Working Together with Nature in Your Own Backyard

Close your eyes and imagine a beautiful and magical space that is self-sustained right in your own backyard. Insects, animals and plants all working together to naturally benefit one another. This magic comes from a new healthier way of living that is so incredibly easy for all of us to maintain even with busy lifestyles. It creates a perfect environment no matter where you live implementing the idea of Permaculture. After a long day, you can easily come home and enjoy fruit off of your own tree grown in your backyard (or small patio) without the worry that chemicals have penetrated or affected the nutrients in each bite. Everything grown is self sustained directly from nature, meaning it thrives and flourishes naturally from it's surroundings.

I was recently graced with getting to spend some time with Brandy M. Hall, Founder and Director of Shades of Green Permaculture based out of Atlanta, Georgia and Asheville, North Carolina. Brandy is a full of knowledge and I found myself scrambling with my pen and paper jotting down notes to make sure I gathered everything she shared with me. She and her company are making such an incredible environmental impact and I realized how passionate she is about what she does even during the short time I spent chatting with her. Her voice when speaking about doing what she loves, resonates. What I learned with my time with Brandy was eye-opening and incredibly enlightening and truly changed my perspective on what landscaping and farming (no matter how small) should truly be about. I knew we had some work to do ourselves in our own backyard and I knew if I implemented even a portion of her techniques, my little family could live healthier everyday.

"Simple solutions can make [a] big impact. Whatever it is that you're stewarding, whether it's a patio or one-thousand acres, the decisions that you make with how you interact with an outdoor space has an impact."

Shades of Green & What They Do

No matter the scale, it's important to focus on the concept of restoring the water cycle and utilizing rainwater harvesting through water catchment and landscaping techniques that beneficially work with the land. Point blank, you need to catch the rain. When speaking with Brandy, rainwater harvesting was something that came up several times in our discussion in reference to small spaces up to working acres of farms. "The size of land changes what the needs are" she explained. "Rather than breaking the water cycle, we restore the water cycle."

Shades of Green describes their approach in three ways, which can be found on their website here:

Water Cycle Restoration: "We are blessed to live in a region [the southeast] with abundant rainfall, but as they say, when it rains it pours. Too often, rainwater is treated like a nuisance and sent into our already-overloaded stormwater systems, and then, when the hot, dry summer months come, we pull from wells and municipal sources to irrigate, depleting our stores of fresh water. Our approach is to capture water, build the soils’ capacity to infiltrate water, and distribute the water where it is useful in the landscape."

Plant Ecology: "We don’t plant plants, we plant ecosystems. The foundation of all of our planting design is to create biodiversity; build seed banks of native and useful species; develop lost pollinator and song bird habitat; transition chemical dependent, poisonous landscapes to thriving organic ones; and generate plant communities that cycle nutrients without the need for chemical fertilizer."

Reframing Maintenance: "Healthy landscapes are dynamic, and function best when someone gives them care and attention. Our landscapes require less inputs, but they are designed to feed you! It is more sustainable to take incremental steps in responding to the ever-changing nature of the living world—learning the nuances and critters and texture of a site—than to keep struggling to keep nature in a static and  unchanging state. The former gently responds to nature, the latter manipulates it with a heavy hand and many inputs. We advocate for management, rather than maintenance."

Design Principles of Permaculture

How Permaculture Benefits Working Farms

Every detail even down to the tiny pollinators buzzing by makes a system successful especially in larger projects like working farms or large-acre homesteads. When designing large scale projects such as farm systems, Shades of Green emphasizes that the rainwater harvesting that is implemented in smaller residential designs through catchment areas (such as a roof), aren't sufficient enough. Farms need irrigation regularly on a larger scale which means that overland flow and the use of gravity is implemented across the landscape. Intercropping (growing two crops within close proximity of one another in rows) or alley cropping (planting rows of trees with wide spacing with companion crops in between, like an alley way) are implemented within farm systems designed by Shades of Green.

"In many of our farm systems [we use] the method of intercropping or alley cropping where you use a wind row of trees and shrubs of mixed species and then a production row that's sized in order to pull tractors or integrate animals through rotational grazing. The allies of trees are laid out on a series of contoured swails, which is basically a ditch with a berm on the downhill side that helps to slow the water to spread [it] evenly and infiltrate to the root zones. This minimizes the need for extended irrigation, helps to build the soil's capacity to hold water and builds organic matter within the plant communities and things beneficial to insects. "

Brandy honed in on the concept that with farm systems, Shades of Green focuses on diversifying income streams and integrating animals in a way where they're working for the system itself and bolstering the health of the system using their own natural instincts. An example of this is with chicken scratching and utilizing a chicken's natural instinct for the system's benefit.

How Small is Too Small?

On the other side of the coin, smaller residential projects are never too small to incorporate Permaculture or have Shades of Green assist in developing a system that works. Brandy shared that they have done projects as small as a patio garden for people with limited space that want to know how they can grow food and herbs.

"We've done potted trees, that don't need a lot of water like figs and pomegranates and mixed those with herbs. We did a patio garden that was centered around cocktail herbs like fennel, lavender, pineapple sage - very small compost systems."

Workshops, Educational Courses & Retreats

I asked Brandy after our talk concluded about how the general public interested in incorporating (or just learning more about) Permaculture in their yard, patio or farm could learn more. She shared with me that Shades of Green currently offers a Permaculture Design Certification Course. The course itself is catered to working individuals so the classes are held one weekend per month for six months. She shared that Shades of Green currently, on average, has about twenty to twenty-five people attend each session from all over the country. Brandy and her team are focusing on developing an online course offering as well and a self-guided Design Your Own Homestead course. Weekend workshops and retreats are also offered and she mentioned several coming up for anyone who may be interested such as a workshop where attendees can learn how to use Kuzdu in various ways entitled, From Wild Vine, to Fine Fiber. Their upcoming events, retreats, courses and workshops can be found here.

---

So I have to admit, I am now obsessed with learning as much as I can about how I can better my surroundings at home by incorporating Permaculture techniques for self sustained and eco-friendly systems. I wish I could share what I look like (I wear all emotions on my face) right now writing this. All of this information is so incredibly exciting for what so many people can implement for a better future. I shared with Brandy I wanted to write this article for our blog not only because it interested me (as I'm sure she could tell my my smiling face while we spoke), but because I knew so many people this information could benefit. If you are interested in learning more please reach out to Brandy and her team using the contact information below. I will be sharing produce grown (and flowers, which I love) in my own personal garden within the next year utilizing the concepts and techniques of Permaculture! I can't wait to continue to grow in so many ways. No matter the topic, everything always starts with a happy little seed...

Shades of Green Permaculture

www.shadesofgreenpermaculture.com

info@shadesofgreenpermaculture.com

Atlanta: 404. 494. 0140

Asheville: 828. 484. 1409