A Beginner’s Guide to The Edible Garden Revolution
Food Plants - Annual, Food Plants - Perennial, Land, Plant Systems, Society, Urban Projects, Waste Systems & Recycling — by Matthew Lynch September 13, 2010
Editor’s Note: We welcome new writer Matthew Lynch as he treats us to this awesome first post! Matthew is currently based in Melbourne, Australia, but will soon be sharing his exploits as he visits permaculture sites across Europe, before heading back to Hawaii to set up a permaculture business there.
Six months ago I graduated from my Permaculture Design Course (PDC) at Southern Cross Permaculture, bright eyed, bushy-tailed, and ready to change the world.
I raced back home and made my first compost pile in the middle of the lawn, then set about the task of redesigning my parent’s suburban backyard in Melbourne to a productive permacultural paradise.
Comments (17)
The Farmers Are At It Again
Animal Forage, Commercial Farm Projects, Food Plants - Annual, Food Plants - Perennial, News, Plant Systems, Society — by Paul Douglas September 7, 2010
There they go again, making liars out of us, undermining our critique that their industry is contributing to the wholesale destruction of water, soil, air and biodiversity.
You know what the farmers have done, don’t you? They’ve only gone and realised that a diverse range of endemic, perennial, drought-proof fodder crops are better for their farm animals, their soil, the atmosphere and their bank balance than introduced, annual, copyrighted fodder crops. Not only that, but there is a symbiosis occurring between the annual pasture crops and perennial natives which is causing both sets of plants to grow better than they would normally otherwise. I happened upon this information via the Landline show on TV last week. I am constantly amazed by how much farmers are warming to the benefits and joys of permaculture elements without even realising it. They’ve been trialling alternative fodder crops, starting with the admittedly non endemic tagasaste “to repair the land and provide feed and shelter for [their] sheep”, and farmers in rural Australia have also long been planting Old Man Saltbush, both as a stock fodder and a way of helping combat soil salinity. This was also reported on Landline in 2008. Recently, they’ve begun trying out other crops, especially native perennial shrubs and have been crash grazing the test paddocks with sheep and experimenting with plant and crop row spacings in order to maximise yield.
Comments (7)Green Manure Resources
Animal Forage, Medicinal Plants, Plant Systems, Rehabilitation, Soil Conservation, Structure — by Rhamis Kent August 31, 2010
Editor’s note: Red clover is a useful leguminous green manure. Growing taller than
other clovers, it can be easily cut down with a scythe or other when it starts to
flower, so that it doesn’t scatter seed where you don’t want it.
You can never have enough information about Earth Repair/Ecosystem Restoration tools, techniques, and strategies. As most of you know, a couple among the many in use are green manuring and cover cropping.
Over the past year of my really digging into this topic I’ve come across a number of useful links to downloadable PDFs that allow for easy access and use.
Comments (9)Swimming Pool to Garden Pool
Fish, Food Plants - Annual, Food Plants - Perennial, Food Shortages, Health & Disease, Plant Systems, Urban Projects, peak oil — by Craig Mackintosh PRI Editor
When I was in Australia over a year ago, Geoff mentioned that a former student and her partner were converting their pool into a fish farm. I didn’t have a lot of time to spare, but told him I had to go. A day or so later I was poking around Vanessa and Justin’s pool, fussing about with my camera and notepad. The resulting article has since become one of the more popular ones on the site.
Perhaps there are a lot of people out there with useless, empty swimming pools? If so, here’s even more encouragement to get busy and do something with it! This family has, apparently, become self-sufficient in food production in record time – just by making clever use of their disused swimming pool.
The Holistic Flower
Building, Consumerism, Eco-Villages, Economics, Energy Systems, Land, People Systems, Plant Systems, Society, Village Development, Waste Systems & Recycling, peak oil — by Oyvind Holmstad August 23, 2010
I’ve found a wonderful flower; I discovered it not long ago. Still, it’s not so much what I know about it that touches me, I’m just drawn to its colors. This flower is unique, it thrives in every country and climate, and adapts very well to the specific conditions of culture and place. Its colors, smell and form is therefore of unlimited variety and complexity, yet it is the same flower. It is the permaculture flower.
Some people think the permaculture flower is a remnant of the hippie’s flower power movement, or that it has something to do with New Age – just another consumerism idea to be sold to the confused and rich people of the middle classes. Oh no, the ‘flower power’ of the permaculture flower has real power. It has the power to reunite humanity with the complex systems of nature, so they can live in symbiosis, enriching each other. Nothing else possesses this power.
Comments (6)Clever Rocky Mountain Greenhouses Give Major Season Extension
Building, Energy Systems, Food Forests, Food Plants - Annual, Food Plants - Perennial, Nurseries & Propogation, Plant Systems — by Mari Korhonen August 16, 2010
In cool and cold areas the length of the growing season and the cold temperatures are the main challenge for growing things and supporting oneself. As part of the search for cold climate permaculture strategies I came across integrated greenhouse designs that seem to have a lot to offer to us in the cool climates. This is a little report from a trip to the Central Rocky Mountain Permaculture Institute’s solar greenhouse workshop in Basalt, Colorado. There, during his thirty five years of living on the site, Jerome Osentowski the director at CRMPI, has overcome the challenges of his steep sloping land at 2,200 meters above sea level with advanced integrated greenhouse designs as a feature in the overall system. They have stretched his climatic zones all the way to the subtropic – all year round, with no fossil fuels used.
Karma in Nature
Food Forests, Plant Systems — by Marcel Werps August 12, 2010
Most of us will be familiar with the Hindu and Buddhist concept of Karma as a factor in our personal lives. In nature, as a general rule, we can experience Karma, as a direct reaction by, for example, animals – as a response to our behaviour and attitude towards them.
Action and reaction. Cause and effect. It is my contention that this concept is also operative in the plant world, as a response to our treatment of them.
If we accept the basic law of Isaac Newton about action and reaction, then surely our dealings with the plant world have their consequences.
Comments (6)Letters from Jordan – On Consultation at Jordan’s Largest Farm, and Contemplating Transition
Commercial Farm Projects, Conservation, Dams, Food Forests, Food Plants - Annual, Food Plants - Perennial, Irrigation, Land, Plant Systems, Rehabilitation, Swales, Trees — by Craig Mackintosh PRI Editor August 6, 2010
Preamble: From my recent trip to Jordan, I shared with you all the news, with loads of pictures, about the International Permaculture Conference (IPC) that will be held there in September 2011. I also slipped over the border to take a quick peek at Murad Alkufash’s work in the West Bank, and took video of the Jawaseri school garden project. In my bid to multitask, I also had opportunity to accompany Geoff Lawton on a consultation in the Wadi Rum district in the south of the country, where we combined the consultation with our investigations for a campsite for the IPC (photos of the latter can be seen via the first link above).
The consultation on its own, however, is deserving of a post. It was highly interesting for many reasons that I shall outline here.
Permaculture designer/teacher, Geoff Lawton, looks at water pumped from
an aquifer under Jordan’s famous Wadi Rum desert region.
All photographs © copyright Craig Mackintosh
Background
The Wadi Rum desert in the south of Jordan happens to be the site of Jordan’s largest mixed farm – Rum Farm. It might, for good reason, seem odd that this beautiful but largely abiotic location would host a large scale farm, let alone Jordan’s largest, but it begins to make sense when you learn that under the Wadi Rum desert (and stretching under the border mountains and well into Saudi Arabia) is a large aquifer. In fact, much of this desert nation’s water supply is dependent on this single water source.
Comments (20)A Call to Large Scale Earth Healing and Lessons from the Loess Plateau (Video)
Alternatives to Political Systems, Biodiversity, Community Projects, Conservation, Consumerism, Dams, Deforestation, Economics, Food Shortages, Gabions, Global Warming/Climate Change, Land, Plant Systems, Population, Regional Water Cycle, Soil Conservation, Soil Erosion & Contamination, Swales, Terraces, Trees, Village Development, Water Contaminaton & Loss, peak oil — by Craig Mackintosh PRI Editor
The world is coming unglued. The world burns. What are we going to do about it?
Map of fires in Russia
As I type, half of Russia is on fire after its hottest summer on record, Pakistan is dealing with the biggest floods in living memory and Australia is still in the clutches of a decade long drought. The last decade, worldwide, was the hottest since records began, and 2010 may break the records of 1998 and 2005 to become the hottest year we’ve ever known. We could spend weeks just examining the extreme weather events going on on a country by country basis.
Comments (14)Decoding Pattern
Building, Energy Systems, Food Forests, General, Land, Plant Systems, Retrofitting, Waste Systems & Recycling — by Adrian Buckley July 31, 2010
The modern-day education system is almost entirely bent on creating an army of university professors and other specialists. We have been systematically trained to specialize, and as a result we approach problem-solving by studying parts of a whole, where the connections between them are commonly ignored.
Comments (15)Companion Planting Guide
Food Forests, Food Plants - Annual, Food Plants - Perennial, Land, Medicinal Plants, Plant Systems, Trees — by Peter Dilley July 30, 2010
IDEP’s Companion Planting Guide
Click here for full PDF
Sometimes you end up wishing you had a resource at hand to make it easier to apply Permaculture principles. This was the case for myself when it came time to start thinking about beneficial groupings of plants and those groupings that do not go well together.
Comments (28)Are Eucalypts Weeds?
Conservation, Land, Medicinal Plants, Plant Systems, Regional Water Cycle, Trees — by Ecofilms July 29, 2010
For many years they’ve been seen as a symbol of pride in Australia. Expatriate writers in the 50s and 60s would write about returning to Sydney by ship and about being greeted by the smell of wafting gum tree leaves as they waxed lyrical about the nostalgia they felt for home.
Authorities still plant them everywhere. In parks, next to footpaths, street corners, new housing development estates, Eucalypts are as Australian as the Emu and the Kangaroo. They are seen nearly everywhere and nobody seems to take them as a threat in Australia.
But should Eucalypts be re-examined as a noxious weed?
Comments (21)What (and not) About that Natural Pool Conversion on the Gold Coast?
Aquaculture, Food Plants - Annual, Food Plants - Perennial, Land, Plant Systems, Swales, Terraces, Urban Projects, Water Harvesting — by Justin Sharman July 28, 2010
April 2008
It’s been about a year now since I had the pleasure of Craig at my house to do the story on the Natural Swimming Pool conversion I am attempting. It was an interesting year for me on the home garden front and the personal front with lots of new surprises and projects. I thought I would do a follow up because we had a lot of enquiries about the pool after the story.
I am lucky to have a wonderful partner Vanessa who, because of her Permaculture training with Bill (PDC) and Geoff (PDC & Internship) and also at Northey Street Farm, is able to accept why I would want to have a go at producing food in our own home and also why I was getting rid of a swimming pool in favour of a pond and some fish.
Comments (6)A ‘New’ Discovery – Soluble Nitrogen Destroys Soil Carbon
Compost, Economics, Fungi, News, Plant Systems, Rehabilitation, Society, Soil Biology, Soil Composition, Soil Conservation, Structure — by Craig Mackintosh PRI Editor July 27, 2010
How many times must we ‘discover’ something we’ve discovered before – particularly when our lives and our futures depend on reacting appropriately, and shaping society, to incorporate the lessons learned?
One of the most transformative experiences in my life was from studying soil science many years ago. Getting something of an understanding of the inner workings of that thin skin which covers our earth created thought-connections in my mind that had me looking at the world in a profoundly new way.
Comments (10)Solving All the Problems of the World – in a Garden
Aid Projects, Community Projects, Conservation, Demonstration Sites, Developments, Education Centres, Food Forests, Food Plants - Annual, Food Plants - Perennial, Food Shortages, Global Warming/Climate Change, Land, News, Nurseries & Propogation, People Systems, Plant Systems, Rehabilitation, Salination, Society, Soil Conservation, Trees, Urban Projects, Village Development, Water Harvesting — by Craig Mackintosh PRI Editor July 23, 2010
This video can be downloaded in high resolution from Vimeo (see ‘About this video’ section on lower right side’).
I hope you’ll enjoy this clip on the Jawaseri School Garden Project. More, I hope it encourages you to dare to be different, and dare to have your work noticed. The garden we profile in the video above, as you’ll discover after watching it, has just won a national competition held by the Jordanian Department of Education – for schools who incorporate environmental projects into their curriculum. This means that thousands of schools, in what is arguably the most water-stressed country on the planet, now have the possibility to learn from this humble example of permaculture in action – and get inspired to do similar.
Special thanks to Lesley Byrne for her enthusiastic support, and to Nadia Lawton for her vision and determination to help her own people – and in so doing setting such an excellent example for us all.
