Plan Your Permaculture Plot

Implementing permaculture practices can be overwhelming, but not because of a lack of information, tools, techniques, skills, or prescriptions. Instead, lack of a clearly defined process to design, develop, and manage a permaculture property is what hinders many people. Thankfully, you can significantly reduce the number of options to consider when building a permaculture property if you take time to make a Venn diagram that outlines what you have, what you want, and what is right.

The good news is that permaculture already includes most of the tools and ideas that can help us with this process of elimination. These tools and ideas just need to be organized and applied in a different way than they have before. In particular, the quintessential needs and yields analysis of permaculture design — which involves selecting an element in the design and listing what it requires and what it produces — is something we rarely complete for the central element of our systems: ourselves. As you’ll see, when applying this method of design to yourself, it