 So, hello everyone. Welcome. I'm super happy that you're joining me. I'd love to share what I know, what I've learned. So welcome. We're going to talk about creating an urban permaculture garden. And the best way that I can do that, I think, since I don't know you and what your needs are, where you live, what your situation is like, is to walk you through how I created ours. And talk about permaculture. Hang on just one sec. What have I done here? There we go. Okay. So permaculture is, it's pretty complicated. You mentioned permaculture. And unless you know about it, you know, people's eyes glaze over and they go, what the heck is that? And you say urban farming and they go, oh no. So I want to talk about urban permaculture, which doesn't officially exist really. We're kind of a bunch of us who are interested in and are creating this genre of kind of urban farming. But we all should understand what permaculture is. It was conceived by two academics, an environmental psychologist and environmental something, maybe two environmental psychologists, in the late 70s, early 80s in Tasmania. And they were super academic, super smart, lots of crazy fancy words and kind of unyielding principles, which isn't bad. It just doesn't work for me. And they came up with three kind of overarching ethics, which were people care, earth care, fair share, which I totally agree with. They have a half dozen permaculture principles, which are listed down on the right. And we can talk a little bit about them. But if you take a quick read, they probably won't mean a lot to you. And they didn't to me before I, you know, I study, I want to study. But basically what permaculture is, it's, it's kind of like biomimicry. It is a design system for sustainable living. It's like in your house and out at work and at school and everything, living and land views that really adheres to nature's logic. And that's, that's it. That's really what it is. We're trying to, we're trying to create closed resilient systems that need very little intervention. So, like rainforest, you know, temperate rainforest, tropical rainforest or river system, they exist and they exist in there within their own system. They don't need us to help them. They certainly don't need us to harm them. But what we're trying to do is create those systems at home so that we have a very low environmental footprint. This little guy, this little squirrel, his name is spot. He lives here with us. He's three, he's a baby here. You'll see him later. Okay, so urban permaculture is what I want to talk about. I love it because I, you know, because it's bendy. I think it's a way forward for the masses way forward for everyone. It embraces the ethos and ethics that you saw listed earlier, offers something for everyone. And that means if you live in an apartment in a tent and an RV. You know, on a, on the beach in a high rise, you know, you just have a balcony. You don't have any outdoor space at all. Everyone can participate and encourages interpretation and imagination. And it is as much of an art and intuition as it is grounded in science and structure, which is my favorite part, and it is based on resilience. So being resilient and building resilient systems. And I always say do your best, imagine and implement as many of the permaculture, the, the rural permaculture principles as you can. And as you are allowed to in cities, we have rules as to create a beautiful, righteous and sustainable life for yourself. So I'm going to start here on the left rural permaculture on the right. This is an aerial view drone picture of our property and my daughter took in August of last summer. Basically, the, the front yard is on the right. It looks like it's the railway track around this actually tell us that is new that up until last summer that did not exist it was just bear, you know, beetle ravaged soccer line raising three kids we did nothing it was just bear grass surrounded by a really old 72 year old hedge, 72 year old house in a 72 year old neighborhood of low rise ranchers surrounded by trees and trees and trees and beautiful gardens very wild. On the edge of the mountains in West Vancouver, about 500 feet above sea level. So that's our little homestead or home site. On the left, you see a typical permaculture kind of zone plan based on the ideals that we learn as permaculture designers. Ideally, you will buy a property or inherit a property you'll have a property of some size in a rural environment untouched. And the idea is you use the design principles you learn. And the natural systems you learn about to design your homestead. So you'll walk this property hundreds of times 12 to 18 months and you'll observe what hydrology wind sun water. When it what the temperatures like at different times of the year where the water pools where the wildlife cut through where the privacy issues are where the, where the kind of disease exists and plants and trees and forest. When the birds migrate all of this you'll observe it, and then you will start planning your home in zone at ground zero in the perfect spot facing south. And the best part of the property and then you'll design everything else you need for your life, you're completely self sustaining life sustained sustainable self sustainings and sustainable life. And then you'll have these five can spider six concentric circles moving out from the center word, which is you, and far away in zone five you have your unmanaged wilderness which is your crazy wild forest or wherever, where nobody lives and just wildlife And then you'll have, you know, in from there you'll have your your foraging for nuts and berries and your summer pasture for your cows. In zone three you'll have like sheep and small crops and maybe your nut trees and maybe your wheat fields. And zone two closer in you've got your berries and your chicken coop and your market garden and your maybe your greenhouse and then zone one you've got your kitchen garden your garden your your rose garden. And then of course there's you that you're inside the house. If we were to have moved into this bare land as a bear as a bear land, we would have put our house where it is, and then we would have zone designed out in these beautiful nice sensible circles. And everything would be perfect and we wouldn't have to walk far to get to the market garden and we would have like the chicken coop would be right outside and everything would be perfect, but this is the city. This is what we ended up with a very messy, but lovely, non concentric overlapping circles and straight lines. And we put things where we could where they were allowed to because when we moved into this home 21 years ago. It had been renovated there's you know there are sewer lines there are sidewalks there's paving there's rules there's neighbors there's senses there's bylaws there's all kinds of things. And this is what you get. And that's totally fine. We still can get what we want we haven't quite finished yet. But this mess this beautiful mess is what you get in urban permaculture. And so I say don't sweat it. Just kind of reinvent permaculture. And I have come up with a solution which is called just do your best and five things. Learn about permaculture and do your best following ethics and principles mimic nature and garden organically design intuitively you know you can't put it in one it's got going five, no problem. It's not a circle it's a square that's okay too. And creates and respect habitats, meaning in your garden and also wherever you live we have to worry about bears and cougars and all kinds of things. Wildlife and salmon streams so we have a lot to work to think about and everybody's situation is different. And finally waste nothing and share everything. In order to accomplish these things I've come up with just five principles, not 12 five. This is my short list. One mimic nature to conserve and store resources. That would be water solar nutrients, all every step along the way. Sorry, I skipped in mimic nature. That means always use organic everything. If you're creating a garden, how would nature create that garden. What would it look like architecturally structurally biologically. And if I'm building something I'm going to try and mimic a natural shape or the the elevations in nature. Okay, we talked about two and three create habitat and biodiversity. That is in my soil, that is all the plantings that I do. And that is respecting pollinators and wild creatures for this is the most important thing. I put it at one step. Nature is more important. No dig, do not dig your beds raised or otherwise and I'll tell you why later. And five is reap a harvest of course food for medicine and then waste nothing from that harvest to the best of your abilities. And then over on the left, I've kind of reorganized my three ethics because I believe every decision I make I am first going to defer to nature into the environment because we're in such a mess. Like I'm not going to choose the environment over my children obviously, but if I have to compromise and not get everything I want because I'm making the best environmental choice that's what I'm going to do 100% of the time. Okay, so now that we have gone over all of this, and you can go back you can email me I can send you these slides whatever you need go to the library YouTube channel and look at it again. It's a lot to learn. But now that we are thinking about these five kind of overarching principles, and we're going to divide that we're going to design our space, if it's a balcony, a yard, whatever it is. We're going to go to Google Earth, we're going to take a screenshot of our of where we live, and we're going to map out what we want to put where. And then we're going to go inside and we're going to start putting bits into place. I'm going to the next slide is going to show you our yard, almost one year ago, March 24. My daughter and I went on to the front block down to just begun and we started walking off and marking out our urban front yards. It looked terrible. It was really brown and bare. There's McMansions going up all around us the trees have come down. It wasn't pretty. And this is how it looked. We had a blank slate, lots of potential, but lots of work to do. We lost a lot of trees. We've done that. Why that light came on anyway, the lot was quite level slow things like the south to west, we had good sun exposure all day long. We had cheaper beetle damage all over the place, but the soil biology was really good because, you know, we never used any chemical fertilizers or even moss kill or nothing. So you dig down and there's lots of worms really great biology. We had good drainage, no storm sewers, unfortunately, but a lot of gravel way, way down. And so, you know, that's where the water goes and we're in a rainforest. There's a lot of water. We had mature conifers behind me where I'm standing to take this photo. Spruce, maple, we had nice wisteria standard, really old, very, very deep hedges of boxwood and laurel, some 10 feet deep. And while I would never recommend planting them now because they're water pigs and they're really not, they are not righteous plantings. They don't really give you anything. Ours are just packed with with wildlife, lots of birds and small creatures live in them because they're so old and so thick. So I would never take them down. And then we have good paving. We had pavers with spaces between them, which allowed the water to go through, which is great. A small but old greenhouse, small greenhouse and in ground irrigation. You can see in the inset my plan, my aerial plan. It shows where the sun comes where the winds coming where the water comes from and where I want to put the raised beds and all the different thesis. So we took that plan. We started marking things off the string building that and just five months later. This is what it looked like standing in the same spot. It was amazing. And that happened because we used permaculture principles. We were we we it's like, I know it's not like a crazy woman, but I promise you, it is like a nuclear gardening. If you just use biological elements, organics, look, listen to nature, follow nature, garden intuitively, it can happen. And it happened here. It's crazy. What can what can happen. So we have this beautiful little lush beginning the beginnings of an urban farm. We had nine raised beds. We had a small mini orchard with fruit and nut trees. We had a vertical structure mimicking nature 150 foot long trellis which was beginning of a food forest slash windbreak slash privacy screen. We had implemented biological pest controls companion planted. We had installed in ground worm composting and started replacing some less productive ornamentals with native plantings. A lot of pollinator habitat be habitat, water and thermal controls, and we had planned for 12 month food production, which is is working still working. And we had isolated sites for mushroom gardens saw covered root cellar and a keyhole garden and those are on the agenda for this year. Those three things, some more views. See starting on the left with this little, it's really quite beautiful and tropical looking out there just based just using perennial vegetables like kale, which are quite beautiful. There's a nice sitting area. The trellis is planted with either pollinator plants or hops for making beer or grapes for making wine or figs, different things. The beds have vegetables we have a berry patch, a small berry patch in the bottom middle there you can see which is actually crazy prolific and a nice sitting area so you know that this whole space, which was completely useless after the kids got big was is now a productive little farm. Okay, no dig beds. These beds. These are very inexpensive just one by Cedar with agricultural hinges stacking beds that I meant I really wanted stone beds and maybe one day I'll get those but it's not in the budget. And for now. So these are beautiful I love them. I think they're really cool. They are four by eight by 20 inches deep. They're at the very bottom there's turned over there's composted sod blocks on the very bottom upended, which I use from another project in the Boulevard, I just composted the sod blocks and then I use them for the bottom of these Then I put cardboard over that and 18 inches of organic compost, which you could. Sorry, you can either make I mean I can't make compost out in the open because of bears, but you can get it in cities will, you can buy from cities, or you know farmers. The wood was treated organically so that it's basically just it's basically been petrified to preserve it. No dig is a great solution because I don't get weeds I'll explain about that and it's very very rich on and it's great soil biology it's living soil. They stacked the beds west each east which is just a good practice and I, you know they they stack vertically. Sorry vertically. Yes, north. So, and here's a closer look at the raised bed there's a variety. There's the ones in the front yard the ones we just looked at. There's an old raised bed if you look in the bottom middle it's an old iron bed. That's about 20 years old. I just replaced the sides on it. Recently, and when I did so the structure of the soil was so great, even though it was really moist I just took off the sides soil stayed intact and replace the side. There's some on the bottom left tomato potatoes, which are crazy last year, and the top center image might seem a bit weird to people, but that is like one of my favorite images because it just really speaks to how good the soil is mushrooms in your vegetable beds or like a good sign just speaks to the, the, the life that's going on beneath the bed and that's I think that's just fennel and beans and mushrooms millions of little mushrooms. I've got raised beds in the back used animal feed troughs on casters they really are make great retain the heat really well I can move them in the sun. The same principle applies to all these beds. I will pull out a root veg but everything else just gets cut at the surface I don't dig them I don't turn them over. I compost them just from the top, just like nature does in a rainforest situation. So I spent a little bit of time on this slide just because if you're going to study permaculture at any level you need to know this, and you'll hear some of these words over and over what the hell is that. Anyway, it's pretty simple soil is your biggest asset, it is a living breathing organism and it feeds the planet, and it has been just killed by industrial agriculture by chemical fertilizer kills all of the soil biology. And then all the fertilizer because there's no structure the fertilizer just leaches out and pollutes the oceans and it's on and on and on. But what we can do is permaculture less permaculturists is feed our soil. And this is what soil should look like it ultimately is made up of the same things we're made up of which is, you know, pretty much half minerals. 20 30% water and air and then 10% well our ratios are different. This is soil and 10 10 or 15% organics and in the organics, it's like things that are living are dead or decaying plant manager plant matter and animals, microbes, insects, fungi. This particular picture is actually taken in a glass planter by the Everdeen mycorrhizal Institute, and it shows a tiny little pine seedling that's just a wee little seedling. And it's roots are not very big. They just are inside those little white ovals that I look like amoeba. Everything else you see there is my is mycelium. The mycorrhizal network made up of fungi, just millions of miles of threads that attach our to and around plant roots, and they act as like super highways for nutrition for water for medicine for communication to and within different plants in this soil structure. They also, they also create the aerate the soil and kind of end hold it together so how this all works is the sun powers this whole thing photosynthesis and the plants photosynthesize by using sun water carbon dioxide from outside out of the air. They pull the carbon dioxide down into the soil, and they create the sugar and in a couple different ways they they create chains of glucose which turn into the structure of the plant so they're building themselves, they're building themselves out of chains of glucose, and they send sugar and protein and carbon down into the soil. And it leaches out the roots kind of like root sweats, it's called exudite, you'll hear that word, I can, and that exudite is smells really good to beneficial fungi and insects microbiome microorganisms that that particular plant in this case, the little line needs to keep it healthy. It's like pheromones. It's like, come on, come live with me and my little, my little microbiome, my microbiome is my family that lives with lives in my hemisphere in my roots neighborhood. And it's all connected. You know, we get our internet or light or water sewer everything is supplied by the micro risal network. And so now that you know this and you see this is all going on invisibly under the soil, under everything under corn, under, under blue to grass, under everything that lives in so you can see why you should not dig, because you're going to crush the freeways you're going to crush the internet, you're going to kill all these little critters and cut them off from each other because they're just living there happily eating each other, creating fertilizer, sinking carbon into the soil into the soil and creating as rich humus black carbon which soil, and they're doing it by way of this amazing network, which just starts with a little spores of the mushrooms to see up top there. They go down, they fly off into the water into the atmosphere and they get into the water stream and find their way into the soil and they develop this amazing network. And you don't see any of it. Anyway, that is at the heart of everything you'll do in permaculture, no matter where you are. Okay. So here we have all of our beds have worm compost in them and you can see an example of one in this right bottom corner is just a black plastic bucket it's not glamorous but it's functional. It has a lid and a whole bunch of holes drilled quarter inch holes drilled all over the place. The bottom and the sides but not in the part of the bucket that sticks up above the soil, because you want to be able to seal it and seal in the smell so you don't attract any wildlife we'd have bears all over the place I didn't have these. So I keep my kid I put kitchen waste in there I keep the beds clean, so that slugs and stuff don't come along. It's very convenient every bed has one and millions and millions of worms come in and out of those holes, and they're having a great time on their little orange margots board inside and then they go out and visit their friends and they poop everywhere and that's amazing fertilizer. One thing to remember is not to, well they say, although my guys seem to like garlic and I mean apparently worms and compost don't like the mind do but that's something to think about. And so for every scoop of green you put in a couple of handfuls of brown that could be cardboard which has carbon in it brown leaves that have carbon in it that's the thing you want your carbon load and you want your green. So just put a little bit of water in there to keep the ants out and you keep the lid on. And what happens is the ants and the insects take the compost down and out into the garden through the hole so you don't really have to empty them they just look after themselves, unless you overload them. This is how they look inside. That's a little cute little red wiggler worm on the left and there's a whole pile of them there in the middle. So you can see how I how I manage it I just put the trimmings in I put a little bit of the dirty water from washing vegetables in, and then I use the rest of that dirty water to water pots elsewhere you don't want to drown rooms. Okay, herb spiral. This is a fantastic and favorite permaculture installation which is really you can see by what it is it's a spiral. It's seven feet wide four feet high. It's dirt right down to the bottom there's no like floors. And by planting different kinds of herbs, and sometimes green vegetables in different locations at different elevations, different sun exposures different damp exposures different wind exposures you are, you are planting herbs from all all around It's contiguous. It's super cool. It's really fun. You can have Mediterranean dry hot loving herbs at the top and this and the south, and then the back you could have things like, you can see here on the bottom right on the far right that's Labrador tea that's a bog herb herb, and I've got a little watercress pond, you can see in the top middle shot. And that likes, you know they usually like riverbeds or creek beds. And this thing looks after itself, you know rains or the sprinkler goes off and the water just percolates down and comes out between the stones and falls out into the herb little bog at the bottom and it's super happy and that actually was conceived by Bill mollison one of the founders of permaculture he did this. He came up with this idea and it's it's absolutely brilliant. Mine is about really far away actually it's in our front yard far from the kitchen, ideally 10 feet from your back door. We can't do that because we have a patio there and that's what happens in the city. You do these things where you can. It could be much smaller could be much bigger doesn't have to be so high and do whatever you like. But you can see on the left there do north is the mountains, and on the far side of this herb spiral. That's where the bog is. It's kind of cold and shady there and on this side with the sun is setting. The lavender is so happy. Okay, we, you might want to think about putting in a little mini orchard, you could do this in a pot you could put one tree. You could have a big pot for a couple of trees you could have a raised long planter put three side by side. You can do you know these little mini orchard mini fruit trees dwarf fruit trees are amazing. And how it works is you have dwarf dwarf root stock, and that ends about a foot above the soil line you can see in some of these photos. And then there's regular tree grafted on to that root stock and the root tells the tree not to get too big, but the top of the tree says, I won't but I'm still going to make full size fruit. So these fruit trees get packed with full size fruit it's kind of weird in a way but it's also lovely. And as you can grow a lot in a small space. You, they will get up some of them will get up to 1012 feet high would never let that happen I couldn't mind keep it about seven feet because I can reach seven feet sometimes. I can, I can prune these I can harvest them I can look after any kind of bugs they get. And the trick to this it's really simple. You can plant them well planted in threes, a triangle like I have you can plant inside by side to but the key is keep the space between them, or inside the column, free prune free just like you wouldn't a fruit tree. So that air and sun, everything can move freely through there and we'll get a disease and stay wet. So a good idea is to under plant them with beneficial plants that are pollinator friendly or attract predator insects to eat, like say lace wings that might come and eat the aphids apple apples might get or ladybugs, things like that. We'll talk a little bit more about under plantings because I got a lot of questions about them. But it is we have 18 dwarf fruit trees, we've got columnar and standard apples we have pairs we have plums. We have cherries we have an almond and a crab apple, which helps in the cross pollination. It's really fun and these are beautiful and pot and patio pots in fact you can get you can have a three foot high dwarf apple bush. It's just depends on how you turn it. Here you see in the top left it's early on in the season, they're just coming to flower, and the child is just started to explode. I put barrage in the middle typically and camomile also as some of my under plantings. You can see on the right, you know, the columnar apple gets pretty quite a lot of fruit on it. And in the backyard, I just wanted to throw this in here I have an espalier apple tree and a feed trough on caskers that I can move it and out of the sun, and has three different species of apple on it and I now it has become like my bait fruit tree. So, you know, the end of last summer I had one apple left, which I was very grateful for. And I was very happy to share the rest with the squirrels and the raccoons and anybody else that wanted to come and eat away and they didn't bother my front yard fruit at all. I've got a persimmon, a thuyu persimmon, that's it in the top there, that was actually taken in December. Thuyus are many persimmon mature very late. No, the tree on the left there that's it's actually in a pot shown there on the left, but by the time the fruit ripens, it's like many hard frosts have come and gone, and there isn't a leaf left on the tree, but the fruit are still there. It's amazing. There's a grafted plum top right there that is dwarf rootstock with five different varieties of plum grafted onto it is really fun to have you know different red green yellow plums growing in one fruit tree, and they're not big you can see on the bottom middle slide. On the left, it's the plum middle is the, they call it almond, and then there's three column your cherries on the right. And I get a lot of fruits. Well, the birds and us get a lot of fruits. So I want to talk about under planting. I have a lot of choices and this is where you can really have a huge impact as a permaculture designer or permacultureist in an urban environment is you can create it like using that fruit, those little say the tree as an example, you can create a whole biodiverse little ecosystem around that tree by planting a say a vine up the tree using the tree as a vining trellis put a tap rooted a horseradish down to grow horseradish for you, and also aerate the deep tap roots and plant chives or herbs that have shallow fibrous roots around it and they will hold help hold water into the system and provide shade a living mulch for the plants. Some plants like the confry which you see in the middle here, you'll hear a lot about confry being like the darling of permaculture, everybody loves to plant confry. I find it a bit big for an urban setting, but in a rural setting it's wonderful. The idea here is that you just, you can just, it's called chop and drop, you just chop off the leaves, leave them there to compost naturally, and then it just grows back really quickly. I find that a bit of slug bait actually I don't do that but it in the city it matters in the country it wouldn't necessarily matter. So when you have underplantings, think about the opportunities, I should say, think about all the different things you can do, you can create food for yourself, you can plant radishes, you can plant celery, you can plant horseradish. And those are our plants that grow down with deep tap roots and aerate the soil. And they could be, they could be perennials like horseradish. If you can do native plants, great, pollinator friendly to attract bees and create habitat for tiny wheat creatures. They're all kinds of options. So come back to the slide when you come to it. You might want to plant a tiny berry patch. This was meant to be a kind of holding area for berry bushes but it ended up being like they just set fruit like right away I think because we had put pollinator friendly sweet elisim on the bottom on the ground as a living mulch and we just had fruit set like it was crazy so we couldn't move them but we will move them this fall I think. We have blueberries, josteberries, three colors of currants, three colors of gooseberries. And we just have to, they look after themselves. One thing I didn't mention, I should have mentioned, when we're talking about the apples, the fruit trees and it applies here equally, is we always have to pick the fruit just before it ripens, because bears, raccoons, other creatures won't bother the fruit unless they're starving of course. Until they know it, they know when it's ripe, they can smell it a mile away and they'll come and decimate your garden. But if you pick it just before it ripens, which we do, you won't have any issues. And I'm going to skip to here to show this little cedar bowl, this little yellow cedar bowl at the very bottom. I don't know what it is about yellow cedar but it does ripen fruit beautifully so we just keep the semi green fruit and tomatoes in this little cedar bowl and the next day they are magically ripe, I don't know how that works. So back to this little berry patch here, you can see the mini fruit orchard in the back, I keep this photo was taken in June. After the first flush of chive blossoms went to seed, I left them for a bit for the birds, and then I took the seed to use in cooking, it's like black onion seed, it's delicious, you can grind it up. So yeah, I just chop it back and then it just grows again, I had three harvests of chives last year. So you can see the blueberries beautiful, a lot of fruit, you can do this in a pot, you know you can do it in a, you know, in a window box or dwarf blueberries you just have to make sure that the soil is suitable maybe put some pine needles or something in it to acidify it. Okay, you might consider putting up some bee houses, and you can do this on a patio. You can do it on the side of your house, you can do it whether or not you have a garden, you could just have a pot of lavender, and put up a bee house and either attract or buy. Oh my god, I'm talking too much. Anyway, okay, so these are native bees, they don't make honey, or they just lay eggs in these little bee houses, you can see in the top right there's some bee houses that we have, you have to provide them with a little bit of water, a little bit of dirt, and they will just lay eggs in those little tubes, seal them up with mud, and they'll provide some early blooming heather or other blossoms with some cornelian cherries there for them to eat, and they will pollinate at 80 times the rate of other bees, so these, they're also endangered, this is why we have them and you might be having some too. There's other pollinator friendly plants we have for the bees, we're converting our lawn to pollinator turf slowly, it's a time consuming thing to do, labor intensive but worth it, it uses up to 75% less water and up to 75% less mowing. You can see there on the left the pollinator turf is on the top of the dead grass and that dead grass at the bottom is chaper beetle grass. Ground covers, we're using a lot of native ground covers and moss, they really are easy, I love moss, some people don't love moss, it really mulches really well, you might consider not fighting the losing battle and just letting the moss take over because it really is beautiful. This is native huckleberry, that is an option, it's a food source for you and for pollinators. It's also beautiful, it looks like boxwood, and if I were to do it all over again, I would, well the boxwood was here, but if you're going to find a hedge, consider a native evergreen huckleberry. Wild roses, some evergreen huckles, sorry native honeysuckle at the top there, beautiful high bush cranberry at the bottom, and that is native goat's beard and mosses there on the left. There's some ladybugs that I mail ordered to control my aphids last summer, I had a little tiny bit of an aphid outbreak in the fruit trees and these little puppies made short work munch all day at all the aphids. And they're very happy I built them a little habitat, you can see it there on the right, bottom right, it's kind of weird looking, I just googled ladybug habitat, built one and they seem happy, they hung around all summer. Other things you can do to control past this copper mesh keeps, you can see in the bottom there, keeps slugs out of garden beds, it like somehow electrocutes slugs, because they're slime, they don't like it, they shock, they take off. The stir chums are like bait for aphids, and I've got them planted there under the persimmon and then in the tomatoes I have, I just put lavender clippings under the tomatoes and basil and it keeps the insects away. And speaking of tomatoes, here's some tomatoes that we have under an open patio in the back. It's a glass roof, and it, because it's a stone floor and raised beds that are metal and quite deep. It acts as a heat sink, it absorbs, it holds two to four times the amount of solar energy that like open beds would, and holds that energy and feeds it back as heat into the evening and at night so that this situation here we have you can see the bottom that's late November, the plants are dead and the tomatoes are still happy, and I will pull courts every day off of that, and that's out of those 20, I think there's 20 plants and three raised planters, and I'll, I'll have 100. I'll be able to dry 100 containers of, of tomatoes and I freeze them and use them all through the year, and the heat sink situation applies here on the left with the lavender. And then the stone planter with the lavender it's both on the herb spiral and the planter. They're holding heat way you can go by there, two in the morning and put your hand on those in the summer and they're still one. Here's tomatoes, this is like this is what now into December here in the top middle that some ripening tomatoes in a bag using the ethylene off gas they generate themselves to ripen them quickly and they ripen that's the last bunch of chair of cherry tomatoes. It's amazing how that works. Water management is another issue. We could do a much better job of managing our water. We go through a ton of water 80 gallons a person a day on average which is ridiculous, almost all of our roof water is just going down into the sewer. If you have a story we don't. We're trying to capture water as best we can. We're using downspouts rain gardens. This is a swell which we dug all the way around the outside of our property to capture all of the crazy rain other runoff that we were getting from the new building. They took the trees down lots of paving water was just pouring onto our property. So we now capture it it runs in these swales which are like underground trenches down under this firm a raised firm of lavender which is the habitat also and it feeds gardens that we needed to feed. Top left and middle, those are both rain gardens that are that are more or less self sufficient they are waters diverted from downspouts. And it feeds the ones that are at the perimeter of the house they actually feed the vines that completely engulfed like they circle the house entirely. And they shade our house without any air conditioning and their habitat for for lots of nests and honeysuckle feeds birds and bees and it's beautiful thing bottom left here that is a big puddle in our backyard which is an in a rain garden in progress, which I'm planting with wild animals for primarily for bees for birds. And then these pictures on the on the right, it's basically us pouring our vegetable washing water all winter into covered into little vegetable planches and dormant strawberry planches that are outside or back door. I always wash vegetables in a bucket or the sink and I pour everything into a plancher because the water is so rich in nutrients, because it's compost tea basically you're washing off the compost and making compost tea so you can circuit resource you don't waste. This is something. This is a vegetable washing station that was created using scrap lumber that was left over from building the trellis in the front. It's just a, you know it's a lee valley outdoor sink didn't cost a lot and some old scrap screen and it's turned into a water reclamation station for washing vegetables and feeds the little seedling nursery behind it, and that's the greenhouse right behind it. I'll skip through. Well, I don't know if I shouldn't if I have time to talk about mushrooms but we are building a outdoor mushroom yard in shady part of the north part of the garden and it's loose tree. We can grow turkey tail and shiitake and lines make mushrooms there is perfect biology for it soil biology shaded thunder conifer couple of shots there of some mushrooms we grow my daughter and I indoors last year that was fun. So you know slowly slowly everybody you know you can do this you can do it anywhere you just need a teeny tiny piece of real estate it just the conditions just should be right. I'm running out of time here so I just scroll through some pitches of our winter garden we put a cold frame in November, put some hoops up in October we had a hard frost October 23. It's a very late planted seedlings I got some things in the ground and this is what it looked like just a couple weeks ago it a big snow. I still had some Rappini and and spot my scroll came to say hi, and that's on the left there that's collect that's like a growing in the under the hoops there. And just today we have tomatoes under lights here in my office and some piece and different things in the greenhouse. And this is kind of my second last slide to show you why I'm doing this to feed my family. Nothing going to waste here you can see I'm even using apple peels to make apple scrap vinegar. After I've made apple butter, and I'm using the blossoms from the from pinching back the basil to make basil vinegar. And there's all kinds of things hundreds of things that I make. And these are my little friends that live in a former what used to be a soccer field bearing landscape is now rich in biodiversity and all kinds of creatures coming to visit all the time at the day. That's pretty much all I have to say. I have one more. Okay, I had one more slide there. Go ahead. Oh, there we go. Okay. So if you have any questions, you can email me you can find me at any of these places I'm happy to answer questions. And I don't know everything but I know a little bit and I'm here to share what I know. So great. So there are questions in the chat and the Q&A and what I thought I've sort of been trying to curate them a little bit group them into themes. So maybe we could start with lawn removal. Okay. Now there was one in the chat. And she's talking. Okay she removed her lawn mostly weeds that was behind or between our front cedar hedge and the sidewalk by pulling the existing plants and shaking out as much soil as possible. Was this a reasonable approach. I planted fern salad flowering red currant and other natives and then someone else was also asking about lawns and it was, I think it was around turning the top layer. Although she might actually just be talking about the soil in a bed, turning that top layer for the birds to eat the cut worms etc before. I don't think that is a lawn removal question. Sorry about that. But I think those are separate questions. When they did their turf, you know, turn it over and then yeah, the birds either pull the grubs and worms out for the birds or the birds will come and find them. That's a good idea. And yeah, I mean, there are lots of ways to remove one, not chemically, but if you do it mechanically or by turning it over or you can just put a some impermeable thing over it that just blocks out light over this like over the winter, preferably, and that will keep the grass from growing and you can just start, you know, to throw some compost on there and start planting in it. Right. Okay, good. Um, so just on the topic of raised beds. Okay, so there's a lot a couple of questions about no dig right. Um, can you use sea soil as your top dress compost. And also I think someone was curious whether did you actually build those those raised beds yourself with the cedar. Or did you purchase those. I actually, we built those those are those corners those metal corners you can get them from Lee Valley. They're not expensive, and they're actually used for those, you know, and they have a or or church they have those big bins they put apples in. Yeah, on top of each other, those are the stacking corners. Yeah, they're one by pieces of wood, you put the, they're hinged, they move so you can kind of bend it however you want, and you can stack them however you want. So you can take it apart, or you can put it higher or whatever you do it's very easy to do. And you just use my cedar. So when you first set yours up. What did you fill it with. I put upturned sod, because I had, I built that swale in the front where the lavender was. So I had 500 square feet, or more than that is ridiculous amount of square feet of sod squares because I had taken it I had to dig way down. So I just piled those upside down in a big compost pile. So the year went by, and the grass died, and then I use those squares upside down at the bottom of the bed. So now the grass is dead and it's really composting full of worms. It was beautiful. And I put cardboard on top of that, just to keep any weeds should any, you know, pop up from coming up through the compost and then I put compost. And you can, you can buy it because you know we're in a big area, a big metropolitan area you can you can order it by the truck load. And some people use something called veggie mix that's widely available, or you know just don't use anything with fresh manure in it would have to be well composted. And what about sea soil that was well is a great product and it's a great top dress. It would be really expensive to use it exclusively, but it's a great it's basically forest finds, which are, you know, stuff from the forest. Hopefully it's not a living forest and not raking the forest but it's porous finds and see biology and kelp which is amazing fertilizer. Okay, and it's not too rich for seeds. It's because someone seemed to think it might be just best for plants. I wouldn't put seeds directly into it. I would transplant into it next with some oil. Yeah, it would probably burn seed in my, I don't know that seeds. Yeah. Okay, so let's just talk a little bit about maintenance like when I look at your garden like I'm just imagining you're doing this. Every day eight hours a day. It just, it looks like a lot of work. No hours or a week or you're putting I tell you that I almost get I get almost no weed, because, because I, it's compost. And it's well composted compost so and I'm not digging and introducing sunlight and water into seeds that are way down there we'd see they just don't grow like you get the odd one a bird will plant a seed or whatever you get the I don't weed. And I because I let the mosque go wherever it wants. I don't read there either. And every, everything is covered with a ground cover like a wild thing a wild violence or burns or bloody doc or something. Obviously, don't weed. And even the weeds that come up through the cracks in the sidewalk. If you if you read my blog you'll see most of them aren't actually we're like, Harry that which is, which is a vegetable. It's like a salad. Most things, and you know they just, it's not a problem when you, when you get into it like Emily a year into this garden and I'm not, it's not making me nuts I spend time out there because I want to. Of course, there are those days when we have 8,000 carrots that you need to pull up right, not really, but you know you've got to get a man you got to get a man. Yeah, yeah. Otherwise, you get too big that kind of issue but no it's not high maintenance that the point of permaculture is that it's supposed to be a self sufficient system just like a little slice of a rainforest or. It's ideal right, but the more elements you can introduce the more self sufficient it will be. Okay, that's very encouraging. So someone was asking about container growing and and you know there are a lot of apartments around the library and a lot of our patrons live in apartment so I think that's a good question and so his, it hits she or he it's anonymous it says do you have any ninja strategies for keeping soil in pots really vibrant and healthy without digging or removing it from the pot. Should one just keep layering nutrients on top. Yes, yes well if you yes that what happens when you have good soil biology is it will be broken down and eaten it'll be consumed by the plants and the fun guy what your community in there it's going to break down. It's going to break it down into smaller smaller bits so if just imagine your pot is in the forest, what happens you get compost coming down in the form of leaves and all these like dead things. Lay on top and they, they decay and they go into the soil and it's no different with a pot. It's a very small worm compost by using a milk jug or a yogurt container. You can get a small you can get, I think Home Depot sells, they sell bigger ones. I think they sell smaller ones to now, but you can make your own out of an ice cream bucket or a small bucket. I think the thing is, start with living soil. It's really like, even if you take a five gallon bucket down to Pacific soils and ask for veggie next you're way better off starting that, and it will be alive already. And as long as you don't let it dry out and kill all those things that are alive. And you can help it not dry out by using compost and some living mulch in there. It will just get better and better. That's really encouraging. And would you like, I always think with pots you're better with a big, the bigger the better like you don't want partly water you don't want it drying out but you want something of a certain size right. Yeah, bigger is better but the material matters to like terracotta dries out if it's not sealed. Okay, like if you can get on Craigslist or you can get something that's stone or cement. You know they, they hold moisture well they also hold heat really well. You know one trick to keeping the soil really moist is wool. Wool. Wool. If you can get. Ideally, in rural permaculture you would use the belly wool, the dirty belly wool of a sheep. Hard or sell because it's covered in poop. Yeah. You put it, you, you know, tear it up and mix it in with your soil. It sends nitrogen into the soil for years, and it holds moisture, but you can do that with recycled wool clothing too. Wow. Moisture well and, you know, it's a great idea. It's just beautiful to hold. That's, that's so cool makes sense it's a natural product right. Someone was curious about almonds. You, I did you mention that you grow nuts I mean I know you have fruit but. almonds actually don't love living in California which is why they take so much water and the bees are so unhappy. Yeah, they're happy here. And so yeah, they're you, they're they're starting, I think that people thought they wouldn't grow here but you're starting to see them at specialty nurseries and you can grow them. They're, they're slow, but it's, it's, it's a beautiful tree, and it's in Google, lower mainland deals, you'll see almond trees available now. Yeah, the blossoms are so lovely right. Yeah, yeah for sure. Okay, are you still, you're still up for more questions. Okay, question about Ivy. The area has plenty of Ivy creepers creepers non poisonous. It's the natural creature creeper in the area how can I remove them from my garden without chemicals. Well, you know what, I just, it's a never ending battle when it's like I get some from under the fence, you know from the neighbor, and they're wreaking havoc but I just cut I just keep cutting them down at the root. That's the best thing you can do and over time you win, just pull it out, because they'll, they'll kill your trees, they'll take every drop of goodness out of wherever they are. Yeah, yeah. What about bindweed like someone's asking about I call it bindweed but morning glory. I mean, same, I just pull it out and you know you will, you know you just got to make a ritual of it, honestly, that's the, that's the best thing I can give us have a cup of coffee cup of tea listen to your BBC news on your iPhone, and just get out there. And, you know, I do it once a year I just do it once a season and it keeps. It's fine. I let it get to the point where really over its past needing to be done, and then I just do it. If you do it really it's never ending. Yeah, so there's, there is some weeding but I think I think. That's in my permaculture garden. That's in my garden. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, gotcha. Sorry. So what about the squirrels like you've got some in your garden. Are they do they eat anything you don't want them to. Yes, they do they eat in the back I, I have baked food for them. They don't let them have it. They know, they know they can have it. And I don't know how I don't, they don't bother the front at all. And the thing about permaculture is you really just kind of have to share. You just got to know I know that the top the bottom 18 inches of my tomatoes will never be mine, because everything's going to munch them. It's okay. Once I get past that point, then I know it's all mine. And, and it just works that way. And I'm okay with that. They're really, you don't have a choice. I know we had, I, there's a bit of a problem with rodents on the whole North Shore, this last year, and probably this year and that that is because people were using rat poison, and the raptors were eating the rat dead rats, and then their eggs were not viable, and the babies couldn't fly, and they died. Oh no. Oh my god. So there's too many rodents so that's what happens when you screw around with the kind of circle. And so now the good news is the raptors that are around have more to eat, and hopefully they'll become healthier. But it's like, it's just have to live in the world that is here with the squirrels and the airs and everything you don't like, as well, and try and figure out a way to, you know, keep them away from where you don't want them to be and make sure they're fed too. I don't, you know, feed them. I mean, I don't want to feed a bear or anything, but if he's, he's happy doing his thing, he's not going to bother me. Yeah, yeah. So a couple more questions. One is about mushroom manure. Someone has just bought some and they want to add it to the raised bed. So they're just kind of wondering, do they just add it on top? The raised bed right now is covered with leaf mulch. What's the best way to do that? I would mix it. I don't put any kind of manure directly. I always mix it like a cocktail. I would mix it up with the leaves and some compost or veggie mix and the manure and just mix it up and try and recreate the soil biology and then put it on. I mean, it can burn. I mean, all manure, no matter what it is, can just overload, can overload with nitrogen. I mean, I've had a situation with my asbellia fruit tree. I didn't dilute it enough. And that year I had just leaves and no fruit. Too much nitrogen. Yeah, I've had that problem with manure. Yeah. I think it, I just think it's better to err on the side of caution and always mix it up. The leaf mulch is beautiful. It's just, you know, how lovely to have that mixed in. Yeah. So you mentioned, I think, Pacific soil and someone was asking just weird where to buy a new topsoil. There are so many different sources and it really depends whether you want a small quantity or a large quantity, but Pacific soil has organic compost. I know that for sure. I know the city of Vancouver does. If you look on Craig's list, there are many sources out in the valley and small jobbers who will deliver smaller quantities. You know, you should just ask for references to make sure that organic would be my preference. Whole compost isn't always organic and you don't know that your neighbor is not doing something you shouldn't do, putting it in there, clipping. So you're taking a little bit of a chance, unless you're buying organic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think we'll stop it there. I did want to ask if you would share with me some of your favorite books and then we can put together lists to share with everybody. Hey, I was hoping you were asking how I put a pile of them here. Oh, good. Yeah, there's some. Okay, this is one of the permaculture Bibles. It's a free, free requisite reading for the permaculture designer become a permaculture designer it's principles and pathways written by David Holmgren. It's really hard to read. You gotta really be into it. It is a lots of information, hard to find it's not been reprinted. But that's the Bible. If you're getting started, I would recommend two books. The Edible Ecosystems Solution written by Zach. It's a great easy to understand, talks about creating little ecosystems. Milkwood. And this is co authored by, I believe, David Holmgren. That's a great one. Farming the Woods. This is a really great book. This is written by Ken Mudge and Steve Gabriel I met both these gentlemen when I went to New York to study outdoor mushroom cultivation I spent some time at the both Cornell and at Steve Gabriel's farm. I'll forget the name of it, but it's just a wealth of knowledge. This is a really great book to really easy to understand. Farming is a little bit of an academic book about micro risel network. It's really good written by Paul Stamets, Stamets who's brilliant mycologists, and he lives on Cortez and in Washington State. This is an amazing book. Grow Your Soil. Ah, oh yeah. Okay, I know that one. This is so great it's written by a permaculture designer and it's really simple simple language and just great information about soil biology and how to grow in it and use it. My last recommendation that I'm reading right now that I just love is called entangled life. So how fungi makes our worlds, makes our world changes our minds and shapes our futures but it's not really just about fungi. It's about permaculture. And these are awesome books I would read all of those books. And you know the other thing, the other way to learn about permaculture honestly is reading old old old cookbooks. Books aren't about cooking, they're about living off the land. Right, yeah. So that you have enough to feed your family over the winter. What do you do with it? If you know any really culinary anthropology is permaculture. Huh, wonderful. Yeah, well what I think I'll do is make a list and hopefully we'll have most of these in our library, maybe not some of them were esoteric ones but I can probably order new things too. And I'll send that out to everybody so that they have that. Thank you for sharing that. That's fantastic. And thank you for this. I just love it. I love your photographs were amazing and all the information you shared. So inspiring. This is great. Thank you so much. And also everybody. The other thing of course is the Modern Farmer magazine which I think you can get online. Modern Farmer.com. Yeah, okay. Great. And Laura's blog upfront and upfront and beautiful upfront and beautiful. Great. Okay. Thank you everyone for coming today. Really appreciate your participation and all the fantastic questions. The next webinar is April 10. And it's going to be all about tomatoes. Jane Sherrod also a local gardener is going to be here once again Saturday 2pm, April 10 talking about tomatoes. So we'll see you then. Okay, bye bye. Thank you. Thanks a lot.