Ep. 123 – Permaculture Goal #1: Start Simple – with Cormac Harkin

You don’t hear this permaculture message very often: Start Simple.

Usually people are watching videos of Geoff Lawton and planning swales and dams and grafting, and…

Cormac Harkin of Vine Permaculture starts his consults with basic questions:

What do you like to eat?
What kind of time do you have during the week to devote to a garden. (if you spend 8 hours a week on a garden, where does that time come from?)
When you walk out to your garden, what does it look like?

He starts people out simply, with a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), and then adds on from there:

A salad garden by the back door with cut and come again lettuce.
A kitchen garden.
A layout that makes sense: You walk out to the chicken coop to get eggs – what gardens or beds can you harvest from on the way?

Listen on your fave Podcast app:

Thriving The Future Podcast on iTunes/Apple Podcast

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Cormac does a Free Food Forest Abundance planning session as well.

Contact him at [email protected].

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Times are tough. How many feet of potatoes and how many potato plants would you need to live off your garden? Thriving Garden Planner spreadsheet can help you. It also has a tab to track how much money you saved by growing your own food. Last year I grew 14 pounds of tomatoes, which would have cost me $50 in the store. It’s on sale for $10 at ThrivingGardenPlanner.com.

GrowNutTrees.com

Elderberry cuttings are still available but Hurry before they come out of dormancy. Now have pecan seedlings and red mulberry seedlings. Order now at GrowNutTrees.com.

Buying from our Kansas homestead, with nut trees grown and adapted to the Midwest, will make them much more likely to be successful on your homestead or in your yard.

Highly recommend Joseph Lofthouse’s Landrace Gardening book:

Gear that I use and recommend: Meadow Creature Broadfork 14. I have used this to turn over sod for new Milpa garden beds, and even hand dug swales with it. Bulletproof.

Check out the NEW 2024 Homesteading Bundle from Permies, which has 35 e-books, courses, videos.

What I really liked:

The Backyard Forest Garden e-book
Agroforestry
Restoration Agriculture: Designing Your Perennial Farm presentation from Permaculture Voices by Mark Shepard
Permaculture Thorns, A Book About Trying to Build Permaculture Community, by Paul Wheaton.
Plus 2 books by Nicole Sauce.