If you want to garden, we want to help you. Most days at EDO we do this by coming out to care for your property with premium organic fertilizers, restoring your soils with our probiotic FertileTea, or helping design your new garden oasis. The best of these days are when clients come out to ask us about their garden. We love sharing what we know, and hearing what you know, which is why we are honored to sponsor the Washington State Fair Permaculture Booth with our local Master Gardener's extension. This year is our second year sharing our passion with you, and we look forward to continuing to do so in the future.
This page dives a little deeper into Permaculture - a landscape design approach that is focused on creating human habitats that follow nature's patterns. By mimicking nature it takes less work to meet our needs, creates more abundance, recycles resources on site, and provides many a hobbit hole for critters all shapes and sizes.
Learning about how to grow your own food can seem daunting, but the good news is plenty of food plants grow well enough without any intervention. Think about plucking juicy huckleberries and thimbleberries on your walk through the woods. They are just there doing their thing, no additional water or fertilizers needed.
Even those dandelions popping up in the yard are entirely edible - their leaves have more iron and calcium than spinach! Dandelions are also an important early food source for bees and were brought here with the honeybees for just that purpose. Permaculture is all about finding these connections, making use of on site resources, and creating more functional connections through designing systems that mimic nature.
Bill Mollison and his student David Holmgren coined the term "Permaculture" as well as identified 12 Principles that are key to designing and implementing a garden that's harmonious with nature.
These spaces have both cultural and agricultural value with their roots in natural and indigenous communities where working with nature to create abundance is an enduring element. Thus the term Permaculture was born, a combo of permanent + agriculture + culture.
We have the basics of each principle outlined here, as well as a presentation below that breaks them down into idioms.
For an in-depth review of the 12 Principles, we recommend checking out the website that David Holmgren helped develop which has many examples of all things permaculture.
Thank you for taking the time to visit our booth and page. We hope this brief overview inspires folks to seek out more information on this ever evolving discipline. An important tenet of permaculture is restoring and respecting soil, after all you can't have healthy plants without healthy soils. We help our clients restore their soils with our FertileTea which we can easily apply to existing landscapes.
For DIYers and Permies, sheet mulching is a great way to improve soils before planting! If you stopped by our booth to see the Sheet Mulching display, but didn't get a chance to grab our nifty handout, use the button below and we'll send you the PDF. Or if you're interested in a permaculture design, but overwhelmed by the amount of information and detail, contact us and we can take care of the design and build for you!
