Permaculture News, Information, Forums, Courses and Worldwide Reports

Unwanted Chemical Pool Gets Permaculture Makeover

July 18, 2018 by Eric Voke & filed under Aquaculture, Biological Cleaning, Building, Design, Fish, General, How to, Natural Swimming, Permaculture Projects, Urban Projects, Waste Systems & Recycling, Water

Six months into our pool to pond conversion and the problem really has become the solution. For some time, we had been flirting with the idea of doing something productive with our unwanted 12,000 gallon in-ground swimming pool. It was during my Permaculture design course with Geoff Lawton last year that I decided to commit to a full conversion to an aquaculture wetland. What seemed like my most daunting project […]

How to Make Instant Garden Beds

July 14, 2018 by Jonathon Engels & filed under Compost, Fungi, General, Geoff Lawton, How to, Plant Systems, Plants, Short Films - up to 15min, Soil, Soil Biology, Videos

A common problem when just starting a garden is dealing with the fact that we’ve not had time to condition the soil, fostering it into something heaving with fertility. Or, maybe we just aren’t that far into gardening yet anyway and don’t know what to do. Basically, it seems we are left with the option of using what we have and hoping for the best, or we can spend a […]

How To Motivate Kids To Learn About Permaculture

July 10, 2018 by Scott Jenkins & filed under Community, General, How to, People Systems

When my kids were toddlers, they wanted to help me in the garden every spring. They were more than happy to wear a silly straw hat like Dad and work the soil with a trowel. I would take the opportunity to talk to them about how our compost was conditioning the soil and how the worms helped the plants grow. But by the time early summer rolled around, they had […]

Different Methods for Propagating Fruit Trees from Cuttings, Etc.

July 7, 2018 by Jonathon Engels & filed under Food Plants - Perennial, General, Nurseries & Propogation, Plants, Trees

While saving seeds is a great practice and every budding grower should be starting a personal seed bank, certain plants and trees are better propagated via cuttings. This is particularly the case with many fruit trees because they won’t produce the same quality of fruit as their parent plant. While it can be a good idea to produce a variety of species and encourage the sowing of wild oats, so […]

Fixes for Nutrient Deficient Soil

July 4, 2018 by Jessica Santos & filed under Food Plants - Annual, Food Plants - Perennial, General

Basic understanding of plant health comes from the soil they grow in. Their nutrition is vital to their health and overall sustainability, so it’s essential for plants to get all of the macronutrients necessary to thrive. However, there are times we still struggle with a plant mysteriously dying off long before its time. It happens, but this is often indicative of a bigger problem with the nutrients in the soil. […]

How Dry Composting Toilets Work

July 1, 2018 by Jonathon Engels & filed under Building, How to, Retrofitting, Waste Systems & Recycling

Dry composting toilets are an efficient, cyclical way of dealing with human waste without using and/or fouling fresh water, which is in ever-dwindling supply on the planet. Using clean water to flush human excrement sends it into either a septic system, which eventually has to be pumped and the sludge moved to larger facilities where it will then be dealt with, or sewer mains, where it congregates into a horribly […]

Real food does not come from supermarkets: 6 steps from bare ground to homegrown cauliflowers

July 1, 2018 by Kate Martignier & filed under Food Plants - Annual, General, How to, Plant Systems, Plants

I imagine that when our grandchildren and great grandchildren read in history books about the supermarkets we relied upon for food, they’ll wonder what we were thinking. My goal is to get to where our family can live without the supermarket entirely. There are many things we have yet to learn, but we’re well on our way. We already raise all of our own meat and eggs, and most of […]

Straw Bale Gardens

June 30, 2018 by Miles Durand & filed under Compost, Food Plants - Annual, Food Plants - Perennial, Fungi, General, How to, Plant Systems, Soil Biology, Urban Projects

What do straw, paint brushes and the human blood circularity system have in common? The answer is capillaries, very narrow, long tubes. It is this physical characteristic of straw which gives its remarkable ability to become the soil of a garden bed. Large amounts of water and nutrients can be held within the straws capillaries. This is an ideal environment for bacterial growth. This conversion from straw to soil makes […]

Greening the Desert with Permaculture

June 29, 2018 by Salah Hammad & filed under Aid Projects, Community, Community Projects, Courses/Workshops, Demonstration Sites, Design, Education Centres, General, Geoff Lawton, Permaculture Projects, Urban Projects, Videos

“I have never seen soil like this before” was the comment that Bill Mollison made during a visit to the ‘Jordan Valley Permaculture Project (aka ‘Greening the Desert – the Sequel’) in 2011. At the time, he was referring to the poor state of the soil in the small village of Jawasari, Jordan. An area of the world where the landscape has been damaged by not only extreme pollution and […]

Permaculture chickens – 6 practical lessons from the evolution of chickens

June 28, 2018 by Marcus Looby & filed under Animal Housing, Animals, Bird Life, Breeds, Design, Food Plants - Perennial, General, Livestock

One of the fundamentals of permaculture design is to observe, understand and work with natural ecosystems. It sounds simple enough to apply permaculture principles to chicken keeping. Can’t we just observe wild chickens in their natural environment? The problem is, modern domesticated chickens don’t exist in the wild. Junglefowl are the immediate ancestor of chickens, however it’s not that simple. Modern chickens were domesticated more than 8,000 years ago and […]

Ornamental Plants That Are Edible and/or Edible Plants That Are Ornamental

June 23, 2018 by Jonathon Engels & filed under Biodiversity, Food Plants - Annual, Food Plants - Perennial, General, Medicinal Plants, Plant Systems, Plants

When I first began growing food and working with ideas of permaculture, I lived in the tropics where many edible plants leaf out large and are exceptionally stunning. Moreover, the places I found myself building gardens tended to be free-for-alls, where anything goes and HOAs didn’t interfere with what people planted on their property. Last year however, after twelve years abroad, I moved back to the US. Where often people […]

First Community Food Forest in the City of Melbourne

June 22, 2018 by Jacqui van Heerden & filed under Alternatives to Political Systems, Bio-regional Organisations, Community, Community Projects, Design, Development & Property Trusts, Education Centres, General, Networking Sites, People Systems, Permaculture Projects, Retrofitting, Social Gatherings, Urban Projects

The Kensington Food Forest began with a dream, to provide healthy nutritious organic food for our local community, to build resilience around food security. Kensington is an inner city suburb in Melbourne. We wanted to grow our own food to reduce pressure on farmlands, reduce food miles and the subsequent use of fossil fuels in transportation as well as keeping chemicals off our plates and creating community. After doing my […]