In November 2025 we were approached by the Swedish Permaculture Association to write an article about Beyond Buckthorns for their quarterly print publication "Permakulturbladet". Of course we said yes and soon afterwards Lumia and I began writing.
Find below the original version. If you are looking for the Swedish version, check the website of the Swedish Permaculture Association and buy the Permakulturbladet! It features the article and some nice images, too.
Visiting Beyond Buckthorns
When you are approaching Beyond Buckthorns, you might walk past the crossing once before you realise you can’t actually see any of the buildings, as they are hidden behind a small hill. What you can see from the village road you are on is the forest and a bush and tree line alongside the road. The line is formed by several plum trees, aronia bushes, apple trees, roses, willows and of course some sea buckthorns which inspired us with the name Beyond Buckthorns. You might rub your eyes in disbelief when you notice that the male sea buckthorn – usually described as a shrub – is the tallest plant in that row, much taller than the apple trees.
The area behind that row and before the forest is about 10 meter in width. Before we moved here, it was used for annual crop cultivation, mostly for potatoes. To be honest, this is clay country, and harvesting potatoes out of clayish soil by hand is no fun at all, so we soon searched for another solution. During Dominik’s Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design studies he looked into syntropic farming and food forests. What we then did was simple: we created plantings on berms on contour. In parallel to the plantings of fruit and nut trees and multiple bushes we planted willows. The willows are cut multiple times a year and “fed” into the swales close to the fruit trees. We also cut the grass once or twice per year with the scythe and remove unwanted trees. The rest of that area is more or less left for nature.
Forests and food
Leaving the fruit trees to your left, you walk up the small hill you see forest on the left and forest on the right. On our 3 hectares we have several forest areas, some of them are mixed continuous cut forests, some coppicing areas, and another bit is an old spruce forest. We use them as firewood, for timber, berry and mushroom picking, for wind protection or for pyrolysing. Multiple functions per element. Usually in November we will take a walk, mark the trees that need to be cut and work through the plan during the winter. It often takes until May until we have the finished logs in storage and the branches ready for the kiln. It is a great workout! We fire the kiln once or twice a year – depending on the amount of material. If we are teaching a Permaculture Design Course (PDC), it is one of the evening activities, as it gives participants a chance to see and participate in charcoal making.
When you walk down the hill our annual garden is on the left. It was there long before we got here. When we arrived the soil was good but compacted due to the usage of a tractor for tilling. We stopped that as soon as we arrived. Lumia divided the annual garden into 12 areas and from then on we were running a no-till crop rotation system. Dominik started to surround that garden, which is around 200m², with food forest islands. Some of them were planted by PDC participants, too. There were already several plum trees on the north side but nothing on the east, south and west side. It is a sunny area with nearly no shade during the summer, protected from southern winds by a tree line along the neighbours road. The north side borders to a forest which is on a slope. It is the first snow free area in spring, which is why we use it for our nut growing experiments.
Since the yield of a system is theoretically unlimited, we are still planting and extending that forest areas – until the main garden is completely enclosed. We now have lots of currants, sea buckthorns, hazels, elaeagnus, honeyberry, etc. and we are not yet finished planting.
We're always experimenting!
Walking from the main garden towards the house, slightly uphill, you will pass one of the barns on the right. Some years back Dominik noticed that the wall was coming off of that building. When he looked closer he realised that the wall was only made of pressed sawdust panels that were painted with weather resistant colour. During his Diploma he transferred the unused barn into a combined classroom, indoor food forest and biogas area. The biogas system unfortunately had a leak, destroyed the structure below and therefore had to be removed. That part is now a yoga and meditation area. In the indoor food forest we have vine, goji, current, blueberry, mustard, glover, multiple herbs, etc. – and there is still space for more. The classroom has space for around 12 students. The room is also used by volunteers. Again: multiple functions per element.
In front of the barn we have an experimentation garden consisting mainly of raised beds. The top soil there is only 10 to 15 cm above the bedrock. Over the years we’ve established some aronia, currants, juniper, firethorn, honeysuckle, raspberry, lovage, mints and other perennial herbs. The area is still in flux but according to the scale of permanence, pathways are more permanent than soil and beauty, and the pathways are already pretty fixed.
About the house
When you look up to the roof our house, you see solar panels. Before we arrived in Finland in 2016 we first got a new metal roof installed. Several of the old roof tiles were broken, and the repair was not viable. The metal roof will probably hold longer than we live. Soon after the roof was ready we got solar panels installed. So far we never had any problem with them – neither the roof nor the system itself.
Our house is an old (on Finnish scale) log house, built in 1952 with re-used logs from the local estate’s worker’s house. In 2022 we had to replace half of the ground floor. That meant taking out the deck panels, the insulation – which was mainly saw dust and old news papers (very interesting read), the lower panels and then the beams. Luckily we had help from friends! It was quite a view when we saw our office space and bedroom without a floor, seeing all the way to the ground.
Some of the new beams came from our own forest. We cut some pine trees, debarked them and pulled them out of the forest by hand and rope, along the principle of Use and value renewable resources. In the process we put in wire mesh to protect it from rodents and a thick layer of new insulation with a higher R-Value. We can now walk in socks in winter and the floor isn’t that cold as it was before the renovation.
Home and work in one
As you enter our home office to admire the sturdy floor, you can often see us at our computer work. We run an ethical marketing and sustainable web development small business called Chase & Snow together. We mainly serve small companies and non-for-profits – often in close by to where we live. The company is value based: as a small example of that, we plant a tree for each of our clients.
While working in the field of IT and permaculture Dominik developed the concept of Digital Permaculture. In 2024 he published his book “Digital Permaculture – design for personal digital sustainability”. It tackles some of our modern problems using permaculture design. It has been highly appreciated by diploma apprentices with an IT background and by permaculture designers alike. Since he is deeply involved in ethical IT, he was part of a research team at the International Permaculture Colab – researching alternatives for the Colab’s Slack workspace. The research concluded at the end of 2025 and the Colab is now using the open-source platform Discourse.
Connections across Europe
We also run a non-for-profit out of our office: Vihreä Pourusmäki ry, which we founded in 2022 after running into difficulties with the national permaculture association. We are focused on sustainable rural development, education and collaboration. We hold courses, events and participate in a few Erasmus+ projects. One of our current projects, LINK, is with a Spanish partner Luna Red Producción Cultural ended in February 2026 with a one-week online convergence. We also run the yearly PermaTalks, a lecture series by and for the European Permaculture Network (EuPN) members.
We are currently also acting as the Finnish partner in an Erasmus+ project called “SMART-CSA”. It is about developing new possibilities and training for the CSA concept (Community Supported Agriculture3), which unfortunately in Finland is heavily under-supported – so far. In order to innovate and grow, we are always looking for partners abroad and outside of the permaculture community. Use and value the edge.
We hope you enjoyed this little tour of our permaculture design hub and home.
