Standing at her kitchen table, Ruth Nichols rolls out a green, brown and white sketch showing what the Cob Project Campus — a permaculture training program she hopes to set up on her property near the Bend Municipal Airport — will look like over the next 10 years.

“There’s a lot of beginners out there who need a place where they can learn everything about permcaulture,” Nichols said.

Loosely defined, permaculture is an eco-friendly discipline focused on establishing a balance between people and nature.

Black squares and triangles dotting the sketch show where Nichols plans to install wind and solar generators to provide electricity and allow the 58-year-old Ohio native to take her house off the grid.

Brown circles mark the future sites of small earthen dome-shaped structures where people could learn or experiment with various permaculture techniques. Green ovals mark the sites of gardens where Nichols would grow food and gourds the campus would use for its programs. And while this vision may be a long time in coming, the work Nichols has put into making it a reality gives some people hope that it may come together sooner than they think.

The project

According to a post on the Upper Deschutes Permaculture Guild’s website, permaculture is a design approach providing people with “an instruction manual for solving the challenges laid out by the new paradigm of meeting human needs while enhancing ecosystem health.”

The guild’s blog post goes on to describe permaculture as a way for people to reconnect with their environment and build a relationship that focuses on doing what works best for everyone and everything involved — both humans and nature — and making sure the work can be carried out for generations to come.

“It has to be good for you,” said Jennel Wassenaar, one of about 40 people who have volunteered with Nichols to help her set up the Cob Project Campus. “It has to be good for the Earth, and it has to be good for the future.”

Wassenaar said one of the principles at the heart of permaculture is making sure that people let nothing go to waste.

Chicken and animal manure is used to fertilize plants in gardens, food scraps and plant waste are turned into compost, weeds are allowed to grow over gardens so they fix nitrogen in the soil, and wooden pallets and other discarded materials are used to build the chicken coops.

“If you bring something in, don’t let it go to waste,” said Nichols, who asks someone helping out at her farm if he or she can reuse a paper sack before she puts it in the recycling bin.

But permaculture goes much further than simply reducing waste. It involves carefully planning where and how crops are planted and structures are placed so that natural rain, wind and sunlight patterns can be put to their best use. It also involves using sustainable building materials like cob – the namesake of Nichols’ planned permaculture school – which is a mixture of straw, dirt, water and clay that can be sculpted into walls and bricks like adobe.

Wassenaar gained a new familiarity with this material when she and a few other volunteers set out to build a cob oven that sits on a patio just outside Nichols’ house. She said they had to try several different cob mixtures before they came up with one that met their needs.

But this experimentation is what the Cob Project Campus is all about, Nichols said.

“Everything is experimental here,” she said, describing the project’s main goal. “If you don’t experiment, then you aren’t going to learn anything new.”

The campus

The 3-acre property Nichols hopes to use for the Cob Project Campus looks nothing like the sketch she has outlining its 10-year plan.

Behind her house, the gently rolling High Desert landscape is interrupted with large piles of dirt Nichols pushed together with a backhoe into spots where she would like to build small cob structures. Pallets and other building materials — including two old metal satellite dishes Nichols hopes to use as the base for a pond or the top of a dome — are stacked on either side of a path that links her house with an outhouse at the edge of the property.

“We have been gathering free materials for a few years and are nearly ready to get something together,” Nichols wrote in an email describing her project’s current status. “But that is subject to volunteers being available to come out.”

In her email, Nichols also described plans to set up a classroom for the campus’ educational programs in one of the greenhouses she has built on her property.

Two dome-shaped structures — one made of wood and one made of metal — stand up on the property and are waiting to be filled in with cob or covered with glass panels so they can be used as an intern’s cottage or a greenhouse that can be used to start more plants. Even the oven on her patio needs another layer of cob and some plaster before it can be used to make some pizza.

While it may seem that she has a lot of work left to do before her project matches her vision, it’s obvious Nichols, her family members, her friends and the 40 or so volunteers who have come by to help have made a lot of progress to reach this goal.

With help from her husband, Nathan Schmit, Nichols has converted one stack of pallets she found outside a business off Boyd Acres Road into a chicken coop so fancy it’s been named “Cluck Med,” after the company that runs vacation resorts. The greenhouse shelves are also filled with trays of plants – some of which have sprouted, some of which have not — that she’ll either place into one of her garden beds or donate to a group that could use them.

“If you care about people, then the right things will happen,” Nichols said.