Toward a Sustainable Cedar Mill
Sector Planning for Permaculture Gardening
By Donna Prock

Permaculture Zones illustration by Cecelia Macaulay

Zone and sector planning is a design tool for analyzing a site for permaculture gardening. It suggests locations for activities so they can be performed efficiently and sustainably. Zones are usually pictured as six concentric circles, ranging from Zone 0 (home) to Zone 5 (unmanaged land). Structures, plantings and activities are located so that those frequently visited are nearer home and those seldom visited are farther away. For example, intensive gardening is set in Zone 1, orchards in Zone 2 and crop farming in Zone 3

There are powerful energies present on any site, both potentially beneficial and destructive: wild energies such as wind, sun, fire, water and even wild animals, and human-value energies, such as views, that potentially impact your property.

Permaculture landscape design takes account of these through sector analysis. With proper placement of design components, these energies can be channeled for special uses, encouraged, minimized, blocked or deflected to conserve site energy, aesthetics and resources.

How do you account for site energies? The key is observation! In most cases such energies will not be fully appreciated right away. A full year or more of information will be needed, as well as delving into longer time frame data and the memory of long term residents of the area.

The information collected is then represented on a schematic sector diagram of the site. The sector analysis diagram simply shows the direction of flow of these energies into the property. Simple common sense then dictates how this sector information influences the configuration and placement of elements within the appropriate zones in the design.

Site all Design Components to Manage Incoming Energies

The basic energy-conserving rule in Permaculture landscape design is to place every element in your system so that it serves more than one function, and have more than one element in place to serve each important function (e.g fire protection, water collection).

For example, you’ll want to facilitate the capture of winter sun and cooling summer breeze energies into your home (Zone 0) and home garden (Zone 1).

Sun Energy

The sun takes a different path across the sky during winter and summer. In North America, the summer sun sector is very large, rising in the northeast and setting in the northwest. In winter the sun rises and sets in the southern sky creating a much smaller sun sector. Efficient home and site design takes advantage of this seasonal sun movement by capturing winter sun and excluding it in summer.

So site elements such as tall evergreen trees and large sheds planned for Zones 2 or 3 will need to be sited so that they do not block the winter sun sector from Zone 0 and 1. The winter sun sector, instead, would be more ideally suited a for a deciduous home fruit orchard because it allows winter sun in and provides summer shade, while being of low flammability.

Wind Energy

Site elements such as hedgerows, buildings and trees can be used as barriers to divert or block damaging winds. Similarly they can be arranged on your site to divert them to where they can benefit the site: towards wind turbines, or across ponds for evaporative summer cooling.

Water Energy

Catchments both within and beyond your property can divert water through your site as storm watersheds, permanent creeks and swales. Capturing the energy of water to increase water storage on your site both in the form of plants and animals, in soil and in dams is an important goal of your design as it is a direct determinant of potential property yield. Water storage at high points on your site represent an energy storage in the form of gravity that can be used to feed water to site elements without energy inputs.

Animal Energy

Animal energies that will influence our area include predatory coyotes, raccoons, owls, hawks and domesticated dogs. Predator-proofing strategies will be necessary, such as roofing your poultry pen.

There are a lot of small native birds in the area which we can encourage by planting dense and prickly shrubs and trees in Zone 5 to provide them with shelter and nesting sites, so that we can harness their insect-eating behaviors to control pests in all our zones.

Aesthetics

Aesthetic enjoyment of your property is an important objective for sustainable living. Use plants and buildings to keep unwanted views out and site buildings and outdoor living spaces to bring wanted views in.

Hedgerows and windbreaks (that might also function as food or fuel for animals and you) can be placed so that they divert cooling summer breezes toward your house, but block damaging hot summer and cold winter winds.

So far I have been talking a lot about big picture, long-range design planning. For those who want to get started growing this season, I will offer ideas and methods in the March issue.

Permaculture Zones illustration by Cecelia Macaulay

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