Permaculture Design: How to support nature in a way to become a thriving ecosystem?

Implementing a permaculture garden around the roundhouse at Gaia Ashram, an intentional community in Thailand

One of the main permaculture design principles is „working with nature, not against“. In our process of constructing a natural building with mud bricks, we’ve always envisioned a structure that is part of nature. We wanted to use the existing nature and support the natural succession towards an edible landscape. Our aim was to be part of nature and live protected by her forces.  

 
This article and the video shows how we came up with the garden design, featuring the permaculture zoning. It gives you an overview of the different stages we went through to turn a degraded area into a thriving ecosystem full of food for soil and humans. It is a reflection on the process and also highlights some of the little details and features. The permaculture design was implemented at 1,000 sqm on the land of Gaia Ashram land within less than 12 months, providing yield and increasing diversity right away.

If you want to experience and learn more about gardening and permaculture, you might want to join our next 17-day PDC starting in November 2020. Get all the information right here! For the time in between, we highly recommend our Free Online Permaculture & Resilience Course. Start today, no registration needed.

Get yourself registered and be part of the new Permaculture Design Certificate Course in 2020 in Thailand!

Author: Lars Blume

This 4 min video gives a great overview about the garden and the design ideas and process.

Make the least change for the greater possible effect

For us, it was most important during the entire design process to reduce our negative impact as much as possible and do not destroy nature. At the same time, we had to create space for our shelter and the implementation of the garden. We wanted to integrate the house and the cultivated landscape into the existing framework and therefore we have been very flexible with the shape of the house. This helped us to save a lot of trees and reduce the surface area we’ve had to compact. Based on the location of trees and the main structure we had less freedom in designing our garden. In the design process of the land, we turned these constraints into an asset. We basically looked at the given land based on the permaculture principle „The problem is the solution“. 


As a result, we have loads of trees very close to our structure, as we squeezed the house in between the trees. For us, this is a great example of how important it is to interact with your surroundings. In return, some of our garden beds are nicely shaded and very productive in the dry and hot seasons. For the tropics, it is ideal as the place is already partly protected from the sun by trees. We came here many times and sat with the land to “observe and interact”. We used the time to better understand the benefits of the existing trees and how to fulfill our needs without destroying habitat.

Conditions of the land before implementing the design

The land of Gaia Ashram used to be a conventional rice paddy for a long time. With creating Gaia Ashram as an intentional community, the land was given back to nature for restoration purposes. In some areas, the regeneration process was supported by human intervention. The 1,000 sqm where we’ve built the house on and implemented the permaculture design was mainly left without human maintenance. It was a wild area with robust and invasive native plants and wines trying to bring pioneering trees back to the ground and turning the trees into habitat and organic matter to increase soil conditions. Some young fruit trees and banana have been planted into the wilderness. On the outer edge of the plot we included a part of Gaia Ashram into our design that was turned into an alley cropping system 2 years ago. The alley crop was still in a very early stage of establishment, however, the structures and the main trees, as well as some smaller trees and shrubs have been planted beforehand. Like in the rest of the area, invasive native plants and very invasive grasses were competing with all newly introduced plants.

Permaculture design process 

The key to permaculture design is to link different elements in a self-benefiting way with each other while creating synergies. In this particular case, we used the land as a design practice during a permaculture weekend workshop. We shared our expectations, limiting factors and identified the main design driver for our permaculture design together. Based on this input we asked the participants to go through the permaculture design process and to come up with two different designs. We wanted to show how permaculture can provide many ways to fulfill your personal needs. In the end, we merged these two designs into our personal design. In all cases, we followed the 7 step design logic called SADIMET (Survey, Analyse, Design, Implementation, Maintenance, Evaluation and Tweaking).

Every design started with the unchangeable infrastructures while defining access and giving priority to existing pathways. The unchangeable elements in our design for the garden area has been the roundhouse plus all existing trees and the main road, one pathway plus an existing alley crop that we, as mentioned, wanted to integrate into the design. 


That’s where permaculture starts: from patterns to details using existing structures and reducing the need for human intervention. Observing and understanding the growth potential and the natural flow is key in using human action in a supportive manner. There’ll be an extra blog post about the design showing the different aspects and a detailed description of our design drivers, and mainly the whys behind placing elements and the different functions we have been able to implement. We will publish a blog post just about the design and all details in a few weeks.

Permaculture Zoning

As Gaia Ashram already has the main garden area to produce vegetables we decided to limit our time and energy input to the kitchen garden around the roundhouse. We designed a small zone 1 just surrounding the house and our daily pathways. This area was productive enough to give us some nice herbs and greens for smoothies or fresh homemade tea and just a few vegetables like tomatoes, eggplants, and spinach to pick it on the go.


The included alley crop is a typical zone 2 feature. A few fast-growing trees like papaya trees, bananas, and mulberries were producing some fruits from the very beginning. In this area, we increased the energy input and replanted some trees that did not survive the first dry season and worked on the ground cover and shrubs to control the invasive species.


We kept a part of the 1,000 sqm as zone 4 and 5. In one part, we planted a few more bananas and other easy growing plants but kept the human intervention on a very low level. Some parts we didn’t even touch at all. This part was designed to be a habitat for wild animals, birds, and snakes and actually it worked out very well. Snakes were not really interested in our main garden and living area. If around, they usually just were one their way to zone 5. In this area, it was easy for them to find food and shelter. 

Explanation Permaculture zoning:

Zoning in permaculture is splitting your land into 5 zones and your house. Zone 1 is the area surrounding your house or along your daily paths while zone 5 is the wildlands that you are not maintaining productively. The boundaries of each zone are flexible and not fixed or static. Zone 1 is the area you visit daily, with each higher zone being visited less and less. Taking this into account, the elements in zone 1 need regular maintenance while elements in zone 5 hardly need any care at all:

Zone 0: Housing, tool shed, accommodation place for processing harvested food. 
Zone 1: An area needing regular observation, energy, and harvesting, very close to the house or daily pathways to increase efficiency. Kitchen garden, and outdoor preparations. Annual plants, medicinal and kitchen herbs, eye-catchers and colorful flowers,  kitchen compost, 
Zone 2: Less intensive managed areas with higher demand for space and opportunity for bulk harvesting. Meadow orchard and partly food forest.
Zone 3: Occassionally visited areas and seasonal wide-ranging crops eg. corn, wheat, rice, pumpkin, bamboo
Zone 4: Is about facilitating and interacting with nature in a more experimental approach. Wild food gathering (mushrooms, nuts)
Zone 5: This zone is part of the fair share approach of permaculture; it attracts wildlife, encourages diversity and is beneficial to the designed parts. Zone 5 is a completely wild ecosystem, a great place to observe and learn from nature.

Implementing in time phases

In the surveying phase of the design process, we already figured out that the soil was very sandy on the one hand and also still in very poor conditions. Taking this into account we decided to go into time phases. 



1. Soil work

2. Speeding up the secondary succession

3. Add edible and medicinal plants

4. Increasing diversity

5. Introducing edible ground cover to the ecosystem

6. Implement plants based on design

Supporting the soil-food-web

At the moment we are still in phase one, working on the soil and feeding organic matter to the soil and planting plants to feed the soil and increase available nutrients in the soil. We had to add a lot of organic matter and other nutrients to get things growing. In some places, we used woody material as a long term ground cover. This tactic went very well and helped to change the soil quality and also suppressed the invasive plants very well. We’ve put food scraps, green mulch, and other fast composting organic matter on top and planted ground cover such as pumping as a second layer of ground cover. This two-step approach gave us a pumpkin yield in year one and reduced our workload of controlling the invasive plants and increased soil conditions. 


In other areas, we only put our kitchen compost and fast composting material to add a nice layer of organic material. This worked also pretty well and in the areas where we worked with this technique we have been able to introduce chilies, root vegetables such as Cassava, mulberry, wild pepper (Piper sarmentosum; a plant in the family Piperaceae used in many Southeast Asian cuisines) and a lot of other plants.

Phasing in time with flexibility and focus

In order to create an edible ground cover, we introduced a lot of spinach and pumpkins. This supported our work to turn the plot of land into a nice garden without a lot of effort. The best thing for me is that almost all of the plants we introduced to this area are edible and have been propagated from other parts of Gaia Ashram. We used the diversity that has been created in other parts of the land in the first place to speed up secondary succession and meet some of our long-term needs at the same time.

As you can see, we worked on all phases at the same time but in year one and in the upcoming years, the soil work will be the dominant and most important work to do. Only if the soil food web is in good condition and the soil quality increased significantly, we will put time and energy in the other four steps. Implementing your permaculture design together with nature might take some more years but for sure it is less work and nature will help you to tweak your design and will also take some decision for you, especially about the best spots to grow a certain plant.

Want to learn more?

Join our upcoming Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) Course in Thailand at Gaia Ashram. It will start on March 25 and continues till April 10. You can find more information here or just drop us a message; we’re happy to hear from you.