Facing a blank canvas? Let’s design it top-down! (walkthrough inside)

Reading Time: 4 minutes Any of these sound familiar? “We essentially have a blank canvas that we want to optimize, to the best of our abilities, as this is our forever home.” “I need a good, broad-stroke food plan for what is now a blank slate.” “I have a lot of ideas of what I would like to do […]

Food forest cover crop update

Reading Time: 3 minutes Somewhere up the family tree, my forebears must have offended a hag coven or something… Behold our ancestral curse: The limestone bedrock. My land is in the mountainous part of Croatia, a region characterized by this particularly challenging landscape feature that has determined the destinies of many generations of farmers before me. On the one […]

How to design a Food Forest in 20 minutes

Reading Time: 9 minutes Tall order? Read on and watch me *demo* it. Earlier this week, I showed you what designing the whole farm layout looks like, and now I’ll zoom in on one aspect: designing a food forest with swales. 5 minutes for Part I, 15 minutes for Part II, and DONE! Food forests, in the context of […]

Water Management For Every Permaculture Property

Reading Time: 20 minutes When I was a kid, my brother and I used to enjoy the winter weather at my grandparents’ farm in the mountains. In a beautiful interplay of natural forces, throughout the winter and early spring we would play in half a meter of snow, walk on frozen lakes and then run from the floodwaters once […]

How to Create a Food Forest – Step-by-Step Guide

Reading Time: 18 minutes Grow 3-5X More Food with Less Maintenance Compared to Conventional Gardening We are going to cover a lot of ground in this post, so I put together a free package of resources that will help you implement what you learn in this post. Be sure to grab it before you leave! If you are wondering […]

How to create a topographic map in 10 minutes without expensive software or mapping skills

Reading Time: 4 minutes Whenever someone asks me to help them design their site, my inner designer says, “give me a topographic map of your site.” With a topographic map, I can feel the terrain and decipher what’s happening from a distance. I can see what the landscape looks like, how the water moves, where there’s a potential for […]

How to work with nature instead of against it to avoid hard work

Reading Time: 4 minutes This is a powerful quote, and in this post, I will illustrate with examples from my property how to implement the ‘working with nature’ permaculture principle in practice. Here’s the thing… We spend most of our days on our permaculture properties, working and thinking about what we need to do. There are always plants to […]