Intro to Permaculture Course Feb 2010

We've locked in the weekend of February 20 and 21 for our first Introduction to Permaculture Course* at Eudlo on the Sunshine Coast - yay!

Email me (Sonya) at permaculturepathways@yahoo.com.au if you'd like to find out more, or enrol or to be kept up to date about other courses and workshops.

This introductory level permaculture course could be just what you're looking for if you're wanting to; live more sustainably, reduce household bills, grow some of your own food, integrate chooks, worms or bees into your garden, or build more sustainable community networks (food co-operatives, Permablitz groups etc) in your local area through the Transition Town networks.

The weekend focusses a lot on the theory behind permaculture - the history, principles, design skills and the things that make 'permaculture' happen.

We cover; soil, climate, zonal planning and sector analysis, suburban strategies, kitchen gardens and food forests.

We also focus on what you can do in a suburban backyard or small-scale acreage property, and we cater for renters and people living in apartments with only a balcony to garden on too.

The course is held in our home and two-acre permaculture garden, so you'll see plenty of examples of permaculture in action.

We offer a friendly, supportive learning environment for you to gain the skills and confidence you need to get started on your permaculture path.

We'll also offer you a lot of practical ideas for you to take home including water harvesting, storage and use - BELOW - although we are only 30 minutes from Maroochydore, we are off the town water grid here and we need to be self-sufficient with our water supply.

We'll look at home energy use and ways to reduce your energy consumption - saving money and reducing your ecological footprint.

You'll see examples of permaculture at work in our 'living classroom' - BELOW - biomimicry - replicating nature, working with nature rather than against it. We also focus on the uniqueness of living in a subtropical climate.

We'll explore ways to build diversity and resilience in the systems around us - a multitude of ways to apply permaculture in our daily lives. BELOW - brainstorming ideas for resilient local food systems.

BELOW - you'll learn how chooks work in a permaculture system - the roles they play in keeping the system healthy and productive, what we need to provide for them and what they can do for us.

BELOW - we have a shady spot on the deck set up as our learning space.

BELOW - and this is what it's all about - productive, abundant, healthy systems that provide your household and family with as much food, water, energy, products and materials as they can in a sustainable way. Reducing your costs, improving your health and helping the planet too.

*there are no pre-requisites for enrolling in our Introduction to Permaculture Course, it would be great if you've read a little about it beforehand, but it's not necessary - I'll tailor the course to meet the particular needs of the group.

Looking forward to an exciting 2010 and a big year of teaching and learning,

Cheers,

Sonya

Announcing our new organic gardening courses...

After careful consideration and much thoughtful planning, we're pleased to announce our new organic gardening courses for 2010.

The backyard vegie patch is enjoying a renaissance - whether its because of the quality of food, the flavour and taste of food, for health, for the family budget or for a myriad of other personal reasons, people around the world are turning to their own backyards, acreages even balconies to start growing some of their own food.

But how do you do it successfully?

It's not hard to grow your own food, but you do need to study up and learn what you can to ensure you have successes not failures, particularly early on in your new life as a food grower.

And people want to grow organically - but how do you deal with weeds, pests and diseases and not resort to sprays?

Well, here at Permaculture Pathways we invite you to visit our small holding and spend a day or two seeing how we successfully grow bucket loads of delicious, nutritious, organic food.

No sprays, no chemicals, no worries - this organic garden will be 13 years old in 2010, we've been here six years and every year the garden just gets better and better.

All through using safe, practical, easy to do organic methods and we open our garden to teach others how to do the same.

Organic gardening shouldn't cost you the earth either, so we focus on teaching people how to make a lot of their own products and simple strategies so you save money at the supermarket and at the nursery.

There is a lot to organic gardening - pest management, watering, where to buy stock, soil health and building strategies... and some people are just starting out, while others have given it a go, but are now running into problems.

So, we've decided to divide our organic gardening courses into two parts

Organic Gardening - Getting Started

and

Organic Gardening - Digging Deeper

What do you think?

First up, Getting Started, this one day course will cover:

(subject to refinement and sudden changes at our whim if we think of a better way of doing this!)

BELOW - planning and designing your new garden. Doesn't matter how much space you have, even a couple of pots will benefit from some thoughtful planning on what, where, how and when to garden.

The focus is on the kitchen garden - growing your own salad greens, vegies, herbs and edible flowers.

Also covers soil - a good organic gardener feeds the soil, not the crop - so we have a big focus on soil (through all our courses). BELOW - a handful of beautiful, rich, healthy soil made using our composting methods.

BELOW - we'll show you how to plant out raised beds using no-dig methods such as this small tank bed

BELOW - we'll cover container growing - a method particularly good for renters

BELOW - and how to get your new garden off and running using no-dig and other methods to turn your lawn into lunch.

BELOW - identifying common insects in the garden - who's on your side and who's a pest?

BELOW - seeds and seedlings - where to get them and what to look for

BELOW - and preparing your beds for planting out - planting seedlings and direct sowing seeds.

The Getting Started course also covers; mulching, what to plant when, safe organic solutions to common problems, weeds and what to do about them, tools to get you started, when to water your garden, where to buy things and much, much more.

Now for the Digging Deeper course - for people who have a garden, want to revitalise an old garden, people who are having troubles with their gardens or want to produce more from their existing garden. We'll show you how to keep your garden healthy and productive year after year.

BELOW - includes seed saving - how to collect, store and use dry seeds

BELOW - and how to collect, clean, store and use wet seeds

BELOW - and plant propagation - creating new plants from old

BELOW - how to garden with chooks - integrating them into your productive backyard organic garden

BELOW - more on integrated pest management and insect identification

BELOW - and getting to know common subtropical edible plants

The Digging Deeper course also covers more on soil - crop rotation, green manure cropping - aquatic plants, compost teas, and much much more.

There will be plenty of opportunities for hands on learning in the garden too.

About course facilitator Sonya Wallace - I'm looking forward to these new courses. I believe they will really meet the needs of people wanting to start growing organic food at home for their families or for income.

I'm a qualified Permaculture teacher with a Certificate IV in Training and Assessment, I have a Certificate in Sustainable Agriculture and I've been teaching permaculture and organic gardening for the past four years at our property and through community garden and gardening expo networks across the Sunshine Coast.

We're also putting our property through the official Organic Certification process (Organic Growers of Australia OGA), so participants can be confident that they are seeing and learning the latest in organic standards and what works best here in the subtropics.

You'll see how to make your garden productive and how to work with nature to produce food for your family. You'll learn how to save money and where the local organic suppliers and resources are on the Sunshine Coast.

As soon as we dates locked in for these two courses, I'll post the details here.

Cheers,

Sonya

Friday at the Herb Farm

I spent today at the Shipard Herb Farm at Nambour learning more about plants, seeds and propagation.

Isabell's book cannot be recommended highly enough - you can find the details of how to buy it here - it would make a great Christmas present for someone special! I'll have some for sale at my stall at the Eudlo Market on December 13 too. (Also check out her Sprouts and Self-sufficiency books - gold!)

Today I planted out Tamarillo cuttings ABOVE

and Spanish Wood Thyme ABOVE

and Sacred Basil ABOVE

and Mushroom Plant ABOVE - guess what it tastes like?

ABOVE and finally the Vegetable Hummingbird Tree - a legume, very fast growing, used in the Ord River irrigation area in northern Australia where it outgrew all other trees - great Permaculture plant for quick establishment of tree coverage and nitrogen fixing. Also very high in protein so an excellent survival food.

I bought home plants of Sheep Sorrel, Vegetable Hummingbird Tree, Drumstick Tree and a couple of Aloe Candelabra (AKA Tree Aloe) - which by the way soothed the itching and burning from the tick bite on my head for the garden here.

Learning about plants is a job for life it seems - so many of them, so many families, so many uses.

But being involved in permaculture is all about learning - forever the student of nature.

Discovering and appreciating the amazing value of plants and how we can use them in our daily lives for ourselves, our families, our food, our pets and livestock, our soils, our health and the environment - there is no better way to spend your time.

Have a great weekend,

Sonya

Birthday celebrations...

There were birthday celebrations in our house this week and they will continue over the weekend too. I love a party!

I was lucky enough to receive a copy of Stephanie Alexander's Kitchen Garden Companion book about how to plant, grow, harvest, cook and eat wonderful fresh goodies from the garden.

I love the images in her books - the beautiful kitchen utensils and implements, like the old blue edged chopping board in the image above.

I also received a River Cottage DVD - yeah! I think this is the only one you can get anyway - hopefully all the seasonal ones will be available here one day.

I was also honoured to find I was featured in a chapter in a locally produced book about sustainability innovators - agents of change on the Sunshine Coast.

I'm among some wonderful people and it's both humbling and interesting to read how someone else inteprets what it is you're doing.

In the book local academic Dr Dana Thomsen, the author and interviewer for the book, wrote that what I'm doing (in the Transition Town movement) 'is a participatory action research approach where participants trial activities, share knowledge and are prepared to learn from their mistakes.'

I do encourage people to learn by doing, rather than waiting until the time seems right.

And also not to be afraid of failure.

And then I came back to earth when I found a tick embedded in my scalp! Rotten things.

Oh well, it could have been worse! I guess

Cheers,

Sonya

Green manure crops

The great thing about livin' the permaculture life is that you also, by default, get to be an organic gardener too.

Every permaculture garden is organic, but not every organic garden is permaculture.

Permaculture is overall design, it’s wholistic, systems thinking, closing energy loops, finding multiple functions and maximum yield, creating diversity and resilience through dynamic stability within the system and when you really get into it, it’s much, much more far reaching than growing food.

But growing food is something we all either are doing or want to do.

We all have to eat.

And we want our food to be clean, healthy and full of nutrition. We don’t want to feed our family chemicals, so we grow our food organically.

We want what’s best for our families.

So the added challenge of becoming a skilled and thoughtful organic gardener lies before us.

This post is about one of the key aspects of organic gardening – green manure crops (GMCs).


ABOVE - a newly planted green manure crop just peeping through the mulch.

One of the best resources I know of for information on GMC’s is Green Harvest – visit their website and read through the (huge amount of) information they have on their website about GMCs, I won’t bore you with too much repetition here, I'll let the experts there fill you in.

You can order GMC packs from them too.

But I will give you a little info... a green manure crop is a mixed crop of legumes, grains and grasses grown specifically for the soil.

You don’t eat it, it’s not for the chooks or the guinea pigs or the worms or the goats or the cows.

It’s for the soil.

ABOVE - our dog Barney sits among the emerging green manure crops in our vegie beds

ABOVE - the same bed a few weeks later - these beds are watered and fed like all the others.

ABOVE - a little later yet again

ABOVE - once the crop reaches its peak - just before flowering - it's chopped down and covered with mulch. Within a couple of weeks (depending on your unique weather, rainfall, temperature and the microbial life in your soil) all the green material will be gone from beneath the mulch and it will be ready to be planted out.

ABOVE - and a few weeks later again, you'll have healthy new plants growing happily in their enriched soil.

Green manure crops are Soil Food – leafy greens above the soil for extra nitrogen and rich lush root systems below the surface for bulk organic matter.

And you have choices when it comes to GMCs – first choice is whether it’s cool season or warm season. That part’s easy.

Next choice is what you want the GMC to do – do you want it to break up a heavy clay soil, to add nitrogen, break disease cycles, provide organic matter or to get rid of nematodes?

So many choices!

ABOVE - a new garden bed planted out with a GMC - Wooly Pod Vetch and Oats are getting the soil ready for a new perennial garden around a new aquatic plant bathtub. We'll plant ginger, chillies, kaffir lime and other Asian goodies in the beds and kang kong in the water.

GMC provide a lush cover crop for your soils, smothering weeds and encouraging microbial life below the surface.

You'll find all sorts in here - frogs, beetles, grubs - it's alive!

BELOW - GMC's are part of the overall garden crop rotation system. So you have them among food crops - not all your garden under GMCs at once or you'll have nothing to eat. In the photo below you can see how we have only a strip of this large bed under a green manure crop - it's pretty shaded, but there are cabbages, lettuces, basil and mustard in the bed also.


And each green manure crop brings it’s own unique qualities and characteristics to the soil. And mixing it up with a wide range of seeds will bring more diversity to the services your GMC will deliver.

We’re using GMCs now to maintain our garden beds over the hot, humid summer here in the subtropics.

They will perform many functions for us – suppress weeds, provide a living mulch, build soil structure, improve soil health, feed microbes and keep the bed biologically active.

GMCs need to be treated like food crops – watered regularly, fed with fertilisers along with the rest of the garden and kept mulched while they grow to ensure you get the very best for your garden.

We’ll cut down our new green manure just before flowering or just before going to seed and they will be the start of some plumped up, well fed beds for autumn plantings.

Happy everything,

Sonya

Following the rhythm of the seasons

Our spring subtropical garden is transitioning into summer and there’s lots to do.

While temperate and cool climate gardeners prepare for their peak growing season, subtropical gardeners like us here on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland are preparing for peak pest season and heavy rainfall, high humidity and at times, overwhelming heat. (Although we're not currently suffering as much as those folk in South Australia - six days straight of really high temps around 40 degrees - I feel sorry for you! I grew up in SA and know what that's like).

Yesterday I was at Veggie Village delivering the final day of a four-day intensive permaculture and organic gardening course I created for members of the community gardens there in the heart of Peregian Beach, a coastal suburb.

We spent our last day as a Permablitz day. Green manure crops were planted, two big composts were made (ABOVE) and a super fast no-dig garden recipe was put together in the top of a raised vegetable bed that has a water tank stored underneath it.

A solar pump connected to a dripper system waters the garden twice daily.

It will be interesting to see how it goes – community gardens are great places to try new ideas and demonstrate a variety of different gardening styles to suit every space and every budget.

ABOVE - the no-dig garden bed with a rain water tank in the base. The solar pump is fitted to the pole in the left of the photo. The tank takes up the bottom half of the bed, and the vegies still have plenty of room to grow in the top half. Plus you don't have to bend over so far to tend to your salad greens and vegies! Win win.

BELOW - students helped set up the dripper system in the new bed before the mulch was laid over the top.

And at the end of the Permablitz we tucked into wood fired pizzas and celebrated the end of the course and all our hard work.

BELOW - everyone bought something along to contribute to the pizzas.

The students kindly got together and bought me a beautiful metal dragonfly (BELOW) which will soon adorn a wall somewhere around here – still finding the best place for it to go.

Today we’re planting green manure crops at home to rest the garden beds over summer and also to suppress weeds. These crops will be cut down and become rich organic matter, building our soil quality, fertility and health ready for planting out next autumn – our peak planting time.

We’re still harvesting plenty of tomatoes – the Romas are fruiting now. Not very good to eat in a salad, but roasted… they're delicious. We’re roasting and stewing them in batches for the freezer. We won’t have to buy pasta sauce for a very long time.

Wild May fruit fly management is keeping them under control and keeping the fruit healthy too. Harvesting them early and letting them ripen inside the house also helps with fruit fly management.

BELOW - YUM!

Seed saving is still going on here – we’re keeping an eye on the weather and trying to get out to harvest the seed pods from the plants before the rains come. But soon it will be too humid and the seeds will just rot.

Veggie Village started a new Seed Saving Group out of the four-day workshop I did there, which was really exciting.

BELOW - Madagascar bean pods ready for saving and storage

As I mentioned earlier we're heading into peak pest season, and the grasshoppers are moving in on cue. We catch some to feed to the chooks, and also try to get any plants past their prime out of the garden so as not to attract pests.

This year we’ll try a diluted molasses mix to spray on plants to keep the grasshoppers under control - it is supposed to deter them. We’ll also ensure bird baths are kept filled and clean to encourage those hungry carnivorous birds into the garden to feast on the bounty of pests.

BELOW - caught in the act - a grasshopper chowing down on a plant! Yes, we can see you!

We also planted plenty of good bug attractant plants in the garden a few months ago, so hopefully we’ll have some natural balance happening out there. Predators are the ones that feast on pests and help us with our organic pest management program.

Having pests in the garden means there is food for the good guys, it's only when things get out of hand we should step in, otherwise let the bugs sort it out among themselves and let us focus on getting the good guys in, not the bad guys out.

Green Harvest sell a great little product - Good Bug Mix - just scatter the seeds through the garden to encourage ladybirds, tiny wasps and other good bugs to move in here, easy as for the gardener - all the work is done for you.

And here is a pot of the Good Bug Mix set right in the heart of the vegie garden. It contains goodies such as Queens Anne's Lace, Coriander, Dill etc - a lot of plants that have tiny white or yellow flowers - which the good guys love.

We also have our fruit and nut trees fed, mulched and ready to for the coming rain, humidity and subtropical heat. That's Pinto Peanut growing around them - a living, nitrogen-fixing mulch meaning we don't have to keep replacing grass mulch there. The yellow flowers of the Pinto's also attract pollinators and keep the orchard cool and happy.

And in our spare time, we’re still dreaming up the most excellent new courses for next year. Seems that hands-on courses are what people want, and we aim to deliver.

Enjoy your day,
Sonya

What would be your dream permaculture course?

We're currently planning next year's calendar of courses and I'd really welcome your input.

Last year we ran Introduction to Permaculture weekends which proved very popular, Beginners' guide to growing your own food - again very popular and the third course we ran was composting and worm farming.

ABOVE - here's our teaching space set up on the deck overlooking the garden - it's cool and shady and comfortable for small groups. This is where we cover all the theory - mindmaps, notes, discussions - they all take place here... then we head out into the garden for some hands on practical experience.

How to grow your own food is a very popular course. It covers all you need to know to get started on an organic vegie patch, or to revitalise an old patch in the backyard that perhaps hasn't worked out so well.

People are becoming more interested in how to grow some of their own food in the backyard. How to grow it organically, how to manage pests and diseases, and how to get maximum yield out of a small vegie bed. Our course includes things like using green manure crops (ABOVE) and how to incorporate them as part of a overall healthy soil management plan.

And finally, composting and worm farming. Yet another popular course for people who are either new to these methods, or have tried but not had a lot of success.

I try to make all the courses we run practical and 'doable' for people to start their own vegie beds, integrate permaculture principles into their lives or start successful compost systems at home.

I aim to give people the skills and confidence to get started - it's the best way to learn, by doing.

Trial and error is a great teacher. Don't be afraid of failing, that's where you learn some great lessons and how to trouble shoot problems - once you know how to do that, you can do anything.

In 2010, we'll continue these workshops, running them regularly with some variety - some on Saturdays, some on Sundays, the two-day permaculture intro split over two weekends... I might even try some weekday workshops to see if that is more convenient for people.

So, my questions to you are; are there any other workshops you'd like to see offered? and what times suit you best - are you available mid-week?

We are working on how we might deliver a part-time Permaculture Design Certificate course too.

Any ideas?

What would entice you to enrol in a course?

What would be your dream 'sustainable living' course?

Let me know your thoughts,

Thanks

Sonya