When Diana and I first started this blog it came from a desire to transform the gardens that surround our home into something special. Our original aims were simple: (1) to try to use the little land we have available to grow our own food, (2) to not follow social conventions on how we use our space, (3) to always eat healthy homemade food and (4) to find ways of reducing our reliance on the supermarkets.
In a wider sense, we’ve often talked about how much easier it would be if everyone in the street was doing the same – since by pooling our resources it would be much easier to grow the quantity and wider variety that we need, as well as experiment with livestock. It would also overcome the problem of time, since the reality not reflected in this blog is that we also have to work (admittedly from home), as well as educate our child (partly from home) and tend to the myriad of tedia that modern life throws our way.
This blog has been a great way of linking up with like-minded people, who share similar aims to grow their own, live a little slower, be more in tune with the environment, and do whatever they can to be self-sufficient. After all, the world is too populated to enable everyone to own a smallholding, a dream glossed up and promoted on TV as the ideal to which many aspire.
We were therefore pleased to recently discover the notion of URBAN PERMACULTURE, since it is heartening to read (and watch via Youtube) that there are many of us that think the same way. In the early days, I read a book that misled me about this topic, concluding that permaculture was the study of how nature can create more biomass than any man-made agricultural system. However, the Internet contains many definitions that are much broader than this, citing the creation of sustainable systems for societies that currently consume more than they produce.
The attached Youtube clip sums up how we think and why we live the life portrayed through our blog. It’s good to discover that there are many of us out there and our reading will be guided towards urban permaculture from this moment on.
You may also like:
