Introducing permaculture into your life starts with changing the way you think rather than with changing a specific action.  Like the natural ecosystems that permaculture is based on, our man-made environments are so variable that no single answer works for everyone.  Instead, we need to take the central permaculture principles and apply them to our own mini-ecosystems on our farms or in our yards.  Here are my top three favorite permaculture concepts:

There's no such thing as waste.  Despite the 14 billion tons of used materials that Americans deposit in landfills every year, waste is more of a state of mind than a reality.  Most of you probably have a worm bin and/or compost pile to turn your food "waste" into productive soil.  Hopefully, you've also done away with paper towels, swiffers, and anything else that is billed as a disposable.  Permaculture admonishes us to think beyond these basic steps and eliminate all types of waste from our lives.  Mark and I have a long way to go, but we've started buying some of our staples in bulk, seriously cutting down on packaging.  We're experimenting with growing mushrooms on our junk mail and cardboard, and are also using these "wastes" as decomposable weed barriers under mulch in the garden.  Our most recent step is harnessing graywater from the kitchen sink to grow King Stropharia mushrooms.  I'd love to hear what your waste-free household looks like.

Every aspect of your permaculture system should have multiple functions.  The earth is full of non-human life, so we are ethically bound to make our homesteads compact, leaving as much natural space as possible to house salamanders and wildflowers.  The trick to keeping your homestead small is requiring each facet to serve multiple functions.  For example, chicken tractors allow you to raise a useful food in the aisles of your garden or even in your city lawn, while at the same time keeping your poultry healthier than they would be in a coop situation and providing fertilizer for the garden.  Even if your neighborhood association restricts you to only growing ornamentals in your front yard, why not intersperse edibles (colored swiss chards and cabbages make elegant show-plants) and focus on nectary species to increase the local population of beneficial insects?  If you've got a multiple acre farm, how about turning a few acres of woodland into a multi-purpose forest garden which will provide your firewood, some fruits and nuts, and wildlife habitat all at once?

Focus on perennials.  While I don't see any permaculturalists getting rid of their cucumber and tomato plants, they do advocate using perennials instead of annuals wherever possible.  Perennial edibles generally require much less input of organic matter, don't tempt you to till up the soil, and need less maintenance.  Perennials also tend to encourage wildlife and discourage soil erosion, another example of multiple uses in a single system.

I could go on and on for hours, but I'd rather hear about your own experiences.  Which permaculture concepts have you applied to your life?

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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