Seasonal Permaculture Design

Garden activity is slowing down for the winter – and design season is upon us, so now’s a good time to be thinking about your Permaculture design, especially if you would like to include trees and shrubs, – which most of my designs wouldn’t be without! Earthcare Permaculture Design offers a consultancy and design service to advise on making the most of your land base -garden through to farm. Just give me a call or an email if you’d like some extra input towards creating your own productive and resilient landscape that can supply your resource needs.
Giving some time to design now means that much of the framework offered by tree and shrub planting, can be installed over the winter – while ‘bare root’ trees are still available and a fraction of the price of potted one’s later in the year.
Orchards for fruit and nuts, trees and hedges for shelter from wind and wise use of water, for essential wildlife habitat and forage, for soil improvement, and for seasonal variety – I love watching the seasons change through the trees, now the purple alder is coming into it’s own outside my window, silhouettes of hawthorn and elm and the unreal pink and orange combo of the spindle splashing the hedgerow down the lane.
This photo is from a few weeks back, a small area I’ve been planting up over the years as a diverse woodland coppice for firewood, flood mitigation and habitat. It’s a wet, riverside field, dominated by rushes, now emerging into a really lovely mixed woodland, with a few of the alder ready to cut for mushroom logs this winter. Other trees here are crab apple, oak, hawthorn, scots pine, rowan, on the drier spots birch, alder, and aspen (I love aspen! – the sound and colour of it in the wind) in the wetter areas. Planting riparian zones, where appropriate is one pattern applied in Permaculture design – protect the edge!

For more images on what I get up to through the seasons follow Earthcare permaculture ireland on Instagram and Earthcare Permaculture Design on Facebook.