Imagine The Abundance - Urban Gardens

Imagine, you're perusing the Sunday paper, thumbing through various articles, world news, sports, opinion pieces... yea, we've all been there. What feelings arise for you as the images pass by your eyes? Article after article, world news and local... everything seems so dismal.

In disgust and with a freshly drained world view, you fold the paper up and drop it back down on the table. Just before you look away and try to forget the morning sorrow, a small advertisement catches your eye.

FREE GARDEN
DESIGN & INSTALL

Free garden? Sounds too good to be true. But it's about the only positive thing you've seen this morning. What have you got to lose?

What you don't know is that, behind the scenes, there are 20 knowledge hungry permaculture students waiting to get out of the classroom and get their hands dirty in your very own backyard!

Enter The Permaculture Research Institute's, Nick Huggins, and his class of Urban Design & Consultancy Students.

With help from Nick, you've sourced all the materials, made sure you've stayed within your budget (yea, well... you do have to provide something. A small materials cost will be well worth the expense after that first time you bypass the produce section in the supermarket), and now, there's a mountain of compost next to Gravel Summit and The Great Wall of Strawbale all ready to somehow be transformed into your new backyard garden. Oh yea... and that pesky depressing paper? It's there too... along with many more like it, waiting to meet what you hope will be their final resting place.

With great anticipation, you try to envision how those pieces might all fit together. You imagine watching steaming piles of compost being shoveled atop some pathetic politicians face. "That'll do 'em right," you mutter out loud with a sinister grin.

The Business of Permaculture

Nick brings an interesting approach to teaching permaculture. One that, I personally believe, is not taught or even talked about enough in permaculture circles. Nick uses his time in the classroom to show students the viability of permaculture as a model for ethical AND profitable business.

Profit. The word itself can drag up some of the same feelings and emotion as those grim sunday headlines. In fact, some might say that many of those headlines are the result of our profit driven society. In permaculture however, we take every opportunity to see how a problem can be turned into a solution... how wastes of one system become resource for the next.

Profit, itself, is not inherently evil anymore than a hammer is a weapon. Like any other tool, it's all in how we use it. The ethics of permaculture (earth care, people care, share of surplus) not only provides some direction to how we might use profit for good... it directs us clearly to share it for the good of the people and the planet. Imagine if all the world's financial transactions were guided by these ethics?

Sharing the surplus of his successes in permaculture business has allowed Nick to grow permaculture's reach into new demographics that would otherwise go unserved. Our clients, the Finlayson's, are the latest beneficiaries of that surplus.

The Garden of Your Future


It's Wednesday morning, a light rain just thinned out as a bus full of permies pulls in to the drive. You can hardly contain your excitement as this international team of permaculture interns greets you.

After a quick brief, the team gets to work marking out the design with a can of blue paint as you try to envision the plants draping over the edges of thin blue lines, heavy with produce.

As images of your future garden flash before your eyes the reality is manifesting in front of you... you stare intently, trying not to blink fearing you might miss the amazingness of it all unfold.

Over the course of next three days you watch as the cycles of abundance are set into motion in your very own back yard. There's no stopping it now. An engine has been started under your soils, and in your heart. What a gift!


(Special thanks to Mark Finlayson and family for the wonderful hospitality and time lapse photography and all the students, interns and teachers of the PRI who made this such an amazingly inspirational experience.)

Interning on Zaytuna Farm

Over the past three plus weeks myself and 15 other cohorts have been fully engaged in farm life. And, although there are several aspects of this lifestyle that you might expect out of a typical farm experience (i.e. milking goats, turning compost, planting veggies, etc...) this is far from a typical farm!

Zaytuna Farm stands apart from other farms in many ways... not the least of which being that it is the home of the Permaculture Research Institute of Australia. The staff at Zaytuna are growing more than just healthy veggies, they're turning out crop after crop of new permaculture professionals.

This year my cohorts and I are lucky enough to count ourselves among the yield! Over the course of 10 weeks we not only engage ourselves in what it takes to run a permaculture farm, we also learn valuable skills such as the ins-and-outs of permaculture earthworks, how to run a permaculture landscape and consultancy business, the finer points of soil biology, permaculture teacher training and how to engage in international permaculture aid work. And, as if that weren't enough, all the while we're caring for livestock, pruning trees, harvesting food for our daily meals... the list goes on and on.

After the first week of introductions and orientation to the farm we got right into the heavy lifting... earth lifting that is. Well, earth moving might be the more accurate term.

In the Permaculture Earthworks Course, we learned about various types of earthworks systems such as dams and swales and how they would be implemented in a landscape. Then we got hands on and tested our surveying skills as we scoped out a location for a new dam (number 15?) on the farm.

Surveying, we learned quickly, is a very important skill in regard to testing our assumptions and finding a suitable site for a new dam or swale. The eye plays quite a few tricks on us and, at one point it took two groups of us swapping places on two separate ridges and looking across at each other from a different perspective before we realized that it wasn't the equipment that was failing us, but our very own eyes.

After a bit of toying around and pegging out different hypothetical dam sites, it was time to get serious. The excavator was on the ground, ready to roll, and it was our job to direct him. Fortunately for us, Glen, our machine operator, was a very experienced earthmover that had put in many of the dams here at Zaytuna previous to this one in courses just like ours. He knew what he was doing, even if we didn't. He also new how to explain what he was doing and share some of the insights of his over 20 years in the business... so long as you can sift through a deep Ausie accent to discover the gems of knowledge he doled out. 

Glen pointed out many of the things we should know to keep an eye out for when going into a job and what to do should you encounter certain situations. We were very fortunate, in a rather strange way, that our dam building exercise was actually wrought with problems. Fortunate in that we had the expertise of both our highly experienced earthmover, Glen, and our highly experience course instructor, Geoff, to lean on. With their combined experience, all the issues we encountered as we excavated our lovely new dam created nothing more than a valuable learning experience... and a perfectly suitable, albeit odd looking, new dam. Check out the video of our project here.

With dams, swales, some pipe crossings, and a couple new camper sites carved out our earthworks adventure came to a close... but our internship had only just begun!

This week, our motley crew of Permaculture Interns (ranging from the Pennsylvania to Perth, Germany to the Caribbean Islands and about everywhere else in between) are taking on Urban Design and Consultancy with previous intern graduate, Nick Huggins. Another great adventure is just ahead as we prepare to install a permaculture garden for a real live suburban client in the neighboring city of Lismore. For the clients sake... let's hope we don't encounter quite as many "learning experiences" as we did during the earthwork's course!