The Permaculture Handbook: Garden Farming for Town and Country

820 Pages·2012·34.72 MB·English

by  Peter Bane

Praise for The Permaculture Handbook
When Apollo 13 found itself hurtling through space on its way to the far side of
the moon with a ruptured oxygen tank, a critical path was assembled that
returned all souls safely back to Earth. In The Permaculture Handbook, Peter
Bane has mapped the critical path to a safe landing for civilization in the 21st
century. That path runs through the backyards of suburbia and across the
rooftops and balconies of urban apartment houses. Like the Apollo mission,
Bane has jury-rigged our carbon dioxide removal system by re-tasking other
components — small scale horticulture, aquatic plants and foraged trash, for
instance — to buy us breathing room. This is a must read.
— Albert Bates, author of The Post Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook,
and The Biochar Solution.
The Permaculture Handbook offers practical examples from the author’s many
years of experience, coupled with information from permaculture practitioners
from around the country. This makes the guidebook particularly useful to
American readers. The chapters covering the integration of multifunctional
species and breeds of domestic animals and wildlife are especially note-worthy.
These chapters address the sometimes under-recognized value of animal
products and services in the Permaculture literature. This book is a joy to read
while thinking about applications to one’s own endeavors.
— Donald Bixby, DVM, Retired Executive Director of American Livestock
Breeds Conservancy
Peter Bane’s characteristic generosity and mastery are on display in this long
anticipated encyclopedia of permaculture knowledge and lore. The Permaculture
Handbook offers a thorough treatment of the design principles and patterns that
of necessity precede the positive, practical, and profitable solutions that are the
hallmark of permaculture design. Bill Mollison famously taught that we can
create the “Garden of Eatin’”. Peter Bane shows us how.
— Claude William Genest, Former Deputy Leader of the Green Party of Canada.
Producer, Host of the Emmy nominated PBS series “Regeneration: The Art of
Sustainable Living”
As oil becomes more scarce and expensive, society must adapt by relocalizing
food systems. The Permaculture Handbook offers us a set of essential conceptual
and practical tools for doing this in a way that’s intelligent, beautiful, and
sustainable. Want to create a better world? Your backyard — and this book —
are the places to start.
— Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow, Post Carbon Institute, Author, The End of
Growth
Here is an exquisite design manual for re-inhabiting our towns and cities,
transforming them into flourishing and nourishing landscapes that provide food,
fiber, energy and community. As you read this book, looking out from time to
time at the paved, manicured tracts we’ve called home, you can almost see the
world around you transforming — a fruit tree here, a greenhouse there, a hill of
corn, beans and squash in the corner, a photovoltaic array that charges your
electric bicycle nearby. We are not in an era of despair, of coming apart. We are
in an era of creativity where strong seeds grow in the very cracks in the concrete
of our old ways of living. I applaud Peter for the wisdom, intelligence and hard
work he has invested in his detailed, beautiful map of the land of permaculture.
— Vicki Robin, author Your Money or Your Life and Blessing the Hands that
Feed Us (Viking/Penguin 2013).
Peter Bane offers a powerful antidote to what we might call our
“ephemeraculture”— the consumerist, oil-dependent, wasteful, and ruinous way
of life produced by the marriage of industrialism and capitalism. In a voice at
once practical and visionary, he tells how we can achieve security, practice self-
reliance, and revive local economies by shifting to a regenerative form of
agriculture, beginning in our own backyards. If you’re hungry for hope, good
food, neighborliness, conviviality, and survival skills, here is the book for you.
— Scott Russell Sanders, author of A Conservationist Manifesto.
Morally mature cultures live well with the Earth and with each other. Peter
Bane’s beautifully written book lays out a path to that maturity and wisdom.
Future generations will thank him — and you if you read and use the wisdom he
has gathered.
— Carolyn Raffensperger, Environmental lawyer, advocate for future
generations, Executive Director of the Science and Environmental Health
Network
The wealth of practical knowledge in The Permaculture Handbook is a welcome
addition to North America’s canon of books on permaculture design, and will
serve other regions as well. Peter Bane’s broad and well-tested experience in
ecological living, expressed here in clear and engaging prose, will guide
homeowners, gardeners, and small farmers toward designing and living in lushly
productive and harmonious landscapes.
— Toby Hemenway, author of Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale
Permaculture
A book to carry us through to Eden, this keen, comprehensive design guide with
its wisdom and instruction will be indispensable to any household aiming at
flourishing, soil-based self-reliance. The practice is permaculture and Peter Bane
is a true master.
— Stephanie Mills, author of On Gandhi’s Path and Epicurean Simplicity
With a lifetime of Permaculture immersion under his belt, Peter Bane’s
contribution to domestic self-reliant security in this comprehensive handbook is
nothing short of remarkable. This will empower thousands of seekers to move
off the bleachers and into the game. He balances beautifully the right amount of
intensive ecological information with delightful case studies and practical
outworkings. A gem of a manual. Thank you, Peter.
— Joel Salatin, Author, Farmer
There are a lot of people out there who want to know how to begin making a
better world, but don’t know where to begin. I can’t think of a better starting
point for someone who wants to restore and transform their place than Peter
Bane’s Permaculture Handbook. Bane has taken the single most urgent question
of our times “How shall we live?” and given a real and viable answer.
— Sharon Astyk, writer, farmer, teacher and author of Making Home
The Permaculture Handbook is worth reading and rereading not only for its
depth of insight but also for its storytelling charm. Peter Bane’s reflections on
community-based efforts to realize permaculture’s potential across entire
landscapes helps us realize that this set of design principles are not vague
abstractions, but something that we can smell, taste and see before our very eyes.
— Gary Paul Nabhan, ethnobotanist, writer, permaculture orchardkeeper, seed
saver
THE
PERMACULTURE
HANDBOOK
by
Peter Bane
Copyright © 2012 by Peter Bane.
All rights reserved.
Cover design by Diane McIntosh.
Main image: © iStock (Jim Schemel); Rooster: iStock (pastoor)
First printing May 2012
Ebook ISBN 978-1-55092-485-5
Inquiries regarding requests to reprint all or part of The Permaculture Handbook
should be addressed to New Society Publishers at the address below.
To order directly from the publishers, please call toll-free
(North America) 1-800-567-6772, or order online at
www.newsociety.com
Any other inquiries can be directed by mail to:
New Society Publishers
P.O. Box 189, Gabriola Island, BC V0R 1X0, Canada
[phone]
New Society Publishers’ mission is to publish books that contribute in fundamental ways to building an ecologically sustainable and just society, and to do so with the least possible impact on the
environment, in a manner that models this vision. We are committed to doing this not just through education, but through action. The interior pages of our bound books are printed on Forest Stewardship
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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Bane, Peter
The permaculture handbook / by Peter Bane.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Permaculture — Handbooks, manuals, etc. 2. Permaculture — Case studies. I. Title.
S494.5.P47B35 2012 631.5’8 C2012-902010-9
To the memory of
Ivan Illich,
defender of our humanity
Contents
Acknowledgments
Foreword by David Holmgren
PART I: ATTITUDES
1. Garden Farming
2. Who Am I to Farm?
3. Gardening the Planet
4. Permaculture Principles
5. Learning the Language of Design
6. A Garden Farming Pattern Language
PART II: ELEMENTS
Case Study A: Renaissance Farm, Bloomington, Indiana, USA
7. Land — Scales and Strategies
8. Labor — Can You Lend a Helping Hand?
9. Running on Sunshine
10. Water from Another Time
Case Study B: Jerome’s Organics, Basalt, Colorado, USA
11. Soil – the Real Dirt