ALDEA PERMACULTURE INITIATIVE & MASTER PLANNING – FACTS AND MYTHS:

A successful Permaculture Initiative includes the creation of a comprehensive Eco-Community Permaculture Master Plan that is thoughtfully prepared by experienced team, lead by certified Permaculture expertise in collaboration with proactive community involvement and support.

Such a plan provides a comprehensive landscape management program in a manner that also establishes and prioritizes the landscape projects our community has interest in. This should be done prior to any related HOA Open Space Permaculture project submittals and approvals to create a responsible framework for processing such submittals. To help create a community forum for this planning process, GaiaQuest has provided an introductory Permaculture class and donated a comprehensive eco-community master planning effort for the Aldea Community, provided by an experienced team of professionals guided by GaiaQuest’s certified Permaculture expertise.

After the class, the Aldea Permaculture Group was created by class attendees to provide a proactive opportunity for Aldea owner and resident involvement. HOA members of the Aldea Permaculture Group have also volunteered to form an Aldea HOA Permaculture Landscape Committee to help educate and guide our community through the planning process. Aldea Home owners and residents are welcome and encouraged to join the Aldea Permaculture Group and its representation to the Aldea HOA by the pending Aldea HOA Permaculture Landscape Committee.

Following are some rumor myths generated by people who do not understand Permaculture and related realities that Permaculture actually has to offer:

MYTH #1: Permaculture solutions would turn Aldea’s open space into terraced gardens that require invasive site grading and existing vegetation removal.

REALITY: This myth pertains to conventional gardening and farming solutions that have nothing to do with Permaculture Science. Permaculture Solutions do not require invasive site grading and existing vegetation removal. Permaculture Food Forest solutions are developed non-invasively within the natural landscape in a manner that restores and enhances the natural landscape’s beauty and health.

MYTH #2: Permaculture solutions will fail. Plants will die. And the Aldea HOA will have an expensive mess to clean up and pay for when the people involved lose interest and abandon the project.

REALITY: Permaculture provides regeneratively-sustainable solutions that will take care of themselves once established within three to five years – in a manner that will reduce the HOA’s existing cost for open space maintenance. And since Permaculture solutions provide a healthier self-fertilizing high-yield landscape with much less effort than conventional gardens, communities rarely lose interest and abandon them. In reality, we have more sick and dying trees now in our open space than we would with a Permaculture solution.

MYTH #3: Proposed Permaculture solutions will replace Aldea’s prevailing open space landscape with fruit trees, nut trees, herbs and vegetables.

REALITY: Proposed Permaculture Solutions primarily offer an opportunity to enhance the health of our community’s prevailing open space Pinon/Juniper Forest guilds that will remain the prevailing landscape. If the Aldea community would like to join a growing US trend to provide onsite community based food security, our community’s Permaculture solutions could also include abundant production of fruit, nuts, vegetables and/or herbs that can be seamlessly integrated into Aldea’s native/naturalized landscape, but only for limited small percentage of open space where viable storm water irrigation opportunities exist.