Hi everyone!

It’s very easy to focus on the gardening side of Permaculture, as that is, after all, its core focus. But as members of Permaculture Noosa, it’s likely we would want to explore all the other aspects of Permaculture and dig deeper into the principles and ethics of this wonderful system.

For me, living on a barely established small acreage, permaculture has so far provided ample opportunities for me to explore one of the areas in permaculture that most resonates with me – the goal to be more self-sufficient.

One of the things I like so much about permaculture is its holistic focus. Unlike syntropics for example, which is a great method for production farming, permaculture likes to look at the whole picture, and how a person can take more responsibility for their life and needs.

Now, I suppose it’s not often that we put our hand up for more responsibility. It’s not as if modern life doesn’t already provide us with lots of opportunities to be responsible citizens. But responsibility in a permaculture sense is not so much about earning a good living so you can provide for your family at the supermarket, but more about directly providing the basic requirements for life itself, rather than simply relying on governments, councils or anyone else for that matter. And it’s a role I willingly put my hand up for when we purchased our property. It’s not as if I want hardship or hard work to be the entirety of my life, but neither do I want the soft consumerism that makes me feel like I am at the whim of a fickle universe.

The type of responsibility we are talking about here is of course responsibility for food, water and shelter. And that’s of course where the gardening comes into play. You need a lot of food to feed even a family of four, and the more you try to be self-sufficient, the more you realise just how hard our pioneering forebears must have had it. Even water is something we take totally for granted, coming as it does to many people, directly to their kitchen sink, by way of the town water supply.

Living as I do, in a rural area with no town water, but in an area with a very generous annual rainfall provided me with a great situation to become responsible for my own water supply. Two new forty thousand litre concrete water tanks, fed by the roof of a newly constructed shed gave me a good start, but swales, drainage, irrigation from an underground bore, and the repurposing of the old water tank were also components of the overall plan, and gave me lots of opportunities to prepare for that drought that is surely around the corner. Even harvesting the water from the chicken coop roof to provide the chooks with an adequate source of water is permaculture in action.

Permaculture is a multi-faceted discipline, and of course, you can explore whatever areas float your boat (let’s hope we don’t have that much rain). For me, after a lifetime of grudging consumerism, it’s finally coming to grips with what it means to be even vaguely self-sufficient, and it’s clear that I have found a life-long learning opportunity that will definitely see me out without running out of content.

Geoff Powell

President.