Permaculture for Kids
In Seven Easy Lessons
What is Permaculture?
Permaculture (per-ma-cul-tur) is a word for Permanent Agriculture for the growing of crops. It is a term used to describe a method of growing plants designed after nature.
What does that mean? It means that we plant things that will take care of the soil, of each other, and of us.
How can plants help us?
They make air.
They make the soil healthy.
They clean the water.
They feed us.
“How can we help plants?” is the first question in Permaculture. There are seven easy lessons to get us started.
Lesson 1: Six Rules
Lesson 2: Balance of Eco-Systems
Lesson 3: Backyard Gardens
Lesson 4: 5 Zones
Lesson 5: Swales and Key-hole Gardens
Lesson 6: Soil Soil Soil
Lesson 7: Composting
Lesson 1:
Six Rules of Permaculture
1. OBSERVE
Every place is very different: City or Rural, Mountain or Valley, North or South. Even kids from the same school can have different back yards. That means we need to observe the area we live in, and look at what plants are growing and which plants like each other.
What bugs or plants have you observed lately?
2. RE-USE
Part of Permaculture is to re-use everything in the garden. We try to do that three times or more if we can. Everything in the garden must be treated with thought and respect. That includes every plant, every rock, every person, and even the wind and the sun.
3. CONNECT
By observing and re-using everything, it becomes possible to connect all the elements of your garden. This part of making a garden work is very important. Like a jungle gym – the more connections there are, the stronger and the more fun your garden will be.
4. START SMALL
Even a deck, a fire escape, or the space by your front door can be used for permaculture. It is often most fun to start small and use your little space to observe, to re-use, and to learn about new connections. Most parents will be happy to help you start your own garden in a small space.
What areas do you know of where a small garden might fit?
5. MISTAKES
Never feel bad about making mistakes. Mistakes mean you are learning. Ask why something didn’t work. Then ask how you can make a better connection and help your plants be healthier and happier.
6. HAPPY PLANTS GROW
If a plant has friends, food and water, the right sunshine, and is not too hot or too cold, she will grow. Just like any child, plants do best when they have good things to eat, good friends to to be with, and a good person to care for them.
Lesson 2:
Balance of Eco-Systems
Succession
When the ground is bare, Mother Nature sends in pioneer plants, plants that move into empty spaces, to cover it. They rapidly move in to protect the soil from erosion by the sun and the wind. Some of these are well known. Dandelion, Plantain, Chicory and…
After a few years, if left to grow wild, the short-lived annuals, plants that live only one year, will be replaced with taller plants. Most of the taller plants will be perennials, plants that live more than one year. They move in and make shade. They can be Asters, Goldenrod, or Fire Weed, but just like the annuals, there are many perennials.
Like tall apartment buildings, they offer homes for all sorts of insects and birds. This change from an open empty area to a dense multi-layered area is succession. All living things in an area are called bio-mass. Over time, if the space is left alone and nothing happens to disrupt it, it will grow to one day become a forest all of its own.
In permaculture, when we build a garden, we try to mimic succession and create healthy bio-mass. That is why we put in so many different plants, avoid killing the soil, and use natural growing patterns.
Draw a healthy area with lots of bio-mass.
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Lesson 3:
Back Yard Gardens
Using permaculture concepts in backyard gardens, you can bring in natural predators to remove pests in an organic way. If helpful bugs have a place to live, they will stay, and the bugs that like to eat on your plants will be kept under control without your intervention.
Often, all we have to do is provide homes for helpful bugs and birds, and they will take care of the pests for us.
Edges
An edge is where one community of plants meets bare ground. What does Mother Nature do with bare ground? She fills it.
Rarely does she fill it with plants that we want in our gardens. Those plants are often referred to as weeds. To make that happen less, we need to have fewer edges. Spiral Gardens and Key Hole Gardens are very good at this. We will look at them more closely later.
Can you think of what type of garden has the most edges? Can you think of the edges in the gardens you have seen? That’s right, every pathway and straight row in a garden makes an edge.
Lesson 4
5 Zones
Another important part of Permaculture is Zones. Use zones to classify different areas you can get to. By observing and using zones we can make our gardens more helpful to us and easier for us to take care of. When we plan a garden we start at the place we are the most. Most often this is around your house.
Draw your house and then add zones as you learn about them.
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Zone 1
In zone 1 we plant the things that are the easiest to get to. This is where you plant what you want closest to you and needs the most care. Salad greens, herbs, flowers, low shrubs, and lawn are often what fill zone 1. This is where people like to put bird baths, worm bins, and little greenhouses. Do you have any of these things close to your home?
Zone 2
The plants that need less care should go in zone 2. These plants will also be home for helpful bugs and animals. It is an area we can put helpful pets as well, like chickens. Squash or other plants often go in zone 2.
Zone 3
This is a low work area. Here are plants that almost take care of themselves, big fruit trees for example. Ponds and swales go in zone 3. It is a good place to store firewood or to have pasture. Goats, pigs, and free range chickens do best in zone 3.
Zone 4
This is a foraging area. Here we go hunting, gathering, and grazing. Some people don’t have access to this sort of area, but if you do, this is a minimal care area.
Zone 5
Zone 5 is not managed. That means that this area is left to be wilderness. This is a place we go to observe nature, to learn how plants grow, and who they like to to grow with. Only occasionally do we take anything from this area.
Draw plants you think you might find in zone 5
Lesson 5:
Swales and Key-hole Gardens
Swales are ditches that are dug or built along the slope of the land to slow down water and to store it for plant use and compost.
By slowing down the water, plants have more access to it, and the microbes do too! Microbes are very tiny single-celled organisms. Many of these microbes are here to help us and our plants. Just like anything else, if microbes don’t have water, they do not do well.
Plants are often put along the swale to take advantage of the slowed water. Do you remember what zone a swale would go into? Do you know of a place near where you live where a swale could go? Have you ever seen one?
Key-hole Garden
Key-hole gardens are gardens that are built up in a circle, often with a little walk-way to the center. We do this to not only give plants deep, good soil but to eliminate edges.
These gardens are called key-hole because from the top, they look like an old fashion key hole. In the center you can either have it open to stand in so that your garden is easy to reach, or you can use the center for a deep compost. Compost is decomposing organic matter. It makes a fun place for good worms and helpful microbes right in the center of your garden. Key-hole gardens are used anywhere there is soil that is difficult to work with or limited space. They even work in the very driest parts of Africa.
Draw your favorite flowers in the key-hole garden
Spiral Gardens
Spiral gardens are gardens that start at the bottom and twist upward. Spiral gardens and key-hole gardens work best for plants with small roots. Plants with big roots will push out the walls of the garden and break it down over time. Think of a big tree and how its roots break up the ground around it, but small plants don’t do that. That is why most people plant herbs and flowers in their spiral gardens.
Draw something from nature that is a spiral.
Lesson 6:
Soil Soil Soil
Without healthy soil nothing can grow. Soil is not just dirt. It is just like a forest. It has many things living in it and we need those things there.
Some of them are so tiny you cannot see them without a microscope, but many others are bigger. Can you think of things that you can see in the ground? Voles, worms, ants, even bees can live in the ground. What else?
If the microbes aren’t there, the things that live in the soil like worms and other helpful critters can’t be healthy. There are many microbes that live in the soil, and just like us, they live in different areas. Some live right at the surface while others live deeper down.
If the soil gets turned over, these microbes get very confused and some will eat everything while others starve. It takes them a very long time, even years, to get back to the area they like to live in.
When one type of microbe gets too much air or too much food, they might grow very fast. For a moment things look good, but when the food is all gone, all the microbes get very hungry.
When they are left to live undisturbed, they work together to give each other and all the plants whatever they need. When they are tilled over and disturbed, they do not.
Some microbes work with mycelium, the tiny under-ground parts of mushrooms, to break down things on the ground like dead leaves and grass. The dead plant is broken down and eaten by invertebrates. Invertebrates are small creatures with no spine, like worms or millipedes. The nutrients are carried away in their guts. The worm leaves casting (worm poop) as it tunnels and that is where the microbes can get to it.
Everything is eaten again and again until it is broken down into its tiniest parts. The critters in the ground bring it to the microbes so that they can turn it into humus.
Even more microbes break that down into edible parts – into sugars and carbon rings. Some even make amino acid piles from long leaf protein chains. Microbes stay very busy as long as they are healthy. Because of microbes, dead plants end up as humus or minerals in the soil. Both are needed.
Can you name these helpful bugs?
The parts of the plant that are the most difficult to break down are sent to special microbes and fungus, but even for them it takes time. That is what the humus is.
We need this in the soil because it feeds those special microbes, but it also holds water very well. Humus swells up like a sponge, breaking up the soil in a healthy way. It replaces the need to till the ground. Humus is also the emergency food store for all the microbes if something goes wrong. If the humus is going away faster than it is rebuilding, that means the microbes are starving.
Lesson 7:
Composting
We have learned that microbes need food, and that we need them to make the soil healthy. We have also learned that some microbes eat one thing while others eat another. If they are starving, they will eat up all the humus and then die. So how can we help hungry microbes?
We can compost. When we make a compost pile or add compost to the garden, we are making a restaurant for our microbes. To make it a five-star restaurant that will make all of them healthy, we need to give them everything in balance. Not too much carbon, not too much nitrogen. If we don’t, it would be like having a restaurant of nothing but candy. It might be fun for awhile, but if all we ate was candy, we would feel sick and not be healthy.
That is why we layer different things in a compost pile. Wet things go on, then dry things; green things, then brown things, like putting grass clipping on top of dry leaves or shredded newspaper.
We have to be careful, though, to make sure there are no toxic sprays on the grass clippings or anything else that goes into the compost pile. These chemicals can make the microbes very sick and even kill them.
Lasagna Garden
If we are trying to plant a new garden and do not have the time to compost new soil, we can always make a layer garden or Lasagna Garden. It is called that because we put in layer after layer just like a pan of lasagna.
We can start with cardboard to stop the weeds, and then we put on the green stuff (like fresh grass clippings). Next we put on brown stuff (like old leaves or newspaper). Unlike a compost pile, in the garden we add topsoil as the next layer. The soil is for the plants, but also to cool it down for the microbes so they don’t work too fast. If they work too fast they will make the garden too hot and cook the plants’ roots.
We can do this once or twice, or even three times if we want. On the very top of it we add mulch, thick enough that new weeds won’t come in before our baby plants get big enough to fill the space.
The microbes will start at the bottom of the new garden and begin to build humus and a healthy soil structure. Microbes, plants, animals, and people can all work together so that everyone has enough food and water.
Always remember to be kind and respectful to everything in the garden, to observe, reuse, and not be afraid to make mistakes.
Draw your dream garden
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Annuals _______________________________________
Perennials______________________________________
Bio-Mass______________________________________
Humus________________________________________
Succession______________________________________
Spiral-garden_____________________________________
Invertebrates_____________________________________
Edge__________________________________________
Zone__________________________________________
Swale__________________________________________
Microbes_________________________________________
Compost_________________________________________
Casting__________________________________________
Lasagna Garden_____________________________________