In this episode of the HobbyScool podcast, permaculture expert Mindy Wood shares practical insights and tips on how to create a successful homestead using permaculture principles. With a focus on Earth care, people care, and fair share, Mindy offers guidance on how to observe and design a sustainable and self-sufficient ecosystem that not only supports healthy soil and abundant gardens but also fits personal preferences.

You’ll walk away with a deeper understanding of permaculture and the tools to design a homestead that is both intentional and efficient.

Don't miss this episode for a holistic approach to gardening and sustainable living!

Summary

Permaculture is a philosophy of growing food and designing sustainable and self-sufficient ecosystems. It is based on three ethics: Earth care, people care, and fair share. Mindy Wood, a permaculture expert and founder of Our Inspired Roots, shares her insights on how to create an easy and abundant garden using permaculture principles.

Permaculture mimics the easy systems in nature. By observing the space and knowing environmental and weather factors, as well as the impact of neighbors, industries, businesses, and roads, designing a homestead can be intentional and efficient. Grouping things together that make sense, such as gardens and water sources for livestock, can make life easier and conserve energy.

Observing the space and focusing on personal needs and wants is more important than following what others are doing. Mindy emphasizes the importance of designing a homestead that fits personal preferences. It is better to have an unusual arrangement of animals and plants that fit personal preferences than to choose common options and be unhappy with them.

Healthy soil is crucial for successful gardening. It can be achieved through polycultures, which support soil life and keep the soil in balance. Mulching helps protect the soil and retain moisture. The first step for healthy soil is retaining moisture. Healthy soil holds moisture like a sponge, allowing it to get through drier periods longer.

Permaculture is a philosophy that looks to nature when designing a sustainable and self-sufficient ecosystem. It mimics the easy systems in nature, such as matching plants to the environment, planting polycultures, mulching, and proximity. By observing the space, being intentional about where things go, and focusing on personal needs and wants, designing a homestead can be efficient and easy. Healthy soil is crucial for successful gardening and can be achieved through polycultures and mulching.

Please note that there is an affiliate link below which means we may receive a small commission if you purchase the permaculture course.

Mentioned In This Episode

• Where you can find Mindy: ⁠Website⁠

• Mindy's Free Gift: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠3 Secrets to Easy and Abundant Gardens⁠⁠

• Follow Mindy on⁠ Instagram⁠

• Course: ⁠Simple Permaculture Design Roadmap⁠ (affiliate link)

• Don't forget to join our wait list for the next HobbyScool online learning summit. Our summits are free to attend and you can be the first to know when the next summit launches by getting on the wait list here.

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Transcript:

[0:00:02] Destini Copp: And my special guest today is Mindy Wood. Mindy is a certified permaculture designer and has spent the last decade learning and teaching homesteading skills in a variety of places on acreage, in the suburbs, and in an apartment too. So if you want to learn how to raise and grow your own food and met and in a way that is healthy for people and the planet, Mindy is the person to help you. And today we're going to be talking about how to use permaculture for an easier garden. And Mindy, thank you so much for joining me. I am very excited to jump into this conversation with you that I know very little to nothing about. So I think it'll be a great conversation. And before we jump into all the questions I have for you, can you tell the good audience a little bit more about you and how you help people?

[0:01:01] Mindy Wood: Sure. Yeah. So I'm really excited about this conversation too. My name is Mindy and I teach people about permaculture growing. I'm a permaculture designer and instructor, so one of the things that I do is teach people how to use permaculture principles on their own property. And then I also do consulting where people will come to me and have me do kind of more of the work of the design for them. But either way, permaculture helps people to have easier gardens. So people typically are really fascinated by that and want to learn more.

[0:01:48] Destini Copp: And we're definitely going to jump into this. But before we do, can you tell the audience, how did you get into this? What made you want to start homesteading and gardening and all that good stuff?

[0:02:03] Mindy Wood: Yeah. So I think I started when I became a mom. And that kind of helped me to start thinking about things that I hadn't necessarily thought of before, about how our food supply is not really the best as far as processed food, chemicals and preservatives in our food. And then even with contamination in things that should be healthy, like lettuce and spinach. So I started thinking it might be a good idea to grow my own food. So I began growing my own food just for the health benefits of that. But then I really just fell in love with the idea of self reliance, having my hands in the things that I am consuming. So kind of growing my own wood and creating my own things in my life. Which is interesting that I was kind of really focused on self reliance for a while because now I'm kind of more in that community reliance space. But that's a whole other topic. But I started learning about permaculture specifically when I was growing my own food. But I started just feeling overwhelmed with it and it just felt really hard. And I was having lots of problems where pests and plants that just weren't doing well and I didn't know why. And it was taking a lot of my time and energy and at the time I had little kids, I think they were even babies at the time and I just needed to find a better way to do it so that I wasn't burnt out. And I figured there must be a way because people have been growing their own food for basically all of history.

[0:03:51] Mindy Wood: Yeah, that's how I kind of got into it.

[0:03:54] Destini Copp: I definitely want to go back and we can touch upon it in just a second. That what you said about self reliance but now you're more towards community reliance. So that's a very interesting concept because I do think a lot of people when they start maybe gardening in their backyard they're like oh, I don't want to be so dependent on the grocery store other people but it can be a lot of work I'm assuming. But before we get into that, can you tell us a little bit more about permaculture because I know absolutely nothing about it. So tell us a little bit about what it is.

[0:04:38] Mindy Wood: Sure. So permaculture is a philosophy of growing food that focuses on sustainable and self sufficient ecosystems. So there are three ethics of permaculture. There's Earth care, people care and fair share. And I'll just tell you a little bit about those. Earth care is obviously taking care of the planet. People care is taking care of people and then fair share, people have different interpretations of this. But the way I see it is just that every being or thing that is on the planet has what it needs to thrive. So not having fair share would be like humans taking all of the resources and animals don't have anything. So it's a way of making sure that everyone is taken care of. So permaculture actually can be more than food growing. It can include communities, like creating sustainable communities which is a really interesting aspect of permaculture. So if anyone's interested in that I would definitely recommend learning more about it. But as far as gardening goes, permaculture essentially looks to nature when designing a sustainable and self sufficient ecosystem. And so since nature already has created these perfect ways of growing food, this is how it creates a really easy way of growing food.

[0:06:12] Mindy Wood: And so when I started with permaculture I started noticing right away how easy things started getting because I was kind of making these connections where like oh in nature there's mulch like a forest, there's mulch from the leaves and that keeps grass from growing there. So that's why the blueberry bushes can grow and all these different things. It's really interesting.

[0:06:43] Destini Copp: That is interesting. So let's delve into that just a little bit more because you did touch upon it about how you can use it in gardening and it makes it easier, makes gardening easier, delve into that a little bit more and let's say that we're wanting to do a home garden in our backyard. What does this look like for the average home gardener.

[0:07:09] Mindy Wood: So permaculture mimics the easy systems in nature. So a few of the ways that we do that is matching plants to the environment. So while we could all grow things that don't naturally grow in our area and it's okay to do that, it's ideal to pick plants that naturally could grow in your area or even better, are native to your area. So, for example, I'm in New Hampshire and while we do grow tomatoes here, it's harder to just because it's cold. But we grow leafy greens and cabbages and other brassicas really easily and root vegetables too. So it makes sense to focus on those plants that do well without a lot of maintenance. And of course then you grow some tomatoes too because we all love those things. But I always recommend trying to include more of those plants that do really well in your environment kind of with a hands off approach. Another thing is planting polycultures. So instead of planting just rows and rows of corn or rows and rows of carrots, using your space for polycultures is a better way to make your garden easy. So that would be like including root vegetables and leafy greens and vining plants like squashes or hops or things like that. And the benefit of polycultures is that every plant needs something and also gives something. So, for example, green beans and tea mixers, so they add nitrogen to the soil and things like lettuce use a lot of nitrogen so they're helping each other to live harmoniously.

[0:09:19] Destini Copp: I love that. Sorry to interrupt you.

[0:09:25] Mindy Wood: My phone just started making noise and I was like, yeah, polycultures are so fun to learn about. It's like a huge topic too, but they're super fun. And so the next thing is mulching. So like I said, in forests, the leaves fall off of the trees and they mulch the area and that keeps the grass from growing so that other things can grow. It also helps retain moisture in the soil so that it keeps moisture in the soil so that when you do go through times where there's not as much rain, it doesn't affect what's growing as much. And then the next thing that I wanted to talk about is proximity. So where you put things in your design on your homestead, for example, so you'd want to put things that you frequent more often closer to your door. So for example, your kitchen garden where you have like your herbs that you cut every day or your lettuce that you cut and use for salad. You'd want to keep those close to your door and then like a chicken coop would still you still want to be somewhat close to your house because you go there at least twice a day to take care of them. But then things like pastures and orchards could be farther away because you don't need to go there as much. And that helps conserve your human energy so that you can use your energy in the best possible way.

[0:11:03] Destini Copp: So I love all those tips and kind of thinking about keeping things close that you're using every day. So let's say that somebody is interested in designing their own permaculture space. What are some of your tips for them on how they could do this and what should they do to get started?

[0:11:25] Mindy Wood: Sure, the first thing is that permaculture design, one of the biggest aspects of it is observing your space. So I recommend people spend a lot of time in observation, like more than you think you need, probably. So what I mean by observation is looking at your space and keeping track of things that you're noticing about it. So noticing that, oh, in the morning this spot gets a lot of sun and by the afternoon this spot gets more sun. And maybe this spot really stays shady all day. And in the spring, when all the snow is melting, there's a big pooled, like a vernal pool here, or maybe in a different spot stays really dry. Maybe there's high winds, all those kind of environmental and weather things you want to keep track of and think about, because those will influence the way that you design your property. Another thing about observation that a lot of people will miss or not understand is that what your neighbors are doing is going to affect your property, especially for those of us who don't live on huge pieces of property, which is, I would say, most of us. And so whether it's people being your neighbors or maybe it's an industry or a business or a road, all of those things can affect your property. And those are things that you want to be aware of and keep track of. And I would say ideally, you would spend a growing season just observing your space before you start designing. But most people kind of know a lot of these things about their space. And being intentional about observing it is just kind of solidifying those things that you already know about your space anyway. But yeah, if you have a new property, if you could spend a season just observing the property, and that would include the wildlife too, that would be really helpful with your design. So the next one is to be intentional about where things go.

[0:13:48] Mindy Wood: And I was talking a little bit about that before. So elements that you go to often, you want to keep closer to your door and then you also want to put things together that make sense. So, for example, you want to put gardens in a place where you have water for them, or you want to make water available where those gardens already are. And also you'd want water available for your livestock. So hauling water is probably one of the worst things to do if you want to conserve your energy and make life easier. So thinking about water systems is really important, and sometimes that means just putting in a hose somewhere or a spigot somewhere, or sometimes that's doing like a water catchment or like irrigation. But just having a solution for the water that you need, whether it's livestock or gardens, will make your life so much easier. And then the last thing that I wanted to talk about for this is that you want to focus on healthy soil. So healthy soil will help your gardens to be the healthiest that they can be so that they don't get kind of overrun with pests and disease and like your plants don't do well and all that stuff. So the first thing for healthy soil is it also retains a lot of moisture. So healthy soil will like, it kind of holds the moisture in like a sponge so that it can kind of get through the drier periods longer. And then polycultures, again, help support the soil life and they also help support each other. Those plants help support each other, but they support the soil life. Plants will give to the soil and take from the soil and so those polycultures will help keep that soil in balance. The opposite of that would be like if all I planted was carrots in my garden, the soil would probably become depleted of potassium and it would probably have higher levels of other nutrients.

[0:16:24] Mindy Wood: And so that's why polycultures are really helpful to the soil, is that some need these nutrients and some need these nutrients and it kind of all works together. And then as I mentioned before, mulch helps to protect the soil, protects the topsoil and keeps moisture in. So those are really the three biggest things that I would say if people were trying to design their homestead. If you focus on those things, you're going to be like way ahead of everyone else in your garden.

[0:16:56] Destini Copp: And I like the tip that you gave about kind of just going at and just observing your space because I know even and I don't have a big area here at our home, but even some of it gets more sun than others. I know if we have a big rain, there's puddles out in some areas that kind of sit there for a little bit. So I think that's such an important tip. Now mindy, before we close it up here today, do you have any last minute advice or tips for the audience?

[0:17:30] Mindy Wood: Yeah, I would say just focus on what your needs are for your homestead and what you want and don't worry about what other people are doing. I think a lot of times we think, oh, well, so and so is growing tomatoes and my neighbor is doing this or that and maybe I should do those things, but you really don't have to. Like if you don't want to have chickens and you'd rather have ducks or maybe you don't want them at all, you don't have to. Just because that's, like, what a lot of people do, it doesn't mean that's what you have to do. And it's better to have an unusual arraignment of animals and plants on your homestead that fit what you want than to just pick the ones that people typically do and then be unhappy with it.

[0:18:20] Destini Copp: So, Mindy, thank you so much for joining us today. Before we wrap it up here, can you tell the audience where they can find you? And I believe you have a free gift for them also.

[0:18:32] Mindy Wood: Absolutely. So you can find me at my website@ourinspiredroots.com. You can also find me on Instagram at our inspired Roots. And I do have a free gift. It's called Three Secrets to Easy and Abundant Gardens, and it kind of goes deeper into some of the things that I just talked about, and you can find that on my website, and you can, even if you wanted to, just send me a message on Instagram and I could send it to you.

[0:19:00] Destini Copp: And we'll also make sure that those links are in the show notes so people can click there and get that free gift. Mindy, thank you so much for joining. I absolutely loved our conversation.

[0:19:13] Mindy Wood: Me too. Thank you so much.