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PERMACULTURE DESIGN BITES 1
Relative Location
by Maddy Harland
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Relative location is about discovering the connections between elements and putting things in the right place to save energy. When we are designing a garden, smallholding, farm or village, there can be many elements which make up the design: intensively gardened vegetable beds, chicken runs and houses, ponds, water butts, greenhouses, an orchard, coppice area, outhouses, conservation area, windbreaks, farm buildings and so on...
Design is not purely about what to include on a site, but about how the different elements are connected. Interconnection is the key. It is important that elements interact positively and efficiently with each other and that they are not just randomly located. By making connections, we can save energy, create many functions for each element and recycle waste products.
In a conventional garden it is common to hide a kitchen garden away from the house, behind a hedge. Composting systems are also regularly ‘ghetto-ized’ as far from human eyes as possible. Yet kitchen gardens do not have to be ugly, as Joy Larkcom and the late Geoff Hamilton have demonstrated. The result is often a neglected veggie patch where the gardener’s shadow is rarely seen.
On the other hand, siting a vegetable garden with composting systems between a chicken run and house fulfils many needs. Kitchen scraps are fed to the chickens, the chickens eat the perennial weeds and unwanted vegetation from the garden that you are loathe to compost, produce manure and feathers for composting, which in turn is fed back to the garden, and provide eggs and meat for the kitchen. Having the chickens near to the house and garden can also save miles of walking over the years. Water can be collected from the roof of the chicken house for the chickens. Fruit trees and edible hedging can be included in the run, providing food for the chickens from windfalls. The chickens help control pests, manure the ground and prevent too much vegetation growing to compete with the trees (but mulch those trees with heavy stones or slabs if you have a lot of chickens as they can be very destructive!).
Another example of good relative location is the greenhouse. Instead of putting it up the garden, out of sight, an ideal placing is on the south side of the house. The rays of the sun can heat the rest of the house, the house wall acts as a heat store and warms the greenhouse at night; and having it so close to the kitchen allows the gardener to water and tend the plants far more easily. In fact, my ‘greenhouse’ is my kitchen, making ‘food miles’ – the shipping of food over long distances, packaging it and travelling to buy it – more a case of food inches!
Relative location not only applies to garden design but also to community structures. A Local Exchange Trading Scheme (LETS) or local vegetable box scheme are both examples of making connections in the community that uses them. LETS keep skills, resources and ‘money’ working locally rather than being lost to the wider world. It is particularly successful in urban areas with high unemployment where money is scarce but there is more free time for people to make exchanges.
Buying organic vegetables through a box scheme provides low cost, fresh vegetables, supports local organic growers, and saves resources by avoiding ‘food miles’. Both schemes not only save their members time and money, they also encourage links between local people, the essential ingredient of ‘community’. Once local people start working together, many more innovative ideas become realities. For example, there is a community coppice on allotments in Suffolk where local people can grow their own bean and peas sticks and learn traditional woodland crafts. There are also an increasing number of urban community gardens in Britain where the unemployed, children and people with learning difficulties can learn how to grow organic vegetables. The success of these projects is due, in part, to good local networking and siting the projects within the community they serve.
To return to the principle, relative location is about seeing an element as a part of a functioning whole rather than in isolation. By putting each element in the right place in a design, the yields and wastes of each element can be made to fulfil the needs of other elements, creating a healthy, energy-efficient system.
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