Our team brings empowering hands-on experience to the teaching of permaculture. This teaching style is unique in its use of the body as a tool to practice and memorize the techniques and skills learned in class. We aim to make our hands-on experiences as engaging and creative as possible by using the guiding principles of permaculture in the facilitation of each project. We reinforce the concepts introduced in hands-on through in-depth discussions and adaptive learning techniques.
Have you ever wanted to know how to naturally filter your laundry water while keeping it on site? What to do with too much cabbage or how to repopulate your gut with good biota? How about finding level so that you can build a swale to harness rainwater runoff for reforesting a site? Or build with local and natural materials procured locally? Do have a lawn and want to convert it into a garden quickly without lots of digging? Want to plant trees but don’t really know how to protect them in their early years? Do you have food scraps coming from your kitchen but don’t know what to do with them? Lastly maybe you have a site but not much money and want to get lots of plants growing quickly and cheaply? Our hands-on sessions address these topics and more depending on the context.
Thus depending on the season and the host site, you will be given the opportunity to learn practical skills and give back to the site in way of the old adage “many hands make light work”. Many students greatly appreciate the hands-on experience so they have the confidence to implement some of the techniques learned straight away after the course. Often we get dirty and sweat a bit, but these are some of the most fun times at the course. It’s definitely a balance though as this is a design course not just an organic gardening course. So if you want more practical skills around composting or forest gardening, please consider taking a PDC like ours that is a well balanced learning environment.
It comes from the Dec 2009 PDC at Escola Da Terra in Portugal where we were having some great opportunity to observe erosion patterns on the site. We then took care of the run-off issue with somesmall-scale earthworks and then planted a food forest on top. Enjoy the video and it’s an example of what we can do as a collective to better the earth.
Do you have food scrapes coming from your kitchen but don’t know what to do with them? Lastly maybe you have a site but not much money and want to get lots of plants growing quickly and cheaply?