good morning this is angelo with parkrose permaculture i am sitting on my front steps here
in portland oregon in late may and i i'm gonna make a little bit of a different video today and
that i'm asking for your help and assistance so recently i made a video about why it's great to
be a beginner in permaculture and one of the things i talked about in that video is how
people who are new to permaculture can bring fresh eyes to the situation and a fresh perspective
so embodying that kind of mindset i am asking for help i've been here for over 12 years and
i'm asking for some fresh eyes on a situation so i would love to hear your thoughts in the
comments we recently did some painting on our house and put in some new windows and fixed some
a lot of rot so we bought this house knowing it was a fixer-upper and it is a long process
i would much rather be out in the garden with my plants than in the house um so we have these
two beds here up against the front of house this one and then this one over here and sunny
and the previous owner put in this hideous rock uh trim it may look good if you have this trim on
your house i don't like it on my house it doesn't fit the period of my house at all but i have it
i'm going to use it as a resource when we first bought the house i noticed that this rock wall
served as a heat sink it absorbed the heat during the day and released it at night and helped create
a micro climate in my garden where this wall and this wall over here were a few degrees warmer
than everywhere else in my garden also they're sheltered from the wind up here against the house
the sun comes in this way we are facing i am facing right now straight south so this area
is very sunny it's very dry the soil here was nothing but gravel and clay so very hard very
um inorganic dirt that was very poor quality so having that combination of factors 12 years ago
having poor soil quality intense sunshine
microclimate that raised the temperature a few degrees and shelter from the wind
my natural decision natural choice the only choice was to put in mediterranean plants so
i put in some rosemaries and lavender and sage and thyme and man did they flourish they did
amazing up here fortunately they did too amazing my rosemary's got ridiculously huge
they were kind of my pride and joy the hummingbirds would visit them all winter long
they were covered in bees all the time so like i thought this was good permaculture design right
unfortunately because they were so vigorous and happy they rubbed against the front of my house
and caused quite a bit a bit of damage we had to replace i'll show you in a minute a great deal of
our bump out window seat because the rosemary had leaned against the house the wind had caused it
to rub and it had trapped moisture so good design in terms of thinking of the plants not good design
12 years ago in terms of interacting with the structure so in permaculture we want to make sure
that our design fits in with all elements of our site and i was new and i didn't really realize how
planting it so close to the house was going to be an issue i was only thinking about the plants
so now in order to repair we had a rotten header in this wall and we had to replace the windows
in order to do that repair i had to rip out all of the plants that were up here
and in order to make the repair over here i had to rip out my giant rosemary on all of those plates
so now i have these empty spaces and i'm not sure what to do with them i have some thoughts but
let me um let me flip the camera around and show you all what
um if i'm a little distracted it's because gracie the garden cat has come to visit me she's not
uh my cat she belongs to somebody in the neighborhood but i belong to her and this
garden belongs to her and she lives here most of the year so um if i'm a little distracted
it's because there's a cat milling around in my feet and i absolutely adore her but um
so let me show you these spaces and kind of what some of my thoughts are i can't put
plants right up against the house again because i just spent a bajillion dollars of my very
hard-earned pennies repairing rot um that i caused and well in some that was not my fault just the
fault of 100 year old house so i need a new design here i need something that's going to be different
and is going to work with the structure and the plants in my needs but i also only have a quarter
acre so i need something that will utilize the space every inch of my garden is used
so let me flip the camera around show you what i'm talking about and see if y'all can give me some
tips and suggestions for what i want to go and do in this space going forward
okie doke here we go context y'all this used to be my driveway this is a temporary walkway as
i continue to work on this part of the yard
this is going to be the greenhouse once it is done the permanent walkway will go in here
the moles have been active i have a triangular shaped bed here another temporary walkway
a volunteer rhubarb and behind it you can see where i took out all of the plants
in this front bed the soil is very poor there's gravel up by the house now i had a rosemary that
i planted in this corner if you look back at some of my old videos or some of my old
posts on my facebook page you can see this enormous rosemary so it was here it grew in
this sheltered corner we had a couple of hard winters and it did absolutely great because
again heat sink from the rock wall shelter from the east wind in this corner of the house
full sun the plant got huge and leaned up against my window seat and caused quite a bit of damage
it trapped moisture and it rubbed on the front of the house so that all had to be replaced but the
rosemary tip rooted right here and then continued to stretch here so i had one rosemary plant
that covered it was probably six feet tall over here in the corner and covered all the way out
here to where these lavenders are i also had a series of sages and lavenders in front of the
rosemary that were all kind of half smothered i've since removed all of those and i have this spot
so what do you all think i should do first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to weed
out these volunteer euphorbia which are yicky weed i'll put on gloves for that
but i have this spot and i don't want to plant anything else here that's going to touch the front
of the house and cause me some costly repairs in the future so what would you do in an area
with full southern exposure you can see here we don't have much of an overhang here at all
and so the rain beats down in this area my initial thought was i would come in and
level this out a bit get the drainage going better and then i thought maybe i would build a deck and
have potted plants or maybe i would just uh have some really big cattle troughs and grow things in
there i don't want to grow in the ground so they can still have green living productive things
even maybe um you know like lavender again but i'm not risking having them right up against the house
now as i said before i don't want an area where i have nothing growing unless it's a deck or a patio
because uh nature abhors a vacuum and she will try and find a way to sew weeds all over because
nature wants to produce green abundant living things nature wants to start the process of
succession this is basically a desert nature wants to come in with those pioneer species like this
mallow with all kinds of weeds and fill this in and start start re-greening my front so if you
have thoughts on what i should do here i'd love to hear it i'm i'm not quite sure yet again i'm kind
of thinking maybe maybe fill this in with gravel and and do lots of containers then i will be sure
to water it because it's right out my front door and take good care of this spot or maybe i want
to do a deck and put potted plants on that maybe i want some big cattle panel big cattle troughs here
so here's the other area that i removed a tree here behind my hudson's golden gem apple
by the way i will be bagging my apples tomorrow to prevent cuddling moth and i'll have a video
on that rhubarb in front of it native crandell current i have this rosemary left you can see
i feel really badly because this is such great winter hummingbird food my rosemary's bloom in
january and february sometimes but i had to get it off the house same thing here i had to
remove it so we could replace this rotten header here and fix my fix my wall left a chunk of it
alive so that i can take cuttings and re-root it and start it in another part of the yard
so i'm thinking here like maybe i will move this container here and make a path back this way
because right now i have a path here but it's very overgrown the persimmon makes it hard to
get through here and maybe i'll just make a new path here and then do some pots along the front
i'm not sure so if you'll have thoughts i don't know um i i would love your input on what
what i can do here at the front of my house that's good permaculture and is good caretaking of our
land trust house so that i don't damage it in the future but i still can grow green abundant things
all right well thank you so much i'm looking forward to hearing your input i will definitely
let you know how this project is gonna shape up i have a couple projects ahead of it like finishing
my greenhouse and a few other things but i really want to take some time and observe these spaces
absorb your input and figure out what i want to do next as you can see this is a really sunny
spot in my yard so whatever i end up putting here is going to have to tolerate full intense sun and
quite a dry spot so thank you again i will look forward to reading those comments and let you
know how this is going to progress what i'm going to utilize this space for in the future thanks so
much if you enjoyed this video please be sure and check out my patreon and click subscribe thanks