Here in southern Spain, many people describe the summer months of July and August as like ‘being in hell’. There is no rain, or even any clouds; temperatures get over 40 degrees Celsius, and even when the wind blows, rather than a cool, refreshing breeze, we get a blast of hot air brought over the ocean from the Sahara desert.

No wonder many people head north during the summer months. This summer, however, I plan to stay on my land. In spite of the heat and aridity, I am confident that I can keep cool. Using different tools from permaculture, a design science which can help us to live a more sustainable lifestyle, I will find ways to maximise our use of water, while still being able to enjoy myself.

Enjoyment is one of the central points of permaculture design. To use permaculture as a design tool, we recognise that humans are part of an ecosystem, made up of other humans, animals, elements and energies which are all connected and interconnected at the same time. No one part of this web is more important than any other. However, we also recognise that the person doing the designing needs to be able to meet their own needs primarily, so that they can keep on living sustainably. Therefore the designer needs to be at the centre of any design. The word permaculture comes from ‘permanent + agriculture’ or ‘permanent + culture’ – the idea is to implement culture of all kinds which can be sustainable (i.e. does not use more energy or resources than it takes) or even regenerative (i.e. it gives back more energy or resources than it takes).

When it comes to gardening and landscape design, we can use permaculture tools to choose to grow perennial crops, such as fruit trees, strawberries, raspberries, etc, which get bigger and more productive every year, rather than annual crops, such as tomatoes or sweetcorn, which have to be re-sown every year and therefore take more time, energy and resources to maintain. We would then intersperse these crops with others, all taking up a different place in the ecosystem, to mimic the layers in a forest. All crops chosen to be grown in this kind of design should have some kind of use for the designer, because, as I said, the designer’s needs have to be met.

In this way, a permaculture garden would require lots of work at the beginning but over time, can just grow by itself, creating a ‘food forest’ which the designer only needs to visit in order to harvest all of the abundant, delicious produce which they are growing. As Bill Mollison, one of the founders of permaculture, said, ‘that’s when the designer becomes the recliner’.

There are many ways to utilise water when growing a garden in this way. The conventional way to water crops is to weed out everything from around the things you wish to grow, so that they are surrounded by bare earth. Bare earth does not absorb water very easily, dries out quickly and can get easily washed away, causing erosion. So one simple way to catch and store the water is to put mulch all around your plants.

Want to know more about water and how to conserve it? You can check out my page on permaculturenews.org - https://www.permaculturenews.org/author/charlottehaworth/ or feel free to book a class with me soon!

(Main picture by Lukas van Oort)
(Srawberry picture by Henry & Co)