Periodically there are advantages to being a blogger.
I fell in love with these stunning Permaculture Playing Cards and was about to buy myself a pack on Amazon when I remembered that I knew the guy who made them.
So I emailed Paul Wheaton, the founder of Permies.com, and said, “Hey, before I buy these gorgeous Permaculture Cards, you wouldn’t have an extra deck kicking around you’d wanna send me as a review copy? Wouldja, wouldja?”
I hear back from him: “Twelve decks will be to you on Tuesday.” (Paul is like seven feet tall and sometimes I think that makes him want to go bigger with everything he does.)
“What the hell, Paul? I mean, a huge thank you, but I don’t really need a dozen decks of cards!”
“So give some away if you want.”
And so here we are. I’m keeping two decks for myself, which leaves ten decks of Permaculture Playing Cards to give away, courtesy of Permies.com.
Perma-wha?
You’ve heard of Permaculture, surely. This work-with-nature, systems-design-approach to growing (and, according to some practitioners, life), is working its way towards mainstream.
Thanks to books like Gaia’s Garden and The Vegetable Gardener’s Guide to Permaculture and the popularly of practical, accessible techniques like hugelkultur and keyhole gardens, more and more gardeners are incorporating aspects of permaculture in their garden.
I, myself, am Perma-curious. My garden is not designed top-to-bottom according to permaculture principles but as I find out how effective the practical techniques are, I move in that direction.
And that’s where these Permaculture Playing Cards come in. The deck of cards is a whimsical way to make “bite-sized” bits of permaculture accessible to people who aren’t quite ready to commit to, say, the 500+ pages of intense study required by Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual.
The cards are stunningly beautiful. I know I keep harping on that, but for real – the artwork and design is simply inspired. The cardstock is thick and will wear well and the size is nice for holding.
Each card has something notably important to Permaculture on it: key people, techniques, plants, animal husbandry techniques and more. Surrounding the image on each card are little facts about that Permaculture concept. It’s just enough to suck you in and make you want to read your deck of cards and go on and learn more, but not so much that the cards become unusable as actual playing cards.
Oh yeah – did I mention you can actually play poker with ’em? Cool.
I think these things are great on multiple levels – as art, as education, as subtle propaganda for a better world. Highly recommended as a gift for your favorite Perma-curious or Perma-fanatic people.
Enter To Win A Deck of Permaculture Playing Cards
To enter to win one deck of Permaculture Playing Cards leave a comment on this blog post telling me what you like most about Permaculture, or (if the whole concept is a bit new to you) what about Permaculture you are most interested in learning.
Ten winners will be selected at random. Contest closes this Saturday, December 14th, at 6 pm PST so that I can mail the cards out to the winners next Monday. If you are a winner you will be notified be email. You have 24 hours to claim your prize. Sorry to be so strict but we are on a holiday timeframe here. Contest open to addresses in the United States only due to shipping. Sorry international readers.
Good luck!
Related Permaculture Stuff…
Permies.com – Huge resource for Permaculture enthusiasts. The forums are extensive, helpful and well-moderated so they stay that way. For more info on the Permaculture Playing Cards, check out this thread on Permies.
Half-Assed Hugelkultur – my post on attempting this funny-sounding Permaculture garden-bed-building technique. Foot-for-foot my hugels typically out-produce my traditional beds with watering four-six times a summer.
Permaculture Playing Cards on Amazon.com – Check out reviews, see what other people have to say.
The Vegetable Gardener’s Guide to Permaculture: Creating an Edible Ecosystem, by Christopher Shein – A fairly recent release focusing on Permaculture basics and how to apply the Permaculture concepts to a more traditional garden. I particularly recommend this book to beginning urban Permaculturists. It has great design and a modern layout.
Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, by Toby Hemenway – a slightly more technical, but still very accessible look at Permaculture at the gardener’s scale.
Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual, by Bill Mollison – for the hard core student of Permaculture. This is considered the classic text of Permaculture, but I wouldn’t personally recommend it as your first text on the subject unless you are pretty NerdCore about gardening.
All images in this post courtesy Paul Wheaton / Permies.com.
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So you have me perma-curious. I am guessing that I have been headed in this direction for awhile and already implementing some of these ideas. My family would LOVE these. The boys in the family are information hogs and the girls are artists so this fits us perfectly. I hope we win!
Jill and Bill went up the hill to plant a sustainable garden
Jill came to harm and broke her arm and Bill has no idea how to farm
Or how to blog either, really. More like show and tell. Been on Permies since spring (such as it was this year), linked to hugelculture and never tumbled your thread! Situation immediately rectified. Sitting here in -12°, Jill is quite envious of those in more temperate climates not confined to quarters till April, and urgently forwarded me your link.
This year we added a few hugels around the perimeter of our raised bed enclosure, and can certainly benefit from wider experience, so you now have two new subscribers in the wilds of Northern Wisconsin.
I am a perma-newbie but these cards will help me learn. I have had an organic garden and am beyond amazed at how i just keep learning more tips techniques and so on. It is amazing. Thanks for the contest and introducing me to a new topic I can dig in to:)
I am also permacurious, I have started incorporating bits, like my personal half-assed hugelkulture beds – I have them in my front yard which is next to a busy road, and I’m concerned about eating anything I grow there so it’s ALL FLOWERS, ALL THE TIME. Insane production, and a sunflower that was over 15 feet tall.
I am permacurious as well. A woman I work with swears by it, but her explanation left me overwhelmed. I want to start small and slowly incorporate the techniques into my gardening. These cards look beautiful and even if I don’t win a deck, I may just go out and buy myself a Christmas present!
I have been attempting to live an eco friendly and sustainable life for a while. I guess I share the same philosophy, but have not heard it referred to as “permaculture.” I think these cards are beautiful as well as informative. My interest is piqued and I would like to learn more. Thank you for sharing this!
I think I love permaculture most for it’s ease of maintenance (when it’s done right). It’s so much more like a natural system that doesn’t need all the fuss of a manicured lawn. I have a friend with the most beautifully permacultured yard. She has a pond (which used to be a swimming pool) filled with fish. The water feeds the plants (everything in her yard is edible), there are zones and layers and a beehive. It is perfect. When I mentioned to her what a beautiful example of permaculture it was, she looked at me and said, ‘Permacuture? I don’t know what that is….’
I’m familiar but completely overwhelmed by permaculture. These cards look like a good solid intro!
Permaculture is an ecosystem in harmony. The trees have an energy that flows into the earth through the soil and through their drip radius. That energy spreads to organisms around and underneath the tree. I love the concept of designing a garden that flows with the natural energy of an ecosystem. Those cards are beautiful.
This is a new concept to me, but I’d like to learn more.
I’m learning more about permaculture, especially in terms of water usage. We have a not so slight drought problem in my area!
I’m most interested in Forest Gardens, (I like trees and I love fruit, win-win!) and how food can be grown in different levels. For example, chickens under fruit trees. I’m hoping that when we start looking at houses this spring I can find one with enough room for at least three or four fruit trees.
oooooh, what a cool idea!
I am an urban-homesteader-permie-wannabe, working hard to achieve my goal. I’m on my way to replace almost 1/4 acre of lawn with a food forest. I still have a long way to go, though. I’ll take all the help and information I can get!
These cards look amazing! My husband and I are just starting out with all of “this,” but over and over again, we are drawn to what I am coming to find out is permaculture. We love looking for ways to work with the natural systems of the plants, soil, and animals- rather than against them. This spring, we’ll be getting chickens, and getting bees is in our 5-year plan. Our backyard is quickly being overtaken with raised garden beds, berry patches, and an orchard, and it couldn’t make me happier!
Permaculture is a wonderful, creative, beneficial way to nurture the soil and care for the land while feeding ourselves. It also allows for us to grow old on a plot we have designed and planted, allowing for perennial crops that needs less care to take over and still continue to produce for us while some of the l focus, labor and daily duties relating to annuals fade away.
Permaculture is a Big Picture idea. My chickens are fans of it, too. 🙂
I, also, am fairly new to learning about permaculture, but love that it is the best “treatment” for the soil and all the good bugs, nematodes, worms that live in it. There is so much to learn about raising healthier food and living on a healthy planet.
From what I gather about permaculture, its very much what I’ve done most of my gardening life (a long time… :): sustainability, composting, valuing every part of nature, making every effort to understand how one thing effects another (lets just say I very quickly gave up “chemical warfare” decades ago after attending a presentation by Ortho), how rotating and diversity are critical. I could go on!
Gorgeous cards. Gives me gift-giving ideas!
Love your blog!
I discovered the joy of hugelkultur this past spring and I’m dying to take the next steps. I’d love to share these playing cards with my grand daughter! Thanks!
I love the way permaculture reminds us all things work together for the common good. I worked with the forrest service in wild life owl studies some years ago. I learned so much about how to forrest rejuvenates and the eco system holds everything in balance. Every living thing relies on each other to do their job – permaculture mirrors mother nature in this way beautifully, and, I would LOVE to have those frickin cool cards!!!
These are beautiful! I’d like to give them to my husband – we are new to gardening and are interested in insects, especially bees.
I’ve been trying to implement some permaculture ideals around my boyfriend’s yard (since I still live in a flat and don’t HAVE a yard). Next year: Hugelkultur!!!!
I know very little about permaculture, but I keep trying new techniques to make my garden more productive. I’d love a pack of these cards.
We bought our first home 2 years ago, and I’ve been reading up on permaculture since then, trying to decide how to incorporate the concepts into our home and garden. Moving slowly, but I like how permies don’t insist everything be 100% off the bat. This summer, we built berms like hugelkultures into the back veggie garden. I’d love these cards to give to my friend who inspired my gardening.
Learning about permaculture extends my understanding which started with staring into tide pools as a child. In those long afternoons I sensed the interconnections that build the life of those tidal pools. I am just beginning to learn about permaculture but the same principles hold. The web of life that must be maintained for large and small to flourish. I love that.
Over the years I’m slowly trying to get used to the concept that I can sometimes put a seedling in the ground and not have it keel over in dread.
That said, I have a friend who is hard-core into permaculture and I love reading her posts; hoping that I can aspire to this. It’s fascinating.
Oh wow! I actually found your blog through searching for hugelkultur. I am taking the permaculture class being taught by Toby (Gaia’s garden) right now in Seattle. And I am going to be doing a presentation on permaculture to my daughter’s class in January. These would be amazing for that. I have been looking for something I could bring that could make the presentation more interactive and this would definitely be it! And afterward I could leave them with the class so they could read and play with them.
What gorgeous cards! I love that they foster learning interesting bits of information in bite-sized digestible pieces. I know about permaculture and I’ve studied a fair amount of the principles but the practical nature of actually incorporating these ideas into the system I’ve got naturally occurring in my yard escape me. I’d love to absorb doable techniques in a way that doesn’t totally overwhelm me and is fun to boot, and I think Paul and his team have created an excellent tool to do exactly that.
Thank you for producing this post. As always, you do a truly fabulous job of sharing information in the most glorious way. There are tons of emails awaiting me in my in-box each morning and it never fails that the ones I seek to luxuriously indulge in over my morning coffee time are yours. 🙂 Happy Holidays to you and yours!
Permaculture: a fascinating culture to learn from, all aspects. I, too, am perm-curious.
I have been “sucked in” by permaculture for the last year or so and I can’t get enough! I currently live on a suburban lot which I practice a lot of techniques, but what I am really excited about is the 5 acres that I will soon be moving to after my husband and I are finished building the house on it. I’ve got SO MANY great ideas from permaculture that I CAN’T WAIT to implement on my raw land! Also, being the manager of a nursery, I get to introduce permaculture to a lot of people who have never heard of it before.
Your posts on Hugelkultur were some of the first things that got me hooked on your blog. I love the idea. I also loved your “half-assed” version. I have a strange little urban yard that I am itching to do something with this spring. Hugelkultur keeps calling me to try it.
I have been gardening for thirteen years now, and I find that I have been transforming my practices more in the past four to five years than in all the years prior. It started with lasagna gardening, which is what convinced me, through its abundance and logic, that working with nature was going to get us (nature and I) further than me following conventional practices alone. Each year I get more ambitious with my beds and projects. This past summer I put in my first two hugelkultur beds. One isn’t finished, but the other already showed me its promise. We also kept a few chickens that my son’s kindergarten hatched in the spring, and they are now integrated into our garden/compost/yard systems. We think we’ve gained so much with “progress” and technology, but I believe more and more that we are shooting ourselves in the foot, as well as making all of this much harder than it needs to be. I’m so grateful for websites such as yours that introduce me to so many new ideas and techniques to transform our thinking and gardening.
My favorite thing about permaculture is the idea of creating an edible landscape with both annual and perennial plants.
I’ve gardened over 50 years, sort of remembering how my parents did it and following what I read in Organic Gardening years ago, I know little about permaculture but am interested in learning.
The cards are exquisite and I love permaculture because it uses a “whole systems” approach. A couple of additions to your resources list are Dave Jacke’s book – Edible Forest Gardens, and works by Eric Toensmeyer and Ben Falk.
The term Permaculture is brand new to me! I am intrigued! I am, however, just becoming very interested in the idea of sustainable living. I have 4 raised garden beds all done organically of course. I’m working on a chicken coop for my back yard. I’ve also joined the non-GMO movement and have committed to working on various boards at my local food co-op. I would love an easy introduction to permaculture, meaning I want free cards!! Thanks for considering my plea:)
Anything which makes gardening more efficient!
Truly beautiful deck. Precious.
Thanks.
Happy season of (no)light.
Happy planning.
By the way did you see these gadgets, made in USA? Maybe more perks of being a blogger?
Check these out!
OX
A
http://www.thegrommet.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=mason
I love mason jar bling. 🙂 I’m a big fan of those reCAP lids – I own many of them and use them for everything.
These cards are awesome! I’ll be buying a deck for myself, but would love to win one to give away,
We live on 20 acres and are trying to restructure everything in a permaculture fashion, using the books by Sepp Holzer and the Resiliant Homestead book by Ben Falk, which is maybe the best book I have read on systems (Whew, that was quite the run-on sentence!). I also read several blogs, (including this one!) that give me some companionship on the journey. Thanks!
I love your blog. Even though I think I have a “black thumb”, I always pick up new tips that hopefully will do my garden good.
The cards are stunning by themselves, but with all the information on them, they transform themselves into a veritable treasure trove.
As with many things gardening, permaculture’s 12 design principles (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture) are widely applicable to life in general. Of these tenets, my favorite is #8 – Integrate rather than segregate: By putting the right things in the right place, relationships develop between those things and they work together to support each other. I have been experimenting with companion planting, and while it borders on the mythological at times, it’s true that relationships between different plants or even types of plants (edibles, herbs, ornamentals, etc.) do form and affect each other. Neat! Will be looking into permaculture more in the future. Thanks for bringing it to our attention.
Permaculture is new to me but I’m excited about working with nature in gardening-I try to keep as natural as possible and look forward to more guidance.
First off, thank you for introducing me to the Permaculture concepts in a recent post. I was intrigued and started researching the Author and Sites that you highlighted. It was an Ah Haaa moment. For years my husband and I have traveled while we worked, always with an eye for where we want to buy land to start a small homestead. Finding the right place has been identified, but the next phase was to have a master plan before touching the land which we which to approach as a blank canvas. This new exposure to Permaculture appears to be the tool that we’ve been yearning for. We would love to have the set of playing cards as a perfect teaching tool at this perfect time. Regardless though, please know you have enlighten our awareness in a critical area and we are grateful. Your website is a wonderful breath of fresh air in my inbox.
I love permaculture, the whole concept of it, wish i could get the community i live in in on it! thats my next mission, but first i’m starting my own permaculture garden to the new property we bought. I want lots of edible bushes and trees and a garden thats nice to the eye as well as to our health! I do think that permaculture is better for the environment and that it’s a better way for a long-term relationship with nature that we’re so much dependent on. I like the big scale thinking and that a whole community (and in the end the entire world) would live like this, seen many examples from around the world on how much it can do for people and communities to be self-sufficient and thats just great!! TY for a great blog! the deck of cards would be the best christmas gift!
/Charlotte
I am very intrigued by the Permaculture concept as endorsed by Paul Wheaton of permies.com and Jack Spirko of the Survival Podcast. I am currently studying all the material I can get my hands on, and these playing cards sound like a great idea.
Permaculture – it’s got a nice ring to it. It sounds, well, permanent – which is a great counter-quality in a society that has been rampantly disposable, unstable and insanely unsustainable.
I have been experimenting with permaculture at my place… I love hugelkulture and food forests! I still have a long way to go when it comes to setting up our place, but anything that provides me a way to get more out of our garden with LESS work… I am all for it.
Those cards are awesome!!
My family had bees when I was little and I have so many great memories of them. What incredible creatures. Finally I have a homestead of my own (as of a month ago!) and starting some hives is one of my Spring priorities!
Great way to get kids gardening, start with a night under the stars in the future garden, sleeping in a cardboard box fort that then gets added to the garden and becomes part of the transformation.
New to permaculture and have most everything to learn, but keep hearing more about it as I have been working with a group going to Haiti in January. On this trip, their major task is to learn about sustainable agriculture by preparing beds and planting, so they will be getting hands-on experience. This is something I want to learn more about as I have a large lot and am interested in growing my own berries and citrus which are suited for my area as well as herbs, flowers and vegetables.
I took a series of glasses on sustainable gardening and permaculture was a focus. It blew my mind! I have started to apply these techniques to my garden – if we can start to move in this direction we can begin to heal this planet.