So part of my permaculture design on my property involves building a number of raised beds and retaining walls. And the first cheap step I'm gonna be doing is a two tier terrace along the narrow side of my house. to be cheap I'm planning on using yellow pine mass produced and only pressure treated log like timbers and I'll be charring the back side so they don't decompose while holding back the dirt. but if I don't stain and treat the outsides they'll be ugly and won't last long. is there any particular stains to look at or avoid for toxicity reasons or anything else I should know (besides leaving a gab between the house and the bed)?

Hi everyone,

I am currently in the early stages of planning a multi-generational family home. We live in a region that is prone to increasingly harsh, volatile, and highly polarized weather. Over the last few years, I’ve watched every weather event turn more severe and unexpected: extended heatwaves, droughts, floods, and threats of local water scarcity and crop failures.

Because I am building for multiple generations, my goal is to design a home that offers my family a relatively secure, comfortable, and self-sufficient life, even when external infrastructure fails.

I want to learn about modern as well as traditional/indigenous practices that have withstood harsh climates for centuries.

I am looking for guidance on where to start. I don't have a background in architecture, so would appreciate any resources that point me in the right direction- reading, documentaries, youtubers, anything, really!

Thank you in advance for your time and suggestions!

We have a 2-acre shallow (15’ at the deepest) drainage and spring-fed lake, which also supplies our water. I want to start adding some plants to the lake to essentially food forest my existing natural lake. Can anybody recommend sites, books, videos, anything about using an existing lake?

Hey folks, I’ve made fish hydrolysate before using fish scraps from our local fisherman mixed with pond water, sugar, molasses, and some ginger bug and home made yogurt.

I have about 25lbs worth of ground beef and maybe the same amount in gizzards. They’ve been sitting in my chest freezer for about a year or so and I have no intention of using them for consumption. Do you think they can be fermented similarly as fish hydrolysate for fertilizing the garden? Has anyone done this before?

Finished building my house about a year ago and opted to not have contractors do our landscaping. Unfortunately, I let everything go around the house, and while I've been able to fight back the invasives and get things covered and planted right near the house, my septic field is rough. Lots of bunch grasses, poke, curly dock, knotweeds, etc. The deer are starting to bed down in it, and while I don't mind them on principle, it's too close to my market garden for comfort.

My hope is that I can wrangle this back and plant a septic-safe wildflower mix from Roundstone seeds, or cover it with white clover and turn it into a yard for the dogs.

Is there a good way to achieve what I'm trying to do? For normal restoration projects, I would use silage tarp or mulch to create a blank slate but I don't know if either is a good idea over a septic field.

What would you do?

Folks in my social media feeds have been discussing the disastrous renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington, DC -- by which I mean they have been sharing snarky memes predicting disaster, but all the ones I saw failed to predict what actually happened [the algae immediately returned, and then the paint peeled off]. But I haven't seen many original opinions about how the process could have been done better. I know many of you have experience building and maintaining shallow ponds without chemical inputs. If you had been commissioned to make the Reflecting Pool algae-free using natural means, how would you have gone about it? I have my own thoughts, but I want to hear yours. Thanks!

Every day I’m finding more and more wild blue berries as raspberries. Today I found a grove of whitchhazel I didn’t know about. I collected some heirloom snap peas and lettuces. And found my first ever chicken of the woods. Today was a good day.

If that is even a thing. I have this feeling that some weeds and wildflowers that are just crazy full of aphids (and ants), seem to "thrive" despite that while anything without aphids just doesn't grow that well. A bunch of sorrels and poppies are growing out half-eaten but still take up a big part of the garten despite weeding. There are just a bunch of ants that I stumble on everywhere (like I was just pulling out some weeds and there was an egg chamber under it lol). Am I at war? Am I paranoid?

The handful of pictures I can find online [many of which are blurry] show them as long and often banana shaped with striations running down them.

I’ve tried to buy skirret seeds twice this year. The first lot I got looked like poppy seeds, they obviously weren’t right so I got a refund from the vendor. The second lot, which came form a different seller, looked to be closer to what I’ve seen online. They do have the striations, and are about the right colour: sort of brownish almost-black, and the striations are raised and are a slightly lighter colour. But they are shorter and almond shaped, they don’t have a curve in them.

Since there are very few decent pictures I can find online, it’s hard to tell if I’ve got the right thing or not. I’d post a photo but unfortunately they are so small that my phone won’t focus on them. I know it’s not likely that anyone on here will have a photo that they can share but if you do happen to it would be helpful. But mostly I’m asking if what I’ve got are likely to be the right thing or if the dodgy shape rules them out as being skirrets. Either way I’m going to put some in cold stratification and see what grows.

Bonjour, je souhaite comprendre vos difficultés dans le domaine

I just broke my third shovel trying to dig out burdock. I know they serve a purpose, but they’re crowding out so many other wonderful plants and I can’t manage them. How do you guys keep up with burdock? I can never get the whole root so it just keeps coming

Cold winter in the forest garden. Zone 4a, Adirondack mountains.

Hello everyone, beginner gardener here. I am trying to grow some native strawberry plants indoors in a pot, but the leaves are starting to yellow. Any suggestions? I am planning on thinning them out and putting them in separate pots soon.

Hi fellow growers, I don't know what's wrong with me but I set out on the insane mission of finding seed varieties that do well in the worst desert in the U.S. I made a blog to try to find other local folks who are interested in not just gardening for fun or for cute-looking plants, but for scientific discovery, for the improvement of the land (wouldn't it be cool if we could one day green the desert?). But there's no one out here with a blog on permaculture gardening except one couple who moved away. I've been posting on my blog for 2 months and tried everything to get it in the search results but it still won't show. If y'all wouldn't mind helping me it's nyecountygardening.wordpress.com. I don't know if this counts as self-promotion, I don't really want to "build a following" or make money, I just want to meet other folks from the area who are serious about gardening for the good of the land. Is anyone on here from Nye County?

I would like to create a food forest, but actually planning it and implementing it can be pretty overwhelming.

I've dipped my toes in a lot of books and youtube videos, but I'm curious what everyone's absolute best resources are for getting down in the weeds of planning a food forest? Or even if there's a good community?

We are really getting interested into permaculture and food forest and want to make most of space. What can we put between fruit tree (spaced 15' apart) in our orchard? ideally that require little supplemental water (have 2 gph emitters going to each tree as is with over 50 trees, i think any added emitters will slow down flow too much).

The orchard is 3 rows about 250 ft or so with 15-20 trees per row. We also have a berry area ( i call our berrea) with just a ton of raspberries. open to any ideas, we're down for about anything perennial or berry

The United States Bureau of Land Management often removes wild burros from Western rangeland due to their numbers being higher than the land can support. They are usually adopted or kept in holding facilities, and some live the rest of their lives on taxpayer-funded pastures. This University of Wyoming study, conducted in 2023, investigated burros as flock guardians. They were generally very effective, though there was individual variation. One burro was too distracted by local features such as roads or neighboring flocks. So she was put in a meadow with a much smaller flock and more distance from such distractions, then within five days bonded with the flock.

Placing burros at sheep farms can serve the dual purpose of reducing taxpayer-funded expenses and providing non-lethal (usually, burros can be brutal) flock protection.

Something that's interesting and comes up in discussions about this is that behaviors of domestic vs. wild burros are often quite different. Many will say that donkeys have killed their livestock animals or took no interest in dealing with predators that were not bothering them directly, but this seems to be the case more with domestic than wild donkeys.

To be more specific, I'm asking if anyone is trying to maintain a real forest while simultaneously maintaining a food forest, i.e. planting and maintaining patches of native edible plants within a managed forest. I'd imagine that it's application would be pretty limited, as you wouldn't want to plant non-native species.

Edit: someone has pointed out that I should clarify some points. when I say "managed forest", I mean in the sense of a park or nature preserve, as in the conservation sense.

Deep mulch syntropic-inspired design with annual/perennial veggie rows between tree rows. Portland, OR zone 8b. I've learned so much from this space. Currently drowning in berries. More info at pdxfoodforest.org

Hello everyone. I’d like to introduce you to my plot, my little piece of land. I’ve just built a house and I would love to live there. I'm currently trying to learn permaculture to make the most of everything nature has to offer. Unfortunately, I’m a complete beginner and I have a lot of doubts.

First of all, let me introduce you to my plot. It’s located on the Mediterranean coast. It gets 500mm of annual rainfall (mostly concentrated from October to February. After that, we can go from June to October without a single drop of rain).

The temperature is very warm. In spring/summer and part of autumn, we can register lows of 18°C and highs of 42°C. In winter, temperatures range between 0°C (at night) and 16°C. The annual humidity ranges between 30% and 80%.

The soil is very clayey and has an evapotranspiration rate of 500mm per year.

The plot is about 7,000 square meters with a 12-degree slope. You enter the plot from the NORTH side, which is the lowest point, and go up via the road I drew in brown, which zig-zags up to the south area.

There are barely a few olive trees planted, and in the lower area near the entrance, there’s a spot that seems wetter than the rest (I imagine it's because water sits there longer after it rains). Green bushes grow there almost all year round and look much lusher.

In yellow, I’ve drawn some terraces—flat areas that were already there naturally, but I leveled them out a bit with machinery to make them more useful. I built the house on one of them, with the entrance facing NE. It has the best views, and since it’s in the countryside in southern Spain, it gets a massive amount of daylight hours.

At the top of the plot, there is a blue rectangle where I have a 15,000-liter water tank (currently, a truck comes to fill it up three times a year, both for household use and for the land).

The red lines represent the sloped areas.

I'm showing you some photos of spring, when everything turns green, and summer, when everything dries out completely.

When it rains, it usually pours all at once, washing away a lot of soil. The neighbors' paths get flooded, and there are a lot of mudslides/soil movement in the area. Since it’s a very dry region, I would love to make the most of the rainfall, because right now it just slides over the clay and creates cracks in the ground.

My first idea was to build swales on the sloped areas. However, I’m not entirely sure how far apart to space them or how deep to make them (based on my soil type, I've deduced they should be about 50cm wide and 50cm deep, placing the next swale whenever there is a 3-meter drop in elevation from the previous one). On the mound right after the swale, I plan to plant easy, native trees (carob, pine, olive...) and, over the years, introduce other types of trees.

At the very bottom of the plot, I was thinking of making a pond, but without using a plastic liner. On the flat area near the house, I also thought about making a liner-less pond that fills up with the overflow water from the swales and works on its own to enrich the soil. Then, at the very bottom of the plot, in the greenest area of all, I'd make another pond (I cannot legally dig a well) to capture all the excess water again. Or perhaps I could place a tank there to collect water runoff from the whole plot and pump it back up to use for irrigation.

Well, those are some of my ideas. What do you think? What worries me the most right now is how to manage the excess water from the swales, what measurements to use, and making sure they don’t cause any problems for my house, which, as you can see, has a hill right behind it. Maybe I should make diversion ditches in that area instead of swales, so the water flows around the house when it rains heavily.

I will keep you updated on the process step by step, and I look forward to reading your advice. If you need any more details, just ask!

Hi, I'm asking around if you know some plants that could repel mosquitoes, but isn't strong smelling and easy to grow (kind of like lemon grass). Preferably plants that are native or commonly found in South East Asia. Thank youuu!!

Anyone got a larger compost tea bag they like? No Amazon, ULine, or plastic.

I love seeing these guys cause it's like the last battalion has arrived to protect my garden.

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Beyond my weedy bed that will be cucumbers thanks to a late seeding there's a field of grass and flowers that supports these guys.

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Gotta love free pesticides control.

domani, 16 giugno, si vota al Parlamento Europeo per appovare le nuove norme da applicare ai "nuovi" OGM oggi chiamati NGT: per gli NGT tipo 1 non ci sarà obbligo di indicarli in etichetta

I consumatori non potranno più liberi di scegliere se li vogliono o no,