This is the landing page for my idiosyncratic notes on Peter Bane’s The Permaculture Handbook (2012). Any misrepresentations of Bane’s words or work are mine alone and completely unintentional. Notes on each chapter — which vary widely in length, from 6 pp. to 38 pp. — will be linked here (just below the next paragraph) as published. The whole book is online in a 500-pp pdf.
Bane provides a short biographical sketch in the book, from which: “Peter Bane has published Permaculture Activist magazine for over 20 years and has taught permaculture design widely in the temperate and tropical Americas.” He’s from the Illinois prairie and has travelled to the Himalayas, Norse fjords, Argentina, Chile, and the Caribbean, among other places, studying permaculture. He helped to “create and build Earthaven Ecovillage in the southern Appalachian Mountains,” building a small off-grid solar cabin. Later, he created a small suburban farmstead in Bloomington, Indiana. He and his partner design and consult at Patterns for Abundance. There is a website for this book, The Permaculture Handbook, with a somewhat enhanced table of contents and a couple of videos.
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Part I: Attitudes
Chapter 1: Garden Farming
Chapter 2: Who Am I To Farm?
Chapter 3: Gardening the Planet
Chapter 4: Permaculture Principles
Chapter 5: Learning the Language of Design
Chapter 6: A Garden Farming Pattern Language
Part II: Elements
Case Study A: Renaissance Farm, Bloomington, Indiana, USA
Chapter 7: Land – Scale & Strategies
Chapter 8: Labor – Can You Lend a Helping Hand?
Chapter 9: Running on Sunshine
Chapter 10: Water From Another Time
Case Study B: Jerome’s Organic’s, Basalt, Colorado, USA
Chapter 11: Soil – the Real Dirt
Chapter 12: Plants, Crops, & Seeds
Chapter 13: Setting Plant Priorities
Case Study C: Old 99 Farm, Dundas, Ontario, Canada
Chapter 14: Animals for the Garden Farm
Chapter 15: Living with Wildlife
Chapter 16: Trees & Shrubs, Orchards, Woodlands, and Forest Gardens
Chapter 17: Productive Trees and Where To Grow Them
Chapter 18: Structures, Energy, & Technology
Part III: Outcomes
Case Study D: Radical Roots Farm, Harrisonburg, Virginia, USA
Chapter 19: Diet & Food
Chapter 20: Culture & Community
Chapter 21: Markets & Outreach
Chapter 22: Making the Change
Appendix 2: Bee-Forage Species
Appendix 3: Nitrogen-Fixing Species and Biomass Producers
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