Join me in this cooking class as I take you into my garden, harvest permaculture perennials, bushfood, fruits and self-seeding annuals and shows you how I makes a quick and easy, yet beautiful lunch.

Home grown food is everyday gourmet!

This is so simple my teenage sons can do it and love eating it – even with an aversion to greens!

If you enjoyed this video you might also like to watch No Dig Garden to see how to set up the garden to grow such abundance.

This free online permaculture class is supported by the Permaculture Education Institute

Learn more about permaculture in my online permaculture courses.

The post Free online permaculture cooking class with Morag Gamble appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

The leaves and flowers make a great tea – recommended I hear to help treat depression. It is also a great nerve-calming tea you can drink when stressed or if you want to have a good night’s sleep. Or just some tea to enjoy after dinner. Harvest the flowers and simply put in a pot. You can dry them too.

Both flowers and leaves can be added into salads and cocktails. Pineapple sage is excellent for making all types of drinks whether hot or cold. The nectar is really tasty too right from the base of the flower! My kids love it, so do I!

Aesthetically, it is a beautiful plant to have in your garden. The flowers of pineapple sage are such a bright red.

Another thing I love about welcoming Pineapple Sage into my garden is that is a great habitat that attracts bees and butterflies. around. Birds love it, too. Even a top choice for hummingbirds (although not here in my Australian garden!). 

Check out my youtube video below about Pineapple Sage. I talk about the many uses of pineapple sage and also how to propagate it which is really EASY to do.

What is permaculture?

To learn more about permaculture subscribe to my newsletter and take a look at Our Permaculture Life youtube channel where I have uploaded over 100 films I have made in my permaculture garden and in conversation with others.  Dive deeper into this blog too and you will find over 400 permaculture articles.

Now is such a great time to learn more about permaculture and make permaculture your way of life and perhaps livelihood too. Join my online permaculture courses.

The post How to grow and use Pineapple Sage appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

I have planted my Acerola on the main path to my house so I notice when it is fruiting and I can get ready to harvest. It’s good to keep them close because it only takes 2-3 weeks from flower to fruit.

I made a little youtube clip, you can watch it here.

Why Acerola?

Also known as the Barbados cherry or West Indian cherry, Acerola (Malpighia emarginata) is a fabulous small tree – great for urban backyards, nestled into your food forest and even suitable in pots. It’s a vibrantly red little fruit with an impressive nutritional profile, full of vitamin C, antioxidants and other essential nutrients. It’s abundant, hardy, tasty, versatile and healthy.

Growing Acerola

Acerola is easy to grow with very little pest issue (except you need to harvest before the birds!). It likes a sunny spot with well-drained soil. I always suggest you add a good amount of compost in the hole when you are planting, create a water retention basin around the plant, give it a good deep soak, then cover the soil around with thick mulch.

You can easily take cuttings to make new plants from your existing tree – a great way to save money and create fantastic gifts too. Just takea cutting from a healthy growing tip (about 25 cms long). Trim off the lower leaves and plant directly into compost prepared soil or a pot. Keep it moist until roots develop.  You can also just plant the seeds directly when you eat them (plant them before they dry out).

Acerola Delights: Recipes for Your Harvest

There are lots of ways to integrate these tasty fruits into your day. Here’s 3 …

Fresh from the tree

Acerola Smoothie

• Ingredients:
  • 1 cup fresh Acerola berries (remove seeds)
  • 1 banana
  • 1/2 cup pineapple chunks
  • 1 cup coconut water
  • A handful of mint leaves

Blend these ingredients until smooth for a refreshing, vitamin-packed treat!

Acerola Bliss Balls

• Ingredients:
  • 1 cup dried dates
  • 1/2 cup almonds
  • 1/4 cup desiccated coconut
  • 1/4 cup fresh Acerola juice

Combine in a food processor, roll into balls, and coat with extra coconut. These make for a delightful and nutritious snack.

When Acerola is fruiting there is an abundance. Make the most of it and experiment.

Happy gardening – and eating!

Permaculture Courses

Join Morag’s online permaculture courses in permaculture gardening, design and teaching.

• Introduction to Permaculture – The Incredible Edible Garden (new price $97 – save $200!)
• Permaculture Design Certificate Course
• Permaculture Educators Program (all inclusive – Permaculture Design Certificate and Permaculture Teacher Certificate

The post Acerola: a permaculture delight appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

Andrew’s passion is travelling the world documenting epic permaculture projects to share inspiration of what’s possible. He’s filmed in places such as India, Egypt, Mexico, Cuba, and throughout the United States. When I spoke to him, he was about to jump on a plane to head off to Senegal!

In this episode, we chat about everything from student power at university & storytelling to permaculture projects around the world & the importance of water in our landscape.

Andrew also runs a podcast, Earth Repair Radio, and to find the films he mentioned in this podcast, visit his fantastic Youtube channel!

You can listen to this episode on any of your favourite podcast platforms.

Read the full transcript here:

Morag:

Thank you so much for joining me today Andrew. I’ve been in awe of the stories that you’ve been telling in the world of permaculture. I see you as a public professor of epic permaculture projects. It’s just wonderful to have a chance to chat with you because I was listening to a conversation that you had with Nate Hagens recently and were talking about things like water democracy, which I think is an absolutely fantastic concept to get our heads around. To talk about how we can scale up permaculture? How can we take the concepts that are in this permaculture world and apply them at the scale that we need in the world today?

One of the things that you’re doing is going around to many countries researching and documenting projects addressing these in your fantastic YouTube clips that you make and teaching it through many different forms. So welcome to the show! Thank you so much for taking the time. I know you’re about to head off to Senegal in just a few days to go and visit another epic project. So maybe we could just begin with how did permaculture call you?

Well, let’s just start there at the beginning and we’ll head to epic projects in a moment.

Andrew:

Yeah, somewhere around the early 1990s as a young man, I got the sense that things were not as I was told they were and that things were actually going awry. I started seeking other ways from what I was taught and I went into different counterculture groups and travelled around, looked around. My first exposure to regenerative design was travelling through northern New Mexico in the United States and running into the Earthships, the tyre houses built by Michael Reynolds in New Mexico.

There’s all these Earthships and I came across them and I was like all I need to do is learn how to build an Earthship and I can grow my food there, process my wastewater there, it’s heated by the sun, and I can have my energy pack, my solar panels on there. I was like, wow, I was naive – I just would just have my Earthship pod and whatever happens in the world, I can sit in my little pod and recycle my own waste and grow food and everything like that.

That turned me on to the concept of regeneration then I dropped out of college, and I travelled around, that’s when I was exposed to that. I ended up going back to college at a place called Prescott College in Arizona, which is a liberal arts environmental school. At the time in the early 1990s, they had a permaculture class taught by the Sonoran permaculture guild, Tim Murphy, Barbara Rose, Brad Lancaster, who became very well known.

I took the permaculture class as part of my college education because I was interested more in architecture, eco design, but everybody said ‘you have to take permaculture.’ And suddenly I was exposed to plants. Like I had never had an interest in plants before, I grew up in the city, in Philadelphia, the urban East Coast megalopolis. And that was it. That was 1994 when I took my permaculture design course in Tucson, Arizona and I always just felt like this is my life. So that’s been almost 30 years, but that was I mean, that was my introduction right there.

Morag:

Gosh, fantastic. I am curious about this idea that permaculture seems to be embedded more in colleges in the States than it is here in Australia. I wonder how that’s happened and I know you’re involved in that as well. Most of the permaculture education that happens here in Australia that I’ve come across, in any substantial continuous way, is outside of the formal education systems, even though there are attempts to have it in different ways. It’s in schools, but not in universities, which is where it really needs to be. I think it really needs to be a foundational course that people from all different faculties attend.

Andrew:

Well, I’m an anomaly right? My university is a Land Grant State University. I mean, it is an agricultural university. If you look at the makeup of the university, there’s great diversity. There’s people doing GMO research and nuclear research and the whole thing, I’m not at some radical institution by any means. But there was student demand. So it all started from a group on campus who formed a permaculture group and some students had taken a permaculture design course, and they started a club. I moved to town around that time, and I gave a talk. Some of the members of this permaculture club came to my public talk and they were like, ‘wow, we like this guy.’ They’re like, ‘Hey, will you come and talk to our club?’

So I gave a talk to their club and there was this one woman, Sarah Rock, who I credit and she basically said, ‘Oregon State University is going to have a permaculture class, and you’re going to teach it.’ She went and lobbied the administration. She went to the Horticulture Department, she got signatures from students saying ‘yes, we would take this class’ and she said, ‘We want a permaculture class and we want this guy to teach it.’ I had already taught permaculture at Prescott college, my liberal arts, kind of fringe environmental school in Arizona. So I’d already taught at the college level of permaculture, even though I was a young man.

So they tried me out, we did a class, it went very well. They’re like, ‘Well, okay, we can pay for one class, but you have to start to figure out how to get paid, we can’t pay you. You have to figure out how to make your own money within the university.’ So I got some sponsorship from a student group for another year. Then Toby Hemenway, who you might know, hooked me up with this contract with the state of Oregon to create an online course, and a conference for the state agency that builds low income housing throughout the state.

So I got funded, and I did this whole programme and then I started developing my online programme. This is 2011. I did summer workshops, I still did other jobs, and it just built steadily, so 2009 to now – where I have this pretty large programme. It’s a programme with a lowercase p meaning it’s not like a recognised programme, but I have a series of classes, and it’s primarily online. I teach on campus in the fall, which is coming up soon, then I have this online programme I’ve been developing since 2011. So 12 years, and we’re actually the largest non credit online programme at the university. By far. So people that want to take an online PDC basically, that’s our people.

Morag:

Anyone who’s listening who’s a student at a university wanting to get some stuff happening, it is about getting active, getting engaged in lobbying and getting it there. That’s a wonderful story.

Andrew:

The students are the clients. They’re the customers of the university, and students have a disproportionate voice at universities even if they don’t realise it. When students band together to approach administration with something, they have to listen.

Morag:

That is a really good form of climate activism, isn’t it? To campaign to get a permaculture course at university? That’s a fantastic form of practivism. So let’s talk about water, because this seems to be a core thread that runs through so much of your work in terms of what you’re exploring with your epic projects and what you’re documenting. Maybe we could talk a little bit about the Apanu Foundation, because that is an extraordinary story of change and transformation. And I think what I find really interesting about it, it’s not just about the techniques and the strategies, but how it went to get the engagement of all of those villages, there’s 1000s of villages. That process of really amplifying really common sense strategies. 

Andrew:

Yeah, yeah. So I had the fortune of connecting with the Paani Foundation. I went there for the first time back in 2019/2020, just before COVID and I visited a couple villages with the Paani foundation. I made a couple of videos. Just recently, I was back in India this last winter, and I visited four villages with the Paani Foundation and I’ve put out two of I’ve got two more videos that are imminently coming out right now.

The Paani Foundation is in my mind, and my experience of seeing a lot of different things around the world, is having the largest, most rapid scale impact of any project that I’ve seen. Now, the engagement. Part of it is that it was founded by a very well known Bollywood star. There’s a famous movie star, Aamir Khan is like, in the US, you might say, Tom Cruise or something – a leading man who’s been in many movies, and is known by everybody .

So there’s that, but they tapped into the basic human nature of competition and flipped it into a positive! So they created a competition between villages, and so which village can install the most amount of water harvesting structures in a 45 day period. They hyped it up and they got sponsorship and Aamir Khan himself apparently has put in a large part of his fortune that he’s amassed into this so I mean, like much respect for him I hope to meet Aamir Khan someday who knows. Just to tell him like thank you, but he’s heard it from everywhere.

They had large cash prizes for the villages, they weren’t insignificant at all. They brought representatives of the villages and they brought them to a training centre. Now let me pause for a minute and recognise that there were some villages that cracked the code in Maharashtra that fixed their water systems, their water supplies and did all this work back in the 80s. This last time I was in India, after our day of filming Dr. Pol was like ‘okay now we’re gonna go visit Hiware Bazar, a very famous village in India. They fixed their water systems, fixed their watershed, did reforestation back in the 80s and flipped their whole village. They literally have their own village tourism with tourists coming from all over India to visit the magical village that turned everything around and is super prosperous today.

So we went to Hiware Bazar and it’s very amazing. It was sunset, so I didn’t film. I had to go back and spend days there. But Aamir Khan was made aware of Hiware Bazar and some other villages that had completely fixed their water problems. So he was like him and Satyajit Bhaktal, who’s the director of the Paani foundation who was a childhood friend. They said, ‘hey, if Hiware Bazar can do it, everywhere can do it in Maharashtra.’

So they devised the contest and they brought people to Hiware Bazar and other villages that had done similar work, and they trained them and sent them back to the villages so they could compete in 45 days and volunteerism is a huge part of it. So I mean, they got points so they were great. It was a very scientific, detailed competition. It’s a fair competition and they have a very intricate grading system and volunteerism is a big part of that. So not only did they fix their watersheds, but they also crossed political parties. I mean, political divisions in India are as brutal as they are everywhere else, the different warring parties, but everybody was able to come out. They had about 8000 villages participate in the competition between 2016/2017/2018/2019.

They haven’t had the water cup competition since 2019. They’ve transitioned now. I just want to take us out and say, what is the village, right? We’re talking about, like, maybe an average of 2000 people. Maybe about 1000 hectares. I would say, from my experience, that’s about the average, 2000 people, 1000 hectares of land. So this is we’re talking millions of people now – a 1000 of these villages – they said, ‘Okay, you have utterly fixed your water problems. And now you are qualified to participate in two versions.’

The first one was called the Prosperous Village Competition, where they had a whole bunch of different criteria then COVID hit, and they had to sort of reorganise and so then they came out of that with the Prosperous Farmer Competition. They said, ‘Okay, these 1000 villages, now, they have all the water they need. They have water stored in the ground for years, all the reservoirs are full, they can survive two to three years of devastating drought, and they’d still have water.’

So, they got the leading scientists, the leading agronomists from Maharashtra, and they did an online training during COVID of these farmers groups and they said, ‘Okay, you have to form a group of minimum 25 farmers.’ So people got together, so no one’s now working in their individual farms. They got together in a collective. Then they took these online trainings, and they were given SOPs, standard operating operating practices, to follow the best practices for organic production. I visited four of these amazing villages, I visited a bunch of these amazing groups and then none of the villages I visited even won! So I saw this amazing work and like they weren’t even the winners.

This was the first time they held the Farmers Cup competition. People went really, really far with this, people’s lives were changed. There were women’s groups, there were men’s groups, they collectively bought seeds together, they learned how to do germination tests, they learned how to make and apply bio fertilisers, bio pesticides – it’s extraordinary abundance. You’ll see in my videos, the fourth video is the village that you’re like, these people have just, you forget when you’re there that you’re even touring villages that were devastated five years ago. You’re like, ‘Oh, I thought I was touring a prosperous Indian village, just because the turnaround has been so dramatic.’

These people literally are rich now. I mean, they’re facing the problems of affluence. I guess the rapid pace of this transformation is quite extraordinary when we’re thinking about what we’re facing globally, with ecological devastation, biodiversity loss and desertification. When you look at this, what can happen, but there’s certain things that make it happen.

Morag:

Well, isn’t there and I wonder how we can translate ideas like this at this epic scale to say, your country and my country? We don’t sort of have those cultural practices of that collective of the village.

Andrew:

Yeah, you’re talking about the watershed democracy thing. They’re really lucky there, because the village boundaries are the watershed boundaries. So their decision making body is also a watershed decision making body where the criss-cross arbitrary grid of property boundaries here and I imagine Australia, give us a real deficit, because of the colonial grid that divided everything up into equal rectangles and squares in order to commoditize the land. Every private property, you have some random square rectangle, then you’re like, how does this fit within the watershed? We’re at this real disadvantage from a village that is already managing the whole watershed.

Morag:

Yeah, it’s interesting. If you look back in Australian history, before it was Australia, there were hundreds of indigenous countries. If you look at the map of the bioregions of Australia, and then you look at the map of indigenous countries, it’s pretty much the same, perfectly. Rethinking how we govern and layering those by regional concepts back into our governance system, I think is a huge part of it. That may not necessarily be through a formal government system, but there’s this informal layer of collectives of people, and that sense of being able to understand what is possible when you do buy a regional project and unlock the possibilities in the imagination in other places is one of those key things of what you’re doing through this storytelling. You’re potentially telling the story of what’s possible if we shift our perception and shift our perspective on the issues.

Andrew:

Yeah, I feel like when I teach permaculture my main thing is teaching watershed awareness and so much comes from that. People say, ‘wow, it’s like a whole different perspective in the world.’ When you look at the natural divisions of landscape, so many things make sense and then so many things don’t make sense. Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, the informal collectivism around that is our best shot, because changing the way that property is divided, legally divided is like, Ooo that’s a collapse kind of thing. Not really something we can do right now.

Morag:

What possibilities are you seeing so far? I mean, as well as the permaculture education and the understanding of watersheds, are you seeing movements towards regional collectives happening? I know there was a big push back in the 1980s, a whole lot of talk about bioregions and then it just kind of filtered away a bit. I’m starting to feel like there’s a sense of it reemerging. What’s your sense?

Andrew:

Well, I want to say a couple of things. I mean, one thing is kind of going back to the Paani Foundation for a minute. I’ve had people recently contact me from both Mexico and Bolivia, who are organising their own Water Cup Competitions. So that has a sort of leverage point, people thinking ‘I don’t know, why don’t we have a competition like that?’ That is a sticky idea. So that’s exciting and I hope that that’s happening in even more places that I don’t know about.

It’s tricky though. Like, there’s some really tricky things with bio regionalism in a way because of the global transportation system – there’s so many people and there’s such high populations in places that cannot support those populations, so it’s very tricky. Of course, we want to restore our watersheds, we want to have a productive bio region here in the Pacific Northwest. But we can’t draw a line. I live in a pretty agriculturally productive area, my bioregion is agriculturally productive. It’s the Pacific northwest of the US. But you cross over the mountains and you’re in the high desert and you keep going and the American West is a vast desert. You’ll get to places like Las Vegas and Phoenix and places where there’s just too many people on very marginal lands.

I can’t say ‘oh, we should be an enclosed bioregion and the good people of Las Vegas, that’s just their problem.’ We’re so we’re kind of far gone in that sense. I’m visiting Senegal and leaving on Tuesday, today’s Thursday. So I’ve been doing a lot of research just to kind of wrap my mind around things. Senegal imports 70% of their food. I’m looking on Google Earth. I’m looking at cities of 4 million people. There’s maybe 16 million people in Senegal. I’m looking around. I’m like, where are all the farms? Like, where are the big agricultural areas? It’s very spotty. Like ‘that looks like a farm, that looks like a village.’ Then when I found out they inputs 70% of their food, I was like that all of a sudden that made sense.

And they import it from Europe.

Morag:

I was just going to say, are they importing it from the Russia and Ukraine area?

Andrew:

It didn’t say, it listed like Poland but it didn’t list Russia and Ukraine. However, I did notice that the President of Senegal went to the Africa summit in Moscow. So I was like, well, they must – Russia has their hold on a lot of the world’s grain supply at this point. I have to look exactly where but I spent time in Egypt, where 100 million people live in the Nile River Valley, but they are the world’s largest importer of grain. It’s coming into Egypt, and then they’re dispersing it to Sudan and Somalia. To think that we can sort of retreat to our cosy bioregions, those of us who live in productive places, it’s like the world’s a little bit beyond that.

Morag:

We absolutely can’t retreat. I think this is a little bit of that sense of when you were talking about before with the Earthship. When we first come across people who say, ‘Oh, this is something we can do for ourselves or if we restore our bioregion, well, we can stay in our bioregion.’ But I think in a way, like the piece of land, where we are, whether we own it or not, we have a responsibility to be take care of the bioregion that we’re from, to be restoring it, repairing it, not necessarily to have closed borders, but just to be thinking in that sense to restore the waterways to restore the biodiversity corridors and all those sorts of things. 

Having that sense of that scale, beyond our backyards, beyond even just a village or a town into a bioregional scale, I think gives us that possibility of seeing our work somewhere else. This idea of scale to me strikes me in your work. You’re going to Senegal and you’re looking at the whole site, you’re not just looking at one in your research, you’re going ‘okay, well, what’s happening in all of Senegal?’ And when you’re going to Senegal, what’s your interaction there? Are you advising? Are you documenting?

Andrew:

Yeah, I’m documenting. Yeah, so I was invited initially, by an organisation in Germany, called Planet Wild, who, like us, pay them money and they vet different projects, they fund actions in those different projects. They hooked up with an organisation that works in Senegal and other places. It’s a US based organisation called Trees for the Future, who have planted 300 million trees since their inception. Their goal is a billion trees by 2030. So they’re really trying to ramp up.

Basically this organisation wanted to bring me to, we’re both kind of doing video documentation work, but to be their expert that’s going to vet the project because the Trees for the Future actually does like farm based, permaculture type plantings, multistoried, multispecies, plantings, hedgerows, so they’re kind of like, ‘oh, well, here, we want to come and document their funding the planting of 40,000 trees there while we’re there.’

So we’re gonna go and see this, but then I was talking to Natalie Topa, who now works for the World Food Programme. That whole thing is like five days, I was like, I’m not going to Senegal for five days, I’m going across the planet, like, what else is going on here that I can see. So I contacted Natalie and she hooked me up with the World Food Programme. That’s the United Nations. They were generous enough with their time to say that they would take me to document some of their projects.

I think their projects are more monoculture tree plantations. I mean, I’ll see what it is. But they are doing some large scale plantings as part of the Great Green Wall. The Great Green Wall of Africa is the row of the band of trees being planted through 22 countries across the width of Africa to arrest the southern migration of the Sahara Desert. It’s interesting, like I said, like when I’m going somewhere, I’m looking at Google Earth. I’m kind of a Google Earth nerd.

One of the places that I’m going with the WFP is the northern border of Senegal, there’s a river there. That river divides Senegal from Mauritania. There’s a lot of vegetation around the river but then if you go north of there, you see the lateral sand dunes just stop there at the border. You can really see this river system, this is literally the boundary, because that’s where the dunes stop. So you realise, if this river system was deforested, or maybe it has been deforested, I’m not sure about the natural history. Actually I’m sure it’s been deforested. But this is like the frontier here, the first line of defence against those sand dunes.

I spent time in the western desert of Egypt in a place called Dhaka Oasis, where it hadn’t rained in 13 years. The pattern of the dunes, the marching of the dunes, they said, like, ‘oh, it could change overnight, it’s powerful forces with that wind and sand.’ And trees are the remedy. Basically, that’s the wall, the Great Green Wall of Africa.

Morag:

You taking your family?

Andrew:

Yeah, I’m taking my wife, my wife’s kind of like, you don’t go anywhere without me.

Morag:

Good!

Andrew:

Yeah. So my wife is coming. It’s the first two weeks of school for my son. He’s a little bit like, ‘Okay, another country all right, I just want to hang out with my friends.’ He’s a teenager now. So, he’s going to stay here and we’ll be gone for 19 days total, which still is not that long. I was just in India for 66 days or something. I like to go that much if I’m gonna go somewhere I want to go and really sink in. So this 19 days is about as long as we could logistically do it to go to Senegal, and on short notice.

Morag:

Oh, gosh, I can’t wait to see what you find there. That sounds amazing. I was gonna say the work of Trees for the Future. Sounds like right up our permaculture alley. Yeah, that sounds fantastic. You also documented the chinampas in Mexico, what are some of the chinampas there? What are some of the other epic projects that you’ve visited?

Andrew:

The other one that we did, it’s a wonderful video, but it hasn’t gotten the kind of views that other ones have, it’s about the indigenous Hawaiians. It’s our longest video we did, almost a 328 minute mini documentary with a group called the Nation of Hawaii, which is a indigenous sovereignty group that has the only land in all the islands of Hawaii that’s actually deeded to native people. I mean, imagine that everything else is private property. They only got this land because they literally took over a beach for a year and a half. They built a whole village there. This is after a whole legacy of protests and finally, the government was like, ‘okay,

if we give you this piece of land here, will you leave?’ and they were like, okay. So they were given this piece of land.

Now they manage the piece of land they’re on, they manage a lot of land behind it. It’s a very large project and they’re restoring their traditional watershed scale design, basically. So that’s a great project. That’s a great video, even just stuff in the US. Another great video that we put out recently is about a project in the city of Oakland, California, called Planting Justice, which hires formerly incarcerated people. It’s a plant nursery is a permaculture plant nursery. They inherited the genetic collection of a very well known nursery that was closing its doors in Northern California. So now they’re in the city. They’re in one of the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods in the entire city of Oakland. So it’s a rough place.

I mean, it’s dilapidated, there’s a lot of garbage and graffiti and all that stuff. They have a permaculture nursery with an incredible selection and a good portion of the people working there are formerly incarcerated – when you come out of prison, it’s extremely difficult to find work, nobody wants to hire you. So that’s a great project that we filmed recently. I also just go to a lot of individual permaculture homestead places and show cool systems that people are doing.

Actually, I just published a video today from New York City. I was just on the East Coast, visiting my family in Philadelphia. I visited a site where a community of guerrilla gardeners took over this abandoned rail yard that’s basically like a toxic industrial toxic zone with heavy metals. They grew a garden that nobody noticed for about a year and a half because they kept the edges all full of rubble, garbage and everything but inside, they were bringing in compost, bringing in food scraps and they built this incredible oasis. Now it’s been 12 years. You gotta watch, I mean, it’s the coolest site.

It’s like, right in Queens in this totally nasty industrial zone, huge train yard, and they built this beautiful permaculture paradise garden. So I just went and released that video today, I got another one I filmed when I was over on the east coast. We visited the oldest non-native American food forest in the United States. It was an agroforestry experiment that was planted in 1917, by Hershey, a guy named John Hershey, who’s part of the whole Hershey Pennsylvania  chocolate and all that. So it’s like a over 100 year old planting of this whole selection of all the different nuts and fruits. It’s 70 acres and it’s a lot of trees, but now has housing developments built up within part of it, it’s like the city has kind of grown up around it.

So we’re just sort of documenting heirloom fruit trees, and what does a 100 year old paw-paw tree look like? How productive is it? What about chestnuts and heart nuts and walnuts and hickories and everything like that?

Morag:

Well, it’s obviously permaculture, it’s diverse. There’s so much. I do see a lot of your water concepts and it holds. Particularly in places like Australia, I mean, water is a very central part of any of the conversations that we begin to talk about permaculture.

Andrew:

I’m also like a real student of the scales of landscape permanence. I mean, if you get your water design, you have a good water design, then all the other layers of design build on top of that. So I figure educating people that water is the most important thing, because then they can have a good basis for all the other parts of the permaculture flower.

Morag:

Yeah, I wanted to ask you just like in a very practical sense, do you do all your editing? Or do you have people helping you do that? And how do you find all these great film sites to go and visit?

Andrew:

I have edited most of my videos. After I visited India for the first time in 2017/2018, I was like, I want to go back. I want to actually learn how to do videography and I want to get some good equipment. So through the guidance and counsel of the people that do the media stuff at the university, I was able to really choose what equipment to buy and try out a lot of different things.

That’s one of the good things about being connected with the university is there’s a lot of infrastructure, so I have people that I could learn from, because they’ve been working with me developing online courses all this time. Then I started learning editing. But in recent times, between working with the university collaboratively on some of these videos like the chinampas one was the first that was the one video I’ve done that I did none of the filming and editing for, which is awesome, but mostly I’m doing filming.

Okay, so recently, I have a great guy who I work with who’s a permaculture guy, a young man who lives not far away and is really into this. So we’ve been doing a lot of filming together. He edited the one I did from Oakland. Then this great woman from the university, she edited a couple of my videos, and then she left the university. So I would say,

of all my videos, maybe six have been edited by somebody else. I primarily do the editing. But recently, when I go somewhere, I really tried to get a second camera person so I can be in it, and I can have someone else capturing so it’s not like all on me.

I just find really good people and I’ve been funding this through my programme through my online classes. Especially with COVID, we had a huge skyrocket in enrollment. I funded a lot of the video work there. But now I’m actually getting to the point where my vision has outstripped my program’s ability to support it. I’m actually, for the first time, I’ve been bootstrapping since 2009, doing this all by myself for the first time. I’m thinking about reaching out to some other people and seeing if there’s some support for someone who wants to help us take this to the next level, basically.

I think of it as like the free education project. We have paid courses and we have a lot of intensive instructor involvement in our permaculture design courses and all that but my heart is in creating high quality free content that doesn’t sit behind a paywall – to democratise education. We’re too far down this road here to not let people have this information.

Morag:

Yeah, that’s right. To be able to just switch people on to the possibilities and show those very strategic examples and snippets of ideas that gets sticky. That’s the stuff that we need. I hope that works. Because that would be an amazing thing to be constantly going out. So do people come and tap you on the shoulder and say, Hey, you should go and film that? Or is your radar out there and you just notice things out there?

Andrew:

I would say it’s a little of both. But recently, the Hawaii thing, for instance, someone said, ‘hey, ‘you should come film this project!’ inviting me in. Basically, the Senegal thing is someone, literally saying, ‘we’ll pay for you to come like we’ll bring you here.’ That’s what I like, I’m not going to spill the beans, but I’m in conversations with other people who are like, ‘hey, maybe you come here, why don’t you come here?’ Like the India stuff.

I just love India. It’s such a wonderful place. From going to the international permaculture conference there in 2017, that set off this cascade of connections and events. Now, I’ve got so many different invitations there. I’ve got places I like to see, I’d love to go back to India. But really, it comes down to me going, where is the most crucial story? Where’s it happening? Like the chinampas thing that was me.

I was like, man, we got to do it. We got to create a really solid educational piece on the chinampas that’s really detailed because people need to know about it. I’ll look up something I’m like, man, the chinampas are so epic, but there’s nothing out there that really articulates the system will. I want to tell a story in a way that’s exciting and artistic, but that gives you enough practical information that you can get something actionable from it.

Morag:

Yeah I think that’s so great. I think a lot of the documentation of chinampas until then, it’s really been this was something that happened in the past as opposed to it being a current practice that can be myceliated. I think that is absolutely brilliant.

Andrew:

Actually I want to say I want to say it was YouTube, because I saw Lucio Usibiaga who’s the main guy that shot that video. I saw him on a YouTube video about food in the chinampas so I started watching it. I’m like ‘dude, I’m like wait, what is he doing?’ The same with the Paani foundation, I saw one of their subtitles videos in Hindi. I’m like, ‘Oh, nobody knows about this. This is incredible.’ So I reached out to them, I just cold call people if I’m super inspired to film their thing.

Morag:

I’m hoping to get a film team together to go to East Africa. I do a lot of work with the refugee communities there. And there’s myceliation of permaculture projects throughout those camps, and to actually go and do documentation of how permaculture has been applied – not from an agency perspective, but from a refugee-led, community-led, often youth and young women-led programme. That’s something that I’m trying to get together at the moment, but it takes a lot of organisation to get into refugee camps.

Andrew:

These things are massive logistical endeavours between the equipment, the skills, the equipment, the organisation of files, making sure you have backups and then the filming part. There’s also the travel part, where you’re going to stay, then finding someone who can really speak good English for the most part, and then coming back and organising the story. I mean, it’s a major task.

Morag:

I want to ask you about those story parts, or do you write or plan your story before you go? Or do you just have a broad structure and then come back and, and weave the story together? How do you come up with the threads?

Andrew:

I’m very in-the-moment, If I’m working with someone else, they might want to storyboard something out and we’ll talk it through. Usually, it just, it just sort of unfolds. My work is in finding the person and the place. If you find the person in the place, you just follow. You don’t have to really do anything. You just follow your curiosity.

Morag:

I’m glad you just said that. Because my films are quite like that. It’s when you show up and you start being in conversation with a landscape and with the people there the questions unfold just naturally through the conversation and give us a shape.

Andrew:

Yeah. However, I must say that the research beforehand, like just the story I told you about how the sand dunes stop at the border between Mauritania and Senegal, was just from Google Earth and me looking around. A lot of my study of a place is from looking at Google Earth, and just interpreting the landscape, what’s happening. I feel like that actually informed the story, things like, where’s all the farms? I’m like, click, what percentage of food is produced in Senegal? Oh, 30% import, so the research brings in these pieces. When I’m on the ground, that’s going to surface when I’m talking to someone, or just in the whole perspective of how could you incorporate food into these agroforestry systems? Because you obviously need to grow a lot more food here? Being prepared is always always the best way.

Morag:

One really technical question, too. I’ve always wondered how you do those drawings on your board? What’s that, like this magic world that you enter into when you do that?

Andrew:

It’s AI.

Morag:

Ah, okay!

Andrew:

I’m just joking. I’m joking. It’s not. It’s just human intelligence. Now, I’ve always been a graphic artist for a long time, since I was a kid, I’ve been drawing. We’re basically flipping the image so I’m not writing backwards or anything like that. That was a tool that was purchased by the university for me, back in 2016, when we created the first intro to permaculture, a massive open online course, so they bought that and I started. If you look at my old drawings, they’re a little more rudimentary. I just started, like when you start to get comfortable with a tool and I just started really understanding the potential of that.

Just recently, it’s not a secret, but we figured out a new thing. It used to be that I’m looking at my paper and I’m just having to completely translate my paper onto the whiteboard and so I have to work out the dimensions when I’m doing the drawing. The hardest part of the drawing is like working out the dimensions, drawing while looking at my paper, I’m measuring things and all that stuff.

The guys at the university who have been doing the tech for me for all this time, they’re like, ‘hey, I think we could actually project your drawing up onto a monitor.’ So I can look at the monitor, and I can make a dot and I don’t have to recreate the proportion with the proportions all there. I’m not tracing it because I’m looking to monitor. But I can almost trace my drawing. At least I can get all the proportions correct.

I was always doing things like pen and paper, then I started using an iPad. With the iPad, I can really work my proportions and my layering well. I can plan it more advanced and then I can put it up on the lightboard in a more advanced way. If you look at the stuff I’ve done, basically, I’d say in the last year and the lightboard I’ve been able to get much more technical, because I don’t have to spend all my time figuring out the scale while I’m drawing basically.

Morag:

Yeah, it’s so effective. It’s such a fantastic tool, and it just brings to life as you’re speaking. It’s wonderful.

Andrew:

Yeah, it’s really exciting. I just want to captivate people, I want people to actually watch the videos who don’t even care about the content. I want them to watch the videos just because it’s interesting to watch.

Morag:

It’s evolving, as you’re speaking, as you’re describing. Even if you can understand English, you can kind of get a sense for what’s going on as well, which is just brilliant. This whole kind of concept of permaculture education, to really bring it into this common space feels to me like something that is so important and something that you just do so brilliantly, whether it be through video or through online, accessible courses. Where do you want to take this? What’s your big picture vision of, of sharing permaculture in the world, if you could unlock possibilities?

Andrew:

I mean, people ask me that sometimes and to some degree, I feel like I’m already living like what I was trying to do before. But at this point, I have actually reached some limitations where I want to, at least in the immediate sense. If I had unlimited resources, I would be travelling with a and doing very high production stories almost continually. I guess that that gets tiring after a while. But I would basically be doing what I’m doing now, but be doing much more of it.

We want to bring back the introduction to permaculture courses. I think that humans like that we really have the capacity to fix our problems. Education is one issue and inspiration is the other part. So I’m just trying to trigger those two different things. I almost don’t really have much of a grander vision other than what I’m just doing right now, I would like to just do more of that. That’s where, if there’s anybody listening that really likes my stuff and you want to help accelerate what I’m doing? If I had more financial resources, I could accelerate, I could just do more work, I could do it faster. That’s what I’m hoping right now is just to ramp up what I’m actually already doing.

Morag:

I think for me, one of the biggest things as well is supporting as many people as possible to become permaculture educators themselves, in whatever community and context they’re in and finding ways to accelerate that process. That to me is a really important part. Because if every community everywhere has people who can catalyse that action, maybe see something like what you’ve done and then ground it where they are, they can help to get it out. That seems like a really important part of the work as well.

Andrew:

Can I throw your question back at you though? Like, what’s your grand vision?

Morag:

Well, I think that for me, that’s where I’m telling the stories like what you were saying and creating the context in which people can become confident, amazing, permaculture educators with access to all this global knowledge and skills. Finding where that is, to be able to to ground that – whether you’re in a refugee settlement, whether you’re in the middle of New York, whether you’re in an indigenous community in Australia – where there are the resources and support to actually be able to find, gather and translate.

There is another sort of, I don’t know whether I should say that public, what I would like to do is to create like a shadow parliament and gather all of the people that I know around the world and in Australia, what I said to you before that I see you as a public professor of permaculture. Who are the people who are focusing on health, on water, on soil, on food, on clothing, on whatever it might be, that we can come together to articulate this alternative vision of some policy as it comes out. We have another way of expressing it and getting it into the public media in a way that can counter that and go, ‘Look, actually, there’s another way that we can be thinking about this.’ So this positive mycelium question of public professors of good works.

Andrew:

Yeah, and I thought of something else, which is the thing about how Natalie Topa has gotten me into the door of being able to visit with the United Nations World Food Programme. That’s actually a goal of mine, to get this information into the highest levels, where people are doing large scale land restoration, humanitarian work, refugee work, all this stuff. These people should know about permaculture. I mean, Natalie is a great example of someone who is in that system and is a permaculture person. I’ve met and heard of other people, but that’s at this point in my life, that’s the Holy Grail.

Morag:

I feel like this is the first little creaking in the door and I think it will fly open, there’s so many people in those systems that are really thinking about it. I would like to say to everyone, too, that permaculture was not a fringe, edgy thing is something that has been foregrounded everywhere. It’s actually what needs to be even foregrounded even more so as our way forward. So let’s shift the paradigm on that, and take it into the highest. I talk a lot to people about really speaking up as high as you possibly can to be like ambassadors for this, if you what’s the highest possible place that you can take it, what’s your capacity? To speak it up and to connect.

I really see that there is this possibility of this notion of myceliation so that rather than trying to fight a structure, it’s that all of these projects and people and expertise around the world are actually connecting up. Every now and then we’ll see these kinds of little mushrooms pop up where you see that action, we just keep feeding that with more compost. This strength of this network globally, is so powerful that it’s this unseen force, wherever you scratch, you’ll see it. I mean, we just scratch the soil in whatever community and you’ll find this way of thinking as a way of addressing the issues.

So it’s just continuously connecting up telling the stories, sharing the stories, speaking it up and taking it to those places. That’s why we need to support the languaging, the way of connecting in this. That’s my big picture, that’s why I do podcasts and masterclasses and films and education, and all of that.

Andrew:

Yeah, I think we are of like mind, you and I.

Morag:

You just make it work, don’t you? There’s no great pouring of funds onto this, you get a little bit of money from this and you make it work for that. You just keep it going.

Andrew:

I mean, the thing that is going to pull this all through is like inspiration. I really feel like we’re not going to fix the world with fear. It’s just not an effective motivator. It motivates people in all sorts of ways, but not constructive ways. It’s got to be that we have sparked people’s spirits. We have to spark their creativity, their interest, their passion. That’s also what keeps me most people in permaculture. They are passionate, they’re having a good life because they’re in their garden. They’re interacting, of course, on the flip side. The dread can be stronger because you understand a little bit more what’s happening. You understand the horrors of a clear cut or something like that. You feel things harder.

Morag:

It’s just more fuel in the belly to show up more and to and to invite more people into the space. I think what you’re saying there about catalysing that spark doesn’t matter whether you’re working at an international level or whether you work in your local community. I just got an email the other day from summer saying, ‘Oh, could you do a piece on community gardening? And why is it the people always disappearing? There’s only a couple of people left?’ Well, that kind of same approach I think is just as relevant there. How can you invite people into the space to make it that dynamic? So wherever you are, whether it be a neighbourhood, a school project, and regional project to really cultivate that sense, yeah.

Morag:

Well, thank you so much for joining me in conversation today. I wish you all the best in Senegal, and I’ll make sure that all the links for all the films and resources that you’ve talked about will be in the show notes. So anyone who’s listening can connect, what’s the best way for people to get in touch with you?

Andrew:

If you do want to get in touch with me? amillison@gmail.com? That’s a good way. You will get an automatic responder that says, ‘Sorry, I can’t answer all my emails’, but I do. I do read my emails. But if you’re that magic person that wants to endow a position at Oregon State University or something like that, then definitely get in touch. I’m happy to talk to you for sure! And also, I just want to say Morag, I’m really, really happy to get to meet you here, in person, or online. I’ve seen your work and your name for years and years. And I’m just very happy to be able to have a connection. So thank you very much.

Morag:

Likewise, I’m glad you’re able to slot in a small chat in between your visits around the world. So thank you for that. Wishing you all the best!

Andrew:

Yeah, thank you so much. Great to see you.

The post Episode 105: Epic Permaculture Projects with Andrew Millison appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

As this podcast is going live, Kirsten has just released her new book -> ‘The Milkwood Permaculture Living Handbook: Habits for Hope in a Changing World‘. You can find it in your local library, bookstore, online and maybe even in your street library!

It was so great to catch up with Kirsten, chatting about everything from her writing process and the importance of books to how to find a belonging to place when you’re renting and practice ‘active hope’.

I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I enjoyed making it!

For those who were interested in Kirsten’s reference to the book ‘It’s Not That Radical:
Climate Action to Transform Our World’ by Mikaela Loach, here it is!

To listen to this episode, head to any of your podcast streaming platforms for the Sense Making in a Changing World podcast.

Read the full transcript here:

Morag:

Kirsten, it’s an absolute pleasure that you accepted my invitation to be here today to talk about your new book. But I’d also love to talk in more general terms about your permaculture world and how permaculture has infiltrated and shaped your life and way of being. Also in informing your book that’s coming out very soon! So firstly, congratulations! I am so in awe of you getting your books out. I know what it’s like, you know, running courses, family and your place and everything that’s going on, so I actually don’t know how you managed to do that. So that’s going to be a question I might ask you later. But anyway, welcome to the Sense Making in a Changing World show.

Kirsten:

Thank you so much, Morag. Lovely to be here!

Morag:

Just to begin with, maybe we could take people right back to your very beginning. Like where did you first catch the permaculture bug? Where did your life and the permaculture world intersect?

Kirsten:

I’m trying to remember how many years ago, maybe 16. Yeah, permaculture completely smashed into my life and sent me over sideways. It was not a subtle and evolving situation at all. My partner, Nick and I, were getting ready to move to Nick’s parents farm at the Mudgee in New South Wales. I had in my head, if you’re going to move to the country you had to do a permaculture course first. We were living in the city and were visual artists making lots of stuff in a city context. But we were really keen to move to this family farm and do the thing where you build a quick, tiny home, because that’s really cheap and easy, and grow some of your own food then keep making up from that base. That was a lot cheaper than living in Melbourne. So yeah, so that was the context.

I took myself off to a two week PDC, the full permaculture design course, because I’m a bit of a don’t-do-anything-by-half sort of person, then went off to welding here in Adelaide and did a PDC there and came back to Nick, who knew a lot more about permaculture than I did at that point. I was like, ‘oh my god, we have to change everything. We gotta admit to the country, we’re going to do this permaculture stuff.’ And I was completely bitten by the bug in terms of a lot of the art I was making at the time was about our relationship to nature, the end of wilderness and climate change.

All of a sudden there was this framework and this design system that gave you permission to be a much more functional part of nature and be part of the solutions, it just completely rocked my boat. I was so into it. So then I forced Nick to go and do a PDC as well. Then we moved to the country, going to do all the permaculture we could. That sort of snowballed from there and turned into us getting experts to come to our family’s watershed and teach classes there so that we could learn and the farmers and lots of folk in the valley could learn about these regenerative techniques. It just went from there and here we are 16 years later, that’s our main game and main love still.

Morag:

What a wonderful story! What I see through the things that you put out, you’re still creating art, you’re still creating beautiful pieces of work, whether it be your posts, or your films, or whatever you do, you infuse it with that artistic… There’s something very visceral about how you share permaculture.

Kirsten:

Thank you! I love communicating good ideas and these are such worthy ideas. They’re such worthy thinking tools and I think we need as many people communicating, and teaching and practising and doing this stuff as possible. It’s a bit like science, communication, you’ve got this incredible information. Once you get all the funky kids saying it and all the different ways, you can resonate with different parts of the community and bring everybody along with you. I just love getting to be a part of it.

Morag:

There’s something that you’ve always said in any of the messaging that you’re putting out is start where you are with what you have. It’s that step by step approach, really bringing it home into your own life. I know that in this new book that you’ve just released, you’re also saying that there’s more than that as well. Or it’s that doorway to more than that there’s something about this ramp between the small and the slow and the steady and this urgent situation that we’re facing, and really trying to bring that conversation together saying that permaculture action is active hope. Permaculture action is climate action. Permaculture action is action for social justice. It’s all of those things from right here right now, right where you are.

Maybe we could just speak about that. Because I know we’ve had conversations before about this, how permaculture can show up in that way. It’s not like something separate, it is woven together with all of that. I wonder where you are with that thinking now and what you suggest to people when you see people feeling overwhelmed with the enormity of the situation that we’re facing?

Kirsten:

Yeah, the book, the Permaculture Living Handbook (it’s just coming out), was very much about where you are in the face of overwhelm. Partly because we’ve got 16 years of teaching and hosting students in permaculture and quite often people come in, wanting to change everything right now. They understand that we’re living in an age of overlapping crises, there’s so much urgency and that is all completely true and the frontline work is absolutely essential, the urgent work is super, super essential. But time and time again, we were seeing students sort of burn out or fall over or get quite despondent because they couldn’t do it all at once. Whether that was because stress got the better of them, or whether that was because they’re juggling jobs, kids, varied abilities and privileges and all these different things.

I really wanted to share permaculture tools in a way that made them as accessible as humanly possible to everyone and also allowed for that ‘I’m not good enough, I don’t know how to garden, I don’t know how to do this. This is far too smart.’ I can figure this out and meet people exactly where they are. Celebrating and helping people get back in touch with how much intelligence lives in our body, how much intelligence lives within us, when we start interacting with our ecosystem, even if it’s a jar of sauerkraut on our bench or our back garden or the weeds in the cracks in our street. We deserve to be back in our ecosystems as useful celebratory life forms. You don’t need to have designed a permaculture farm or move to the country to interact with your ecosystem or these world shifting ideas and habits.

It was very much coming from that place and wanting to flip the script, which is not a static script, within the regenerative movement – there’s a fair bit of ‘the big thing will save the world.’ And we do need urgent frontline action, we do need big solutions. But we need the small solutions, as well and they both need to coexist all the time. I really wanted to get away from that binary of things like ‘this thing counts and this other thing doesn’t.’ Even though it’s true that greenwashing has a lot to answer for, and the whole carbon footprint concept brought up by BP to give individuals the majority of the guilt for what was happening, that’s all true, but actions can still matter. The way we live our lives can nurture both us and our ecosystems. And we get to contribute something. That’s beautiful.

Morag:

It’s absolutely beautiful. And I wanted to ask you, as you were speaking there, because I just imagine, for you, how does it personally feel to be able to know that you can walk out your door and harvest food and have abundance? Like, it’s really that abundant thinking? Like, how does that help your personal well being?

Kirsten:

Yeah, hugely. We are extremely lucky, extremely privileged to be stewarding half an acre down here in Southern Tasmania these days. We’re no longer renting, which is amazing, and really good for our nervous systems in terms of safe harbour and putting down roots and having a home. But a lot of this book, and a lot of what we’ve been teaching has been during the years where we were renting here or renting there, managing someone else’s farm or on a family farm, and these situations were all a bit temporary, potentially.

I love finding ways to feel at home, in my ecosystem, that didn’t rely on me going, ‘this is my backyard forever and ever’, because that wasn’t possible for me. Most of my friends didn’t own anything, because we’re the first generation of the people that even in Australia, quite often don’t own where they live and have that housing insecurity. Which means that feeling like you’re in place, living in place, and part of an ecosystem, sometimes feels a bit harder. But at the same time learning the weeds on your street, learning your waterways, doing all these other things, cultivating community and all the ways that do not require us to own land or steward land, became a really important part of how I felt about what safety and home meant.

Finding how to motivate communities and to help people feel like they had a place, even if they didn’t have a backyard, or they didn’t own a farm. There’s so many ways to interact with these beautiful ecosystems that we get to be a part of, and expand some of the ideas like, ‘you need this, you need to build that, you need to grow this and it has to be grown like that.’ That’s all super true and really excellent if you’re a land steward and you have access to land, structure, energy, funds and abilities that allow you to do those things. I really wanted to emphasise with this book, and how we teach intro to permaculture courses, that there’s a million ways to have relationships with your ecosystem, community and yourself. Things that aren’t necessarily tied to having the perfect backyard or the abundant veggie patch.

Morag:

Yeah. Just looking inside your book that I’ve had that little sneak peek of, what I love about it is it’s looking at the habits, behaviours, practices, our ways of showing up and connecting. There’s lots of practical tips all throughout, but it’s that lens really, that we’ve looked through. Where did those habits come from? Because it’s peppered all the way through the whole book. It’s basically a whole series of habits that you can change, all structured around the permaculture principles. Where did that idea come from? Because it’s just brilliant, so simple, so clear, and really is a new framework to put all of those different strategies, wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, whatever place you’re in – to start just look differently at things and interact differently, build different relationships, and cultivate different deeper connections with things. I think that relationality is so beautiful.

Kirsten:

I’m so glad you like it, Morag. That means a lot to me. It was this structure that had been teaching our Intro to Permaculture Courses through a few years. So it’s been a work in progress. It was probably Nick that came up with the actual structure of like ‘let’s plunk all these permaculture tools, skills ideas and can be used within a permaculture framework that belonged to permaculture but framing them within the 12 principles. It allows people to use them as thinking tools, dive in wherever they want and appreciate how nonlinear making change can be. You don’t need to start at this point and progress forwards, you can pick any habit, anything that speaks to you. Get good at it, make that just really normal and then pick another one.

I think as someone who has had a lot of anxiety and depression, a whole lot of other things throughout my life, overwhelm is a huge thing and it can really sabotage all sorts of things for sometimes really long periods of time. I really appreciate being able to offer people one tiny little thing which has huge implications. For example, if you’re walking somewhere, instead of taking your car, you’re just choosing one place that’s 10 minutes away from you that you go to fairly regularly and you just walk there instead. That’s your role and you try to do that as much as possible. It’s such a simple action, it’s such a simple habit to get into. But the implications for both your relationship with your ecosystem and your neighbours in your community are huge. It’s also this collectivism of these little habits.

The idea that one person walking to the store, instead of using their car, will not save the planet is abundantly clear. But we’re all only ever individuals, we can only ever do individual acts and the idea of this sort of decentralised collective action is as true and as valid as many of the huge actions that we all need to be involved in and committed to. It’s not at all saying take your reusable cups and save the world, we all know that. That doesn’t mean that getting into the habit of taking your reusable cup is anything other than a good idea. You can do both.

Basically, you can join your local climate action group, you can protect your waterways, you can get involved in all the things, you can pay the rent to your traditional owners, and you can do everything at all the levels or even just a few things that are at other levels. But we need to act and live in a way that nurtures ourselves and the wider landscape. There’s just so many roads into that debate.

Morag:

It’s really important that those choices that we make are the ones that resonate, the ones that speak to us, the ones that move us into action. When we open that door, a whole other series of things start to become visible and possible. Once we step through that metaphorical door, it’s not actually even a door! You take that step into that direction, all of these other things start to happen. Sometimes there’s amazing epiphanies, other times, it’s just another step and all of those things are good.

What I love, and this relates so much to what you’re saying is that just that simple act of walking there, you might end up with a conversation along the way, which then that person tells someone. You never actually know the ripple effect of an action that you do. But just showing up in a way that has meaning, purpose and is demonstrating your commitment to it and sharing with the world, not going out and telling people you must do this, you must do that. Just showing up in that way with your authentic self. It’s so magnetic, I think…

Kirsten:

Nourishing, it helps you keep going. We’re in an age of many crises. We need to nourish ourselves in order to keep going. We need to keep our hearts whole however that looks, our families, our loved ones, all those little nurturing things that will help us get there as much as everything else.

Morag:

So you use the term active hope, I was reading. Do you want to describe what active hope means to you through a permaculture lens?

Kirsten:

So there’s a wonderful writer/educator called Joanna Macy, who is of an advanced age now and isn’t actively teaching anymore. But she articulated the idea of active hope, although it comes from many traditional practices, being a goal and a practice. So it’s not a kind of hope, where you go, ‘Oh, I hope that happens. It didn’t happen.’ It’s this very robust practice – it’s goal setting, in a sense, living in a way where you’ve got the thing that you hope will come to pass, you identify it, you get it clear with yourself, then you solidly take little steps towards that goal. It’s not to say that you will get to that goal. It’s not a ‘if Step Two doesn’t work, then the end goal of whatever it is, will never come to pass.’ But it’s a practice of moving towards the world that we want.

In that practice, and in that process of taking steps that are positive, and that are downright blindingly useful towards that world that we want, we create that world that we want, in our every day, a little bit more and a little bit more. Again, in a time when hope is fairly scarce and there’s a lot to be upset and worried about. I find active hope a really excellent way of keeping your head up. But also just taking solid steps towards a useful future for now, as you do that.

Morag:

Yeah, I really appreciate Joanna’s work and feel that it’s so relevant, something that we can really bring more into the permaculture education that we’re offering in all different dimensions, from short workshops to permaculture design courses, and open up those conversations. I think that’s why a lot of people do end up on the door of permaculture courses, because they’re looking for something else, looking for a new way of imagining the future.

You also talk about permaculture being quite radical, or maybe that we need radical change. So what is radical to you? Sometimes I get a bit frightened of using the word radical. Whereas in actual fact, what we need is a radical change in the way we think and the way that we show up. So how are you using that word? I know that you’re always very conscious about bringing people along on the journey. It’s not about ‘okay, this is something that’s over here’. This is something right in the middle that we can all participate in. So how can we layer the radical? How can we weigh the radical term into that kind of concept? Bring it into something that we can learn with and work with every day?

Kirsten:

I mean, it makes me think of Rebecca Solnit, who talks a lot about radical hope, which is pretty much the same as active hope, but coming from a slightly different perspective. Radical hope as a concept comes from a book by Jonathan Lear, who was researching First Nations American indigenous cultures who were behaving in these extraordinarily excellent ways, even though there seemed to be very little chance that there was much future for their people. It was this investigation into how, as a people, one might keep behaving in a way that would benefit future generations, even if you weren’t even sure anymore if there would be future generations, whether that was culture stewardship or land stewardship, all those things entirely.

It’s an intense and wonderful book, looking at that in one specific group within a traditional culture, but we see that across indigenous and traditional practices, we’re also seeing it within our communities. Now, people are choosing to act in a radical way, the sort of way that we need to behave and live in order to create goodness and livability for future generations.

It feels quite radical now, but it’s actually not. It’s just one step at a time, one foot in front of the other, behaviour to get us towards the world that our communities need and deserve. So that’s the whole radical skill that I think almost all of us use intuitively. But we know it’s not actually radical at all. It’s just common sense that there’s got to be a lot of gumption attached to that action.

In some ways that’s what people term as radical, although it also reminds me of Michaela Loach who is this incredible British author and their recent book is called, ‘It’s Not That Radical: Climate Justice To Transform Our World’ and it is very good. It is a really, really excellent book, laying out the climate crisis, solutions, responsibilities and considerations in terms of climate justice. It is an extremely radical book for some I would think, but at the same time, again, it’s common sense. Once you look at it, well articulated, it’s like, ‘oh, it’s not radical at all.’ That’s bloody obvious. That’s what we need to do.

Morag:

Those of you who are listening, I’ll put the links to the books in the show notes as well as to where you can find the books from Milkwood. Now though, I wanted to come back to your book and maybe ask you a bit about that writing process. I was alluding to this before, how I interview people about writing as part of this series of podcasts and talking with permaculture authors.

I always like to ask about your process of writing. Someone once told me how they go walking with the woods in the woods with their microphone on, dictating notes, then they download it and transcribe it when they get back and edit it. Someone else’s, they just mind map it all out, and then sit down at their child’s tennis lesson and bang out a chapter while they’re sitting in the car watching. And it’s like, oh my gosh, how do you do that? What’s your process?

Kirsten:

The process for this book was quite different to the first book. The first book was me having a lovely time, writing about seaweed and tomatoes and collating many years of knowledge from experts that I knew and getting to call them up and going, ‘Hey, I just want to check this bit about tomato seed starting.’ And that book was a tribute to the generosity of many teachers that we worked with, and beautiful folks sharing their knowledge. Then I got to collate that knowledge into five delicious chapters, which I had so much fun doing. This particular book, The Milkwood Permaculture Living Handbook, took a lot longer than it was meant to take, about two and a half years longer than it was meant to. I had a few health crises along the way and had to slow right down.

Truth be told, I did use some of the days when everyone thought I was writing a book to just sit in the sun on the floor, because that’s what my body required at the time. But funnily enough, I couldn’t actually share that with anyone. I couldn’t just go, ‘Hey, I need to rest and need to put this book off.’ I had to sort of hide and sit in the sun on the floor and pretend I was writing a book. But that said, that was part of the process, I guess.

Once I was feeling better, and got more into it, I went for the whole, I call it a flatlay. But it’s like a big document/spreadsheet. Basically that goes this is page one, this on page two, there’s that on page three. Although that sounds extremely uncreative, I found that fantastic. Can’t remember who told me to do that. But yeah, so I took a spreadsheet and laid everything out.

The reason that was so important for me, was because I could write about weeds for a very long time. I like them very much. But I knew I couldn’t from my last book and the ruthlessness of a book editor who quite reasonably has to cut you down to size in terms of word count. Because this book was so late, I didn’t have time to just write as much as I wanted to about weeds and then figure out how to fit that into four pages. So all of a sudden, it was like, right, we’ve got four pages for weeds and need two pages of images. That means there’s only two pages of text. How do you want to convey these concepts in only two pages of text? Then I figured it out from there, which I found really creative.

I love those constraints, although they’re quite annoying sometimes when you want to write more, because this book has 60 habits for hope in a changing world. There’s a lot of bits in there so there isn’t the space to go super deep on any subject. It’s more a handbook of suggestions. Have you thought of this or have you thought of that? Have you thought about how buying local affects food security and pollinators and watersheds and food justice and equity and all these other things. Using these really cool concepts, practices and habits as more of a ‘Have you thought about doing this’, I had to approach it like that.

Once I had a structure, I didn’t have tennis lessons to bang them out in, but it got a lot easier to bang things out. And I should say, we had this online course called Permaculture Living and the book is based loosely on that course. I was pulling things out of the course and going, ‘everyone really gets into this subject for whatever reason, I’m going to make sure that’s in the book.’ So we’d had the feedback of a few years of students passing through this course to go on and you could tell what lit people up, you could tell what things people didn’t understand. You tell what things people went, ‘Oh, I never thought about that.’ So we used that community knowledge to craft the book.

Morag:

Yeah, fantastic. Having that structured start feels somehow liberating. Once you’ve got the thinking of the pattern, then you can get into the details. It is that design from patterns to detail, isn’t it? You don’t have to think about all the things you’ve got to include and then to get them slashed?

Kirsten:

Yeah, it’s so great.

Morag:

That’s wonderful. Yeah. How do you feel now that it’s finished and going out in the world?

Kirsten:

It’s so good. It’s a little surreal as I’m sure anyone who’s been involved in a long term project feels like. There’s also the sense of the last time you got to write anything, and it was well over six months ago, longer, a book is not a blog post. Fortunately, unfortunately, you can’t go back and change anything. So it leads to all this pressure when you hand in your manuscript. I kept changing what I wanted to say about the subjects. I’m such a tweaker, that I was like, ‘Oh, I just want to change that a little bit more’, until my publisher said, ‘No more!’

So yeah, and I got to live with it and it’s this lovely life with it. It’s a lovely, amazing, useful handbook. But it’s also a little bit of a time capsule for how you felt about this subject, or how you were writing about this, in my case, the spring of 2022, because that’s where things are at. There’s a beautiful sort of solidity, it’s interesting how most of our world can be updated. Most of the writing we read, most of the writing we write, can be very easily updated these days. So it’s really interesting to have that permanence. It’s a snapshot in time for you.

Morag:

You also have all the digital media as well. What do you feel is the importance of having that book? What is that difference in the media world for you?

Kirsten:

Well, I mean, like many of us, I’m trying to find a balance between screen time and not screen time. I love the fact that a book is the thing you can take outside in the sunlight with a cup of tea and you don’t have to plug it in, it still works. There’s a resilience to books that I think is obvious and also, crucial. At this point in time, a book is handed from hand to hand, you lend books, you don’t lend an Ipad with an article on it, you send it to your friend, but you don’t know if they’re going to read it. The lending of the book, the holding of the book, the underlining of bits and pieces in a book, I just think the information goes into your brain differently, or at least it does for me.

The same way that if I really need to get some creative thoughts down I write them down in my notebook. I can type obviously and do a fair bit of it. But the way my brain comes out through the pencil is quite different to the way my brain comes out through the keyboard and making the most of that is sort of similar to the different parts of life. It’s wonderful to have a bookshelf full of really cool information and useful stuff that if the power goes out for a week, no worries, you can just get on with it.

Morag:

That’s right. I have a bookshelf over there that’s full of wonderful information I’ve been collecting for decades now and I wouldn’t part with it for the world. I also think it’s something my dad used to say and he’s 86 now. He says ‘I would like to be able to read a newspaper rather than reading it online, because I’ll be opening the newspaper and all of a sudden I’ll see something that I’ve never thought about before!’ Whereas if I’m online, I would choose it and then the algorithm tells me what I should read next. I don’t get to see all the context like in a book, I have that possibility. I might have been interested in the composting pump, and then all of a sudden I start to see the other suggestions that come through. So I really love that broadening.

Kirsten:

Yeah, the author gets to create their own algorithm, I guess! You get to decide what they’re going to think about and see next but you’re right, like the distraction engine that is any online world, any online device. That’s literally what it’s built for, to distract you. A book is, in some ways, an antithesis to that. This is what’s on the next page. Let’s sit down and read that as well.

Morag:

Yeah. Wonderful. Oh, gosh, look, I’m so glad we’ve had this chat. I think this whole point of really embracing a permaculture way of life, it feels like to me, I can’t imagine living any other way. I mean, I haven’t really had many other experiences, because my life has pretty much been entirely permacultural. But I do speak to a lot of people all the time who’ve kind of smashed into it but use it. There’s the hope and the possibility, feeling grounded or connected wherever we are, whether it be a community garden, backyard or balcony. The possibilities of connecting and deepening our relationships with community, feeling held like creating a sense of home.

I was asking the other day I was on Country up the road with some Gamilaraay folk, a local indigenous group here, working on a project to restore a piece of land that they’ve been able to access. I asked this question about the feeling you get when you’re deeply connected to a place and it’s not biophilia. Because it’s more than that. It’s about knowing where your food comes from, and you’re feeling held in that state of abundance of the place, and it’s not about ownership of land or anything like that. I’m really searching for a word to describe that feeling.

I said ‘I don’t know if you know, but is there anything from your language that might say that,’ and he just looked at me and he thought for a minute and he said, ‘Oh, well, I have a word. But it translates as home.’ And my mind initially went to ‘oh, that’s just like the house home.’ But then I just paused for a bit longer and realised, ‘yeah, that’s it, our home is like that.’

We were talking about that before about coming home and creating a place of belonging, where we understand we can read the landscape, where we know our region, we have a sense of what’s edible, what’s not, and how to interact and be in relationship with that place. That deep sense of home is so important and these habits that you’re describing is a way to find our way back home. So thank you for writing a sense of home that we all need and deserve. Thank you so much for being here.

Kirsten:

Thank you so much, Morag. That’s great!

The post Permaculture Living with Kirsten Bradley appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

The post Loving Nature & Gardening with Poppy Okotcha appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

Dr. Stobart’s journey into the realm of herbs started when she participated in a permaculture design course at Dartington in Devon during the early 1990s. This ignited her passion to cultivate more herbs for her clinical practice and she began cultivating herbs in her cottage garden and allotment. However, her desire for a more substantial supply of plant materials motivated her to purchase Holt Wood in 2004. Using permaculture design, she and her partner transformed the area from a redundant conifer plantation into a flourishing medicinal forest garden.

Beyond her hands-on work with herbs, Dr. Anne Stobart has worked extensively in education. She took a leading role in a professional herbal medicine program at Middlesex University in London. Additionally, she is a founding member of the Medicinal Forest Garden Trust and is a member of the advisory board for the Journal of Herbal Medicine. Her noteworthy contributions to the field led to her appointment as an Honorary University Fellow at the University of Exeter.

Anne has also published research articles on historical recipes and the history of herbal medicine, and has a continuing interest in research into agroforestry and permaculture related to herbal medicine.

Click here to find out more about Morag’s courses at the Permaculture Education Institute.

Or watch this episode on any of your preferred podcast streaming platforms or Youtube.

Read the full transcript here:

Morag:

Well, thank you so much for joining the show today. It’s an absolute delight to have you here. I’ve been exploring your works in medicinal forest gardens and I absolutely love it. It was fascinating to me that you did your PhD on 17th century healthcare. Where did that spark of inspiration come from? Because it’s quite a specific thing.

Anne:

Well, I suppose when I completed my first degree, which was in psychology, I really didn’t know where I was going. So I was trained as a teacher and I ended up in adult and further education. To cut a long story short, I used to live in Liverpool, being from London originally, I moved down to Exeter. Exeter University had this wonderful programme, which was a Masters in Women’s Studies and being an out and out feminist I joined up as soon as I got there.

The tasks set in that course were very varied. Looking at women’s history, I kind of latched on to the history of medicine. I discovered some local archives of handwritten recipe books and I just wanted to know where they used and that sent me on quite a long exploration. I was very lucky that I was able to embark on the PhD when I was working at Middlesex University, training herbal practitioners and I had a wonderful supervisor who was interested in the history of science. So the whole idea of herbal history really got kind of wrapped up into a study of domestic medicine – this was in the 17th century.

Morag:

Fantastic! Household medicine in the 17th century. Wonderful! So are people still doing those practices in some way? Did you find that there was a continuation of this? Or are you rediscovering things that were done before and bringing them into this new food forest garden context?

Anne:

Okay, so there is a punch line here. The records that still exist are mainly to do with larger households – more wealthy, aristocratic households. So it’s still very difficult to research what happened to poorer people and women in particular, because so much of their work went unrecorded. But I looked very closely at letters, recipes, household accounts, for those that were focused during the southwest of England and prepared a huge database of the recipes, the constituents, and so on.

I actually discovered that most of the recipes probably were not used. I mean, it was a bit of a shock and it still is a shock. People don’t want to hear this from me when I say it. But even further than that, I discovered that the recipes that were likely to be used, recorded and shared as very valuable were ones that contained bought ingredients. So spices and more expensive items. There were a few simples that tended to get repeated quite a lot and so it’s possible that they were handed down.

But in general, I think we have some very mythological ideas about household recipes. I write about that in the book and describe the research process in some detail – trying to get to the nub of which plants were used. Actually, I think people were really poorly informed, even by word of mouth about plants in the past and they suffered, they suffered a lot because they couldn’t do much about illnesses in the like.

So to answer your question, yes! We do have lots of history around herbs and the like, but some of it’s pretty suspect because it’s wishful thinking, romanticism about herbs. While I was doing the research, I got together with other herbal practitioners because I’m a trained herbal practitioner, and we set up the herbal History Research Network to try and encourage more scholarly approaches to the research as it exists.

Morag:

So what are some of those main herbs that you found that actually were used commonly? And what are some of the myths that you busted?

Anne:

Okay, well, in the research, I found that the recipes were about 80% plants and then otherwise minerals and animal parts. I put it in the book, they weren’t the ones that came out as most popularly mentioned, but they weren’t really simples. There were occasional plants that became quite famous like elder because they had a particular interest in the households. There was one member of a household who had a swollen neck gland, scrofula, which was basically down to tuberculosis infection, and the elder was recommended by some people as a treatment for that. 

So recipes got spread around because they were thought to help. In this case, these were herbs that dried up the nasty secretions issuing from ulcers, and then there were other herbs that were spread around for example cures for rickets and such like. I don’t think I could really pick on any one particular except for possibly roses.

The reason being that one householder, Mary Clark – was a very interesting, forthright lady – she gave her children rose syrup, and it’s still not totally clear whether it’s rose leaves, which were rose petals (they call them leaves), or rose hips. But it’s likely that the vitamin C produced a laxative action. So it was thought that Rose was clearing for toxicity in children to reduce diarrhoea type problems. In that case, we don’t know the parts properly – we don’t know what problems, when they were given, why they were given, but they were very popular. They probably worked for reasons that were not clearly understood. Today, we would think of roses as stringent. Not as a laxative!

Morag:

We think about lots of things as being vitamin C though, don’t we? I mean, that’s true that roses have lots of vitamin C in them. So that the action may have been to do with the vitamin C? 

Anne:

Yeah, the action may have had something to do with vitamin C, especially if it was rose hips which are higher than oranges in vitamin C. So just investigating – it’s very difficult to find the evidence. But that’s what I was after, to find corroborative evidence. Of course, women who collected herbs and brought them to the household for sale at the front door, or probably the back door, were rarely recorded in accounts, but they occasionally pop up. So you do get other particularly flowers, as well.The folklore traditions don’t appear in the recipe books an awful lot.

Morag:

That’s fascinating, wow, that’s really interesting! Because there’s a lot of information out there and it’s hard to know what is actually useful and what is real. It’s really interesting to hear this work that you’ve been doing. You’ve recently, it’s about to come out, the title of the book is ‘Trees and Shrubs That Heal’. So in this book, you’re really focusing on looking at a forest garden approach. You also have a previous book, ‘The Medicinal Forest Garden Handbook’. So you’re taking the research that you have and then blending it with transforming landscapes that heal the planet and heal people. What does that start to look like? What are the kinds of plants that you’re incorporating and encouraging people to grow as ways to help common conditions and help to keep people healthy?

Anne:

So as you’ve probably gathered, I’ve got a fairly rigorous approach. I’m a sort of an evidence seeker. But of course, sometimes the evidence is not easily found. My first book, the design book, was really all about the experience I gained in setting up the medicinal woodland Holtwood, which I can talk about more. But the experience of writing about the design, people wanted to know, like you’re asking, which tree is the one that you would recommend to plant? 

So I felt I had a lot of material about how these trees could be used. And I was very frustrated about the other herb books around – they’re mostly about sort of twee herb gardens. They’re wonderful in their own right, but I wanted to look up and see what else was available. We did a lot of pollarding and coppicing at Holtwood. So I learned about some of these trees that I was planting.

I wanted to write a book that told people about the magic of medicinal trees and shrubs, but I wanted to explain the magic. So in the book, I have not included a lot of history, folklore and so on. People write about that really well and it’s not really my place. Instead, what I’ve tried to focus on is what these plants really do. We’ve got a bit of an idea from tradition, Chinese traditional medicine, North American traditions, as well as European and UK traditions. I’ve tried to provide some introductory material which puts the plants in their place.

I did it by herbal action – the astringent properties of the trees and shrubs, their leaves, and all the antioxidant properties from the fruits and so on and I tried to write about how they can benefit health. So I suppose my answer to the question, which tree? ‘You could use this one, for example.’ For an astringent you could use oak for wonderful body washes and all sorts of external uses. But what about this lovely ornamental Asian forsythia plant the flowers are fantastic – they’re astringent and antiseptic, they can be used for soothing a sore throat or for a face wash and the like. It’s a bit of a melting pot book – I’ve got 80 trees and shrubs that I’ve managed to get into that framework of different herbal actions.

Morag:

Fantastic. I wonder if there’s also a recommendation for some that would go well in tiny gardens where people can create. Like mini medicinal forest gardens if they don’t have the space. Are there some that you think are really good for that kind of urban context?

Anne:

Yeah, I’ll probably start doing some blogging later in the year once the book is out to draw attention to different site requirements. But the smallest plant in the book, which is technically a shrub is Partridge Berry (Mitchella repens) – a wonderful North American, a sort of ground covering, it’s just a few inches tall. It was traditionally used, partly for its astringent and antiseptic effects in childbirth, and related to women’s complaints. There are a number of other plants, like eucalyptus trees, which are huge. So I’ve been trying to find cultivars or varieties or species that are somewhat smaller and I latched onto the Snow Gum (Eucalyptus pauciflora), which is a smaller eucalyptus. We started to grow it at Holtwood to try it out.

Morag:

How’d that go? Did it grow alright there?

Anne:

Well, it’s very slow growing! It doesn’t produce a huge amount of material. But all of the eucalyptus trees are so wonderful in the leaf matter that it produces. The eucalyptus are part of the myrtle family and there are other trees in the myrtle family that are fantastic. And in fact, common Myrtle, it does really well here in southwest England, and it’ll do well in sheltered sites. So as global warming, unfortunately, hits us, it’s one of those that I would be looking to. It has wonderful aromatic leaves, beautiful flowers, which are great for celebrations, and berries as well which are edible.

But it is the aromatics that interests me because it can be distilled and it can be clipped like a hedge into any shape you like. So, one of the things that I tried to do in the book is to identify some of the variations of families that have particular characteristics that can be used in different contexts. I’m aware that smaller gardens are a bit of an issue for people that don’t have that much space here.

Morag:

Yeah! Have you come across any that are good as soap? I keep getting this question because I talk about soap and actuaries, for example, and people say ‘yes, but they come from the Himalayas and they’re disrupting that.’ And I’m always looking for plants that were used as soap. It’s not medicine, but I just wondered if you’d come across any on your way.

Anne:

So it’s quite interesting because of course, when you make soap you use sodium hydroxide for alkali and then you add oils – it’s the whole process of combination. So you could infuse any plant matter, leaves and whatnot in the starting material, but the chemicals are so powerful that they tend to denature everything. We had masses of willow and we ended up stirring in dried powdered willow as an exfoliant into soap. So that’s because sometimes you get soap with oatmeal and other things like that. And that seemed to work quite well except some people find it a bit strange having little grains of brown in there. So not everybody likes that.

But in general I would avoid using citrus in soap because it denatures so much. It’s sort of looking for the less reactive essential oils, the lower key odoriferous smells that might be appropriate. After we sold Holtwood, we didn’t produce the products anymore, but I think that’s a really interesting area that you mentioned to explore more. There’s lots of potential.

One of the things I’d really like to do is work on how to use infused herbal waters in making shampoos – so that’s one of my bucket list of things to do! So because there’s lots of saponins in some plants like horse chestnut. I put a recipe with every one of the 80 trees and shrubs, I put a simple recipe and I can’t remember which one it is now, offhand. But you can make a soapy lather with something like horse chestnuts because of this saponin content.

Morag:

Great! I can’t wait to check out all those recipes, because it’s fascinating! And it’s there right in front of us. Talking about adding these medicinal and really fantastic household uses into our forest gardens – expanding it from the sense of chop and drop for the soil, food for us, food for the wildlife. There’s this other dimension that I think hasn’t been talked much about in the permaculture world, and I find it fascinating. It’s one of the things I love. I often go out and give talks in local community centres, libraries and garden groups. One of the things I love is the bit afterwards, when everyone comes up and says, ‘Ah, I use this plant for this and I use this plant!’ 

That’s when all this knowledge sharing happens. It’s just so fascinating that so much knowledge about plants is held within families. I think that bringing that into a book that we can share with recipes is great.

Anne:

Yes, I’ve particularly tried to use simpler recipes. Some people might think they’re almost too simple, but I want to get people started. Yeah, one of the online courses that I’ve been running, I got a bit of feedback from someone saying ‘Your course got me started on making things and I’m really looking forward to making many more.’ That’s just the sort of feedback that I like to see that once people try out a few things, they get hooked. For example, who knew apple leaves can be made into tea! Once you start to harvest tree leaves, then the world is endless!

Morag:

We need to talk about tree leaves a bit more, because this is something that I absolutely love. I mean, here in my garden, I have mulberry leaves, and I use them as a tea. Also the olive leaves, I use them too. There’s a lot of leaves all through my garden. I actually did a whole series of little YouTube clips about them when the pandemic was in full flight and people found it hard to get out and get food. I was just saying just have a look in your garden and walk around. So we did that. But I didn’t know about the apple trees! So for your climate, I wonder what other edible leaves there are? Because then all of a sudden, your mind just goes ‘poof! there is so much food around us all the time that we just walk past!’

Anne:

So there’s two things: one is it’s great to be able to preserve some of these leaves. So it’s quite important to think about a drying facility somewhere in your house, whether it’s drawers, a loft or hanging baskets or whatever. Because it’s very frustrating just to try things fresh and very often. Drying seems to concentrate the flavour. For example, I’ve just ordered a dryer and it’s supposed to arrive today. So I’m really kind of yay!

Morag:

Is that one of the multiple stacked cabinet ones?

Anne:

Well I made my own when we had Holtwood – a big thing based on baking trays, which worked brilliantly. I used a fan from a computer to get air into it and a puppy blanket warmer to warm the air. This homemade version worked really well but it’s too big now, because I’m sort of semi-retired – just writing and doing talks and such like that. So that’s one thing that I think people don’t always have, and it’s good to think about.

The second is: I really love tree leaf combinations. This is where the trees and shrubs come in because of course, every single rose family member – raspberries, blackberries, right up to the apples and cherries – all of those leaves are quite astringent. So I love combinations. I like to combine an astringent with something that’s a bit more aromatic. So that’s where the myrtle comes in. And then mint for the aroma, rosemary, those sorts of things, although they can be a bit overpowering. And then I like to add something a bit medicinal. For example, there’s always the ground level herbs like yarrow, great for urinary problems. Then plants that can be somewhat more digestive, so quite bitter plants. I may add three herbs together to make a tea. 

When we were running courses in Holtwood we would walk about with people and just literally pull leaves off trees and, and then come back and put them in a pot to brew them up. People would be sitting there saying, ‘Gosh, I never knew tree leaves could taste this good!’ I think sometimes it’s an acquired taste and I would never want people to drink stuff they don’t like, but you’ve probably experienced this, that bitterness is a very individual thing. Some people do like the bitter taste.

Morag:

So can we just talk about bitters? Because it’s something that I think in our society we’ve pushed, quite aside to the detriment of their health. What’s your take on that? What are some of those ways that we can reintroduce the bitters into our system?

Anne:

This is a bit of a hobby horse for me too, because there’s so much bitter potential in bark. I’m a bit mad about bark as well, because trees and shrubs are so productive, especially if you’ve coppiced and pollarded. It’s very, very straightforward. If you’re able to manage them in a garden or other sites to get large quantities of bark. I’ve always been very interested in buckthorns.

We have two native buckthorns in the UK – the purging buckthorn which gives you an idea of what it does, it’s so bitter that it’s probably not safe to take. It causes a lot of griping and stuff. The other buckthorn is the alder buckthorn, which is the most beautiful little tree. We have one in our cottage garden and it’s just buzzing at the moment with bees and other insects. It seems to be full of tiny nectar full flowers.

The bark of the alder buckthorn (which is Frangula alnus) is supposed to be aged for a year and then it is an excellent laxative. So that’s the kind of thick end of the wedge if you like the laxative, detoxing action. But then at the other end, there’s the bitterness of all of the daisy family, which is excellent for stimulating digestion. So if you over brew chamomile wildflowers, that bitterness is great, because it gets your digestion going at that slight edge. Yarrow, I always think of as a supercharged chamomile. So from the bark through to the ground level. We’ve got bitters to suit every situation. And I think in a world where detoxing is sold as a commercial possibility, we could do much more just for our self help and improve our health by clearing the body from these regularly produced wastes just from everyday living.

Morag:

Yeah. I was gonna ask you, as you were talking about the buckthorn – how do you get the bark off those in a way that’s not damaging the plant? Do you take off the cuttings when you’re coppicing it? What’s the process of collecting bark?

Anne:

So bark on mature trees is thick, rigid, grooved and brown and not much use. So we want the bark from younger trees or branches, maybe two or three years old. In the case of willow, one or two years old. Other trees, maybe a few more years. So they’re ideal for coppicing cycles, and just pruning branches. I’ve got a beautiful fringe tree, Chionanthus virginicus, which is a member of the olive family in the garden and I know that the roots are great as gallbladder remedy and I’m thinking, aha, perhaps the bark! So I’ve just been pruning it because it fell on my Chasteberry and greenhouse!

So quite often, branches need to be taken down for all sorts of reasons, safety or otherwise. What’s needed is a knife which has a bit of a curve on it. I designed one, which I called the Stobi, which I’m huge on. It was handmade so it’s quite pricey, but it was actually based on a carving knife, which had a sort of a curve to it.

Morag:

Where did you get that made? That fascinates me that you designed a knife and got it made! Is there a local knifemaker you went to?

Anne:

It’s kind of a no. I think the networking here applies. I was doing a stall for the Medicinal Forest Garden Trust somewhere and came across a person who made knives. So I drew it on the back of an envelope and about six months later, came back with a beautiful knife. I mean, there are alternative ways, but maybe we can get the Stobi into mass production.

Morag:

Yeah, that’d be great!

Anne:

So a bit of a curve is ideal for thin thinner branches. Always cutting away, for health and safety. In the spring is the best time when a lot of pruning is done. But it can be done at other times of year. If you’re cutting two to three year old or younger branch bark, you can strip it off and put the strips in a paper or cloth bag, give them a shake every now and then and then they’ll dry really well just indoors and they’ll keep for years.

Getting the bark off in strips in that way, it means that then you’ve got just a ready-made bark for making teas and the like. So for example, I harvest ash bark. We have this awful problem with the disease of ash here, but there are some ash trees that are okay and its bark is brilliant for arthritis. It grows really well as a coppice, so I save ash bark peelings, and I put them into a mixture with nettle and rose as a way of getting rid of joint pains tea.

Morag:

I was wondering, I live in a subtropical environment and one of the things that I battle with when I’m saving anything is mould. I wonder whether in a moister environment like yours if that’s an issue? How do you make sure that you dry things properly so that they store for a long time?

Anne:

Drying is a big issue. Actually, it’s an issue for larger scale producers, smallholders and the like, who want to produce herbs for sale, because they’ve got to have somewhere where they can dry and store effectively for safety’s sake. But our cottage is made of manure and straw and it’s quite old. The moisture level is quite high, I think it’s often 60%, easily everyday. And so getting things to dry, because you want moisture to get down to about 10-15%, it’s very difficult. It’s also quite difficult to find something that measures that moisture accurately. Apart from the snap test as well, that’s always quite good.

There is a way forward, which is that if you dry things until they seem to snap, and gentle warm air is the best that I found. Then, once those things are dry, you can package them in paper and then put them in a big plastic barrel. That is a way to keep things properly dry or otherwise they have to be processed because they won’t last. But in general, dry things don’t last for more than 12 months really.

Morag:

I wanted to ask you, you mentioned before about when you dry things that it concentrates the active ingredients. I’d always wanted to ask someone who had knowledge about this, something in my brain says ‘When you dry things, you actually lose some of the living qualities of it. Where does that sit? Like do you lose something but concentrate something else? Do you understand what my question is? I’m not sure what I’m asking.

Anne:

Again, I think a lot of the tradition is around dried herbs because that’s one of the best ways people in the past had to preserve. Things like freezing and so on are quite new possibilities and we don’t really know how that works. But my interest is really good drying. So good practice in drying then preserves the most active ingredients. When you see herbs for sale in a shop and they look a bit brown in the bottles and jars you know, don’t buy them.

What you want to do is dry gently – so heat is not the key. If you heat herbs then they will start to denature. You tend to lose the active, particularly the aromatic ingredients. But if you can blow air across them, I like to use pillowcases. I bundle everything into a case and pillowcases have this really useful. I don’t know if they do this the world round but they have this really useful flap. You can hook them up or on a stick and then as I go past I give them a whack, which bundles up all the heavy stuff inside and they’re cotton so they can be washed. That’s a really great way to dry just at room temperature and then pack up in glass or paper. Always add a label! The number of times I’ve dried things and forgot to add the label…

Morag:

Before we go and talk about design, I wanted to ask you another question that I get asked a lot when I’m talking to different groups about the safety of different things, because we’ve become so disconnected from plants. As kids, a lot of people say ‘don’t eat little berries, don’t eat this, don’t eat that.’ And there’s this fear there. How do you know? When you’re making your home herbal remedies, what’s a safe thing? Can we harm ourselves as well? In? How do you educate around that?

Anne:

I mean, I think we need to avoid experimenting when we don’t know what we’re doing. Just recently, there’s been newspaper articles in the UK about hemlock being found on the road on the way to school that children walk past and shock horror! Of course, this hemlock’s been there for years! And it’s everywhere. It’s a beautiful looking plant, it’s very ferny. I would absolutely go with the view that we need to educate people so they can identify plants. The carrot family is a particularly good example because there are some toxic members alongside the sort of edible versions. When I’m doing talks and walks, I always warn people about that particular family, because it seems particularly problematic.

But the thing is that in the past, there’s been a lot of observations of what are safe herbs. So generally speaking, traditional recommendations that survived today are pretty safe, because just by experience, we know that they’re safe. We also know that herbs are very difficult to measure exactly in terms of their ingredients, there’s a lot of variation through seasons and the way they’re prepared. But in general, they’re very weak. If in doubt, many of the recipes in the past for things like wrist plasters would be used externally on the body. So maybe only 10% of the active ingredients would have been absorbed. And so using externally is a good way to go. 

I have quite a lot of thoughts about health and safety. But essentially, they boil down to education that people need to learn about plants. We have these lovely forest schools here in the UK, and I think they’re quite widespread now. And I’m really quite keen. One of the things we did at Holtwood was to have a training session for forest school leaders, where we could talk about health and safety in relation to health and medicine ideas. Because what we don’t want is to have children going out, not knowing what’s safe and what isn’t.

Morag:

Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you for clarifying that. There’s one other question on health and safety. What’s your take on comfrey?

Anne:

Okay, so comfrey is full of pyrrolizidine alkaloids and particularly in the root. When I was first training as a medical herbalist, we used to use the root to make an ointment and some herbalists still do, because used externally it’s relatively safe. Generally, they’re pretty bad for the liver and I would only use comfrey leaf nowadays to make the ointment. I would only recommend it for use externally. But since comfrey is also a wonderful fertiliser plant, there’s lots of other uses for it so we don’t need to completely chuck it out.

Morag:

Yeah, it’s fantastic! I have a lot in my garden, but there’s always lots of questions about it. Thank you for clarifying that too. So Holtwood! You transformed a conifer forest into an edible and medicinal forest garden. Can you tell us a little bit about what it looked like and your process? What was your motivation for taking a piece of land like that and how long did it take? Lots of questions all bundled up in one, sorry!

Anne:

So, I was trained as a medical herbalist, so I had a bit of a career in adult and further education, managing programmes and meanwhile, I trained as a medical herbalist. As I went along, I found it really odd that so many of the herbs that I was buying from my dispensary like Hawthorn, Berry tincture? I mean Hawthorn hedges? There’s millions of them in the UK. And yet the Hawthorn berries were coming from Eastern Europe. I just couldn’t kind of put it together so I started to learn to make a lot of my own tinctures and I thought, ‘Well, can’t I grow them as well?’

I got in my head that I wanted to be able to harvest particularly trees and shrubs. Then my partner Kay and I discovered that there’s a lot of small woodlands for sale in the UK, which are broken up from larger woodlands that have been sold off. We discovered this hectare of Sitka spruce in North Devon, and it had been up for sale for five years, nobody was interested in it!

When we actually went to look at it, we walked down a hill through the spruce and we discovered that the bottom was a meadow leading onto the River Torridge. Just straight away we went ‘great! Let’s buy it!’ So we grabbed the money somehow and bought it with the idea that we would gradually fell all these conifers. There were about 1000 Sitka spruce, they were all very neatly planted in rows. I think it had been an insurance company investment in the 1960s so they were about 40 years old.

Anyway, the idea was to gradually fell those trees and replant. As it turned out, it’s not that easy to just fell a few trees – it’s actually easier to have help from a friendly contractor to clear the lot. We ended up with a bomb site for Sitka Spruce stumps and the story unfolded from there. A lot of this experience is in the book, The Medicinal Forest Garden Handbook. Somewhere I have an archive about that process. So now, which bit of the question has not been answered yet? 

Morag:

From the bomb site, how long did it take for you to create the forest garden? What were the starting points in that transformation?

Anne:

By that time, I was living in Devon and I had done some permaculture training. So I was fascinated with the idea of edges. I did a back of the envelope design, splitting this hectare up into about a dozen rectangular spaces with the idea that around the edges of all these little planted tree plots, would be introduced trees – I was very interested in North American trees particularly – then I could harvest them for use in my practice! There’s a wonderful organisation in the United States, United Plant Savers, and I did a six week placement with them when I retired from the university job and learnt a lot more about those beautiful North American trees where the United Plant Savers are trying to make sure that they are sustainably harvested.

I was able to look for trees, not just native trees, Oak and Ash and Willow and Birch and so on, but also introduced trees, ranging from a Snow Gum that I was talking about earlier, the smaller eucalyptus to Virginian Witch Hazel (Hamamelis virginiana) which is North American, Prickly Ash (zanthoxylum americanum) – zanthoxylum species from North America and so on. We had some wonderful volunteer help and we started to plant up the bomb site area. We have got it fenced to stop deer coming in, which is just about feasible to fence a hectare. I’m not sure if you could do it for larger areas. So it grew like topsy.

Morag:

How high did you have to create the fencing system to keep the deer out?

Anne:

Two metres high is the minimum in the UK because we’ve got three types or more. We’ve got red deer, we’ve got fallow deer, we’ve got Muntjac, we’ve got so many. They all nibble everything. So the idea was that these sections would be coppiced and pollarded bit by bit and we could move around harvesting the produce. As it turned out, the trees just grew so rapidly, particularly at the lower parts where there was a lot of moisture from the meadow and river – the Willow and Cramp Bark (Viburnum opulus) – they just grew like topsy. So in the end, there was no way of keeping up with the coppicing regime.

Morag:

Can you say a little bit of the difference between coppicing and pollarding?

Anne:

Coppicing is cutting at the base, and pollarding is cutting it. Usually willows here would be meadowside willows, we pollard it quite low, maybe a metre high. A lot of pollarding in Europe is done more at five/six foot high.

Morag:

Have you tried any hedging as well on your site? Do you work with hedging methods or any other more traditional ways of managing trees?

Anne:

So I didn’t try it at Holtwood. But I have been talking with other organic growers about ways that medicinal trees and shrubs could be cultivated for commercial use here. For example, there’s so many miles and mock ups of Hawthorn as a hedge – it seems madness that they can’t be harvested. In this country, there’s no tradition and also other plants could be readily used in this way. But there’s an issue about how hedges are managed here. Because many hedges are cut sometimes by flail, which is quite violent, most years. Of course, Hawthorn only produces flowers and fruit on one year or older shoots. So it would be necessary to look at the way that hedges are managed. It seems to me that there’s lots of potential!

Hawthorn is used here because it’s very easy to grow and its stock proof because it’s quite thorny. It’s like a miniarchy type of forest. But it would need a bit of a study, I think to look at maybe with some sympathetic farmers who are smallholders? Why couldn’t they cut each side in alternate years so they could get the fruit? That sort of potential. We don’t have to rely on traditional methods, we could be looking ahead and thinking about what do the plants actually need to produce?

Morag:

I understand there’s quite a rewilding movement going on in the UK. How does what you’re doing and advocating for here fit with that rewilding context of turning UK’s land back to wild spaces for biodiversity? I don’t know if I fully understand the controversy around the rewilding that’s going on as well. So I don’t know whether I’ve misunderstood anything, but you could hopefully clear up my understanding of what’s going on!

Anne:

So I think that there’s a bit of a myth about rewilding that you just leave land to regenerate naturally. But in the original rewilding projects that have sparked off interests, like Isabella Tree and her farming set up in Southern England, they actually manage that process – they cordoned off areas, they stopped animals from going into certain areas, and so on. They had to negotiate with neighbours and walkers. I think rewilding is slightly a bit of a misnomer.

The other problem, of course, is when I’ve approached members of the Woodland Trust and other tree planting initiatives, that there’s been very much a focus on native trees and shrubs. Quite rightly, there is an interest in making sure that the sort of flora and fauna match up here. So I suppose my view would be, well it’s great to see rewilding, but well-established forests here have a fairly limited array of medicinal possibilities. So what interests me more is recognising that we do interfere with the landscape. We do want to manage our growing areas.

Also some plants can be quite invasive. For example, I’ve just written a blog on my website for the Medicinal Forest Garden Trust about Buddleia and I discovered that one flower spike of Buddleia may contain 40,000 seeds. Although it’s called the butterfly bush and very welcoming nectar wise for bees and butterflies, it’s actually not a good plant because the caterpillars can’t eat it here. So it doesn’t help the wildlife in the way that people might think it does. The important thing is to deadhead that plant. You can have it, so long as you deadhead it and don’t let the seed spread. That’s the kind of management that I’m talking about, is within sort of fenced or limited areas that we can grow medicinals that we really want to see and are just the right products.

Morag:

I was going to say I imagined though that by doing the plantings the way that you’re doing them, and bringing in that diversity of layers, niches and all different foods, that the biodiversity is naturally increasing on your site. Did you map that at all or notice the shift and change from the Spruce to when you left the site?

Anne:

Well, the problem is, it’s difficult to measure because as this global catastrophe of climate change has come upon us, it’s been so noticeable that there’s been a massive drop in diversity out there in terms of birds and insects. Our garden is a miniature permaculture project here. We do have birds, insects and butterflies, but still the numbers have dropped. I think one of the reasons is that the plant material, the habitats are very piecemeal. So the garden next door’s garden is quite bare and the same with fields. I think you mentioned hedges earlier and if we could start looking at ways to join up those habitats, then we might begin to reverse some of this decline. If we could join up more habitats, then we actually give the insects and wildlife a bit more of a chance to prosper.

Morag:

I was just asking about as well, do you find that the general movement in your country is tending more towards regenerative approaches? Do you find his more support for that? Has there been a shift? Because I know there’s been different agricultural bills come in and different support for expanding that approach? Are you seeing that on the ground yet? Do you get a sense that there’s a cultural shift happening?

Anne:

Yes, yes, there is. You know, we’ve had sort of ecological arguments on the Arches, and Farming Today, Countryfile – our TV programme on Sundays visits places that are doing good things. But it’s pretty hard going even though there are changes afoot in terms of funding, which will hopefully help pay farmers for what they call public goods.

It’s kind of difficult to get the messages across, because people want to know exactly how to do it. They want to be told what to grow, how to grow it. There’s still a lot of experience and experimentation to be gathered about what are the best ways. I think that it’s an evolving process and we do have a really good band of organic growers in this country. But there seems to be, not silos, but some separation between being organic, being agro-ecological and being permaculture. They do have a lot in common but they’re not all totally at one.

Morag:

You do have the Food and Farming Festival which seems to me like a great idea because all those different groups are coming together, at least there’s conversation going on!

Anne:

But notice that it runs at the same time as the official Oxford Farming Conference, which is where all the big landowners are.

Morag:

I didn’t know that, ok!

Anne:

There’s probably a lot more that could be said about how the economics of farming works here. But I discovered this up close when I tried to work with organic growers and colleagues in promoting a herb market. Because there was a huge amount of interest and people saying, ‘What should I grow? What should I grow? How do I dry it?’ and so on.

The problem arose that we couldn’t get buyers in the firms that use these plants to commit. Some of them would say, ‘Oh, well, we’ll buy any if you’ve got some leftovers after harvest!’ But no grower can commit land on the off chance that they might. So it was like a lottery! People can’t plant trees on the off chance that they might be a value at some point. We need some more well-funded projects to prove that some of these approaches could be used in a more commercially sustainable way.

Morag:

Yeah, great, Tell us more about the trust and what you’re working on with the trust.

Anne:

Okay, so it’s very much the Medicinal Forest Garden Trust is a bit of a fledgling organisation. During the pandemic, we decided that we needed to move on from Holtwood and it was sold at the time, so I went online. There’s a website, and because Holtwood had become very popular, we were running courses and they all had to be cancelled and money was refunded.

I went online, and tried to recreate those courses. So the Medicinal Forest Garden Trust is is kind of a focus, if you like. I try to do a monthly blog about particular trees, and how they might be used or places I’ve visited, and such like. What I want to do is to highlight examples of where medicinal forest gardening is going on. The idea really is just to spread the word of the possibilities. We’ve also got a little shop where we can sell a few things.

Morag:

Fantastic. And, and there’s a book that you’ve got coming out later this year?

Anne:

It’s coming out in October 2023. It takes the previous 40 trees and shrubs that were in the medicinal forest garden design book and adds another 40 that I wasn’t able to squeeze in last time. There’s a bit of information about cultivation and other uses so that it may be useful for permaculture growers, to see how it would fit into the context of a forest garden or some sort of project. As I was saying earlier, there are recipes with each species.

The idea is that there’s plenty of information to select for different sites, if you want to grow, but also perhaps foragers and forest schoolers, might be able to use it looking at trees and shrubs, not just in local woodland, but also in gardens and parks. Because there are plenty of ornamentals in the UK, coming from Asia, Australasia, and North America, particularly which can be used. The introductory chapters are mainly about how these plants might be used, giving people the possibility of substitutes. Once you know what you’re looking for, for example, you’re looking for a stringent action, maybe there’s an alternative if you can’t find a particular species of plant.

Morag:

Oh, fantastic. And I love the way you know that it’s global, that people will be able to pick it up from lots of different places across that kind of climate zone and be able to see all those uses. There’s a lot of things that are in and around our gardens wherever we look that are possible. So having that is absolutely amazing.

Anne:

Well, they’re all temperate plants so they would all be suitable in a temperate context.

Morag:

Fantastic. I was gonna ask you a little bit about your writing process as a final question, because as part of this writer series on Sensemaking in a Changing World. I’m always fascinated by how writers actually structure their thinking and manifest books. I’m always curious personally, because I’ve got lots of little book ideas that keep on swirling around my head, but I never actually find the time to make the discipline of doing it. So what was your process of actually writing? You’re on your third book now!

Anne:

There’s two sides to this one: getting someone interested in publishing! And the other side is actually writing it! So my background is in sciences, I’m a report writer, I don’t have much artistic ability. For me, writing is very often a case of getting loads of notes, putting them together on the computer, then printing them out and looking at them and thinking, ‘oh my god, that doesn’t make much sense’, and scribbling all over it, and going back to the computer. It’s an evolving editing process. The key being that I ended up with far too many words, like I remember with my research thesis, I ended up with twice as many – usually producing about 100,000 words and I ended up with over twice as much. Trying to reduce that is a bit like cutting off arms and legs. 

But the key to that is, what am I trying to say? I talked about the historical research that I was doing earlier. Then the two things I wanted to say was, how you could consider researching recipes in context and actually, when you do, you find that surprising result! Maybe they weren’t used so widely, after all. Similarly, I’ve had to focus on ‘what I am really trying to say’, in a nutshell, and then that helps to prune and focus. I am very much in favour of the introduction – what I’m going to say is all about ‘this, this and this’, ‘here is this and this and this’, and then concluding, ‘what I’ve said is this and this.’ So it’s a bit kind of stylized, but I don’t really know any other way.

The first question is how you get something published, don’t just send it off into the ether! You need to network and get to know the publishers, ideally, the editors and their names, and try to speak to them about your idea of what you want to produce. Because they’ve got to be with you on the idea. The first time I tried to publish my research, I was a bit knocked back by other people’s comments and ‘what you should do is this, what you should do is that’. I tried those things, and it didn’t work. I needed to go back to my original nutshell idea.

You need to stick with it. And a network until you find the right people who want to publish your book, or self publish – which I didn’t have much experience of.

Morag:

So I was wondering about the topics of your book, did you unfold the topics as something that emerged from your passion and interest? Or are they things from all the education that you’ve done – common questions that people ask and that? Where did you find yourself landing?

Anne:

The topics are a bit like those spider diagrams. They do come up from what people ask about and problems particularly. I think they kind of start from what I think people ought to know and then they’re slightly modified by not just what people ought to know, but what people actually are interested in. That’s probably why this third book has been produced because not everybody – although everybody ought to design a forest garden – not everybody has the possibility. So this third book is intended to give a much wider set of people from gardeners to foresters, and foragers and therapists, ideas about what they could be harvesting or growing.

Morag:

Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me today. I’ve learned so much and I really look forward to the release of your new book. I wish you all the best with the release and with all the things that you’re sharing through the Medicinal Forest Garden Trust!

Anne:

It’s been an absolute pleasure, thank you!

The post The Medicinal Forest with Dr Anne Stobart appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

Gav and I go way back to the early days of setting up Northey Street City Farm in Brisbane, where he’s now the education coordinator.

In 2020, Gav was awarded a Churchill Fellowship to investigate the potential of community food forests and orchards. Because of the pandemic his journey was delayed, but finally he got to visit 10 of the world’s exemplar sites and recorded 51 projects in the USA, Canada, UK, The Netherlands and Italy. We sat down shortly after his report was released for this chat.

In this conversation, we talk about what he learned, the insights and recommendations for establishing successful community food forest and orchard projects here in Australia (but obviously ideas that are  relevant around the world) as well as his path into permaculture and how his livelihood is connected.

Gavin’s Churchill Fellowship Report

You can listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Youtube and any other of your preferred podcast platforms.

Read the full transcipt:

Morag:

In this episode, I’m speaking with Churchill Fellow, community food forester, multi award winning landscape architect and permaculture educator, Gavin Hardy. He’s not far from me in Meanjin, Brisbane. Gav and I go way back to the early days of setting up Northey Street City Farm in Brisbane, where he’s now the education coordinator. In 2020, Gav was awarded a Churchill Fellowship to investigate the potential of community food, forests and origins. Because of the pandemic, his journey was delayed, but finally he got to visit 10 of the world’s exemplar sites, and actually went on to record 51 projects in the United States, Canada, UK, the Netherlands and Italy. So we sat down together shortly after his report about this was released for this chat.

In the conversation, we talked about what he learned, the insights and the recommendations for establishing successful community food, forest and orchard projects here in Australia. But obviously, the ideas are relevant around the world.

Welcome everyone to the Sense Making in a Changing World show. We have a special guest here today. He’s someone who I’ve known for decades, probably one of the first people I met when I first moved from the southern part of Australia to Brisbane, and got involved in the Northey Street City Farm project right at the very beginning. This is Gavin Hardy! Welcome Gav to the show.

Gavin:

Thanks, Morag. Thank you very much.

Morag:

So Gavin has just returned from an epic journey to five countries – the United States, Canada, UK, the Netherlands and Italy on a Churchill Fellowship. A little bit of a postponed one because of COVID not allowing you to go when you actually wanted this Fellowship. So you went to look at the potential of community food forests and orchards. In reading your report, you were saying you went to 51 sites, but you had 10 official sites. So you just immersed yourself over a period of what a couple of months in the world of community food forests. Some listeners calling in from around the world probably don’t know what a Churchill Fellowship is. So maybe, let’s begin there. And then we can go into the community food forest topic.

Gavin:

Yeah, that’s a good place to start. So the Churchill Fellowships have been around since the 1960s. They’re available in Australia, the UK, and as I also understand, Canada. People might have heard of Winston Churchill, a famous person who earned a lot of respect in Australia, particularly from returning soldiers from World War Two. When he passed away, a memorial was set up for Winston Churchill in the form of this educational scholarship trust.

The story goes that it’s the biggest fundraising effort ever in Australia, where I believe 2 million pounds were raised on one Sunday back in the 1960s. It wasn’t done using a smartphone or credit card, people were actually going door to door and getting cash. It’s the only time that the banks have ever had to open on a Sunday to receive all that money. It was a big fundraising success because Churchill had a lot of respect in the Australian community. 

From there, that Fellowship has been around and Churchill Fellowships are available to anyone from any walk of life. If you’re passionate about something that you feel you can only go overseas to learn this stuff, then you’re the person to do it – you have a chance. I’d been thinking about doing a Churchill Fellowship for 10 years, I’d been nagging my partner Amanda about it, throwing her crazy ideas about what I was going to do with my Churchill Fellowship, then finally landed a really, really cracker of an idea. In 2020, I was successful in the application. So very, very happy about that.

Morag:

Yeah, so the Fellowship funds you to travel around to an end journey and an investigation of your choice of topic, meeting the people that you know in the world who have the information you want and bring back to Australia to share with the community. That’s how I understand it, and they’re open every year to apply for, aren’t they? You don’t have to have a degree, just a passion, an experience and an opportunity to share – to want to share it back out to the community.

Gavin:

Exactly. You don’t need to be an academic to get a Churchill Fellowship. In fact, a few years ago, I met a bloke who was an acrobat. He was going overseas to learn new tricks and new techniques. So you can come from anywhere to do a Churchill Fellowship. Some of the other things that have come out of Churchill Fellowship are things like the Neighbourhood Watch Scheme. So some of this stuff has a really big influence in Australia.

Morag:

Thinking back to what we were talking about just before we turned on the recording, that is the value of the Churchill Fellowship, sending you out to do this research on really important things and then bring it back to document. So you’ve documented this, you’ve got your report now available on the website, so check that out if you’re listening! Let’s go into that. Why are you so passionate about this topic of community food forests? What about community food forests and community gardens really ignites your passion?

Gavin:

Yeah, okay. So I’ve been involved in community gardening, as you alluded to We were involved way back in the 90s of Northey Street, getting that up and running in Brisbane. Since then, I’ve been involved in community food projects for a long time and in multiple places. I guess I’ve always been inspired and excited by growing food in public places. It’s a social connection, I always meet great people and it’s about reclaiming the commons – turning places that’re underutilised into really thriving public spaces.

They’re unique places, they’re different from a park. They’re places where people can come together, learn how to grow food, and enjoy each other’s company, while also restoring the environment. It’s great for biodiversity and animals and urban nature – community gardens in general. So when you think about community gardens, you might think about the old style allotment gardens where people rent a plot to grow vegetables, maybe some fruit, but also shared gardening spaces. They’re probably the spaces I’m more excited about, where people collectively garden together. From there, my thinking has sort of evolved into food forests and orchards.

We’ve got a few examples of them in Australia, but we don’t have a lot so I wanted to travel overseas and understand how they work to compare them to the way we do community gardening here. I get really fired up about food forests because they seem to me to be very resilient, sustainable systems that’ve been around for a long time. Martin Crawford talks about forests in the subtropics and the tropics that’ve been around for 15,000 years. They’re a very old system and provide copious amounts of food. So I’m really interested in that. And then orcharding as well. Orchards are probably a bit more of a basic form of food forestry. But the orchards are things that people understand a bit more readily than food forests.

Morag:

So what’s your definition of a community food forest?

Gavin:

Good question. So, food forests. Typically, all food forests mimic the patterns that you might find in a natural forest. If people think about the forests that I visited, perhaps at a national park or local bush land, forests have layers – so think about the tallest trees in the canopy layer, there might be a lower tree below that and then shrubbery. Then the herbaceous layer at various levels and at the ground level up to your chest height. Think groundcovers and vines. So we see that pattern repeatedly through nature. Food forests mimic that pattern, mainly with edible plants for humans and support species. The reason why that’s happened is because forests are one of the most abundant ecosystems on the planet. Perhaps the coral reefs and the underwater seaweed forests are more productive in terms of biomass. But forests certainly up there in terms of their biomass.

So if we can mimic those structures and relationships in food forests, then we get a huge amount of food out of them. So that’s a food forest. They’re quite complex, in some ways, and to understand them, starting with an orchard is a much simpler thing. An orchard is typically orderly rows of fruit and or nut trees, traditionally on pasture grazed by sheep, cattle or ranging poultry through them. These days in an urban setting, the animals have generally been replaced by the lawnmower. So there must be a much simpler system. I don’t think most people understand what an orchard is. They’re part of the cultural landscape.

Morag:

I see lots of food forests in people’s backyards. In rural homesteads, there’s usually sections of food forest and I see a number of food forests in parts of community gardens, because of my experience of being involved in Northey Street City Farm and other similar projects. I wonder what you’ve noticed as being the different challenges that you’ve come across to establish community food forests, as opposed to community orchards because doing it in your own backyard, it’s okay, you get to choose and you can decide how you want to design it. But what challenges have you found for the establishment of commons based food forests?

Gavin:

Yeah, that’s a great question. So there’s a few different challenges. Some of these challenges are common to all community food projects – allotment shared gardens, an orchard, or a food forest. And some of them are specific to a food forest. I can go through some of them. One major one is fundraising, bringing a group of people together to do work in public space requires funds. How do people do that? So that’s one particular challenge. In my overseas work, I found out a whole whole range of different strategies that people are using to fund themselves. Some of these operations are big, they’re half a million dollar charities that are rolling out lots of food funds to all over their regions. So funding is definitely a challenge for folks, motivating volunteers – a really, really common issue across community food projects all across the country.

If there’s anyone watching all this has been involved in a community garden, you’ll know that the volunteer effort is keeping up the motivation is another really big challenge. My work overseas demonstrated that there’s a whole lot of different strategies. Perhaps we’ll talk about the strategies a bit more, but keeping people involved and interested, how do you do that?

So that’s another key to challenge, getting groups united. How do we work together as humans? We often work together well, but sometimes we don’t. Have you noticed? So groups have evolved different, different strategies around resolving conflict, or in a more positive sense, working with that diversity of opinion. What are the tools in the toolkit for bringing in people’s different ideas? How do we sift them and filter them and bring them together to create better ideas from all those individual ideas? So as groups overseas, particularly I’m thinking of Beacon Food Forest in Seattle – some great processes around how they do that.

They’re probably my top three challenges in that community food forest space. Particularly focusing on food forests, we might think about education. As I was saying, food forests are quite complex, aren’t they? And how do you convey that complexity in a public setting? People are coming into a space and going, ‘Oh, what’s this? What’s this all about?’ It might look like a collection of trees that most folks won’t even recognize as a food forest. So how do you get the message across? We can talk about signage by examples of how to communicate the message.

Morag:

Yeah. That’s a lot of really great points to drop in there. I wonder whether another one would be about communicating with the land owners, land managers, land stewards? What’s that relationship? How do you communicate with the local council or whoever it might be? Has that been something that came up as being a really big thing? I know you’ve been on both sides of that conversation, I’ve worked with in council as well. What challenges are there and how do we overcome some of those challenges in communicating this idea of a different wave of public landscape?

Gavin:

Yeah, we talk about councils, but more generally, we talk about the landowner. In Australia, that’s generally the local council, because people want to do work in a public open space or parkland, but it can also be the local church, it can be the Scout den, it can be the local library. There’s lots of different places where this stuff is being integrated, even the local cemetery. I came across a big orchard in a cemetery in Philadelphia. Conversations with different landowners, that’s important. It’s taking people on this journey, talking about the benefits, talking up the benefits of community food forests, particularly in an urban setting. There are examples of food forests in rural and regional settings as well.

But it’s talking about the tremendous benefits and in my work overseas, I sort of categorised four different benefits. One of them being biodiversity, so the fauna and flora in a place. So some of those projects are immense in what they’re doing in biodiversity. So a beacon food forest, for example, has 1000 different species of plants. Wow, that’s crazy. Not 1000 plants. 1000 species!

Morag:

How big is Beacon? What’s the scale?

Gavin:

It’s relatively small. Let me see if I get this right, it’s just over three acres in size.

Morag:

That’s amazing.

Gavin:

Yeah, it’s just wedge with this incredible biodiversity. The Agroforestry Research Trust, Martin Crawford’s site in the UK, his Dartington site has about 300 species of plants. In the Picasso food forests in Italy, another 300 species. Now why is the diversity of plants important? Because it helps us support a diversity of animals, of the fauna. And so the Picasso food forest recorded about 300 species of fauna. On their tiny little site, their site is half and half a hectare. And they’ve recorded 50 species of birds on their site, and we’re not talking about fungus or mycelium either.

Morag:

Just the visible things that you can see and measure easily, yeah.

Gavin:

Yeah, so the fungal networks as well, the different types of fungi, they’re recording in those places, it’s quite immense. Some of these places started off like Beacon, Picasso started off as just grass fields, they were pretty low on diversity.

Morag:

Biodiversity like that, visibly showing the beauty and the benefit of having more biodiverse spaces. What you notice when you pass by a place like that, the feeling of coolness, maybe on a hot day, or the sound of the birds and the insects or the smell of a flowering citrus. There’s so many other intangible qualities that are really hard to measure, but it’s that quality of life that comes when you are in proximity to those spaces.

Gavin:

Exactly. And that’s a beautiful segue into one of the other benefits, which is health and well being. In my work, I was going into places and recording my thoughts and feelings. In these places, when people have a look at the report, you’ll see some little breakout boxes about how I was feeling in some of these places. Generally the feeling is one of total security and just really lovely places to be in, like the amenity value of these places is immense.

Parking up under a shady apple tree or a walnut tree as I did in Canada and the USA, just feeling like I could be there all day. No reason to go, just totally relaxing, unthreatening, not a threatening environment at all, just very welcoming spaces. So I recorded that. And I think it’s important for us as a movement to be talking about those sorts of health and wellness, that amenity benefit.

Another amenity benefit I was getting was just the social connection. So I attended some harvesting events put on by some of these amazing organisations that advertise different events that are happening in the orchard. It might be a pruning event, or a mulching thing that’s going on. But I was there during the harvest season. So I was attending apple picking sessions in Seattle, in Victoria, in British Columbia, on Vancouver Island and in London. Those events are fantastic, just for connecting with people – just having a laugh, sharing stories, sharing the yields, having a bite on the fruit and picking big quantities of apples. Feeling really great because those apples are taken to charity given to people or actually processed into bespoke ciders or ales.

Morag:

What were some of the other people saying that you met up with? Why do they go to those places, why do they come along and volunteer? You must have asked a lot of people I imagine.

Gavin:

Yeah, so you know, folks are coming along for different reasons. Some people are doing a permaculture course and learning about how these places operate and getting some information about how they could design an orchard or a food forest. Other people are just attending because they love it. They’ve done a few in the past and that’s their social connection.

When I was in London I actually met someone at the harvest event. There was this lovely woman who flew in from Israel to attend this event! There were a couple of other community food related events for a week that she had in London. The jet set coming in to attend this event because she just felt she didn’t have that opportunity in Israel. And obviously, she had a bit of money behind it to do it! But she wanted to come and get the benefit of that social connection.

The commonality is social connection. People coming in to get a bit of the yield, take a bit of that home. It’s either as a table fruit or to turn it into apple sauce and then make a lot of that to give to their friends and neighbours. So there’s all sort of stuff going on in the informal economy as well.

Morag:

Yeah, so there are two benefits: health and wellbeing. What’s the first one that you mentioned about biodiversity? What are the other key benefits that you pegged?

Gavin:

I might just have to pull up my report. There’s so much in this report, or even I forget what’s in there. Let me just go through a little bit. One of the other benefits is obvious, about food sustainability. I guess this is in a few categories. So food justice and food sovereignty. But maybe all of your listeners and viewers know what those concepts are about.

Morag:

I’m sure some people would, but it’d be worth just distinguishing the difference between those two things.

Gavin:

So food justice and food sovereignty. I talk about those definitions as part of the report. In a nutshell, food justice is about allowing anyone to have access to food. Now, in our country, we might not see that as a problem. But in some parts of the world, that is a massive problem. In rural, regional and remote parts of Australia, that’s a thing too. So allowing people to have universal access to food, particularly fresh food. Okay. Food sovereignty is about allowing different cultural groups to be able to make decisions about the way that they grow, cultivate and process food in their own way. They’re two very important differences, very important concepts in the whole food sustainability movement. It’s not just about yields, it’s about the cultural interaction between food and culture.

Morag:

I was going to ask you, how much did you see those key parts being part of the reason that people were doing this work?

Gavin:

Yes. So in my report, I talked about how there are hundreds and possibly thousands of community groups that are in the northern hemisphere who are motivated by those concepts. What they’re doing, they’re installing the food forest in the orchards on properties that they manage – they might even own it, most probably lease it. They’re restoring old orchards on abandoned public land. Then there’s groups that are going out who are harvesting the urban orchard, like the event that I attended. So there’s a group in Seattle, for example, called City Fruit, and they harvest the urban orchards. So Seattle reportedly has 7000 fruit trees in public places. Which is quite remarkable when you think about it.

They’re going around and harvesting those fruit trees and then distributing that food to charity so that people get access to fresh table fruit. The fruit that’s a bit spoiled, a bit buggy or a little bit bruised, will be processed into ciders and beverages. And that’s fruit that would normally just go to waste. It would just rot on the ground.

Morag:

I think this is really interesting because a lot of comments that I’ve heard about why local authorities might not want to have urban fruit trees is because of the problem of the fallen fruit and the public health issues that entails. Whereas when you combine having an organisation and supporting an organisation to be able to engage in this work, I wonder how that group supported itself? Because if they’re harvesting it to then give it back to charity just harvesting from public fruit, what’s the relationship between the public fruit and this group?

Gavin:

Yeah, that’s a great question. It’s a big question. So, I guess there’s a couple of things with local authorities generally trying to get rid of the fruit trees, because they dump all this rotting fruit on the ground. So these organisations are set up to ameliorate that problem, really helping out the local authority, eliminating that issue. The groups are funded in really interesting and diverse ways to be able to offer that service. So they’re going around and harvesting the fruit trees for no charge. And I was like, wow, how do they do that? They’re employing five or six or more people. How are they offering a livelihood, but getting a service for next to no charge or free? The way they’re doing that is partnering.

So there’s this partnership model that I talk about in the report. So an organisation like city fruit, they’ll partner with charitable food banks and other organisations like meal programs, organisations that are helping out people in need. The funders, they’ll say that City Fruit is helping out the charitable food sector. And now they want to fund City Fruit because they’re an enabler for the food bank and they’re offering fresh food. A lot of food banks are offering people processed food, but now they’re offering fresh food. So funders will come in and fund that as well as the donors, the sponsors and everyone else.

The other thing that these groups do really well is their fundraising themes, their demons when it comes to the fundraising stuff. They have social media people, they’ve got fundraising experts, a board of directors or management committee, they’re all out there every day promoting what they do. They’re amazing networkers. City Fruit in Seattle has hundreds of different funding sources coming in – philanthropic foundations, government grants, donors and sponsors, individual donors and they’re running small businesses on the side, which also promotes the organisation and provides an income. They’ll be running tree care services, they might run a gourmet food tour, they’ll be making ciders and ale and they’ll be selling that in partnership with a beverage provider and getting 10% of the profits.

Morag:

What I’m hearing you talk about is really a local food ecology, this ecology of organisations that exist together and there’s no kind of coordinating body, but they’re all interconnected. There’s obviously a conversation that happens amongst them and it seems like there’s a culture of local food in that city. But I wonder whether there are events or advocacy organisations that bring together those different sectors. I would imagine the same in Brisbane, if we had organised spaces where all those different groups could come in and be in conversation together, more of that partnership and collaboration would happen – not to control each other, but just so more of those connections can be made. Is it about creating more context for connection to happen to support these? Do you think that’s like a key part of this?

Gavin:

Yeah, exactly. There’s some amazing organisations overseas and we’ve got some good ones here too. So when you were talking then I thought about Sustain in Melbourne, they’re running an agriculture month in November and you were involved last November and so was I. Sustain is about bringing different groups together and talking about urban agriculture with community food as part of that story and bringing different organisations together to have one voice, to be in alliance. The shareable food banks are in that conversation as well, different organisations, universities which are really important players in this. Some of the organisations overseas that I met with, they’re partnering with universities, post grads and undergrads are coming in and doing research on site, producing lots of data publications and that’s attracting funding, as well from government organisations because they can see some rigour and defendability there. So amazing stuff.

I talked about Sustain just then in Australia. Overseas, one of the big things that’s in the Pacific Northwest, in that area of Seattle and British Columbia, going down into Oregon, is the food policy councils, they’re big things. So they’re groups that come together to talk about food policy at a higher level, they bring in lots of different groups and network. Really getting the conversation going with the power brokers in government and in corporations. You’re right, we need to bring in different groups and talk about what our commonalities are. My role at Community Gardens Australia, I’m at the operational level, but I know at the board level, they’re really deeply committed to that conversation with like minded groups.

Morag:

Did you recently have a meeting in Canberra? Were you at that meeting? Was that a policy meeting? What happened at that one?

Gavin:

Yeah, so I was involved in the Canberra Urban Agriculture Forum. That was a great meeting, probably 50 people in the room. One of the senators was there, Senator David Pocock, he spoke for a bit – very supportive of what we do in urban agriculture in general and community food. Then there were four Churchill Fellows talking, so Dr. Nick Rose, Abbey Lacey, who is the president of Community Gardens Australia, and Fiona Buting who’s the Canberra president. They’re all really interested in urban incubator programs for young farmers, and of course, you know all these people Morag.

So that was a great forum, there was a lot of discussion about what’s the future for Canberra in terms of local food? You know, Canberra only gets 5% of its food locally. It’s very dependent on imported food. Not sure what the definition of local is, whether it’s within the ACT boundary or not. But, yes, there’s so much potential in Canberra for a local food movement. They’ve got lots of open space. They’ve got a great cohort of people who know how to grow food. There’s already a small little orchard industry. It’s been around for decades in Canada.

Morag:

And an amazing food co-op movement as well. There’s a brilliant food co-op, right in the heart of the city. So we’ve done three benefits. Let’s get to the fourth one. What did you see is the core fourth benefit of food forests?

Gavin:

So just going back a little bit to food. I talked about food sustainability, but I didn’t talk about yields. Some of these organisations are getting amazing yields. So in 2021, the Lifecycles Project in Canada, they harvested 79 tons of apples from the urban orchard. It’s a city of 350,000 people, that’s the size of Victoria, from public and private apple trees. So getting significant amounts of food. In a typical year, 2021 was a big year through North America for yields. But typically they get 15 to 20 tons every year of fruit. So really good stuff. Some of those harvest events like the London harvest event in one morning got half a ton of apples from five trees.

Morag:

So how much of the community food forests are actually measuring their yield? Because when you go out to industrial agriculture you measure how much wheat you get. Whereas when you come into a food forest, you can measure the apples because the apples are a thing. But to look at that whole system of 300 species which mostly you’re not harvesting at all, because it’s part of the system itself. It’s a completely different model. How do you then use that? What are the kinds of indicators and monitoring systems that are being used to talk about yield in a way that can compare? Because it’s not apples with apples, you know, it’s a completely different beast!

Gavin:

Yeah. It’s a particular challenge. The orchards, the community orchard organisations, they are measuring with portable scales and that’s a relatively easy thing to do. But because of this tremendous diversity you get in some of these food forests, unless you’re walking around with your portable scales, weighing every single plant that you’re harvesting from, it’s a very tricky thing to do. And I think we’re not there yet with getting the metrics, there was a food forest that recently harvested 1700 kilos. So they’ve got a little bit of metric there, but they’re also 24/7 open as well, they encourage people to come in and harvest.

Morag:

Who knows? I mean, from City Farm and other community gardens and universities, you encourage people just to harvest a leaf here and there. You have no idea how many leaves have come off, it’s not like you’re going to rip out the whole lettuce and weigh that to say, ‘Okay, we’ve got 100 kilos of lettuce today.’ It’s this constant flow and when you measure just yield you miss out on all the other benefits that you’re talking about. It’s really about taking those metrics to a different logical typing, stepping out from just quantification of kilos of food.

Gavin:

Exactly. What some of these organisations do really well is in their annual reports, they might talk about yield, but they’ll be able to put into metrics those non tangible benefits. So how many people got involved in events over the whole year? How many volunteers did they have? So they get those sorts of metrics too.

Morag:

I’d like to hear too how many people come to a community garden and take a cutting to get it happening in their own backyard as well? There’s so many perennial plants that can just have cuttings taken out and be spawning gardens everywhere around the city. That only comes through storytelling, doesn’t it? And being in interviews, it’s a different way of measuring the quantity. But that’s still about the quantity of food. But it’s not all in that measurement. It’s like you can’t measure the quality of wellbeing in Australia by measuring our GDP. It just doesn’t work, the kind of metrics are all wrong.

Gavin:

Although that particular metric is all wrong, GDP, and I think a lot of people don’t understand that we’ve got a big problem with that. Yeah, so metrics is only part of the story. It’s the conversations, the stories we’re getting from people involved in the experience. They’re really important too. And both of them collectively add up. Talking to the government, talking to decision makers about the benefits and that’s what some of these leading organisations overseas, some in Australia do really well to communicate those messages in a very effective way.

So anyway, we digress, we were talking about food. I’m gonna go into the fourth benefit, capacity building. This is all about community capacity, increasing our ability to know about food, to grow food and to generally become more autonomous and skilful people. When I was in Miami, I was with this tremendous program called Food Forests for Schools Program. So this is an organisation that’s to date installed 28 food forests in elementary schools. In Miami, they’re aiming to get it up to 51 in Miami County.

The food forests are very integrated into the school, they wrap around the buildings, they’re part of everyday life, the kids see them all the time. The kids are learning in the garden, they’re learning their science, maths and biology with approved curriculums in the gardens – their scores are going right up. But the other thing they’re learning about is nutrition and how to grow food. They’re getting lessons from really inspiring teachers and they’re also taking food home to Mom and Dad.

Morag:

What a brilliant project!

Gavin:

It is an amazing program. One of the really delightful stories I heard was, a lot of these kids come from poor neighbourhoods. They come from immigrant families from the Caribbean, Cuba or Central America and they’re living with the extended family. So Mum and Dad, Grandma and Granddad, they’ll know about the foods being grown in the food forest, because that’s what they used to grow back home. But Mum and Dad might not. So the story I really love that I heard was that in some of these households, Papa or Mama is teaching the kids how to use the foods, there’s cross generational stuff that’s going on through food. Really good!

That’s an example of capacity building where the kids are really learning about being more independent, how they can grow food at home. They might only have a small patch where they’re able to do that, but they can grow a little bit. They can grow stuff in the food forests at school, they have after school gardening clubs, amazing stuff going on there. And again, the funding models are all about philanthropy, corporate money, USDA and Environmental Protection Agency money coming in and partnerships with universities.

Morag:

So the schools themselves don’t pay for these, the school gets the programs for free, and the children and the community get involved for free and the organisation that’s running this brings in that funding to enable their team to go out? Do they have teams that stay with those schools? Or do they train up people in the schools to be able to run those? How does that work? Do they keep ranging around them? Tell us more?

Gavin:

Yeah, it’s a fascinating place, isn’t it? So Food Forests for Schools, they have a team of six and they are dedicated to supporting teachers and school admin to continue maintaining the food forest once they’ve been established. Some will be there every year, at certain critical times of the year doing the maintenance on the gardens, because the school teachers don’t have the time. They just decide to come in, do the teaching, maybe teach enough to do an after school gardening club. But the team at Food Forests for Schools, they’ll be there supporting teachers, that’s for sure when they are funded to do that and that’s the power. That’s really the power of this funding model is your offering of service. The school doesn’t have to pay for it. That money’s coming in from the general society which I think is a great idea.

Morag:

This service delivery model was something that you wanted to talk about. So this is obviously one of those kinds of models that works to make sure that people who need this or have places that can really be catalysts for change can access this. They have these food forests, which are demonstrations, their education, it’s food security, it’s intergenerational relationship building, it’s all of those things together and that’s valued. What are some of those other models that you’ve seen that are behind making these work? That’s what we need to have to roll out these projects everywhere. That’s what we need to know.

Gavin:

Yeah, so through this overseas work, I developed two different models. Food Forests for Schools is one of the examples of the multiple site service provider. So these are organisations that are providing a service to multiple sites, multiple places. Food Forests for Schools serviced multiple schools, then the orchard project in the UK delivered 540 orchards across the nation in seven different cities, working generally with underprivileged & deprived neighbourhoods for a no cost service. Another group in the Netherlands called Corporate De Underground – 16 food forests in the city of Rotterdam partnering with different groups, installing food forests in a fairly dense urban environment. So they’re multiple site service providers, their funding models are generally the same, the Rotterdam models are a little bit different.

The genius is providing a service for no or low cost, getting your funding coming from other sources and building a story that the general society believes in. Like ‘I want to be involved in that. I’ll fund that. That’s a great idea!’ And it’s defendable. You know, there’s no bullshit about it, this is real stuff, we can deliver on the ground, we’ve got the experience, we’ve got the runs on the board. Some of those groups, they took ages to get to that point, I mean you know what it’s like, you’ve been doing this for a long time. They’ve got to a point now where they’ve got a great story to tell. And that’s sort of how it works. So that’s one of the models.

The other model is the urban orchard service provider. So I talked about City Fruit in Seattle, and I also touched on the Life Cycles Project on Vancouver Island. So they’re harvesting the total stock of fruiting trees, shrubs and vines in a region. And again, they’ve got a great story and funders want to come in to fund. They’re helping out people in need, who are generally living in food deserts, where there’s no access to a fresh grocer or the food costs too much to buy fresh food. That’s a great story, so the funders will come in and find that.

So there are two models with that urban orchard service provider model, I think it can only really work in regions where you’re getting tons of yield. It doesn’t have to be apples. In the Pacific Northwest, it’s generally apples, pears, cherries, stone fruit, blueberries, kiwi fruit. Grapes are another thing. Once again, you’ll go into their annual reports and you’ll see all the metrics on all the different fruits they’re harvesting. Very good at recording that. But you know, in our country, in Queensland, it could be mangoes, could be…

Morag:

Macadamias, bunya nuts.

Gavin:

I think about regional Queensland. I think about the town of Bullin for example, remnant mango trees in that area. Now a big mango tree yields a lot of fruit in a season. I think further south, I think olives. I think of all of the olives through the Adelaide Hills. My god there’s so many olives that we could be harvesting.

Morag:

I know through where I grew up in Ringwood I would go ranging around and find all these plum trees. Those really dark purple coloured ones, they were street trees everywhere. They were just planted because they had a beautiful colour but no one ate the fruit or harvested them. You know, wherever you are, you can find something.

Gavin:

Yeah, there’s fruit trees around in every region of course, but I think for this service to be viable, you need to be getting tons of fruit. There’s potential in Australia, but we need to do some more research on what’s viable.

Morag:

Maybe it doesn’t exist yet. But maybe that’s part of the model of actually saying, ‘this is a model that can work. Therefore, we need to encourage more fruit tree planting in public places.’ That could be part of that support, because up until now, it’s not been supported, because there’s not been the infrastructure. So you can say, ‘Okay, we now have a model that can work in tandem with that, we can get rid of the food deserts in the city. Particularly with the cost of fresh fruit, this could be put together as a combined package to present.’ It might take a while to get off the ground but that way…

Gavin:

Yeah, so we could set up the multiple sites service provider. Now, I’ve had conversations with people in Canberra around this route, setting up something similar to the Philadelphia Orchard Project. We’ve delivered 67 community orchards throughout the city of Philadelphia since 2008. And we see Canberra is something that could be done similarly. We could set up that sort of service delivery model or get community forests all through the city.

Those trees go up, then we could set up an urban orchard harvesting model, as well. Then we can set up some little side businesses and fruit tree care businesses. For example, one of the things I noticed with arborists in our city – another great job – they look after our trees, but that’s specialist knowledge in arborists, looking after fruit trees to increase their production. Arborists generally don’t have that. That’s a real niche that we could be filling out through that model.

Morag:

There are just a few courses out there in terms of urban orchading. I know the Berklee College of Horticulture has started running some really innovative courses in managing urban food systems. So it does require these multiple phases of change simultaneously. I come back to that thing that those bigger conversations need to be had so the work that sustains us can keep going – we need to support and amplify that and have conversations in each of the regions far more often. Like the Melbourne based ones, we need those conversations happening everywhere.

Gavin:

Absolutely. I think that’s going to happen next Urban Agriculture Month. I believe there’s going to be a big forum in Sydney. I’m trying to get the mob up here into Brisbane, we need to have conversations in Brisbane and Queensland, so much potential in our great state. And everything about education! So there’s a certificate in community orchading that’s coming out of the UK. I’m talking to the CEO of the Orchard Project, Cath Roslin, about bringing that program to Australia. Then as the Master Fruit Tree Steward Program comes out of Seattle, I’d love to bring that program into Australia as well. So there’s programs and education out there for that sort of capacity building. That’s another revenue stream for that urban orchading model.

Morag:

Yeah, and how to support teachers as well, like that kind of model from down in Miami. That would be amazing!

Gavin:

There’s a lot of learning about how to develop curricula. Working with the teachers on this is a dynamic duo, Eddie Rosinos and Eddie Lobelo in Miami who just spent major amounts of time working with teachers, developing curriculum, making sure it works for them, making it seamless. You’ve got to make it seamless for those people. And they cracked it, a lot of hard work but they cracked it.

Morag:

That myceliation is what we need, you know? We need education on so many fronts – from education for the policymakers, for those who do the nuts and bolts, those who are rolling out education programs for the children – there’s so many opportunities. This is what I see all the time when you apply a permaculture lens or a community orchard lens to what we’ve got. Now, there are so many niches that need filling, and we need to be in conversation together to bring out this change and make it visible. I guess the other thing that you mentioned too, volunteers and people, what were your inspirations around it? What made people really want to come and be engaged? To keep them engaged and in conversation with each other in a generative way, as opposed to a degenerative, not degenerative, but dissipative is the word I’m looking for.

Gavin:

Yeah, so some of those groups that are there do amazing work. Beacon Food Forests, before COVID, at a typical working bee, they’d get 100 people to a working bee, how did they do that? Post COVID they’re getting 20 to 30 plus numbers are moving up again. So my observations, I do that in a few ways. One of the things is, it’s very simple, they make sure they have fun. So, you know, we’re all busy people, we make choices about our social life. ‘I’m gonna go to the stuff, it’s fun.’ They make sure they have a bit of fun, they’ll do a bit of work and at the end of the work session, they’ll sit up on the benches with an amazing view of the city, they’ll sit back with a drink and a few hamburgers and share some food.

It’s just a really pleasant and convivial atmosphere. So that’s my number one word is ‘fun’ with volunteers – making sure you’ve got your timing right for the volunteers. Making sure that you’ve got your session that works in the neighbourhood, the timing. Beacon runs a session called the Sunset Lab. So the Sunset Lab is where you come down just after work on a Tuesday afternoon. I think it’s not going to get 100 people but you might get 20 to do some work. Again, meeting at sunset, kick back a few beers, off you go, next thing. That’s the kind of thing they do really well.

The other thing that Beacon Food Forests does really well is this inclusive model of sociocracy or dynamic governance, where everyone gets a say in how the place works. Every idea is valued. There’s a process for determining whether your idea is gonna get up all night, you might not but at least people are listened to. And so people, volunteers feel like they own the place. ‘Yeah, I’ve got this sense of ownership in the place,’ they feel that they’re an integral part and they’re really important.

Some of the other groups put volunteers front and centre. Because if you don’t have volunteers… they’re the most important part of the whole operation really. Getting in and putting programs in place to support them. So they’ll be the lead orchard volunteer program in Philadelphia. Those people are getting supported, they’re allowed to act autonomously in orchards all around the city. But there’s this group that’s got their back.

Morag:

I guess with that, too, there’d be some sort of supportive education. So they’re learning great skills that they get to take home, some cuttings or food or other things that they can take back. So there’s that, which to me is such an important part because often people can feel like, ‘Oh, it’s just me coming in here, and I’m doing all the hard yakka.’ But someone else is making it as long as there’s that engagement and I think putting the volunteers front and centre is critical.

Gavin:

So it’s mission critical. The lead orchard volunteers or the neighbourhood ambassadors in Seattle, they’ll get all the training and they’ll get all the equipment. The funds come in, and they’ve got the equipment, and that’s how they’re doing the work. It’s, again, it’s seamless.

Morag:

It’s that autonomy, because with autonomy also comes a level of respect. That level of respect, it’s that purpose, and connection. And it’s really very simple, isn’t it?

Gavin:

That those people are celebrated in the neighbourhoods where they work, as well. You know, there’ll be blog posts going out on social media, all that. That’s all happening. Just lots of different ways of motivating volunteers. The other thing I noticed was by having really cool buildings like bespoke designed structures and spaces that people can come into, they want to be there because they’re just really cool to hang out in. I saw that quite a bit.

That’s another thing that attracts people to a place is we don’t generally see and customise buildings in our urban spaces unless they’re really high end, very expensive, big end of town stuff. Those local, little bespoke everyday neighbourhood structures & buildings are the ones that are really interesting. They caught my eye and certainly other people that will be attracted to those spaces.

Morag:

One of the things that I noticed too, in some of the community gardens in St. Berkeley was just the beauty of the art that entered into the space. So the quality of the mosaics of the centrepiece where people would meet, like you’d sit on these beautifully mosaic seats and a mosaic floor in the middle that had just just an incredible feeling being there. Then when you looked out into the garden space, there were the trellises, where they would be growing up. 

They were designed, it was like this web of life of trellis, not just something with a piece of wire stuck out, it was actually beautiful. I think with the buildings like all the infrastructure, with all that thought and presence and bringing in that culture into it, it’s not just a production space. It’s a space that you want to be and express your sense of belonging to a place.

Gavin:

Yeah, exactly. They’re inspirational places that have been crafted.

Morag:

Yeah crafted, that’s the word.

Gavin:

That’s really, you know, they might have a lot of good design thought behind them. But at the end of the day, when you go to build it, there’s a lot of craft that’s going on. It’s often built by the locals as well. So there’s a story behind it as well that people can relate to. I think that’s what really attracts people to this place. Then the volunteers will come in, and want to be there. The combination of all those different things I talked about really works.

Morag:

It’s a process of attraction, isn’t it? Rather than saying ‘we’ve got to do this, we’ve got a job to do’, it’s how to invite people to come and play with you to be part of something that’s going to be really joyful and make you feel like you’re able to make a contribution while really nourishing your your own soul.

Gavin:

Yeah. One thing I’d like to say to listeners and viewers, perhaps a little bit controversially, is I’m not into this term, the working bee. I’m into this term, the ‘work party.’ Let’s make it a party! You know, let’s make it fun! I think that by changing the words & terminology, the phrases can be really helpful.

Morag:

Yeah, absolutely. Because it does, it shifts your relationship with the concept. And you know, you go along there expecting to have a bit of fun so you bring your sense of humour, you bring the food, you bring up some music and bring your guitar and yeah! So I wonder whether you could just let people know, what’s the best way to get involved in this kind of movement? Either here for the listeners in Australia, but also in other parts.

What’s the way that you are seeing based on this research you’ve just done, now that it’s all fresh for you? How do you see that we can turn up the dial on this and really amplify the community food forest movement around the world? Because it feels like it’s something that for all the reasons we’ve talked about, that it can just be so important and nourishing for communities. Whether they’re urban or rural communities or places of restoration of biodiversity, restoration of landscapes, or also addressing climate change and well-being – all simultaneously with this one kind of concept.

Gavin:

Yeah, I think in some ways, the answer is quite simple. Wherever you live, there’ll be a community to get involved in something. There’ll be a Scout Den or it’ll be Girl Guides, Residents Association, a local library. Have those conversations with those people about  ‘learn about this amazing idea called the community orchard! Or the community food forest!’ I think that could be a very good thing to have at the scalp then. Or down at the swimming pool or in a local sanitary or at the footy field or in any leftover space. Probably don’t plant the orchard in the footy field, that might be a problem. But wherever you are. I guess what I’m about is trying to embed this stuff in the everyday fabric that we currently have.

For most of us, we live in a suburban place or an urban place. We’re surrounded by community institutions and are also surrounded by green space. Just have those conversations with people, fight to get the conversation rolling. If you’re involved in community gardening, you already have those conversations about orchards, food forests. Maybe they don’t have one of them yet, or maybe they’re thinking about a different way of doing things. Moving away from the vegetable patch, going into more tree-based perennial food growing systems like the orchard or the food forests, to start having those conversations.

You can go to my website and look at my report and other people’s as well. All of the technical information is out there for how to do it. We have great designers here who know how to design a food forest technically. We’ve got a lot of good information about food forests and how to create them. But I think initially, it just started in the conversations. We also have stuff about all this learning about fundraising and motivating volunteers, these other sorts of challenges, how to overcome them. Go from there, that’s where I would start. Where you’re at, wherever you’re at. That’s the place to start.

Morag:

Yeah! Because you already have a set of relationships and a sense of belonging and that is the place to begin always isn’t it? With what you have with people that you know, and just start to let it roll from there

Gavin:

Obviously, if your kids are going to the local primary school and they don’t have a Stephanie Alexander kitchen garden yet, maybe get that started.

Morag:

For example, if there’s a group of people who go to their school and say, ‘Yes, we like this idea, can you bring in a video or examples of this?’ What would you point to if there was a group that was showing interest but needed more visuals and there’s not another in their local neighbourhood that they can just go and visit? Where would you point people to so they could say ‘okay, let’s have a little video day, or watch some videos, we’ll talk about this and we’ll see what we can imagine for our site.’ Where would you send people?

Gavin:

Okay, specifically for a school, you can go to my website and click on my YouTube channel, and I’ve got some videos of a couple of the school gardens in Miami. Also read my report specifically, I have a case study report. If people want that they can email me and get that case study report and read about the Food Forests for Schools Program. Go to the Food Forests for Schools website as well. There’s a couple of great videos on that webpage. Food Forests for Schools sits within the Education Fund, they’ve got a much bigger fund in Miami, but they’ve got a webpage just dedicated to Food Forest for Schools. They’re a unique program, I’ve not come across another food forest growing program in the world like that.

In Australia, we have the fabulous Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden program, more of a program dedicated to raised garden bed box gardens with vegetable growing and I think fruit trees as well. So that might be a starting point.

Morag:

Just taking a look at your report and all the different examples. And then like you said, your YouTube channel, you’ve got clips from many in the different places that you’ve visited. So that will be a good link and then launching from your report to many of the other different examples around.

Gavin:

Absolutely. Yeah, the more conversations, the better. I’m all about getting projects on the ground. All this research and stuff is great, we know that we need to do a lot more case study research, but I’m really into project delivery. I come from a project management, engineering, landscape architecture background, and that’s my focus – getting more and more projects happening on the ground.

Morag:

Yeah, great. Let’s see how we can make that happen. That’s so exciting. I think it’s just been wonderful that you’ve had this journey to bring all of that together, take the time to think this through and get some strategic points of where we can go, ‘Ah, right, that’s where we need to pay attention to this, these are the key things.’ I think, often we spend our time going out into the world and visiting places, but actually coming back and having, like the Churchill Fellowship, the opportunity to report back. Thanks for taking that time to do that, Gav.

Gavin:

Yeah, and as I was saying before, I’ve been thinking about the Churchill Fellowship for 10 years. I’ve been reflecting for a long time about the gaps in our knowledge about delivering community food projects in a more effective way. And so they were the things I was targeting, governance, and how all these people make a quid? How do they fundraise their operations, manage volunteers? How do they give volunteers confidence to go up a ladder harvesting apples, three metres off the ground? Just, how do they do that? So really, reflecting a lot on that. And COVID was interesting too, because it delayed when we went overseas, but that was actually a good incubator, thinking even more about our project. I think in the end, it’s got a much better outcome as a result.

Morag:

Yeah. Great! I’m sure people are really interested in having you as a guest speaker to share your results. Are you open to that, if people have organisations for you to speak at?

Gavin:

I’m on the road showing what I’m doing at the moment, I’m trying to get around as many places as I can, whether it’s in person or online. I’m also doing some ABC Radio stuff. I think that I’m doing something for outback Queensland radio tomorrow afternoon. Yep. I want to get out to regional radio and just talk about this stuff and get people enthused and excited about it.

Morag:

Yeah, brilliant! Okay, so listeners, if you just heard that, that’s an open to get in touch with Gav to see how you can activate your community food projects, your many fruit orchards and food forests! Here in Australia, at least, and you have the possibility to zoom out to anywhere in the world as well. So, yeah, absolutely!

Gavin:

And talking to people who might be interested in setting up a regional-based service, service delivery organisation. I’d be really keen to talk to folks like that. I’m talking about some flights to Canberra about setting up an orchard organisation. So really keen to have those conversations as well.

Morag:

I guess part of what you’d be doing too, is keeping those different projects networked so that they lift each other up as well?

Gavin:

Absolutely and talking to peers overseas to bring their expertise into our country and getting them involved as well.

Morag:

Fantastic. Thank you so much for taking the time today to chat with us about this incredible work! I can imagine the possibilities – if you put the community food forest lens on as you walk down your street today, see what happens! It’s quite amazing when you do that. Thank you Gav.

Gavin:

Yeah, thanks!

The post Community Food Forests with Gavin Hardy appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

From the Half Acre Homestead, Stephanie explains how to grow year round using climate friendly regenerative organic gardening methods for abundant harvests and fewer weeds, working harmoniously with wildlife, and what to do with your harvests, from seasonal meals to preserving, homemade body, home and garden care, remedies and natural dyes.

In this episode, Stephanie shares a wonderful story about how she discovered permaculture and gardening, the joy she derives from it, and how growing food has helped her to put healthy food on her children’s plates on a modest income. This affordability and accessibility piece is a big part of what Steph is about, and what she shares with people – nothing highbrow or expensive. Just straightforward simple advice to get a diversity of healthy food from the pot to the plate.

ABOUT STEPHANIE
Stephanie is an award winning garden and food author – she wrote the Creative Kitchen, and co-authored No Dig Organic Home and Garden – and she’s a cover girl for a recent Permaculture Magazine! Stephanie is actively involved in Permaculture Wales and UK, and is a Vice Chair of the Garden Media Guild.

She’s also been featured on the long-running UK gardening show, BBC Gardeners World  and other shows, and has 30 years of practical experience to share. She runs courses in her edible garden (and soon online) is a simple living and no-dig gardening advocate, a sought-after speaker at gardening events and she consults with edible gardening projects far and wide.

Stephanie has created and worked home, community and market gardens, gardens for  large  estates, restaurants and galleries. In 2021 she led the RHS No Dig Allotment Demonstration Garden at Hampton Court Garden Festival.

Follow her gardening and homesteading life on YouTube, her blog or social media.

Find on any of your preferred podcast streaming service or on Youtube.

Read the full transcript:

Morag:

Hello and welcome to the Sense Making in a Changing World Podcast, I’m Morag Gamble. In this episode, I’m delighted to be speaking with Stephanie Hafferty based on her half-acre farm in lovely Wales. Stephanie is an award winning gardener and food author. She wrote the Creative Kitchen and co authored No Dig Organic Home and Garden, she’s the cover girl of a recent permaculture magazine too. She’s also been featured in the long running UK gardening show BBC Gardeners World and has 30 years of practical experience to share. She runs courses in edible gardens and soon online workshops. She’s a simple living and no dig gardening advocate, a sought after speaker at gardening events and she consults with edible gardening projects far and wide.

In this episode, Stephanie has a wonderful story about how she discovered permaculture and gardening. The joy she derives from it and how growing food has helped her to put healthy food on our children’s plates on a small income. This affordability and accessibility piece is a big part of what Stephanie is about and what she shares with people – nothing hybrid or expensive, just straightforward, simple advice to get a diversity of healthy food from the pot to the plate, and how to grow food all year round in places like Wales.

Well thank you so much for joining me, Steph. It’s lovely to see you again. It’s been a couple of years. I think it was pre-pandemic when I caught up with you in Somerset. And now you’re in lovely Wales. How’s life in Lampada?

Stephanie:

It’s gorgeous here. It is lovely. Yeah, where I live is very, very rural. So all the views are fields and more fields and fields again, and it’s absolutely fabulous! I love it and Wales. I visited Wales. Last time I was there and actually to Lampeter and one of the lasting memories I have of our journey. There was this gorgeous little people’s market and local food, local cheese’s, all these wonderful things going on. And there seems to be quite a bit of a permaculture community that’s scattered around that area. 

Morag:

Is that still going on since a few years ago?

Stephanie:

Yes, absolutely. When I moved here, of course I moved during lockdown. And Wales had a very strict lockdown. So none of these things were happening, but it’s all reopened again. And the local markets are still going and it’s local produce, local cheeses. There’s fish because we’re not too far from the coast. There’s local meats, local everything. Really, it’s lovely. And a lot of permaculture stuff going on. We’ve got the Welsh permaculture gathering happening here in September on Patrick Holden’s farm, which is about 20 minutes away. So yes, the hub has wonderful public culture, possibly here.

Morag:

It felt beautiful when I was there last time. I hope I can get to visit again. When I come again later in the year I think I’m going to miss you at the permaculture festival. You’ll be at the Welsh one and I’m at the British one.

Stephanie:

Yeah, the British one that’s about a six hour drive away from here. So I’m going for the one that’s 20 minutes away. 

Morag:

Yeah. So I’d love to hear a bit of your origin story. Where did you find that you love it? You’re so immersed in gardening, you’re an award winning author and you’ve been on BBC. Your gardening seems to surround you. Where did that begin for you? Like, where did your love of gardening come in?

Stephanie:

Well, apparently, according to my mom, I’ve always liked grubbing in the mud. And I remember as a child being really happy being in nature and in the garden. I’d make little fairy gardens, underneath shrubs and things. So I’ve always enjoyed that, actually gardening to produce edibles. I had cacti and succulents on my windowsill as a child and I enjoyed having those. But I got into growing plants outside when I got a book from a charity shop when I was about 17. It was an old fashioned book on making wine from plants. And of course, I’m 17 – I discovered you could make alcohol from things you grow. So I started, bought the book for 50 pence and I’ve still got it, it’s falling apart now but still going strong. I had a corner of my parents garden where I grew a few plants and got some plants going and started to learn how to make wine.

Morag:

So, was it tasty? Or was it something you could strip paint with? 

Stephanie:

Yeah, so it was variable. Some of them were lovely. I’m sure it boosted my immune system, some of the brews that were concocted. Gradually I then went off to uni and while I was there, I really got into making as much food as I could, because obviously it’s cheaper. And then got interested in plants for cooking, not just making alcohol.

Morag:

I know a lot of uni students, and I’ve been involved in helping to get a number of university gardens started. Not everyone does that though, even though it is cheaper. And it makes a whole lot of sense. What was there that inspired you to do that? And where did you grow? Were you living at home?

Stephanie:

Oh, this was on a very small scale. These were window cells. So it’s like pots of herbs and things. But I was lucky that when I became a student in Bristol, there were organic shops at a time when this wasn’t very normal. So I was getting aware of all of this, the Soil Association was big there, although I wasn’t doing anything with them. I was aware of their presence. I lived quite near a community garden which is still there and there were a lot of us actually to be perfectly honest, we were walking to the pub, but you’d walk past all these allotments to get to the city farm where there was a really good pub.

So I was a student. I socialised. I went to bed at six in the morning, you know, but it was there. And just by walking around and seeing all these things, you’re gradually getting it ‘Oh, this is interesting.’ I could do this. Once I left for my first job, I had a postgraduate degree to be a teacher and I went and got a job in Cambridgeshire. I actually had access to outdoor space properly then. And I started the usual things, tomatoes and more herbs and just started getting into growing a few bits and pieces and it kind of went.

Morag:

Yeah, I think it’s interesting how you’re saying that. Just the fact that things are around you – that it’s there. It goes in somehow. And I think this is really important. I was doing a talk the other day about the way that we design our cities and suburbs and how the ones that have the food embedded in like village homes in Davis, California or some of the Danish ecovillages where there’s food everywhere. Some of those traditional towns and villages, we have the allotments that it just becomes part of our norm.

But in a lot of traditions and the newer suburbs that we have in Australia there’s just nothing edible. It’s just cheek to jowl houses and that’s it. And so as a child growing up or even as a teenager, in that sense that you have these possibilities. So I love that it’s just kind of there in some way or other.

But what led you to actually get to the point of becoming what you call a homesteader and growing your own food for your family? Does it actually save you a lot of money? That’s a question I guess that people want to know. Because at the moment with all the crises that are happening, is growing and all that food actually helping?

Stephanie:

That’s a very good question. I was giving a talk at the London Permaculture Festival a week ago and that question was raised as well. So I was a very bookish child, I read and read and read and read. I would go to a party and sit in the corner and read so I was a great excitement to be around. I loved to read things like Little House on the Prairie, those kinds of which I know have issues now. Obviously, I didn’t when I was a small child. I would play farming and homesteading with my Lego. So I got a piece of cardboard and made my garden using paint & crayons.

So as a little child, I was playing, going off and gathering – it sounds completely mad now. But this was how I liked to play and made all this stuff out of Lego. Then as I got older, it was this interest, which again, I think was why I was attracted to making wine. It’s the idea of being able to make something and then discovering that you can actually make jam, it doesn’t have to come from the shelves. And watching The Good Life. I mean that brainwashed a lot of people.

Morag:

Good Life? Oh my gosh. Yes. That was influential for me too. Like I didn’t get to watch much telly as a kid. My parents were pretty strict on that. But they did let me sit and watch the Good Life with them.

Stephanie:

Yeah, I inflicted this on my children as well. So they’ve had bad experiences. There was all these various factors. Some of it’s reading, some of it was from television. And then once I was getting into growing food, I started to read. My mom gave me Jeff Hamilton’s organic gardening book. When I became a parent at 27, when I had my daughter, one of the things we did living in Wiltshire and then Somerset was go to a lot of green festivals and fairs. And that’s how I got to find out about permaculture.

I’ve got the bias that I’ve completely gone blank on that. The small holding book everybody had, John Seymour, I got a copy of that from the library. We were very big on libraries, we had one in the bottom of our road, and it was brilliant the amount of books you could get out. sort of devoured all these permaculture and gardening books and that kind of thing. It really intrigues me being able to make stuff. I love it. I think it goes back to when you’re very small and you’re making things from glue and cardboard and sticky paper. It’s the same kind of pleasure of creativity, but you can eat it or you can drink it. So I got into growing more and more and more food.

When I had my daughter, I was renting a place in Northamptonshire. I was sort of digging out because I didn’t know about no-dig then and I was digging out bits of the garden and growing what I could, because I was there on my own with a small child. It all helps and I was interested in doing it. Then I had more children and for a time I was married. We bought a small house in Wiltshire which was an ex-council house and because it was affordable back in those days, you could get an ex-council house on a mortgage with one salary. Now that’s just not possible and rural British old council houses were made with big gardens, relatively big gardens. The idea was you had enough space to have fruit trees, keep chickens, grow vegetables and keep a pig by the standards of those days. So we’re talking houses put up in the 20s and 30s.

So I had chickens and ducks and I started my veggie garden there. After a couple of years we had three kids, so we moved to a slightly bigger house in Somerset and the same thing happened. Gradually, I was getting more and more food growing as possible around having young children. We were pretty scared, particularly when my husband and I broke up. I was on my own with three kids and a very low income. Absolutely for sure, growing as much food as I could, preserving and storing it as I could, it made a big difference. I also stocked the discount parts of the supermarkets and all that too. I think it can if you’ve got the space to get as much food as you can. It is about accessibility to land. I was lucky to be able to get something going way back, as I say, my daughter’s nearly 29. When it was affordable to be able to get these places that are relatively affordable on a mortgage.

Morag:

So in the UK now, where are the most accessible places to access land? Are people still able to get allotments big enough sizes to grow food? How’s that? What’s the situation there? I hear there’s long lines for allotments or is it?

Stephanie:

Again, it depends where you are. So in some places, there’s long, long waiting lists. The allotment I had in Somerset where I grew my garden was up the road. It cost me 20 pounds a year and you could get five tons of well rotted cow manure from the local farm for 30 quid and that went for two years. So you could easily grow that amount of food and that was definitely accessible and affordable. Even on a low income as I was then, I still am actually, but then in other places because it became very fashionable, for want of a better word. It became very popular to have allotments to grow your own food, particularly during the lockdowns – prices have increased. Some places are very expensive.

Some organisations are buying up land and converting them to allotments. And I mean, they’re charging a fortune. It’s all about making money, which you’re only making accessible to people on high incomes who have enough land, but absolutely everyone should be able to grow. It’s not accessible to people who really need to have that. In Bristol, my friend Sara runs Edible Bristol. So there are community projects in a lot of cities using land there to create community spaces. So it really does depend. And there’s also areas which are essentially food deserts. There’s nothing and pretty much entirely all of those places are where there is the most need. Yeah, so some bits are good. Some bits are terrible.

Morag:

So the kind of methods that you use for teaching. You run courses and you’re a writer, blogger and you have YouTube. You also offer people tours into your place. What are the kinds of methods that you’re teaching people to help them to get started in their homes? What are your go to methods that you help people with?

Stephanie:

I mostly teach the no dig gardening method. But I teach it in different ways that are affordable because a lot of people think of no dig gardening as like when I used to work on market gardens. A lot of those beds were made with six inches/15 centimetres of compost on the ground, which is fair play if you can get access to it, but most people can’t afford that. So I teach different ways of doing it, which includes using less compost and it’s much cheaper. Another thing is how to grow food year round with the planning. I’m lucky I’ve got a polytunnel. That’s great. But I also say if you don’t have a polytunnel, this is what you can do. This is what you can make using essentially free resources and waste. And also teaching what you can do with it.

I think a lot of people don’t know because there’s been a separation between food production and cooking. A lot of people, they’re growing, they get their allotment and they grow all this stuff. And then it’s like, okay, I’ve got three recipes for courgettes in my repertoire. What should I do with these 40 courgettes now?

Also we are in a bit of a changing climate at the moment. So it’s looking at ways of growing without soil disturbance and how things can be adapted. Because as you’ll know from having been to the UK, we are the land of the slug. I think we have the world’s largest slug population, or it certainly feels like it. So a lot of the methods we use here are very much about reducing habitat for slugs. We are also starting to get long dry periods, which for a country which is used to basically being like today where I got wet. It’s a challenge, and it’s a change.

Morag:

Yeah, I think I started to hear about that last time. Because, many, many years ago when I was there, we were saying, ‘Oh, we don’t have to worry about all the things you do in Australia, because it’s just going to rain and rain barrels and we’re just going to get filled up tomorrow.’ Whereas, here we have 25,000 litres stored on our property because there’s such a dearth of water at certain times a year. But this changing climate, as you’re talking about, is making us really think about how we can build resilience into our gardens. Much more. Something I like is a framework of those really robust and resilient plants that then we can intersperse with other seasonal things.

I wonder in your climate, what are some of those foundational plants that you always include as a survival plant that keep you going throughout the year? What are they in your part of the world?

Stephanie:

I think we don’t have the same range as you might do in Australia because of our climate and our relatively shorter growing season. But certainly perennial brassicas would be a key thing because they pretty much crop year round. And you can always make a meal out of some perennial kale leaves with other ingredients. It depends very much where you are, I think as well in the UK. I did note, if you have too much planting, then you’re creating a slug habitat. So I have perennial areas where I wouldn’t grow lettuce, for example, because they just get slugged because the slugs are living under some of my perennial plantings. This may change you know, the slugs may bog off, they might decide it’s too dry there. But mostly plants that are there permanently are things like fruit trees, soft fruit, that kind of thing, which I do grow around.

I grow in my orchard where the apple trees were here when I moved. I grow heaps of food underneath. And I did this in my previous garden because I’m trying to grow as much as I can and it’s surprising how much you can grow under the shade of trees.

One big difference I noticed, when I put my polytunnel up here, I put it in the only space that it would fit. So there wasn’t any design to it at all. It was literally this is the only bit of my garden where a polytunnel that size can go. I was a bit concerned about its proximity to all these fruit trees. Actually, I thought it was to be shady, I’m not going to get any tomatoes. It turned out to be a bonus when we got these hot, dry spells in Britain. So it’s all relative for other parts of the world.

It’s like a balmy summer’s day, but for us, it’s like crikey. So as the sun was moving, when it got to the hottest part of the day, these trees were shading the polytunnel. Problems that some other people had, like my friends in Somerset, with things just literally stopping growing, because they’re almost cooking. I’m not getting that because of these planting. So looking at how you can use larger plants, trees and things within gardens as things I mean, we don’t know how things are changing. We literally haven’t a clue.

It’s certainly looking beyond that idea of having an allotment and vegetable gardens, just being a rectangle of fairly low planting that we’re always taught. ‘Don’t put it near trees because they’ll suck all the moisture out.’

Morag:

So that’s a shift, isn’t it? There’s approaches that really make us think differently about what we imagine is the right way to garden. I’m seeing the shifts and changes here, too. So when you got your garden started, I know you only moved to this new place a couple of years ago now is it?

Stephanie:

Yeah, it was March 21.

Morag:

So that’s, gosh, that’s almost two years.

Stephanie:

Over two years? Yeah.

Morag:

So what did you do when you arrived there? You left, but you’ve been working in this for 20 years and you’ve landed a new place. Did you decide to do things differently? What was good? What was your first starting point? How did you design it and get it going to amplify the growth there as a starting point?

Stephanie:

Obviously, I would have been planning it since I knew that we were going to move, which wasn’t too long. Gosh, I’m trying to think how long it took. Maybe three or four months from the offer being accepted to actually physically getting it. So one of the things I did was as part of my moving house budget… and moving houses is so expensive. When someone says moving house budget, what they really mean is, what else is going on the mortgage to pay for this. So it’s not like pots of gold sitting around the house that you’ve got available. I did include getting compost because I knew I needed to get my garden set up really quickly. 

Everything was locked down, I didn’t have any of the accessibility to networks that you would normally have, such as finding out where you can get municipal waste compost or farm manure or whatever. I had an arrangement with a certified organic compost company that I already knew and we sorted that out. I got the keys on the Wednesday, moved in on the Friday and the compost came on the Monday. So it was organised.

I was moving home with three kids. So there was a removal van with all our stuff in it and then another half removal van that they attached to the back that I put in my garden. I’d been growing a lot of things in pots in my previous phone because I had areas of concrete and I was making green forest gardens on concrete to increase food production. All of that went in, all of my stuff, all of my hoops and netting. I’d been splitting plants so I was bringing those things with me as well. Soft fruit and that kind of stuff.

The people I bought from weren’t gardeners, they hadn’t lived there very long, but the lady before them was keen. The established fruit trees were here, some of the fruit bushes, some edibles here already. But mostly it was grass and flower borders, which are lovely. I haven’t had to do anything with the flower borders. But I knew that I was going to be away for nearly a month because I was project managing a show garden at Hampton Court just a few weeks later.

I decided to do the cardboard composite no-dig method that I’d been using for some years in what we call the back garden – it’s an area of grass just outside the back door. On March the 31st, we put cardboard down on the weedy grass. And I put five centimetres/two inches of compost on top and then cardboard for paths. I made a bed and planted it up because I’d literally just moved, I had to get some plants and sow some seed in the orchard. A bit at a time, making beds there, some of it was compost.

I was using resources that were there, part of that was I had to get some trees chopped down because they were hazardous or dangerous. I had a lot of wood chips and sawdust, although it wasn’t a free resource because I had to pay to get the trees cut. But it was a resource, I was using different kinds of mulches and experimenting. All of the orchard beds were made with pretty much the stuff that’s around here. The odd one used compost if it needed it. Then I set up a compost heap. So it’s been a mixture of the ways I knew, it really did work. With experiments.

Morag:

Sounds like fun. I know you’re talking about bringing groups into your garden. So when you were designing this, I often explore this with students of ours who are doing the permaculture design course and the permaculture teachers course, talking about, ‘well, how do you design a garden that is going to be an educational garden?’ As you were thinking about designing it, were you thinking about how it could be part of that as well as being for you? Were you thinking of the educational elements or different kinds of spaces or areas that people could meet outside? How did you think that through? Was that part of it, are the elements just going to weave their way through?

Stephanie:

Well, I’ve only got about half an acre here. That includes the footprint of the house and where to park the car and that kind of thing. So it’s not a huge space. Certain things like in the polytunnel, which is 45 feet long, the first 10 feet of wood has a little border. So that was partly so I’ve got a space to make things when it’s raining. And partly that I had an area undercover that I could have people in the groups that visit here. The courses are very small, 8 to 10 people at the most, which is practical when you’re running something on your own.

I wasn’t thinking of very large groups for this space. Previous courses I ran, we’re looking at 18 to 20 people and that was on a much bigger plot. But yeah, it was quite interesting making the garden accessible for my family and a family space. Because my previous garden was completely full of vegetables by the time my children were teens, we had nowhere to sit outside, we just had to perch on things.

Inside the top of the orchard, it was like this is going to be kept for the family for barbecues, and put tents so my kids can have friends who camp. So that has naturally created a space where I can also host courses and talk to people, then we can move around. But the courses are very much walking around the garden and interacting with what’s there. The planting was first and foremost practical stuff for growing food. My ambition is to get 75-80% self-sufficient in plant food. So no coffee, and I don’t want the closed loop, I want to be able to go to the market.

Morag:

it’s really important isn’t it? Often with homesteading, it’s thinking that we have to be self-sufficient. It’s about growing as much as you can and then having a relationship with your community – trading and exchanging. That’s really important, because otherwise it can feel like a big slog, and you could feel quite alone as well.

Stephanie:

Yeah, one thing with this whole COVID pandemic and people being stuck at home has shown us the value of community and how much most of us really do enjoy interacting with other people. Obviously, if I made all my bread then I wouldn’t be getting the pleasure of going and buying the locally made bread in Lampeter so you don’t get those interactions. If we all make our own bread, they’re going to go out of business. It’s working out the balance between ‘I want to make all my jams and chutneys but I’ve got a callus’ or that kind of thing. But I also want to be able to go and buy my organic lemons from the organic farm shop. Because trying to grow lemons in Wales, it’s hilarious. The winter killed my plants, so I’m not going to do that anymore.

Morag:

It’s being realistic, isn’t it? Well, I love what you’re saying about the preserving and thinking through what you can do. What can I be supporting my community doing? You have a book out that talks a lot about processing food and cooking food. I want to ask you about books because part of the series that I run on this podcast is a permaculture writers series and you’ve got your book called The Creative Kitchen and you co-wrote a book called The No-dig Organic Home and Garden. I’d love to hear about it. You have three kids. You’re running this program. You’re working to earn a living. How do you get to write a book at the same time? I’m so in awe of anyone who writes a book, honestly, it’s an enormous task. How do you do it?

Stephanie:

Yeah, the hilarious thing about writing the Creative Kitchen was having to do a recipe test when it was winter. So I had to get the aubergines and the courgettes from an online supermarket in order to make the recipe. We were all eating nothing but soups and salads for a whole week when I was taking those photos. One of my main jobs is as a writer, I’m a feature writer for magazines. I do schedule it in, it is part of my day’s work. It is finding the time and just working long days. I tend to do a seven day week often and that isn’t viable. So I moved here starting again, but I unexpectedly lost my main job within a couple of weeks of moving here, which was a hell of a shock. I just worked and worked and worked, as you do. 

I definitely need a little bit more of a work/life balance. But it’s setting all these things up, you just keep at it. I did go and visit my dad for a month in January and relaxed. I read books not written by me. But it’s scheduling, it’s finding the time. It isn’t easy when you’re doing lots of other jobs too.

Morag:

You are a writer, you have a discipline – doing it in a particular way of structuring. Do you actually map out the whole book to begin with? What’s the actual structure of how you go and do it? Do you see the book and then you write it out? Is that how it works?

Stephanie:

You get an idea of what the chapters are going to be and what the topics are. I mean, one was co-written. So we just split who was writing what, more or less. Some things were both, some things were one of the other. I have notepads, I’ve got one on my desk here. I actually weirdly handwrite quite a lot of it. But I find handwriting uses a different part of the brain to my typing brain. So even when I’m writing an article, I map it out on paper first with a pen. It’s actually this pen here. I was given this when I went to university at 19 by my friend and I’ve still got it. This has been very helpful! Just buy refills every now and then. Then I type it up. 

So it’s a lot of planning first and having a clear idea of what you’re going to be talking about in each chapter and each subsection of chapters. Very different from a recipe book to a gardening book, obviously, for practical reasons.

Morag:

Creative Home, you’ve got recipes, but you’ve also got recipes for your body as well. What other sorts of things can people find in that book of yours?

Stephanie:

There’s some interesting preserve shortcuts, making booleans that you can store in simple storage – you can store it in a clean jam jar on the shelf. Then in the winter time, you get those flavours and fragrances of the summer and add it to your food – there’s alcohol too surprisingly, given how it all started! There’s also some crafts. One of the things with making things for your skin or things you can use to clean your house is partly allergies. If I go down the detergent aisle of a supermarket, I’ll get a headache, I’ll start sneezing.

Morag:

I’m with you there, yeah.

Stephanie:

So it was a lot to do with finding ways of cleaning the loo which isn’t going to give me a blinding headache. Also I like to think that I started off growing on a windowsill and then in a very small garden. So each plant really needs to work on as many levels as possible. So it’s thinking: if you grow parsley on your windowsill to flavour your meals, these are the other things you can do with parsley…

Morag:

Yeah, great!

Stephanie:

It’s going beyond just seeing it as something that’s chopped up and added to your soup.

Morag:

Yeah, it’s not just a garnish! The bit that gets left on the side of the plate when you go out and you see plates where it’s just on top. Like that’s the best bit! Why would you waste that?

I think it’s wonderful. You talked about the joy of gardening as a child and that was something that was there with you. I’ve been wondering about this lately, there’s something I feel that I need a word that describes this and I’m looking for one, maybe you know. There’s something about when you walk outside your door, and you’re surrounded by food, and you can just go and harvest your lunch or you grab some fruit, there’s this deep sense of feeling contented, feeling secure, of smelling it and feeling it. That joy of scent, hearing the sound of the birds or watching something going on. There’s is contentment, but it’s not biophilia. There’s a word about being surrounded by an edible landscape, and I haven’t come across it yet.

Stephanie:

I don’t know? Make one up!

Morag:

I’m going to make one up.

Stephanie:

I would definitely. There’s something there. I know there’s people who get incredible contentment from being surrounded by beautiful ornamental gardens.

We’re all different, I have some good friends and that’s what they do – they create these amazing spaces that just make people relax. Whereas I like to be surrounded by things you can eat or make things from. That really relaxes me and makes me happy. And I am even happy here. So where I live – you’ve been to Wales, you know how tiny the lanes are, we can barely get a car through them. My front garden is quite tiny and then there’s the lane and the hedge of the field opposite. And from sitting here, basically, it’s just food. This hedge, it’s either food for me or food for the wild things. It’s wonderful, it’s just non-stop everywhere you look there’s food. I appreciate it, I’m very lucky that I live in a rural area.

Morag:

It’s funny, I was telling you before we jumped online, my daughter has just gone to live on campus at a university in Canberra. She’s grown up here in this ecovillage surrounded by permaculture gardens. One of the first things she said to me when she got there was ‘I just feel really disconnected from my food system.’ Anyway, we would wander through the campus and we’d go, ‘oh, look, here’s some lavender, or here’s some really cool native berries.’ We had a great time just reconnecting with the fact that there was a food system on campus, if you just happen to look in the right places. There were some gingko, really interesting and unusual things.

Then she said she went walking through the landscape with her friends that she’d met at uni and started saying, ‘oh, there’s this.’ And they were like ‘how do you know this stuff? Who are you, plant lady?’ She can read the edible landscape. I think this is a skill and it’s a lost art. In many ways, this ability to notice the edibleness of plants, that there’s some really beautiful quality to be able to share that.

The fact that you’re taking people on walks through your gardens and inviting them into that space to get to know all the multiple ways you can use parsley and all the ways you can store, share and bring a bit of summer into your winter. That’s important, it touches us in some way. There’s a kind of almost unspeakable quality of joy that it brings into our life. It makes us feel secure and happy and nourished.

Stephanie:

Yeah, it’s wonderful. For people who haven’t got access to growing spaces, when I was writing Creative Kitchen, I made sure that if there was a recipe that involved chopped tomatoes, the recipe worked around the same quantity that you would get from a tin of tomatoes to make it accessible to people whose only access to food is the local supermarket. You can get incredible pleasure from getting lots of peaches from the bargain bin at the supermarket and making your own preserve. But I’m saying peaches because they’re quite difficult to grow here. I’ve got three peach trees and they’re three feet high, I’ve only just put them in. So I think there’s ways of connecting with creating food, even if you can’t yet have access to edible spaces where you live. I’m a huge fan of bargain bins at the supermarket, you might have noticed.

Morag:

Like you say, it’s a way to find how you can reconnect with your food rather than it being just an assembly task. Getting into the art of cooking, the art of growing! There’s a very visceral joy that comes from that level of connectivity. There’s also stories to share, we do it together, we will come back to the community meals. I don’t know if Lampeter has community meals where people bring potluck dinners, bringing different things to share. I always love those because you get to go ‘Oh, wow, you did that with that! Wow, that’s incredible.’

Stephanie:

The first night of the permaculture festival is a potluck. So when you come you bring your dish of whatever. Yeah, there are potluck types of things around. And there’s a food festival here at the end of the month at the university. So I’m there giving a talk of plot to plate, I’m going to talk about some of the things you can grow and what to do with them. There is definitely more and more going on with connecting with food.

I’m a member of The Guild of Food Writers which is brilliant for the amount of international cuisine, the stories and the heritage that people talk about. God, it’s fascinating. You just want to literally travel the world and eat. You do nothing but eat in all these different cuisines. There can be a disconnection between seasonal food and affordability. I don’t know how it is in Australia, but certainly here we’ve got problems with a lot of the slow food movement. It’s only accessible if you’re at a certain income level. It’s making it as it always was with my background being working class in the north of England. My great granddad supplemented the family income with an allotment in Bradford, a massive industrial town. It was something that regular folk did, not just middle class and beyond.

I think rekindling that is really important, which is why these urban community gardens are brilliant. The amount of times I see seasonal and local food recipes where it costs a blinking fortune to get all the other ingredients. Which is fine if you want to make that, but it’s not really what most of us can do.

Morag:

Now, I look at my garden and go what’s growing? Alright, that’s what I’m eating today! 

Stephanie:

Yeah, exactly. That’s pretty much what I do. I have frozen peas in the freezer for those emergencies. In the winter, when you realise, ‘oh, it’s time to make dinner and it’s now dark and hailing. The emergency pack of frozen peas from the supermarket will come out now.’ But yeah, generally it’s okay, what are we harvesting now? What’s there? The one thing we’re not harvesting is onions because they all got eaten by mice when they were transplanted. So they come from the shops, but everything else.

Morag:

My little friends in the garden at the moment are bandicoots. Every time I plant something in it… they’re like mice, but they’re about this big and they’ve got very big noses. When you put a little extra compost on things, they like to go down and eat things in the soil. They flick out all your transplants as they’re going along, so you come out in the morning and all your seedlings have been flicked out. That’s really frustrating. I also have some scrub turkeys that are going in and trying to scratch out lots of tubers at the moment. I’m just thinking, ‘okay, well, they’re just kind of cleaning up that section for me. I’ll come follow them after they’ve moved on and I’m not going to fight them.’ I’ve decided that my approach to gardening is a peaceful way. Otherwise, it could do your head in!

Stephanie:

Oh totally. I’m happy I have a trail camera in the garden. I know there’s at least five farm cats that come here every evening. I’m surrounded by farms, so these are cats that just live in barns. They come along and they think my garden is theirs. We’ve got rats, moles, voles and mice, all little rodenty things about. So they’re helping keep the balance because it’s all about balance. I know there’s rats living in one of my compost heaps. I’m just thinking, ‘well, while you’re eating what I’m putting in there, you’re not eating the stuff over there. You stay there, you’re turning the compost for me!’ And you’re food for the owls here. There’s lots of birds of prey. 

I’ve got this beautiful shirt that I can’t use at the moment because there’s a wasp’s nest in it. Which makes me sound all lovely and benign because obviously I’m not going to kill a wasps nest because we need wasps. But I’m also aware of their role as predators. So they’re eating my cabbage white caterpillars, they’re eating my aphids. So it sounds really nice and friendly and ‘let’s be at peace with everything.’ But I am also thinking of the whole hierarchy of predators and the balance between predators and prey.

Morag:

Yeah, that’s right. Me too.

Stephanie:

Which is nature. So I don’t know what eats bandicoots but I imagined something does?

Morag:

Maybe owls? I just heard them a few hours ago outside but I think they’re going something smaller. The bandicoots have gotten too big and fat on all my food. I’ll have to send my kids out to dance around all night. I don’t know.

Stephanie:

You’ve got like these really sleek bandicoots that are just living their best lives.

Morag:

Oh my gosh, it’s been lovely chatting with you. Where can people find out more about all the things that you’ve got going on?

Stephanie:

Conveniently, almost everything on my social media and website is my name, Stephanie Hafferty. So that’s easy to find. I have my YouTube channel as well. It’s Stephanie Hafferty Homesteading. I think it’s that. But it’s definitely Stephanie Hafferty. My website is also No-dig Home, but both go to the same place. Books are available all over the place. I do courses here, but I’m in the process of writing things which will be available online. So it’ll be more accessible to international people. Although I do have people coming from America to one of my courses here. Then they’re going on holiday in Wales which is exciting. I mean, Wales, the landscape is to die for. It is stunning. The history here is amazing. So I can see why someone would come all the way from the States just to immerse themselves in all things Welsh.

Morag:

Yeah, well, it’s a beautiful place where you’ve landed. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk about your love of gardening and no-dig in your approach to homesteading and all the resources. I encourage anyone who’s listening to this to check out the links that Stephanie’s shared and you can find in the show notes below! And yeah, stay in touch with Stephanie and thanks for listening and being part of our show today. Thanks Steph!

The post Affordable No-Dig Gardening with Stephanie Hafferty appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

You can find this episode on any of your preferred podcast platforms or watch on Youtube.

Read the full transcript:

Morag:

This episode, I am delighted to be speaking with Erik Ohlsen, a well known successful and much loved Sonoma-based ecological designer, permaculture practitioner, educator, author and regenerative entrepreneur. He runs multiple companies deeply grounded in a love of nature of service to the community and based on the permaculture ethics and principles. Erik’s just kind of one of those wonderful people who gets stuff done!

In this conversation I asked Erik about how he’s grown his wildly successful permaculture artisans company that is regenerating landscapes from urban to rural. Even as we spoke in the process of informing the design of permaculture agrihood. It’s a wonderfully inspiring, uplifting and wide ranging conversation spanning from his early volunteering projects giving away gardens while cultivating huge social capital and skill development to his current work. His legacy book, as he calls it, is just about to be released by Synergetic Press, the massive 550 page guide, ‘The Regenerative Landscaper: Design and Build landscapes that Repair the Environment’. This is going to become the go to manual and curriculum for permaculture learners who want to put into practice their learning in permaculture courses. It gets right into the nitty gritty and shows how to make it work.

Towards the end of the conversation, I asked Erik about his process of writing. I now feel entirely liberated and how I can set about writing too. So thanks so much, Erik. So check that out if you’re interested in writing as well.

Erik, welcome to the show. It’s really great to have you here on Sense Making in a Changing World.

Erik:

Oh, thank you so much for having me. It’s such a pleasure.

Morag:

Well, across the oceans, I’ve been watching your work for a really long time and been superbly inspired by not just what you do, but where it comes from for you – the heart of what you do, your purpose in this. Before we talk about your book and your work that you do, can we start just there? Where is that kind of fire in the belly for you about the reason that you do permaculture and perhaps how you even discovered permaculture?

Erik:

I got into permaculture when I was 19. So for me, this has been my entire adult life. I’m 44 now, and this is all I’ve done in my career. What started it for me was you first off to know, I was never very much an academic person. I didn’t go to college, I barely graduated high school and didn’t find a lot of nourishment there. But I got really turned on by learning about some of the terrible things that happened in the world as a teen, which I think a lot of teens are experiencing right now.

It’s hard to look away from climate change, hard to look away from genetic engineering, genetic seeds, industrial agriculture and all these things. As a teen, you’re about to inherit this world. You’re about to come into and be a steward of this world. ‘Here’s the keys to the house. Good luck.’

What first turned me on was learning about Monsanto’s Terminator seed technology. So that was back around 1999. The concept of thinking about technology that could sterilise the biosphere, sterilise the plant world – something inside me clicked and I just became terrified and turned on at the same time. Because coming from a fairly challenging home environment, I’ve been through a lot of challenging things in life and getting through was always about bootstrapping it, get to work, we could do this, we can change things.

When I first discovered permaculture, I found a sense of hope, a sense of belief in what’s possible, that really sings the song of the natural world. I grew up hiking and camping with my parents and being outdoors most of the time. So the natural world is really infused in my life at all times. You know, when you look out into the forest, it’s hard not to see abundance, right? It’s hard not to see beauty and goodness and possibility. So permaculture became that for me, while holding this grief of the world that I was inheriting at a young age.

I came through the ranks of hardcore activism. Going to mobilizations, locking down streets, getting arrested, protesting, organising on all different levels, nonprofits, collectives, activist groups, and everything in permaculture was a thread through all of that. When I hold up, when we contrast, the world that we know is possible that we are creating, you and me and so many of your listeners here. And we look out through the media and we look out and we see through the industrial agriculture lens, the technology complex, the military complex, all these things. When you hold up, what’s what we’re creating out in the garden, it’s like, that’s not all bad.

We don’t have to wallow in how terrible things are. Because we can create beauty, we can create abundance. That’s my drive, you ask what keeps me going, what my drive is, getting out. Listening to frogs and birds and watching the fox, we have a fox family living here that we see everyday, and we engage with every day. So being in a relationship with foxes, these fuel me these relationships, fuel everything I do. Because I know what’s possible. I know abundance is possible.

Morag:

Thank you for articulating all of that, from the terror to the active hope to being in relationship with the natural world – we’re not apart from it, we’re in daily relationship with other species. 

As you were speaking, I find it resonates a lot with my journey, the activist journey. Getting up and trying to find a way to live. I heard another video of you talking about one of your early projects when you were 19. The Great Garden Giveaway. I wonder if you could do some retrospective and tell us about that. Because there’s something about the way that you were saying instead of going to college, ‘I did this and this was my learning.’ Through that you crafted what’s become your career. I think it’s a beautiful inspiration to young people looking for an alternative way forward, a way that we can step into this active hope and make a contribution. I’d love it if you could unravel that story a bit for us.

Erik:

Yes, the great garden giveaway. Thank you for presenting that into the space here. I think in Australia, you have the Permablitz. So this is almost the same thing. But before I first heard the word Permablitz, we kind of imitated earlier pioneers – all building on much more ancient ways of being. So in 1989, we started an organisation Planting Earth Activation pa like the pea plant. Our mission was to create a seed bank, a seed safety network, in our community. We did that by offering free gardens to anybody that wanted them. We were very idealistic, very powerful and very effective. There was maybe a core of eight to ten of us, but we worked with other collectives, and we grew into about 40 strong at our peak.

What we would do is we’d go into a neighbourhood, we’d walk down the street and say, ‘There’s a lawn. There’s a lawn. There’s a lawn. There’s…Okay, our new target.’ So literally, we would go knock on the door. ‘Hello, we’re Planting Earth Activation. Can we give you a garden for free? Turn your lawn into a garden?’ And you know, it’s hard for people to say no to that. The way that we organise this was usually a neighbourhood weekend volunteer project. We usually wanted to have ~6 gardens we were going to do at one time, but we’ve done up to 10.

We’d organise a whole weekend volunteer effort, we got a lot of the compost, mulch and plants donated. And so we would take over neighbourhoods, sometimes we would even get to literally shut the street down, the city would give us the cones, ‘okay, the street’s shut down for the weekend.’ We would give gardens away through the weekend, and the exchange was that we would come back and save 25% of the garden seeds that we would let go to seed. We would save and process that seed as a community resource.

Morag:

Wonderful. And as a direct response to that Terminator gene, this whole cycle of the ripple effects of what you were doing that – the closing the streets, building community, bringing food into the urban landscaping, the way that ripples out. And then each of those 30 people and all the hundreds of people who are involved, shifted something in them. So I think the power of these volunteer actions, activating programmes that are so awesome, and then rippled out into your enterprise, and what’s eventually also become your books that you’re writing as well.

Just before we move into that, this role of being a volunteer in permaculture, as a beginning point, as a training ground. Maybe there are ways that you’ve seen as you’ve continued on that you’ve been able to help other people to step into these volunteer roles or internships? Or is there a way that you see in your world that that can continue?

Erik:

So I’ve spent years, 40 hours a week, volunteering for many years and built my whole career off that. Of course, I had help from my parents, I took side jobs and we fundraised a lot. When you think about being a permanent volunteer, that’s it, that’s a whole thing. I actually even started an organisation once called Adopt an Activist, specifically to fundraise money for people who were volunteering full time. That’s another story, but that, for me, was my college period training ground.

That’s what it was, it was skill, it was about learning skills. It was not just about the skills of transforming a lawn into a garden, saving seed, planting fruit trees, building soil, catching water and all these things that we do. But also the skills of working in a community, building a vision and then doing the work to see it come to fruition. Also working with city politics, city government, and how we engage these civil processes that are there for us to engage in – this was all part of the learning ground.

I think next to skill building, the second greatest harvest of volunteering is social capital. My entire business, my entire career is built on social capital. And I still volunteer, even though I have a successful business, and I will if somebody’s in need. They’ll have funds, depending on who they are, and what the situation is, ‘oh, I’ll go, I’ll spend a month with people who need it to do the work.’ Because we can’t lose track of the gift economy. We can’t lose track of a non-monetary exchange with our people, with our land, with our community. I think it’s social capital that generates relationships.

Sometimes what I like to say is that a lot of the things that I do now don’t have a harvest for another year or maybe five. And that’s how social capital works. You don’t get an immediate return because you’re not doing it for a return. You’re doing it to be of service but inevitably you’ve put energy into a social bank account, and in some way it will come back. At times when you aren’t expecting it and times when you need it, you can lean on that.

Morag:

It’s a kind of a trust, trust in the process of being part of something larger than yourself. And being in that mind, in that way of being, that ‘I am part of this broader community’ and by giving someone else who gives someone else something – it kind of works out somehow. But it also means that we do need to step in at some point and think, ‘Okay, the things we need to make some money to do concrete things is where your companies come in.

I wonder if you could talk us through the transition from your volunteerism approach to starting to make a good living from permaculture. I also want to sort of talk a little bit about that notion that ‘you can’t make a living out of permaculture’ – I think it’s essential that we can, let’s explore that a bit too. So what was that transition point between being an active volunteer out in the streets into starting a business in permaculture.

Erik:

One thing we have to kind of present before we dive deep is what’s happening on a mental emotional level for folks when they are going into this activist mode. In all these wonderful things we said about volunteerism, part of the motivation behind that is anger about the world. This destroyed planet that is being inherited. Grief that the generations before me didn’t do more, and a feeling of ‘I need to be worthy somehow.’ And I think this is really important, we have to start here to understand this transition. Because this self identity of how we do the work, who we are and why we’re doing it is fundamental. It’s make or break for the whole process.

I’ll tell you what happened to me – I broke, completely broke. I gave everything I could. My entire identity was wrapped up as being an activist and being this person who volunteers, this person who goes out there. Then I got sick, I got a chronic illness. I literally couldn’t go to meetings, I couldn’t go do the work that I had been doing before. I couldn’t even teach a permaculture course! I’d been teaching permaculture courses since I was 22. And I had to stop doing that at that time. Grief really set in because these were the ways I was finding financial reciprocity – was being an activist, Adopt an Activist and getting fundraised money to care for me, working on projects that had funding behind them. Then I was able to make my ends meet that way, by teaching permaculture and getting paid a paycheck from that. 

When I got sick, I totally burned out. I couldn’t do these things and  I really had an identity crisis, honestly. That identity crisis was rooted in the fact that I couldn’t go out. I hated money at this time in my life in my early 20s, I literally hated money. The idea that I couldn’t make ends meet through my volunteerism, right? It’s weird to say it that way. But that’s just basically what it was. I couldn’t tap into the fundraising and all of that. I had only one thing to fall back on. And that was my permaculture skills. Something in me had to change in order to say, ‘I’m going to charge for my time.’

I got invited onto my very first project! It was a commercial lavender farm with rainwater harvesting terraces and microclimate moderation, with a stonefruit orchard element. Luckily that that came around, right as this was happening, I said ‘yes, I’ll take this project on.’ That was my very first project for my business, which is still alive today – Permaculture Artisans we’re a design contracting company.

We’ve been around since 2005. And that very first year, when I got on that first project with one wonderful client who mentored me – she was a business woman, very ecologically minded. She helped me kind of get in. The most amazing thing happened on that first project. I’ll never forget it. I hired a bunch of friends to come help me. Within that first year, we planted more fruit trees, built more water harvesting systems, than in two years of nonprofit organising.

All of us were like, ‘we’re able to pay our rent doing that. We were able to put gas in our cars.’ You want to stay away from cars as much as possible, but I live in a rural area and you have to use vehicles to get around. So it kind of blew my mind like, whoa, wait a second. There’s something here that I hadn’t seen before. Now we’re doing the work that builds soil, we’re doing the work that captures and stores water, we’re growing food, we’re growing medicine, and all these people, these guys and gals who are working with me, they get to do this for their job! And I get to do this for my job!

A light bulb went off and all of a sudden, I understood something that had taken me six years in the movement to understand. We can’t be stuck doing this work as a hobby. This can’t be just a hobby thing that people do on the weekends. I mean, that’s lovely. That’s what you do. And you have a job you love and you do great. No judgement, you know, more power to you. But when you look at the scale of the problems, and we want to respond, we have the solutions, right? We have the solutions, the solutions are really not the issue at all. We have so many solutions, it’s almost overwhelming. But how do we implement them?

We live in a society that is money based. Let’s be real, if you’re putting on your permaculture lens and you’re reading the existing social landscape, that’s the system that we’re in. Yes, we can change the monetary system, we can do all these things. But if we base all of our work outside of the system of money right now, we’re essentially not applying basic permaculture principles, we can’t use the existing resources that are moving quickly through all of our families and systems and communities towards that end. So the other piece is the social bit about permaculture.

Yes, volunteering is lovely and wonderful, we should all put our time in it. But not everybody has the privilege to do that. Plenty of families are poor, living in poverty, don’t have adequate housing, don’t have clean water, and don’t have healthy food. They have to work six or seven days a week. That’s just the reality and I work with a lot of these families, I know a lot of these folks. They’re going to just go wherever the job is, people who are that desperate are going to go where the job is.

If the only jobs that are available are spraying roundup at the edges of a lawn, putting chemical fertiliser down and putting in irrigation that they’re going to do that because you don’t when it comes to baseline survival for a lot of people in the world right now. It is about money and access to that.

Morag:

It’s creating work in this, creating livelihoods – not just for yourself, but for other people is a prime directive. I think this is an enormous piece that we need to understand as a movement that, we have the solutions. You can look at all of the things that are going on. There are so many dimensions that come together through this way of thinking. It’s not a set of recipes, but it’s a way of seeing the world. And we apply that thinking to everything that we look at – then there’s possibilities everywhere.

I think we need to be able to articulate that clearly, step up and speak up – be a little bit more. The word that keeps coming to me at the moment is audacious. We need give ourselves a bit more permission and agency to step up and speak up – to put permaculture in all those different realms. So how did you transition into that? You did your first one, how did you get from making your first garden to creating this hugely successful company that you’ve created?

Erik:

Well, I had to learn business skills. So that first year was ‘oh, now I have to learn.’ I hate asking for money. I hate charging. But I have to learn these skills and I have to learn project management skills different from when you’re volunteering. You don’t think as much about the logistics and costs of getting a delivery of compost and the timing because that’s usually donated and it’s a resource that just arrives. But when you’re doing this work professionally, you’re managing the flow of material in and out of a project – the timing, the staging, the placement, the costs, the sequencing of the project itself, and how all of these factors play out. That took a while to learn, probably about five years.

Within that five years, I was fortunate enough to barely make it to the end of one project, having no idea what’s on the horizon, asking ‘is this is all about to just collapse under me?’ And then another project comes in and then I would volunteer to initiate a project, because again, this is what I know – how to build social capital through volunteerism.

So I’ll work with a client, I’ll start doing free design, free consultation, and I’ll take them out to lunch. Whatever is needed to build relationship, build trust. Then little by little, ‘oh, we have a project here, and how much is it going to cost?’ We engage, we negotiate and we do that. I was fortunate enough to just have referrals come in at the right moment.

I remember even once I was sitting in the parking lot of a landscape materials vendor, and I was all out of work, this was my last day on the job – I had four people working for me at the time. This is what they were feeding their families with, doing this work – working for me doing this work. If I couldn’t get them work by Monday, then why would they stick around with me? When I’ve trained them with permaculture and the whole thing. Now sitting there, and I was pulling my hair out, and almost prayers to the universe. Just, I don’t want this, we have to keep going. Let’s keep going.

And right at that moment, the phone rings, and I pick up the phone. It’s an old client who says, ‘Hey, I’ve got a project, I need you. Like, how soon can you show up?’ ‘Oh, we can be there Monday, no problem.’ That’s how on edge for five years it was. But what happens is after, it takes about five years for any startup to become an actual viable business. And that’s been my experience with other endeavours as well. At that point, there’s enough word of mouth, enough skills and enough understanding of the industry that now you have more work than you can do.

I had a lot of students, because I teach people how to build landscape companies, ecological permaculture landscape companies. And I find this as the, the crux position for a lot of folks, they can get started, they can get known, they get some establishment, and then there becomes a moment where either they have to go to the next level or they’re going to start losing clients, losing staff and things are going to unravel. It’s a weird little thing that happens around four or five years in, and you have to take a risk.

Usually that risk is hiring people onto your business team who are not billable. That means that you can bill hours out to clients – people in the office, taking phone calls, returning phone calls, doing the bookkeeping, doing administrative stuff. These are vital components of running system. It’s an ecosystem. And this is part of the nourishment that keeps the exchange flowing and moving. But those are hard decisions to make, to hire people.

Often when you get more work than you can handle, then you start thinking what do I do? If I say yes to all these projects, then how do I come through and surface the land and the people in a way that still has integrity. Sometimes that means hiring a bunch more people to try to get them trained. So it takes a bit of time to go through those processes and a lot of risk.

But for me, it was always that seed of seeing the landscape come to life. We’ve transformed asphalt parking lots, we’ve transformed schools, we’ve transformed cities, we’ve transformed congested forests that were about to burn down. When you start to see these landscapes respond to management, seeing food growing in abundance and people actually have too much food. ‘Oh my gosh, this is my big problem!’ If that’s the problem, I want you to have that, it’s game on. This is what we’re doing. And this works.

On Fridays we had a tradition for years, we’d all come back to the ranch where we had our ‘offices’ and have a beer or a barbecue. We’d listen to each other’s stories, talk about each other’s kids, talk about each other’s families. And at one point, this light bulb went off, like, there’s 50 people, not just who worked for me, but all their families, depending on this company right now. Right now, there’s probably 75 to 100 people, depending on this company. And these people are spending their days planting fruit trees and digging swales and putting in roof catchment systems.

Morag:

That’s so fantastic to hear. I started getting really excited to hear the way you take it from the forest to the city, to schools, to all of these places across your bio region. I wonder, I often look at the suburbs around here in Australia on the Sunshine Coast. It’s one of the fastest growing suburban areas up here in the Hinterland and all the bit between me and the coast is starting to spread out with cities and suburbs. With all the work that I’ve done over the years and all the places that I’ve seen, the possibilities of designing them differently really excites me.

I wonder whether you have any interesting examples of how new suburbs have been transformed and whether you had any influence into that space? I’m trying to find the key. I don’t know if that’s a bit of a random question. But if you’ve got any ideas of how to approach developers…

Erik:

Yes, I do. I have a project like that right now that we’re working on. We’re working with a developer who’s about to put in around 250 units, it’s a whole neighbourhood building a whole neighbourhood. And they’re very conscious already. So that helps. But one of the things that they and a few other folks I’ve talked with too are doing similar things, is that they are starting to understand instead of building homes to just sell a home, they actually get more value if they’re selling a lifestyle. This is really a change in approach, obviously, it’s part of that money conversation. And we’ve seen places that we’ve transformed into permaculture paradise gardens that look like your garden, that looks like my garden. 

Typically in this area, in almost every case, the last few years those houses have been sold for bids around $100,000 over asking price for the garden. People are buying that lifestyle more than they’re buying the house. Because yes, the house is cool. Yeah, we need a house, but what’s gonna happen when the next pandemic hits, what’s going to happen when the next fire hits? What’s going to happen? People are on edge and they want security. I think globally in western industrialised culture, there’s a new understanding that security isn’t just financial, it’s also peace of mind. It’s food, it’s medicine, it’s access to nature. So with this developer I’m working with, they’re on that so we’re designing a 25 acre regenerative farm in the middle of a neighbourhood!

This farm will be a CSA, there’ll be a CSA programme that will provide for the neighbourhood. The farm will be a place for people in the neighbourhood to come in, push your strollers, put your babies and go around the hiking trail that’s going around the edge. Then there’ll be cultural events, harvesting events, music events and maybe even have your wedding there – have your daughter’s wedding there. Whatever it may be, have your Bar Mitzvah here. This that’s how we’re designing the space so there’s cultural relations and honouring of the community as well as food production, as well as connection to the land. 

What I’m starting to understand working with this developer and speaking more to this is about selling the lifestyle more than the house. If you’re a developer wanting to make money, that’s going to be a lot more attractive to the millennial generation – the new way of thinking about the world is a different kind of security that you provide. So I think that is one way to look at it and agri-hoods. Essentially, it’s an agri hood. And there’s so many great examples around the world of agri hoods.

Morag:

That agriculture idea is absolutely fantastic. I’ve seen examples of this across Europe and in the States as well. I keep spruiking it here in Australia, and I’ve just not been able to get an edge in yet. I think it’s possible, when we have the land, we have so many new sorts of suburban developments getting started now. Now is the perfect time for these to get going. I’m looking, maybe I need to go on a bit of a road trip around Australia and talk to different developers with examples to boot and just sharing this out.

Erik:

Another in is talking with county officials, it’s finding the ones that are also aligned with the permaculture thinking. One of the things that happened in Sonoma County – really building on that earlier conversation about The Great Garden giveaway and what we did 20 years ago – from those members of that original group I worked with, they got elected to the City Council at the age of 24. And went on to become mayor and be on the decision making body for eight years after that. From that point on, our city council has been a progressive majority council for decades, from a base built out of this wellspring of good ecological thinking and planning in the city, from a prior grassroots organisation.

Morag:

As a 19 year old doing what your heart speaks you to do, you’ll have no idea that that was going to be the ripple effect of your actions. When you ground yourself in, in being in service, and coming from this place of trying to be in service, to do good in the world to regenerate the planet. It’s this myceliation that happens and it brings a kind of a power to the moment that you have no idea when those little new mushrooms are going to start to pop up and be seen. But this rippling going on, this connective thread that’s unseen most of the time. 

Erik:

How many city planner folks or future city planner folks have taken your programmes, listened to your podcast or listen to us right now? Are the ones that will now or in the near future approving these suburban developments? What kinds of parameters are they putting on these developments? Because one of the things that’s been happening a little bit more in Sonoma County, where I live, is the planners. We have permaculture trained people on the board of supervisors, we have permaculture trained people on multiple City Councils, permaculture trained people in the planning departments. And this takes time.

I’m positive that it exists throughout Australia too. Within that, when developers are coming and saying, ‘we want to do this in that project’ we can say, ‘okay, great. We want you to do the project too but we want you to have this much green space, we want you to grow these kinds of trees, we want you to look at all on site water management and these sorts of stipulations.’ And the developer is like, ‘Oh, shoot. Okay. Well, I haven’t done it that way before. Oh, no. I need somebody who knows what to do to help me.’

Morag:

All right. You’ve been teaching people how to set up these companies and you’ve written a book, as well. A couple of books now, actually. So what’s the latest one that’s about to come out? Tell us about that?

Erik:

Yeah, so it’s called The Regenerative Landscaper. Honestly, this is 25 years of experience all wrapped up in this book. I would say it’s probably will be of the most comprehensive manuals out there on regenerative design, permaculture and the rest. It’s 520 pages packed with fully-referenced scientific backing of cutting edge ecological science and how to implement them. It’s what I wanted to do with this book, I haven’t seen a lot of this in the ecological design and farming space, getting beyond inspiration. Of course, it’s filled with inspiration, but it’s not just about that. It’s not just about theory and exciting ideas. But how do you go from that to then actually doing stuff, doing the projects?

This is something that a lot of students of permaculture struggle with, as I’m sure you’ve seen. You come out of a permaculture course and you’re so excited. And wow, a lot of folks who come out of these programmes are turned on by the principles and such, they still don’t know how to get the principles in a principled way of thinking to work. It usually ends up being more about technique than bigger strategy. So you go to the land, ‘oh, swales, of course, every land every project should have swales.’ I did the same exact thing. I’m totally guilty of that, without stepping back and looking at what’s there already.

What’s actually the ecological dynamics that are occurring right now? Who are the stakeholders here, human and non human? How do we create an experience of collectively designing, stewarding, managing and moving towards a goal that takes into account all these all these project stakeholders? You know, birds, lizards, foxes, trees – those are all project stakeholders.

So this book is really about how to do it in a very rational way. How to create a project timeline, how to manage a budget, how to implement an agroforestry system from step by step. That’s what I wanted to give to the world. You know, it’s really a legacy book, it’s something that you can take, and you can really dive in and reference it.

And of course, you know, the Permaculture Manual, that was like breakfast, lunch and dinner in my early 20s, just munching up that manual, implementing every single thing that I could. But Bill is a brilliant thinker. And sometimes it’s hard to wrap your mind around what he’s saying. I don’t totally understand it. I would read like a column and then spend a week trying to figure out how to get away, you can’t read it cover to cover that? No, no, I probably do it three, four times, my friends. I would be like, What does your permie book look like? It’s like, ‘I sheet mulch the cover of mine on you, you’re better than us.’ But, there was some struggle in the the realistic side of implementation.

I think that what my book offers is a smoother, more realistic way of doing the work. So for people who want to do this professionally, this book would be a manual for professionals. But that’s just one of the audiences, for anybody who wants to just do it in their own backyard, build their garden, build their homestead, this would be a full scale manual to do that.

Morag:

Oh, fantastic. I know that it’s taken me years to do this. And it’s kind of like a little bit of growing up with permaculture, that like you’re saying, what Bill did was he grabbed a whole lot of things and put it together. And then here’s an idea. Here’s all the things that I’ve been thinking of, and through the practising, the experimentation, the application and all these different contexts it’s grown up into what you’re now presenting. It’s something that’s super tangible, tested and tried and bringing in all the latest things that’s been going on in the world in the last 40 years. It’s time to really bring those into the fore.

So can you tell us a bit about your writing process? Part of what I do on this podcast, I’m speaking to authors and ask you how do you do it? I’ve always in the back of my mind 10 books all hanging around here. Honestly, I didn’t find the time to start writing the first chapter because I’ve got the charity over here, the teaching over there and I’ve got kids at home. How do you write?

Erik:

I love that question. Because it’s a process as you are acknowledging here, that can be quite challenging and especially with the businesses. Okay, so the first thing that I tell people who are interested in writing is that you have to get away from having things done right at the beginning. You have to let go of any expectation that what I write today is going to be good at all. That expectation has to go out completely. The most important thing to do is to get words on the page, no matter what quality they are, you have to start with something. So you have an idea, ‘oh, boom,’ right down to notes, just get it down.

I have really honed the art of dictating into my phone. For me, this became a life hack. Because the last thing I wanted to do was sit at a desk, six to eight hours a day. I had a computer, but that’s not a life that I want to live. So what I would do is, ‘I’m going to write a new section in my book. I’m going to go to the beach and I’m gonna hike for hours on the beach, dictating into my phone.’

The night before, I would create a bit of an outline. Let’s say we’re going to talk about water harvesting. Okay, infiltration, rain gardens, swales, terraces. rain catchment, tanks, roofs. I’ll just create a little bit of an outline there, then I would go out and I would just have adventure, dictatating into my phone. I don’t even look at it when I’m doing it, the technology is pretty good. So that’s maybe about 90%. When you go back, there’s some things that I don’t even know what I was saying there. ‘That doesn’t make sense. That doesn’t matter.’ I could do 4000 words in a day that way. That’s a significant amount of words in a day so I created the whole first draft that way of every chapter.

My book has 55 chapters or more, it’s a nine part book. It’s about 200,000 words. I would dictate, then I would go back and I would edit that. That’s the sitting at the desk part. Now I’m editing it. But when I’m editing it, a new little thing clicks in. When you’re editing, people misinterpret about editing, it’s mostly removing stuff. That actually makes the writing so much better. When you go into remove, you’re just like, ‘oh, that paragraph – delete.’ It feels so good to get down and compress it. So that’s how I would do it. I would reward myself.

I would oscillate between these writing adventures, to get myself out in nature. If I want to talk about water, I go for a walk along the river. And then when my brain gets tired, I just stop, sit by the river, watch the Ygritte, listen to the water and look at the willows. Then the next idea comes out. Let’s keep walking.

Morag:

That is so brilliant, Erik. A book written in that way must have such a different tenor, I think it really is emerging from that. I think you might have just unlocked something in me, telling me that story. Because as an educator, a lot of the way that we communicate the knowledge is through speaking it out. And that articulation of ideas as you’re teaching and as all the ideas sort of flood into your brain you can bring all these things. And it comes. I don’t even know what I say at the end of lots of sessions, because it just kind of comes. Also if you’re walking through a beautiful place and you imagine you have a group of people, you’re explaining what’s going on, maybe that’s just – boom. Exactly. Thank you.

Erik:

My pleasure. Yes, I was the same exact way as you. I’ve always been good at teaching and public speaking and educating. And I thought, how can I bring my voice into the writing because you know, sitting here doing this, I’m not very good at it. But I will say just to forewarn you that the writer’s voice does have to change, that it does have to become a writer’s voice, not a speaker’s voice, that gets smoothed out in the editorial process. All your little nuggets and gems and how you connect them are all there for you to find. Then you just have to adjust the words.

When we speak sometimes we add things at the end of a sentence that when you write it, you wouldn’t put it at the end, you’d put in the beginning. So those are some of the editorial things that would come up. It’s like, ‘oh, I have to rearrange this for a reader versus the way that a listener would hear it.’

Morag:

Yeah, great! The other thing I want to ask you about story is, how much story do you use to explain? It’s like the batting about how things happen. But there’s also stories which open up people’s perception of how those bits of information land, where does that fit into your writing?

Erik:

Well, story must be part of any book for anyone to want to sit through it. You have to ground information, especially scientific information in actual stuff. Real things that happen can’t just be lalalalalala all up here. Then you have a story about actually how it was implemented or what you experienced. I think stories are a journey that a reader gets to go on, where they get to see a lot of your mistakes. I think that’s one of the most important parts of stories, to highlight mistakes. And in learning lessons, my approach is that I want readers to know that I’m human and that they are just as capable as I am doing anything that I talked about or speak about. And I truly believe that 100%.

I was a 19 year old kid, I had absolutely no skills, I barely graduated high school, you know what I mean? But the path, to step on the path and open up and listen, eat, drink, breathe, ecology. To breathe this work into the world, and you learn as you go.

I think how we become learners is probably one of the most important things that we could get from a permaculture course. Honestly, how do you become a learner? How do you listen? How do you observe? What kind of perception do you bring to the land, to a community, to a partner or a client? These are skills that are the most important. And if we can get that, then all the rest will show the secrets of the universe. So this book, these stories are parts of that experience of going out into the world with ideas and perception, either failing or having success.

One of the other aspects of my book is I do feature ten other regenerative designers from around the world, a lot of women, people of colour, indigenous folks to tell their story. I felt like it was vitally important to not have this book be only my voice. Because I’m a white dude in California with a very specific context. And there’s a lot of other contexts when we talk about regenerative design and regenerative landscaping, that are necessary to understand different approaches, ways of beings and cultural emergence that’s happening from different cultural groups. It’s so fun to tell the story of other people and the work that they’ve done because it’s so inspiring. And the possibilities, the things that people are doing.

This is a little bit of an aside, but it just has to be said. There amount of solution oriented projects happening in the world right now, it’s impossible to quantify. When we get into dark conversations about the world ending and out of control climate change, the military, the industrial complex – all these things where you could just give your soul to that and die in your heart. What isn’t able to be told. Because it’s so decentralised on such a massive scale, many ecologically based regenerative systems are happening around the world, millions and millions of them are happening right now.

We’re not quantifying the carbon that they’re capturing, we’re not quantifying the food that they’re producing. We’re not quantifying the community resiliency that’s been developed – because it’s totally decentralised! I just wanted to state that because I don’t think it’s a fair representation in any any media forms that tell us about the state of the world because you it’s hard to quantify the good stuff.

Morag:

I’m so glad that you said that because when you do put on this lens, you see this dimension of the world of what people are doing. When you notice those things, it fills your heart and your soul with this active hope of possibilities and you know that everywhere around the world are seeds being planted, these ripples that are forming. There’s this mycelial network that connects them all. And what I love about permaculture is that it becomes a language that can connect us. When we speak across the planet, like through the Institute, I speak with people on six continents almost daily and just hearing these snippets of news and stories, they’ll hear that general theme of something over here. It just keeps going and there is no measurement. I wouldn’t have even have a clue of how you’d begin to measure that. 

But this is the power of story, when we share the stories and we find a way for those stories to get out. When there’s a manifestation of those stories and maybe a glimpse of it in the city, through the projects that you’ve always been doing or something that’s going on in the refugee settlement, foregrounding these stories and finding a way is why I also run a new programme I started recently called Share permaculture. It’s about how do we share what we’re doing out to the world? How do you blog it, YouTube, podcast it, get into the media, on TV, on radio? What are the skills that we need to tell those stories? And books are always the keeper. That’s the bit that eludes me. And congratulatios for getting that – your second book, is that right?

Erik:

This is, if I counted all my books, this would be my seventh book.

Morag:

No way!

Erik:

Some are children’s books and some ecology based colouring books. Another was how I described my path into permaculture. I didn’t go to college, I just got out there learnt that way. Well, that was the same way for writing for me. It’s been seven years now since I wrote the first book. That was part of essentially putting myself through a master’s writing programme, not through any conventional means, but just through podcasts, online programmes, experimentation and reading every single book on writing out there. So experiment, experiment, experiment, write, write, write. I was producing little children’s books, colouring books and things like that as a way to understand the industry, to learn about the production process, and to start to hone my writing skills. This new book that’s coming out, The Regenerative Landscaper, this book for me is more like a masterpiece. 

Those other books were more like training grounds. So there’s still value in those and especially, I have a children’s book called the Forest of Fire. That’s a book to help children understand wildfire and living through wildfire and fire ecology. That one has been very well received as we live in the lands of fire, as do you. We’ve been evacuated and have been in the smoke and all of it, the whole experience. So that’s been a really nice book to share with folks, kids in schools and things like that. But it was all part of the learning process, to develop skills and understand the industry. And this new book, The Regenerative Landscaper is the evolution and emergence of all of that.

Morag:

So when will it be coming out? When can people get their hands on this book?

Erik:

It’s available for preorder right now through Synergetic Press and other outlets, it’ll be officially sent out and available on August 22. That’s when the printed versions and the Kindle ebook versions will be released.

Morag:

Fantastic. I can’t wait to see it and to share it, to share this podcast too and encourage absolutely everyone to to get their hands on it. I think it’s going to be a new textbook for permaculture educators. This is a transformation of possibility right here. So thank you so much for taking the time. I know it’s taken you so many years to write, all that knowledge that’s gone into it and the process is the book, how many years has it taken?

Erik:

Three years of writing to get the book to this part – diligent writing every week for about three years. So it’s a big body of work! Thank you so much for sharing it, talking about it and your enthusiasm. It really is a full curriculum and I’m very excited to share with folks and see how people respond. Then the hope is that it’s a real reference book that people can come back to. One could read it from cover to cover.

I did try to write it with a logical flow of information with stories and inspiration and things that can carry you all the way through. But people who are more experienced and well seasoned could also just jump in & reference the water sections. I think there’s seven or eight chapters on water, things like that. That’s a very robust part of the book.

Morag:

Well, thank you for taking the time to rigorously document your work and to make it available to the world. I mean, what a gift! Thank you so much. And thank you for joining me today and sharing your story. Absolutely inspiring. I’m going to get my phone to go and start walking, I think.

Erik:

Oh, it’s truly been a pleasure. I’m so grateful to you for having me and for all the work you do in the world. And thanks.

The post Regenerative Landscaper with Erik Ohlsen appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.