EcoExplorers Madagascar 2010 from Shannon Kohlitz on Vimeo.

Here we are past July’s time for fleece, hat and socks, wouldn’t you believe! Manintsy – cold (25/16 °C day/night or less) was the semiarid southwest Madagascar in winter; winter in the dry southwest where ‘it never rains’. Well, never say ‘never’ and/or be prepared for rain in the no rain season and for beautiful double rainbows arching gently over the glowing morning skies….

Since our last update in February, ho avy has been on a ‘high season rainbow ride’ – exciting in a way, admittedly speedy and bumpy some of the time – more like a downhill slalom race against time, where falling over exposed tree roots is unavoidable. Retrospectively, it’s been a valuable growing time: our trees are growing and we are growing with them.

We especially enjoyed the rainbow of colors left behind the pens, pencils and brushes of Eco-Explorers – talented undergraduate students of the University of Michigan’s School of Art and Design. These young students overflowing with creativity came to Madagascar expecting no rain. Although they got some, they seemed to greatly enjoy this mad ride, and so did we on ho avy & Madagascar Eco-Explorers’ tour and project service work in Ranobe.

A double rainbow morning

Some truly beautiful pieces of art were born on this three week long trip from mid May to June, exploring Madagascar and spending five days doing projects with ho avy in Ranobe. The students painted two interpretation panels: one for the native tree nursery and another one for the reforestation research center. Several oxen carts (and finally also oxen horns) were colorfully painted. Without doubt, the favorite motif is Star Wars. With pride this cart has been riding to the next village and the city of Toliara! Bar relief sculpturing on adobe walls on the reforestation center has adaptively used the wet walls leaving our planned spiny forest mural for another occasion in the future. A treadle pump for easier and playful water access has been built during the days of the group visit and another one completed in even shorter time by one volunteering student staying beyond the expedition.

Bar relief

Deep impressions have anchored in minds and hearts of these young people exploring Madagascar on their first step out of their secure homelands into the unknown. Madagascar is quite an experience.

Wildlife theme on centre

The 19-person art student group was the largest we’ve hosted in Ranobe since last December, adding significantly to the 4 Czech, 2 American, 1 French, 4 Israeli, and 2 Spanish visitors already spending several weeks with us – sharing their skills and expertise to advance various aspects of our program, from forest habitat description, GIS to business development. They have been a refreshing change for ho avy as well as our hosting community.

The most recent partner of ho avy was a team of four engineering masters students from the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan (www.hazomanga.org), who came to Madagascar with the group of the art students. The engineers give sustainable energy assessments and make conservation management recommendations. They collected solar data, built housing for ho avy’s solar system, designed and built a solar dryer, water filter and evaluated the feasibility of biofuels. The students interviewed the Ranobe community on wood, charcoal and water use issues. Mapping of land use, deforestation and forest recovery, set a good ground for a long-term monitoring research. Being a well organized, dynamic and enthusiastic team with women in majority, they creatively filled their free time with experimental baking in our solar box oven. Banana bread, chocolate chip or oatmeal raisin cookies, among others, turned out being delicious field yummies. Nicely done!

Clair, Brennen and Olivia taking solar data

Patty and Brennen constructing solar dryer

Ho avy’s daily interactions with the villagers since October 2009, with international visitors and cultural and language exchange, have been raising environmental awareness and building capacity. Needless to say, information starvation and curiosity is apparent among villages of all age groups. Ho avy has been collaborating with the GTZ and Sokapila organizations on implementing the Kit Mad’ere, a tool introducing environmental education to schools and community. A workshop was held in early April for teachers from the schools in Ranobe and Ambolimalailaka. In March, ho avy organized a workshop to improve farming methods: introducing the system of rice intensification (SRI). The workshop has been well attended and the method is now practiced on several FIMPAHARA fields.

Olivia with Tsiforse and Malai mapping deforestation

Improved and alternative technologies brought by ho avy seem to get adopted: the fuel efficient stove was in full operation, the biogas digester has been producing methane for the ladies to cook with for several months now. The output of the biogas digester is an excellent fertilizer and FIMPAHARA used it for their crop fields. Ho avy’s well, installed in December last year got a manual pump and has been in non-stop use by the villagers. Results of interviews show, the pump is greatly appreciated for easing everyday chores. The solar box oven has not had a break and delicious variations of bread, cakes, muffins, or roasted peanuts for snacks indicate a growing appreciation of solar energy as a passive cooking option.

Housing for solar panels designed by the MSc students

Speaking of solar – ho avy’s solar system is now located on the second floor of ho avy’s research center. Ho avy spiny forest research center will generate knowledge about how to conserve biodiversity through research, sustainable development and forest restoration. The center has been under construction over the last months – largely natural building, designed by Anthony, who has worked closely on it with the FIMPAHARA men. The building progress has been exciting, considering the tool limitations, e.g. a non-functional drill, so much of the building was done creatively – by hand and off the grid, with local wood, rock, roofing material, bamboo and adobe mix. The building is not far from being completed; we plan for an inauguration by the end of this year. The center’s surroundings are developing into a demonstration site of integrated sustainability, home gardening, multi-crop plots, agroforestry and more.

Agroforestry has been our focus activity since March. We raised fruit trees along with native trees in three tree nurseries on an area of 184 m2. Nearly 10 000 native trees and 5500 fruit and multi-purpose trees have been nurtured. FIMPAHARA collected 75 species of native and 5 non-native species for medicines, non-invasive fast wood propagation and oil-rich seeds. Up to June 2010 over 800 native and 750 fruit trees have been planted on 1.35 ha of FIMAHARA land: on edges of forest, in agroforestry polyculture plots and in live fences/hedges. Jointly with FIMPAHARA, we planted diverse fruit trees on ca 3 ha of crop fields. These efforts, i.e. planting indigenous and fruit species on disturbed forest edges and reforesting in belts, aim to assist ecological forest recovery. We want to create ‘ecotones’ (transitional habitats) favoring wildlife colonization and assisting seed dispersal. Planted trees have been monitored for survival and growth.

Just hanging out in the village

The local community has been enthusiastic to participate and support these agroforestry trials. The planted species included native fruit trees ofen harvested from the forest, locally planted bananas, papaya, mango, guava, lemons and tamarinds and tested varieties of species that are on the market, but not grown in Ranobe, such as litchi, clementine and orange, cashew, annona, passion fruit, pomegranate, avocado, loquat, date and coconut palms.

The community helps build the reforestation center

Ho avy’s involvement on site for the last quarters of a year has been an invaluable experience which allowed observing and figuring seasonality in terms of food growing. One has to skin-experience it, especially when coming from completely different climate. By living through the ‘cold’ parts of the year – we got it right now with April/May potato planting time. Besides potatoes, 1 ha of garden has onion and garlic, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, red beets and radishes, carrot and parsley, basil, lettuce, spinach, swiss chard, a variety of beans, peanuts, sesame, flex, several kinds of squash and melons. A few sunflowers have made our gardening efforts more cheerful. Malagasy people like rice, but they also like flowers and so do we. This is indeed a very exciting step forward to community-scale gardening, greater diversity of food production and important dietary supplements, that have been largely lacking.

Watering the nursery

For filling these gaps, we need to continue our mission; we let the exciting energy of the upcoming spring enter: rising temperatures, new beautiful flowers and fresh leaves or magnificent courtships of birds, bring inspiration to the next phase of ho avy’s efforts in Ranobe. We have a few exciting goals and future prospects and will mobilize our efforts to reach them before this year’s end, moving step by step towards a sustainable future. Stay tuned if you’d like to hear more in few months….

Photo galleries:

• Forest, wildlife and research
• Eco-Explorer’s art student trip
• MSc. students
• Ho avy and community interactions
• Technical alternatives
• Center construction
• Nursery, agroecology, agroforesty & gardening

During my two week immersion into permaculture design, Bill Mollison was asked by a student, "How do we go about teaching permaculture to our children?” to which Bill replied something along the lines of, “I don’t believe we should be teaching Permaculture to children. They already have enough on their plates in terms of responsibilities and such, so we shouldn’t overburden them with yet another subject.”

True enough, if you take permaculture as the full 72-hour course that we adults tend towards. But I approach the idea that teaching children permaculture is vitally important to the sustainability of life itself and needs to be taught to youths so that by the time they are adults, permaculture is no longer a subject, but a way of life that is as natural as breathing.

But how would we go about uploading The Permaculture Designers Manual into the minds of our youths without overburdening their grey matter? Exactly the same way that farmers (1) are learning Permaculture – a bit at a time, with small bite sized chunks of drip fed information, with an emphasis on tacit learning. My son’s school has done their part in this by going for the low hanging fruit, the easy beginners’ steps of sustainability;

• Rainwater tanks all over the place, so many of them I lost count and the larger ones are connected to the subsurface irrigation system on the sports field. No swales though…
• Vegetable gardens for the children to learn about where food actually comes from and how to grow it. Other schools have taken this step even further with a Kitchen Garden Program
• Teaching about biodiversity; what it means, why it’s important, and how can we go about achieving it in our area? The NSW Government has provided fantastic teaching resources for this subject. They are covering subjects such as; the web of life, habitats and homes, ecosystems, vertebrates, invertebrates, food chains and webs and vertical layers of habitats.

Now these simple elements are not Permaculture as such, but they are a fantastic place to start and they will sow the seed within their generation for them to make the necessary changes for a sustainable planet.

I should probably point out that that my son is not at high school. He is only 7 and has already begun walking the path to sustainability. If he and his class mates can do it, then there is hope for us all.

Notes:

1. You would simply be amazed how well farmers are warming to elements of Permaculture. More on that next time.

Further Reading/Watching:

• Solving All the Problems of the World – in a Garden
• Scary school nightmares and de-schooling society

Resources:

• Eat Your Garden – Organic Gardening for Home and Schools
• Seed to Seed – Food Gardens in Schools

There are two very unique and exciting opportunities to learn Permaculture Design and obtain your certification in Kenya this coming December of 2010 or in March of 2011. Students from around the world are invited to join local Kenyan students and International permaculture teacher and designer, Warren Brush, of Quail Springs Learning Oasis and Permaculture Farm and other teachers from the local culture for this learning journey of a lifetime.

Nyumbani Village

In December of 2010, we will be convening the first course at a village outside of Nairobi called Nyumbani Village. This village stands on one thousand acres of land donated by the Kitui District County Council. The site is within the poorest division in the Kitui District and has a high incidence of HIV and a high number of HIV orphans. When complete, the Village will accommodate approximately 1000 orphans and 100 grandparents living in 100 dwelling units each with a grandparent and 8 – 10 children.

The Village provides a family-like setting for orphaned children under the stewardship of elderly adults and seeks to ensure that the children receive love, sustenance, health-care, holistic education and culture transfer, aiming for their physical, psychosocial and spiritual development, and, at the same time, providing holistic care and support for the grandparents in their later years. Through group homes and community services, the Village seeks to harness the energy of youth and the maturity of elders to create new blended families that foster healing, hope and opportunity. The village also seeks to ensure that the residents in the surrounding communities reach a certain level of self-reliance through the Village sustainability program.

They are ripe and ready for permaculture education to take root in their development process. Local teacher, Joseph Ntunyoi, from the Maasai tribe, will be assisting Warren Brush in the teaching of this course along with an up and coming teacher Ayouba Kamara from Liberia as well as with other special guests.

Badilisha Village

The second course is in March of 2011 at a village development called Badilisha Ecovillage on Rusinga Island on Lake Victoria. Badilisha has been organized by local people to make valuable lasting contributions to the social, economic, emotional, mental, spiritual and physical health of the people and ecology of Rusinga Island in Kenya

The good people at Badilisha Ecovillage are well on their way in establishing a community from which Earth Care and environmental conservation is supported by conscious design and application. They are growing food using permaculture principles, they are working to establish a resource centre for local residents to learn about sustainability through various projects and programs and they are working to improve the economies of the island by developing ecotourism. Their work spans working with school programs, teaching and practicing non-violent communication, assisting people with HIV, and they run a family sponsorship program for the extremely disadvantaged people of their region. This course will be taught by Warren Brush and assisted by local teacher Evans Owuor Odula and international teachers Elin Lindhagen and Loren Luyendyk.

At each of these visionary sites, we will be offering an affordable full two-week permaculture design certification course that will blend both local students with international students in a unique cross-cultural learning environment. These courses will incorporate myriad hands-on learning opportunities with practical permaculture theory and storytelling that is delivered uniquely by Warren Brush and the local teachers.

To keep within our ethics, we are asking that the students who cross the oceans to get to this course also commit to offsetting their carbon emissions for their travel to get to Kenya through designing and applying what they learn in the course. For the local students, we are asking them to commit to taking what they learn in these courses to their communities through applied projects that better the lives and ecologies of their home regions.

May our work in Permaculture around the globe continue to bring healing to place and people as it provides abundance, resilience and stability to our strained world!

Take a PDC in Kenya (PDF) or donate, either way will help to underwrite the course expenses so that local Kenyans can participate without cost….

~~~~

Warren Brush is a certified Permaculture designer and teacher as well as a mentor and storyteller. He has worked for over 20 years in inspiring people of all ages to discover, nurture and express their inherent gifts while living in a sustainable manner. He is co-founder of Quail Springs Learning Oasis & Permaculture Farm, Wilderness Youth Project, Mentoring for Peace, and Trees for Children. He works extensively in Permaculture education and sustainable systems design in North America and in Africa through his design firm, True Nature Design. He can be reached through email at w (at) quailsprings.org or by calling his office at 805-886-7239.

Tongue-in-cheek instructional video

Note: This is an update on PRI’s position and direction, and an opportunity for you to get paid to help!

The short version: We’re now paying you to write for us! Click here to get started.

The background/long version follows:

Over the last two years since I took over the running of this site, I’ve been pleased to see significant growth in traffic. I’m not so narrow-minded as to believe this is just due to my efforts or Geoff and Nadia Lawton’s or the rest of the PRI team, however. Aside from the tremendous support and input from the wider permaculture community, I also note that current events and the spread of information through the internet is threatening to actually wake the world up – and this ‘awakening’ is seeing an unprecedented growth in interest in sustainability, transition and the creation of resilient people systems. This interest certainly isn’t coming too soon, but better late than never.

For whatever reasons, though, this site is today regularly recognised as one of the, or even the, leading permaculture website worldwide. This has come about with a lot of help from readers like yourself, and permaculture project leaders and workers worldwide. This growth is helping increase permaculture exposure, and is helping our aim to drive permaculture into mainstream consciousness. (Examples: CNN, SBS, ABC, etc..)

But, whenever a site or entity grows, there are always questions about its purpose. I want to share the Permaculture Research Institute’s intentions as succinctly as possible here, and also solicit your support to help us in our goals – goals I believe many of you subscribe to. And no, I’m not asking for donations! (Although these are always appreciated!)

The Permaculture Research Institute (PRI) is an independently audited (annually) non-profit entity. But, it’s a non-profit with a difference. While a large part of our focus is on project aid work, where we seek to implement permaculture solutions in some of the most challenging places in the world, we don’t subscribe to the traditional strategies that NGOs often ‘utilise’. It was my personal prediction that many NGOs will, as our energy and economic woes intensify, lose their funding as charitably-minded people and businesses lose their liquidity and reprioritise expenditure. From some of the NGOs I’ve worked with and spoken to over the last couple of years, these predictions seem to be coming to pass. More and more people and businesses are finding they just don’t have excess funds to pass on to ‘feel good’ causes. In a peak oil world, this can translate to huge humanitarian disasters as dependent populations find supports removed.

In other words, if we only ran on donations, we’d be as finite an endeavour as industrial civilisation.

The PRI, instead, wants to see permaculture education and uptake spread – despite a failing/flailing economy. We thus seek to be as resilient financially as our on-the-ground systems are biologically. As such, our methods differ not only in the solutions proposed (we prefer to teach a man to fish, and how to manage fish stocks sustainably, rather than just dump piles of them at his feet) but also in the financial model that keeps our permaculture evangelism growing and working while we’re still, reluctantly, in the ‘money economy’ era of the society we find ourselves in and are trying to transition ourselves out of.

Another point of difference, while I’m discussing this, is that we regard the suburbs of Los Angeles or Brisbane just as ‘challenging’ as rural Ethiopia or Vietnam – in that people in ‘first world’ countries are acutely vulnerable in so many ways (economy, energy, centralised food systems, etc.), but just don’t see it, nor where they’re headed – and thus don’t see the desperate need to transition to a life based on real-time sunlight. In contrast, ‘two thirds’ world people are generally struggling on a day to day basis, so can be highly appreciative of tools that make their lives more productive, resilient and efficient – and they are often barely only a generation or so removed from a sustainable, low-impact lifestyle, so their skill-set is usually far more practical. As such permaculture ‘aid work’ is just as essential in London and Melbourne as it is in Lesotho and Mombai. Given what’s looming on the horizon, some might say even more so….

The Permaculture Master Plan

Anyway, the PRI seeks to develop and support the growth of successful, mutually beneficial, interdependent relationships (both between individuals and communities, and between these and the land at their feet), with these successful interdependencies occurring by largely self-reliant individuals cooperating with each other to meet human needs in holistically sound ways. The emphasis here is that we seek to build relationships that are mutually supportive/symbiotic, and not competitive. Just as in the plants and organisms around us and at our feet, we believe the success of the permaculture movement as a whole is entirely dependent on our leaving behind the selfish ambition that most of us in the west have been programmed with through our education, media and through our participation in the contemporary, competitive economic model almost universally applied today – and instead to find ways to interact harmoniously to support each other.

Furthermore, we seek for our projects to transition to localised resilience in food and other base human requirements (housing, clothing, etc.), but also to become financially self-sufficient. As we do not believe in contributing to globalisation, but, rather, to help transition away from it, we do not encourage projects to be self sufficient through sales of produce or goods, or at least not to make this their primary endeavour, but, rather, to sell knowledge, so the people around them can begin to grow and produce their own goods. The idea, expressed by our Permaculture Master Plan, is to educate the world in permaculture design principles and application – making each project site both an impressive demonstration site of what is possible and achievable by and for local people in their respective regions, as well as a professional education site sharing the ‘how’ of it. Following this demonstrate-and-educate recipe enables project leaders and their teams to concentrate on transitioning/building the community around them while course and consultation fees finance this evangelisation.

We don’t see any losers in this scenario. The ideal and ultimate goal is that these projects will self-replicate to the point where they will saturate the global landscape with mutually interdependent and resilient communities of knowledgeable permaculture practitioners – setting the stage for a softer landing on the peak-oil downslide. Although the income from course fees would gradually diminish over time, as more and more demonstration/education sites multiply – this income would become increasingly redundant/unnecessary as the growth of resilient permaculture sites and communities fills the void created by a crashing money economy.

Time is of the Essence

If you’re following the logic so far, you will recognise that time is of the essence. To have paying students finance the ballooning of permaculture demonstration/education sites worldwide, we need to get a large portion of this ‘evangelisation’ work done before the economic mayhem born of peak oil and climate change begins to hit us even harder than it already has. At the moment, increasingly, people are seeing the need to get permaculture-educated while they still have the finances to do so. Many can still afford to take flights to learn at locations where their hardish western currency can not only train themselves in modern permaculture design systems whilst gaining valuable indigenous knowledge but also subsidise the training of poverty-stricken locals. This will not always be the case. We’re working in a window of opportunity that will close in the ensuing years.

Making the Most of the Time Window We Have

As such, we feel that leveraging the impact of this website (www.permaculture.org.au) is paramount. I note many permaculture individuals endeavouring to develop their own readership in fragmented efforts that, often with the best of intentions, fail to achieve much. The reason they fail to achieve much is that it takes a lot of time and dedication to grow a website, and that growth is largely dependent on a consistent stream of quality content that keeps people returning to, and linking to, your site. People are too busy on the ground to maintain such sites, or dedicate staff to the task. A million small websites sharing intermittent posts is not nearly as efficient as a few larger sites with far higher traffic counts sharing regular engaging content. I like to think of the networking and leveraging of grass-roots permaculture labour and resources – to build mainstream momentum in all things permaculture – as represented by that largest of all biological organisms: mycelium. While various plants and rocks and microorganisms appear independent of each other, there is a common link – in soil biology – that connects them all. In like manner, the internet, perhaps one of the few real gifts the industrial revolution has given us, is enabling us to connect and share our energies in symbiotic and synergistic ways for the benefit of all. For us to reach mainstream consciousness, funneling our experiences and knowledge through reliable website ‘portals’ is, I can say categorically, far more efficient than expecting readers to browse a thousand sites to get the information they need.

How to Leverage Our Collective Energies to Spread Permaculture Fast

The lifeblood of my work, that of trying to drive permaculture thinking into mainstream consciousness, is found in sharing quality reports from around the world. My logic goes like this: when people in mainstream consumer society confront permaculture, if they believe it’s only practiced by a few sandal-wearing souls living on the fringes of society, they’ll conclude "nice idea, but it’s too little, too late", and they’ll write the concept off as being idealistic dreaming. But if, instead, they realise the reality – that this is a movement of many tens of thousands of people working, right now, in almost every country on every continent of this jewel of an earth we call home – then they’ll instead think to themselves – "hell, change is afoot, and I’m getting left behind – I want to get involved, and now!"

The work is happening, and it’s building momentum. But while the word ‘Permaculture’ is now finally in the Oxford English dictionary, it needs to be on the lips and in the hands of everyone if humanity-saving goodness is to reach that tipping point where it’ll take off and meet the enormous challenges we face today.

Those tens of thousands of people are working hard, accomplishing great things, but they’re often too busy to look up and around to view where they fit in the big picture – the big mycelium fungal net, as it were. I would like to say to those people that by writing articles and sharing your work, frustrations, challenges, successes, observations and inspiration, your effort to report, as an ‘element’ in your system, does in itself serve several ‘functions’.

1. You inspire others to imitate/emulate your example.
2. You educate people in the ‘how’ of it.
3. You make your work known. People can’t help and support you if they don’t know you or your work exists. Such assistance can come by way of encouragement, gifting practical knowledge/information that is relevant to you, and actual physical involvement and financial support.
4. You enable us (PRI) to better understand your situation, and tailor support to assist, assuming you are seeking such assistance.

As many of you will know, I regularly undertake to do such reports myself, and have done so in places as far afield as Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Chile, Jordan, the West Bank, Slovakia (and), Australia, (and, and, etc.). But, while I will continue to seek to profile successful examples of permaculture around the world, we want to hear your views, your experiences, your challenges, your successes and gain knowledge and inspiration from your particular observations. You don’t have to understand the science of web promotion – that’s my job. You don’t have to understand how to deal with websites, image optimisation and editing – that’s also my job. I get tired of hearing my own voice, as I’m sure do our readers. We want to hear yours! I want to see the permaculturists out there, from novice to guru expert (we don’t believe in gurus – but rather, real people doing real doable things), sharing their knowledge for the benefit of all.

Get paid to spread knowledge and inspiration

And guess what – we’ll even pay you to do it! Recognising people are very busy, and that in today’s world time is food, we will pay to hear your stories on a per-post basis. Click here to learn more.

We of course still welcome volunteer posts. Again, we’re a non-profit, so the more money we save the more we can inject into starting and assisting projects worldwide. In the last year, for example, we have donated approximately $100,000 to projects worldwide, either by way of direct donations or through teaching or consultation time. Over the next year we anticipate this figure will increase again. And we’ve assisted further through my time – utilising this high-traffic website to bring course adverts for diverse locations worldwide to the attention of our readers. We’ve seen sites where they were struggling to find students, but after an advert here the courses filled up. This is what it’s all about! This is funneling information and resources to spread permaculture as fast as we can!

This website and our forums (which we’ve recently upgraded by the way) have been a gift from PRI to the permaculture community. We’re very glad to see them getting utilised. I still see many people, however, not quite understanding our ’services’. Many almost appear to think we’re some kind of independently wealthy (or even publicly funded?) entity with a duty to spread research knowledge and long term analysis of various aspects of permaculture systems, and share it freely, not understanding that within our current capitalist framework such important but time-consuming work is impossible to do, simply because it’s price prohibitive. We remain financially independent, yes, but only due to the hard work of people within the team – and that work is based on classroom and field education. We’d love to initiate research-and-document projects, and create unending ‘how-to’ videos and articles, but doing so takes time and money. As such, we encourage all permaculturists to undertake these tasks as they are able, and to share them to the largest audience possible. We’ll help subsidise this work, by paying per-post as an encouragement/incentive to take the time out to do so.

So, in the busyness of life, I hope you will see that, as I’ve often said to PDC students, reporting on your work and observations is just as important as the physical design work itself. Make your voice heard. Share your knowledge and we’ll ensure it gets maximum exposure.

I look forward to receiving and sharing your articles!

P.S. Until today we’ve had excellent results from our arrangement with people interested to advertise their courses on our site. In exchange for a separate non-promotional article (i.e. something inspirational or educational or both), we’ve put their course adverts up at no charge. This arrangement will continue.

Journey to Igourdane: Large communal extended family home.
Only the part on the far right is now inhabited.

The days on the course were spent going through the theory and wandering about on the farm trying to apply it to surrounding landscape. Every now and then we might be given some mint tea, batboot and olive oil.

Pattern in design session

Spicer officanalis and Lucerne

David and Alex

Berber garden: olives, almonds, pomegranates, lucerne, broad beans,
fenced by dead hedge and native cardoon.

Irrigation at Ourthane, the course farm

Lunch was eaten at the spring, usually a tagine or couscous and salad eaten with bread. The day of the souk we had an outstanding dish of sardine meatballs in a very tasty stock.

We were so lucky to get such a rich and diverse bunch of students. The knowledge and experience they contributed to the course was truly invaluable. I don’t think Dave would argue that we learned something new every day through our exchange through the students.

The sessions were structured along the sections of Bill’s A Designers’ Manual although there was a certain freedom to discuss and reinforce the material we were going through. Many thanks go out to the multilingual students who helped us clarify the material at each stage to make sure everyone understood it before we moved on.

And so the days passed: learning, food, discussion, practical sessions, mint tea and sunshine. Donkeys brayed, turkeys gobbled and cocks crowed.

Break time. Atay (mint tea), hobbs (bread), and zitoune (olive) oil

On the Sunday in the middle of the course some of us chose to visit the Cascades du Ouzoude, a system of waterfalls a few windy mountain kilometres away.

The visit to the falls provided us with a good break from the course. The first week of a PDC is always going to be intense with so much to take on board and comprehend. We spent the day taking full advantage of the relaxed pace. Rainbows, thundering water and Barbary apes all blessed our visit.

Cascades du Ouzoude: Barbary Macaque and young

Cascades du Ouzoude

The Cacades du Ouzoude is part of a larger watershed fed by highland areas such as Igourdane. The falls are a natural wonder and are truly something to behold and yet they represent so much more. Tourism has blossomed around the falls with restaurants, tea shops, craft and antiques shops studding the terraces and paths around the water. On the day we visited the vast majority of tourists were Moroccan with a few visitors from elsewhere.

This highlights how interconnected places like Ouzoude and Igourdane are when considering permaculture design over larger areas, ecologically and economically. These centres of human activity are interdependent and it is our job as permaculture designers to cultivate the awareness of such relationships and their relevance to the designs we are engaged with.

Cascades du Ouzoude

Cascades du Ouzoude: Waterfall powered flour mill

A real highlight of the course came at the beginning of the second week. The journey to Igourdane was a transformative and emotional experience, a real turning point. The students got to tread in the footsteps of the villagers by taking the route they take to fetch water down the mountain and back albeit in reverse.

The Journey to Igourdane

We held a morning session and after another lip-smacking lunch, this time under venerable shade of the carob elders, we set off on foot, on mules and donkeys for the road into the mountains.

The journey to Igourdane. The journey begins.

Marwane had engaged the services of a water diviner with a track record of locating water for agribusinesses. He was to locate the place we could drill to find potable water. He was an elderly yet ageless, spritely man full of laughter. He always had a smile lurking behind every other expression and a roguish twinkle in his eyes. He took off ahead on a donkey before we set off, we wouldn’t see him again till we reached Igourdane some hours later, where he greeted us with the villagers as if he were the tortoise and we were the hares.

The journey to Igourdane: dried up river bed and ruined Ksar

The way to Igourdane from the farm led through sparsely planted olive groves, a seasonal water course and a dried up river bed, before we reached the road itself – a rough limestone track that would allow two pannier laden donkeys to pass each other comfortably. The track climbed gently higher before turning in the twisting hairpin bends of a mountain path.

The journey to Igourdane: Traditional buildings

I rode a mule up the mountain having only ridden camels before. I actually did very well all things considered. Advice on how to ride comfortably from the others was just as well as my mule refused to let the pace be set by the other animals and took me off a fair way ahead of the rest of our train. I assumed he wanted to be rid of such a heavy burden as quickly as possible.

As the path lifted us steeply out of the foothills, allowing us a wider view of mountains, the stone track was patterned by water and covered with small stones and scree. I fell in such a rhythm with the mule that using the movement of my body I was willing each step he took to be sure and firm, as every now and then he would slip on pebbles and the polished rock before correcting himself without breaking the rhythm of his doleful stride.

It was an incredibly hot and arduous journey for those of us uninitiated with travelling through mountains (not including Dave of course). However it was the ideal way to impress upon the students and me, as to what life was really like for the people of Igourdane, to tread in their footsteps even just a little, to put ourselves in their position, to try and understand.

As the path levelled out, dwellings, carob and olive trees came into view. Sadly the first house we passed belonged to a family who had had to leave the area, mainly due to a lack of potable water.

The journey to Igourdane: Immature carob pods

It was not long before children appeared from here and there, hollering news of our arrival through cupped hands and thus, thanks to the Berber telegraph Igourdane knew our exact whereabouts and estimated time of arrival. Faces familiar and new greeted us and our caravan and led us to the shade of ancient carob trees that had been planted long ago in the shape of a horseshoe – the roots of which had been mounded up with rocks to form a shady and cool corral for stock. The welcoming party consisted of the local men, farmers, boys and elders. We exchanged warm greetings before resting and taking stock of the place we had all been thinking of for so long; in my case for well over a year.

Igourdane dam. Heavier than usual seasonal rains have given a
false impression here. This was taken in May. By August this will be dry.
As will the surrounding land. Just look at that unused catchment above….

The village consists of homesteads and house clusters dotted about terraces and plateaus amidst dry-stoned walled fields of barley, wheat, lentils, olives and carobs. The buildings are constructed out of stone and pisé with traditional roofs made of long poles laid over modular square rooms and piled with earth and sods with grass growing above.

Cross breed calf

Stay tuned for Part IV….

I promised last week that I would tell you about the cows here at Zaytuna and I’m going to do just that. I’d like for the vegetarians out there (who will find most of this menu unpalatable) to still be interested in reading about these cows because it’s not just about the beef that ended up on our plates….

Zaytuna cow
Photo © Craig Mackintosh

Cow’s Breakfast Salad

Billy the bull Photo © Craig Mackintosh

I spent some time watching the cows this morning. They’re playful these cows. Tame. I stroke their hides and smile at how beautiful they are. And as I have a chat with Jordan, the good lad who wakes up each morning to milk them, I keep smiling at all that he has to tell me about the fresh salad he prepares for them in exchange for their lovely milk.

He harvests some arrowroot, comfrey, bamboo leaves, acacia leaves, protein rich leaucaena and pigeon pea leaves, lupin cover crop in the winter and cowpea cover crop in the summer, the occasional helping of mugwort for worming. He takes all this good salady stuff and he chops it up, throws it into a bucket and prepares the dressing. Ha! These cows have got it made. For the dressing he takes a touch of copper sulphate and stirs it into some hot water. Don’t worry, Jordan won’t harm the cows- he adds a tablespoon of animal dolomite to the mix to neutralize poisoning effects of copper sulphate, then a tablespoon of sulphur to acidify the alkaline effect of the animal dolomite. Some dried kelp seaweed, some full compliment rock dust, a big spoon of molasses for sweetness plus a good half cup splash of organic apple cider vinegar. Bring it all together with some Lucerne (alfalfa) and pollard and you’ve got yourself one mineral rich dressing.

Jordan mixes it through the bucket of the chopped greens and I watch the cows eagerly follow him all the way to the milking station. They know a good feed when they taste one and they get this every day. You should see how healthy they are. Good looking animals full of energy and life.

And as I watch the milk squirt out, I can’t help but smile some more, thinking how all that energy and life is being transferred into the milk. This isn’t just good animal husbandry. This is intelligent design. Especially when you realize that the minerals Jordan gives the cows aren’t just in their milk. They get into the soil too, through the cow’s waste, also as a main compost and worm farm ingredient. Soil we grow our food in. Food that we dispel into the compost toilet…. The whole thing going round and round in a beautifully managed pattern.

Zaytuna calf
Photo © Craig Mackintosh

It makes sense and makes for some seriously tasty and nutrient rich milk in a raw form that can’t be beat. And away to the diet police out there who say milk is no good for you. Why, without milk we wouldn’t have cream or cheese or frozen yoghurt (flavoured with rose water and sprinkled with candied pistachios) and we wouldn’t have butter and all the good things that butter makes possible like croissants and scones and pasta flora and butter on warm toast and smiles all round. Food is too important to be restricted by fear or prejudice my friends. Let me eat in peace, with joy in my heart and hopefully some good folk to share the meal with.

Troop’s Breakfast

Goat milk porridge folded through with pan fried apple slices and sunflower kernels. Coffee and tea.

Photo © Marcelo Severo

The troops don’t dig the goat milk much so I slip it into their porridge and they don’t seem to notice or mind. (You can disguise liver into a beef pie if you chop it small enough and cook it long enough in a rich sauce. Slivers of poached tongue disappear amongst the other toppings on a pizza, the tongue poaching liquid goes into the Bolognese sauce, burnt biscuits into the muesli slice, left-over pancake batter into the sourdough bread…)

I gave them goat milk with their coffee and tea once and they used half as much as they do with cow milk. Nothing wrong with goat milk I reckon, but there was the odd comment and complaint. Goat milk tastes funny. I don’t like it.… When it’s in the porridge though, everyone likes goat milk only they don’t know it. And I don’t tell them otherwise, removing the chance of any discussion upon the subject.

You see, it’s my job to not let anything from the farm go to waste in the kitchen and to try to keep everybody here well fed and as happy as they can manage to be with the food I give them. I do my best and when I get that odd complaint I suffer the old cook’s customary desire to whack a chopping board across the complainer’s head. I’m too busy feeding all the people to discuss the issue of any one individual’s dietary dilemmas. And I keep my eye on the milk supply line like a hawk. I know what’s going on with the milk and I’ll make sure you get some, that’s all you need to know. In this world, just be happy there’s any milk at all.

Morning Tea

Pancakes with banana, honey and walnut cream.

Ever since the cows changed pastures there sure has been more cream sitting on top of the milk. We’re eating what they’re eating and today what we get to eat from the pasture via the cows comes in the form of lovely silky thick cream. I skim it off and beat it stiff. Drizzle in some honey and crushed walnuts. Fold it all through with smashed up bananas and a sprinkle of cinnamon and brown sugar. Yum, especially dolloped upon pancakes cooked on the wood stove. No complaints from the troops.

Lunch

Caramelized eel. Thai-like beef salad. Steamed rice. Lemongrass tea.

Caramelized eel and Tai beef salad with rice
Photo © Marcelo Severo

A complaint drifted into the kitchen of not enough meat. I did the calculations and figured that we’d have to kill a chicken a day or use a kilo of beef or some other kind of meat to satisfy this request by (in their defense) only a few members of the group. It’s manageable I believe, but I’m not sure if it’s necessary. I figure most people around the world get by on a high carb diet with a little protein and some vegetable matter thrown in to help make more interesting and nutritious their humble serve of rice or cassava or polenta or tortilla or noodle or couscous or piece of bread….

Good enough for them. Good enough for me. Good enough for you if you’re eating from my kitchen. I’m fair though. Children and nurturing mothers first. And I take care of the workers who work and work and work. They’ve earned their crust.

But today there’s lots of meat for everyone. A surplus of three eels presented itself to the kitchen via a couple of the intern’s fishing efforts. Good on them for sharing their bounty with everyone and good on the Vietnamese for showing me the way to cook the eel.

Eel, raw and cooking
Photo © Marcelo Severo

Kill your eel with a good whack to the brain. Open up the guts and scoop all that stuff out. Grab a cleaver and chop your eel into chunky steaks… skin, bones and all. It’s all good stuff. Next, throw a handful or two of sugar into a pan with a little water and put it on the stove. Let it caramelize golden and lovely, not burnt and bitter. It’s a tightrope and you have to pay attention to the pan. When it gets to the golden lovely point, you pour in a good helping of soy sauce and let it all reduce a bit. (While it’s doing that, you can throw in some combination of garlic, chili, lemongrass, ginger, galangal, fish sauce, kaffir lime leaf, oniony things… all the usual suspects in Southeast Asian cuisine.) Add your chopped up eel to the pot (including the head, which is delicious) and let it all simmer for a good while. You want all that eel fattiness to melt into the sauce and for the sweet sauce to reduce down to a syrup that melts into the eel. A very satisfying way to eat eel. Thankyou Vietnam. Thank you eel.

To cook the beef for the salad, I stole a bit of the caramelized soy reduction out of the eel pan, added more fish sauce, more garlic, more chili, more galangal.… Massage this stuff into your beef then place into a baking pan, cover and shove the whole thing into the wood oven for a slow braise. When it’s done, you slice the beef up nice and thin and toss it along with the pan juices and some pickled strips of turnip and carrot and cabbage, roasted onion wedges, toasted coconut, fried peanuts, lemon segments, lots of coriander and mint. Only a vegetarian could complain and to them I say – do the same thing but swap the beef with some stir-fried tofu or shitake mushrooms or even some smashed up adzuki beans. Everybody happy? Let’s move on to dinner.…

Pizza Dinner

Photo © Marcelo Severo

Everybody loves pizza right? So why not use the opportunity to sneak in the somewhat less popular culinary item of poached tongue? Slice it thin and scatter it amongst the other toppings of leftover pumpkin wedges, sautéed calvo nero and onion, marinated olives.… Just watch the happy pizza eaters shovel it in, even the ones who think they don’t eat tongue.

I don’t know what anyone could have against tongue anyway. I love the stuff and made sure to keep some for my breakfast in the morning. Before I went to bed though, I marinated my slices of poached tongue in a bath of (50/50) olive oil and lemon juice. You can heat your marinade up with some sliced garlic, chopped chili, some lightly toasted coriander seeds, a bay leaf or two.… The next morning, you take a boiled egg and chop it up with some green olives and parsley. Put it all together on top of some toast and the only regret you’ll have is using too much of the precious tongue on the pizzas….

Tongue on toast
Photo © Marcelo Severo

In partnership with Sust`aina ble Molokai and the Ho`ala Hou Program, the Permaculture Research Institute USA is proud to announce an upcoming series of key Permaculture courses on the Island of Molokai, Hawaii.

We are offering the following four foundational courses between October and December this year:

• Permaculture Design Certificate Course with Andrew Jones and Shenaqua Sookhoo-Jones, Oct 10-22
• Practicum: Incorporating Traditional Hawaiian Plants, Foods and Fuels into a Permaculture Design with Andrew Jones and Hunter Heaivilin, Oct 25-29
• PDC Teacher Training Course with Andrew Jones and Shenaqua Sookhoo-Jones, Nov 1-6
• Earthworks with Geoff and Nadia Lawton, Dec 6-10

These courses will be held in conjunction with the Ho`ala Hou Program, a substance abuse and prevention program that works with youth and families to set up up community garden plots. Courses will take place on Ho`ala Hou’s 20-acre site.

This series is also part of an island-wide initiative with local nonprofit Sust`aina ble Molokai to work toward the goals of the Molokai Sustainability Plan, a plan created by the people of Molokai that honors Hawaiian traditional and cultural pathways alongside modern strategies for a sustainable future.

For more information and to register for these courses, please visit the Permaculture Research USA website at www.permacultureusa.org.

Aloha and A hui hou!

Together with three Ethiopians and eight other international participants, I recently attended a 72-hour permaculture design course hosted by Alex McCausland and the Strawberry Fields Eco-Lodge in the Konso province of southern Ethiopia.

Tichafa Makovere – 15 years experience around southern Africa

The course venue was fantastic. Particularly appealing were:

1. the classroom, a small building located on a hill and with walls opened to the surroundings and incoming breeze;
2. the accommodation, consisting of private tukuls located on a ridge for scenery, and with a comfortable bed, a mosquito net, private toilet, and nearby showers;
3. the organic food restaurant, with both indoor and outdoor seating tables, pleasant food from the garden, and inspired architecture and design;
4. the encompassing permaculture garden – well designed and thriving with biodiversity;
5. the very friendly Ethiopian staff and workers, and foreign volunteers.

The course content had an appropriate mix of theory and practical exercises, was highly relevant, systematic and nicely structured, and not the least was extremely well presented. The teacher and facilitator, Tichafa Makovere, from Zimbabwe, has a unique African experience base in education in general and in permaculture specifically. He is a truly gifted motivator and pedagog, and a permaculture top expert for Africa.

In addition, the Strawberry Fields Eco-Lodge has a vision of implementing permaculture in southern Ethiopia, starting with 13 village clusters in Konso. Already, after less than two years, implementation has taken place in 5 villages. The vision is multifaceted, consisting of:

1. establishing permaculture at schools, through provision of seeds, seedlings and consultancy, through teacher involvement (initial 72-hour training course, 3-day consultancy to get the garden started), student involvement (having them participate in maintaining the permaculture garden during class hours and operating a fruit and vegetable market), parent involvement (through fascination over the school garden, and as consumers/customers for the fruit and vegetable produce);
2. generating interest in the village communities for the sustainability, drought resistance, biodiversity, and year-round productivity of permaculture, which in turn will lead to gardening and small scale farming away from the schools and into the family compounds (facilitated by consultancy and material supply from Strawberry Fields, both towards other schools in a given village cluster and towards village residents and farmers).

The unique vision described above is further stimulated by making an annual permaculture proficiency competition between the schools, where they are evaluated on a number of criteria, and awarded various prizes such as stationary and sports and games equipment for both girls and boys (football, etc). It is a huge asset to the permaculture design course at Strawberry Fields that the participants are taken out to the schools and villages to witness these islands of permaculture starting to thrive, within an otherwise monoculture-dominated farming landscape.

The general impression I am left with is that the Strawberry Fields Eco-Lodge has all the necessary processes in place to generate much value for both the local community, for the regional expansion of permaculture in Ethiopia, for training up-and-coming permaculturists (both nationals and foreigners), and for attracting visitors in search of sustainable ecotourism, relaxation, and Ethiopian friendliness.

Pierre Theriault
Quebec, Canada

We killed a goose at Zaytuna Farm the other day and by my count we served out 60+ student meals from it, plus two day’s worth of wonderful breakfasts for the staff. Not a bad effort I thought. Pretty good use of a bird. Here’s what we did….

Breakfast One

Goose offal on toast accompanied with eggs from our beautiful chickens.

We scramble the eggs with homemade butter that a French friend Jean-Luc brought over as a gift. He also brought homemade cheese and croissants. All good – good eggs, good butter, good Frenchman. Homemade bread toasted on a wood oven stove. Fresh goose offal sautéed with garlic and fresh herbs. Cardamon coffee. Yum.

Breakfast Two

Hash browns and goose ham with tomarillo relish and sautéed greens – served on grilled toast.

This one took a while to prepare….

Photo credit: Marcelo Severo

You take your goose and remove a breast. Then you take this breast and cure it in a 50/50 (or so) mix of salt and sugar. Spice up your curing mix with aromatics. I used garlic, cloves, juniper berries, fresh cumquat & galangal, some bay leaves… you get the idea.

Muscovy geese rest after a leisurely swim on the Zaytuna dam,
with food forest in background

Photo credit: Marcelo Severo

Cure your breast overnight. Then wash off the curing mix, patting the lovely thing gently dry and laying it skin side down on a heavy pan to render out the fat and crisp up the skin. Do this slowly- on the gentlest heat you can manage. We used the wood stove. Not bad the old wood stove. It also warms up the kitchen on these crisp mornings we’re getting coming into the end of July. And it heats our water, makes the kitchen look pretty and it feeds ash to the compost and if you save your mandarin skins you can put them into a saucepan of water and set it on the stove for the ultimate kitchen incense….

And it sure is nice to toast our bread on it while we slice up the goose ham and fry up the hash browns – made with potatoes from the crop garden, cooked in the rendered goose fat and Jean-Luc’s good butter, plus a little relish made with tomarillo & galangal plucked from the food forests, some sautéed greens straight out of the kitchen garden. What else could you possibly want?

Life is good while it lasts

Lunch One

How do you stretch one goose missing a breast into lunch for 30 people? You throw it into a pot and cover it with water. Cold water. Put it on the stove and once it starts boiling, bring it down to a gentle simmer. Skim the scum off the surface. (Not much scum on these birds, they live a healthy clean life and are naturally free of impurities.) Throw in some carrot and onion, a few celery leaves, a bay leaf or two, some peppercorns, a piece of lemon. Simmer gently for a couple of hours.

Drain your bird, keeping your stock of course. Eat the feet if you like. They’re pretty tasty. I never used to think so but then my boss – a smart Jordanian woman by the name of Nadia showed me the trick. Peel the skin off dummy. With the skin on, goose feet are tasty-but-tough. With the skin off it’s another story. There’s nothing between you and the sweetness. A real treat. Thanks Nadia. And thanks for shredding the meat off the goose carcass too. I’ve worked with a lot of good chefs and I’ve never seen one strip a bird as economically and quickly as Nadia can.

Photo credit: Marcelo Severo

I make a couscous in her honour, marinating the grain in olive oil spiced up with toasted and crushed cumin seed. I use the stock to soak the couscous – one litre of hot stock for every kilo of grain. Then fold the shredded meat through with some roasted carrot, dried fruit soaked in tea, toasted nuts and seeds, fried onions, fried garlic, fried ginger, lots of fresh herbs from the garden and a refreshing squeeze of lemon juice. Tasty. And plentiful….

Lunch Two

Leftover shredded goose couscous.

Stretched it out for the next day’s lunch by accompanying it with radishes, dips and a quick salad. Worked out well for me because I ended up with a little more time up my sleeve to stay outside and dwell in the garden, picking radishes, lettuces and herbs at my leisure, eating the occasional chive flower or deliciously sweet strawberry, marveling at life’s miracle as the blue wrens flickered about the lemongrass border and the giant bamboos creaked in the wind. Mmmm… bamboo shoots. Coming soon…. Why can’t everywhere be like this? It is possible after all.

Afternoon Tea

Chocolate cassava cake.

The Brazilian take on cassava cake is you grate enough fresh cassava root to fill the tray you want to bake your cake in. Bind it with grated coconut, sugar, eggs, coconut milk and mix it all together. Bake till it sets. You can’t go wrong. You could eat this thing raw. My other boss, a smart Englishman named Geoff, does his cassava cake with cream and honey instead of coconut milk and sugar. He likes to use what the farm provides and who can blame him?

But no honey for anybody this time. No one has harvested the honey from the hives lately and I haven’t the faintest idea how it’s done. I take the safer option and grab a bottle of pomegranate molasses. There’s my sweetness. As soon as I pour it in, my nice cassava cake mix turns a not-so-nice colour. I add cocoa to cover up the slip. Chocolate cassava cake it is. Add cinnamon, nutmeg, a touch of chili. I use oil instead of cream or coconut milk and into the oven it goes. Came up ok. Kind of overdid it with the molasses. Turned out more of a slice than a cake but nobody complained.

Dinner

Colcannon mash and a beef pie made up of a sloppy delicious mess of leftovers. What made it delicious was the beef we used but I’ll get to the cows here at Zaytuna Farm at a later date. There’s just too much to say about them and I really want to talk to you about the mash.

You see, like I wrote last week, we’ve got lots of potatoes here. Lots. And lots of cabbage and kale too. And if you want to know how to cook lots of potatoes and cabbage and kale on a cold winters night, you ask the Irish. And if you listen well you’ll be told something like Colcannon mash.

So caramelize some shredded onions in butter and oil. Chop up some of the ever-abundant cabbage and kale, and throw them in too. When you sauté these things, (especially in big batches) it’s good to add a little at a time rather than all in one heap, so that the ingredients caramelize properly instead of stewing and turning sour.

And with the potatoes it’s good to peel them and cut them all roughly the same size. Put them in a pot and cover with cold water. I like to throw in a few garlic cloves too – they go all soft and creamy and they mash up with the potatoes nicely. When they come to the boil, start keeping an eye on them and take them off the heat as soon as they’re done. Drain and throw them into your pot with the caramelized loveliness of onion, cabbage and kale. Throw in as much butter and cream as you can handle, a little nutmeg and maybe some roughly chopped parsley. Mash it all up and slop it onto a warm plate. Throw on a chunk of good beef pie, and maybe a little tomarillo relish to spice things up a bit. Then settle down to a nice warm comforting dinner after a relaxing day of economical cooking using leftovers and the steady garden supply. Cold Channon mash? Yes please.

Peppi Gauci

‘Confessions of a Permaculture Aid Worker’ is a weekly podcast show from PRI Australia aimed at documenting the experiences of people out in the field and making more information available about what’s happening in the Permaculture world.

This week I’m speaking with Peppi in Malta about his project, Bahrija Oasis, which he setup eight years ago in Rabat, Malta.

Click play to hear all about it!:

More info on Peppi’s project here, and a downloadable PDF here.

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