Permablitz

In recent months, since I retired from teaching and moved across the country to Oregon, I finally have gained the leisure time I need to pursue my aspiration--to transform my own small, suburban property into a model Permaculture garden, to take the Permaculture Design Certification course offered online by Oregon State University, and to use all my communication skills to help others propagate Permaculture theory and practice throughout my new community of Salem, Oregon, and everywhere else as well, right up until my last breath.

My first discovery, of course, has been that I have a steep learning curve in all of this. Although I had my own modest summer vegetable garden for many years in Virginia, I know little to nothing about gardening, since I spent my professional career as an English professor, doing little with my hands besides typing on a keyboard!  So I decided, before I attempt a Permaculture Design Certification course, to take a crash course in basic gardening knowledge and skills through the OSU Extension Service's Master Gardener program--a rigorous curriculum consisting of 12 weekly all-day classes, followed by a comprehensive exam and some 66 hours of volunteering in various capacities before I can be certified as a Master Gardener.  And this has been well worth the effort: I am learning a vast array of conceptual, procedural, and contextual knowledge of basic botany, orchard pruning, weed control, plant diseases, water management, beneficial insects, and all sorts of other skills necessary to be able to offer others sound, research-based advice when they call into the Master Gardener's hotline. I have also made a lot of new, knowledgeable friends, with lots of good advice.

I have also volunteered, in March, to team-teach a free six-week course offered by the local food bank, called "Seed to Supper"--a basic course in Vegetable Gardening 101 for low-income residents--and I have made friends with the manager of a community garden near my home as well.

But now that I am gaining a footing in serious gardening, I have another practical challenge: in order to achieve my dream of converting my lawn into a full-fledged Permaculture garden, I face a lot of heavy lifting--digging up my lawn, laying out flagstone paths, creating keyhole gardens and raised beds, composting, mulching, building Hugelcultur mounds, etc.  In a Permaculture design, most of the heavy labor comes upfront, in laying in the "hardscape" or infrastructure for the thriving, integrated garden to follow.  And at 68 years old, with declining upper-body strength and a bad back susceptible to painful spasms when overworked, and with little to no experience or manual skills, I face a fearsome uphill battle.

This is where the delightful concept of "Permablitz" comes in.  It is a recent coinage--I don't know who invented it, but etymologically, it is a felicitous oxymoron, meaning, roughly "Permanent Lightning."  And it refers to the Permaculture community's equivalent of a barn raising among the Amish: an event where a large group of "Permies" converge upon one person's garden, to pitch in and help take up their monocultural lawn and lay the more complex infrastructure for the Permaculture garden to follow.  In return for this service, the beneficiary agrees to participate in Permablitzes for others to follow. Here is a delightful videoclip from New Zealand that illustrates a Permablitz in action. Note how they begin by laying out a set of specific tasks, and then the participants learn and teach each other by doing, throughout the day, so that everyone is enriched with new knowledge and skills, even as they help one of their members get off to a running start.

What I love about the Permablitz concept is that it is a vivid illustration of the truth embedded in a slogan I came up with some time ago:

Grow Gardens...
Grow Community...
Grow Awareness...

In short, the minute you undertake, seriously, to grow a garden, you start creating community almost immediately. First, you get into conversations with neighbors and passersby, who are all too willing to share insights and information about local growing conditions--what grows well, what doesn't, etc. And a Permablitz will accelerate this process of community-building enormously, as participants learn and teach one another the skills they are implementing on behalf of one of their members.

Finally, through such bonding and community-building, everyone's awareness is raised of both the guiding ethics of Permaculture (Earth Care, People Care, and Fair Share) and of the challenges they share in healing the landscape and community. In effect, a Permablitz is a practical and visionary way of creating a convivial Gaian culture from the ground up, for the fruits of it will be more thriving Permaculture gardens along with greater reciprocity, shared problem-solving, and conviviality throughout the community--taking care of everyone, and abandoning no one.

It is a vivid illustration of the benefits of reciprocity--of sharing knowledge rather than hoarding it, of working with one another rather than for a boss or employer. A Permablitz illustrates the truth embedded in the Chinese concept of Guanxi --their traditional social network of reciprocal gifts and obligations within an ever-expanding community. As a Chinese proverb goes, "Guanxi is better than money."  Likewise, through the expansion of Permaculture, people may yet discover as well that Gaia is better than Glomart--that working together, sharing ideas, and restoring topsoil, ecosystems, and bioregions is far better than competing, exploiting, hoarding, and polluting. As Permaculture guru Geoff Lawton put it, "You can solve all the world's problems in a Garden."