Jawaseri School Garden Project, Jordan
Aid Projects, Community Projects, Conservation, Courses/Workshops, Demonstration Sites, Developments, Eco-Villages, Education Centres, Food Forests, Food Plants - Annual, Food Plants - Perennial, Food Shortages, Irrigation, Land, Nurseries & Propogation, People Systems, Plant Systems, Rehabilitation, Trees, Urban Projects, Village Development, Water Harvesting — by Craig Mackintosh February 6, 2010
Just as I was leaving Jordan, after making the Greening the Desert II update video, another little project was just getting underway – the Jawaseri School Garden project. A few people have emailed pictures of progress over the last few months and I’ve combined these with Geoff’s narration from the PRI home base in Australia, to give you all a bit of an idea what’s happening there. May it inspire you to do similar where you are!
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.
Comments (5)Letters from Sri Lanka – Sarvodaya’s Home Gardens
Aid Projects, Community Projects, Conservation, Demonstration Sites, Eco-Villages, Education Centres, Energy Systems, People Systems, Village Development, Waste Systems & Recycling, Water Harvesting — by Craig Mackintosh January 16, 2010
Part VI of a series – If you haven’t already, please read Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV and Part V before continuing. This series is part of my work for the Sustainable (R)evolution book project.
A coconut shell is an excellent, biodegradable planter.
The coir (husk fibre) is extracted and mixed with soil to become a potting mix
with particularly good water retention capacity (the fibre reduces evaporation).
All photographs © Craig Mackintosh
The world’s largest water harvesting earthworks has transformed Sri Lanka, or at least large parts of it, from aridity to lushness. This mainframe design provides biological resources that villagers can use to maximise biodiversity for personal and environmental health. In similar fashion the ‘mainframe design’ of the ‘invisible structures’ of Sarvodaya’s community network provide avenues for the free flow of permaculture information to help achieve this goal. The good news is that many villagers are making use of these resources and this potential, despite constant attempts by Big Agri to lure them, through offers of free product samples and demonstrations, into chemical dependency.
Comments (6)Rosella Waters Earthworks, Phase I, Part B
Aquaculture, Biological Cleaning, Conservation, Dams, Demonstration Sites, Earth Banks, Education Centres, Food Forests, Gabions, Irrigation, Land, Material, Natural Swimming, Rehabilitation, Roads, Soil Conservation, Swales, Water Harvesting — by Kym Kruse January 9, 2010
 The Mushroom Dam overlooking the beach area |
It’s taken a while to find the time to sit down and report on Part B of our earthworks here at Rosella Waters, near Cairns in far North Queensland. Phase I Part A was documented whilst the process was taking place. This latest update however will rely on memory and hurried notes made during the process, together with numerous photos. Large excavations such as the two large dams we constructed in part A are considerably easier to direct and far less time consuming than the finer detail work using smaller machinery as we experienced in putting in Part B.
Comments (6)Anupam Mishra: The Ancient Ingenuity of Water Harvesting (Video)
Conservation, Food Shortages, Global Warming/Climate Change, Irrigation, Regional Water Cycle, Water Contaminaton, Water Harvesting — by Craig Mackintosh January 5, 2010
India is a country where water shortages have become so acute that the failed monsoon rains in 2009 had people literally killing each other over buckets of water, and tensions are still rising. (See this video also.) In many places cities are receiving less than half the water their populations need to meet basic requirements, and the constant bickering between individual states often breaks down into violent clashes.
Comments (0)From Annuals to Perennials
Conservation, Food Plants - Annual, Food Plants - Perennial, Plant Systems, Rehabilitation, Seeds, Soil Conservation, Structure — by Craig Mackintosh December 20, 2009
Permaculture is all about mimicking natural systems – patterning our agriculture and other critical human needs on the symbiotic processes we observe all around us. If you compare nature’s methods we see that stable natural plant systems are polycultures, and perennial, whereas our modern industrial agriculture is the exact opposite – largely being monocultures and annuals.
But, imagine if the annual crops we rely on the most, grains and pulses, could be made to grow perennially instead. No end/beginning of year ploughing, no annual replanting, etc. It would save enormous amounts of time and energy on cultivation and planting, and allow soils to remain undisturbed for longer, with immense benefits to soil life, structure, organic matter and carbon content.
The video below highlights this out-of-the-box permaculture thinking. The Land Institute in Kansas has been working solidly on engineering annuals into perennials (by way of natural plant breeding – not by gene gun). They take ancient wild, perennial varieties of grains, and cross them with their modern annual counterparts, and repeat, and repeat, until they end up with a harvestable product from a plant that doesn’t have to be resown every year. Or at least that’s the aim. This is still a work in progress, but their purpose is "to develop an agricultural system with the ecological stability of the prairie and a grain yield comparable to that from annual crops".
Comments (10)Yeomans’ Pioneer Demonstration Site to Be Turned into Housing Estate
Conservation, Demonstration Sites, Irrigation, Land, News, Rehabilitation, Soil Biology, Soil Conservation, Structure, Water Harvesting — by Craig Mackintosh December 19, 2009
One of the most influential people in sustainable agricultural systems development is the late P.A. Yeomans. Yeomans went against the contemporary fertility-in-a-bottle school of thought to develop ‘keyline’ concepts of land management that work in harmony with natural land features (working with contours), to maximise water harvesting in the landscape, minimise soil erosion and build lasting soil fertility. His observations and practice led him to design and develop the keyline plow, a deep chisel plow that maximises water infiltration and soil aeration – setting up conditions that soil macro and microorganisms can flourish in – but that doesn’t overturn the soil, with its associated destruction of soil structure and life, as other plows do.
The ABC just ran an interesting spotlight (video – or transcript here if you prefer) where we learn that one of Yeomans’ properties, ‘Yobarnie’, in Richmond, north of Sydney, is facing ‘development’ that would turn this important historical demonstration site into a housing estate. In the 1950s and ’60s the site attracted busloads of people on weekend tours where observers could see the transformation his methods effected and learn about their implementation.
Comments (1)Greening the Desert II – Final
Aid Projects, Biological Cleaning, Compost, Conservation, Demonstration Sites, Education Centres, Food Forests, Food Plants - Perennial, Fungi, Irrigation, Plant Systems, Rehabilitation, Salination, Soil Biology, Soil Conservation, Trees, Water Harvesting — by Craig Mackintosh December 11, 2009
The Greening the Desert II video I shared with you recently was edited in Jordan. Now that I’m back at my desk again I’ve had time to edit it slightly. I’ve added the original five-minute Greening the Desert clip in to the front of it, to ensure viewers have context for Part II (and we’ve also had requests for both to be made available together), as well as cut a few minutes out of Part II to keep it flowing a little better. You can not only watch online below and embed on your own websites (click for embed code at top right of video screen), but it’s also available for download, so those who’d like to have a ‘hard copy’ to circulate are welcome to download, burn to disk or transfer to USB key, etc., and circulate freely.
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:
Comments (12)Keyline Swales – a Geoff Lawton/Darren Doherty Hybrid
Biological Cleaning, Conservation, Earth Banks, Land, Soil Conservation, Swales, Water Harvesting — by Campbell Wilson November 30, 2009
A swale on Zaytuna Farm – © Craig Mackintosh
(Remaining images below © Cam Wilson.)
Geoff Lawton and Darren Doherty are the two highest profile people in Australian Permaculture when it comes to broadacre water harvesting earthworks. They’ve both had success in some very tough environments, and yet it’s interesting that their styles are quite different, particularly when it comes to infiltration strategies.
This article is a short comparison of their approaches, along with an idea I had recently for amalgamating the benefits of each.
Comments (16)Letters from Melbourne – Cam and Jesse’s Urban Retreat
Conservation, Demonstration Sites, Food Forests, Food Plants - Annual, Food Plants - Perennial, Plant Systems, Rehabilitation, Soil Biology, Soil Conservation, Structure, Trees, Urban Projects, Water Harvesting — by Craig Mackintosh November 10, 2009
An urban hideaway managed by Cam, Jesse and Yarrow Wilson
(Yarrow was taking a break for this shot)
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.
Comments (8)Dalpura Farm – Experiments in Permaculture Forestry
Conservation, Deforestation, Demonstration Sites, Land, Nurseries & Propogation, Plant Systems, Regional Water Cycle, Rehabilitation, Trees, Water Harvesting — by Craig Mackintosh November 9, 2009
Photographs © Craig Mackintosh
 Inter-row Eucalyptus saligna (Sydney blue gum) & Casuarina cunninghamiana (river she oak) planted in 2000 |
I recently had opportunity to visit a Permaculture site called ‘Dalpura Farm’, near Geelong, outside of Melbourne. Although (or perhaps, because) designed by Darren Doherty, the very well known Permaculture designer and teacher, it was dramatically different than your average Permaculture site. Rather than an urban edible garden, or a fruit-/veg-/livestock-oriented rural block, this 140-acre property was all about trees.
It’s an experimental agro-forestry project, aimed at finding the best way to produce a range of commercial products and ecological benefits from trees, with timber production being the primary focus.
I contacted Darren, the designer, and George Howson, the owner of the property, to see what it was all about.
Comments (3)Rethinking Water: A Permaculture Tour of the Inland Northwest
Conservation, Earth Banks, Food Forests, Plant Systems, Regional Water Cycle, Rehabilitation, Water Harvesting — by Kyle Chamberlain November 2, 2009
Ever since I’d first read of it, I felt I would never understand the state of my bioregion until I saw the Milner Dam. So, when a road trip finally brought the opportunity, I made a somber pilgrimage. Unlike its famous counterpart, the Grand Coulee Dam, Milner Dam is not a tourist destination. It has no museum, no bronze statues, no gift shop, and no laser light show. Finding Milner required navigating the ambiguous grid of numbered and lettered roads that cover much of the Snake River Valley in Idaho. On my map, the square and orderly roads seem reminiscent of city blocks, but buildings of any kind were sparse. The nameless roads and the checkerboard of crops between them stretch as far as the eye can see in some places: potatoes, alfalfa, sugar beets. As conspicuous as the crops themselves was the ceaseless artificial rain. Despite the oppressive summer sun, the air was heavy with humidity and the chirp of giant motorized sprinkler systems.
Got Water?
Aid Projects, Conservation, Courses/Workshops, Regional Water Cycle, Water Harvesting — by Jill Ross October 25, 2009
A grassroots effort to increase, catch and store rainwater on Molokai
Kanawai. Ka-na-wai literally means “belonging-to-the-waters”. Under traditional Hawaiian law it meant the equal sharing of water. The Hawaiian people planted taro farms along water systems shared by everyone. A farmer took as much as he needed, then closed his inlet so the next farmer could get his share of water. This meant using only what was needed and looking out for your neighbor’s needs. Unfortunately for the island of Moloka’i (and most of her sister islands) the big agricultural corporations that use the majority of the island’s water reserves, “got no Kanawai”. This didn’t sit well with Permaculture co-founder Bill Mollison when he spent time on Molokai twenty plus years ago, and next month we’ll let the people of Molokai know that it doesn’t sit well with us (PRI USA).
Comments (0)Each Step is the Way – Part III
Biological Cleaning, Conservation, Demonstration Sites, Food Forests, Irrigation, Land, Rehabilitation, Swales, Waste Water — by David Perkins September 17, 2009
Recent developments at Kailash-Akhara, Adi Yoga Retreat Center, Phu Rua, Loei, Thailand.
By David Perkins (Dharmadeva) – Farm Manager and resident permaculture designer and educator at Kailash-Akhara.
This report provides an overview of many aspects of creating a retreat center and living sustainably using the principles of permaculture. Short updates will be given regularly to keep our wider community informed. See Part I and Part II if you haven’t already.
First phase of building is now complete
 The dormitory |
After a year and a half of construction in the core area, painting was completed just before an opening ceremony and party to celebrate the annual festival of Guru Purnima on the full moon in July. Four buildings make up the core area: The Temple/Training Hall, Dormitory, Kitchen-Dining Room, and Bath House with composting toilets. We are now practicing, sleeping, cooking, eating, showering, doing laundry, and recycling our poop in shiny new surroundings – a level of relative luxury compared to the stripped-down facilities we began with.
Comments (4)The Rocket Powered Shower
Building, Conservation, Energy Systems, Waste Systems & Recycling, Waste Water — by Milkwood Permaculture September 1, 2009
Plan for our Rocket-Powered hot water system for the Basecamp shower + bath block
Spending all your day gathering sticks for a hot shower is just no fun. No fun at all. Mind you, anything that results in a hot shower (or even better, a hot bath) has to be considered a priority at Milkwood. So when Nick finished converting the old ‘Sunbeam Sheep Shower’ structure (basically a new-fangled sheepdip) to a shower block with a little wood-fired, home-made firebox thingamy to heat the water for the shower and the bath, that’s what we did. Lots of stick-gathering.
The romance of wood-fired hot water quickly wears thin, however, if your water-heating system is not terribly efficient. Because this means the system requires a fair deal of wood to heat the water, which therefore releases a corresponding amount of CO2. And also results in lots of stick gathering. So Nick went searching for the most super-efficient, super-simple and super-funky heating system idea he could find, which could then be converted to a water heating system. And thus we discovered the glory that is the Rocket Mass Heater.
Comments (8)Letters from Sri Lanka – Greywater Recycling at Kuttam Pokuna (the Twin Pools)
Biological Cleaning, Conservation, Irrigation, Natural Swimming, Regional Water Cycle, Waste Water, Water Harvesting — by Craig Mackintosh August 12, 2009
Novice Buddhist monks listen to their instructor
Photos Copyright © Craig Mackintosh
Last time I spoke about the world’s largest earthworks project – an incredible and unrivalled example of large scale water harvesting. Today we continue the tale, highlighting the beautiful and practical Kuttam Pokuna, or Twin Pools, found at Anuradhapura in north-central Sri Lanka.
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