Week two saw the coming together of a new community; being tested, overcoming, growing as individuals, and bridging gaps between consciousnesses. We continued our preset order of operations, with lectures in the morning followed by hands on activities in the afternoon. We completed many different tasks this week, and spent a lot of time interacting with the larger farming community of Maui.
On Monday, we learned about Yeoman’s Scale of Permanence and how important it is towards production permaculture farming.
The overall design process was designed to:
- Focus on the whole (holistic)
- Recognize the critical importance of goals, and especially prioritized, holistically-considered decision-making for planning
- Acknowledge the role of people as a crucial part of the system — maintaining that land health was “a direct reflection of the people”
- Use conscious design sensitive to ‘place’ in farm landscapes
- Integrate the land improvement tool of livestock grazing with technology (Yeomans Keyline Plow) to accelerate fertility succession
- Pay attention to the importance of scaled organization of agro-ecosystems (recognition of nested hierarchies and the interplay dynamics between levels) as an explicit dimension needed to effectively plan for permanence
- Increase flexibility, adaptive capacity, and resilience of the whole-farm.
For our activity, we prepared a permanent row system that should allow Evan to work the land for the foreseeable future. We designed the system to consider climate, geography, water, access, forestry, buildings, fencing, soils, economy, and energy.
On Tuesday we got to play a little. We used caught water to power a slip’n’slide, which ran into a swale, which held the slowed the water moving down hill to water the crops for the next couple of days. Who says farming isn’t fun? We also planted seeds, learned about biodiversity, and made herbal tinctures. At night we had a fire, and I got to lead my first ever Orchard Wassail ceremony!
Mahalo