Organic Landscape Design

One of the Permaculture Design Principles is that each element of a system serve multiple purposes.  In the disipline of Multiple Use Faciliities, we shift from the industrial age effort to maximize efficiencies for the production of a single product to an effort to balance the needs of multiple uses.  The first approach has brought us the amazing economies of scale now dominating the planetary economy.  However, those efficiencies are unable to fulfill all the needs of all the people . . . and for those unfulfilled needs we need a different approach.  The approach of balancing the needs of multiple uses leads us to "economies of integration" in which a single investment realizes multiple products.

The long term goal is a set of integrated functions such as described in Designing the Future.  The first step is a simple, inexpensive and easy to operate greenhouse that supports and is supported by our gardening system.  The next step will be to add animals to the system.  Please feel free to join the discussion on Transition Colorado.

The Parmenters have been experimenting with passive solar greenhouses in Westcliff, Colorado at 8,000 feet in elevation.  Their system relies on stores of water to absorb the heat during the day and release it at night.  Another system has been developed through the Central Rocky Mountain Permaculture Instititute called the Subterranean Heating and Cooling Storage System (scroll down) which relies on moving warm moist air through pipes buried in the growing medium.  Because of the single use for the water stored in the passive design, we are starting with a simple design where the heat storage medium is also the growing medium.  Once we have the parameters for the performance of the simple system, we can add additional water in the form of an aquaponics system, or look at adding small animals such as chickens or rabbits.

As with all our designs, we are not designing to produce for the market.  We are designing to produce for the consumption by the people who own and manage these systems.  As such, we want to reduce the cash cost of operations as much as possible after the initial facility construction.  In the case of animal husbandry, the key will be to include breeding and feed production as a part of the overall system.  Here is the preliminary design for our first test facility at the Buland Garden:

 This design contains the equivalent of +/- 700 gallons of water in its 3X3 foot growing beds.  We would need the equivalent of 1200 gallons to provide the recommended heat storage for a passive system.  By adding the air flow through the growing medium we hope to make up the difference making the material in the growing beds serve both the purpose of heat storage and nutrients for our plants.

Top Bar Bee Hives

Building 7 Modified Warre' Bee Hives