Urban Paradise
Gardening

Urban Paradise Gardening (UPG) offers consultation, design, client education and installation services for “perma-culture” style land management.  Owner Zev Friedman has 9 years of experience working with holistic design, edible and medicinal plants, farm animals, mushroom cultivation and other elements that help people live fuller lives and find ecological solutions through land use style.  UPG was conceived as a cutting edge service to help landowners respond to projected large-scale changes in climate, economy and cultural preference by achieving greater self sufficiency and resiliency on their properties.

1. “Consultation” is either an initial visit to begin a design process or a dense session to provide as much information and insight as possible to help the landowner plan the landscape themselves.
2. “Design” describes a process, usually taking place over 3 to 18 months (depending on the property size and other variables), during which we meet multiple times in order to refine a detailed, long-term land use plan, including buildings, roads, earth-shaping, water systems, and plantings, as well as budget and a phased installation timeline.
3. “Client education” ranges from information that we convey during consultation or design sessions to actual private classes in specific permaculture topics that we have organized and made available from an assortment of instructors. 
4. Finally, “installation” delivers the actualization of the landscape that we’ve envisioned through our design process.  Permaculture systems require a unique range of sub-contractors, materials, and techniques that we’ve assembled to create abundant, beautiful, functional results.

Some descriptions, from shortest to longer:

a) Perma-culture (PERMAnent CULTURE) is a design system for creating sustainable human environments.

 – Bill Mollison, co-founder of the permaculture concept

b) Permaculture: the use of ecology as the basis for designing integrated systems of food production, housing, appropriate technology, and community development. Permaculture is built upon an ethic of caring for the earth and interacting with the environment in mutually beneficial ways.

 - From the Permaculture Drylands Institute, published in The Permaculture Activist (Autumn 1989)

c) Permaculture principles focus on thoughtful designs for small-scale intensive systems which are labor efficient and which use biological resources instead of fossil fuels. Designs stress ecological connections and closed energy and material loops. The core of permaculture is design and the working relationships and connections between all things. Each component in a system performs multiple functions, and each function is supported by many elements. Key to efficient design is observation and replication of natural ecosystems, where designers maximize diversity with poly-cultures, stress efficient energy planning for houses and settlement, using and accelerating natural plant succession, and increasing the highly productive "edge-zones" within the system.

- Lee Barnes, former editor of Katuah Journal and Permaculture Connections