Author: Jayme The Designer

Twice this week I have seen posts on social media where someone is asking for farm fresh local vegetables or fruit or flowers for foraging that are not in season. These folks have no idea that their ask is a seasonal one and they missed the season or it hasn’t happened yet.

In our instant gratification culture we have lost the knowledge of the patterns of food, of growing plants, of the harvest widows for nearly everything we eat. The patterns of food? It’s really very simple, in each season and climate there are foods that are available depending on where we are in the calendar that may be sourced locally. This context varies depending on where you live in the world. Some places have a bounty of foods available year round: the tropics, sub-tropics, Mediterranean and a few other climate types with more or less stable above freezing temperatures for long periods or even year round. Others climates, not so much. Here in a high altitude, dry, short season climate many fruits and vegetables are only available in short windows and in the case of many fruit only every few years as the conditions line up in our favor. In my county there are very few produce growers because of the climate and water availability, or lack thereof. When I see people asking for fresh local produce I can tell by what they are asking for that they are truly disconnected from our food context. I have seen people asking for vine ripened tomatoes in February and March, plants that we growers are just starting from seed to be put out in mid to late May or sometimes even June. Even the shortest days to maturity varieties won’t produce for at least 60 days from transplant, the ones worth eating anyway. Are there shorter days to maturity types? There sure are. They aren’t very tasty, they just make some thing that looks like a tomato very quickly. This season, in 2026, has been particularly hard on food producing plants with hot drying winds and very little rain. Harvests will be minimal this year. Want Spring broccoli? Too bad. We go straight from cold to hot with no middle cool season to speak of which is where broccoli is happiest.

Not only have I seen people asking for items locally that are not in season right now, I have also seen more people asking for all foods that they can get their hands on to be locally sourced. This is challenging. There are many beef producers. Some pork and lamb. One or two poultry producers. It’s hard to get pasteurized milk products from a small producer here and with the threat of bird flu many folks are opting for pasteurization over raw. Then we get to vegetables. In our county of almost a million people we have a tiny handful of farms that are growing enough vegetables to offer to the public. A small population of the public. Generally they offer these in the form of a CSA (Community Support Agriculture). Most of our produce that is touted as local comes from no less than an hour and a half away (driving). It’s hard to get our heads wrapped around how little food is actually produced where we live, and, for some, even harder to imagine that the availability window for strawberries, or tomatoes, or dandelions has either passed or has not come yet.

Until we had so many methods for storing foods, especially our perfecting refrigeration, we were seasonal eaters. The spring season usually started with greens, which was a welcome change from the dwindling food stores of winter that generally consisted of processed meats, potatoes and other roots, winter squash, and in more recent years whatever could be canned from the harvest the year before. There is nothing wrong with these foods but eventually we start to crave a salad. Asparagus is probably my favorite vegetable (don’t tell the artichokes). I wait, mostly impatiently, for the stalks to come up in spring. I eat asparagus until I am sick of it, sometimes for breakfast, raw, while standing waiting for water tanks to fill; by then it’s too warm for it to continue to send up new shoots. I don’t buy that skinny sad stuff in the grocery store unless I have to due to a failure in my own patch. About the same time that the asparagus finishes the rhubarb is ready, at least in my garden. My rhubarb plant is likely at least 30 years old and has a 6 to 8 foot spread when fully grown. There is no way I can possibly eat or process all the stalks from the single plant but for about a month I do what I can to make a dent. If I have planned well I will have radishes ready during this window in the spring, along with baby lettuce, snap peas, and if I’m lucky and it’s been warm the first of the strawberries. And so it goes…

There is a principle in permaculture – Use Edges & Value the Marginal. Seasonal foods are marginal, and we no longer value them when they are at their peak of perfection like I do my asparagus in Spring. We take for granted that tomatoes, and peppers, and bananas, and celery are available to us as soon as we step into the grocery store no matter the time of year. This is comes at a true cost, both to the environment and to our health. That Honeycrisp apple in the grocery store took up to 14 months to land on that shelf from when it was harvested. We have strategic refrigeration warehouses all over the US. They are very carefully climate controlled for the type of produce they hold. Apples are kept at temperatures just above freezing and at about 90% humidity. In some systems there is also a reduction in oxygen in the space to prevent spoilage, it is very energy intensive. This is just one of the ways our food system has allowed us to become disconnected from the realities of the foods we consume. It allows us to have fresh foods on demand as we desire them with none of the wait.

We also consume foods shipped from many miles away, frequently in the thousands of miles. Our bananas, avocados, and citrus are just a few examples of foods we will never be able to produce outdoors in Colorado and that we happily drop our dollars for in the average grocery trip. How many people in my climate genuinely know that winter is citrus season in the Northern hemisphere? Not many. This is because we don’t grow these types of foods and they are available year round in nearly every grocery store.

One of the instructors we invite in to teach frequently shared this little gem – try to eat something that you grew in your garden each day of the year. I challenge you. This task makes you aware of food in a completely different way than you are likely used to. It gets you thinking today about what you eat today and tomorrow and in the depths of winter. It gets you making plans and practicing preservation techniques and using your harvest. Over time it gets you recognizing the patterns of your food.

Today I had a small handful of raspberries. They are a touch late this year and smaller than usual. If I wasn’t intimately acquainted with them I wouldn’t recognize this pattern in their growth. The potatoes are dying back two weeks early, but I snuck a peek and there are tubers to dig. The patch always dies from the middle out to the edges. I always look forward to the first fresh potatoes, before they have been cured they cook up fast and are extra creamy with less developed starch. They will store for the winter once cured and I will have them for fulfilling the challenge of eating something I grew in my garden each day of the year along with the onions that are coming along, the tomatoes that will make sauce, the eggplants that will be marinated, and the herbs that will be dried. This information about the raspberries and potatoes are examples of the pattern knowledge we are missing as it relates to our food.

As I type out my answer to one of the social media posts I wonder if we, collectively, can get back to understanding the patterns.

Since shortly after I began my permaculture journey I realized that none of this life makes any sense without a community. Community generally shares common goals, supports each other, holds community members to account. Good community is uplifting, helpful, and generally healthy for all its members. The process of community building is simple but isn’t easy. In our culture where the individual is held as the pinnacle of an evolved human, it’s frequently difficult to shift the thinking of many folks into that of supporting people outside their immediate or extended family.

One of the ways I work to build community is to be of service. This can look different for each of the members of my community. I make myself generally available, with some well constructed boundaries, when my people have a need. Most times it is answering questions that are within my area of expertise, sometimes it is listening during particularly troubled periods, and less frequently but still important, it is making soup for someone who may be sick or having surgery. Showing up is how I have chosen to be in community. Sometimes there are some dollars involved, more frequently it is just being a reliable person that others can count on.

Last year about this time after changing chiropractors I learned that at some point in the past I broke a vertebra in my low back. Before it healed, likely at the time that the injury occurred, the bone where it was broken slipped, healing in a way that was misaligned. I suspect I know when it happened and I haven’t been able to work physically as long or as hard as I had in the past. When I learned this information it broke me. I spent months in internal shock and in body protection mode. That was likely not what I had needed to do, the injury happened years before and I had been getting on just fine… mostly. As a consequence my garden, the thinking, planning, working meditation space that has pulled me through summers for over a decade, became a landing place for everything I didn’t have the bandwidth to deal with. It became a representation of how I was feeling inside. Messy and broken, with only a fraction of productivity that had existed before. This year the plan was to whip the space back into shape to maximize food growing, which is important with the ever rising cost of food. It was slow and I was dreading some of the tasks that needed to be completed which included reclaiming a fairly large area taken over by an invasive rhizome grass. I started slowly working through it. In April I received a message from a group I’d done a talk for a few years ago-

“Our gardening group is focused on field trips this year. It there any possibility that we could come to your place to see your gardens? Soil health is very important to our group because our focus is on optimal nutrition. Our members are willing to pay for a class there.” – D

When you say things loud enough long enough people want to see what you are doing with their own eyes and this is a logical consequence of me running my mouth. When messages like this come in many people rejoice, excited that folks want to see what they are doing and get some well deserved accolades. Me? My heart plummeted into my stomach. There was no way I was willing to bring strangers into the space that was more of a representation of my inner landscape than the place that had the soil built from a substrate as hard as concrete and that has grown thousands of pounds of food over the last 14 years. The growing season just around the corner already felt daunting enough at the time and I had areas that needed to be reclaimed from the mat of smooth brome that had spread by seed and rhizome, seemingly overnight, last year. Physically, even though I had months to get things in order, it felt impossible to honor the request.

I did it anyway.

For the next 2 months I worked on cleaning up and cleaning out the garden. Some days I was able to work for several hours, others only 15 or 20 minutes. It wasn’t enough. I finally looked around and conceded that I needed help. The kind of help only a group of people moving materials and fighting back grass would be able to provide. I hesitated to make that request for a couple of weeks. I have become accustomed to being the helper in community, not being on the receiving end of the help. The day I sent the email with the request to about 40 people I called my friend and cried. Most of my life my personality has been wrapped up in a bow made of independence. How would my request be received? How would I handle people in the space I built with my own hands over many years?

I set two dates, one week apart. I knew there was no way to get everything completed in one session. It was too much. Responses started coming in almost immediately. 10 people for the first day, nearly as many for the second. It was real and now I had a deadline. I had to be ready when people showed up to help and just like people who clean their house before the housekeeper shows up I went into panic mode about what should be done before people were in my space. By the end of each day before the first community work session my body was screaming at me. I pressed on.

Only the people I talk with on a regular basis knew I was having people come to help out, at least for the first session. For the second date there were a couple of people I talked to the day of who only know me on the periphery and I needed to explain that folks were coming to do some work in the garden because of the content of our conversations. Their response was “must be nice”.

Within community there is what many people would consider sacrifice: time, sometimes money, compromise, and having people hold you to account. To really be in and have community you have to be a good community member. This is the part that is hard for people in western cultures, especially those embedded in capitalism where there is a value assigned to every action. You have to communicate, be present, accountable, and honest. You have to expect others to do the same but understand that this isn’t a one for one transaction. You have to be willing to meet people where they are, which is sometimes tough in our society that silos people into groups that are alike, class and income bracket in particular. Good community has to be fostered.

“Must be nice” —

Yeah, actually it is. This community I’ve been cultivating for years. The service. The relationship building. The showing up for others. Nearly a decade in the making to be able to have a list of 40 or so people to send a message to with a request and have people respond, some of them with resounding enthusiasm. Community building takes work. It takes intention. It takes humility, and listening, and counseling, and holding space. It takes showing up. It takes being someone others want to be around, even when they know you aren’t a morning person and that you have opinions. Even when they know that you don’t mince words or shrink back in favor of appearing more palatable. I wasn’t always good at this, and there is more work to be done. Now more than ever I hear people talking about finding their village; about how we need to get back to living in community. So few of these people understand exactly what it means to live in community.

I’m going to keep building and expanding my community and just maybe those two people will become a part of it and realize what it takes to get people to show up for them too. It’s tough though. There are actions that must be taken, words to be spoken, and a life shift that has to occur.

If you want people to show up for you, work on the skills it takes to be a member of a community. You won’t regret it.

When your soil is very degraded it’s in what is considered in the first successional stage. This is where soils start the restoration process on their own beginning with weeds. This process takes nature hundreds of years or more in our dry climate. We can push succession along using a specific methods and get the work done in a few seasons. The problems we are trying to solve are numerous. Compaction, weeds, and low moisture retention are the primary indicators that something is wrong. Disease tends follow.

The processes of soil restoration are the same whether you are trying to get to a vegetable garden, a lawn, a food forest or any other plantings.

In soil restoration I use a combination of things. The first is microbial rich compost. This is an important key in pushing succession from weeds to desired plants. It’s important to know that not all compost is created equally. It’s best to learn the compost process that gets the end result we are looking for and do it yourself. This ensures that you have control of all the ingredients and the process so that you don’t end up with putrified organic matter that sets your soils back in succession. I once had a neighbor buy a garden mix that was heavy in compost from a local garden materials supply company. Nothing would grow in it, not even weeds, for 4 years. We never found out what specifically was in it, but I suspect that it had a measurable amount of herbicide. This is why it is important to make your compost. There are many techniques involved with the compost making process. Once you try out a few you will find one that works for you. The internet is full of compost technique information, though I wouldn’t trust all of it. Thermophillic compost is the fastest with the highest learning curve, static compost is the easiest pile type compost but takes the longest, sheet mulching is layering in place and allowing the compost process to happen over a series of months (usually put down in fall and planted into in spring). Vermicompost is very appropriate when all you have to contribute to the compost process is food scraps and can be done indoors.

The second part of soil restoration is to follow the 5 tenets of soil health. These are an important reminder of what we should be adhering to to achieve optimal soil health. They are as follows:

1. Soil armor. — Our soils should be covered at all times. This means either a mulch cover or plant cover, always. This prevents evaporation, aids in soil cooling, and helps prevent compaction. Compaction is bad.

2. Minimize soil disturbance. — No tilling, ever. When we create disturbance we disrupt the microbial communities that create soil structure, cycle nutrients, and keep water in the soil. This sets back succession and weeds seeds get the signal to germinate. Tilling also creates compaction. Compaction is bad.

3. Plant diversity — Each plant family has a separate microbiome. When we plant many plant families together their separate microbiomes begin to cooperate. When we plant a high diversity of plants we see healthier plants, less disease and better seed and fruit production.

4. Continual live plant — We are feeding the microbiome. When we don’t have a living root in place there aren’t sugars going to the biology. The good and diverse biology either dies or goes dormant. This sets back succession to weeds.

5. Livestock/animal integration — This one can be challenging in an urban setting but is important nonetheless. Animals provide services. They graze, trample, and make nutrient deposits in our soils. These can be domestic or wild, though it’s easier to manage the domestic animals.  

The last part of this overview is no chemicals, organic or synthetic, ever. When we use biocides or artificial fertilizers we kill all the good things in our soils that give us the results we want. The use of these chemicals makes us addicted to them by requiring their use indefinitely.

As plant people we tend to look at our struggling plants and want to help them, we need to remember that if our plants are struggling we have a soil problem. Practicing the soil health principles alleviates the problems over time, allows us to do less work with fewer inputs and makes our gardens stronger.

2025 potato harvest. 49.2 pounds minus the 3 or so pounds I got impatient and harvested last week.

This is from an in ground bed. It is 7×7 feet at it’s widest points but is not square in shape so it is not the full 49 square feet of planting space. I’ve been growing potatoes in this area for 4 or 5 years and, with the exception of last year, have gotten a harvest like this every time. Last year in late June, before any tubers formed, the grasshoppers defoliated every last plant in this bed so there was no harvest.

I plant using the Ruth Stout method with one exception and that is that I make sure the seed potatoes are nested into the soil before I cover them with mulch.

I never honor the spacing suggestions for things and potatoes are not an exception. I think most of the seed potatoes were spaced 6 to 8 inches apart.

I generally only do one application of mulch but make it quite deep and then ignore the bed until harvest. This year I am wishing I had added a little more mulch once the plants started coming up. The microbiology in my garden is so active they ate most of the mulch I put down and some of the potatoes were exposed to sun and turned green once the plants began to die back signaling the end of the season. I will save the green ones to plant next season. There is no mounding and I do not try to force a larger harvest by adding soil; it makes them harder to harvest when they are too deep anyway. I really do just plant and then ignore, or admire as the season goes on.

This bed is the most disturbed bed in my garden due to the intensity of the harvest of the tubers. Tomorrow it will get a fresh layer of mulch to suppress the weeds that are now going to germinate because I stirred up the seed while harvesting. I will probably plant winter kill cover crop to help the biology recover from the disturbance.

This variety is Kennebec. It is my favorite for cooking with. They don’t disintegrate like a russet can in some applications if you take them just a bit too far. The inter-webs say this about the Kennebec potato:

Kennebec is a medium- to late-maturing white potato. It was bred by the USDA and selected by Presque Isle Station, Maine, in 1941. Kennebec is not under plant variety protection. This fast-growing variety has high yields. It maintains good quality in storage and is grown for both fresh market use and for potato chip manufacturing.

I have never found them in a grocery store so I need to grow all I can for my potato needs. Even though this is nearly 50 pounds it probably won’t be enough.

The next step for these will be sorting, pulling any that I accidentally damaged while I harvested them. I hand dig to minimize problems but my fingernails scratched the skin on a few of them. I will also pull any that have scab. Scab doesn’t affect the edibility of the tubers but I won’t replant them. They will get eaten before non-scab potatoes do. Then they will be brushed clean, no washing, and set under canvas tarps in my back room to cure. They need to be kept out of the light or they will turn green which makes them bitter and slightly toxic.

If you have a decent harvest make sure you cure your potatoes so they will store longer. – Garlic and onions, too.

Don’t store your potatoes with onions or apples. The chemicals released by both with make your potatoes go bad faster. Potatoes want to be stored cool with a decent amount of humidity. Damp sand works well, or a root cellar that isn’t too dry. Check stored potatoes weekly for any that might be going off and dispose of them. The saying “a rotten apple spoils the bunch” applies to potatoes too.

Permaculture [ pur-muh-kuhl-cher ] verb

A systems design science whereby regenerative actions are taken to build human habitat within a natural context rather than opposed to it.

Peregrination [ per-i-gruh–ney-shuhn ] noun

• travel from one place to another, especially on foot.
• a course of travel; journey.

In March 2020 when everything began to be shut down due to the onset of the COVID-19 virus it screwed up my plans. I know I’m not the only person it affected but still it needs to be stated. I convene permaculture courses with Pikes Peak Permaculture and we were on pace to have an amazing course with a good balance of students and teachers with great design sites. We managed to get in one weekend of our 9 month long course when the world began to shut down. I had plans the next month to travel to Arizona to The Canelo Project to participate in a straw bale building workshop, there was going to be a repeat visit the following October to participate in a workshop using a clay building medium to make art. Neither was meant to be.

Just about the same time the whole world was shutting down I was getting emails from a small company about their newly created course to learn about soil. It promised to teach about all the microscopic creatures in the soil and how they are what creates life and disease resistance in plants. I debated for a few days, it was an expensive investment. I kept oscillating between the ‘should I’ and ‘shouldn’t I’ argument. By the fifth day of arguing with myself about the pros and cons I received an email, this company worked out a payment plan for completing the course. This seemed to be my ticket. I didn’t have the nearly four thousand dollars in hand to get this information but I could certainly make some payments.

The terms of the payment plan were a little rough but I figured I could handle it for a little while. I had parsed down my expenses and had no debt. So I signed up. I’ll be honest, the thought of all the tests was intimidating. Yes, tests. This is self paced learning but on a time limit and actual testing to make sure you are learning the material before moving on to the next class. You only get one shot at making the grade (90% average to move on to more advanced training in the future).

Part way through this course my mom mentioned that this was quite fitting considering she never could keep me out of, or from eating, the dirt. Yeah, I was that kid.

I want to be able to say that I took to learning this new skill like a duck to water, I would be lying. It was fascinating and in some ways there was so much that just felt like I innately knew that the soil was so much more than just dirt. I was determined that a new career path was unfolding if I could just get it right. Because of this the amount of pressure I put on myself to get it right was enormous. Add in that the learning was all self paced online, no one really to answer real time questions, no one to confirm that my thought processes were headed in the right direction, no one to correct if I was on the wrong track. I took 5 of the 12 allowed months to finish the online portion. I feel like it should have been significantly less time than that, but with a full time job, a part time volunteer position, and a pandemic, it just wasn’t something that could be completed quickly. I probably made it harder than is actually was.

Once the online portion was completed I had to wait for an available mentor to finish the process, the microscopy analysis. Though I practiced I wasn’t confident in what I was identifying. Turns out I was doing just fine but again it was a lot of self imposed pressure, after all, I was contemplating this path as a career, wasn’t I?

My first successful thermophilic compost pile stressed me out. I liken the amount of attention it requires in the first few days to a quiet toddler in the other room, you have to go see what is going on because inevitably they are getting into some trouble. That pile got to a peak of 173 degrees Fahrenheit. This created a small amount of panic. Alcohol producing bacteria start rapid reproduction at 175 degrees. Alcohol combusts at 180. This is how you get compost fires. What was I doing with my life?! On one hand this was very cool science-y things that I really loved and on the other, the possibility of a fire, or worse the creation of a pile that could make me sick if it went anaerobic. It turned out that I didn’t need to really worry about either scenario and the pile did what a well built compost pile does, it decomposes. Through the process I was able to see some really interesting life through the lens of my microscope. And learn that microscopy makes me nauseous. How was I supposed to make a career out of this if looking at tiny microcosms made me sick?

It turns out that on a sunny morning while feeding all my creatures, looking at Pikes Peak I had a confessional moment with myself. I didn’t want to be strictly a soil consultant, or own a compost company. I wanted to be a permaculturist, with all the complexity that comes with being a permaculturist. Examining soil we find a complex system of partnerships, high diversity, and relationships that keep the system cycling. Permaculture is much the same, design with partnerships, diversity, and relationships that support balanced systems that keep cycling.

Soil education is a huge part of what I do now, but design is the key to systems that are resilient. Permaculture is the design process that chose me.

No matter your political leaning one thing in our society today that can’t be denied is the vast and growing gap between those who have and those who have less. The data is very clear that the crevasse of wealth inequality is widening into a canyon. This creates a squeezing feeling on the parts of the population who, up until recently, were feeling mostly comfortable in their lives, but who also could lose everything with a just a couple of missed paychecks.

In the US we are experiencing a high number of working homeless, people who are working full time jobs but can’t afford housing. At the end of January 2023, 653,104 people, or about 20 of every 10,000 people in the United States, experienced homelessness across the United States. Estimates show that 53% of people living in homeless shelters and 40% of unsheltered people are employed, either full or part-time.

We have a healthcare system that can bankrupt you even if you have health insurance coverage. There are billion dollar companies who would rather not pay for our medical coverage and so have poorly negotiated rates and then set up policies with excessive deductibles. What normal middle class family can pay $12,000 per person per year and an 80/20 split of the costs? May as well be paying out of pocket.

We see the gaps between what CEO’s earn and the median wage in the companies they control increasing. The current ratio data from 2022 shows that CEO’s make 344.3 times more than their average employee makes. In 1965 it was 20.4 to 1. Then we have the ultra rich, their ratios are even higher. Families with inherited wealth, who tend to be a bit quieter than the new wave of tech billionaires who have only gained gargantuan wealth through the boom of the tech industry, who seem to be untouchable. Some of the practices keeping them ultra wealthy are probably against the law, though no one will try to do anything about it.

We know how this ends. We’ve seen it play out before in history over and over and over. Most of the time it ends with violence; the people rising up to the inequality, fed up with the way they are being treated. Mostly it takes a very large population getting pushed into the discomfort of starvation, poor health, loss of loved ones, loss of property and loss of the rights of autonomy to get to the point of revolution. We aren’t there yet, but the signs point to that end if we don’t start to make changes now.

A few years ago on a whim, recommended by Amazon of all things, I bought a book called the Dandelion Insurrection (yes, I know, Insurrections are bad…but…). It’s the first book of a trilogy and I have since bought and read the other two. The story is cheesy but the messages sound loud and clear. I see so many parallels with what is happening in this fictional book series and what is happening now. It doesn’t take too much of a leap of imagination to take the context of the now, turn the inequality up two to five notches and write down what that looks like. I ask all my adult students to read at least the first book. The whole series is based on nonviolent actions to make change. Do we feel oppressed enough yet to make change? I’m not sure we do. But for some in the world we are thinking about what some scenarios look like. We feel the need to at least try.

So, what does trying look like? Well, with good mass organization corporations, governments and oppressive bodies make changes. We show them that they don’t have any choice but to be governed by the people, as it is supposed to be. This requires participation, as opposed to just going about our singular lives in a cloud of frenzied dust too thick to see through. Again, I’m not sure we are at that point…Yet. So, what’s my point?

Plant the seeds and see what grows.

There are some actions that can be taken now. Without much in the way of announcing anything we can:

-Stop participating. Whether it’s paying for things we’re not getting an actual benefit from, or it’s from companies that are using our data without permission, or it’s companies that will opt out of any liability for causing harm through their terms of service clauses, if we stop participating we cripple companies. Mostly this works when it is an organized effort, but it can have power if we as individuals just decide to quit on mass. For some of us this is super easy, we never started participating to begin with. For others this will be harder.

-Skill up. Learn how to do things. Basic things like cooking, mending, repairing things, home and car maintenance, growing a little bit of food. This is a subversive act that keeps money in your own pocket rather than that of someone else. Outsourcing our lives has never been easier and corporations especially have learned how to take advantage of that. There is in entire convenience industry that would collapse if we learned how to do things again. If we must outsource we should be utilizing people we know in our communities who have the skills we are seeking and compensating them for those skills. This keeps people working, keeps the dollars out of the money machine, and helps us know our community members better.

-Shop local. Have community conversations about where the money goes by not shopping local. When we make it a priority to shop local, paying people who also shop local, we keep the money local rather than having it disappear into the wealth machine never to be seen again. Pay with cash. The electronic processing fees are basically a tax that no one voted for and they are sucking our money away little by little every time we swipe a little plastic card. We can keep the same $100 circulating in a local economy for months or even years this way, creating a value that $100 paid to a corporation could never even come close to. This is the best way to make communities financially stable. There is even at least one case study that proves it from a small town in South America.

-Host things like Warm Data Labs where complex perspectives on subjects can be explored. Also consider Crisis Drills with a non-governmental perspective. I use the permaculture framework in my daily life so for me hosting a community crisis drill would look very different from what a church group or government agency would put together. Most disasters will be of a local nature. Every context is different, so every crises can have different flavors.

-Get vocal. Put pressure on local government first, then move up to the state level. Trying to push the federal government is like screaming into the void. We can overwhelm local levels to make change the fastest, they will in turn help us move our State governments into action. We know that there is a State tipping point required for the Federal government to make changes that are pushed, reform by the people doesn’t happen top down, it happens bottom up.

-Build community. Despite the narrative, we can’t do anything alone.

-Be an active community member. Once you’ve started to build the community you have to participate. For every individual this will look like something different. For me it means being a good permaculture educator, speaking my truth about the state of our society and the natural world. It is holding people where they are and leading them in their process through being a good mentor…

…and it’s making soup for you when you are sick or have surgery or need a short break from life, whether you want it or not.

As winter storms go, this was wasn’t really much to write home about. It was a bit long as far as duration and had a significant amount of snowfall, 28 inches at home measured in the only place it didn’t drift from the wind. The drifts are pretty tall, well taller than I am anyway. The power went out for a couple of hours the day before yesterday due to someone hitting a power pole because they just had to go out.

What do you do when you are all alone for days while it’s too uncomfortable to go outside and play? Well, though I tried to avoid it, I spent too much time online watching while people complained about not being able to leave their homes, about the roads not being passable, about not having been alerted to the severity of what was possibly coming. I recalled many storms before this one in my lifetime where it snowed enough that you just stay home for a little while. Ran out of milk, oh well, you can get some in a couple of days. The snow here, once it is finally done falling from the sky melts pretty quickly. In a weeks time there likely won’t be any signs that it ever happened at my place. There are already bare spots where the sun has melted the shallowest parts.

I don’t have the mechanical resources to dig my car or truck out, but I am unconcerned. With today’s connectedness I already had a heads up about what was potentially coming as far as snow totals. So, if I knew, why didn’t others? In this information age we are more connected than ever, and more disconnected from reality than any point in our evolution. We have more opportunities to be safe, to be prepared, and to know what is potentially going to happen well before it is upon us. But, we are also more likely to make assumptions, to desire that our instant gratification wants be met when we want them and we can wait for nothing.

Prior to the weather moving in I stopped by the grocery store. I picked up some pickles, some cheese, some discounted apples, and one or two other things and headed home. These things are hardly items that most would grab in case of a storm but they are what I knew that I could add to what I already had to make meals over the coming days. No panic, I was already prepared.

When it all started I just watched. I watched as post after post asked about the passability of roads. Whether or not the food delivery services were still running. Of people running out of dog food, or needing to go to the airport, or trying to come into Colorado from other places. It all just had me shaking my head.

Twenty five years ago all we had was the regular TV forecast, they did the best they could. Longer ago, there was little warning, though I suspect, people were much more connected to the land and nature than now and they had their ways of knowing, to some extent, what was coming. The difference is they were always prepared, because they had to be.

We are so used to going, getting in our cars at any given moment and being where we have a desire to be in minutes. We can’t fathom a few days at home, especially if we run out of something we deem is an absolute necessity, like milk, or wine. We can’t get our heads wrapped around slowing down. There is nowhere more important to be than safe. My neighbor ventured out the first day, and he almost made it home. He didn’t though and his small SUV couldn’t make it through the snow drift near my driveway. He decided to try to walk the rest of the way, but is fairly disabled and fell in the snow enough times that he wasn’t strong enough to get back up. I went out to throw the horses some more hay to keep them warm for the night about 10:30pm and he heard me and called for help. I have no idea how long he was out there. Nothing is worth leaving your safety in these conditions. What if I hadn’t gone outside?

Permaculture teaches us to prepare. Not in the ways that the prepper/survival communities do, but to make sure that we have what we need, and share with others our surplus. Weather events like this are a prime example of making sure we have what we need. I have everything I need so that if I am snowed in there won’t be a circumstance of desperation. Every home should have a minimum of seven days of supplies, and even better if you can get up to fourteen. Get comfortable with staying put. Don’t create a hazard for others, whether it’s first responders, delivery drivers, or road crews.

With weather patterns shifting toward more extreme outcomes it is our responsibility to help ourselves in every way we can prior to an event. Some weather events can’t be prepared for, like the hurricane that happened a few weeks ago in North Carolina, all you can do in those cases is mop up what remains and begin again; but in cases like this snow event we can be prepared to be uncomfortable for a few days until the sun shines and all signs that it happened disappear.

I have been a horse girl my whole life.

Horses have been an integral part of my growth as a human.

When I began to really get an understanding of permaculture and fall in love with the potential of design, it seemed to me that my love of horses and my new found passion were at odds. In wild environments equines move up to 35 miles a day. The landscapes we tend to find them in are open, often harsh, and do not resemble the abundance of the polyculture landscapes that typically represent a mature site designed using permaculture. Many places we find horses naturally like the Scottish Highlands, the Mongolian Steppe, or the North American West are vast and open with rough grasses and water sources that are few and far between. Permaculture designed landscapes on the other hand are pulled back to human scale, favor a polyculture (many plant species and families), and are perennial in nature. In the semi arid high desert prairie I live in the combination of horses with a polyculture felt out of reach, especially without the ownership of a few hundred acres of land.

This was a conundrum that weighed on me. How could I use permaculture design to improve the land and provide my horses with something more than a life spent standing around waiting for their next meal? I pushed on in my permaculture education. I knew there had to be some way that my ponies could fit into design as a beneficial element rather than a detriment, that a solution could be found that included them and supported their nature…honoring the the horseness of the horse.

I continued down the permaculture path and in tandem continued to learn about natural horse keeping. The two topics were related but I still couldn’t figure out how to connect them in my context of high altitude, dry climate and small acreage…then one day I found a book. I was shopping at one of the the locally owned bookstores that buys and sells used books and I discovered a title by author and farrier Jaime Jackson called The Natural Horse: Lessons from the Wild for Domestic Horse Care. The title intrigued me. I flipped through the pages, read and few passages and then put the book back on the shelf, I was just browsing after all. A few weeks later I decided that I should buy that book. By then the bookstore had sold the copy I had been looking at so I turned to the internet. Naturally, as internet searches do, I not only found The Natural Horse, I also found the book Paddock Paradise: A Guide to Natural Horse Boarding. Huh. I bought it and waited impatiently for it to come. Turns out that 121 quick reading pages would be the key to successfully incorporating horses into a permaculture design that is good for the ponies, good for the land and good for my heart.

The concept of Paddock Paradise is the conclusion Mr. Jackson came to after following and observing wild horse herds, then observing wild captive horses deteriorate in holding facilities, as well as horses in other contexts. He recognized that movement is the natural way of the horse. For many hundreds of years we have housed horses in environments that are counter to their true nature. Stalls are the worst we can do, equivalent to solitary confinement. Equines are relegated to standing still in a boredom box, some for 24 hours a day. Some begin to display behaviors like cribbing or swaying as a way to cope, others just resign to their fate… they are never truly happy in this context. Health declines, feet get soft, there is higher potential for ulcers and colic.

Not all horses are stuffed in stalls, some get land to live out their lives. Jackson spent some time on a 20,000 acre ranch where the owner rescued many horses. He noticed that the horses in this environment had many of the same hoof and body condition issues as those that spent their days in holding pens or stalls. His observations led him to recognize that the horses were just standing around, even though they had large open pastures to roam. These horses had everything they needed dropped right in front of them and spent most of their time parked. Through these observations the Paddock Paradise concept was conceived.

Paddock Paradise solves horse problems.

The Paddock Paradise design concept recognizes the biological need for a horse to move to be healthy (this isn’t the only thing that creates health but is a large part of equine well being). Following their nature ponies seek food and water, require companions and interesting things to look at and play with. When horses have their needs met they are in better physical condition, better mental condition, and are far less prone to hoof issues, colic, and metabolic problems.

Horses are uniquely hard on a landscape, wanting to have mouthfuls of food 22 hours a day and constantly seeking blades of grass. They lack the digestive tract of ruminants who eat a meal then spend time relaxing and digesting what they’ve eaten. Horses are perpetually hungry. Paddock Paradise turns the dry lot concept into a track that gets horses moving rather than standing, allowing the area inside of the track to be reclaimed for grazing. Food and water placements promote more natural equine behaviors like seeking their next bite. Enrichment can also be included. Things like rocks and logs to navigate, bits of things to pick up and carry around; some horses are similar to dogs with their play and will happily carry around a bucket, or section of hose, or anything else that isn’t tied down and we can promote that in a safe manner, even going as far as to provide ‘toys’ designed just for them. Well designed track layouts can also create a natural fire break as animals living on the track eat down vegetation, especially in low rainfall climates like ours.

Here in the semi arid high desert West Paddock Paradise is a tool for helping us to maintain better pastures for grazing. Unless we have a large number of acres we are bringing in hay and possibly other supplementary feed. On properties that are not technically large enough to support the number of equines living there, a track allows the inner paddocks to be managed for pasture growth. This concept can (but doesn’t always) decrease the amount of area needed to be maintained as dry lot, and increase the amount of area that can be managed pasture. Not only is there opportunity for better grazing management with this system but there are opportunities within the paddocks.

When we design well we can stack the functions of our paddocks to increase soil health as well as take advantage of all our land has to offer. Well timed chickens run in paddocks spread manure, eat fly and other larvae, break up crust formations that impede water infiltration, eat weeds, including seeds (many of which don’t survive the digestion process of a chicken), and add extra fertility to the landscape through their manure.

Permaculture is a verb. It is a process of design that uses principles to drive decision making. Good permaculture design uses these principles again and again throughout the design. Using a Paddock Paradise system as a tool in permaculture design makes sense.