Zone 1

The permaculture zone framework asks one simple question: how often will I visit this part of the garden? Daily? Several times a week? Monthly? Once a year? Never (deliberately)? The answer determines what belongs there.

Zone 1 is the daily-visit zone. The bed by the kitchen door. The window box outside the sink. The herb spiral next to the patio. The salad bed inside the back gate. Anywhere the gardener walks past — or could walk past — every day.

What belongs in Zone 1

Crops that benefit from daily attention or harvest:

• Salad greens — lettuce, arugula, mustards. Harvest is daily during peak production.
• Culinary herbs — basil, parsley, cilantro, chives, mint, oregano, thyme. Cut as you cook.
• Scallions, baby alliums
• Cherry tomatoes — picked when ripe, often daily during peak
• Edible flowers — nasturtium, calendula, borage
• Microgreens trays — on a windowsill if outdoor space is tight
• Compost bin — daily kitchen-scrap deposits; needs to be close enough to use

What does not belong in Zone 1: storage crops, winter squash, sweet corn, dried beans, asparagus (visited weekly at best), perennial fruit trees (visited at most monthly except in harvest).

The other zones, briefly

• Zone 0 — the home itself. Indoor edible plantings, seed-starting setup, kitchen-as-garden-extension
• Zone 1 — daily-visit area; the kitchen garden
• Zone 2 — several-times-weekly. Chickens, soft fruits, regularly-tended vegetable beds
• Zone 3 — weekly to monthly. Orchard, main crops, larger livestock
• Zone 4 — semi-managed; visited occasionally. Woodland, foraging, occasional grazing
• Zone 5 — wilderness; never managed, only observed

The zones are not always concentric rings; they’re a useful framing rather than a geometric rule. A south-facing wall some distance from the house can be Zone 1 if it gets daily attention.

The principle: match attention to placement

Permaculture’s underlying design principle here is don’t ask the gardener to walk further than necessary. A salad-greens bed at the back fence will be harvested less than the same bed at the kitchen door. A compost bin at the back of the garden will be used less than one near the kitchen. A herb spiral on the patio gets clipped at every meal; the same herbs in a back bed get used once a week.

The design implication: put the high-attention elements close to where the gardener spends time. Don’t fight this; design around it.

Where it sits in this wiki

Zone 1 is referenced from [[permaculture|permaculture]], [[kitchen-garden|kitchen garden]], [[gardening|gardening]], and the broader cluster of design-pattern entries. It is one of the most-useful concrete applications of the permaculture design vocabulary at home-garden scale.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

• Subset of: [[permaculture]]
• Shares approach with: [[kitchen-garden]]

Sources

• Bill Mollison, Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual — original zone concept
• Toby Hemenway, Gaia’s Garden — Zone 1 in home-garden practice

Rooted in life.