Earlier this year, in the spring, I was able to acquire a handful of horseradish roots to plant in a garden my wife Emma and I were putting together. I’d first encountered it as a plant the year before and was happy discover the leaves were edible with a flavor reminiscent, though milder, of the root. I’d never had horseradish in anything besides cocktail sauce, possibly some other condiments here […]
We in The Permaculture Research Institute of Australia are supporting this project and would like you to consider supporting the great work Seeding Futures are doing in Cape Town. They started a fund raising campaign hoping to expand their outreach and influence more lives through their mentoring and training programs. Seeding Futures unlocks the immense potential of our unemployed youth to contribute to the resilience economy and enhance city-wide […]
Hi Everyone Nadia Lawton here I’m very pleased to announce that we have opened a Permaculture cafe at The Greening The Desert Project site. We hope that the cafe will have many positive functions, bring in funds to further the project but also to be a centre point in the village where visitors and locals can gather and get introduced to the Permaculture concept. We will also sell home made […]
This article is Part 2 of a series that is mostly about chickens – not how to care for them, but how to appreciate them as being more complex and interesting than most of us give them credit for. If you are interested only in chickens, and especially mother hens and chicks, this article will be fine to read by itself. But if you’re just tuning in and you want […]
In part 1 of this article (1), I explored a little how we might use permaculture as a lens through which to visualise communication. By seeing our communication with other humans as an energy flow which could potentially be mapped, we could find efficient and holistic ways to utilise this energy. In this article I will focus on some possible practical applications of this, and how we can communicate in […]
“Navigare Necesse Est, Vivere Non Necesse” “We have to sail, we do not have to live, Sailing is More Important than living” Ancient Latin Motto Pietro, first of all, I salute your ongoing work in preservation of an agriculture and culture of the territory which is not only sustainable, but also advanced and which keeps on improving fuelled by your inexhaustible spirit devoted to the research. It seems to me that even […]
This 3-Part Series articles starts off with our cultural lack of understanding about our place in the web of life, which is at the root of why our efforts to address ecological destruction aren’t working yet. If you were mainly interested in chickens, stay with me – I’ll get onto backyard chickens in the second part of Part 1, and then I’ll stick almost entirely to chickens for the rest […]
I did a lot of research. I hummed and hawed, danced around the issue, came up with a veritable pros and cons type of list. Ultimately, the base of our food forest needed some fast-growing, nitrogen-fixing trees, and whether or not they were native came to feel somewhat moot. I found a good tree species. It was readily available (and free). What difference did it make if folks had deemed […]
If you’re a small farmer, it can be hard to make a living selling $3 bunches of kale. You likely just don’t operate on the scale that’s needed to profit from this model of simply growing the classic vegetable suspects and hoping your customers buy enough to make it worth your while. Luckily, there are ways to diversify your small urban farm that can help make it more sustainable in terms […]
The Greening the Desert Project started with the purchase of land about ten years ago, and it expanded slowly until that mounted into exponential growth. Things started at the top, literally, with a large water tank that feeds a shower/toilet block just downhill. The toilets are dry composting, supplying fertilizer for plants on site, and the greywater from the showers and sinks goes to a nearby reed bed. The reed […]
The Post Carbon Institute released this animation as a simple message to raise awareness about how technology has grown with us to the point where some of its gifts have come at great cost .What are the challenges facing us and what are the opportunities we need to move forward with? Visit http://noapp4that.org to learn more.
Paul Alfrey from Balkan Ecology Project shares with us his observations and thoughts in regards to a visit he made to a farm he designed and how it slowly developed into a polyculture of fruit trees, aquaculture and vegetable gardens. Last week Dylan and I set off on a road trip to discover the flora and fauna of the North East of Bulgaria. Our first stop was to Catherine Zanev ‘s farm […]
