300+ research-backed guides · Every claim cites its source
Gardens that work like forests
Evidence-based permaculture for real backyards. Build a garden that feeds your family and mostly runs itself — no ten acres required, no jargon walls, no guilt trips.
Fig. 1 — an ordinary backyard, redesigned to run itself.
Field notes for every plot size
What’s your space?
The Balcony
Containers, vertical trellises, and a worm bin in the corner. Permaculture principles scaled down to a few square feet.
Start small
The Backyard
Turn lawn into food. Guilds, curved beds, and a compact food forest that fits behind an ordinary suburban house.
Plan the yard
The Homestead
Swales, syntropic rows, and systems thinking for land that should feed you back — without burning you out.
Scale it upThe most productive gardens are the ones the gardener barely touches.
Forests feed themselves. Nobody fertilises them, waters them, or sprays them — yet they produce more biomass per square metre than any farm. Permaculture is the craft of borrowing that design for a backyard.
We write about it the way a knowledgeable friend explains it over coffee: what to plant on Saturday first, the philosophy second, and a citation for every claim — cross-referenced against Mollison, Shepard, Hemenway, and Jacke & Toensmeier.
Read our story
Free field guide
The 7-Layer Backyard
One illustrated guide to designing a self-sustaining food forest in an ordinary yard — layer by layer, from canopy to soil. Plus one practical email a week: The Weekly Dig.
The system behind the slogan
Seven layers, one garden
A forest stacks its production vertically. So does a well-designed backyard. Trace each layer — every one links to the guides that build it.
- 01 Canopy Food Forest Tall fruit and nut trees form the roof of the system — apples, chestnuts, mulberries working overhead.
- 02 Understory Food Forest Dwarf and semi-dwarf fruit trees thrive in the dappled light beneath the canopy.
- 03 Shrub Food Forest Currants, gooseberries, and berry bushes fill the middle height with low-effort harvests.
- 04 Herbaceous Companion Planting Herbs and vegetables — where companion planting pairings do their heaviest lifting.
- 05 Ground cover Companion Planting Strawberries, clover, and creeping thyme protect soil and crowd out weeds.
- 06 Root zone Soil & Composting Where compost becomes fertility — roots, worms, and the living soil food web.
- 07 Vine Food Forest Grapes, beans, and climbers stitch the layers together vertically.
The departments
What we cover
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01
Companion Planting
Science-backed plant pairings that boost yield, repel pests, and build soil — not folklore, not guesswork.
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02
Soil & Composting
Turn kitchen scraps into garden gold. Hot, cold, bokashi, and worm-bin methods for every scale.
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03
Permaculture Foundations
Zones, principles, and first designs — the thinking toolkit, explained without the lecture.
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04
Food Forest Design
Layer-by-layer guides to a self-sustaining food forest — even on a quarter-acre suburban lot.
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05
Syntropic Agriculture
The Brazilian method taking permaculture further: dense planting, heavy pruning, fast succession.
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06
Permaculture Around the World
Chinampas, terraces, forest gardens — what five continents can teach a backyard gardener.
Free field guide
The 7-Layer Backyard
One illustrated guide to designing a self-sustaining food forest in an ordinary yard — layer by layer, from canopy to soil. Plus one practical email a week: The Weekly Dig.
Why gardeners trust GrowPerma
300+ cited guides
Every claim links to its source — university extension research, peer-reviewed studies, and the foundational permaculture texts.
Tagged by scale
From a 6-square-foot balcony to a 60-acre homestead. Filter every article for the space you actually have.
Practical first
We tell you what to plant on Saturday before we explain the philosophy behind it. Theory earns its place by being useful.
Grounded in Mollison · Shepard · Hemenway · Jacke & Toensmeier — and 300+ primary sources cited across the site.
Before you dig in
Common questions
The five questions every new permaculture gardener asks — answered straight, with the details one click away.
A food forest is a garden designed to mimic a natural forest ecosystem with seven distinct layers — from canopy trees down to root crops and ground cover. Yes, you can absolutely build one in a small yard. Our guides cover designs for as little as 200 square feet.
Organic gardening focuses on what you don't use (synthetic chemicals). Permaculture focuses on how you design — creating self-maintaining systems where plants, soil, water, and wildlife work together. The goal is a garden that needs less input over time, not more.
Not at all. Permaculture principles work on a balcony, in raised beds, or across acres. We tag every article by scale — from 6 square feet to 60 acres — so you can filter for what fits your situation exactly.
Companion planting is the practice of growing specific plants together for mutual benefit — pest deterrence, pollination support, nitrogen fixation, or shade regulation. It's backed by decades of agricultural research, and we cite every source so you can verify the claims yourself.
Start with a simple cold compost pile: alternate layers of green material (food scraps, grass clippings) with brown material (leaves, cardboard) in a 1:3 ratio. Keep it moist but not wet. In 3-6 months, you'll have rich, dark compost. Our composting guides cover hot, cold, and worm bin methods for every situation.
Free field guide
Start with the seven layers
Get The 7-Layer Backyard free, plus The Weekly Dig — one practical permaculture email a week.
Gardens that work like forests.