"Permaculture is a design science based on three simple ethics:" "care for the earth" "care for people" "share the surplus" "Permaculture also has core principles" "They guide us in creating sustainable abundance" "Nature is our model in Permaculture" "The meander of a river teach us how to design a path" "We are always looking at connections and flows" "designing relationships" "looking where things are in relationship to another, like putting the plants and the herbs that we need most often close to the house" "catching water, apply in the landscape and storing it so it can gravity feed down" "we favor biological resources over the use of fossil fuels heavy chemicals" "The low carbon footprint" "The wheat bed will purify wastewater and a living machine, like this one in Findhorn, treats our sewage with plants and algae" "Plants catch and store the sun's energy and so can we using the energy of sun" "and wind and we celebrate diversity" "because diversity gives us resilience and true abundance" "but to see how these principles work in practice let's visit a permaculture designer" "meet Eric Olsen using the classic designer's tool the hammock" "Eric is one of the key teachers for Earth Activist Training and he also has his own company, Permaculture Artisans" "Eric's own garden is based on flowing patterns and diversity in it, every plant and every element serves more than one function" "Calendula not only looks pretty but you can eat it it attracts beneficial insects and is a medicinal plant used in healing ointments and salves" "and a core principle of sustainability is to obtain a yield" "Eric definitely knows how to do that" "Here is a food forest he designed on the terraced hill side in Sonoma County" "It is based on many mutualy beneficial associations of plants, that we call guilds (guilds)" "A forest has many layers of growth from the canopy down to the understorey the low shrubs and the roots" "So, we are getting our layers, right?" "So, this is gonna be upper canopy in this part of the food forest this is lower canopy and then we have our penstemon and our insectory hummingbird attracting and insectory perennials, creating another layer," "We've got some lower layer, with this yarrow, and then we have our clover, a nitrogen fixing ground cover which is pretty much a perennial cover in most of the terraces this clover is not getting any irrigation" "except for surplus water, that's coming from the irrigation system on the berms," "These were planted in February" "So you work your soil correctly, you put the right soil, you slow water down, you design correctly and you gonna have..." "I mean when we got these... these trees, and Laura can testify," "I've pruned them back to a stick then we have: pine nuts, hazelnuts, wallnuts, we have asian peer, apple, plums, peaches, nectarines, several species of blueberries, persimmons, figs," "many other types of plants, cornelian cherry, cherry, mulberry," "are all in this system," "Go see for yourself" "On your farm, you always have a percentage of plants whose purpose is building soil, because there are so many plants that are drying nutrients up, then you are building with minerals accumulator, nitrogen-fixers and here we have chickens, the swell composting system," "and we will have the clovers, so we'll see how is done this cycle, which is a dialogue, a communication and we will play on this concept and see how it works, but I think that will work well," "especially considering that we will introduce the chickens" "and will continue to see the kind of growth that we saw in the first year," "The goal is how do we transform this system from having to introduce inputs each year and do not want to have to bring tons of compost and wood chips each year" "we want a system to provide the soil in nutrients needs and suppress weeds for itself." "Gardens that function like a forest, that generate their own fertility," "catch their own water, systems that can meet human needs and regenerate the land around us." "That's the goal of Permaculture" "When we see ourself as part of nature, when we work with nature, nature will work with us."