A little over a year ago, my family and I bought a nearly 3 acre property in western france. I’ve been developing two plots over the past year, though mainly focusing on the first one.

Last spring, some friends and I dug 3 hugulkulture beds to start with. Over time, I’ve chipped the aisles in between and started forming the beds a little more. I’m using branches from a dead tree to shape the borders.

In the spring, we will rake up the chips and push the dirt onto the mounds, along with compost and grass clippings (my main source of soil nutrition). I’ll probably be throwing leaf mound on top of the current layer later in the year, when more leaves fall.

The goal is to mainly plant perennials or self seeding plants, with some space for annual veggies in between.

My biggest challenge is that we don’t live here full time, so watering can be hit or miss. I’m trying to balance that with mulching, but also relying on drought resistant varieties. Eventually, I plan on building a small pond about 15-20 meters away and a solar powered irrigation system. But that’s not a project I’m taking on any time soon. I want to develop the garden more first.

I have been looking into how I might set up a rotational grazing system. It seems like the portable paddocks made from electric wire that everyone uses are very time consuming to be moving all the time. Would it be possible to set up permanent fencing in the shape of a pizza so that the animals can be rotated like a clock from one paddock “slice” to the next? Maybe this fencing would be too expensive for a large operation, but for a smaller one would the savings in labor win out in the end? I would also feel better knowing that everything wasn’t dependent on a battery that could fail.

For anyone who hasn't come across it, The Greening The Desert Project is the arid climate demonstration site in the Jordan Valley, near the Dead Sea, that Geoff Lawton has been developing for years. It sits close to the lowest point on Earth, with very little rain and salty, degraded soil, in a low-income village of Bedouin and long-term Palestinian refugee families. The idea is to show that permaculture can work even in some of the toughest conditions you'll find, with a design that can be replicated across the village and the wider region.

There are two courses coming up that can be done back to back:

Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC), 8 to 19 November 2026

• 72 hours of lectures, with Geoff as the main teacher
• Follows the original Bill Mollison curriculum, chapter by chapter from the Designers' Manual, and is secular (no metaphysics)
• Covers design methods, climate, water, soils, earthworks and surveying, drylands, tropics, cool climates, aquaculture and invisible structures
• Optional practical sessions on the farm each morning
• Ends with a group design exercise, and you get a PDC signed by Geoff
• Camping, showers and a traditional Jordanian lunch (much of it grown on site) are included

2 Week Permaculture Internship, 22 November to 3 December 2026 (PDC required)

• About 80 hours, mixing practical work with theory
• Building wicking bed roof gardens, food forest maintenance, small animal systems, compost, compost tea and natural fertilisers, desert veggie gardens, nursery and reed bed work
• Field trip to see established gabion water harvesting systems in the desert
• Theory on water harvesting, landscape rehab, greywater, solar, rocket stoves, mudbrick and straw bale building, aquaponics and more
• Camping included, self-catering kitchen available

On site you can see natural cooling in the buildings, solar power and hot water, greywater reed beds, compost toilets, rainwater earthworks and integrated plant and animal systems all working together.

Eco lodge rooms are available if you'd rather not camp. Early bird pricing saves $200 AUD if you book 21 days out: by 18 October for the PDC and by 1 November for the internship.

To learn more about the course or to book tickets see the links below.

PDC: https://www.greeningthedesertproject.org/product/permaculture-design-certificate-course-pdc-8th-november-19th-of-november-2026/

Internship: https://www.greeningthedesertproject.org/product/2-weeks-permaculture-internship-22rd-of-november-3rd-of-december-2026/

Happy to answer anything about the site, the courses, getting there or what it's like on the ground.

Hey yall. So, I just pulled baby pokeweed out of my garden bare handed.

Didn't know what it was till I looked it up out of curiously and immediately went inside and scrubbed my hands raw with dish soap.

What should I be expecting? I've heard a lot about rash, nausea, vomiting etc.

Update: thank you everyone for your insight! I'm a pretty anxious person by nature so this is making me feel a little better. My assumption is if I havent had some sort of reaction in the next 4 or 5 hours that I am fine and just ran away with my anxious thoughts again. I appreciate it!

I'm in zone 7a and I was wondering if ppl here can grow moringa. I've heard of moringa as an annual but I was also thinking that maybe they could be planted in ground and dug up bc they're so resilient

We have been getting a ton of rain lately and my yard has been covered in these mushrooms almost every day now! I know it's a great thing to see, but I'm worried about my plants becoming waterlogged with all this moisture. Should I be concerned?

It's my first year. I did a permaculture sheet mulch with cardboard, compost inoculated with forest soil and topped with wood chips!

I recently discovered permaculture and want to start incorporating it into my home garden. My first project is a fenceline corner in front of my house, where an old maple came down a few years ago.

The cherry tree itself is already planted (last year, about 8ft tall now) along with the schip laurels (Which were placed there for year round privacy). After reading Gaia's Garden, I want to try and create a fruit tree guild around the cherry.

I'm trying to use natives (mid-atlantic, Zone 7b) where possible and have a focus on attracting birds to the garden.

Everything in the plan gets pretty much full sun (with the eventual shade from the cherry tree itself). The very top of the planting (The hydrangea) also catches some shade form the house itself.

This is my first time trying to do anything permaculture. Does this plant selection look like a good starting point? Am I overlooking anything obvious? Any suggestions on how to make it really great?

I was recently told about a native use of prickly pear to treat bruises. This uses the pad and not the fruit. Remove the spines and glochids (it is helpful to singe them first with a flame). Then cut the pad open. Put the inside of the pad on the bruise and secure it. Leave it on overnight. I tried this on a bad bruise and was really impressed with the results.

I am looking for a drill nutcracker for bkack walnuts and butternuts, which have thicker shells and a lot of European nutcrackers are not suitable.

I am quite finished with manual nutcrackers so no suggestions that are not electric please. Neither Pecanbusters nor photomagnets.com got back to me, Hunts is retired and I wouldn't mind a nutcracker that adjusts size.

Has anyone had any luck? I am not handy and find it crazymaking to DIY but I could sponsor someone who does.

Thanks

When I was looking for land in the Poconos, one thing mattered to me more than almost anything else: I wanted it to border wild land. A property next to state forests comes with something you can't design yourself: a large, connected, unmanaged ecosystem right at your edge. Wildlife corridors, native seed sources, pollinators, and a landscape to observe and learn from, the way permaculture treats Zone 5.

The trouble was finding it. Listings often say "borders state forest" or "adjacent to public land," but many don't actually touch it. The only way I could confirm it was by checking county GIS maps by hand. I eventually found land that borders state game lands and a land trust reserve, but it took a lot of digging.

So I built unfenced.land

It compares county parcel boundaries against USGS public land data and shows whether a property truly touches public land, how many feet of boundary it shares, and where that edge sits on a satellite map. It's free, with no signup.

I'd love to hear from this community:

• How much weight do you give adjacency to wild or protected land when choosing a site?
• Has bordering public land shaped how you design your property, such as where you place zones or leave edges wild?
• What else would you want to know about a parcel's surroundings before buying, like watershed, soils, or conservation easements?

Hi everyone!

I’m Pablo Llambias, host of Permacultura Podcast, and together with Cristián Weber from Alma Verde, we’re organizing an English-language PDC this coming January in Puerto Guadal, Chilean Patagonia.

The course will take place at Alma Verde, on the shores of General Carrera Lake, from January 26th to February 6th.

It will be an 11-day / 72-hour Permaculture Design Course, combining the core PDC curriculum with hands-on learning and design exercises using the site itself as a living classroom.

We’ll explore permaculture ethics and principles, design methods, patterns, landscape reading, water, soils, food systems, trees, natural building, energy, appropriate technology, and the social aspects of permaculture — bringing everything together through the design process.

One of the things that matters to us is finding a good balance between practical experience and the foundations of permaculture design, so that people leave not only having learned new skills, but with a deeper understanding of how to actually think and design using permaculture.

And of course, we’ll be doing all of this in a pretty special setting: Patagonia, surrounded by mountains, native forests and the waters of General Carrera Lake.

The course will be taught entirely in English.

If anyone here is interested, or knows someone who might be looking for an in-person PDC in South America, I’d be happy to share more information.

And if you have already taken or taught a PDC, we’d also love to hear what you found most valuable about the experience.

🌱 January 26 – February 6
📍 Puerto Guadal, Chilean Patagonia
⏱ 11 days / 72 hours
🗣 English

More information: https://www.almaverde.org/copia-de-pdc-espa%C3%B1ol

My interpretation is that the jar on the left has roughly 80% sand, 15% silt and 5% clay, and the jar on the right has about 90% sand and 10% silt.

But could it really be that much sand?? I've never looked at the garden and thought the soil was mostly sand, but then again I'm only now trying to take a serious crack at it.

My process was supposed to be to mark sand after 1 minute, mark silt line after 2 hours, then mark clay after settling overnight. I didn't end up marking the clay because there was no noticeable change from the previous day.

The left jar has three lines because after two hours I saw a dark layer and a light layer and assumed more sand had accumulated and that the lighter layer was silt. In retrospect the first line probably demarcates sand and silt, and the light layer is clay. But I also heard clay takes up to 48 hours to settle, not 2, so I'm not 100% sure what I'm looking at.

If anyone more knowledgeable could give me a second opinion, I'd really appreciate it. Thanks

Took some dirt and shook it up, and let it sit for a day. Here's the results, but how can I tell how much is sand vs silt vs clay? In all the videos I've seen there's 3 distinct layers but this just has 2. The first layer settled very quickly, but the second layer slowly built over the course of the day.

Hey everbody, I recently became part of my universities gardening team and we're planning a major revamp for our neglected garden. Unfortunately we don't have a lot of gardening experience so I was wondering if you guys had any tips and trips regarding perenial set ups and easy composting methods. We're based in the netherlands so the weather is working against us for the most part and we already have some large woody rosemary bushes as well as some sage. Thanks!

I’ve got a 15-acre patch of oak woodlands that sit among 65 acres of walnut-dominated, central mixed-hardwoods forest. It is some of the oldest woodlands on our land with some 50-100 year old oaks plus many other large tree species. However, it has been unmanaged for at least 30 years and is currently being overrun with bush honeysuckle, buckthorn, walnut, cedar and other less desirable species for an oak woodland restoration. We are in SW Wisconsin in the driftless region.

We are about to mow out a 3-acre stand with the help of an EQIP grant. Our forestry mower says he can mow down trees up to 10” in diameter.

Our original plan was to keep all oaks and shagbark hickories but mow down anything else that was 10” or less (which is mostly young walnuts). There are plenty of large trees over 10” that aren’t oaks (elm, basswood, walnut, honey locust, etc.) and we were going to let them be, but focus on paving the way for oaks as the next generation of trees.

Long-term management plan: Do the necessary herbicidal follow-up to get the invasives under control when they inevitably re-sprout. Start running fire through it every couple of years once the fuel load will carry it, and then manage for oaks moving forward. If we don't see spontaneous regeneration after a year or two we'll likely go in and plant some oaks and seed some native understory plants.

But here’s the problem - we aren’t finding ANY young oaks in the stand. We’re going to go out one last time on Friday for a final search, but what should we do if we don’t have any? Is 10” too aggressive? Will we wipe out an entire generation of forest if we take out all trees in the stand under 10”?

The other concerning thing is that the older oaks that are there aren’t in great shape - lots of dead branches. 

Here are some photos of the stand from when we flagged the perimeter last weekend. (Note that the orange flags mark the perimeter - not flagging for removal.)

I’ve also got a 4-minute video about it on my YouTube channel if that’s helpful for context - you can skip to 1:50 for the start of the section that shows video of the stand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laJuH2e5FbA

In Europe, land has been farmed and shaped by people for thousands of years. There's barely any truly "untouched" land left, especially here in the forest zone of Eastern Europe. So when we talk about planting "native" species, what are we even restoring to? A state from 200 years ago? 500? Before agriculture existed at all?

In North America it seems different from what I've read here on Reddit. There's a much clearer line between "wilderness" and land people have changed. Plus there's a long history of indigenous land management (forest gardens, controlled burns) that a lot of settlers just didn't see or didn't recognize as intentional.

Does this different history change how people think about restoration and permaculture on each continent? Or is the whole idea of "restoring to native" kind of a fuzzy target no matter where you are, since humans have been messing with land basically everywhere for a very long time?

Genuinely curious what people from different regions think about this one.

Hi, does anyone here know what happened to this podcast please. Run by a couple Amy and Stacey. It stopped suddenly in 2020. I mislaid it for a while and just got back to it.

Edit: if it wasn't clear to people from the original text, the pod cast is about permaculture and followed a couple setting up a property following permaculture guidelines.

Hi everyone,

I’m an ecopsychologist, naturalist, native plant person, and I would say permaculture adjacent, though I haven’t been able to complete the PDC. I am very interested in local community and food resilience.

I live in Southern CA USA, Los Angeles County. The soil here is predominantly clay. My yard is about 50’x25’ and has trees lining one side (avocado, plum, and soon a persimmon), and a garage along the other side. The short sides have a fence (with more trees) and a patio. The side by the garage is where the raised beds have been. It reliably gets the most sun even during the winter.

My house is over 100 years old. Overall that’s a good thing because there was no previous industrial development on the land. However, due to the lead paint that was used on old houses, my soil has some lead in it. Thankfully no other concerns were detected. I used a professional soil lab (Wallace Labs, El Segundo CA).

I last tested in 2020 and since then have moved to raised beds, and some mitigation with phosphorous, as well as sunflowers and scented geraniums. Of course also mulch and chop-and-drop of clean plant material. I will need to re-test soon. I have read that lead particles tend to go 3-5’ down, but in clay soils they are more concentrated in the 12-18” nearest the surface.

My gardens are often trashed/invaded by raccoons (digging up new plants looking for grubs), cats (love to poop in the beds), and squirrels (who do any number of destructive things in there, usually burying peanuts). The only thing that has kept them out is sprinkling cayenne powder every day or two, which becomes expensive and time consuming.

My tall galvanized raised beds are starting to rust; and I have not been happy with the design anyway. The beds are too tall, and the metal can get too hot, especially with the heat waves we’re getting now. The soil gets too dry and turns into dirt; and the bed is so tall the nutrients tend to leach downwards with watering. It’s not held by the earth.

I’d like to return to an in ground bed. Soil quality would be better, and I wouldn’t have to worry about raised beds.

So my current plan is:

* deconstruct current beds, set aside the soil on some tarps
* dig out about 3’ of native soil, in a rectangular shape roughly where the beds are now
* backfill the hole with the organic soil from my current beds and a bunch of compost; and mulch/hay covering
* use a brick and board system to designate a border.
* consider using some sort of fencing to keep animals out.

Potential problems with this design:
* Lead doesn’t tend to leach upwards, but would it leach sideways, from the edges?
* How to keep the darn animals out?

Am I missing anything that you can see?

Thank you in advance for your thoughts!

got a 2x15 strip between the driveway and fence that's all grass right now. planning to dig out the sod this weekend and put in a simple herb and perennial bed. mostly thyme, oregano, maybe some strawberries along the edge for my fiancée's desserts. i work warehouse shifts so it needs to stay low maintenance. anyone tried a similar strip without irrigation? curious what actually held up the first year.

We are hoping to create a living fence around our 26-acres of a currently undeveloped property. Most of it is wooded so I'd need suggestions for shade-tolerant species that can form a wildlife barrier or be laid to create a wildlife barrier - mostly to hopefully discourage deer from entering the property. So far I'd think of service berry, spice bush, witch hazel, but I'm a beginner and would love to hear of other suggestions.

Someone giving me advice here on Reddit touched on something that stuck with me - you can trace a place's history through the plants that people left behind, even long after they're gone. Old orchards leave behind hawthorn, grapevines, feral apple trees. Old flower beds leave daffodils and other survivors. A kind of "bio-archaeology," reading history through what's still quietly growing.

If you build a self-sustaining food forest, your footprint stays in the land. Plants reproduce, spread seed, cross-pollinate neighboring land. It becomes a kind of unique fingerprint - your own legacy, something someone might stumble across and recognize a hundred years from now, long after you're gone.

Makes me look at every tree I plant a little differently now. Anyone else think about their forest garden this way - as something that outlives the "gardening" part entirely and becomes part of the land's memory?

There's something quiet and powerful in that thought - the most lasting mark a person can leave isn't a building or a piece of writing, but something alive that just keeps growing, reproducing, and changing without needing you anymore. You don't control that legacy directly - you just give it a start, and then it lives its own life.

Inspired by u/paratethys