Awesome Permaculture

Curated readings, designs, and tooling for permaculture — the ecology-led design discipline for human habitats. Heavy on free / open resources.

Foundational books

• Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (Bill Mollison) — the encyclopedic reference. Dense, opinionated, indispensable.
• Gaia's Garden (Toby Hemenway) — best entry point for home-scale design.
• The Earth Care Manual (Patrick Whitefield) — temperate-climate adaptation of Mollison.
• Restoration Agriculture (Mark Shepard) — perennial-polyculture commercial farming.
• The One-Straw Revolution (Masanobu Fukuoka) — natural-farming roots; not strictly permaculture but adjacent.

Course material (free)

• Permaculture Design Course (Geoff Lawton) — paid, but his free YouTube content covers most of the syllabus.
• Open Permaculture School — free PDC modules.
• Toby Hemenway's lectures on YouTube — multi-hour archive.

Plant & species references

• Plants For A Future (PFAF) — searchable database of edible/useful plants. Free for individuals.
• Practical Plants — community wiki, similar dataset.
• Useful Temperate Plants Database — Ken Fern's curated list.
• USDA PLANTS Database — authoritative US flora reference.

Design tools

• crop-rotation-planner — multi-year rotation in the browser.
• QGIS — free GIS for site mapping and overlays.
• SketchUp Free — quick 3D site sketches.
• Permapeople — plant database + community garden planner.

Climate & site data

• WorldClim — global gridded climate data, free.
• SoilGrids — soil properties at 250m resolution.
• USDA Web Soil Survey — US-only, very detailed.
• ECMWF reanalysis — historical weather.

Water

• The Permaculture Earthworks Handbook (Doug Crouch) — swales, terraces, ponds.
• Brad Lancaster's Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands — accessible, dryland-focused.
• FreshWater Forum — practical articles on small ponds.

Standards & policy

• Permaculture Association Britain — UK accreditation pathway.
• Permaculture Research Institute — Geoff Lawton's organization, project case studies.
• LANDS network — Latin American permaculture co-op.

Magazines & journals

• Permaculture Design Magazine (US).
• Permaculture Magazine (UK + International edition).
• Acres U.S.A. — broader sustainable-ag, lots of permie overlap.

Communities

• r/Permaculture
• Permies.com forums (Paul Wheaton)
• IFOAM affiliates by country.

Contributing

PRs welcome. Each entry must be:

1. Open or affordable (≤ ~$50 books are fine).
2. Genuinely about permaculture or directly adjacent (regenerative ag, agroecology, agroforestry).
3. Currently useful — broken links removed on sight.

License

MIT.