers, whatever the case may be, you want to be using the systems that have evolved to fulfill those rules. To fulfill those rules, you may or may not be afraid of certain creatures. I myself, personally, I don't like frogs or toads, or really I don't like most animals personally,

I just survivee with them. However, Comma, I recognize the importance right, So frogs and bats and snakes, all of these creatures helped provide like a stable system. Whether it be snakes dealing with um crats or bats stealing with insects, or frogs also dealing with insects. You men want to

use companion planting as well. Um, like the three Sisters method, which is a combination of beans, corn, and what's the third one again with squashes, right, and squash, and that would help to establish you know itself and maintain itself. It's sort of like a microcosm of the Broada Puma culture concept and one that has been in practice funititive years.

The sixth principle is the practice of energy cycling, trapping sunlight through greenhouses, making the most used basically out of the energy that flews through your system before it leaves your system, recycling the organic matter that passes three system so that produces no real waste. UM. When I was at the site at the Puma culture forest, I witnessed compost toilet for the first time and was immediately grossed

up by the concept. However, Comma upon being blown away by the product of those compost to that I changed my tune very quickly. And although I would not I probably would not use a compost toilet on a regular basis. I think it has some benefit, um, because we're flushing away some some real power, some real nutrition stuff. UM. Of course, there are risks associated with using human mania.

But the process that he had put in place involved using in human waste um and then for every certain amount of human waste, you would dump sawdust on top of it. And that sawdust helps to deal with the smell um so much so that I actually didn't smell anything when I opened up those those compost toilets. But it also helps to create that balance between the carbon

and the nitrogen that is required for compost. And so after that, after a tub has been filled compostor the tub has been filled, he seals it up, leaves it for a year to break down, and by the time it comes out, it's just like regular soil. However, of course safety prequestions, I believe he only uses it for his orchards, so only like fruit trees and other kinds

of trees. I spent a lot of time so far discussing these sort of larger systems where you know, I'm basically assuming you have several acres of land like this guy does. I don't have several acres of land. I don't have an inch of land um, and I feel like a lot of people listening don't. So there are elements that you can incorporate on the small scale such

as grew boxes. You can have deep litter beds, you can have aquaculture systems, and that's actually one of the things that he Foost established um which is like a series of aquaculture systems, and it's actually one of the main focuses of his project to this day. But I was quite surprised as to the yield that could be produced from something as simple as a couple of pipes put together with some to me to plants grown out

of it. So I mean, don't underestimate yourself or this pace available to you, because it might not be able to plant the whole forest, but you can do a little something. Coming back to the food forest concept, the eighth principle is the use of natural plant succession and stack. It you are a group plants together, they would give a continual production over time and both the short term

and long term. And like I established, you want to have those layers in place, the roots, divines, the trees, etcetera. The ninth principle encourages diversity, encourages polyculture, which is something that I'm sure you would have picked up on by now. The tenth principle is increasing the edge within a system. By creating unique niches that allow for the more rare, the more vulnerable corners of life to sustain themselves. And I think that's something that a lot of pumic culturists

do in terms of establishing their own systems. They have like a special focus or certain passion project to certain species that they just love and want to see flourish, and so they create these niches within their systems that allow allow for those creatures to flourish. Principal eleven employers

that you observe natural patterns. Nature rarely goes in a street line, and you may want to make that pattern, whether be spirals or waves or branches, whether it be patterns over time from you know, the week to the month of the year to repeating patterns in the weather or the seasons. You want to be observing these patterns

and adjusting system continually. The early parts of establishing a puma culture system is certainly the most difficult part, but even five to ten years down the line, when the system is more established, more self sustaining, he still want to be playing that role of tweaking it as you go along, and I think that's something that more people need to recognize about humanity. We didn't just bring on to hear like some sort of alien parasite leaching off

of the youth. Right, We just like every other animal, like every other creature on this planet, have a role to play in the ecosystems we inhabit. Unfortunately, a lot of that activity has been destructive because of how all as socio economic system has been structured. But that's something we have a role and change, and part of that is recognizing that we are stewards, so we we can be good words. We can't help to facilitate the flourishing of life. We don't have to be grim reapers upon

the systems that we are a part of. And so even as you're late, couldn't quote in these long term projects twenty years, thirty years, you're still going to be tweaking and cultivating and hopefully expanding these systems over time. Principle twelve reminds us we gotta pay attention to the scale of these systems, to the long term of these systems, recognizing that this is something you want to establish over generations.

And finally, principle number thirteen is be positive experiments small, learning from your mistakes, scale up bringing more people get involved, get more of your community, of your social circle, of your family, of your affinity group, of whatever the case is, gonna be get more people involved, UM in imagining this complex, beautiful, revolutionary project. We have a long way to go, but a lot of progress could be made in a short space of time, and a lot of projects already going on.

With this ended mind, I would suggest just going on, I really and just switching for the different Poma culture projects happening around the world, whether it be the food forests that Jeff Lawtern is working to establish in Morocco, or the puma culture Pumablitz systems that people are putting in place in Australia, and or the greening the Sahara projects in the Shill region across Africa, or the many small skilled projects taking place and large scale projects taking

place across the America's a lot of people put it in this work, and there's a large community UM willing and able to support as you hopefully embark upon this journey. That's about it for me. Yeah, that's that's fascinating and I'm really interesting this stuff. I think. Yeah, it's it's massively missing in our discussion about like I don't know how to phrase this rightly, but like making a better world, just to give it a really broad sort of phrasing.

And when we often think about like political discourse, and when we think about political systems, but without food systems, we really like the hierarchy of needs is not satisfied, right, And I think that folks listening can make a really positive change really really quickly and in their own lives and spaces if they sort of spend some time with

this stuff. Yeah, absolutely, and it's cool. I think, um an important to to reference at like so much of this, Like we're like the person you named a start who name I'm sorry I've forgotten, but like, um, I think, yeah, it's important to a reference that these are Indigenous ways of knowing and doing and being and living, and like you said, they've existed for millennia, and like going back to that is good as part of the largest sort of way of respecting indigenous cultures and land rights and

all the other things. For me to be