I'd also recommend book that's developed the ideas of the Permaculture further to suit better for farming: https://www.regenerativeagriculture.co/ Just bought the book and it's a very thorough and practical guide on how to run small farm profitabily while building new soil and implementing Permaculture patterns. Richard Perkings who has written the book is a pioneer in regenerative agriculture and runs his own farm at Sweden (https://youtu.be/J_htLIUKX1Y) He explains the principles and theories behind his farm in this great lecture he kept at food-related hackaton: https://youtu.be/3Knn7ZH4Tiw
Keep in mind that building an ecosystem up is sort of a lifetime-scale project, so we're mostly talking about rather un-controlled experiments running for decades. A more recent book I'm going through that I like is Martin Crawford's
"Creating a Forest Garden: Working with Nature to Grow Edible Crops"
In the section on soil fertility, you can find tables quantified in terms of pees per area, depending on the breakdown of what you already have planted.
He avoids the term "Permaculture" because like "organic" or "bio" it's turned into this whole badly defined spiritual thing, instead of just being about growing as much food as possible, with as few inputs as possible, with perennial plants.
+1 re "lifetime-scale project" nature of the work.
> it's turned into this whole badly defined spiritual thing, instead of just being about growing as much food as possible, with as few inputs as possible, with perennial plants.
I recently purchased Bill Mollison's designers manual. From this book, it's clear that the spiritual/ethical component has been integral to permaculture since the beginning.
"growing as much food as possible...with perennial plants" is great, but it's a subset of what permaculture is or was about.
Gaia's Garden is great for beginners and is what I tend to gift people as an on-ramp. Edible Forest Gardens, Volume 2 is a comprehensive and complimentary to Permaculture - A Designers Manual, which is also comprehensive and rather timeless.
“Restoration Agriculture” by Mark Shepard is a great book. It’s about his project, “New Forest Farm”, and is heavily influenced by Permaculture. He pulls from a lot of references like “One Straw Revolution”, etc, with a heavy focus on agroforestry (where tree crops and more traditional crops are grown in a mixed system).
“The Resilient Farm and Homestead”, by Ben Falk is another great one — full of illustrations and practical ideas (like using a compost pile to power a radiant heat system.)