How to Apply Permaculture to your Garden

Permaculture is a concept of permanent agriculture. Permaculture focuses on growing plants in an eco-friendly manner. In other words, it is sustainable agriculture where you utilize natural wind, soil, water, etc. for growing organic crops. Permaculture helps you reduce the carbon footprint while providing you healthy organically grown food options.

Applying permaculture to your already existing garden is not very complicated. But, it requires immaculate planning.

Tips for applying permaculture to your garden:

Design your Garden
The first step for applying permaculture in your garden is designing your garden. You will need to decide how much space you want to allocate to your permaculture garden. Make sure that space receives sunlight for at least 6 hours in the day.

Choose the Plants
Choose plants according to the space available in the garden. Take inspiration from Mother Nature when you plan the layout of your garden. For instance, if you look at a forest, you have a canopy of tall trees which require plenty of sunshine. Below this are the shrubs and below them are herbs. Besides these you have vines growing vertically. All these plants grow together spacing themselves according to their needs of natural resources such as sunlight, water, etc.

You can use these principles to design your garden. This will enable you to stack several plants in limited space in your garden.

Also, it is important to choose plants that benefit each other when grown together. You can plant crops that stimulate the growth of other crops, make your plants resistant to pests and disease. Certain plants attract pests protecting your crops from them. Having predator animals such as frogs, lizards, etc. also helps avoid pests in the garden. Besides, certain plants attract beneficial insects such as pollinators.

Water Distribution
Sustainable practices are the highlight of permaculture. Therefore, even the water used for watering the plants should be collected from sources such as rainwater, melting snow, etc. Rainwater harvesting is an effective way of collecting water for your garden.

Preparing the Soil
The best way to protect the soil and keep it in place is by using mulch or ground cover crops. Peas and beans serve as excellent cover crops because they keep the soil in place. Besides they decompose and feed the soil if they are cut before they seed.

• Check the soil before you start gardening. If the soil is dry or has limited organic contact then it needs to be built up.
• Compost your soil adequately.
• Make sure to design the garden such that you do not need to step on the soil for harvesting because this negatively impacts the soil.
• Avoid tilling the soil because it exposes the lower layers of soil to sunlight with the result that the beneficial nutrients and living creatures below the top layer of the soil get destroyed.

Adopt these easy to follow principles and cultivate your permaculture garden and enjoy organic products of your very own garden!