Terra Perma Design is the permaculture design consulting service offered by Jonathan Teller-Elsberg in Norwich, Vermont and surrounding Upper Valley region. I specialize in edible landscape designs for small properties.

  • Permaculture is an ecologically based approach to design that relies on nature’s patterns and methods to grow a variety of beautiful, bountiful foods, medicinals, and other useful items.
  • Once established, a permaculture landscape is far less work than a purchase-and-plant-each-year garden.  There’s less spring planting and less weeding.  It part that comes from emphasizing perennial vegetables, fruits, berries, mushrooms and other edibles, which happily grow back on their own, in abundance, year after year. (Fear not: there is no exclusion of common favorites such as tomatoes and cucumbers!) Other features, such as the use of living mulches, reduce the opportunity for weeds to gain a foothold.
  • A permaculture garden is a healthy, organic place, free of pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers.
  • The permaculture approach can be applied well beyond your garden:  for renewable energy installations, food storage, small-scale animal husbandry, and so on.

Permaculture is a method for designing the places we live so they provide a bounty of natural wealth in a sustainable and resilient manner.  We arrange plants strategically as well as attractively, placing them near their natural allies.  The result is fewer pests, richer soil and healthful, low-maintenance abundance.  For a little more on what this can look like, see the About Permaculture page.

Please call or email me to discuss anything from a simple garden plot to a small forest garden. Contact me at jonathan@terrapermadesign.com or 802-649-1509.

A note on the daylily illustration. . . for my logo, I am using a block print by Anne Nydam, with her kind permission. I chose it for two reasons. First, I have always loved block prints. Second, and more meaningfully, the daylily is a lovely example of the sort of multifunctionality we seek when choosing plants in permaculture design.

In addition to their aesthetic value, all parts of daylilies are edible. The flower buds, in particular, are a common vegetable in parts of China, where, in dried form, they go by the name “golden needles.” Some people eat the flowers or buds raw, though do take some caution as they can cause digestive discomfort. My preference is to cook the flower buds like green beans, especially in a stir fry. I think they’re quite delicious.

With a mix of varieties, you can have an available harvest lasting through nearly the entire summer. Daylilies will even tolerate a fair bit of shade, though they flower less than in full sun.

Daylilies are wonderfully care-free, requiring almost no maintenance, and coming back year after year. They can be used to create a lawn-blocking barrier for garden beds, and provide nectar to hummingbirds. For these and other reasons, daylilies are on the Top 20 list at Plants for a Future.