The Pocket Dojo podcast #17 - Creating your own food forest

Permaculture principles, sustainable gardening and a personal journey

In the latest episode of the Pocket Dojo podcast, my co-host and partner-in-mischief

Paul Crick

is talking with the fantastic Nicky and David Schauder, co-founders of Permaculture Gardens.

Their story is a wonderful personal journey that began when their young children had food allergies that felt inexplicable to them. Their desire to understand what was present in the food they were buying prompted them to explore how they could become healthier as a family. So they began to experiment with growing their own food and then how to extend that into something they could live from and help people like them to do similar.

Permaculture offered the Schauder family a set of principles, practices and tools to learn how to garden sustainably and create a flourishing food forest. It is a way to design and maintain human settlements and agricultural systems using the patterns that we can observe in living ecosystems. These principles encourage us to take care of:

• the earth - because all life needs a healthy planet

• each other - because we need each other to live well and sustainably

• our resources - because we need to share them fairly for everyone in the community to have what they need and to ensure future generations can also have them

Permaculture also offers a wise and tested way to become regenerative leaders and create healthy, sustainable organisations. As we shared in series 1 of the Pocket Dojo podcast, regenerative leadership is all about nourishing relationships, both with each other and the places we move through. That requires us to value diversity and weave community. The ways in which Nicky and Dave have built their business demonstrate how they have observed and learned from nature, designed for both efficiency and resilience, and used local, renewable resources. Their recognition of the links between all the parts of the system they have created is evident in all they do.

If you are interested in learning more about permaculture, check out their new app SAGE, which will help you plan and manage your garden effectively.

We will be coming back to permaculture principles in our writing and future episodes of the podcast. They are truly transformative.

Thanks for reading.