Posts tagged Permaculture
Revealing the potential of your landscape
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Living fences border the perennial poly-culture at an organic farm near Ubud, Bali.
The main crops here are coffee and cacao but there are many other edible and useful plants which form a functional food forest.
Jean Pain, a tinkerer,from France showed how it was possible to provide a major part of his energy needs from composting.
For Part 2 click here.
Raising Veggies
Whenever we decide to start gardening we come up against challenges, usually brought about by our preconceived ideas of the way things should be. For example, the neighbors might get annoyed by the untidy look of a permaculture garden, or perhaps instead of understanding a particular garden niche and growing something to suit the conditions, we decide to change the site to grow what we want.
Attaching the corrugated sheets. Chicken tractor and poly tunnel in the background.
The raised garden bed is something that is often used in both of these situations, to “tidy up” or make a site appear more ordered and to change the growing conditions by increasing drainage.
Food Forest Workshop @ Zaytuna Farm, September 21-23
Would you like to have food for your family now and into the future — food that is truly fresh and packed with flavour, and food that doesn’t cost the Earth? Would you like it to be grown in a way that not only doesn’t destroy soil, but builds it instead, so that people can be fed long after you’re gone? Would it be asking too much for this food to be grown in a way that cleans the air and the water as it passes through, and which contributes to climate restoration?
What you need is a food forest.
Once a rainforest, then cleared for timber and grazing land, a food forest now
grows around this old decaying stump from the original forest.
It has been known for a long time that wild forests provide ecosystem services of purifying air and water while building soil. These systems are capable of supporting large predatory and opportunistic species of animals with no substantial inputs from outside the system other than sunlight and the weather. (In reality the weather is more of a relationship between the forest and the sun than an input.)
Tucker for Travellers
The Arts Factory backpackers resort in Byron Bay, New South Wales, has just been blitzed by an efficient team of Permaculturalists taking part in a five day course focusing on bringing permaculture designs from the page into the landscape.
The Arts Factory backpackers resort sees travellers from all over the globe come to relax and soak up the sun and surf. During their stays they chomp their way through countless meals consisting of food that could have travelled just as far as they did. In an initiative to reduce the impact of the food consuming hordes of travellers the Permaculture Research Institute has provided a helping hand to set up a kitchen garden.
Ridge dam construction at Zaytuna Farm
On the 31st of January the Permaculture Earthworks course at the Permaculture Research Institute domonstration site, Zaytuna farm, began with good weather and a group of enthusiastic students ready to see the process of laying the groundwork for functional rainwater harvesting features in landscapes. During the week a variety of works were conducted across the property, including a new dam and swale, swale pipe crossings, building site levelling and, to make everyone’s life a little bit easier, the excavator divided some clumping bamboo.
The first project for the 25 ton excavator was to construct a ridge point dam connected to the end of an existing swale that would increase the catchment. If the dam were to be built independent of the swale it would not naturally fill. The primary purpose of this dam is to increase the volume of water stored on the property at a height where it can be gravity fed to areas below for use.
