Photo by Julie, one of our organizers for the day

Yesterday, I helped build a rock wall at a Permablitz in Portland.  Permablitzes are groups of 15-30 people who show up to help one of our neighbors implement a permaculture design for their yard.  Organized by the Resilience Hub & Portland Maine Permaculture, they also provide an opportunity for learning more about permaculture options, connecting with others who share a love for the earth, and having a lot of fun doing a lot of hard work. By helping others, we also can put our names in the ring for future help with our own permaculture designs.

Yesterday was also Maine Permaculture Day, with statewide open houses and events.  I visited one yard nearby because they had fruit trees and hazelnuts, and I wanted to get a sense of what that might be like, since we’d like to do something like that for our yard.  They had peach, apple, pear and cherry trees.  They also had planted a row of hazelnut shrubs, hoping the row would eventually create a privacy wall as well as produce hazelnuts. You can learn so much more by seeing plants as they are being grown, than by reading about them. I look forward to the time when we start on our own gardens.

In the meantime, on Friday, we had gutters installed on our house.  We plan to add rain barrels but decided to wait until next year for that, since it will be a lot of work to build bases for them, and we won’t need them until we do more with a garden anyway.