By Merve Yeşilkır, Waikato Branch
As tree croppers, we all carry that dream of having land that is both beautiful and productive, picking fruit, right and left through summer and winter. At the same time, there are moments of struggle, the amount of work that needs to be done, pests to tackle, and invasive weeds.
The solution often seems to be finding a teacher who has figured it all out, someone who understands every detail and grows so successfully that plants thrive wherever they go. Although this sounds idyllic, that teacher is very real and accessible to all. Papatūānuku, Pachamama, or Mother Nature is the greatest grower of all time. She transforms exposed and cracked soils into lush forests and creates systems that are both efficient and abundant. She speaks in patterns. This is where permaculture comes in.
Permaculture is a design system that draws wisdom, techniques and tools from nature to create a life that is not only in alignment with nature but also efficient, abundant and resilient. Although we often see permaculture in the form of gardens or food forests, at its core it can be used as a tool to redesign how we live, build, and relate to land and community. It brings together indigenous knowledge and modern ecological thinking.
In its simplest form, permaculture is about learning to work with nature. When we do that, things start to feel lighter. The workload reduces, systems become more efficient, and abundance begins to show up in unexpected ways.
Permaculture is grounded in three core ethics: Earth Care, People Care, and Fair Share. These ethics create the foundation for how we make decisions. Earth Care is about looking after the land and its needs. People Care is about supporting ourselves and each other. Fair Share is about sharing surplus and recognising limits, even within renewable systems.
From these ethics come 12 principles. Rather than strict rules, they are tools for observation and design, ways of seeing and responding to what is already present.
The first six principles are about working with nature, starting small, and building foundations. I like to think of them as a bottom-up approach because they show us how to begin from what is already here, grounded in soil, water, sunlight, and observation. Observe and interact, catch and store energy, obtain a yield, apply self regulation and accept feedback, use and value renewable resources, and produce no waste.
The first principle, observe and interact, is the one I keep coming back to the most. It sounds simple, but it changes everything. When I slow down and really look at the land, it starts to speak in a very practical way. Where water moves, where it sits, where things grow without effort, where they struggle. Nothing is random.
By observing without rushing to fix things, patterns start to show themselves and this is where I found the principles really come alive. For example, in our food forest, I planted bananas in the lower part of the land.
Bananas: The Lay of the Land
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In the first photo above, the bananas have just been planted. This area was chosen by simply observing how the water moves over time. During rain, water and nutrients naturally flow downhill and collect in this lower zone. Instead of fighting that movement, I worked with it.
The bananas sit in that flow. They catch water when it rains, slow nutrient movement, and turn that energy into growth and yield. In the second photo, I am holding a big bunch of bananas in the same spot two years later.
In permaculture, energy is anything that can be captured, stored, moved, or used to support life. Water, sunlight, organic matter, and even human effort all move through a system in different forms.
What started as a simple observation has now become one of the most productive parts of the land. We now harvest regularly, often a bunch a week.
Greywater system
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The first photo above shows our banana greywater system during its establishment.
Greywater from the kitchen and shower flows into a composting pit filled with logs, branches, leaves, and organic matter. Bananas are planted around the edges.
Instead of seeing greywater as waste, it becomes part of a cycle. Water feeds decomposition, decomposition feeds soil life, and the bananas respond with strong growth.
Nothing is removed from the system without purpose. Everything is reused and redirected.
The second photo shows the growth of bananas from the same spot, now providing year round banana production.
While the first six principles shape how we relate to the land, the next six shape how we design whole systems. They are less about steps and more about relationships between elements.
These principles are: Design from patterns to details, integrate rather than segregate, use small and slow solutions, use and value diversity, use edges and value the marginal, and creatively use and respond to change. Rather than treating these as separate ideas, they show up together in practice.
Patterns in water, wind, and land shape inform where systems go. Integration appears in how animals, plants, and people connect. Small and slow solutions show up in how systems are built over time rather than all at once. Diversity creates resilience. Edges between systems become some of the most productive spaces, and change is something that is always being responded to rather than resisted.
The greywater system came from responding to a problem and turning it into a long-term solution.
An example of integration
In the first banana planting photo, you can also see chickens in the background. This is a simple example of integration in action. The chickens are not separate from the system. They move through it, scratching, fertilising, and interacting with the soil around new plantings.
Rather than isolating elements, permaculture connects them so that each one supports the others. The system becomes stronger because of the relationships between its parts.
Stacked food forest
In a stacked food forest, the system is designed in layers rather than as single elements. Instead of planting only fruit trees, the space includes multiple layers working together: canopy trees, smaller fruit trees, shrubs, ground covers, and supporting plants. This allows sunlight, water, and nutrients to be used more efficiently while creating resilience through diversity; everything is planted to support something else. The same thinking extends into community and learning spaces.
Planting at school
I’ve had the opportunity to design and plant food forests in schools. The intention behind this work was to integrate children directly into living systems, rather than separating them from nature or teaching it only as theory. Instead of seeing food growing as something outside of them, they become part of it by observing, interacting, and being involved in how the system develops over time. This is where the permaculture principles become very real in practice, especially integrate rather than segregate and observe and interact. It shows how learning changes when people are not placed outside of the system, but inside it.
What stands out most for me is how practical these principles actually are. They are not abstract ideas, but grounded tools that help make sense of how natural systems already work. At the same time, they feel deeply intuitive. It is not something outside of us, but something we already recognise when we slow down enough to see it.
What I’ve noticed through workshops and shared learning spaces is that the biggest shift doesn’t come from learning new techniques, it comes from revisiting these principles and applying them in different ways. That is where perception starts to change. People begin to see patterns instead of problems. Relationships instead of separate parts. And from there, the way they work with land begins to shift. For me, permaculture continues to be a reminder that nature already holds the answers. We are not inventing something new, we are remembering how to see.
About me: I’m based in Raglan, Aotearoa New Zealand. We live near the harbour but our property is very sheltered due to the scenic reserve around us. We get occasional frost but it’s a fairly warm spot especially where our food forest is, as it’s north facing and on a hill surrounded by native forest. Our farm, Hakea, is 40 acres, but the area we are actively working on as food growing areas is approximately three acres.
I work with permaculture design, food forests, and regenerative land systems. I also run workshops and learning spaces where people can get hands-on experience with growing food and designing ecological systems. I help individuals, schools, and communities create food forests and develop more connected and resilient ways of working with land. If you’d like to connect, you can find me through Rooted in Nature (Instagram) or merveyesilkiriztech@gmail.com.
