permaculture Archives - Our Permaculture Life

Designing for Water Resilience

Morag Gamble — Tue, 07 Jun 2022 05:48:57 +0000

Creating a regenerative garden or farm, and a robust food system depends on designing for water resilience. This is the focus of the Permaculture Education Institute‘s permaculture masterclass #41. I have invited my good friend and collaborator, Natalie Topa join us this month to share her amazing work in designing for water resilience in some of the most challenging situations. There are deep lessons in what she has to share that can be adapted and applied in all different contexts. Her work is inspirational!

For two decades, Natalie has been supporting communities devastated by hurricanes, drought, floods, conflict, and wars. Water is at the core of human resilience whether in humanitarian emergencies, recovery, or long-term development and community planning. In this presentation, Natalie takes us through work she has led in various contexts to support community and household water security – from harvesting greywater to passive water harvesting design at a catchments scale.

ABOUT NATALIE TOPA: Natalie Topa is a regenerative and circular educator and designer who has worked hands-on in Africa, the Middle East, and South East Asia and focused on resilience in forced displacement for almost 20 years. She is the creator of the Sponge Village concept and a hands-on designer and advocate of passive water harvesting, soil building, agro-biodiversity recovery, indigenous food, and seed systems. Natalie is also the founder of Utopa Design and a member of United Designers International.

Click below to watch a recording of the session

The post Designing for Water Resilience appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

How to grow a food forest in one year

Morag Gamble — Tue, 17 May 2022 22:31:29 +0000

Can you grow an abundant food forest in one year? The answer is yes. Chantal Tulliez recently took me on a tour of her 600m² garden in Pomona — not far from Noosa in subtropical Queensland.

In the space of 12 months, Chantal has transformed a garden that was filled with gravel, road base and grass into a beautiful living, diverse and healthy ecosystem that is providing a bounty of food. Here’s how she did it, and how you can do it too.

Knowledge is key

Chantal is a veteran of Permaculture. She completed a Permaculture Design Course 35-years ago, but never had an opportunity to use her knowledge until now.

More recently, she refreshed her knowledge by completing my online permaculture gardening course, The Incredible Edible Garden and joining a local Permaculture group.

With her mind brimming with ideas, she started putting them into practice.

Start with the soil

To begin her garden, Chantal focused on improving her soil, adding manure, organic matter and lots of mulch — up to 30cm deep in some parts. The mulch pathways created a barrier to stop grasses and ultimately changed the ecosystem of the soil.

Capture and collect water

Water was a huge focus for Chantal. She used swales and berms to passively capture rainfall and added two tanks to improve the garden’s resilience during the dry season. A pond in the centre of her garden also plays a prominent role for wildlife and water-loving plant varieties.

Grow varieties that suit your climate

In her previous garden, Chantal grew European fruits and vegetables. This time, she went straight for what works best in her area, focusing on perennials that would help establish her gardens quickly. In this way she could help activate the ecosystem she was creating while building her food forest.

At a rough count, Chantal was growing at least 35 varieties of edibles – all within a year.

Feeling inspired?

Join The Incredible Edible Garden Course today to get your edible landscape thriving. We start with the soils, explore how to set up resilient, low-cost, low-maintenance gardens and food forests full of diverse abundance. This is a self-paced online 6 module program that you can start anytime and keep forever. There are over 95 lessons and 12 hours of video content. CLICK to find out more

Watch my garden walk-around with Chantelle

Subscribe to my YouTube channel

More great garden tours coming soon so make sure to click the notification bell too when you subscribe.

The post How to grow a food forest in one year appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

Becoming a permaculture professional – living and working a permaculture life

Morag Gamble — Wed, 30 Jun 2021 13:29:06 +0000

What does it mean to live your life as a professional in the world of permaculture? There are many ways of course, and in this episode I am delighted to welcome Andy Goldring to the Sense-Making in a Changing World podcast to share his story. Since 1999, Andy has been the CEO and Coordinator of Permaculture Association (UK) . He has dedicated his working life to coordinating permaculture programs and events and helping to make permaculture far more widely accessible in the UK, and connecting globally.

Click below to watch the podcast episode on youtube.

Permaculture is about designing for one-planet living and creating a new culture, a new story, of a positive future. Andy shares about many of the programs he’s involved with that are actively working toward this.

Hearing Andy has made permaculture his profession is so inspiring. It is becoming increasingly obvious that this work – reimagining, redesigning, resilience, restoration, regeneration, reconnection – is so essential. The world certainly needs more people diving into permaculture education and leadership whole heartedly, making it their livelihood as well as their way of life.

MORE ABOUT PERMACULTURE ASSOCIATION AND ANDY GOLDRING

Find out more about the Permaculture Association and all their programs here. You can follow Andy on twitter or LinkedIn.

AUDIO PODCAST LINK

Watch the listen to the podcast here:

BECOME A PERMACULTURE PROFESSIONAL

Are you seriously considering stepping into permaculture as a career? Take a look at the Permaculture Educators Program – a combined permaculture course for designers and teachers with a global community of learners. The only place you can do these two certificates together online, and in such an in-depth, supported and flexible way.

The post Becoming a permaculture professional – living and working a permaculture life appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

Living close to the land – permaculture neo-peasantry

Morag Gamble — Sat, 26 Jun 2021 04:57:16 +0000

Join my conversation with friends, Meg Ulman and Patrick Jones – 2/5ths of Artist as Family, on Episode 47 of Sense-Making in a Changing World podcast. Meg and Patrick are living close to the land in a rural Victorian town and share wonderful insights to the many dimensions of their way of life. You can listen in here or watch on Sense-Making in a Changing World youtube below. I am so happy to share this conversation with you. I have been a long admirer of their creative and radical approach to permaculture.

ABOUT ARTIST AS FAMILY

Artist as Family are Meg, Patrick, Blackwood (Woody), and back in the day, Zephyr and of course Zero (their dog).

Before covid, my family had the great pleasure of visiting their home in Daylesford, Australia in Djaara Mother Country. They live on a quarter-acre permaculture plot which is home to their School of Applied Neopeasantry at Tree Elbow University. Artist as Family is a practice – a unique form of performance art, comprising how they live, get their food and medicine, and move around; performing modes of life making they call permacultural neopeasantry.

Meg and Patrick teach a unique skill set of radical homemaking, community economy making and other accountable living skills to volunteers and online through various videos, talks and blog posts.

They are bloggers, unschoolers, fermentors, writers, public speakers, goat-herders, gardeners and video makers who also make music, but mostly are a family who belong to a fabulous community and a beautiful small patch of sacred forest, and therefore describe being much more than the sum of their parts.

ARTIST AS FAMILY LINKS

You can follow Artist as Family as they head off on their new cycling adventures around Australia here, watch their wonderful series of practical videos on Youtube, and feel great inspiration from their Instagram sharings.

The post Living close to the land – permaculture neo-peasantry appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

Regenerative Food & Farming Education: Caroline Aitken & Morag Gamble. Episode 45

Morag Gamble — Mon, 14 Jun 2021 10:59:18 +0000

Join me in conversation on this episode of Sense-Making in a Changing World podcast with fellow permaculture educator, Caroline Aitken who lives on the edge of Dartmoor in England. For the past couple of years, Caroline has led the development of the first ever regenerative food and farming undergraduate and Masters program in the UK, and it has just opened at the innovative ecological university, Schumacher College. Caroline has designed the program to give students opportunity to explore leading-edge alternatives to mainstream agricultural practices and food systems, to visit leading local regenerative farms, get growing too.

It’s fabulous to hear how permaculture is being woven so intricately through some of the most innovative programs in the world. I was delighted to catch up with Caroline to hear all about it, and thrilled to be able to share this conversation with you here.

Caroline apprenticed as a permaculture teacher with UK permaculture pioneer and author, Patrick Whitefield, and after his passing, carried on his work.

WATCH THIS YOUTUBE PODCAST EPISODE

AUDIO PODCAST

Listen to the audio version here.

RESOURCES

In our chat, Caroline mentioned these books:
- The Earth Care Manual by Patrick Whitefield
– Food from your Forest Garden by Caroline Aitken
– A Small Farm Future by Chris Smaje
– Farming on the Wild Side by Nancy J Hayden and John P Hayden

and these regenerative food and farming organisations:
– Food in Community CIC
– Huxhams Cross Farm
– Dartington Mill
– The Land Workers Alliance
– La Via Campesina
– The Ecological Land Co-operative

Plus these links too:
– Dartington Learning and Schumacher College Live Chat online events
– Farming for the Future Podcasts
– Chelsea Green Publishing youtube channel

The post Regenerative Food & Farming Education: Caroline Aitken & Morag Gamble. Episode 45 appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

Imagine the future – the best version of us

Morag Gamble — Fri, 04 Jun 2021 13:44:18 +0000

Join me and Dr Millie Rooney as we dive into her explorations of how people imagine the future in Australia, and the new stories people are dreaming of. It’s a great pleasure to share this Sense-Making in a Changing World podcast episode with you, and to catch up with my friend Millie. Click below to watch, or you can also listen to the audio version here.

Millie is the National Coordinator for Australia reMADE, a vision-based collaboration of everyday people and community leaders working to build a country where people and planet come first. As a kid she spent hours collecting toothbrushes outside supermarkets for Gulf War refugees and, although wasn’t allowed to watch movies for fear of scary themes like ‘divorce’, was aware from a young age of scarier things like ‘war’. As a result Millie’s dream was to become a butterfly dancer on stilts, catch the eye of a journalist and make it to the front page of the paper so that there could be some good news for once. Is it any surprise she ended up involved in Australia reMADE?

Millie grew up in Canberra on Ngunnawal country and although now calls Tasmania home, she misses the dry scrappy dirt, the warble of the magpies and the smooth, flat bike paths.

Millie has worked as an environment officer at both the Australian National University and the University of Tasmania. She has constantly worked off the principle of ‘delight not fright’ which has resulted in Celebrate Sustainability Days, visions for student-led campus transformation and an award winning student sustainability internship program.

Millie’s PhD was an exploration into the social norms that determine our ability as Australian’s to share, or not, with our neighbours.

Some of the programs of Australia ReMADE helping us to re-imagine the future.

Other interesting links Millie suggests you look at:

The post Imagine the future – the best version of us appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

Permaculture Teaching Farm – Podcast with Suzie Cahn & Morag Gamble

Morag Gamble — Fri, 28 May 2021 21:35:15 +0000

I had such fun with this episode of Sense-Making in a Changing World. I am joined by my great friend Suzie Cahn, a leader from the Irish permaculture world, creator of a permaculture education farm, and active in permaculture education globally. She is an adventurous teacher who’s worked with communities from Mongolia to Belize.

Back in 2008, Suzie and her husband Mike established Carraig Dúlra – social enterprise, community education, nature connection and permaculture hub in County Wicklow and is exploring her Irish indigeneity through this lens.

Suzie and I met at a climate change conference in Findhorn Scotland a few years back and just clicked. She coordinates a Climate Justice Centre in Ireland piloting community-led approaches to Climate Action and is active in ECOLISE (the European network for community-led initiatives on climate change and sustainability). She deeply involved in the transition and permaculture movements .You can hear her speak about her many threads of interest in her own podcast Cailleach (actually, you’ll hear this episode there too – we did the beautiful multi-functional permaculture thing and interviewed each other!)

Together we explore how we came to being permaculture teachers and what shapes our thinking and our approaches as educators.

To listen to the audio version of our conversation go here.

More information about Suzie’s place.

Carraig Dúlra is a 3.8 acre smallholding in Wicklow that has been designed and developed in collaboration with many volunteers, students and tutors and now contains (from Permaculture UK site):

1.5 acre native woodland

0.5 acre food forest and apple orchard

different types of organic annual gardens:

the circle garden

a herb labyrinth insectary

a traditional market garden

an allotment sized garden

large greenhouse with perennial polycultures and annual beds

a mixed material (round poles, cob, straw bale), naturally built round barn with a reciprocal roof

a washhouse/sauna cabin

pond and swale systems

indoor kitchen, clad with forestry waste timbers, and up-cycled dumped kitchen counters and cabinets

outdoor cooking area: with cob oven, biogas generation, rocket stoves and BBQ

The post Permaculture Teaching Farm – Podcast with Suzie Cahn & Morag Gamble appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

One Acre Permaculture Farm Podcast with Brett Cooper and Morag Gamble

Morag Gamble — Tue, 25 May 2021 14:41:07 +0000

Join me in this episode of Sense-Making in a Changing World, to hear my conversation with passionate one-acre permaculture farmer and teacher, Brett Cooper from Limestone Permaculture in Stroud, north of Newcastle in NSW.

CLICK BELOW to watch the my podcast interview with Brett below on youtube, or listen to the audio here. Listen in & be inspired by the transition story Brett shares – from city to country, from full time job to permaculture way of life & livelihood – motivating, uplifting and enabling!

Aerial view of Limestone permaculture – one acre farm

Brett and his family moved from the city and busy full time jobs and health issues to this quiet country property. After a well considered transition, some great planning and lots of dedication to their vision, they now source their entire income from their beautifully designed small-scale permaculture farm with 11 sources of income – including food, courses, tours, accommodation, consulting and importantly – the gift economy.

Brett and Nici

Also, have you seen the film about their farm by Happen Films. You can also check out their other resources on Facebook.

One Acre Permaculture Farm before and after

The post One Acre Permaculture Farm Podcast with Brett Cooper and Morag Gamble appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

An Ecology of Changemaking: Collaborating with Nature for a Better World

Jo Anne Coruña — Sat, 24 Apr 2021 07:44:46 +0000

Guest writer: Jo Anne V. Coruña – graduate of the Permaculture Educators Program writes about the education program she designed through the course – An Ecology of Changemaking that she launched with the Ashoka Foundation.

Amidst these times of quarantines and lockdowns, our forest garden has been a source of joy, wonder, relaxation, and hope for me and my family.

I can imagine that the same goes for many more people who have taken to the Earth and to growing their own food recently.

I know it is a gift, and in my part of the world, it is not lost on me that it is quite a privilege to have some land, however small, to tend to, to seek sanctuary in, to be able to divert attention from anxieties around the uncertainties that loom. Because of this, I often think about how I can share the abundance – not just harvests, but more so the mental, emotional, and spiritual yields – from our forest garden with more people. My background in social innovation as a former Ashoka staff member and my various experiences working with nonprofit organisations paved the way. As I was in our forest garden one morning, it dawned on me how Permaculture makes Systems Thinking a lot more tangible, and its impact quite immediately concrete. I’ve known about Systems Thinking for a long time, but it was different seeing it right before my eyes, through the ecosystem that I have helped build – and am actually a part of – in our piece of land. This was when the seed for the Ecology of Changemaking was sown. A program, a paradigm, and a mindset, the Ecology of Changemaking is an approach that integrates nature into the design of social initiatives and projects. It asks the question,

How might we make lasting positive change in collaboration with nature?

This is a frog my very observant daughter saw in our forest garden one morning. Can we learn from it to make our changemaking better? I believe so.

Changemaking is the act of creating positive change in small and large contexts. All of us are capable of being changemakers in our families, schools, communities, and in the world. There are problems that call to us for solutions, and it’s been shown that the most effective way to address these concerns is through a systems thinking lens – by considering the whole environment where the problem persists, and not isolating it from everything else and just coming up with a band-aid solution. In designing a permaculture garden, with the ethics and principles as our guide, we look at patterns, we investigate our soil and the wild plants that grow in it, we study the history of the land, and we observe the various forces that affect our site such as the arc of the sun, the flow of water, and the direction and intensity of the wind. We consider the entire ecosystem before we start transplanting trees or sowing seeds, because if we don’t, then our efforts may come up short or in unfortunate cases, may actually do more harm than good. So it is with changemaking. And while it may be more complex to study the entire ecosystem of the problem we are trying to solve, systems thinking is a critical skill to hone and use as changemakers. Permaculture offers a pragmatic, tangible, and relevant method: Working with nature and learning from her ways and wisdom.

The Ecology of Changemaking mindset consciously situates the work that changemakers do in nature. Being humans, we are inevitably embedded in nature and her systems, and so is any work that we do. Continuing to separate our lives from nature can only lead to our own detriment. The Climate Crisis is real and we are feeling its effects, from this pandemic to “natural” disasters everywhere. If we are to work towards a better world, or zooming in closer to home, a better village or city or community, we have to embrace an Ecology of Changemaking approach. We have to collaborate with nature. We have to realise that we are a part of the vast and deep ecosystem of the natural world. We have to learn and honour the way indigenous peoples all over the world harmoniously co-exist with nature. I believe that knowing how to grow our own food must be a skill all of us must learn, just as how we are expected to learn how to read and write.

Greens grown and harvested from our kitchen garden, clockwise from middle-left: Okra, Society Garlic, Talinum or Philippine Spinach, and Sweet Potato leaves. All on a sustainably woven fabric from ANTHILL Fabric Gallery a social enterprise in the Philippines that works to keep weaving traditions alive, while helping their partner communities have sustainable livelihood.

With an Ecology of Changemaking mindset, we acknowledge that the solutions we wish to design and implement to address social problems will be more robust if it weaves the patterns, processes, and wisdom of nature through it. When we collaborate with nature and care for her in the process of doing our changemaking work, we address our own needs more holistically and regeneratively as well. I hope you’ll join me in this journey; I post regular updates about the program and my thoughts and reflections on its growth and evolution on my website.

Jo Anne VC is a visual artist, writer, and permaculture designer & practitioner. She is based in the Philippines with her husband and children, growing a food forest garden in their backyard. She co-hosts Tanum Tuesdays, a podcast featuring people and plants in the Philippines. You can find more of her writing, art, and permaculture field notes on amidstthegreen.org, and support her work and the Ecology of Changemaking program on Patreon.

The post An Ecology of Changemaking: Collaborating with Nature for a Better World appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

What is Marine Permaculture? Masterclass with Dr Brian von Herzen & Morag Gamble

Morag Gamble — Fri, 22 Nov 2019 03:29:45 +0000

What is marine permaculture? How can it contribute to the reversing of climate change and species loss? And how does it relate to land-based permaculture?

Are you curious about marine permaculture? In permaculture masterclass #20, I am delighted to be joined by the originator of Marine Permaculture, Brian von Herzen, PhD, founder of the non-profit Climate Foundation to explore these questions and more.

I am really very excited about the potential of marine permaculture and Brian is just such an inspiration. He is dedicating his life to this as a practical and positive response to the climate and ecological emergencies, and the immediate needs of many peoples that depend directly on the oceans for their daily survival and well-being.

A little more about Marine Permaculture

Marine permaculture is a regenerative solution that has a potential to sequester vast amounts of carbon and restore balance to ocean ecosystems. It has the potential to create an abundance of food, habitat for a complex diversity of marine species, livelihoods for farmers in the global south, excellent fodder, powerful natural fertiliser and lots of organic matter for soils.

Marine Permaculture was featured in the recent award-winning documentary 2040 by Damon Gameau showing some of the most viable and available possibilities we currently have to not only slow, but reverse climate change. It is featured also in the accompanying book 2040: A Handbook for Regeneration . Cool Australia has even collaborated to make a marine permaculture school worksheet for grade 7-8s. The Intrepid Foundation is helping to raise money for it to be set up off the coast of Tasmania. Paul Hawken’s featured marine permaculture too in his wonderful book Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Roll Back Global Warming

Excerpt from 2040 Movie

Click on the image below to play this podcast with Brian and Dr Karl recorded at Woodford Folk Festival in 2017.

Permaculture Educators Program

Dr Brian von Herzen is a foundation member of the Permaculture Educators Program that I launched in June 2018 through the Permaculture Education Institute. Join him and hundreds of others in this fabulous learning community that spans 6 continents to make permaculture your way of life and potential livelihood too. Find out more

Watch Masterclass #18: Soil Repair as Climate Action

This is a related masterclass. In Masterclass 18, I explore permaculture approaches to storing carbon in the soil – how to grow and repair soil to harvest great food and drawdown carbon as a positive climate action.

The post What is Marine Permaculture? Masterclass with Dr Brian von Herzen & Morag Gamble appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.