Permaculture Homestead – My wife and I want a small permaculture designed homestead with enough land for some chickens, horses, and a small orchard.

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Permaculture Quickstart

Permaculture? Is it swales? What on earth is a swale?

Swales are a dry-climate, tree-growing system. Permaculture may use swales, but that is a small, small part of permaculture.

Permaculture is often described as “Permanent Agriculture.” However, Permaculture is better described as “Permanent Culture.” That includes:

Earth care
People care
Returning surplus

Permaculture transcends politics, religion, and country. You can throw a prepper, a tree hugger, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a capitalist, and a communist into the same permaculture class and have them all walk away determined to use the knowledge they gained in their individual pursuits. In fact, I’ve seen that happen.

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Homestead (Idaho)

Yes. We made it to the homestead we’ve talked about most of our marriage. However, that was just the beginning of the work. I’ll get into that in other posts.

I have a few notes for my own memory.

Small scale flood irrigation from wells with water near the surface seems to be a better alternative than sprinklers or drips. Flood irrigation wipes out many pests, including ants and mice. It results in better soil hydration, and better seed germination. Also, you get far less water evaporation, and the excess water ends up right where it came from after filtering down through the soil. Sprinklers are a massive waste of water, because surface area is directly related to evaporation rate.
Plant potatoes 12″ down directly in the soil for best harvest and largest potatoes.
Radishes and zucchini are deer resistant.
Get another watering trough to use as a raised bed and plant blackberries in it. This will contain their spreading.
Plant garlic at 4″ depth and 7″ spacing between plants.

We Made the Leap

The pandemic and shortages it brought pushed us over the edge. My wife and I decided it was time to build or buy.

We love Dove Ranch and would have loved to build there, but after we saw the vandalism and ridiculous thefts that occurred there, we decided we needed to live somewhere with enough neighbors to look out for each other. I still have plans to improve Dove Ranch and use it for recreation, but not building a house.

That led us to question what is the ideal location. We searched all through 2020 and part of 2021, and almost bought a place in Stone, Idaho. That place had too many problems with it, so we expanded our search and landed in central Idaho.

Homestead — Our not-so-new homestead in central Idaho.

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Back At It

Since my last post, I’ve changed web domains, changed jobs twice, had another child volunteer as a Christian missionary (Latter-day Saint), had a child nearly die of T1D, raised five chickens, and seen my daughter get married.

Life’s been busy.

Home Grown Chicks — We have five chickens we raised from chicks–ISA Browns and Golden Comets.

Now my wife and I are working on a huge upgrade. We’re under contract to buy a 1970’s house and homestead near Dove Ranch. (The travel time to Dove Ranch will be cut by 66%.) My day job let’s me work from literally anywhere in the world, so we’ve decided to sell house we’ve lived in for 15 years, and move to a 1-acre house out in the countryside.

I love our current home, but we couldn’t turn down the opportunity for an acre of land in a beautiful rural area.

NOTE: Turns out that this homestead had some issues the inspection uncovered. We found a better homestead, though.

Water Rights Course

I want to put a well on Dove Ranch at some point. I’ve tried figuring out Utah’s water laws and have failed for the most part. Then I found out that there is a Water Rights course offered by the Utah Division of Water Rights and the Rural Water Association of Utah. I decided, this would complement my permaculture training nicely, so I’m going to sign up for it.

water rights brochure 2017

If anyone else is interested, you can sign up online at www.rwau.net

Before Permaculture at Dove Ranch

Geoff Lawton emphasized in the Permaculture Design Certificate course that I’m taking, that you really want to have as many before shots as possible when applying permaculture to land, so that you can see the progress made over time. So, in keeping with that strong suggestion, I’ve taken a few pictures that are typical of the ranch, now.

Driveway Before Permaculture — This is our modest driveway in 2017 with my Subaru Forester parked in it.

2017 Eroded Flood Plain — This is the majorly eroded flood plain down in the wash. This is pre-permaculture in 2017, looking south along the west property boundary.

2017 Flood Plain — This captures a view of the 2017 snowmelt running off on the north side of the floodplain looking south before I’ve applied any permaculture design to the eroded muddy mess.

2017 Looking East at Fork in the Wash — Using permaculture I intend to introduce dryland trees and erosion control methods to the wash. This is known to create water plumes and often creates natural springs where there were none in the past.

Permaculture and the Homestead

I intend to use permaculture to create my homestead. I want a small homestead where I grow my own food and enjoy working the land. I also want to improve the land I am not using in a natural, water-wise way that doesn’t encourage more desertification and erosion.

My wash does not currently have the native biodiversity that permaculture can design into it using typical permaculture techniques. Cottonwoods are native to Utah washes, so I’m introducing a stand of them to grow in my wash.

My dream property would have under five-acres of land. After years of looking at land, I finally bought 72-acres in early 2014, not because I want that much land, but because I could afford it and not the smaller parcels I was interested in.

The land I ended up purchasing was described in the real estate listing as “good for nothing but sagebrush.” However, after seeing what permaculture design has done to far worse chunks of dirt, I’m willing to give it a go, even though I have limited time and money.

Finding the Farm — The piece of dirt and sage we could afford. It’s not much, but it’s ours.

This piece of dirt and sage will make a great permaculture demonstration site.

Update on the Permaculture Design Certificate Course

I’m almost half way through the Permaculture Design Certificate course. I’m on week 9 and it is a 20 week course. I love the course, but two months in, I’m starting to look forward to finishing it. I can tell from my changes in perspective that this is likely to change my life forever.

In addition to the normal course material, I’m reading the 550 page manual by Bill Mollison, and listening to Bill’s 70 hour 1983 course on MP3. It’s interesting to see the major differences in personality and teaching style from Bill Mollison to his most-well-known student, Geoff Lawton. They are very different personality-wise and teaching-style-wise.

Between the book and two classes (current online one and the 1983 MP3 one) I’ve already learned tons relating to management zones, patterns, plant-animal guilds, tree placement, earthworks, and permaculture related legal, economic and social networks. I had no idea what I didn’t know about permaculture.

On a funny/interesting note, I was listening to the the 1983 course this week and Bill M. mentions Yeoman’s so-far unproven keyline design theory. Of course, Geoff Lawton and other Permaculture Design Certificate holders have proven Yeoman correct over and over again since 1983–most famously Geoff Lawton turned several acres a few miles from the Dead Sea into a forest garden on almost no well-water and then left it alone for a decade and came back to show it was still there even when mismanaged.

Permaculture Guilds

My takeaway from the Online Permaculture Design Course this week is the use of guilds. Guilds are groups of plants and/or animals that work together. Often, a guild contains a central element such as a specific tree and then other elements are gathered around it to assist the central plant or animal. The goal is to assemble components that help each other in some way. The more ways components help each other, the more likely the guild will work out. Look for large numbers of connections between elements.

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Week One of the PDC

I’ve been through the first week of course work for the Online Permaculture Design Course taught by Geoff Lawton. I found it was a good thing that I’ve been studying permaculture on my own for so long. My previous permaculture studies helped me understand a lot of the more abstract theory that the course starts out with.

Since this is a pretty big investment for myself and my family, financially speaking, I decided to make the most of it and study Bill Mollison’s Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual along with the course. Also, I decided to take it up a notch and also listen to Bill Mollison’s original 1983 permaculture design course on MP3 while driving to and from the day job.

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