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
