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About Perma.tips

This email series grew out of my attempts to master permaculture.

Permaculture is a response to the massive environmental damage happening throughout the world today. It’s a design science that uses natural ecology to meet our energy, fuel and fiber needs while healing rather than harming the environment. For this reason, it may be the world’s most important new career path.

Whether you read a book about permaculture, take the 80-hour design course,  or live with someone who has, it’s full of big, exciting ideas that you may be eager to apply right away.

But when you get out into the field, it can be hard to remember all the countless details that can make or break a project.

• When you lay down a sheet mulch, which goes first: compost, cardboard, manure, fresh clippings, or dry hay?And what can you leave out?
• Before you even install that bed, in what order should you design and put in your earthworks and other infrastructure?
• Maybe you read about a cool technique such as hugelkutur. Will it work in your climate?

The problem with books and courses is that they focus on knowledge, which is so easy to forget without daily practice or review. Even with lots of practice, it can be hard to stay on top of all the details and the big picture.

I've been there myself.

My first permaculture course in 2005 felt like drinking from a firehose: it was such a deluge of information that I found it hard to absorb all at once.

Fortunately, the design project I did with two other students tied things together a bit. Our work became the official city plan for our neighborhood. For my efforts to implement it, I was named Bloomington, Indiana’s Neighbor of the Year in 2008.

Bloomington also had a large, active permaculture guild that met for work parties nearly every month. We planted gardens and orchards, built straw bale, cob and straw light clay structures, constructed ferrocement water tanks, and talked permaculture for hours on end. 

My neighbor and classmate even founded a neighborhood garden that started hosting weekly permaculture  events, and this increased the pace of learning.

Even when I moved to Ohio to start a market garden, I continued to visit or work on organic farms and permaculture projects in the area nearly every month.

By 2014, I had tons of construction experience (including the first of three tiny off-grid houses I built).  I had visited over 100 sustainable homes, businesses and farms. I had designed houses and landscapes, turned tons of compost, terraced, grown produce and delivered it to market by cargo bike.

Even so, I had made a lot of mistakes along the way.

Some were just newbie goofs. For example, my first greenhouse blew over six times before I figured out how to anchor it!

Other mistakes went right down to the core concepts. The greenhouse ended up too far from the main house, and I never did install a high water storage for my market garden. These mistakes cost me a lot of extra time and money.

So  enrolled in Geoff Lawton’s excellent online Permaculture Design Course by way of refresher, and poured my entire being into my studies.

I was shocked at how many basic facts I flat-out missed in my first course. I checked my notes, and much of it was actually there. I had simply forgotten it!

So I made a pact with myself: I would use the discipline and study skills that got me through college, and master permaculture once and for all.

How to Master a Subject

Confession time: I have degrees in astrophysics and I used to work in space exploration. But believe it or not, I was not always a good student.

When I was 14, I warned my parents that I was probably going to flunk English. The teacher had assigned us a textbook on Greek mythology, and we had to know every tiny detail for the closed-book final.

The book was crammed with hundreds of unfamiliar names and stories, and I knew just reading it the way I had any other book wouldn’t lock enough of them into my brain.

So there I was,  admitting in a choking mumble that I simply wasn’t smart enough for school. I would never go to college, never amount to anything.

That’s when Mom introduced me to flashcards, and study skills in general. I remember thinking, “Wow! So you can actually learn how to learn...?!”

Over the next few weeks, we made flashcards for every beast, hero, demigoddess and battle in the book. We trained every other night until I could rattle off every last Fate, Fury or Muse like a freestyle rap artist.

I remember feeling ten feet tall as I walked into that final. It was my first perfect score in anything.

The key? Break it all down to small chunks and study them separately and together often.

Learning Permaculture

Most permaculture courses have lots of great hands-on demonstrations and almost no evaluation and feedback until the final project. Maybe this is because so many of the early permaculture courses were taught in foreign aid situations, where literacy rates were low and people often already knew a lot about growing food.

Now this isn't all bad for students from affluent countries, many of whom will probably need to know this stuff soon. To get good at permaculture you need both concepts and dirt-under-the-fingernail skills. Permaculture courses and guilds handle the skills part. They just fall short when it comes to holding students accountable for the concepts.

Most people forget 90% of everything they learned in class after a few months. But with carefully-timed review, they can actually remember 90% or more for years.

So I took it upon myself to make permaculture flashcards and study them to fluency.

I had written over a hundred flashcards before I realized that this might work better on computer, where I could search and share them.

But I soon discovered that every flashcard app had its own obscure format. If the app I chose went out of business (happens a lot in software), I could lose all my cards. And not everybody was going to use the same app.

If I was going to make and share my flashcards, I needed a way for people to keep them in a format that is not going away soon. I also needed a way to facilitate daily review.

Because for long-term recall, it isn’t how many cards you review at once that counts, it’s how often you review them over how long a time.

What if I could deliver a series of permaculture tips in a medium that people see and archive every day?

What if that series had, built into it, the precise training intervals that linguists use to memorize vocabulary? 

Introducing PermaTips

I built Perma.tips using the best practices I gleaned from decades of experience as a successful student and lifelong learner. Key features:

• A daily 3-minute email. Most of us check email at least once a day, so this is a really painless way to study.

• Question-Answer format. Language instructors have long relied on Q&A to help students master new material, and that’s what flashcards are about, too.

• Hints, study tips and links separate the Q from the A so you don’t immediately see the answer.

• Questions repeat twice in the first month, once in the fourth and again after two years to really lock it in. This is in addition to one new item every day.

• Emphasis on actively using the material and building connections between concepts and applications.

Perma.tips will cover the whole permaculture curriculum every year, going deeper into specifics with each cycle. For example, by the end of year one,  everyone who joins this project should be able to:

• Read landscapes at a glance and know where any earthworks should go.
• Apply climate-appropriate design in the right sequence anywhere in the world.
• Build, diagnose and maintain compost piles.
• Know the formula for rainwater catchment.
• Name the world's 36 most useful multi-purpose plants.

The next year, we’ll go deeper into every aspect of design and add another 72 plants. If we're still at it by year 5, we'll know some 500 plants, and the details of dozens of design strategies in each climate.

And did I mention we're doing all this in 3 minutes a day of screen time?  (OK, ok it does help a lot if you try and recall each day's Q & A off-screen a few minutes later, then a few hours later).

Small and slow solutions is a permaculture principle that really applies when it comes to learning. This is how we lay a lifelong foundation of knowledge, so you can confidently work with the Earth rather than against it.

Which plan works best for you?

   

Keep growing!

Kev Polk