So I am going to get my “low of this part of the seminar out first” and then get on to the good stuff, I didn’t like how one presenter made this type of system a “lifestyle” and I do mean it just that way, he gives examples in the same way someone would if they were taking about the church, and I didn’t go to a garden seminar to have folks talk to me about using a garden idea in my business and or personal life as a moral compass.  

Now for the good stuff! I love this quote.. ” The health of your soil is tied directly to the health of your own family or farm”   At that point he talked about if you had children, and recommended ” Allow them to have some small business on the farm/land as soon as possible to allow them to connect directly to the land, otherwise, they will pull away as its their parents thing” examples for even very young children, grow flowers, sunflowers, worms, etc.

Gave ten basic things to keep in mind.. I will just work down the list with you..

1) Always Observe and learn from Nature examples, before you go to plant, look at what is there and see how it has figured out the sun, the winds patterns and how the water lays or where frost will dip down etc.

2) Start Small and Slow- Work a four by four space at a time, it’s about the amount of space that the average person can get done in a single working time and go from there, ideally you are working to create layers and spacing that with time require less work with time, rather then creating garden spaces that require the same amount of work year after year.

3) Multiple Fuctions-Always look at Stacking your functions Each time you look to add an element to the system it should ideally serve multiple purposes and give ideally multiple yields in different parts of the process.  An excellent example that was given is chickens, they provide eggs, meat, feathers and compost, but they also can be used as living tillers and also as a bug control method, they are a good first choice as a living example of something that works well as a stacking example

4) Redundancy-Everything you need to have happen in the system should have a redundancy built-in, Every vital function is take care of by multiple parts. The example given was planting the same plants in different parts of the garden and or having a couple different gardens around your property so that if one fails in one area, you have redundancy in other area’s.

5) beneficial Relationships, Stability and resilience come from having many different but useful connections between the different parts

6) Biological and renewable resources, and the interesting one about this one was that if focused not on the garden so much as on being aware and using people for their knowledge and skills as a renewable resource.

7)Cycling Resources and energy Basic Closed loop systems, kitchen waste goes to the chickens, makes eggs and compost, the compost is in turn goes into the garden and round and round it goes!

8)diversity and edges Edges are those marginal places where two systems meet and mix, they are the most productive, walk you land and learn your edges.

9) Evolution and succession-Work with time and the evolution of creating mature self-reliant systems.

10) Be Creative -The problem is the solution, The yield of the system is limited to only the creativity of the designer, and remember “Your attitude affects the overall Design” The example given was- You don’t have a snail issue, you have a duck deficiency.