[drewm1980]

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.

[nominalprose]

+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.