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Hey r/Permaculture,

I’m creating simple, beginner-friendly permaculture garden templates to help people to design and visualize their plans for food forests, permaculture systems, or agroforestry projects—without getting overwhelmed by design theory.

I’d love your input: – Are there specific areas you struggle with or layout problems you find challenging in your permaculture gardens? (e.g., small-space guilds, water-harvesting earthworks, etc.)
– Would you use a downloadable garden template that included: – Zone-by-zone plant lists – Rough spacing guidelines – Blank sketches to pencil in your own ideas

**The first 5 people to comment/DM me get a free custom sketch of their garden space (hand-drawn or digital) in exchange for honest feedback.

Why? I’m testing demand before launching paid products, and I’d rather build something actually useful.

Projects Examples of what I’m working on: – suburban backyard homesteads -Urban patio/balcony -Rural homestead -Community Farm Scale

My Background: I’m a landscape architect passionate about making regenerative agriculture and permaculture design accessible.

Would this help you? Brutal honesty welcome!

I have about 40 acres of raw desert land that little by little I want to green up. I will first work with the arroyos and from there start to make Earth Smiles. I made some “human” beaver dams along the arroyos. I checked them out yesterday and they slowed down the rain but also broke down (not completelt).

Do you recommend me making those dams with just rock from around the land?

What other techniques, ideas do you recommend me?

I can learn how to make adobe bricks and made actual mini dams.

Thanks

I bought a property last spring and there are 2 areas where the previous owners burned. I’m not concerned about branches, leaves and shrubs of course but more concerned about lumber (possibly treated?) and other things.

One pile has a burn barrel and looks like it was mostly sticks and small branches and what not but also noticed some bits of remains from lumber.

The other pile also had branches and stumps but there are remains of burned lumber, metal hinges and screws, a few small painted pieces, small amount of plywood, burned ash remains of papers (one page looked like it was a recipe), also small amounts of some fibrous materials that must have been insulation (I rolled it in my fingers and it just durned to dust and wafted away).

The first area is adjacent to where I would like to plant in ground garden beds. The second pile is adjacent to wetlands and is where I would like to plant things such as raspberries or perhaps out in a run for chickens.

I think there used to be goats kept there and the burned remains seems like they might be the old goat pen, but could also be old fencing or even from an old deck.

I carried a van full of lumber and partially burned lumber to the dump and paid to dispose of it. Also a van full of metal scrap to recycle. Then bagged up the ash and smaller bits and mixed it with other junk (mostly plastic, netting, broken pots etc) and brought to the dump as trash.

The soil seems very rich and healthy but I don’t know what I don’t know. The home was built in the late 90’s so lead is less likely to be an issue but treated wood could be and when someone would rather burn something than dispose of it properly then I also wonder what they did with things like used motor oil.

Any advice here? And affordable DIY tests for arsenic, metals and hydrocarbons? I don’t want to spend a fortune but do want some peace of mind and ensure I am doing things right. The property has well water which I tested and the quality is great. I didn’t pay to test for things like VOCs and PFAS though because it was like triple or quadruple the cost of testing for everything else combined.

I recently bought a house with plenty of land in south Italy (Calabria). There are plenty of old olive trees, oak trees, fruit trees (figs, mandarines, oranges, lemons, pears) and some 70 year old grapes. I am completely new to gardening and I have been educating myself on how to do it properly.

I would like to have some more fruit species that are not there already, some vegetables, herbs etc.

What would you advise me to do?

I recently learned about a food forest but I am confused on how one can transform an existing piece of land into one. Should I just plant some smaller trees, bushes and vegetables between the existing olive trees?

Please give me some tips or help me find resources that would be relevant to my situation. Especially relevant to the Mediterranean climate.

So our huge spruce tree is coming down mid May and they will chop it into fire wood size logs and mulch the branches for me.

Any thoughts or warnings for using this mulch in a permaculture set up? Altering PH, nitrogen stealing, anything that comes to mind would be welcome

I’m looking for a vine that will grow on this fence. It gets a lot of shade.