Written into our history is the horror of the Irish Potato Famine, when a nation of working people’s diet was almost exclusively provided by a variety of potato which failed. Another dramatic example of the poverty of monoculture was the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s, when arable farming laid waste the delicate ecological balance of the mid-West and made a generation homeless.

In a sustainable design, important functions are supported by more than one element. The more elements there are to support an individual function, the more stable and safe the overall system will be in the event of any one element failing.

Food
For the gardener this means bio-diversity. If we have space, we rarely plant one variety of annual vegetable and if we do, it is usually backed up by another entirely different annual that crops at the same time. Better still, find perennials or self-seeders to compliment the annual and sow it only once!

In our garden we mix and match as many crops as possible. We do grow plants like lettuce, rocket, beetroot and tomatoes for the salad bowl. We also back up these crops with almost year round growing of plants like Egytian and Welsh onions, sweet cicely, land cress, claytonia, numerous culinary herbs, oriental vegetables, Campanula versicolor and corn salad. By mixing conventional annuals with self-seeders and perennials and growing plants inside the conservatory/living space as well as ones that crop outside in winter, we ensure a variety of fresh food all year round. In addition, having tree crops, bush fruit, fruit and nuts from the hedgerow, an annual vegetable garden, a growing selection of perennial vegetables, bees, chickens and ducks ensures that our food supply is supported by many elements. And there is always the local veggie shop in times of need...

Heat
House design too can demonstrate this permaculture principle. A conventional house is usually heated by either gas or oil and has little insulation. If the cenral heating breaks down or prices rise dramatically, there are few alternatives beside electicity. Our house is heated by a highly efficient gas condensing boiler, a wood burning stove and passive solar heating. The south-westerly aspect has been redesigned to take advantage of the heat of the sun by adding a conservatory/living space built from local douglas fir and double glazed with low ‘e’ argon filled glazing.

The house also conserves energy by being highly insulated in loft and wall spaces, by using high quality storm proof argon filled windows and by using thermally insulating blinds in the glazed south-westerly aspect to limit heat loss at night and on cloudy winter days. Low energy light bulbs are also being added for greater energy efficiency. The house is warm in winter but does not overheat in summer due to good passive solar design and the blinds, reducing our heating bills significantly.

There is much more that we can do in the creation of an ecological design. We will stop relying solely on gas to heat our water and are planning to install a solar hot water panel on the south-facing hip of the roof this year.

Water
Water, once taken for granted in our climes, is becoming scarcer as climate change becomes a reality. Before we even started thinking about seperate supplies, we thought how we could use less. Domestically, there are many ways of conserving and harvesting water rather than relying on the one source out of the tap. In the house, water is conserved by obvious changes in habits like not running taps when we clean our teeth, not using a dishwasher and using an energy efficient washing machine which uses a spray system to rinse clothes. We have installed a Swedish Septum urine-separating compost toilet to replace a flush toilet upstairs. The harvested urine from this unit was diluted and put on our vegetable garden last summer, giving us the finest crop of sweet corn we have ever had. We also use mulch to conserve moisture in the garden and water it with washing water.

We are also in the process of installing a rainwater harvesting system which takes all the water off the roof into a 300 gallon tank. When full, this will be pumped to a 1000 gallon holding tank at the top of the garden slope. The long term plan is to connect a drip irrigation system around all of the fruit trees on the site. Being on a slopey chalk site with poor soil, irrigation makes all the difference to healthy trees and good yields.

Planning and/or building regulations had to be obtained for the solar panels, the compost loo and the rainwater harvesting system. East Hampshire District Council had no known precedence for our domestic water harvesting system and our compost loo certainly raised a few eyebrows!

The rationale for diversifying sources for food, heat and water is not only to save money but to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Whilst our great leaders argue over insignificant reductions and the planet continues to heat up, we must ‘walk our talk’ as well as lobby politically.