Ep. 21: Permaculture and Biodynamics with Debby Ward

Gardening with a sense of place

Author

Plants Always Win
May 07, 2025

You Could Win!

The cover of the picture book Wait Like a Seed by Erin Alladin and Tara Anderson shows a white-skinned, little girl with blonde pigtails and a blue dress blowing milkweed seeds into a yellow sky.

For the month of May we’re running a promotion: anyone who is subscribed to the newsletter at the end of the month will be automatically entered to win a copy of Erin’s new book, Wait Like a Seed (retail value CAD $22.95 / USD $18.95). The giveaway is open to residents of Canada, the United States, and Mexico. If your name is drawn, we’ll email to request your mailing address!

Have you ever wanted to go a step beyond organic gardening and buzzword-y sustainable practices?

Do you want to grow food, flowers, community, and even society in relationship with the land? This week’s guest, Debby Ward of Prior Unity Garden, helps her clients and students do just that in their own yards. This week she joins Erin to talk about two systems she draws on in her work: permaculture and biodynamics.

Debby shares her own journey in organic gardening and her mission to help clients understand their gardens, not just to maintain them. She and Erin compare notes on the principles of permaculture (Observe and interact! Use small, slow changes! Stack functions!) and the ethics that underpin it (earth care, people care, fair share). Then Debby introduces Erin to biodynamics, another holistic approach to food production that seeks to marry the scientific and the spiritual. The conversation emphasizes the debt owed to Indigenous ways of knowing, the interconnectedness of gardening practices, and the importance of building community relationships with both the human and the more-than-human worlds.

Debby offers courses, coaching, blog posts, and resources a-plenty at her website: https://priorunitygarden.blog/

Comments? Feedback? Want your garden question to be featured in a future Q&A segment? Email us, reach out over social media, or get Q&A priority by supporting us on Patreon.

Credits

Website Design and Illustration by Sophia Alladin

Intro and Outro Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!): https://uppbeat.io/t/soundroll/when-my-ukulele-plays
License code: GWOIMMBAS15FG6PH

Timestamps

00:12 Intro
00:48 Introducing Debby Ward
2:07 Prior Unity Garden
05:17 Defining Permaculture: Integrated, Evolving Systems
07:00 The Permaculture Ethics: Earth Care, People Care, Fair Share
08:25 The Permaculture Principles
11:12 Permaculture Origins
15:20 How Debby Applies Permaculture with Clients
18:32 Water Break: Giveaway!
19:30 Biodynamics: Relationship with the Spirit of the Land
22:15 Applying Biodynamics as a Home Gardener
24:10 Provings, Research, and Radishes
26:45 Using Biodynamics with Clients: Everything is Connected
29:09 Resources and Contact Debby
30:08 What the Horticulture Industry Could Learn from Holistic Practices
32:20 Find Debby on Social Media
33:49 Outro and Contact Us