Permaculture with Andrew

Andrew explains the principles of permaculture to Mia and James

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to the a coort Happen. Here is practical guy
to make it Puma culture happen wherever you are. I
am your host for this episode, Andrew of the YouTube
channel andrewism and I'm joined here with Chris and Jeames

(00:24):
he Lou. Hello, Hi, thanks for having us, Thanks for
having me. It's the guest. Well, you're gonna walk us
through this. I'm very excited to learn more about it. Yes,
so I really see it as a as a key
component in the restoration of the youth. And so I

(00:45):
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

(01:09):
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

(01:32):
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

(01:55):
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

(02:16):
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

(02:39):
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

(03:00):
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

(03:22):
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

(03:45):
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

(04:06):
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.

(04:26):
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,

(04:50):
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

(05:14):
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

(05:36):
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

(05:57):
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

(06:21):
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

(06:46):
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

(07:08):
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

(07:34):
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

(07:59):
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

(08:19):
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,

(08:47):
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

(09:13):
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

(09:35):
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

(09:58):
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

(10:19):
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

(10:44):
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

(11:05):
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

(11:26):
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

(11:49):
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

(12:11):
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

(12:33):
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,

(12:54):
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,

(13:16):
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,

(13:37):
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

(14:01):
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,

(14:26):
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

(14:47):
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

(15:09):
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?

(15:32):
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,

(15:53):
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

(16:14):
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

(16:35):
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

(16:57):
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

(17:20):
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

(17:41):
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

(18:06):
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

(18:28):
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

(18:50):
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

(19:11):
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

(19:32):
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,

(20:05):
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

(20:30):
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.

(20:52):
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

(21:13):
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

(21:36):
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

(21:57):
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.

(22:18):
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

(22:39):
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,

(23:00):
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,

(23:23):
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

(23:44):
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.

(24:07):
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

(24:28):
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,

(24:49):
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

(25:12):
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

(25:34):
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

(25:57):
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

(26:20):
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

(26:43):
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

(27:11):
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,

(27:35):
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,

(28:00):
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

(28:22):
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.

(28:46):
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

(29:07):
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

(29:31):
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.

(29:52):
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

(30:12):
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

(30:34):
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

(30:55):
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

(31:16):
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

(31:37):
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

(32:16):
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.

(32:36):
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,

(33:00):
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,

(33:20):
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,

(33:42):
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

(34:02):
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

(34:23):
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

(34:44):
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

(35:07):
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

(35:29):
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,

(35:50):
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

(36:14):
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,

(36:34):
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

(36:54):
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

(37:17):
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,

(37:41):
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,

(38:01):
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

(38:24):
all the other things. For me to be