Sometimes you end up wishing you had a resource at hand to make it easier to apply Permaculture principles. This was the case for myself when it came time to start thinking about beneficial groupings of plants and those groupings that do not go well together.
This is what I often find lacking with the current publications on offer. There is a lot of good knowledge locked up that could benefit so many of us in applying permaculture principles.
A simple A3 or A4 information sheet or booklet of a small number of pages is easy to mentally digest and take in and very handy to have as a reference, either printed out and hung up on the wall or on the computer when we sit down and start thinking about designing our gardens or food systems.
IDEP’s Companion Planting Guide
Click here for full PDF
That is why I was so happy to learn about the IDEP Foundation, a non-profit non-government organisation inIndonesia. IDEP maintains a host of produced small documents on permaculture from free training guides and tools to teach the very basic of permaculture principles to students to information on Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO), gardening, composting, waste management, health and nutrition, seed saving, seed propagating, and community based disaster management. Best of all, they offer their materials free of charge to the wider community in English and Indonesian languages.
I would like to call out special attention to the A3 poster on companion planting. This chart is just fantastic. It communicates so much, so easily and is a tool of great benefit to many.
More important we should make more of these brochures even more expanded in coverage by adding listing items for E (edible) N (nitrogen fixing) and G (green manure). We can break these down by climate zones so that anyone who needs help getting started can find the lists of plant resources to get them started on the right footing in their move to a more sustainable and permanent way of living.
