What Do YOU Do On Long Dark Evenings?
I spend most of my life in front of a screen in my day job as you would expect. It’s not all bad. This morning, for example, I was directed to a brilliant and hopeful article on indigenous fruit trees in Africa* by a long-term PM reader and supporter, Michael Lane, plus an article about selling up and buying a 10 acre woodland, besides corresponding with various lovely people like Patrick Whitefield and Emma Cooper who both write books for us. I love my job and I think I am very lucky to be PM’s editor as well as Permanent Publication’s book editor.After work, for most of the year, I can go home and have an hour or two

CELEBRATING THE MARGINAL
Long-term readers of Permaculture Magazine, please bear with me while I ask, What exactly is permaculture? In the 1970s, Australians Bill Mollinson and David Holmgren observed how soils were devastated by the imposition of a temperate European agriculture on the fragile soils of an ancient Antipodean landscape. Like the dust bowls of Oklahoma in the 1930s, an alien agriculture has the capacity to turn a delicately balanced ecology into desert. Bill and David’s response to what they saw was to design a permanent agriculture with tree crops and other perennials inhabiting all the niches from the canopy to the ground cover and below. The soil is left untilled to establish its own robust micr

Farming and Gardening the Natural Way
Last summer, Tim and I visited Devon to see the Hoskings’ farm which is featured in BBC2's Farm For The Future. The farm dramatically contrasts the neighbouring barren, over-ploughed agricultural desert drenched in fertilisers. On her farm there are huge ancient hedgerows full of nesting birds and old standard apple trees, pastures that haven’t been ploughed for 500 years full of orchids, buzzing with life, nesting birds, and a stream meandering though muddy flats full of yellow flag irises. I haven’t seen a farm like this since I was a very little girl visiting Connemara in Ireland in the sixties. Every summer, my family used t

Low Impact Development
Patrick Whitefield has just sent me a review of the new edition of Simon Fairlie's Low Impact Development book. I have already published a review by Dawn Houghton in the new issue PM62 out next week so I thought I would share his thoughts with you here.Low Impact Development, planning and people in a sustainable countryside, Simon Fairlie, Jon Carpenter, 2009, 233x155mm, 174pp, £15, ISBN-13: 9781906067076, available from The Green Shopping Catalogue. A majority of the people who come on our permaculture courses declare that their long-term aim is to ‘get a piece of land out in the country’, and this probably goes f

Dramas at Permanent Publications
I got home from a conference in the early hours of Monday morning. Tim wasn't home. He'd been called out to check our offices at the Sustainability Centre as the alarm had gone off. It was a pitch black night with only a slither of a moon and no lights were on outside the building... Tim let himself in through our front door and walked through to the rear of the office. It wasn't until he got through another two doors that he began to see evidence of damage and then the awful thought struck him that the burglar could still be in the building. Luckily, the intruder had made his escape and what an escape that turned out to be.The burglar had managed to break his way into our shop