A backyard border of tall mixed perennials beside a lawn, with a garden hose, a plant pot and a house behind

What you actually do

Mostly watching, then one piece at a time

Most early sessions are an hour or two outside with a clipboard: measuring, sketching, and noting where frost lingers or puddles form. From those notes you draw a plan that puts the things you visit daily (herbs, salad, the compost pail) nearest the door and the things you visit monthly farthest away. Then you build one piece at a time, usually starting with a bed made by smothering lawn under cardboard and wood chips. Each piece is chosen to do more than one job, and you add the next only after watching how the last one behaved.

The ideas a design is built from

Zones

Number the yard by how often you go there. Zone 1 is the path you walk every day, and it gets the plants that need picking or watering most often.

Sectors

Draw the outside forces as wedges on the map: summer sun, low winter sun, the wind that dries things out, the neighbor's runoff. You block, catch or use each one.

Water first

Slow rain down and soak it in before it leaves the property. Where water moves decides where everything else goes.

Stacking functions

Give every element at least two jobs. A hedge can break wind, feed birds and drop mulch.

Covered soil

Bare soil bakes, crusts and washes away, so it always wears mulch or living plants.

Small and slow

Change one area per season. A mistake on 32 square feet costs an afternoon to fix.

Your first month, step by step

Tick each station off as you finish it

A pencil landscape plan drawn to scale, showing paths, open water and tree cover — A landscape drawn to scale

For the first bed

What you can build in your first month

Base map

Your yard drawn to scale on graph paper, with the house, trees, taps, downspouts and fences in place.

Sector overlay

A tracing-paper layer showing summer and winter sun, wind, and where water runs and sits.

Sheet-mulched bed

A 4 by 8 foot patch of lawn smothered under cardboard, compost and wood chips, ready for transplants.

Cover crop patch

A corner of bare or tired soil sown with a clover and grain mix that sprouts within two weeks.

Rain record

Four weeks of rainfall readings beside notes on which spots stayed wet the longest.

Two directions to grow into

Open one to see where to start. Each can add its own lines to the kit.

Food forest gardeningA planting copied from a woodland edge, with a fruit or nut tree on top, berry shrubs below, then herbs, groundcover and vines. Start with one tree and its ring of helper plants, called a guild.

Start here

Pick the sunniest open spot on your map and mark a circle as wide as the tree will be when grown, often 10 to 15 feet for a semi-dwarf. Plant one young fruit tree in the center this fall or early spring, guard its trunk, and set comfrey cuttings around the edge of the circle.

SDSU Extension layer and guild chart

HügelkulturA raised mound with logs and branches buried in the core. The wood soaks up water like a sponge as it rots, so a mature mound needs little irrigation. It suits yards with storm debris or poor, compacted soil.

Start here

Collect a pile of fallen branches and rotting logs about 6 feet long and 2 feet high, then choose a spot on flat ground away from the house. Stack the wood, bury it under the sod and soil dug from beside it, cover the mound with straw, and sow the cover crop mix on it for the first season.

Richsoil hügelkultur guide

A mown path running between rows of old fruit trees in dappled sunlight — Fruit trees over a mown path

One good guide for each

What trips beginners up

The first year looks like nothing

A design pays off in years two and three. Expect a map, one mulched bed and a lot of notes after the first season.

Building before watching

A bed dug in spring can turn out to sit in full shade by October. A month of notes saves moving it.

Planting too close

Trees get set at the size they are today. Space them by the width on the tag at maturity.

Too little mulch

Two inches of chips lets grass straight through. Four inches over overlapped cardboard is the minimum that holds.

Glossy or taped cardboard

Tape and plastic labels never rot. Use plain brown boxes and pull every strip off first.

Aggressive spreaders

Mint, comfrey and running bamboo are hard to remove once in. Give spreaders a bed with a mowed edge or a pot.

Copying a design from another climate

A swale that saves a dry hillside can drown a clay yard. Let your own rain and soil notes decide.

Before you dig or catch rain

Buried lines

Contact 811 a few business days before digging for a tree, a mound or any trench. The marking service is free and gas, power and fiber lines are often less than 2 feet down.

Rain barrel rules

Collecting roof water is legal in most states, but limits vary. Colorado, for example, caps a household at two barrels and 110 gallons total. Check your state and any homeowner association rules first.

Barrel water

Roof runoff carries bird droppings and shingle grit. Use it on soil, not for drinking, and keep the lid screened so mosquitoes cannot breed.

Earthworks

Keep mounds and ditches at least 10 feet from the foundation, and do not dam or redirect water onto a neighbor's lot. Where the ground drops more than 1 foot in 10, get local advice before cutting any ditch.

Wood to leave out

Black walnut suppresses many plants, and cedar and black locust barely rot. Never bury treated or painted lumber.

Invasive plants

Some plants praised in permaculture books are banned or invasive in certain states. Look each one up on your state's invasive species list before planting.

A tall rainwater tank on a brick base beside a timber shed, with a tap at the bottom — Roof water stored beside a shed

Before any digging

811 Before You Dig Free national service that marks buried utility lines before you dig

Where to learn more

Andrew Millison, a permaculture instructor at Oregon State University, posts free videos that read real landscapes and plan them for water.
The Permies forum has regional boards, which matters because advice for Arizona fails in Vermont.
Your county extension office runs low-cost soil tests and Master Gardener help lines that know local soil and pests.
A Permaculture Design Certificate is the standard 72-hour course. It is useful later, and nothing on this page requires it.

Free places to keep learning

Why the kit looks like this

The essentials are split between the desk and the yard: a book, a tape and paper for the design, then a soil test, a fork, compost and seed for the first bed. Cardboard and wood chips are free, which is why neither is on the list. The recommended lines are the next things most designs call for, led by a rain barrel and something with a wheel for moving mulch. The two add-on groups hold only what a food forest or a hügelkultur mound needs beyond that. Plants are left out of the base kit on purpose: the map has to tell you what belongs where first.

A small seedling coming up through a bed of wood chip mulch — A seedling up through wood chips

Plot the starter kit

Compare the options on each line, then set your tiers and check out from the cart. Clicking a card selects it there, and clicking the selected card again takes that line out. The food forest gardening and hügelkultur lines and the optional line level start out of the kit.

EssentialDesign tools

Beginner permaculture design book

One home-scale book gives you the full design method in order, which scattered videos do not. You will reread the chapters on water and soil each season.

budget

Practical Permaculture: for Home Landscapes, Your Community, and the Whole Earth

4.7(559)

$15.00

Permaculture

What you actually do

The ideas a design is built from

Your first month, step by step

Two directions to grow into

What trips beginners up

Before you dig or catch rain

Where to learn more

Why the kit looks like this

Plot the starter kit

Beginner permaculture design book

100 ft open-reel measuring tape

Graph paper pad

Soil test kit

Mulch fork

Bagged compost

Cover crop seed mix

Tracing paper pad

Rain gauge

Rain barrel

Wheelbarrow or garden cart

Bypass hand pruners

Young fruit tree

Digging spade

Tree trunk guards

Comfrey root cuttings

Bow saw

Bypass loppers

Straw mulch

String line level