Site maps (8m 4s)
There are several methods you can use to draw a site map. You can print a satellite image and sketch around the edge. Or if you don’t have access to a computer, you can walk around the boundaries of your site and sketch the perimeter. After you have a printout or a sketch, try to draw a clean outline of the boundaries of your property. Boundary lines mark the outer perimeter of your site. Here are a few other elements you could include on your site map.
Existing structures, existing buildings, public space, forest gardens, roads, bridges, paths, water bodies, or any other important existing features. You also want to include a legend, which includes symbols or labels to indicate all the information on your map. Include the name of the project, the location, the climate, you can also include a scale, a scale shows the relative size of the site. You just want to create something to sort of see what you have the space that you have and what’s available and then as we go through the rest of the course you can plug in new ideas as they come to you.
Okay, so while we’re on the topic of maps here, I’d like to share a few designs that I have made in the last few years. I’ll start with the most recent project here this is Magic House here in india. This is one I was working on for the last year or so [10 months]. It’s very basic. This is a 1 acre piece of land, with you can see the existing structures here at the top and these are more conceptual stuff, the one in the middle here didn’t actually get built. I was just laying out some ideas.
Here’s Kailash Akhara, it’s a much bigger property. I think it’s about 20-35 acres. There are a lot of existing structures there, gardens and things. I drew some smaller more details to illustrate some of those areas. Here’s one from the Panya Project, I did this one later, sort of working with the people who were there to illustrate some of the ideas going on there. And also here’s a photo from my actual Permaculture Design Course I took there a few years ago. This was a great team I was working with there, we came up with a fun design. Here’s one from Mango Tree in Nepal. I spent a little over a month there, working with Devendra and putting some of his ideas down. Figuring out… it’s just a way to illustrate ideas, that a group of people have, that an individual has. Here’s Saelao project in Laos. I taught another permaculture course with some buddies there, this is Bob’s place. So I talked to him for the day and came up with this.
Here’s one from the Art of Living. This was done by Janine, a friend of mine, she’s from Argentina and was living at the Art of Living at the time. She was in one of the workshops. I like how Janine broke this into phases. You can see she listed the phase I projects, and then we talked about in the workshop what would be phase II. By splitting up the work by phases, she made it easy to see what work was already there and also what was planned. Here’s one called Phayao Permaculture, this is a guy named Bruce Bebe, he’s 83 years old and was in the first PDC in the USA. He has a beautiful piece of land, in central Thailand there.
Here’s Okumura Farm, this is a couple in rural Thailand, in Sameong, Thailand. The woman is from Tokyo, Japan and the guy is from Sameong, which is a very rural town in Northern Thailand. Here’s Ao Kao Resort in Ko Mak, which is the largest privately owned island in Thailand. I met with this guy Kevin, I went down there with my buddy Troy and Howard, Howard Story sort of set these visits up with WWOOF Thailand, he set up a lot of these different visits. Kevin wants to build 16 bungalows. Here’s the outline of the bungalows. He wants to build a pool, and have different guilds around each house.
Here’s one called Burr 52, this is also in Northern Thailand, my buddy Ben did this one. He met this guy John and John had some land. We visited his land one day and walked around and Ben came up with this good design. And now I’ll just share a few last ones here. This was, this was a wall at Suncamp in Dominican Republic where I was a few years ago. I like painting on big walls. It’s a great way to share what is going on in a place. This is what is going on at Suncamp. Here are some maps in the batey that we painted. We painted a world map, an island map. I like design, you know permaculture design, but it’s also just something nice to look at, something you can learn from sort of locate yourself, get on the same page as another group of people, and this last one is Jose’s house, I spent about a month here, it’s ¼ acre piece of land and this was conceptual as well, I ran out of money before I could turn this into anything.
Something else to keep in mind, there is no format to project planning or map drawing or really any of this stuff. The main goal in drawing a map is to inform someone about what you’re doing or what you want to do, in the shortest amount of time as possible. If that person doesn’t have credentials at reading the you know architectural or engineering plans, you know, it’s you just want to pass their idea, here’s the land and here’s what we want to do.
Another thing you can do when making a map is to make a detailed drawing, which is a smaller focused sketch of more particular work you are going to get into. It’s an area within an area.
Here’s a greenhouse I built with a group of farmer’s in Haiti. This was a project, I don’t know, some other NGO started it and then had it handed down to me, I ended up going into the bush and building this greenhouse with about nine farmers. Which was kind of, it was a cool experience, we got it done.
Here’s a sketch from when we lined the Panya pond, a couple years ago. My buddy Ceril and I made this sketch. This sketch shows the different cut plans of what we needed when we were cutting this liner and laying it out. And then here are a few sketches from around the house where I stayed in Thailand at Kailash Akhara. Ben and I we dug up the side yard with a bunch of volunteers, and tried to, we planted some gardens and things like that. And the idea was to use earthworks to catch rains as it rained down. These are just examples of small detail drawings, that are sort of a plan within a plan type of thing.
Another type of diagram you can do is a flow diagram. This just shows a lot of different projects together. Here’s one I made a few years ago from a lot of different projects that my colleagues and I were working on in the Peace Corps. These are a lot of different water projects and how you could basically take water from the ocean and use it to serve all of your needs.
Yeah good deal. So as far as final designs and things like that, you know just, you just want to have a sketch showing what the land of research is and then something that shows all of the different ideas that are going on there.
Okay, that concludes this video. Thank you for your time.