In classic permaculture style, within the problem lay the seeds of the solution. The deforestation due to conventional agriculture in these surrounding hills has caused soil erosion and during the rainy season much of this rich volcanic black top soil is washed downstream. This annual bounty has been redirected through the Ijatz site using a sequence of channels and sink holes, which in turn slows the water flow enabling the nutrient rich humus to be captured and stored on site. The earth has been moulded to create slopes, edges and contours essential for increased growing opportunity.

During the dry season any rainfall is held in the pond sequence, maintaining the local water table which is the source for the hundreds of trees and plants. While the flora perpetually contributes biomass to improve soil fertility, a micro climate suitable for growing has developed in what is essentially a few acres on the edge of town. Prior to the establishment of the Ijatz project, over one hundred homes were annually flooded in the immediate vicinity. Currently, the site can receive flood water to the depth of more than a metre during the wet season. A perfect demonstration of a multifunctional permaculture design element, the banana circle has provided the solution. Acting as a pump, that most excellent of pioneer species, the banana simply sucks up and holds this water. The spaces between the rubbery concentric rings of a banana tree are simply saturated in water. The centre of the circle becomes a compost heap for any site prunings while the worms of the vermicomposting stations make short shrift of sections of banana trunk. The composted output is another useful income stream for the coop. Of course, let us not forget nature’s own delicious potassium stick – the banana itself! All this and the local community benefits from dry homes throughout the rainy season too. This in turn satisfies one of the cornerstone ethics of permaculture: people care – positively affecting the local community.

Banana circle

The project is only thirteen years in the making and boasts a diverse range of trees and plants that reach every level of the canopy. Timber is harvested and the bamboo stands are about 6m tall. There are a number of guava, grapefruit, lime and lemon fruit trees. A vine layer producing a vegetable called güisquil (sechium edule) when boiled is similar in texture and taste to a tender swede or turnip. There are several other local tropical plants that contribute roots or leaves to the kitchen table. The annually deposited soil is then built up to form raised beds for growing vegetables. My three week stint centred around reinstating the vegetable and herb beds preparing them for fresh seedlings, including lettuce, coriander, frijoles (beans), parsley, celery and radish. This soil food web is teaming with life and I encountered countless worms, spiders and other small creatures. Thankfully, the nesting cobra we stumbled across only wrapped itself around Pancho’s arm (the head gardener). No harm done – sadly only true for Pancho!

The core focus of the Ijatz cooperative is coffee production. On the final day of my visit, the ladies of the cooperative harvested fifty kilos of coffee beans ready for processing. However, they collectively own several plots of land on the slopes of the now extinct Volcán Tolimán. Through the cooperative, the workers have generated a stable income which has funded educational programmes on child care and nutrition. They also have discussions to understand where their high value product sits in the open market. I was invited to describe the drinking habits of Europeans. My talk was graciously received even though my Spanish is woefully short of adequate.

If you are interested in volunteering your time and energy to the assist the Ijatz project and you have a command of Spanish language you can contact them directly at asociacionIjatz (at) gmail.com otherwise I can advise you. Volunteer opportunities exist throughout the year.

Read my follow up article about how Ijatz manages its core business – coffee, using permaculture principles. You can follow my blog at www.kevpermatour.blogspot.com as I travel Central America gaining permaculture experience working towards my Diploma in Applied Permaculture from the Permaculture Association Britain.

Permaculture education should be in every school, everywhere. If it was, I believe most of the world’s problems could be solved within a decade.

Then came, what one of my elders have called, the Western Syndrome. For thousands of years there has been a syndrome (We call it a SYNDROME because the definition of the word describes it perfectly; syn•drome n, a group of things or events that form a recognizable pattern, especially of something undesirable) that has moved around the earth consuming intact cultures by replacing our rooted stories with distant tales and a commerce that carries no responsibility for the land that sustains it. And now, the story of broken-hearted people who have no origins place who move continually west to flee their oppressors only to find they have become the oppressor themselves of the intact peoples they encounter in their flight. This story has repeated itself in untold ways for millennia and it runs deep in most of our blood and bone as it plays itself out in our daily lives and worldviews around the world. This syndrome is not just carried or transmitted by one particular grouping of people defined by race, creed, or color but has affected and been purported by us all and continues to do so.

In my Permaculture education and design work in the West African country of Liberia, I have found myself often in a face-off with the Western Syndrome in its quest to cull life from communities to gain a profit, mostly for large western corporations. I soon found that one of my roles as a permaculture educator coming from the so-called “developed” world was to dispel the myth that the “western world” only leads to a glorious future. In Liberia, many of the people, young and old, will adopt nearly anything “western” as a personal sign of status and progressiveness. Where I was first confronted with the reality of this is when I went to visit one of the student’s midwifery clinics, which was close to where I was facilitating a permaculture design course.

When I arrived at the clinic, which was well made of mud bricks and palm thatching, there were women, some pregnant, others with babies and children all about on benches, playing, sitting next to a cooking fire, and others were weaving baskets as they they shared stories, laughed and tended to the little ones. One particular woman was walking about with a spray can pumping away to keep the spray mist constant on all the leaves of the plants that were all about. My curiosity hoped it was a compost tea she was using to fertigate the plants, yet my intuition knew differently, so I went to see what the magic concoction was that was so necessary to spray around this clinic for women and children. It was DDT. I was shocked. As I read the label on the can she was re-supplying her sprayer with, it only had the warning, “fatal if swallowed” and the name of an American Chemical Company. My heart sank in the dark reality of standing face to face with the Western Syndrome.

I asked the woman who was spraying the DDT, what her reasons for spraying were, and if she knew about the repercussions of using this biocide. She replied, “We have to use it to kill the bugger-bug which destroys our crops. They have got so bad since the war that we have no choice but to use most of the few dollars we make to buy this chemical or we lose our food.” She also shared that she knew it would make her sick if she drank the chemical, but nothing else.

Later that day in our Permaculture Design class, consisting of 25 students, some of whom were respected elders in their community, others who were barely adults, and all who are from a wide range of backgrounds in education, traditions, tribes, languages, and beliefs, I asked them, “what is this bugger-bug?” It was as if I had incited the devil itself as the translator shared in the common tribal language my question. Everyone stirred, some even grew fiery red in the face as they explained how the losses of their crops from this little beast could mean the difference between life and death for whole families and communities. They also shared how they were told that they should spray to kill mosquitoes that bring them malaria. When I asked them about the DDT they used, they spoke to it as a type of savior, yet a costly one for people who on average make $2 a day for 8-10 hours of hard labor. None of them knew anything of the long-term travesties that are caused by this chemical and why it is illegal to use in most “western” countries in the world including the country of origin of the spray found at the midwifery clinic – that being the USA.

I spent some time gathering some information about DDT to better inform them and myself of the chronic effects of this toxic substance. I shared the gamut of research that detailed how DDT is an endocrine disruptor and has other chronic effects on the nervous system, kidneys, liver, the reproductive and immune system, it is a carcinogen that contributes to cancer and is one of the nine persistent organic pollutants, which more importantly for the midwifery clinic, accumulates most intensively in mammals in the mother’s milk. Needless to say, they were horrified.

When everyone began to settle down a bit, one elder asked the very important and relevant question, “So what else can we do about the Bugger-Bug if we don’t use DDT?” I certainly did not have the answers, as often I don’t when it comes to regional knowledge of place. So in full Permaculture style, I replied, “Let’s go ask the Bugger-Bug?” So right then and there, with very quizzical looks abounding, we all got up from our makeshift classroom and went out into the adjoining landscape to ask the bugger-bug what can we do to survive together.

We all walked into a recently cleared area of rainforest where the debris had been burned-off and the land was laid bare and exposed except for patches of mono-cropped maize and cassava. The bugger-bug abounded, busily gathering leaf material from the crops and bringing it back to their growing mound in the middle of the clear-cut. We found that their mounds were rich in detritus and bird manures and seedlings of the native forest were sprouting all around it. Their growing mound looked like a miniature forest mountain, rich in diversity and nutrients.

We then left the middle of the clear-cut and went to the edge of this mono-cropped farm where the forest and the maize intermingled and to everyone’s surprise, the bugger-bug was significantly less prevalent and the damage to the crop was minimal. In-fact, anywhere we went that had diversity of plant species with a mulch layer on the ground there was minimal damage by the bugger-bug.

We finally ventured deeper into the forest to observe how the bugger-lived there in a natural setting and found that they were so diminished in numbers within the forest that we had a difficult time finding any damage at all from them on the understory plants. They seemed to only be feasting on the leaf drop from the canopy trees and had significantly less numbers than in the clear-cut areas.

In true detective fashion we then assembled our observations and clues that we gathered and low and behold, a story of true forest stewardship emerged. Our little bugger-bug was a “keystone” pioneer in the forest regeneration process. It seemed that this termite would live peacefully in the forest until the time where a complete devastation of the forest occurred, then it would spring into action to assist the forest in rebuilding its structure. Its numbers would increase and then they would search out plants, especially unhealthy stands of plants, to begin its soil building, mound-raising process. As their mounds grew from their efficient gathering, they would soon be the highest point in the landscape where birds of all sorts would perch. Thanks to the birds, their mounds were seeded with myriad types of plant life and from there, the forest would regenerate outward in concentric ring-like patterns.

The spell of the bugger-bug had been broken. We excitedly went back into class where we applied our new learning into the design of a food growing system that incorporated diversity in both annuals and perennials, layering in both space and time, and deep mulching that is most analogous to the structure of a natural forest. We then began building our demonstration farm using these practices learned from our bugger-bug teacher. One elder shared with me while pointing to their 150-foot high ancestral tree, “I will give thanks to these little bugs for I know without them we would not have our forests.”

At the very root of Permaculture is the knowing that we must live in integrity with the world which sustains us. The Western Syndrome cunningly distorts our ability to take responsibility for our lives through the many faces of globalization and often leaves us barren of integrity whether we are aware of it or not. The bugger-bug story illustrates that with our work as Permaculture teachers and designers, we have a duty to honestly read the pattern languages around us and incorporate them into the conscious design of how we live in support of that which gives life.

~~~~~~~~~

Warren Brush is a certified Permaculture designer and educator 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 (a few of their offerings include: Permaculture Design Certification courses for Youth called Sustainable Vocations, PDC for Adults and Sustainable Aid Courses among many other offerings), 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.

www.quailsprings.org
www.sustainablevocations.org
www.mentoring4peace.com
www.treesforchildren.org
www.truenaturedesign.net

A gentle slice of moon on the star crowded sky of southwestern Madagascar just set gracefully and yet another day is over; we are now in the second half of January 2010.

And what day is today: Monday, Wednesday or perhaps Sunday? We easily lose track when in the field, especially during our prolonged stays – keeping busy in the nursery, forest and the village of Ranobe with several community participatory projects – keeping the momentum of excitement and action. The dynamics are encouraging and there is wonderful energy flowing. Every day is somewhat special; ups and downs along the journey to the ultimate balance. Capacity building is about trust building and about generosity, patience, humbleness as well as discipline. It’s a wonderful lesson for all of us, for ho avy team and for FIMPAHARA.

And what is the fresh news? Ino vao vao? As expressed in Malagasy. Aha… tsisy vao vao, is the universal answer – there is no news (even though there actually are news). In fact, misy maro vao vao – there are many good news in the process of ‘growing for the future’. And so let us fill you on those:

Work in our three native tree nurseries has been truly a rewarding time; reconnecting with nature and sharing the cheerful time with FIMPAHARA members actively involved. It’s been a pleasureable time of nature observations, provided that we are situated between a nice patch of mostly continuous forest in southwestern Madagascar and diverse agricultural land. Our nurseries attract a lot of incredibly interesting wildlife. Spectacular wildlife moments are abundant: we have been observing several local endemic species of frogs, a slim worm-sized transparent skink Voeltzkowia sp. ‘pallida’, about which not much is known, ancient looking dragonflies, beautiful butterflies and their colorful caterpillars, bizarre insects, flies, beetles and even a ‘may fly’ specimen looking quite prehistoric.

The forest is culminating in its green coat refreshed by spectacular flowers of the most bizarre shapes and structures, opening after a couple rain storms, the first just before Christmas and in the first week of January, each yielding about 20 mm. Days have been pretty hot here with maximum of 39°C and up to 70% humidity, so we like to spend our lunch breaks at what we call ‘a la plague’ (on the ‘beach’ of the lake Ranobe) in a shadow of graceful bananas. Since the beginning of January we have a very good track of weather measurements logged by our meteorological station; great tool for long term monitoring of climatic changes.

Trees in our two full-to-capacity nurseries are doing well. New species are germinating continuously and we have been monitoring their growth each month. Replanted trees have each gotten their unique tags for long-term monitoring. FIMPAHARA receives introductions to plant growth monitoring. Ho avy together with FIMPAHARA is finding local solutions to upcoming issues such as nutrient balance and plant survival. We have been supplying the saplings with compost tea, with a solution of local natural insecticides: the soaked bark of katrafay (Cedrelopsis grevei and soaked crushed leaves of neem, Azedirachta indica), keeping the insect herbivores off and strengthening the health of the seedlings; this is part of our nursery maintenance lessons we have engaged FIMPAHARA into.

Creating sunken vegetable beds

Our third nursery’s construction has just been completed we have been filling it up with pots rapidly. It is an extensive nursery, 4m wide and 16m long, with a capacity of more than 6000 pots. At the moment we have 4000 pots waiting for planting in just a few days and we are continuously filling new pots. We anticipate the seed planting will be finished by the end of January – when we will be up to 10,000 pots with growing native plants. This is certainly exciting progress. The children are a dynamic component in that progress; they have been engaged in pot filling and cheerfully carrying bags on their heads. One boy has carried a pot filled with soil on his nose; laughing when we called him ‘mifioky’ (which is the vernacular name for the endemic ephemeral chameleon Furcifer labordi – meaning the one with long nose who can whistle). We have been designing the third nursery to combine natives, food and medicinal plants, using the full potential of the nursery and proximity to the agricultural field for future tree transplanting to agroforestry schemes.

Last Sunday we had an important meeting in the village, during which FIMAPAHRA and ho avy organized a guided tour through the three nurseries, potato cropped land, our two new completed biogas installments, of which the first one has started to produce biogas already, just after two weeks. This is certainly one exciting alternative to the local cooking options – that being open fire and charcoal from the endemic forest wood. One night, returning from the nursery after the sunset, Ondra, our biogas technician grabbed our attention and whispers "come over… I’ll show you something." Taking us to the biogas storage tank, he lit the burner and … a powerful blue flame lightened up the scene. We have natural gas! It’s methane produced by anaerobic fermentation from zebo dung and water.

The villagers were impressed by the flame, and with the fact this may reduce the amount of wood they burn to cook their daily rice. More than 75 members of the community, the local land and land management association (GELOSE), local forest service (SAGE), WWF, the inter-communal association MITOIMAFI, ho avy and FIMPAHARA have gathered to carry discussion on forest protection and sustainable use within the new protected area being finally zoned. All the involved parties have officially approved patrolling against further wood cutting and charcoal making and assist ecological restoration within an area of up to one thousand hectares behind the nursery. This is certainly an incredible step forward with the prospect of sustainable conservation of the unique spiny forest in Southwest Madagascar. We are currently drafting and discussing further agreements between individual parties and discussing the local land policy (dina) for protection and enforcement. The next couple months will be an exciting time to get these documents finalized and implemented.

Along with the nursery works many activities have been carried on in the village through the interactions of ho avy and FIMPAHARA: an effective wood burning mud stove built by ho avy as demonstration has been already replicated in the seasonal home at rice fields, a new well with natural and effective filtering system put in place, language exchange has become popular and we have finally started and are highly energized for building our reforestation center which will be developed over the next month.

Well building

For more information about our progress look at issue three of the newsletter (PDF) of the program ho avy.

Recent photo galleries can be viewed at:

• http://picasaweb.google.com/martina.petru/FinalPicasaNewYear#
• http://picasaweb.google.com/martina.petru/ForNFWebblogging#

Matt Kilby from Trees for Earth is committed to rehabilitating our landscapes by planting trees in habitats where tree removal was implemented in the past.

Matt focuses on establishing trees in a way where survival rates are paramount and functional landscapes are all important.

Here he takes us through how he plants into difficult areas, where special techniques and care is critical to ensure high rates of survival and successful landscape rehabilitation.

Further Reading:

• Man of a Thousand Trees

Often, as I’ve travelled and lived in different parts of the globe, I’ve stood on mountains and beaches and looked around, somewhat wistfully, trying to visualise how those landscapes would have looked a few centuries ago. I’m sure you’ve done it too.

Many, if not most, of these places were once vast tracts of old growth forest, with rich diversity in flora and fauna. Natural biological water cleaning systems were in place, as the hydrological cycle was efficient and largely unmolested by man. Most places still had rich, dark soils and no chemicals had yet been employed to stamp out soil life.

These were the days of 280ppm. We lived then with respect, if not even fear, for a nature wide and wonderful – never for a moment thinking we could one day be the cause of these vast and mysterious systems collapsing wholesale.

But, that was then. The industrial revolution, in combination with the exponential function that has taken the human population into a steep hockey stick incline (it took from the dawn of time until the 1800s before we reached our first billion people, but we’ve multiplied that almost seven times in the two centuries since), has landed us in a world that looks vastly different today.

Reluctantly putting visualisations aside, now as I scan the landscapes in front of me, it’s mostly just cities, tarmac and a massively inefficient waste-of-space large-scale industrial monocrop agriculture. Cycles of precipitation and transpiration have been interrupted as we’ve cut down forests, ploughed the land, and almost universally determined to pipe precious rainwater directly to the ocean. Water tables worldwide are falling and many rivers no longer reach the sea while often the land is parched, eroded and turning to desert.

And, oh, all that carbon! Razing forests and churning soils has been a mass eviction of CO2 into our atmosphere. For the last fifty years – the period we call the ‘Green Revolution’ – we’ve been hastening this process further through additions of soluble nitrogen which results in nitrous oxide emissions (almost 300x more powerful a greenhouse gas than CO2) and which is now also seen to have even further detrimental effects on remaining forests.

Our before-abundant oceans – the massive heat and CO2 buffering mechanism we’re blessed with – are now taking in far too much CO2, changing seawater’s pH to the point where it’s interfering with basic processes for crucial members of the food chain: coral, molluscs and plankton.

Over the last few years I’ve spent considerable time examining these issues. The more I dug into it, the more depressing it got – not only because it’s looking increasingly like we’ve already passed the dangerous threshold (see also) that risks systemic environmental meltdown, but also because popular understanding of the problem is so linear in view. The chain reaction of the almost global recession of glaciers and the melting of the greenland, arctic and antarctic ice sheets and permafrost are the result of greenhouse gas concentrations from the 1980s, with a lot more damage yet to occur from today’s greater concentrations (see here for a summary of today’s noted changes), and yet mitigation has been almost entirely focussed on reducing fossil fuel consumption, only. Being a little ‘less bad’ does not a positive make. We can’t just reduce our emissions, we actually need to be sequestering GHGs out of the air – now! While reducing fossil fuel consumption is imperative, highlighting this alone sidelines the far more holistic course of also reinstating our soils as the massive carbon sink they once were. Increasing soil carbon not only has significant potential to ameliorate the climate change problem, but in doing so we increase soil fertility, improve soil structure (critical for water- and oxygen-holding capacity) and productivity whilst decreasing plant disease and insect attack (think improved nutrition and less chemicals). And, significantly, if we were to take these things a little further, developing biodiverse food forests to relocalise food production, we can also increase heat reflecting cloud cover whilst repairing/reinstating the hydrological cycle that supports all life on earth.

In other words – the focus of governments has only been on reducing emissions and the focus of trigger happy geo-engineering advocates has only been on ‘adjusting’ the world to accommodate our lifestyles, whilst little thought has been given to restoring natural biological mechanisms that would do most of the work for us, better, and for free. Like many aspects of modern civilisation, we find ourselves yet again dealing with symptoms and not root causes.

It’s with these thoughts in mind that I introduce you to The Biology of Global Warming (182kb 8-page PDF), which was originally published as pages 7-14 of the Dec 2006 – Jan 2007 edition of Nature and Society, the bi-monthly journal of the Nature and Society Forum.

The key point of the document is to ask the question why CO2 emissions were already rising before we really made much, or any, headway into mining for coal and drilling for oil. The answer is obvious:

• "Substantial de-forestation and farming of the Middle East, Europe, North Africa and North America prior to 1750 resulted not only in the release of vast quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere through the burning of timber and associated loss of soil organic matter but also the destruction of the carbon bio-sequestration of these forests."
• "…the destruction of up to 80% of the earth’s primary forests by humans during industrialisation could have resulted in a marked loss of natural cooling capacity and therefore increased global warming, particularly as biological systems increasingly need to shade and cool the planet from incident solar radiation."

To acknowledge these simple facts is to get us halfway to working on actual solutions. Harness biology and natural symbiotic relationships, I say, because through imitating natural systems in our food production we can initiate a ‘geo-engineering’ program that comes without side effects or risks and that holds significant promise of providing for human need in a manner that doesn’t put our race at odds with every other organism within the biosphere.

We now have no choice but to address global warming through its primary and initial cause. We need to rapidly re-establish natural cloud albedos and their cooling effects. To do this we need to re-establish the bio-systems that provided the transpiration and cloud nucleation processes on which such cloud albedos and cooling effects naturally depend. To help restore and support these bio-systems we need to biosequester carbon in forests but particularly soils so that they may enhance the natural infiltration and retention of availability soil water on which forest transpiration and cloud albedos depend. – The Biology of Global Warming (182kb 8-page PDF)

Postscript: Although perhaps controversial, I also personally believe that in such efforts we’ll need to quit our narrow views on maintaining only native flora, and work towards building food-providing ecosystems everywhere – systems that mimic natural forests in function but that utilise productive edible plants and trees alongside non-invasive support species.

Further Reading:

• A referenced restatement of the above PDF (PDF)

Download: You’ll see the option to download the 913 megabyte MP4 file at bottom right side of this page.

YouTube: The video can also be watched on YouTube, in four segments, here, here, here and here.

Greening the Desert II (including Part I) – Greening the Middle East
(Duration: 36 mins)
Tips for playing: If it’s slow to load, turn off High Definition (HD) on the player.
If you still have problems, click play (on low or high def) and then after it’s started,
click on pause. The video will then continue to buffer into your computer.
Play once fully loaded.

I would like to take the opportunity to thank Kelly Kellogg at this juncture. Kelly donated initial funding that enabled the purchase of the land for the Jordan Valley Permaculture Project site (aka ‘Greening the Desert – the Sequel’). But, upon watching the Greening the Desert Part II video, Kelly was inspired to donate an additional $20,000. These gifts are very encouraging to us as we try to solve problems at source (teach a man to fish…). Others who may feel inspired to donate to help us move this work forward faster can do so here.

A little background on the video follows:

Children in a school playground, Al Jawfa, Jordan Valley

When there’s no soil, no water, no shade, and where the sun beats down on you to the tune of over 50°C (122°F), the word ‘poverty’ begins to take on a whole new meaning. It is distinct and surreal. It’s a land of dust, flies, intense heat and almost complete dependency on supply lines outside of ones control. This is the remains of what was once called the ‘fertile crescent’. It is the result of thousands of years of abuse. It is a glimpse at a world where the environment – whose services provide for all human need – has all but completely abandoned us. This is a glimpse at the world our consumer society is inexorably moving towards, as our exponential-growth culture gorges itself at ever-increasing rates.

The original Greening the Desert video clip has been watched hundreds of thousands of times and has been posted to countless blogs and web pages in the datasphere. Although only five minutes long, it has inspired people around the globe, daring the lucid ones amongst us, those who can see the writing on the wall, to begin to hope and believe in an abundant future – a future where our survival doesn’t have to be based on undermining and depleting the very resources of soil, water, phosphorus, etc. that we depend on. The work profiled in that clip demonstrates that humanity can be a positive element within the biosphere. Man doesn’t have to destroy. Man can repair.

In the clip at top I introduce you today to Greening the Desert II. I shot the footage for this video last month (October 2009) and edited it on location in the Dead Sea Valley in Jordan – the lowest place on earth, at 400 metres below sea level. Much of it was shot in or near the village of Al Jawfa where I stayed, which is effectively a Palestinian refugee camp that has morphed over the decades since 1948 into something resembling a functional small town. It was first shown to delegates of the ninth International Permaculture Conference (IPC9) in Malawi, Africa at the very beginning of November and is now being released for general consumption. The video will take you to the original Greening the Desert site, letting you see its present condition after six years of neglect when funding ran out in 2003. You’ll also be introduced to our new project site – the Jordan Valley Permaculture Project, aka ‘Greening the Desert, the Sequel’ – and see some of the spin-off effects within Jordan from the influence of the original site; promises of much more to come.

The work we’re undertaking in Jordan is in accordance with what we call the ‘Permaculture Master Plan‘, where the project’s future is assured through funding from running educational courses. Project sites thus become self-sufficient, and self-replicating.

Geoff Lawton instructs students in a school yard in Jordan, one that PRI has
just created and begun the implementation of a design for, so its
many children can see, experience and learn permaculture first hand

Through this work we envision thousands of educational demonstration sites worldwide – all inspiring and teaching communities around them how to begin to tackle at root the massive challenges we now face after decades of short-term profit-based thinking has all but ‘consumed’ our planet and dismantled the social constructs that the human race has always depended on for its survival. Through this work we see desertification stopped in its tracks, and reversed. We see this century’s dire water issues getting resolved. We see productive work for millions in bypassing the irrelevant efforts of our ‘leaders’, to instead build a new kind of culture – a culture based on cooperative effort and learning. It’s a culture where its members have regained a sense of their place in creation, where they become land-based stewards of remaining resources; creating a culture where we at last find ultimate satisfaction – promoting and building peace and low-carbon, relocalised, community-based prosperity.

We have many such ‘Master Plan’ projects in various stages of development worldwide, and a steady stream of enquiries from people around the globe wanting to get involved and help widen this cooperative network. Perhaps it’s time you took a look at Permaculture? After all, do you have something more worthwhile to do?

Jordan Valley

We’re pleased to announce that we’re partnering with the makers of the video above, WeForest, to help establish self-replicating permaculture reforestation demonstration sites in accordance with our Permaculture Master Plan, in several worldwide locations – starting in Zambia in the first instance. Our Geoff Lawton has just agreed to be on their advisory board, and we’ll be working to supply guidance, knowhow and staff to pioneer these projects.

This is just one example of the many encouraging collaborative results we get as people boil current events down to their only logical conclusion – discovering we need to quit battling nature and get busy harnessing biological synergies to repair the earth and rebuild sustainable community interactions.

I completed my PDC in January ‘09 with Geoff at Zaytuna farm, along with a lovely range of fellow students from the far reaches of the globe. I sincerely hope they also post stories to share – come on guys, it’s time to be brave!

I returned to my home in south western Victoria (Australia) a changed woman, and I sometimes wonder what it was I use to believe in before I was transformed.

So returning home with fresh eyes for the world, I have set about transforming everything that I can cast my Permaculture web over. So hopefully I will have more than one story to tell!

My climate is cool and almost coastal ( I am 15km inland). There is a prevailing south westerly winter wind blowing fresh from Antarctica, and almost no frost. Our rain is mostly in winter and spring; our summers reach the mid thirties but usually for no more than a day or so before dropping. However last summer (Jan/Feb) set a new precedent; our hottest consecutive days, high thirties to low forties for four to five days in a row, a significant and dangerous change for us.

With a new thirst for experimentation, I have been doing informal trials and generally playing around in the garden, all the while observing and forming new questions.

So what is the story with the apricots and the weeds?

My three year old apricot trees were growing alright, considering they were planted traditionally, in an area of lawn, had never been watered, and had generally been pest free, besides a nibble from a curious horse in their first year. However I was keen to see what improvements I could make to the soil for fertility and water infiltration, and I wanted to practice increasing soil carbon on a home scale.

Firstly I sheet mulched the area with large quantities of fruit and vegetable waste from the local supermarket (diverting it from producing methane in land fill). I covered it over with all our cardboard and shredded paper waste, and then I topped that off with pea straw and old rotting grass hay.

I built up a few double reach beds in between the trees with compost and planted up some broccoli and cauliflower seedlings. I also broadcast the entire area with a winter cover crop seed mix containing oats, barley, turnips, radish, broad beans and kale to name a few.

I stood back and let nature take its course.

What I have experienced is the most beautiful and magnificent act of nature I could have dreamt for.

I harvested the broccoli and cauliflower heads as they matured then left the stems to continue growing. The pea straw grew peas and the rotting hay grew every grass and weed species available and imaginable.
The veggie waste produced a few surprises, peach and avocado seedlings (great for understock), garlic and onions. The entire site has an understory of potatoes, soon to be uncovered and enjoyed.

Many of the plants have grown exponentially in the past few weeks as they bolt to seed, radish and turnips at two metres, and hemlock (a local weed) heading on to three metres.

This abundant growth is building delicious topsoil and hosting an enormous quantity of soil biota.
Rainfall infiltration has been so advantaged that I have not experienced the usual winter run off from my land, despite our best winter rainfall in five years.

The brassica flowers are full of bees, all contributing to honey production and the whole place is alive with predatory wasps. Lots of the small local bird varieties such as willy-wagtails and fairy wrens reside close by, all consuming, producing and living contentedly in the abundant surroundings. (We should all be so lucky.)

Snails evidence a duck deficiency

The arrival of a warmer burst of weather is heralding the next succession of production. Tomato and pumpkin seeds from the veggie waste have been patiently waiting for their turn to appear. The drying off of the broad beans, barley and oats means its time for the chooks to get lucky. The seed-eating birds will collect the majority of the fallen ones but hopefully some will escape to begin the process again next autumn.

I suspect the nearby rose bushes are hiding and protecting a few birds’ nests hidden safely away from the neighborhood feral cats.

The apricots have set enough fruit to support a decent taste test and maybe a few jars of jam. But look out next season!

I will begin to chop and drop to favor the next round of production and I imagine I will find some other unexpected treasure amongst the bounty.

All photographs © Craig Mackintosh

On my recent trip to the Bill Mollison/Geoff Lawton course in Melbourne, that I forced myself to miss so I could go on site visits in the area, Cam Wilson kindly offered to be my guide – giving me very knowledgeable insights into the places we visited. As well as the Dalpura Farm site we just posted about and giving me the heads up on Angelo the Wizard, covered in this post, Cam took me to see the very cool stuff he’s doing on an urban block currently under his expert control in the ‘burbs of Melbourne.

Cam’s garden is rich in biodiversity, yet purposeful placement and organisation
makes for a very aesthetic retreat – one you truly feel a lure to spend time in

Cam has that kind of a quiet, understated personality that inspires confidence. He said his garden "should be worth a look". Being a Permaculture instructor – running regular PDCs – and being one of the main guys helping get the Permablitz movement off the ground, I was keen to do exactly that.

Cam uses a broadfork to aerate the orchard soil, stimulating microbial life and
soil building, whilst chickens get busy maintaining the section through their
irrepressible behaviours and their manure

The section is rather generous – three quarters of an acre all up, leaving a full quarter acre to garden once you subtract the house and garage. Cam and Jesse take care of the place for Kim and Clive, who are currently doing international Permaculture project aid work in Africa. Rather than leave their home to grow musty and the yard to turn rapidly into a candidate for a small scale carbon offset venture, Kim and Clive thoughtfully placed their own hard working pioneer species in their garden – namely, Cam Wilson!

Distractions of colour and fragrance, as well as beneficial host plants with
multiple purposes, all make it very difficult for ‘pests’ to become an issue.
Healthy soil, means healthy plants, which also repels pest attack.

And, what would you do once when you’ve successfully roped an expert Permaculturist into house sitting at your place? Well, you give him a budget, a big thumbs up, and tell him to let his creative knowhow loose on the place in whatever way he wishes, of course!

And so he has.

The original mainframe design of the section was done by Dan Palmer and Cam Wilson (placing the swaled orchard, chook system and raised kitchen bed), before Cam was invited to move in and take it further. Cam has since designed and implemented the terraces, the food forest, a very cool and functional water feature, and more.

Next-in-line plants wait their turn….

Everything about Cam’s work is ordered. Raised beds are on contour to ensure passive water filtration, and, with the whole yard sloping, plants like yarrow (achillea millefolium) are planted on the downward side to act as dynamic bio accumulators – collecting and storing the downward flow of nutrients, where they can later be pulled and returned to the beds as mulch.

Yarrow, bottom, mops up nutrients that leach through the garden

Grapes are being planted to run along wires above paths, where they’ll cut light intensity in the hot summer months, before dropping their leaves as mulch in autumn, and thus allowing full winter sunshine through during the colder months.

Cam checks the temperature of his compost pile

Nasturtium flowers add colour and a peppery tang to salads

I visited in mid-winter – but would love to take a lengthy wander, preferably at lunch time, through the orchard in summer and autumn months, when your average fruit preserver would be getting frantic with vacuum sealed jars. You’ve got persimmons, plum, apricot, pomegranate, olive, peach, nectarine, pear, apple, fig, orange, lemon, grapefruit, mandarin, hazelnut and mulberry. Interplanted support species – for nitrogen fixing and/or biomass – include tagasaste (Chamaecytisus palmensis), Acacia floribunda, subterranean clover, white clover, vetch, broad beans, oats and wheat during winter, along with nasturtium and comfrey for chop and drop.

Yarrow swings through the larder

Comfrey works well here, with its deep root system bringing nutrients up to the surface from depths that regular grass never could. Nasturtium is used in many places, also acting as a nutrient accumulator and a great ground cover – protecting against erosion, improving soil structure and providing beneficial insect habitat. (Hoverflies love ‘em.) Excess growth is simply broken off and put around fruit trees, or eaten!

Chunky wood chips make for guilt-free, comfortable walking along paths – holding moisture, absorbing pressure to reduce compaction, and ultimately converting into rich, dark humus.

Even the laundry gets a great view

The latest addition is what will ultimately become a gorgeous and still practical centrepiece for the yard – a pond fed by a cascading series of infiltration basins that slow-soak water through to a number of newly planted trees.

Those of you interested to combine urban water harvesting and food forest establishment with yard landscaping will find Cam’s detailed article on how and why he built this invaluable.

Despite the garden still being in full establishment mode – i.e. quite new, being only two growing seasons in since initial designs – it was producing a good amount of food already, and my visit six weeks ago was right at the trailing end of winter. Cam and Jesse have been at the site only since January, and Cam has put in an average of one day per week into the garden. For what you’re getting in return, base costs look modest:

• Huge worm farm – $250
• 4 main terraces – $2000 (should last at least 50 years)
• Greenhouse – $700
• Food forest plants – $400 (mainly fruit trees and shrubs and some of the herbs). Cam grew most of the under-storey himself from seeds, cuttings and divisions.

Cam’s already taunting me by email with descriptions of how it looks now that spring is in full swing. I can’t wait to check it out again. In the meantime, I asked Cam to give us all a few tips from his storehouse of knowledge – be sure to check them out below.

Worth a look it was Cam!