Heather Jo Flores

Heather Jo Flores

Hello! This is my blog, filled with rants, plants, and incantations of a more personal nature. If you’re looking for my permaculture courses and related content, scroll down.

Free Online Courses for Creative Folks Who Love Plants

Select from a unique collection of unique and original courses & resources based on permaculture, friendship marketing, the heroine’s journey. I specialize in stuff for women writers, but you don’t have to be a writer nor a woman to enjoy my work–all types of creative people will love these resources.

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Food Not Lawns, How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden and Your Neighborhood into a Community

This was my first book, published in 2006 and based on a decade of community gardening and grassroots activism. Read the entire, original text, with more than 90 original illustrations by Jackie Holmstrom, for free!

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Naked Lady Soup

Part memoir, part manifesto, part magical realism, this fast and funny novel tells the story of a group of young, creative, single women trying to navigate the absurd and hilarious woes of modern relationships while also trying to stay sane, make the rent, and manage to enjoy what’s left of their youth.

Permaculture Women Magazine

I am one of more than 100 writers contributing to this collaborative publication.

Here’s a selection of articles I wrote about permaculture:

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Access to Land

8 places you might be able to garden if you don’t have access to land.
Read More…

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Eat the Weeds!

12 delicious and nutritious foods you’re probably already growing
Read More…

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Food Not Lawns

How and why to turn your lawn into a garden.
Read More…

Into Permaculture? Check out my YouTubes!

YouTube Video VVU2TkppNTJyZTRSVVV0SFdoTUxiOXlnLjZEZmVfTHBfaVFj

This video is part of the online permaculture courses taught and organized by Heather Jo Flores
visit
www.freepermaculture.com
www.permaculturewomen.com
www.foodnotlawns.com

Hey, everyone, I just want to talk for a few minutes about where to practice permaculture, where you can grow food and connect with the plants even if you don't have immediate access to land. So there's lots of options even if you live in an apartment or an intense urban environment. If you're just renting and you think you won't be there very long, you don't want to invest time and energy into the space where you live then here are some other options. So ideally, as we know, permaculture isn't just about gardening. And if you're going to practice permaculture and practice building whole systems design, then you need an opportunity to create a system. So even if you live in an apartment and you decide, oh, I want to do this permaculture project in this other place, you still should at least think about how you can tie that in with your home system, even if you can't step outside your door and have access to your permaculture garden right there. How is it connected? How are the inputs and outputs? How are they flowing between the two places where you live and where you work in the garden?

So let's talk about that for a few minutes, and I'm just going to brainstorm through some options. So the first and most obvious place is to check out the roof of the building that you live in. A lot of apartment buildings do have roof access. And there are some extraordinary examples in cities all over the world of communities working together to create rooftop gardens and farms. So check that out. The next most obvious place is to look at your local parks and community gardens and see if there is some sort of system within your local community to give you access to land, a little plot that you can rent or a program that you can participate in, in which you will be able to have some space to grow food.

Another option is to just make friends with the neighbors. If you don't have land and they do, then maybe you can work out some sort of arrangement with them where you do a certain amount of work and they take a certain amount of the produce, or you could just become friends and participate in this process together. So, you know, the neighbor's lawn is an option, even if you don't have one that you can turn into food.

Another option is to get out of town and go volunteer at a local farm or on a larger piece of land where you can participate in an organic agriculture system and see perhaps a working farm where there is companion planting and maybe have a perennial food forest. Maybe they have cash crops. There's lots of things you can learn about your food system and be able to sort of conceptualize if you don't want to stay where you are, where do you want to go? And the more sites you visit that you think might have the type of system you dream about, the more likely you're going to be able to conceptualize that system for yourself. So go check out some local farms and see if you can become a part of that and hook up with free vegetables and garden starts and make friends and learn more that way. So it's a really nice way to get your hands in the soil. It's just, you know, hop on a bus or hop in the car and go out to your favorite local organic farm.

Another thing that a lot of people don't consider is that you can depave your sidewalk, our driveway. So if you do have a little bit of access to a courtyard or a driveway and and you can't grow anything there, you can only do container's let's say and you want to really grow some stuff in the ground, you can remove the concrete. I've seen some really beautiful community gardens evolve in places that were depaved. One space that I'm thinking of, it was a shared parking lot between a few apartment buildings. And they, a few of them had cars, but most of them didn't so they collectively decided that the few people who had cars could park on the street and everyone else participated to dig up the asphalt. And they put in this really sweet little garden place like a community firepit. And it's a really nice way to get back to the land, literally right through the through the concrete. And then there's always guerrilla gardening, which is basically growing food in the existing landscape. So this can happen on a small scale. This can be as small as putting some seeds in at a local park where, you know, it's getting watered.

This video is part of the online permaculture courses taught and organized by Heather Jo Flores
visit
www.freepermaculture.com
www.permaculturewomen.com
www.foodnotlawns.com

Hey, everyone, I just want to talk for a few minutes about where to practice permaculture, where you can grow food and connect with the plants even if you don't have immediate access to land. So there's lots of options even if you live in an apartment or an intense urban environment. If you're just renting and you think you won't be there very long, you don't want to invest time and energy into the space where you live then here are some other options. So ideally, as we know, permaculture isn't just about gardening. And if you're going to practice permaculture and practice building whole systems design, then you need an opportunity to create a system. So even if you live in an apartment and you decide, oh, I want to do this permaculture project in this other place, you still should at least think about how you can tie that in with your home system, even if you can't step outside your door and have access to your permaculture garden right there. How is it connected? How are the inputs and outputs? How are they flowing between the two places where you live and where you work in the garden?

So let's talk about that for a few minutes, and I'm just going to brainstorm through some options. So the first and most obvious place is to check out the roof of the building that you live in. A lot of apartment buildings do have roof access. And there are some extraordinary examples in cities all over the world of communities working together to create rooftop gardens and farms. So check that out. The next most obvious place is to look at your local parks and community gardens and see if there is some sort of system within your local community to give you access to land, a little plot that you can rent or a program that you can participate in, in which you will be able to have some space to grow food.

Another option is to just make friends with the neighbors. If you don't have land and they do, then maybe you can work out some sort of arrangement with them where you do a certain amount of work and they take a certain amount of the produce, or you could just become friends and participate in this process together. So, you know, the neighbor's lawn is an option, even if you don't have one that you can turn into food.

Another option is to get out of town and go volunteer at a local farm or on a larger piece of land where you can participate in an organic agriculture system and see perhaps a working farm where there is companion planting and maybe have a perennial food forest. Maybe they have cash crops. There's lots of things you can learn about your food system and be able to sort of conceptualize if you don't want to stay where you are, where do you want to go? And the more sites you visit that you think might have the type of system you dream about, the more likely you're going to be able to conceptualize that system for yourself. So go check out some local farms and see if you can become a part of that and hook up with free vegetables and garden starts and make friends and learn more that way. So it's a really nice way to get your hands in the soil. It's just, you know, hop on a bus or hop in the car and go out to your favorite local organic farm.

Another thing that a lot of people don't consider is that you can depave your sidewalk, our driveway. So if you do have a little bit of access to a courtyard or a driveway and and you can't grow anything there, you can only do container's let's say and you want to really grow some stuff in the ground, you can remove the concrete. I've seen some really beautiful community gardens evolve in places that were depaved. One space that I'm thinking of, it was a shared parking lot between a few apartment buildings. And they, a few of them had cars, but most of them didn't so they collectively decided that the few people who had cars could park on the street and everyone else participated to dig up the asphalt. And they put in this really sweet little garden place like a community firepit. And it's a really nice way to get back to the land, literally right through the through the concrete. And then there's always guerrilla gardening, which is basically growing food in the existing landscape. So this can happen on a small scale. This can be as small as putting some seeds in at a local park where, you know, it's getting watered.

How to find a place to grow food when you don't have access to land

YouTube Video VVU2TkppNTJyZTRSVVV0SFdoTUxiOXlnLjZEZmVfTHBfaVFj

Back in 2006, I wrote about the GOBRADIME permaculture design process in my book, "Food Not Lawns, How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden and Your Neighborhood into a Community," and discussed how it can be used to design everything from your organic garden to your online business and everything in-between!

Since then, I have used GOBRADIME to design many amazing projects, from food forests to a global network of 100,000 people, learning permaculture together, for free.

Learn more at https://www.permaculture.link

Hello, in this video, I'm going to explain the GOBRADIME design process, which we use for permaculture design GOBRADIME combined with our ethics and our principles, creates a framework upon which we can create a somewhat linear, somewhat circular plan of action so that we can apply these ecological ethics and learn from these ecological principles, mimic these ecological principles, and create sustainable human habitats that are more in harmony with nature than the systems in which we live now.

So these are big ideas that sort of come from all different directions. And that permaculture process indeed is a bit of a starburst pattern. But the GOBRADIME design process will help you sort of make sense of it and work it into a document that you can then show other people and get their feedback and begin to move forward on the process of actually implementing your ideas into reality. So in this video, I just want to go through the steps very quickly to make sure that you understand what they are and and how it's going to unfold.

Goals is the G and and that's it, what do you want? What problems are you trying to solve? That's this process and you really need to understand that and engage in the very difficult, sometimes frustrating process of taking your lofty ideas and sitting them down and turning them into measurable objectives that you can reasonably achieve. So that's the G.

O is the observation process. And that, truly that's intermixed with goals you can't really establish your goals without doing observation. You can't really do observation without knowing what the goals are. So you pull back and forth between that. you know, the the root of the permaculture process is observation. So that's our O.

The B is boundaries. And that's everything from establishing a base map to understanding the emotional boundaries that you're going to have with the neighbors or the financial boundaries that you want to set around the project, the climate based boundaries the sectors, and you get into all of that during the B process.

R is your resources where you assess what you have and what you need and what you can generate and how that's going to affect the whole.

The next step is analysis, and that's where you go back through all the other information and you sifted and you make sense of it and try to work it into some datasets that you can then make plans around.

Design is when you sort of get creative and start doing art. And really the whole thing is the design process. But, you know, for our purposes in the GOBRADIME pattern, we use design as the time to really draw everything out and try to represent visually what our plans are.

Implementation is, is when we're doing the design process, implementation is the plan that we make. And usually in two or three or 10 phases over the years to come a realistic pattern of action based on the boundaries that we've set.

And then maintenance or management or monitoring. That's the end, the second to last step in the GOBRADIME process. That's when we sort of see what mistakes we've made, M could stand for mistakes, too. So that's a really important part of the process. And, you know, it sort of doesn't go completely like this. It goes like this and it continues forward and circles back to the last one every time.

And then the E is for evaluated and enjoy and expand and evolve. And that's a really important part of the process. Also to just reflect and look at all that data and compare it to your original goals. And then it cycles back around and you create a new set of goals based on what you've learned and you move forward. So that, in a nutshell, is the GOBRADIME design process.

GOBRADIME Permaculture Design Process, explained

YouTube Video VVU2TkppNTJyZTRSVVV0SFdoTUxiOXlnLlFhOUwxTV8za2lZ

Here are a handful of ways you can start doing permaculture, even if you don't have a green thumb or don't have access to a place to grow food.

This video was created for the free online Permaculture Design for Beginners course.
Visit www.freepermaculture.com/permaculture-for-beginners

#permaculture #permaculturegarden #growyourownfood #foodnotlawns

So we've been saying the Permaculture is not just about gardening, but what do we mean by that? What we mean is that it is also about energy and transportation and waste and community relationships, your relationship with yourself, it's about how your house is built and how that connects to the landscape around it.

So in this video, we're going to explore a little bit more of permaculture beyond the garden. And as we cultivate our whole system designer's mindset, then think about how these ideas connect to what you want to do in your home and and in your garden, and especially if you're a renter or you're in a place right now where you don't feel like it's a permanent abode for you, maybe you don't want to put in a whole big food forest. So some of these ideas in this video will help you sort of conceptualize how you can start practicing permaculture right now no matter where you are.

One of the most important things to think about is your transportation. How do you get around? How does your food get to your table? Farm to table is great, but how did it get there and how far away was the farm? So if you're thinking about how to incorporate permaculture ideas into your life, start with transportation. So one of the most important parts of this work is the community relationships. You can build these interactive communities that really make it possible to consume a lot less resources. We live here in this neighborhood where everyone knows each other and people freely share stuff like eggs and cheese and extra baby plants, and it's a really awesome way to participate in a system, even though we're only renting.

Energy is a really big part of this as well. How are you consuming energy? Where are you getting your electricity? How are you heating your water? How are you cooking your food? If you look up there, you can see our solar water heater and here in this house, we don't have solar electricity, but we would like to have that. But you know, you have to sort of weigh the pros and the cons. So there's a lot of different things to think about. And you should do the math in your own situation. But for us, it definitely makes a lot of sense because we have a ton of sun here. So it would make no sense at all to use gas or electricity to heat our water. So make common sense decisions, think about the whole system. And also having the water heater gives us just one more thing to add to our home system to help us pull things into a greater ecological harmony with the whole. So even if we're not growing all of our own grains and proteins, which we are, we have a nice walnut tree, so we're growing a lot of protein, but we are still purchasing protein, but at least we're heating our own water.

So, you know, every little bit counts and you're not going to achieve a perfectly sustainable system, but you're going to learn so much about how to be a part of nature and your quality of life is going to become so much better, even if you're only doing little bits here and there. (talks to neighbor in Spanish) and then another thing you can and should consider is the waste cycle. Are you recycling your compost? Are you making best use of available resources? Are you resisting the urge to buy unnecessary items and and not use them in your house? Are you accumulating other people's waste that you thought was a resource and then not using it?

Permaculture isn't just Gardening! Here's what we mean when we say that.

YouTube Video VVU2TkppNTJyZTRSVVV0SFdoTUxiOXlnLnV6aEpHbGR5czNJ

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