Documenting the making of a permaculture farm in the suburbs of Boston
On Saturday, we started our first Real Work in the food forest to be: taking down lots of saplings and brush. We don’t like to take down trees and bushes, but we also want to create the space for our intentional plants, ones that are really good at producing food for us or for wildlife, or super providers for the soil in our little micro-ecosystem. It was exciting to get outside and use some muscle power to move a lot of stuff around. Read more
The scrum board is a tool to help a team go through a project efficiently and effectively, with flexibility, while having fun. Often, in projects, people make a huge project spreadsheet with rows of tasks, organized in order, and time, in weeks or days, going across the top. They fill in the week or days for each task, one following the other, so you get this nice cascade of going down your task list over time. This is called a Gantt chart. The problem is it never works out as planned. Read more
And finally… after taking a design class, after writing a synthesis document, after getting to know our land, and making time, and going through the Process …. we have a design, a paper version of our vision! It is very exciting! Read more
Have you ever seen a drawing of a garden design? The swoop-y paths, and the green circles that mean “this is where you put X”. How do they get there? Read more
The Synthesis Document is a kind of getting to know yourself; the other side of this is getting to know your Land – or site analysis. I learned about site analysis from the Permaculture Design Course I took last year, discussed in an earlier blog. Read more
After we had agreed that we would work together, Mark said the first thing we should do would be create a Synthesis Document with all the jobs and functions that this project will need to fulfill. This document will help guide the design – because we will be able to look at the design and check off how all the jobs and functions are going to be met. Read more
The other day, we had a big snowstorm. It dumped 12 inches (30 cm) of the white stuff, and made everything very beautiful. Around here, with snow means snow-shoveling. As the storm eased up, I headed outside, and grabbed our shovel, which consists of a blue curved metal shaft (ergonomic), a blue plastic handle, and a blue plastic blade. Read more
