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Miller, who ran Make ’s Web site at the time, told me about a weeklong class on the subject she’d taken in northern California. After hearing about the things she’d done there, I fantasized about turning my house and property into an experimental permaculture lab, with bees, chickens, and a garden, all connected in a way that let nature do the heavy lifting while I harvested the bounty.
    In a permie paradise, “nuisances” like bugs, deadwood, and rotten fruit become valuable resources. Grass clippings become nutrient-rich fodder for the compost pile; fallen leaves can be raked up and turned into mulch, to be spread on top of gardens to conserve water and inhibit weed growth. Terry Miller lays burlap feed sacks under the elevated wire-mesh floor of her chicken coop. After a couple of weeks, she removes a well-fertilized sack and lays it over the soil of one of the potted fruit trees on her deck. That way, when she waters the tree, the chicken droppings dissolve into the soil, providing nitrogen and other minerals.
    David Holmgren, cofounder with Mollison of the permaculture movement, developed a seven-step design process for establishing a permaculture system, encapsulated in the mnemonic O’BREDIM: observation, boundaries, resources, evaluation, design, implementation, and maintenance. The first five steps, which require little or no physical labor, are the most important ones and require at least a year to complete, if done correctly. They require careful observation of your land, watching what happens to it over four seasons. At the observation stage, you’re supposed to study what kinds of plants grow in different locations, where water tends to collect, what the soil conditions are, and how different parts are affected by the sun, wind, shadows, wildlife, and rain.
    After becoming intimate with the land and the way it changes over the course of the seasons, you make a map of it, establishing its boundaries and topography. Next, you take stock of your resources: How much time, money, equipment, and materials do you have? The information gathered from the first three steps—observation, boundaries, resources—is then evaluated before going on to the single most crucial step: design. This is where you create a plan to harness sunlight to create complexity out of chaos, providing you and your family with the things you need to survive. Only after these five steps are complete should you even start making your permaculture system.
    In theory, Holmgren’s plan makes sense. But I had no intention of following it to the letter—I wanted a garden, chickens, and bees as soon as possible. I figured that having lived in the same house (a 1930 farmhouse in the Melody Acres section of Tarzana) for more than three years counted for something as far as steps one through three were concerned. I spent a good couple of hours on step four—evaluating—before moving on to step five—design—which amounted to eyeballing where the raised-bed planters and the beehive would go. I was almost ready to move to the fun part—implementation. But first I had to kill my lawn.
    In August 2008, after having read a few books like Edible Estates and Food Not Lawns —which were about converting front lawns into vegetable gardens—I decided to get rid of my own front lawn. My entire yard was about a half acre, and my front yard constituted roughly a quarter of that. That was sufficient to provide the blank slate on which to build my own permaculture system. As I learned from these books, lawns were invented centuries ago by moneyed Europeans as a way to show off the fact that they didn’t need to use their land for farming—similar to the way a peacock’s tail feathers advertise to potential mates that he can survive despite such a cumbersome fashion statement. Eventually, lawns caught on among the less well-off, including homeowners in the United States, who today spend billions watering, mowing, fertilizing, and resodding ground they