Homestead Scale Permaculture Design

Join NC Cooperative Extension, Blue Ridge Women in Agriculture, and our presenting sponsor and host, the Valle Crucis Lavender House, for a homestead-scale permaculture workshop!

Permaculture is the " the conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems" (Permaculture Research Institute). Participants will leave the workshop understanding the basic principles of permaculture, and how to apply them to a homestead-scale property. They will learn about design principles and site analysis from local permaculture expert Richard Boylan. They will also have the opportunity to tour the Valle Crucis Lavender House's permaculture gardens and learn best practices from their landscape designer, Taylor Drouet.

Workshop schedule:

Introductions & welcome

Assessing a Homestead site

• Defining goals
• Zones at the Homestead scale
• Sector analyses: sunlight, water, wind, visitors, etc.

Snack & water break

Tour of the Lavender House's permaculture design

• Water management
• Building soils with hugel piles, mulch, etc.
• Plant selections / siting / sourcing / propagation
• Microclimates due to aspect / windbreaks / etc.
• Integrating animals into the landscape (if time allows)

Speaker Bios:

Taylor Drouet

Taylor is a certified Anatomy Trains Structural Integrator, mover, teacher, and passionate advocate for sustainability from the personal and lifestyle realm to her professional and advocacy work. She grew up gardening, worked on homesteads as a WWOOFer in her teen and young adult years, and then in 2020 the pandemic finally afforded her the opportunity to delve fully into the world of permaculture research and experimentation in her role as Farm Director at The Valle Crucis Lavender House. Inspired by the work of Toby Hemenway, Eric Toensmeier, and Sepp Holzer, Taylor began to initiate hands-on projects with the support of an incredibly trusting partner and a small budget. The first step was to turn the Lavender House lawn into a mud pit! Slowly the native plants grew in and now it is well on its way to becoming a healthy wetland habitat and food forest. Using permaculture principles, earthworks to navigate floodplain challenges, ducks as co-creators, a huge variety of native plants, and plenty of mulch, she now has valuable experience managing a small team to nurture biodiversity on an impressive scale across a soggy two-acre property. As her own projects come to fruition both literally and figuratively, Taylor is thrilled to have some increasing availability for permaculture and food forestry teaching and consulting.

Richard Boylan

Since 2001, Richard Boylan has worked as an Area Extension Agent with growers in the area of the New River Headwaters (primarily Ashe and Watauga Counties) to grow opportunities for diversified and sustainable agriculture. Richard holds a B.S. in Environmental Science from Antioch College and an M.S. in Environmental Science from the State University of New York, College of Environmental Science and Forestry. He completed a Permaculture Design Certificate course in 1998 under Penny Livingston and Brock Dolman at Island Mountain Institute in Northern California, and from 1998-2000 he managed the 220 acre Heartwood campus there using Permaculture principles. In addition to recent Extension work with local small farms, he has practiced Permaculture design efforts across several smaller Appalachian properties over the past two decades.