I’m really excited to be working with Rhonda Baird and William Faith on this one day workshop! As always it’s a chance to expand awareness of permaculture and to think critically about the problems we collectively face. I come away from these experiences feeling energised about what we’re able to do together.
You can register for the workshop here.
Permaculture is a way of being in the world often thought of as a gardening system. This is
Join us for the Cooperative’s annual Mushroom Workshop and Future of Food! You can pre-pay on the website or RSVP by emailing us at .
Behold:
The next rocket stove design to test, a box rocket! Luckily consumer culture has just the thing to make a stovetop, a cast iron casserole pan. It burned reasonably well when the wind wasn’t knocking over the chimney. It burnt much better when we converted it to a standard J tube (sorry no pictures). It burnt well enough and had enough functionality that I would like to test this in situ. The next steps are to build the infrastructure to set this up in a hoop, we need a concrete and a chimney. Then, we can test out some designs and zero in on a design to build!
Here is the original inspiration:
Always, always, always, we work in context with what is before us. When we design we work from the midst of someone else’s decisions as our starting point. We enter into the scale of permanence rather than defining it.
Permaculture will not be given to us by our parents. You can’t buy it at the garden store. It won’t be shipped in from California or Chile. We need to build its systems from scratch with our own two hands.
Permaculture can only grow where we are, from that which surrounds us.
Careful crafting of your goal in permaculture design is as important. The right words matter, weather just in your head or on paper! Subtle differences in intent leads to different outcomes.
Permaculture is the space to allow the emergence of a set of practices that meet the test of the ethics: Care of Earth, People, and the Future.
I want to take a moment to address the idea that permaculture is only a kind of “gardening”. Nothing can be further from the truth! We create our world from the things around us, permaculture helps us arrange and optimize them. Sometimes, for any number of reasons, a garden is just not possible. Permaculture still has much to offer in how we arrange those things that are not a garden. 
That being said there is a great amount of leverage to be gained by interacting more closely with food. We all eat and it’s going come from somewhere. So, I’ll just throw out some guidelines that you can start with. Of course they are loosely drawn from permaculture’s principles.
It’s pretty certain that someday people are going to have to be much more in tune with their food and where it comes from. But that someday is somewhere in the future. For now we just have to be ahead of any change that’s coming. In the meantime there are many other things that also need our attention. If gardening is not something you can really do, find a placeholder and then work on the aspects of your life you can change.
Learn how with a Permaculture Design Course!
