Permaculture
Permaculture is a design process. It helps design intelligent systems which meet human needs whilst enhancing biodiversity, reducing our impact on the planet, and creating a fairer world for us all. People across the globe are creating thriving communities with permaculture.
Chris Marsh is a member of Dawlish Transition group and also a trustee of the charity Plants For A Future (www.pfaf.org ). She is currently working with another trustee, Wendy Stayte from Transition Town Totnes, to identify and then visit sites in Devon where combinations of unusual edible perennial plants are being grown. If you know of other sites in Devon that Chris and Wendy could visit, where people are growing food in unusual ways, especially using perennials in combination, please email Chris at chris_e_marsh@hotmail.com.
On 26 March, as part of their Earth Week programme, Teign Estuary Transition invited Mandy Barber of Incredible Vegetables to give a talk on ‘Perennial Vegetables’. Chris Marsh of Dawlish Transition joined a packed audience of gardening and local food enthusiasts at TAAG, Teignmouth. Mandy showed slides of how a patch of sheep pasture had been transformed into a thriving garden of perennial greens, flowers and roots, in a flowing and evolving design, all organic, no dig and wildlife friendly. She described her favourite 10 edible vegetables providing spinach, broccoli and kale, roots and alliums for an all-year-round living larder. Afterwards people queued up to buy the plants Mandy had brought along.
Individual visits: These were visits for Plants For A Future, all aware of permaculture, but Wishtree most permaculture oriented.