Session 3: Placement of an Element
COVID-19 Community Resilience & Permaculture Course
Session 3 Placement of an Element
Watch the video, check the summarazing graph, read the text, and finish the learning exercise to complete this session.
Interacting with nature the permaculture way.
How to choose the right element and the right place?
After finishing this session you will:
Be able to question yourself about why you are about to implement an element
Know the three aspects for placement
Be able to place a single element on your land.
The first practical session of our Community Resilience and Permaculture course is dedicated to the question how to implement a single element. We will use it to introduce and experience some important underlying principles and design drivers in permaculture. You can come back to these principles and design drivers when placing a single element, implementing a permaculture technique or designing entire ecosystems.
Bill Mollison is guiding the way
Before implementing an element or intervention into an established ecosystem it is highly recommended to slow down and act in line with the following quote.
““Protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless action!“
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Simply put: Before you start implementing without asking for the why and elaborating on what is a good placement within your permaculture design, slow down and guide yourself through the following process.
Understanding the why
It is helpful to step back from the detailed implementation plan that might be in your mind already and ask yourself three questions:
What is my need I want to fulfill with this intervention?
Can I fulfill my need in a more cooperative way?
How can I fulfill my needs and strengthen the environment and ecosystem?
Once you have answered these questions individually for each element or intervention you are about to do, you will experience that your first idea might not even match with the need you actually wanted to fulfill. You might even find a more energy-efficient and cooperative way to satisfy your needs.
Right element
You can fulfill one need with different elements. Once you understood the why, it is about to figure out what element is the best in this particular moment and situation to fulfill your need and function and is still in line with your values. In the tropics, managing soil fertility in the long-run is hard work. Thus, we decided to go for Sepp Holzer’s famous Hugelkultur (horticulture) to design a new garden bed to increase our ability to grow food and to become more resilient as a community. By designing this garden bed, we were also able to introduce and experience some important underlying principles and design drivers of permaculture. (We will talk more about what hugelkultur is and how to make it in our next online session!)
Right placement
To elaborate on the right location for an element you would normally follow the holistic permaculture design. Why is that? Permaculture design teaches us to design from patterns to details, which means we define our needs and wants and design accordingly in a holistic way. Even if you are about to implement just a single permaculture technique without changing your entire plot into a permaculture place, it is still worth spending some time to elaborate on the three following aspects:
Access: Do I have access to the element? Do I block existing paths or access-ways to other structures or non-developed areas of my land by implementing the element? Do I have access within the element? (e.g. can I reach all plants in my garden bed from the outside or do I have to put a path in like a keyhole design).
Structure: Which is the right structure to fulfill my need? Is the structure able to sustain itself? How is the structure interacting with other structures around?
Water: Where is the water coming from? Do I need to manage water intake (minimize or increase)? Do I need irrigation or do sufficient natural water sources exist?
How to implement a single element by: Sketching the move
Experiential learning
At our session at Gaia Ashram we took the participants out on the land to place an element. In this specific case, we want to transform a straw-bale circle that used to function as a gathering spot for people into a garden bed. As time passed nature started to use the circle in a different way. Now it blocked human interaction and kept people out of the circle. Due to this, nature used the time to regenerate and life in the soil came back as human weight and constant trampling did not further compact the soil and smash all efforts of life to return. We saw the first indicator of fertility and water - robust green plants had returned. We played around with the three aspects (access, structure, and water) and defined the spot, and the size of the Hugelkultur to ensure access without compacting the soil.
We discussed if we should integrate the existing straw-bales into the structure. The group decided to do the following things:
Increase the distance between housing and garden bed to give access for maintenance.
Reopen the blocked path between the house and the main path to allow easy access.
Reduce the spacing of the garden bed to be able to work in the bed without stepping on the soil.
Center the structure around the green spot as we assumed that this spot has better access to water and fertility than the rest of the area.
Integrate the straw-bales to give further strength to the Hugelkultur during the upcoming rainy season.
As we did not have access to more soil, we also decided to take the adjacent top-soil to cover the Hugelkultur afterward.
It was great to see how easy the group started to make use of permaculture principles and designing techniques based on gut feeling. We supported the process and linked the decisions back to the permaculture framework to showcase how to make an intervention according to the permaculture framework. Whenever you are about to place an element on your land, implement a social element guide yourself through the three steps:
Why? What? Where?
By doing so you will right away increase the efficiency of your ecosystem without having a full permaculture design at hand
Learning exercise:
Just have a look around your area and define one element you want to implement. You could choose the one you are about to implement anyway or just go for a compost pile. Now ask yourself why you want to implement this element first. Secondly find the right spot and placement following the three aspects (access, water, and structure). By doing so you will easily see how important and easy these two steps are.
