Permaculture

So! The whole purpose of me being here is to learn about permaculture and I do that every night from 8-10pm with the lovely Benjamin and his guest leaders. It's probably about time I share some learnings with you..

So.. what is permaculture? Basically it's a whole range of systems and philosophies that look at creating not just environmental sustainability, but something that goes beyond it - rather than just putting back what we've taken out - permaculture looks at creating systems that regenerate and give back more than was taken out and in a way that is as effortless as possible. The principles can be applied not only to land stewardship and gardening/ farming but to everything in life from finance to health.

One of the co-founders of permaculture was a teenager - something that I find very exciting - as it's proof that everyone can be a mover and shaker on this planet.

We're being taught in a very experiential way (my favourite!) so every 3 days we have a different permaculture principle to meditate on. Mine is something called "stacking functions" - or in plain old English killing two (or 3 or 4) birds with one stone ..

Let me give you some examples .. rain falls anyway from the sky. If a household sets up a system for collecting rainwater, they can use it for washing the dishes and can then create a system to use the runoff water from washing the dishes to water the plants with. So, no water is being used from the tap and two needs are being taken care of ..

Another great example .. there's a plant that grows here called poison oak which many people are highly allergic to. It's growing around the kindergarten here. Rather than getting a gardener in to hack it away (expending human energy) the farmyard goats were moved to that part of the property. The goats enjoy eating this plant - so they got rid of it. And if we were to milk those particular goats and consume their milk (in the form of cheese, yoghurt whatever) we would in turn get immunity to poison oak through the antibodies in their milk. No gardeners required! No allergy medicine required!! And the byproduct of some tasty dairy foods.

I have yet to develop such bright systems in my own life - although one idea is making me excited. Every class, I have to turn in a response to what I learnt in the class before. I've been told everything from an essay to a piece of interpretive dance is fine .. So, dear readers - how would you feel if I use my blog to share with you what I learnt the night before? In that way, I'm doing my homework, sharing my learning with a wider audience and not wasting paper. I think as long as I'm able to find a free computer each day (this is the hard part!) I will be doing this .. I'll write something in the headline, so you'll get an idea about whether the post is going to be about permaculture or more general stuff.

Still lots of permaculture things I want to share with you - but this post is getting long and I've used up my 15 mins on the computer! Let me conclude by saying that one thing I love about it is that it is totally solution-focused and uses problems to find solutions (rather than getting bogged down in negativity). This sits very nicely with my lifecoach hat.

A quote here from our visiting teacher Kat Steele - an urban permaculturist. "There's a seed of a solution in every problem. Permaculture is about taking responsibility for our world."