Urban permaculture in a fast-paced world

How can we apply permaculture in cities and small businesses to create a more regenerative, restful and happy world for all?

I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Alysse to share my thoughts on all this, during an episode of the Practical Permaculture podcast.

In this interview, we discuss:

• Why I believe permaculture can be a powerful movement for positive change when applied within cities and urban areas.
• Financial budgeting, bartering for services and how to make the ‘business of living’ cost less so you can work less.
• Simple structures you can implement to help ensure regular rest and time off from your work life.
• How small business owners have a unique opportunity to introduce more healthy diversity into the corporate world.
• Two key tips for growing more food in urban spaces.

Huge thanks to Alysse for having me on the podcast — chats like these are always so helpful for clarifying my thinking and approach.

Have a listen or, if reading is more your thing, you can take a gander at the full transcript below.

Podcast interview transcript:

Alysse:           Hey, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Practical Permaculture Podcast. We have Koren on the podcast today. She’s a journalist by training and has gone into digital marketing as well, but she has a very strong affiliation with permaculture. And she’s designing her life and her business around only working four days a week, and really slowing down and being very intentional. She writes for The Guardian and the ABC as a journalist, but she does have her own business as well in digital marketing. And she targets small ethically aligned businesses that have a triple bottom line. So, she’s aligning her life and her business and the choices she makes around permaculture.

I just love how she’s designing her life in this very intentional way that she can relax and recharge, and have pockets of slow. And she’s in an urban environment, which is the other thing that was really cool to talk to her about, the fact that she made that decision to be in a city and how she integrates permaculture on an urban block. So, yeah, really interesting. Welcome, Koren.

Koren:            Hello, hello. Thank you so much for having me.

Alysse:           It’s my absolute pleasure. I was just telling Koren that I first heard about her through Morag Gamble and she’s done work for a friend, so I feel like we’re all connected in this little permaculture world, aren’t we?

Koren:            Yeah. It’s beautiful how that happens, and often make connections you don’t even realise. It’s like, oh, that mycelial network really is working.

Alysse:           Yeah, definitely. Before we get too far into the podcast, we always acknowledge the land that we’re recording on, so whereabouts are you?

Koren:            Well, I’m based here in Tantanya, Adelaide. So, I’m on Kaurna Land here.

Alysse:           And I’m up in Yaegl Country on the Northern Rivers. So, for anybody who doesn’t already know who you are, do you want to give us a little bit of a background and context as to who you are and what you do?

Koren:            Yeah, sure. So, I’m based here in Tantanya, Adelaide, on a really small urban block. I’m just like a couple of kilometres from the city centre. Definitely not like a sprawling country acreage or anything like that. I’ve got 478 square metres, so smaller even than a lot of typical house blocks. Luckily, my house is quite small as well. It’s only 87 square metres, so I do have a fair bit of room to garden. I moved here in 2017 as a renter, but then I was lucky enough to be able to buy the place in 2021, I think it was.

                        So, since then, I suppose my dream for this location has been to turn it into an urban permaculture demonstration site. It’s a very slow burn. I’m doing it by myself. I’m a solo mortgage owner and a solo business owner. So, there are lots of time, energy and financial constraints. But I’ve really been looking at what I can do outside in the garden in terms of permaculture design. This is a really old house. It’s 100 years old. So, I’ve been looking at small‑scale renovations that I can do indoors to make my house more energy efficient.

                        And then also just applying permaculture to every other context I can think of, like my business and my friendships and the way I travel, the food I eat. Yeah, I’d love that it’s more than just gardening.

Alysse:           When did you first come across permaculture? Was it like something you grew up with, or was it a slow burn, or did it kind of slap you across the face one day?

Koren:            Well, I think my parents always had strong environmental values. I grew up in the country in the Barossa Valley, like riding horses up until dusk, and I spent a lot of time outside as a kid. So, yeah, I suppose that that upbringing did inform me and my values.

                        But it was really when I moved to Brisbane in 2008. And I was working for a metropolitan daily newspaper up there. I was a fulltime journalist at the time and ended up covering politics. And it just felt like really out of alignment – it was a Murdoch paper, after all. So, at the time, my sister, Alana, and I had decided that we would launch a blog. We talked about sustainable ways to live in the city. I think that started in 2010 or something and carried me all the way through the next decade, really.

                        By then I had moved to Spain. I lived in a fourth-floor apartment in the middle of the city in Alicante. So, I had no garden and it was a really interesting experiment to figure out ways to live sustainably in such an urban environment.

                        So, I guess, the sort of ethos was always there, but it was when I moved back to South Australia in 2017 that I did my Permaculture Design Certificate and that really just clicked everything into place. I was like, “Oh, this is so much easier.” You know, now I have this established and practical, logical framework for sustainable ways of living, inspired by nature. So, I feel like it’s supercharged in my life since then. There’s the three ethics, the 12 principles, that design system that you can literally apply to anything.

                        And all of that coincided with moving into this little house as well. So, it’s kind of given me a canvas upon which to apply all that knowledge and give it all a crack.

Alysse:           And was it like a very conscious decision to live in a city, even though you had this permaculture lens? A lot of people, their first instinct is to sell everything, or to go find property or land and that they need that to homestead, or they need it to do permaculture. So, was that a conscious decision, or did it kind of happen and you made it work? What was the context around that?

Koren:            Well, I’ve actually always thought that I was a country person. I grew up in the country. And then, you know, I lived in Brisbane, I lived in Spain, I lived in Adelaide and at some point, really recently, maybe two years ago I realised like, “Oh, actually, I spent my entire adult life in cities. I probably need to just admit that I am a city person.”

                        I remember when my partner at the time and I were looking for a house, and we were looking in the country and we had lots of big discussions around what that would look like. And at the time, I wanted enough land for a few sheep, and a huge garden and all of that sort of thing. But I guess there were two major constraints there for me. One is money, obviously. It can be quite expensive to buy something large in a country area. But the other one I had to kind of face up to was my own health and energetic capacity.

                        I’ve got a few really strong feedback loops in my life. So, I’ve got a back injury that gives me almost daily chronic pain and can influence my energy levels quite significantly. And then also a brain type, a neurotype that is quite prone to sensory overload and burnout. So, I was like, “Okay, I probably need to make a better choice here about where I’m going to live because I don’t have endless amounts of energy.” And if I end up living in the country, that’s going to be a real struggle and I probably will constantly feel like a failure because I won’t be able to do it. So, that’s sort of where I arrived at with like, “Okay, I’m going to try and do something in the city.”

                        And then I realised this is actually a space where I could have a really big impact. There are statistics that say nine in 10 Australians live in urban areas. That’s phenomenal and it makes sense if you think about our geographical spread. But that means that if I can find a way to help people understand more sustainable ways of living in the city, ways that permaculture can help you practically apply that, I can actually help so many more people.

                        I think historically, permaculture has been very focused around those large country acreages, which is totally awesome and I’m in awe of all of those people who do manage to do that. But I think as we move into sort of this new financial reality for a lot of people, that’s just not doable. So, it’s great to see now voices in the city popping up all over the country, talking about ways to do it on a much smaller scale that’s a bit more manageable if you’re single, or you’ve got a health condition, or you’re a mum of small kids or you’ve got any of those other constraints that mean you just don’t have the time and energy for something huge.

Alysse:           Yeah. We have so many of our listeners that go, “Oh, that’s all well and great, but I’m in a city and how do I do this? And how can I implement these things?” So, I think it’s great that there are people modelling that. So, good on you.

Koren:            Yeah. I think the thing there too is people often think that permaculture really is just about gardening. So, they think, “Well, I don’t have a huge garden,” or “I don’t have even space for any gardening, so I can’t do permaculture.” But it’s so much more than that. You know, it’s a design framework that can be applied to any domain in your life. And as city dwellers, all of those other domains, like where we get our food from, how we travel to work, how we fly for holidays, the way we move around cities, they’re often really, really unsustainable.

                        So, you can apply permaculture thinking and permaculture design to the way you live in a city. It totally doesn’t even need to include a garden. And then have these really kind of profound impacts on your local community and the wider world that I think there’s a lot that permaculture could help us do in terms of figuring out ways to live more lightly in the city. And it doesn’t even matter if you don’t have a garden.

Alysse:           Totally. And I think it also brings into that concept of community sufficiency. People buy these properties and think, “Oh, I’m going to be totally self-sufficient and provide it all myself.” And it’s just not realistic. You have to buy your coffee from somewhere, or you will always have that, I feel. But also, what if you break your leg? What if you hurt your back? If you are on a property, you still need community around you. And so, I think when you bring it back to that urban context, it really makes you find your community and create more community sufficiency and I think that’s a good thing. I think it creates resiliency in our economy, and community and our lives.

Koren:            Yeah. I definitely agree. And you have to work hard to build hyperlocal community in a city these days. If you just even think about the way new houses or new units are built, they’re built with these frontages that are designed to decrease interactions. You drive into a garage, you roll the door down and you enter your house through like some hidden door. You rarely see- there’s not that opportunity for waving at your neighbour in the driveway or anything like that. I’ve got this older style house, so I’ve got a little porch out the front that you can sit on and sort of wave at people and that sort of thing.

                        But it is harder now to make those hyperlocal connections. So, I think permaculture, because it so stridently encourages that, it’s a way of like re-localising our cities as well. And there’s all sorts of little ways that you can do that. The dog park I always think is like an- I honestly don’t love dogs, which is a controversial opinion, but I accept that there are many people who do, and if you’re one of them, that seems like a really great place to meet local people.

                        I’ve put a little honesty stall out the front of my house, which is just a place where I share bits and pieces from my garden. But it’s become this amazing community interaction point. People just see it there and assume that I’m going to be up for a chat, and I am. So, that’s lucky. I know heaps more neighbours now just from having these incidental chats in front of that stall. It’s these strategies that provide a way to get to know literally the people living on either side of you or the people in your neighbourhood because like you say, that’s resilience. They’re the people who are going to be right there if something goes wrong, not your friend who’s on the other side of the city.

Alysse:           Yeah. And I saw on your Instagram, you even had a little Permablitz when you were building some of your garden beds and things. That’s so cool.

Koren:            It’s funny, I’m actually just writing a story on that now for ABC. So, it’s very topical in my mind. I was literally writing about it yesterday. But yeah, I think that’s been one of the things I’ve had to accept in doing this on my own is like, “Okay, I don’t have great building skills.” It’s not something I’ve learnt. And I started teaching myself. I do believe you can learn anything. But I found it really tedious and boring and I was like, “I actually don’t enjoy this and I don’t need to have every skill under the sun.” I could actually just turn to my community.

                        So, when it came to setting up some annual veggie beds in my backyard, and I’d done this permaculture design and I’d kind of figured out where everything needed to go to make the best use of the sun and the warmth and all of those sorts of things that permaculture design helps you with. And then I was like, “Great. I want to make these very low raised beds, which is a super simple project for anyone with any kind of practical skills, but totally beyond me. And it turned out I had a friend who’s really great at woodworking.

                        And he gently, probably over the course of a year, was like, “I’d really like to help you with this. I can definitely help you.” It took a bit of convincing. So, yeah, I acknowledge that there is a challenge there, definitely for me and probably for lots of other people, in asking for help. It’s not something we necessarily do a lot of. But I did finally. And a crew of five of us came and built it all together. And it was amazing. The amount that five people can get done in just a couple of hours is astonishing. But it’s super fun as well, you know. And then I’ve got this beautiful memory of this shared experience that we had in a space that’s really important to me.

Alysse:           Well, that’s lovely. Touching on your work for the ABC, I’ve read a lot of your articles and you are quite passionate about designing your work life to include rest and relaxation, and also, yeah, just to kind of design that life that you want to be living. Can you talk to that a little?

Koren:            Yeah, for sure. So, I guess a lot of that rest-based mentality and systems thinking approaching to rest has come from necessity, those two feedback loops that I was talking about earlier, being my back injury, my energy levels and my neurotype. So, I guess in trying to figure out how I could be like a modern-day person, who works, and makes money and is somewhat successful in life, but can also manage my own personal capacity, that’s what started all of this thinking.

                        To give people a bit of background on my work – I have this fairly diverse work background, which is partly by design. Like in permaculture, we like to use and value diversity. That’s one of the principles, but it’s also how my brain works. I love to be working on lots of different things at once. So, I have founded my own digital marketing company, helping ethical small business owners communicate online. I also write about permaculture living and city living for ABC and The Guardian. And then I do a bit of sustainable city living education as well, so like workshops, and talks and things like that.

                        So, lots of different irons in the fire. And it’s like, “How do I balance that in a way where I’m not just constantly burnt out?” And I think lack of proper rest is almost like a plague in our society at the moment. The more that I talk about this, the more I see people struggling with busyness, or feeling guilty about resting or taking time to rest and then going, “I don’t even know what to do with this time.” And I totally understand that. I’ve been there myself as well. And I guess, I got to a point where I was like, “Okay, how can I use permaculture to create systems that automatically grant me rest?”

                        I realised I’m not very good at just spontaneously taking time off for something like that. There is a permaculture principle around apply self-regulation and accept feedback. So, that was the main principle that I worked with when kind of deciding this system. It was like, “Okay, the feedback is that my body can’t go as far and as fast as I’m asking it to.” And the self-regulation that I need to apply is something that works within this. ” can’t do it spontaneously. There needs to be a regular system for me for rest.

                        So, at the moment, what that looks like is I take every Friday off. So, I work a four-day work week and then I take quarterly rest weeks. So, every season or every three months, I take one full week off. And they’re booked in my calendar. They’re like non-negotiables.

                        But crucially, I don’t book anything into those times, even on the rest weeks. Occasionally, I’ve gone on a holiday, but mostly I’ll just stay home. And the idea of that is just creating space to show up on that day and do whatever I need on that day. And some days, no rest might look like a big day of gardening and really getting out there and having a great time in the garden after a full week of screentime as a digital marketer. But other weeks, it might look like reading a book for 12 hours because I’m actually totally down and out, or watching TV even for 12 hours. That happens at times when I get really burnt out.

                        So, yeah, those systems, they’ve been really important to me for self-regulation. And obviously, that’s not going to work for everyone. But I guess, the core idea there is for people to think about their own feedback loops, like what’s going on in their life that’s telling them something isn’t working here around busyness, or stress or lack of rest and then looking at how self-regulation could help you rest more. Is it something every morning, or are you really a spontaneous person? Do you just need to have a little bit more room in your calendar for spontaneous rest? I don’t know, it could look like anything, but the idea there is observation, close observation and then figuring out something that works for you.

Alysse:           I so resonate with what you were saying about rest because a bit of our context that the listeners probably know, but you don’t is that I got really burnt out. And so, we sold everything and we travelled around Australia for two years with our kids in a caravan. And then we’ve chosen where we’re living now because of affordability. So, we didn’t want to have a big mortgage. We didn’t want to be a slave to our finances and feel like we’re having to always pick up more hours and chase the dollar to then fund our lifestyle. And so, we kind of made that very intentional decision to slow down. My husband only works four days a week. I only work part time. But I guess also, with that decision, do you think you have to shift your perspective then on like what you need or want, or how you define wealth or happiness, and that kind of shift of perspective because potentially, it might mean losing out on a bit of income or making sacrifices in other areas of your life?

Koren:            Yeah, definitely. And you’ve probably seen this in your own life too. I think there’s a couple of things there. So, one thing that I’ve noticed I have to be really conscious of is reminding myself of my own values and what is enough for me. So, every now and then, I might go visit a friend who’s got a really fancy house, or see someone roll up in a really fancy car or something like that and start thinking, “Oh, I should sell my totally shit-box car and get a better one.” I mean, obviously, an electric one would be a lot better, but often that thought is more around wanting to look better than anything values-based.

                        So, I suppose there’s a lot of work in- it’s almost like tunnel vision, reminding yourself that, “No, I’m consciously going in this direction because I’ve acknowledged the feedback. I’ve accepted it. I’ve regulated for what’s right for me.” All this other stuff that all these other people are doing, that’s great. That’s their choice. But I don’t have to compare myself to that, or try to adhere to that. So, that’s helped a lot.

                        I think one of the hardest ones for me personally is seeing other gardeners and seeing how quickly they smash through stuff. Then I remind myself of all the things that this slow journey offers me, like connection with those friends who really wanted to help me or learning new skills. Some of them I don’t find boring, so I actually do want to learn and that sort of thing. So, yeah, kind of being aware of what’s right for you I think is really important.

                        But even just budgeting, like before I made a lot of those decisions around the amount of time that I would be able to take off, I just did a really solid budget and it’s just the basic stuff that you’d normally do, like figure out everything you spend money on and then break it down so you know each week and month how much you need to earn. So, that gave me a realistic picture of what I need to achieve in order to make this lifestyle real. So, it wasn’t like, “Well, I’m just going to do this and hopefully it will be fine.” And I think that’s another great thing about permaculture is that it is so often grounded in the practical and in reality of a situation. There’s less like, “Just give it a go and see if it works,” and more like, “Think it through. Make a plan. Look at it from all the different angles.”

                        In a garden, you might map sectors of sun, and wind and frost pockets. In your financial world of permaculture, you might map- mapping your budget is kind of one sector. You might map all your different income, potential income sources and other ways to make money or spend less money. I think that’s a really important one to map.

                        Doing that ‘how can I make living cost to me less’ exercise led to some really lovely things like, “Okay, I can share internet with my neighbours.” I live in a house that has a shared wall, my neighbours are literally just on the other side of the wall, so we can share internet really easily and that reduces both of our costs. Or growing some of my own food, or bartering, finding like-minded businesses who offer services that I need, like acupuncture or massage for my back, or beautifully organically grown veggies from a local farm, some of these things I can barter my services for to help just the business of life cost less. So, yeah, it’s kind of always been a bit of a work in progress, I suppose, and it sort of always will be, but they’re the main things that help keep me on track.

Alysse:           Yeah. How do you find that process of bartering, especially in a city where money is the main commodity?

Koren:            It’s worked really well for me. I think that the uncomfortable part for me in the beginning was figuring out what is a fair barter and how do you effectively communicate the value exchange so everyone’s really clear. And I had a few instances where that wasn’t super clear and then it was like, “Oh, hang on. What are we offering?” So, I’m much better at that now, just upfront like, “Hey, would you like this? In exchange, I can give you that,” or “I’m looking for someone to help me with this and in exchange, I can give that.” And then you can have the conversation, but at least straight up. A good example is I recently had my 40th birthday party here.

Alysse:           Oh, happy birthday.

Koren:            Thank you. And I really wanted a photographer to come and mark the occasion. It felt like a big milestone for me and everyone dressed up in crazy vintage outfits. I really wanted to treasure it. And there’s an amazing photographer here in Adelaide, Bri Hammond, and I’d loved her work for years and I knew that she was fairly like-minded. So, I just sent her an email and said, “Not sure if you’re open to this at all, but I’d love you to come and shoot my party and in exchange, I can offer you some digital marketing coaching and this is the offering.” And it was a “heck yes” from her.

Alysse:           Wow, that’s cool.

Koren:            Yeah. That was a really cool one because we’d been lightly in touch. We’d message each other a little bit on Instagram. But I think all the other ones I’ve had direct connections with and that’s one of the first ones that I’ve felt confident in going out and just pitching it cold, I guess. So, yeah, I think if people are looking at delving into the world of bartering, maybe start with someone you know first. It definitely feels easier. You can iron it out, figure out how you want to communicate about it. But you can sort of see if people are like-minded too, so you can find service providers that seem like they’ve got similar values. And if people say no, that’s cool. If you don’t ask, you don’t know.

Alysse:           There’s a good book. I don’t know if it’s Grown & Gathered or The Village, but Matt and Lentil, they exchange flowers for a whole year and for everything that they needed. And that really opened my eyes up and they just said even some of the barters that you might not seem like fair in a financial sense, they learnt so much from it. So, I find that really interesting.

Koren:            That’s so cool. I know some people do barters at the straight time for time as opposed to, “My service costs this much and yours costs this much.” It’s like, “An hour of your time for an hour of my time.” So, that can be a nice way to propose it, or you just agree on whatever people think is fair and kind of go from there.

Alysse:           And so, with your work being a journalist and in digital marketing, I mean they’re often seen as very fast-paced go, bang-bang jobs where you’re in that world of busyness. Did you find that making that conscious decision to only work four days impact it, or is that something that you thought about? Did it ever cross your mind, or did you kind of just have faith that you’d find those connections that would work for you and that it would all kind of be okay?

Koren:            A little bit of all of those things. I think clear communication can solve almost any problem. So, being really clear with people, right from the proposal documents where I talk about that fact that I don’t take phone calls that are unscheduled. It needs to be by email for me because I like to work in really focused chunks and I like to preserve that time. So, then I’m not getting random calls on my Fridays off because my clients don’t really call me unless it’s a scheduled call.

                        I guess I’m lucky in that I talk about this kind of thing fairly frequently publicly, through the ABC stories, but also on my Instagram and my newsletter. So, I often find clients are already receptive. For example, I’ll send an email to current clients a couple of weeks before my quarterly rest week and say like, “Hey, just a heads up. It’s coming up. Is there anything beyond our already scheduled work that you urgently need done? Otherwise, I’ll keep chuffing along.” And the most common response I get to that is like, “This is the coolest thing ever. I need to implement something like this in my business.”

Alysse:           I love it. I just love it. And I really admire you for having those hard boundaries because it’s so easy to say yes and to get wobbly. And I think you also did a recent post about the fact that you did kind of break that rule, and what you did to mitigate that and how you planned for it. And I love that because there are times that you may not have a choice or you kind of do have to hustle, but putting the boundaries on even that and so you don’t get stuck in that hustle mentality infinitely and it just kind of becomes second nature without even consciously thinking about it.

Koren:            Exactly, yeah. My friend, Nat Mendham, talks a lot about radical rest and I like her approach to it where she talks about mimicking nature. And in nature, there are always these cycles of explosive growth and then rest. If you think about plants in winter being quite dormant versus in spring going nuts. So, yeah, recently I did have this kind of perfect storm of personal and work events that I couldn’t shift, or move or spread and it was a seven-week stint, which was far too long for my little brain. But there were lots of other things- requests that came in during that time and it was quite easy to just be like, “Not right now. Yes, but it needs to be in December, or January or February.”

                        So, I guess what I was thinking of there is like, “Okay, if this is my spring sprint, which funnily enough, it was in spring, then I’m going to need a winter, at least a short winter after this to recover.” So, I kind of kept my December fairly free so that I have some recovery time. So, yeah, there are just so many different ways that you can incorporate it all. But I think the main thing is, yeah, letting people know, being really clear about what you’re doing so that they’re not left wondering. Most of my clients know that I’m not around on a Friday. So, even if they email me on a Friday, they don’t expect a reply and I’ve just been clear about that.

                        But I think the other thing around the business world is there’s all sorts of different brains out there that work in all sorts of different ways. And we’ve been fed this line that you have to work in a certain way, in a certain corporate, professional, always available, fast-paced way to be successful in business. And I’m sure that does work, but there are lots of other brains out there for whom that doesn’t work, or they don’t expect that, or they wouldn’t want that. So, I love that we’re sort of getting to a place now because so many people are having their own small businesses where we’re starting to get this diversity of approaches.

                        And there’s plenty of people who would think my way is super annoying and be like, “No, I just want to pick up the phone and be able to call you.” And that’s cool. They can go and work with someone who works like that, but there’s also lots of other people who are like, “Oh, I appreciate the slower pace of this, and the considered communication,” and that sort of thing. So, yeah, I think if you have your own business, you’re in a bit of a lucky spot where you can, to some degree, start to make decisions that work a little bit better for you and your own brain and energy, and then have a bit of an impact on the diversity of the business world at large.

Alysse:           Yeah. And it’s also those people who hustle constantly at what cost as well, what other areas of your life may be suffering, or not rich because of the choice that you’ve made. I know me personally, we can’t really structure our week so much like that because with young kids, things have changed all the time. But we try and structure our days like that. So, our mornings, are our kind of busy hustle times. We have a coffee, hubby and I, in the morning and the kids know that they don’t come near us. That’s our coffee time. And then after that, he goes to work. I do some work. And by that time, they’re outside kind of playing. And then at lunch, we kind of have a reset and the afternoon, it’s like all bets are off. We have no commitments. We don’t do anything.

                        And so, yeah, we’ve structured each day like that so we know that the mornings are our busy time where I’m switched on in the morning. I totally check out in the afternoon. I’m terrible. We had someone in the UK try and FaceTime and it was like 6:00pm here and I’m interviewing them, not even- I don’t think I was even in the room. I was awful. I should have never said yes to it. But that’s that. Apply self-regulation and feedback. So, yeah, we structure our days with our mornings where I’m most productive and then the afternoons are a write-off. And we just kind of slowly cook dinner, and putter around the garden or do whatever we need to do. And the same with homeschooling. We don’t have school holidays. We just do two or three days all year round because that’s what suits us. So, I think it’s really important to consciously design your life and how you live and you work and how you go about the world. And I think it makes such a big difference energetically to how you live too when you do start practicing that and follow through with those decisions.

Koren:            I totally agree. I love that you found that cycle within a day. That’s so beautiful. And it just makes me think that permaculture design is kind of like a choose-your-own adventure for sustainable living. It’s like you get this really solid framework and these ethics and principles to work within. And then you get to look at your own life in your own context and figure out how they’ll work specifically for you. And there’s no one right way. But the overall impact is that we’re all living with a bit more energy, and rest and happiness, and hopefully a little bit more sustainably, a little bit more lightly on the planet. And yeah, it’s just lovely that it provides this framework that helps you to make those choices.

Alysse:           Your garden is amazing, by the way, all the photos that I see on there. Have you got any tips for people who are in urban areas or small spaces, how to garden in that way so that you still have this abundant, resilient, thriving polyculture of a garden in a smaller space?

Koren:            I think one of the biggest constraints that small spaces give is sunlight. You might have a large building next to you that blocks a lot of sunlight, or a neighbour’s tree or your own house and that sort of thing. So, one of the concepts that permaculture teaches is sun mapping where you look at where the sun falls. Obviously, the sun is higher in the sky in summer and lower in winter. So, those shade lines move throughout the year. And when you’re first starting gardening, you might not even be aware of that. And I think it’s like does it leafy green need six hours, minimum six hours of sunlight a day, but lots of other plants need more, like tomatoes and cucumbers and all those really delicious things need more sunlight. So, if you’ve got a spot in your garden that only gets four hours of sunlight a day, it’s going to be tricky. And it might not even be worth throwing tomatoes there, for example. You might just try leafy greens.

                        So, I think the first thing I’d recommend to people is have a look at sun mapping. It’s really easy to do. It doesn’t cost anything. I think I’ve even got a blog on it that runs you through how to do it step by step. And I’ve got examples of my own garden, plus a friend of mine, Nicole, in the Sunshine Coast. I think she has like 50 square metres or something like that, a really tiny context. And we sun mapped on her little block as well. She’s got a lot of shading and figured out placement of things. And that can be the difference between success and failure, just having enough sunlight. So, if you’re going to do anything, I would say figure out the sun first.

                        And then the other thing that works really well in small urban contexts is growing vertically. You can maximise your space by going up. And what I’ve done here, in Tantanya, Adelaide, it’s hot a lot of the time. It gets above 40 degrees frequently in summer. Really low rainfall, like less than 500mm a year. So, keeping soil covered and moisture is crucial in this particular context. So, I’ve planted a food forest in my backyard, which is sort of like fruit trees and then understories of other edible like strawberries, and asparagus, and rhubarb and, I don’t know, lemon basil and all these beautiful perennials. And I’m finding that’s working really well both in terms of the amount of food I’m able to grow in this really quite small space. But also, it’s just a lot less work.

                        I’m doing things that live for more than two years. You’re not there constantly, having to pull everything out and put things back in. So, I do have an annual bed area, but it’s quite small and a lot of my garden is dedicated to perennials. So, yeah, that would kind of be something to look at. You can definitely make a little food forest in an urban space. They work- even in a pot, they work really well. But even failing that, thinking about mesh that you could grow up or what are they called? Garden arches? Yeah, you can grow up and over and they’re all just ways to get more space in something that’s quite small.

Alysse:           And do you find growing up also helps with the sun then too? Like it might be the shadier spot down low, but once it kind of gets high enough that those little solar panels are getting more light as they get higher?

Koren:            Yeah, absolutely. So, in my garden, I’ve got a northern fence line that throws quite a lot of shade. It’s got a neighbour’s shed behind it that’s quite high. So, in winter, it’s in deep shade. And as part of my permaculture design, I designed my chicken run to kind of come off that fence. So, the chickens can kind of be in that shady area where it would be really hard to grow. And then the food forest sits in front of that fence. Those are trees that are going to get a bit higher. So, whilst their roots might be permanently in shade, their leaves, their solar panels are much higher. So, they’re going to be able to get sun and make use of that space.

Alysse:           Yeah, and it’s that permaculture principle of integrating as well, I guess. So, if you have that small space, how you integrate your chickens with the rest of your food forest and all those things because I think that traditional way of maybe gardening where everything is separate makes it really tricky in a small space. So, I think you’ve given us a lot to think about. And at this time of year, people often start reviewing the year that was and looking forward into 2025 and maybe what they might want to implement. If someone’s really resonating with this idea of maybe curating their life a little bit more and how they’re working and putting intentional rest in, where do you think they should first start? Would it be with an audit maybe of their time, or kind of how could you go about that if you kind of want to implement these things?

Koren:            Hmm. I think it would be worth figuring out what your feedback loops are. So, that could be things like writing a list of things that make you feel energised versus what takes energy.

                        I guess, one of the things that became clear to me when I did all of this thinking was that I didn’t actually know what rest was for me. And so, when it came to thinking about needing more rest, I was like, “But what do I do? Like what does that even look like?” And so, then I spent maybe six months really consciously clocking, “Oh, this tires me out. Oh, this is really regenerative.” And that’s how I realised that really going hard in the garden actually can be a form of rest for me.

                        So, that could be a really nice place for people to start and it might be like weaving, or mending, or going for a walk or hugging your chickens. There are all sorts of different things that that can look like. But I think it’s really impossible to rest if you don’t know how.

                        And then, yeah, looking also at what are the things that drain your energy. And they might be things that you just have to do in life. There are things that we all have to do and once you’re sort of a bit more aware of those pluses and minuses, you can start to figure out ways to balance them. I think we’ve given such great examples here, like you’ve got this in sort of a daily cycle. Mine’s more of a quarterly and weekly cycle. You can see it really can work in any context across any timespan. It’s just a matter of observing, which funnily enough, that’s sort of step one in permaculture design, isn’t it? Observe.

Alysse:           Yeah. For sure. Lovely. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to chat to me. I was so keen to talk to you. We’ve had this in the calendar for a whole month and I was super, super excited.

Koren:            Well, it’s been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me on.