Our 5-Step Process to Build Your Homestead

When we complete a Concept Design for our clients, we use the 5-Step Permaculture Process as discussed in Takota's book "Building Your Permaculture Property". Here is a brief introduction to each of the steps of our design process.

"When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go where we've already been. If process drives the outcome we may not know where we're going, but we will know we want to be there."

-Bruce Mau

Step One: Clarify Your Vision, Values, and Resources.

The infinite possibilities to consider when Building Your Homestead can be significantly reduced when you take the time to consider the questions; What do you want? What do you have? What is right?

We help our clients create a clear vision for the future they want on their property. 

"If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable"

- Seneca

Step Two: Diagnose Your Resources for Strengths, Opportunities, Weaknesses and Threats. 

Every single property has at least one piece of hidden information that, if discovered, changes everything for the better. And if not discovered, for the worse. 

Diagnosis is the most valuable part of the whole process. It is also the part most homesteaders try to skip! There's cheap, fast and good, and you can only pick two. Assuming you want a good diagnosis you only have two options: pay a good consultant to speed up the process or take the time to do it yourself.

We merge our client's individual skills, observations and knowledge of their land with our skills, experience and advanced digital mapping to make discoveries that most homesteaders miss. 

"A correct diagnosis is three-fourths the remedy"

- Mahatma Gandhi

Step Three: Design Your Resources to Match Your Vision and Values

The secret to design is, it's actually the easy part! A good design is the natural and inevitable outcome of thorough clarification and diagnosis. It's not an exaggeration to say that when we do a good job of steps one and two, the design ideas jump off the page. 

We remove all of the ideas that are not suited to our client's vision and values and focus on maximum synergies between the most useful and efficient elements which best serve our client's goals.

"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Step Four: Implement The Right Design to Improve Your Weakest Resource

When you are developing a property, you need a quick framework that gets all stakeholders quickly onboard and allows you to make decisions you can trust.

We provide our clients with a clear framework and include follow up support with each design to help make good decisions. We also offer mentorship services available into the future, long after the design phase has completed. For clients local to Alberta, we may also be available for on-site project management.  

"Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare"

- Japanese proverb

Step Five: Monitor Your Resources for Indicators of Well-being or Suffering

Well-being is the ongoing pursuit of the best within yourself, while encouraging all other organisms to do the same. Suffering is simply feedback for bad design. 

We help our clients in all 5 stages of the process. Our mentorship services are tailored perfectly for clients as they implement and monitor the right design on their homestead.  

"More accurate measure of an inappropriate criteria isn't particularly clever"

- Johan Zeitsman