Permaculture Zones
Soil, Community, Resilience
First Published: 2025-02-05| Last Updated: 2024-08-31
Status: stub| Audience: post-industrial farmers| Confidence: aficionado
Permaculture is a philosophy of working with, rather than against nature; of protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless labor; and of looking at plants and animals in all their functions, rather than treating any area as a single product system
Traditional agriculture was labour intensive, industrial agriculture is energy intensive, and permaculture-designed systems are information and design intensive.
Permaculture Zones are a key design tool. Zones are designations of the relative level of human activity or effort on a site. Numbered from 0 to 5, they work outwards from the nucleus of the human use of a site (usually the house) to the (theoretical) wild land unused by anyone.
These are the basic zones, and how they apply in particular to our site.
Zone 0
The home. It’s the hub of daily activities, where energy and water use are most intensive.
While most permaculture practitioners consider zone 0 to be only the inside of the house, that does not map well onto how we actually live. Not only are our pantry, cleaning closet and laundry facilities not inside the main house, we also live in a way that makes use of the traditional Asturian antoxana. Therefore, for us, Zone 0 includes the antoxana and the structures that surround it on three sides; the house, the despensa, and the guest house. The fourth side, the barn, marks the beginning of zone 1.
Zone 1
Immediate Surroundings
For us this is the area immediately outside our front door or just off the patio/antoxana. It comprises our most visited sites on the smallholding, including:
- Strawberry patch
- Workshop
- Storehouse
- Chicken coop and yard
- Sheep sheds
- Goat barns
Zone 2
Intensive Cultivation / small orchards
La Pomarada, La Llosa (Fruit Forest), bee hives
Zone 3
Broad-Scale Farming / field crops / cows
Tierra Grande (Field Crops), blueberry terraces, Sheep fields, cow fields
Zone 4
Semi-managed / silvopasture / agroforestry / foraging
Woodlot, monte comunal
Zone 5
Unmanaged / foraging