2025 Permaculture Roots Workshop Series 29 Mar 2025, 4:14 pm

May-October

Saturday Workshop Series

Hillsborough, NC

Join us for the whole Permaculture workshop series or drop in for any!

Far more than a system of gardening, Permaculture teaches a way to harmoniously integrate people and ecosystems in a way that regenerates both. 

Deeply indebted to the ancestral ways of old growth cultures across earth, Permaculture was consciously created in the 1970s as a response to living in uncertain times.

Permaculture moves us, one step at a time, from consumers to a people able to meet our needs through partnership with the land. We learn that the earth is already in each moment creating everything we need to thrive. If we re-learn how to tend those gifts, there can be enough for everyone to live well.

Through Permaculture design, humans cease to be the cause of ecological destruction and become a vital part of the healing of the land.

We learn to live lives that are more resilient to change, healthier for the land and our bodies. Every step we take considers the effect on the greater family of the wild and the generations that come after us.

By choosing to work with nature's intelligence, we create low-input gardens, homes, and ways of life that benefit from the support of natural forces instead of being stuck in a fruitless struggle against them.

Sign-up for One or More Workshops here:

Learn Permaculture Locally

In these times of tremendous challenge and change, our hope is to pass this bundle of seeds called Permaculture into as many hands as we can.

We're partnering with Living Arts Collective to bring this 5-part series of one-day Permaculture workshops. They're designed for both beginners and people who have practiced some Permaculture on their own.

The workshops will take place, indoors and outdoors, at Jubilee Healing Farm in Hillsborough, NC (details below).

Come for any one workshop or sign-up for the series at a discount. We would love to see you there!

What You'll Learn:

Every workshop will include opportunities to connect with nature and our senses, learn Permaculture design, answer your questions, and meet other amazing humans interested in Permaculture.

Coming for any one workshop should be a complete experience by itself - and, if you come for the whole series, you can count on receiving the beginnings of a deep permaculture education!

All workshops will also have an optional evening portion around a fire to connect and share in each other's stories, songs, and plant and animal knowledge.

May 17 - Roots 1 - Intro and Food

• Permaculture 101 - What is all this anyway?
• Tuning Into (and Turning Into!) Land
• Building Good Soil and Creating Your Own Soil Fertility
• Growing Food in a Permaculture way
• Gardening in Times of Climate Change
• Foraging
• 15+ plants for the Permaculture Garden
• Answering Your Permaculture Questions

Sign up for May 17 Workshop (or whole series) here

May 31 - Roots 2 - Creating a Food Forest (Part 1)

In May we'll practice applying Permaculture design to a new food forest at Jubilee Healing farm. In October, we'll start installing it!

• All About Food Forests / Forest Gardens
• Applying Permaculture Design Techniques
• Weaving Beauty and Places for Life
• Laying Out a Food Forest Design From Pattern to Detail
• Selecting the Right Plants
• Some Favorite Edible Trees and Shrubs!
• Food Forest / Forest Garden Questions

Sign Up for May 31 Workshop (or whole series) here

June 21 - Roots 3 - Tending Land for Regeneration

• Reading Landscape Practice
• Simple Ways to Restore Land and Improve Biodiversity
• Working With Water in the Landscape
• Creating Habitat
• Learning Our Local Trees and How They Help
• Tending the Wild
• Introduction to Making Local Herbal Medicine
• Answering Your Permaculture Questions

Sign Up for June 21 Workshop (or whole series) here

September 13 - Roots 4 - Living Closer to Earth

• Main Things to Know When You Move to Live On Land
• The Pleasures and Perils of Tiny Living and Going Off-Grid
• Affordable, Ecological Shelter Options in 2025
• Fun Off-Grid Things - Outdoor Kitchens, Rocket Stoves, and So On!
• Living Well on Small-Scale Solar
• Permitting, Loans, and Other Uncomfortable Stuff
• Catching Water and Living in the "Rain Budget"
• Designing for Wildfire and Heavy Rain
• Answering Your Land Buying / Home / Off-Grid Questions

Sign Up for September 13 Workshop (or whole series) here

October 18 - Roots 5 - Planting the Food Forest!

Continuation of the May 31 Food Forest workshop - now we start to install the design! This class will be a mix of hands-on installation and other learning about food forests.

• Food Forest Review / Questions
• Hands-On Food Forest Learning!
• Installing the Food Forest From Pattern to Detail
• Using Fun Hand Tools
• Planting Trees (...the Easy Way)
• Installing Tree "Guilds"
• More Plants for the Food Forest
• Answering Any Other Permaculture Questions

Sign Up for October 18 Workshop (or whole series) here

Sign-up for One or More Workshops here:

Come To Our Workshops If You Want To:

• Learn and applying Permaculture skills and perspectives in your own life.
• Gain a deeper knowledge and belonging in the changing ecosystems we live within.
• Learn a Permaculture approach to growing plants and working with land that aligns with nature to create life.
• Open your own dormant capacity to perceive the wholeness in ecosystems and to become more receptive to what they are saying.
• Know 25+ plants specifically helpful to grow in the Southeast and how to grow them
• Have a deeper understanding of how water, sun, wind, fire, soil, animals, plants, and people affect a landscape and can be worked with.
• Be equipped to participate in restoring the ecosystems around you.
• Be more prepared to work with the intense change happening around us and tune into a resiliency and trust in the earth, your community, and yourself.
• Learn how to spend less money and buy less crap by understanding some of how people met their needs for millions of years without money, factories, or online shopping.
• See your environment with new eyes and learn to see many problems as holding the seeds of their solutions.
• Become as obsessed with trees as Matt is! (... well, maybe)
• Laugh, have fun, and be challenged and supported in learning a beautiful art of reunion with earth.
• Meet other brave people finding their way home to nature, one step at a time and hopefully make friends!

About the Facilitator

Matthew “Watersong” Tracy started practicing Permaculture in 2011 and received his design certificate from Wild Abundance in 2015. He has been consulting and teaching as a Permaculture Designer since 2018.

Along the way, he learned from numerous Permaculture teachers, tended land with minimal inputs, worked with around 50 clients on their land, lived off-grid for nearly a decade, and made (... and still makes!) a whole lot of humbling and valuable mistakes on his way back to life in harmony with the earth. 

With all that experience, Matt is ever a beginner and student of the land. Nature is infinite. What can we do but listen and try?

Matt is honored to be a Permaculture guide to anyone interested in coming a little closer to earth. Becoming a father in 2023 has made passing down these teachings that always consider future generations more important than ever.

Read the rest of Matt's bio here.

Possible Guest Teachers / Collaborators TBA!

The Strongest Protest is a Garden 18 Jan 2025, 2:03 pm

I wrote this on 2017 as a call to the activists in my life and to myself. There is so much to feel sorrow and anger about in industrial civilization, and yet if we depend on it completely, we have very little power to change it.

All the well-meaning posts by activists on social media ultimately give money to the billionaires who run those social media platforms. Most of the activists struggling to slow climate change are still bound to the big energy companies, the fossil fuel companies, the mining companies, by the devices they use and the ways they live. Protests against corporate destruction have a hollow core when the protestors are themselves beholden to industry at the most basic level.

The point isn’t to feel bad about ourselves or to be perfect. Contradiction and irony are fairly impossible to avoid in this time period. This is just a simple call to remember that we gain a far greater power to affect the world by getting down to the roots of the world.

When we can grow each other’s food, build each other’s homes, take care of each other’s health and spirits, we can shake off much of the machine with a simple, “no thank you, I’m good.”

---

As long as we don’t have the skills to meet our own basic needs, much of our lives will ultimately go, no matter what political opinions we express, to feed the industrial growth machine just so we can live.

That machine may occasionally reward some of us with small reforms and concessions, but it cannot defy its purpose: to protect and concentrate wealth for a few. As it finds more ways of existing without us (e.g. automation), it will eventually choose those ways rather than give power and wealth back to people.

In our lives we always have tremendous power to be healers to the land and people around us and this is vital, precious, and needed always. We can live lives of great love, healing, and regeneration no matter who we are; and, if we want to talk seriously about slowing the big machine, we need to talk about how powerless we really are unless we can live without it.

When we can learn to court the land for the impossible gift of abundant food; when we can create our own shelter from the old timber grove we keep healthy for future generations; when we can entertain ourselves without digital media; when we can heal our bodies and spirits from the plants; when we can travel by horse and bicycle and gather our families and friends around us in a village; when we can live with so little power that Duke Energy will not have any customers to buy its coal – these are the places the power to resist the industrial growth system comes from.

If we cannot meet our needs, we can only beg the institutions which are the codified algorithms of our own reified fears to be a little less horrible. Sometimes they will and sometimes they won’t. Meanwhile we’re stuck begging congresspeople to even begin to care about the smallest version of our most compromised dreams.

Better to start learning to beg the land for food. Better to stand outside the office of the soil, humbly practicing your best arguments as to why you need the land to please hear your very legitimate need to live.

What if 100,000 activists sang a honey-tongued petition to the land right beneath their feet to please help them live without relying on the bulldozers, mountaintop removers, nuclear reactors, child laborers they never see but certainly somewhere inside feel?

What if those 100,000 just went on a general strike from the laborious and hazardous daily maintenance of the illusion of separation, instead seeing the people around them as the stubborn flawed and immeasurably alive and potent members of their very own village with whom they will tearfully and screamingly learn to cooperate with no matter what?

What if 100,000 learned herbal and country medicine that weaves people back into the land as it weaves whole their bodies?

What if 100,000 sold all the things they didn’t need and bought from a local blacksmith scythes, hoes, broadforks, axes, and saws?

Once the pain of the news is just too great, it is time to stop feeding that system with your life.

There is something holy in the land beneath your feet that wants you to feed it. Do you hear the patience in that wounded scorched soil? We can stop giving our attention to our “feeds” and start feeding our attention to life.

Begin with stillness, and then loving actions of care with the land to meet our common needs; these are the only things that will serve us through the million possible futures and under it all, the welling up joy of an infinite sunrise…

What Happens When You Can’t Garden? (part 1) 20 Dec 2024, 4:11 pm

What happens to our gardens when the gardener can’t tend them?

It was Spring of 2020.  My life was undergoing a total transformation, a shedding of thick old skin affirmed one day by a visit from a 5 foot long black snake that crawled his way into a small gap in the ceiling of my unfinished little cabin to live within my walls.  Everything seemed liminal.  I didn’t even know where I’d be living in a few months.  

The critical moments to start Spring seeds indoors or sow a Spring garden came and went.  I didn’t sow any seeds, and I did nothing for the soil of my 3-year old forest garden – and in that context of a pandemic and the collapse of my life as I knew it, with no garden work on my part, the earth provided for me beyond my greatest hopes.

At a time when I could not garden and had nothing to give the earth but the charcoal and ash from my fire and the fertility in my waste, I ate fresh, mineral-rich, semi-wild food every day of Spring because of what Permaculture taught me.

In the Ruins, a Garden Dream Coming True

It was a dream that had come true for me as I know it has for many others; a dream one of my dearest teachers, Patricia Allison at Earthaven Ecovillage, held and had shared with me:  what if instead of planting and ceaselessly tending vegetables for food every year, we learned to let the wild vitality of the land take care of us?

Four years later, I would have another chance to receive that kind of care from another forest garden. In late 2023, my life underwent another kind of transformation – this time, a much happier one!  Our daughter was born.  

With a newborn, our homestead, and my work, it will come as no surprise that I wasn’t able to worry about the garden!  And yet, we were able to eat free, healthy, fresh food from the land again. The garden and the wild showed up for our new family.

Without lifting a tool or planting a seed, we ate nutrient dense and wild food – the food we’d been fertilizing for years only with the outputs from our own life.  

I am blessed to say that our daughter is already so strong and vital of a little human and that some credit must go to the rare nourishment of those deep-rooted and nutrient dense plants with their perennial and self-seeding wisdom of how to find their way.

The Plants That Gave To Us Without Asking a Thing

On those April and May days of both 2020 and 2024, I made salads and cooked vegetable dishes with the diversity of a hunter-gatherer’s diet.  

I could group the plants we ate into three basic categories:

1. Perennial Vegetables I planted once years before
2. Self-Seeding Annuals I planted or encouraged years before
3. Wild Plants and Volunteers foraged inside or outside the garden

Some of the plants would have been typically thought of by most Americans as too intense (…bitter, medicinal, spicy, and so on…) to eat as a vegetable only by themselves; but when these same strong-flavored and medicinal plants were only one of as many as twenty (!) different plants in a dish, they helped weave a healthy and astoundingly delicious plate that always felt good in our bellies.  

As a Permaculture nerd, it became a game to me to put in as many different plants from as many different families into one plate of cooked or raw greens.  I didn’t write it down, but I think I hit around 25 plants from 10+ families…!  Eating that kind of diversity meant we were taking in a range of minerals and of medicinal qualities that blended together to make our bodies balanced and strong.  When I think about the stress i was undergoing during both of those transformational times, I know that the vitality in those plants carried my body through.

Low Input, High Yield – Gardens for the Uncertain Future

I want to emphasize the lack of water, effort, and any inputs into this system.  In one of those gardens, I’d built soil years before by relying partially on waste-stream inputs, like spent Oyster mushroom straw; and in the other, I pretty much only used what came naturally out of our daily life.  Neither garden had ever been tilled.  Weeds either became food, medicine, or mulch.

When we think about a future that may have far more resource constraints, or about aquifers going dry to irrigate fields of crops, or about top soil loss from over-tilling or nutrient pollution from fertilizer run-off, this wild garden way calls out with an important lesson.

…and, the beauty of eating wild goes beyond any calculation of harm or benefit.  There is something sacred in feeling the Earth rise to meet you and provide for you.  It’s a reversal of the curse of toil so many of us seem to have inherited.  It’s a serious shift in the image I know I carry of the tired farmer, breaking their back to wrestle out rows of vegetables or turning to giant machinery to force the matter.

The Earth can take care of us and we need to experience that.  Two Permaculture friends of mine shared with me a tradition from their Jewish heritage of a seven-year agricultural cycle.  Every seventh year, the call was to let the fields rest and to depend instead on what the land and wild provide of their own will.  It is easy for me to see some of the wisdom in that practice.  For one year, we break the spell of thinking we’re doing it all and fall back on the trust of something greater that is here to take care of us and always will be.

An Aside:  My Friends Think I Hate Kale 

I don’t hate kale; but if I’m being totally honest, my love of the perennial and other self-growing plants has made me mostly lose interest in growing lettuce, spinach, and kale and other brassicas.  I’m especially skeptical about growing them in the hot parts of the Southeast.  Obviously, people do it; and I wonder, for how long and with what inputs?

The Brassicas I know are largely cold season plants that grow better and sweeter with a long cool Spring and a gentle transition to Summer.  My experience of Spring in the Piedmont has been that it keeps getting shorter.  The time between Spring planting and Summer’s swelter that bolts the plants narrows by the day.  

Gardeners and farmers get around this with laborious and sometimes energy-intensive season extension techniques.  A lot of it results in plastic landfill accumulation and tired farmers.

I spent a little time learning from one of the Piedmont’s best small-scale organic gardeners and plant breeders.  He grew amazing food.  When I saw what he had to do to get marketable Spinach to grow in the Piedmont’s abbreviated Spring, I decided I would never bother.  Spinach has a bunch of wild cousins in the same genus that show up on their own and are delicious and good for you.  Sorry, Spinach.  If I were another ten degrees North, it might be different.

Other Traditions Around Spring Vegetables

I also consider what I’ve learned from Natalie Bogwalker and Joe Hollis of Mountain Gardens about Sansai, the Japanese mountain vegetable tradition (and it’s Appalachian variant) of eating a whole lot of plants in Spring that might not be edible later in the year, but that are the earliest and most nutritious delicacies in Spring.  Sansai can break the categories of what plants we think of as edible.  There are so many plants that become tough and unpalatable (or sometimes toxic) by June, but that are as tender as, oh, I don’t know, Smilax tips in Spring.  In the diversity of a Permaculture forest garden, this can mean dozens of plants to eat in Spring without toil or plastic tunnels.  

Some of these veggies also have a specific reputation for detoxification of the thick, stagnant state Southern and Native American herbalism recognize as following a hard Winter.  They work with blood, kidneys, and liver to get things moving again and to bring out our inner Spring Chicken.  

Many of these plants (especially the forest ones) have their own ways to discourage too much herbivory.  Some need to be protected as much as any, but almost nothing is as helpless as the veggies most of us grow.  

The other astounding thing I’ve learned about the herbaceous perennials veggies is that they appear at the very first moment possible.  They know exactly what cold week will be a good one to stick their stems out.  If the patch is big enough, you can eat some of these very first greens as early as February.  To get fresh greens that early from the usual veggies, you’d usually need to use seed starting trays, grow lights, plastic, watering, potting soil, and that’s before the process of hardening plants off and the transplant delay.  By the time the Spring kale gets vigor enough to be eaten, we’ve been eating Stinging Nettles for weeks (unless it’s a kale that overwintered).

Similarly to Perennials’ great sense of timing, self-seeding garden plants (usually known as “weeds”) often know exactly what week to sprout in.  They know where to sprout.  They decide.  Their intelligence is engaged.  We can’t know all that went into their choice to appear in one spot and not another and we don’t have to.   

Expanding Our Narrow Idea of Food

I’ve read that our society relies mostly on about 20 plants out of the 20,000 potential edible ones.  We may not have access to 20,000, but how many already grow around us and how many more would be glad to grow easily without extra labor?

… and if we’re into the extra labor, wouldn’t these plants that choose to grow here or that grow from deep roots be the ideal ones to save the seed of and to try to breed for more resilience and edibility?

… and another thing!… (ahem)… it’s a little odd to me that, in contrast to many of the more wild and perennial foods, most of the vegetables we see for sale are uniquely single-function – meaning they are really just used for food, and not also medicine, habitat, fiber, pollinator plants, and so on.

That isn’t to say you can’t come up with a dozen creative uses for a cabbage (you can) or that there’s nothing medicinal about a collard green (there is); but for the most part, lettuce and others = thing you eat and that’s it. 

The perennials Permaculture has done a lot to popularize as well as the weeds and forest edge plants that just show up are almost all known medicinal plants, and the perennials are also largely habitat for all kinds of helpful critters and many meet human needs beyond dinner time.  This fits with Permaculture’s unique emphasis on each element of the system providing multiple functions. Only in a human-made system does something really just do one thing.

We’ll explore some of these amazing plants that can take care of us when we can’t garden in part 2 of this series on wild gardening (coming soon).

We Don’t Have to Know the Way 12 Nov 2024, 2:19 pm

There are no mistakes in a forest. There is no problem that does not hold the seed of its own solution.

There is no waste in a forest. There is no fertilizer, no irrigation, no weeding. Every being’s gifts are another being’s needs.

We don’t have to do it all. Trees want to grow. Animals create homes. Everything gardens. We only have to join in.

We don’t have to know it all. When we hear the land, tending our home becomes a dance. Each step follows the next.

We don’t have to hurry. Life has a rhythm. If we feel too busy, we can try on a tree’s sense of time.

We don’t have to grow alone. The resilience of a tree is in the other trees, plants, fungi, and animals. We complete each other.

Instead of interrupting the song of life, Permaculture teaches us how to join the music.  Together we find our way home – back to the garden, where all good things begin.

Learn this way of no way with our Permaculture workshops.

Our New Name 7 Nov 2024, 5:53 pm

Silver Branch Permaculture

“Silver Branch” is a an archaic symbol recorded in Irish myth but most likely originates far in the Paleolithic. It points to the memory of an entirely other way of seeing.

In myth, the Silver Branch reopens the door of perception and allows for reunion with life.

When humans had become lost and forgotten their roots in the sacredness of land, the Silver Branch was the key to their recall. The sacred object initiated a journey into the Otherworld – a sacred place that ancient cultures on every continent recognize some version of. Upon emerging from the Otherworld, so the old stories say, we see things entirely anew. Silver Branch perception is beholding the world as it truly is – alive, sentient, complete. To hold the Silver Branch is to learn again to see the wholeness that becomes obscured by too much reliance on the rational mind.

In the Silver Branch way of seeing, we are not separate from animals, plants, waters, stars, or sky. We understand that damage done to the land is damage done to ourselves. We feel that the running waters are our blood, the Winter wind is our breath, the fire is our spirit. To hold the Silver Branch is to re-enter kinship with all life.

Silver Branch seeing happens in a flash. It is the sudden epiphany that all that we see is alive and nourished by the spirit of life. Beholding it, we are beheld by it. Beheld by life, we no longer feel alone.

In Silver Branch perception, we do not have dominion over the animals and plants. We do not see the land as something to take from. Trees are not timber, plants are not crops, stones are not something to mine for profit. The trees and the plants and the stones are our mothers and fathers, our teachers in how to live.

In my own Permaculture practice, this way of seeing is the star I ask to guide me. As a system that has a lot of clever techniques and sayings, Permaculture can sometimes fool us into thinking we’re in charge. But we are only here by the vast grace of life. The indigenous peoples that many of Permaculture’s elders learned from knew this to be true. Our tools and our maps can serve a purpose for regeneration, but they are no substitute for bending low to hear the voice of a violet beneath the empress tree.

Silver Branch reminds me to ask again and again: am I viewing the land as an object, as something separate? Or am I taking our seat at the great table of life where a conversation has been happening long before we were born and that will continue long after we die? Do I rule over the land, thinking I know what to do? Or do I remember to ask the beings that are far wiser than me to show me the way?

When the garden feeds my family, does my pride tell me that I did all of this? Or do I remember that it is only life that can grow a chestnut or an ear of maize – and that life gives this to us because life loves us? Do I let myself feel the love that life feels for me?

I use the name “Silver Branch Permaculture” to draw these lessons near. The consequences of living as if the earth were just dead matter to take from have brought us beyond the threshold of crisis. Even more than changing the details of how we live, we must change our perception. We must restore the sight that is unbroken by reductionist thinking. The earth can teach us how and Permaculture is a good light that points the way.

The practices and principles of Permaculture can guide us back to kinship with life. There, on the ground of the real, knees on the earth, hands in the soil, the voice that yet sings within the land calls to us. Silver Branch in hand, we open to hear what the forest has to teach us. Are you listening?

With gratitude to my Irish ancestors and the people who have kept alive the indigenous Irish wisdom so that many may learn from it.

And here is a poetic and magnificently filmed documentary that evokes Silver Branch perception. It takes place in an undeveloped landscape in Ireland where people yet put their ear to the earth. Highly recommended: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/silverbranchfilms2?autoplay=1

Releasing An Old Name

Golden Egg Permaculture is a name this humble Permaculture practice began with in Carrboro, NC before I was involved with it. When I became Golden Egg’s other main designer, I was grateful for the shelter of the established name to gentle the wind as I got my bearings.

The Golden Egg name was from a cautionary myth about greed and the goose that laid golden eggs. It called in the Permaculture teaching to accept the slow gifts of life rather than the shortsighted profits of quick extraction. It is a good teaching story, and yet I felt a need to let it go.

My own association with the golden goose story was that, while it was a warning, it was also a bit of a judgement already passed. If the goose who laid the golden egg was already killed, what hope do we have? Something was left out of this story that I wanted to call closer.

One of my core beliefs about life is that we can’t actually lose the earth. Earth’s gifts are not a finite supply or a fluke phenomenon. They are the ground condition of being and the model of what unconditional love looks like.

Unlike the stories of judgement wedged into many religions, earth raises no hand in punishment. As Mary Oliver sings in Wild Geese, “you don’t have to be good.” After the multiple cataclysms and waves of extinctions earth has already experienced, what happened next? Life kept creating life.

After the small apocalypse of a forest clear-cut, what happens next? An abundance of disturbance plants appear as if from nothing, bringing food, medicine, habitat, and a rapid remediation of the wounded.

Some of the rivers that ran yellow or orange with poisons thirty years ago are drinkable now and full of fish. Iridescent toxic “superfund” lakes are redeemed by extremophile bacteria able to survive in industrial poison, deposited there by the droppings of of migrating geese to begin the work of turning minerals back into biology. We can do everything wrong and we will never change life’s will to create more life.

This is part of what calls me to let go of the Golden Goose story: if the goose that killed the golden egg were slain, that would not be the end of the story. its body would almost immediately become an eruption of other forms of life – microbial, fungal, insect, and other detritivores.

Some of the bacteria in its guts might be the ones to begin turning wasteland back into meadow and then forest. The slow fire of decomposition would make the goose’s body like the phoenix, a center of rebirth. Death is end and beginning. We would not be doomed for our sins; we would only have to tune back into where life force was now flowing. This understanding is central to the trust that Permaculture has taught me.

Raised Bed Rebellion 30 Oct 2024, 6:16 pm

What if we have everything we need?

How does a garden begin? Past the first dream of ripe and gnarly heirloom tomatoes, and after finding the perfect space in whatever land we are lucky enough to be able to alter, how do we start our garden beds?

One of the first moments of action for many of us is to get in a car and go shopping.  We buy wood for raised beds.  We buy soil.  We buy fertilizer and maybe mulch and some kind of fencing and maybe some stakes for our beans and tomatoes and we buy seeds.

There’s no blame in this.  It’s what most of us are used to doing. Though I didn’t grow up with a lot of money, I was still conditioned to think that the first thing to do in response to a problem is to go to Wal-Mart or some other store crammed with the big and the cheap and acquire a solution boxed in cardboard and tape or bagged in plastic.  

It can be fun, too.  We catch the first promise of all that’s green and growing on a particularly warm February breeze, and off we fly on its current to accumulate the things that will let us make a garden real. If we’re lucky, we still have a local garden store with all the attendant good vibes those can bring. We pull out the credit card and it feels like we’ve accomplished something.

Yet more and more, we’re all coming to understand that there are costs to buying our solutions.  Inflation, aka everything is expensive now and probably will be until we die, means a simple home project can suddenly look like a stressful investment. It quickly puts any argument that we’re saving money by growing our own vegetables or raising our own chickens for eggs into question. Yet that high price on the receipt is only the visible cost. If you’ve taken a step towards Permaculture, it’s likely the less visible cost matters to you as well.

We all know, but we can often forget, that almost everything we buy now for cheap is made somewhere far away that we’d rather not see with workers working in conditions that we’d never want to work. 

We would not want to live by the factories, mines, distribution hubs, or power plants it takes to make what we buy, or the landfills that what we buy usually ends up in down the road.  We wouldn’t want to breathe the air or swim in the river by the industry that makes the items we buy to build our gardens or our homes.  Most of us never encounter these places put out of sight by design; yet years ago, before I ever heard the word “Permaculture,” life took me right into the belly of one of the places that all those cheap things in the blocks of windowless warehouses come from.

Working Behind Barbed Wire

We can never know where life will take us or what it will ask us to witness.  

In my mid-twenties, I ended up in a car crossing the border to one of the maquiladoras (giant factories) in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.  

I had been working a skilled, low-wage job for a small startup business in North Carolina that was starting to grow.  Since the job involved manufacturing, growth meant moving manufacturing out of the backroom where a handful of US seamstresses made the product to an industrial factory in Mexico across the border where they could pay the workers a whole lot less.  

I was brought on the trip to teach my job to a college-educated worker in Mexico who could do it for cheaper than my already low wages.  For days I worked a relatively easy job in a closed office inside of the massive fluorescent humming beast of the maquiladora.

When I toured the factory floor, I noticed that the hundreds of workers were grouped into different sections sewing and soldering different things.  I was especially struck by watching the production of what looked like camping equipment.  

Tents, outdoor canopies, hiking backpacks, canvas parts for campers, sleeping bags – the items that I’d use when I was taking time to relax in the wild were made by workers, mostly women, mostly exhausted, working twelve-hour shifts on a concrete and windowless factory floor in a building barely distinguishable from a prison.  The tools I used to get out and breathe fresh air depended on a whole lot of people breathing bad air for most of the hours of their days.

Whatever label was put on it later with promises of sustainability and a quality product, I saw that these things were being made by people whose lives I would be frightened to have to live for even one week, working inside of a building surrounded by ten-foot barbed wire fences.  I couldn’t shake the feeling that the fences were there to keep people in.  From then on, I never lost the awareness that most of the things that we buy come from a place we ourselves would not want to be.

Where it Comes From and Where it Goes

The truth of where things come from and where things go is one of the essential threads of Permaculture.  We can follow it into a total transformation of our lives.  It was always there for the founders of Permaculture.  When I teach Permaculture, one of the most important teachings is to learn to ask, “Where does it come from and where does it go?”  

This question is not to shame us or punish us or mess with any pesky feelings of personal inadequacy.  We are born in the world we are born in.  I don’t find any help in blaming ourselves or anyone at all.  This question is meant to set a part of ourselves that is locked in those factories free.  

Opening Ourselves to Life

Caring about where things come from is not only altruistic. Our disconnection from the origins of our goods, our energy, our food and our homes does not only affect those people we will likely never meet; it also disconnects us from ourselves. To be fully alive, we need to turn to face the full truth of our existence and decide, in the light of that difficult understanding, what our responsibilities are. As long as our life requires us to ignore and wall off a painful part of the reality we depend on to live, we are only living half a life. 

Our very ability to feel pleasure is one of the first victims of this disassociation.  The teacher Joanna Macy wrote about how our sense of Eros, the sensual pleasure inherent in experience, is impossible to fully feel without also consenting to feel our sense of Grief.  Buddhists have said: No Mud, no Lotus.

Ultimately, there is no real escape from what is happening. There are only the ways – that a large part of our economy is based on selling to us – to numb and distract ourselves; and a secret not mentioned in the commercials for all those palliatives is that none of them work for long.

If we want to feel the bliss of the life force that the antelope feels when it bounds or the raven feels when it dives and barrel rolls on a highland current, we can’t leave out any part of this reality.  And part of this reality is that everything we have, everything we buy, everything we are comes from somewhere and goes somewhere.

It can sound strange to say that Permaculture can open our bodies to greater pleasure and it is absolutely true.  I’ve experienced it first hand.  My willingness to face and understand all that I am connected to has often been a source of tremendous pain and sometimes a great loneliness; and, it has opened for me the ability to feel the wing brush of a zephyr on the hairs of my forearm and to taste the bitters and the syrup sweetness of the wild weeds I eat in Spring.  When I see a raven dive, I dive with it. I was not raised this way. I don’t know that I could have learned it without the holdfast of Permaculture.

It wasn’t just that Permaculture helps me know where things come from and look at the shadow of our society.  I could do that without Permaculture, alone in front of a computer reading upsetting websites or watching depressing documentaries all day.  Permaculture does something different:  it gives us the capacity to face the disconnection by giving us small ways, every day, to heal some portion of it.  It helps us do this by giving us the understanding and tools to meet our needs in ways that we would want to witness. It turns out that to feel more whole and alive in the face of so many broken systems, we don’t have to fix them all or even any of them.

We only have to take one small step, every day, to come a little closer to a world where the beginnings and ends of things and the ways that we meet our daily needs all consist of experiences we would be glad to show our children and grandchildren.

What is eating food we grow, wearing clothes we make or living under a roof we built in the face of all that’s broken? I can say from experience: it’s a lot more than we might think. In every small step that moves us from consumer to creator, we can get a taste of complete liberation from the systems of harm. Every homemade sauerkraut, every spoon of wild autumn olive jam, every meal cooked with kindling or bookshelf built from scraps opens the window of our life to a fragrance that blows from a vast green place of benevolent mystery.

And so, by way of long introduction (!), I share a raised bed I would not hide behind a security gate, but would love for you and everyone to see.

 A Raised Bed of What’s Already Here

Wood for Raised Bed Borders

Don’t buy the wood.  Pressure treated wood is full of heavy metals that you have to worry about anyway, and other wood costs a bunch, is cut from forests far away, and rots pretty quickly.  Where you are or somewhere nearby, there are trees that no one is valuing.  Use standing dead wood or ask a tree if it’s OK to harvest it for this purpose.  

If you use live wood, consider inoculating it with mushrooms.  Shiitake logs can be great.  Raised beds that fruit mushrooms for you to pick while you harvest veggies; Home Depot can’t do that!  The logs won’t require any nails.  If you want to stack them more than one layer, you can cut notches or cut stakes from saplings and pound them in.

If you buy lumber that’s not pressure treated, it will rot, but in relatively boring ways.  Logs will rot interesting.  In a season, they will be full of other organisms.  You want those organisms in your garden.  What the logs leave behind feeds fungal life brilliantly.  After a year, the soil under those logs may be some of the most beautiful in your garden.  After 3 or 4 years, you might replace them.  That’s fine.  No landfill, no factory, nothing but beauty in all directions.

Stakes and Trellises

Don’t buy stakes or trellises.  Use saplings or grow a thin bamboo just for the purpose.  Making stakes may seem time consuming but compare it to a trip to the store and time worked earning money to buy them and it’s nothing.  

Need to lash the stakes?  Why not use a honeysuckle vine?  Or make fiber from Tulip Tree bark, or from Basswood, or any of the countless sources of free cordage?  

Or want to skip stakes altogether and have a little more time?  Grow your vining tomatoes (or Air Potatoes, or Passion Flowers or Grapes) up Tag Alder saplings you plant for that purpose.  In Italy, there were vineyards grown on Alders in just that way; and the Alders, unlike anything you could buy, fix atmospheric nitrogen to fertilize the plants trellised on them!  

Soil

⁠Don’t buy soil.  We can build soil right where we are.  My favorite way to start a raised bed is to sheet mulch for the first season and then plant only big-seeded plants or transplants into holes in the cardboard that I surround with just a little fresh compost.  There’s also the whole mulch-bed potato pattern to try.  I also love the pattern of compost pile to garden bed [link].  As the compost breaks down in place, your garden bed will be the most nutrient-rich microorganism party in the garden.  

If you really want to have some obvious soil in that bed from the start, you can also look for a nearby spot to dig a micro-pond or micro-swale; just be sure to keep the subsoil on the bottom and retain any top soil for the top.  This will work best for plants that don’t need mature soil, like grain crops, and you can always add a little extra compost on top.  I’ll even forgive you if you buy it.  But…

Compost

Don’t buy compost.  I mean, there are worse things you could buy.  A lot of the best Permaculture gardeners buy compost every year.  If you’re taking a lot of fertility out of the garden in the form of sold or shared veggies, bringing in compost can be a good way to replenish.  

But… if you’ll forgive me for inventing a term, I’ve found gardening without importing compost to be “eco-kinky.”  It opens all sorts of weird and wild possibilities.  What can you get away with by only using the sources of fertility right around you?  Where is the fertility in the land you are in?  It can’t be far.  Certain tree roots draw up certain minerals from far sources and from the bedrock.  What do the weeds carry?  The leaves?  The food scraps, and your own human “waste?”

Fertilizer

…and of course, don’t buy fertilizer.  There are dozens of simple and advanced homemade garden amendments you can make yourself [link]; but lacking that, urine and wood ash are thought by some to be a complete fertilizer [link] and all you have to do is pee and burn things.  A unique joy we’ve taken more than once has been to do a low-temperature from piles of weeds right atop the new garden bed we hoped to prepare.

Mulch? Probably not, right?

You definitely don’t have to buy mulch. Sometimes it’s convenient. But almost anything can be mulch. Put stuff on stuff. Preferably organic. Preferably not too compacted. Try different things. We mostly “chop-n-drop.” Living plants can sometimes be mulch too if there’s sufficient water and no root competition with the plants you want to mulch. Have fun with it.

Oh come on.  Fencing?

OK, but what about fencing?  can I buy that?

…look, you can do whatever you want.  I’m just some guy.  But since you’re asking…

fencing can be a challenge.  People have grown living fences out of trees or built dense barriers out of saplings.  Those with a knack for scrounging craigslist or Facebook or whatever can often get free or cheap used materials that could be a makeshift fence.  All of these can be needed for something bigger like a forest garden.  I want to share with you another solution that worked so well, I wanted to do it every year.

Sheilah came up with this one.  When we moved into our first shared homestead, she felt that the tangles of Greenbriar (Smilax) were making it hard to enjoy the forest right around us.  She wanted to open paths to walk as well as airflow and a little more light to the forest floor.  

We already loved Greenbriar for its generosity as a Spring perennial vegetable [link] and its value (and delicious taste!) as an herbal medicine and I think that was part of why Sheilah didn’t want to just throw her prunings in a pile somewhere.  Instead, she wove them into dozens of circular thorny wreaths.  I don’t think she even had a plan for them in the beginning, but we quickly learned they were the perfect barrier to protect new seedlings and transplants from animals.  

Our main problem at the time was bunnies.  Bunnies have sensitive paws and sensitive noses.  The plants with Smilax thorns around them survived when the ones next to them didn’t.  Finding another Smilax wreath became my response to seeing bunny damage.  Instead of getting angry, I’d just put a wreath around it and never worry about it again.   Like making our own stakes, it may sound like a lot of work; but the same wreaths lasted for over 2 years.  It was so satisfying to have our own free rabbit protection and to watch those newly protected plants grow!  

Enjoy the Little Rebellion of Having What You Need

Every time we skip the checkout, physical or digital, we feel the satisfaction of the quiet rebellion that Permaculture disguises as gardening.  Whatever we may have gone to school for, I think the main thing we are really trained to do in America is to consume things.  

The good news is that the gifts of the earth are closer than we know.  It won’t take years for you to learn a few plants already growing around you that make a more delicious tea that you can buy in the hippest of downtown haunts or order from the splashiest website.  It won’t take you long at all to learn to save your own seeds or build your own soil.  

And if you want to make a garden bed, there is no better place to begin than with the life surrounding you and no better place to start our quiet rebellion against anything that would dare to put our wild hearts – or those of people we have never met – behind barbed wire and fluorescent lights.  

To begin, you don’t have to know a thing.  Your hundred-thousand ancestors who lived and lived well before there were factories will remind you how to walk every step of your own way home.

Matt’s Path to Permaculture 29 Oct 2024, 9:58 pm

My journey to Permaculture began in a community garden in 2011 in Carrboro, North Carolina.

Like most people I knew, I didn’t know how to grow vegetables. I couldn’t identify one tree from another. I remember being asked to mulch a path and having to admit I didn’t know what mulch meant.

What I did know was that the way we were living couldn’t go on. The foundations of life – clean water, clean air, and deep soil – were being destroyed around me. The people who grew the food I ate were being paid almost nothing to work in fields thick with toxic chemicals that I didn’t want them to breathe or my body to eat.

The number of problems we were facing seemed insurmountable, and yet somehow I knew that if we couldn’t get our food right, we had no hope of anything else getting better either. I came to gardening to try to change the world. What I now know is that I first needed gardening to change me.

I grew up anxious – like, really anxious. In school, I spent two years barely talking to people. I looked down when people talked to me. It got a little better in my twenties and I made good friends, but inside I still always felt this persistent sense of being unworthy.

I remember the anxiety I felt on the day I went to the community garden. I was afraid of meeting all those new people, but I felt like to do the right thing, I had to start growing some of my food. I mostly kept my head down and set to pulling weeds and planting seeds as I was supposed to.

Hours passed and it took me hours to notice something important: I didn’t feel anxious or unworthy anymore. Somewhere along the way, the soil took away my anxiety.

It wasn’t that I’d never feel anxious again (… I mean yikes, this world…!). It was that when I put my hands in the earth, the earth made me feel better – all the way better. The earth made me feel human.

The word for “humus,” the rich dark soil that every gardener dreams of, and of “human” come from the same root. To be human, I had to be with humus.

Before I went into that garden, I didn’t value growing our own food that much above any other area of activism. It was just another thing I thought I had to do to be a “good person.” After I experienced that relief from the pain I thought I’d have to live with forever, I started paying closer attention.

It was in one of those return visits to the community garden that a friend would put the “P”-word (Permaculture) into my head. Following that lead, I picked up a copy of Gaia’s Garden and something long sleeping in me awakened.

The simple song of working with nature instead of against her touched on a truth I’d been waiting all my life to hear. For the first time, I saw clearly that we didn’t have to live in this destructive, disconnected way. There was another way possible and it began right where we were with the simplest steps we could imagine – and, unlike the activism I’d been doing before, the way would actually help us feel better (and taste delicious!). I knew I wanted to devote my life to this vision in whatever way I could find.

Some thirteen years, dozens of clients, and 3 off-grid Permaculture homesteads later, I can’t imagine living a life that doesn’t cleave close to the song of the earth.

It matters now even more than it did those years ago. In a world where everything around us seems to be breaking, the slow and steady growth of trees, the wisdom learned by living with the seasons, the taste of wild water and medicinal roots, and the simple joy of many hands making work light together in harmony is the way to help our often broken hearts stay strong and true in a time like no other time. The crazier the world gets, the more the sanity of rocks and trees, compost and medicinal weeds, and catching rainwater and building soil help us ground into something healthy and real.

I don’t know what my or my daughter’s world will look like five, or twenty, or fifty years from now – but I know that rain will fall, sun will shine, and trees will grow – and I am learning, every season, that maybe that is enough.

-Matt

New Name, New Life! Autumn 2024 Update 24 Oct 2024, 7:55 pm

If you’ve noticed that we’ve been quiet for a while, we have a very good excuse.

As of 2023, Matt is the father of a new baby. It’s taken a little time to adapt to the miraculous chaos of parenting while also starting a new homestead!

Having a child has renewed Matt’s fire for teaching care of the earth and each other. Now that he’s finally feeling rooted, he is more ready than ever to share this art that has always been for the ones who will live after us.

We have also renamed our little Permaculture practice! Golden Egg Permaculture is now Silver Branch School of Permaculture – or just “Silver Branch Permaculture” for short. You will always be able to find us at silverbranchpermaculture.org. If you’re curious what’s behind the name, you can read about the change.

We are now open again to seeing a small number of clients in NC and Southwest VA and preparing to teach a whole bunch of workshops in 2025! If you’re interested in workshops, sign-up below. If you’d like to work with us for a permaculture design on your own land, contact us here.

Trees are Sanctuaries 8 Jan 2023, 6:04 pm

“Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life…

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day leads you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.”
— Herman Hesse

No script, no master plan 14 May 2022, 8:44 pm

Imagine you wanted to help a relationship with someone and so you visited a therapist together. You both tell the therapist your problems and pay them a lot of money. Everyone goes home, and in a week you meet up again. Smiling, the therapist hands you each a script with everything you should say and do with each other for the next ten years. If you follow the script exactly, they say, your relationship can’t go wrong.

This example is intentionally silly. Even if a therapist really could tell you the best thing to do or say in future moments you haven’t reached yet – they can’t – the relationship would be one with no life in it. It would have lost any ability to respond to what is actually alive in the moment, based on the advice of an outside party who can’t really know either of you as well as you do and who won’t be able to know what you will each become.

Many of us in the Permaculture design community are realizing that this is sort of what it’s like to give a detailed on-paper master plan for land.

When we draw a detailed map of where every tree, shrub, vine, pond, and structure should go for your whole land, we are writing a script for what two living beings – you and your land – will say to each other.

Asking people to let go of having a detailed plan can be hard. It is easier to make money drawing up expensive detailed designs, handing them over, and then moving on; but in our experience, the most beautiful permaculture sites we’ve visited evolved not from a detailed plan but from a thousand small steps taken each day in deep relationship between the people and place. That goes for our own forest gardens, the forest gardens of our friends, and the ecovillage Matt watched emerge over years.

Permaculture is a moment-to-moment process that must ultimately come from the people living on the land every day. Our job is to be a steady support and guide to your long beautiful relationship with your land. We do this by helping you tune in more deeply to what is already alive on the land and in yourselves in any given moment and, from that place, find the next best steps to take.

Any design work we do for you is in support of this. While it can be nice to look at an attractive finished blueprint, the rough sketch leaves a lot more room for life to happen. Design in permaculture is to help us see the patterns of the land. It’s to communicate possibilities that are incomplete without your inspiration and the voice of the land. We also help teach the skills to start gardens, design shelter, and tend land and we continue to be there as a resource and ally as you and the land grow together, day by day, season by season.

Making this shift from planner to guide has been a leap of great faith for us; but because of it, we’ve had the gift of feeling the earth rise to meet us.