Permaculture Design Course (PDC) Modular Format
August 26 @ 9:00 am – November 27 @ 5:00 pm
Sydney Edible Garden Trail
Spend a weekend visiting edible gardens and talking to like minded gardeners across Sydney! OR open your own garden as part of the trail!
The Sydney Edible Garden Trail is a self guided two day event showcasing the many ways that Sydney residents are creating food security in the urban environment, saving money and the environment, while enjoying the health benefits of home grown fruit and veg. Backyard growers, large and small, throughout Metropolitan Sydney will open their gardens to the public on the weekend of 26/27 March 2022!
We are a non-profit event run by volunteers, with profits going back to local schools and community gardens.
Permaculture Design Course
The 2-week intensive Permaculture Design Course at Djanbung Gardens is held in a beautiful 25 year old living, working Permaculture farm, where the concepts taught are practiced. Robyn Francis is a Permaculture Pioneer, deeply committed to furthering permaculture education in Australia and overseas, joining pioneering projects in India, Taiwan, China, Indonesia, Cuba, Europe and Iceland. During the PDC you will gain the knowledge to design your property, create abundance, build resilient community and bring practical sustainability in to your personal life, community and profession. Examples are drawn from urban, rural and bioregional design from all the major climatic zones, including temperate, sub-tropic, tropic and arid landscapes. A team of experienced PC teachers including John Button, who instigated the reafforestation of the sacred mountain of Arunachala, in India; Annaliese Hordern, Janelle Schafer and Angela Skehan join Robyn for this course. The team brings a breadth of diversity and experience in people care, organic farming, disaster management, strategies for pest and disease control, food forests and much more. The course is fully catered, some accommodation is available on-site and camping is available for the duration of the course. Join us for this August PDC. We are grateful for the help we receive from many enthusiastic participants and interns. This PDC is offered to Permaculture Australia members for a special 10% discount.
PDC Winter 2021 > Protracted 14 day Permaculture Design Course over 3 months
14 day Protracted PDC – 2021
A Limestone Permaculture Design Certificate course offers real time examples of a successful design process and transitioning sustainable living systems on a successful working permaculture principled homestead!
This is the backdrop for your PDC learning experience…!
Our course emulates Bill Mollison’s – PDC curriculum along with Morrow / Holmgren teachings and backed by our own experiences of over 18years in both Suburban & Rural settings.
We cover a wide variety of landscapes and climates & include the application of Permaculture Principles to food production, water harvesting, home design, construction, energy conservation & generation, income from homestead and practical strategies from tried & tested Permaculture Solutions.
It is an expectation that you will finish the course with a property ‘Concept’ design of your very own to get you started on your Permaculture Journey!!
Course registration here > https://www.limestonepermaculture.com/events/pdc2-winter-2021-protracted-14-day-permaculture-design-course
Course details here > https://www.limestonepermaculture.com/permaculture-design-certificate
About Limestone Permaculture > https://www.limestonepermaculture.com
Limestone Permaculture Facebook > https://www.facebook.com/LimestonePermaculture
Experience the best teacher in the garden
This article was written some years ago for PIE — Permaculture Information Exchange — the journal of Permaculture Melbourne.
WHEN ‘Woz the PIE baker’ asked me to write something about experiential capital a few years ago, I was stumped. So I looked it up online and then, over coffee and a leftover honey cake I had an idea. Why not write it by telling a story of something that happened?
That story starts with my partner, Fiona Campbell’s Forest Gardening courses. Fiona is Randwick City Council’s sustainability educator and she uses the Forest Gardening and Organic Gardening courses to build the forest garden area of the Permaculture Interpretive Garden, a combined city park/edible landscape/education garden. Out of this courses, participants go away with take-home skills sufficient to get them started in their home or community garden.
Kim was one of the students of the latest Forest Gardening course and, like many, when she started she knew little. She had, however, completed Fiona’s Organic Gardening course and this gave her some basic knowledge. Forest Gardening is intended to be a follow-on from that course.
Participants including artist Linda Cairnes (left) and Permafund’s Virginia Littlejohn (centre) add compost to a young citrus tree in the forest gardening course at Randwick Sustainability Hub.
Kim persisted through the six Saturday afternoons of the course, participating in discussions and small group activities inside the community centre to comprehend the intellectual part of forest garden design and maintenance, then joining the group in the garden. Here, she joined the other students in improving the sandy soil with the addition of compost and biochar. Seeds and seedlings were planted, watered and mulch added.
Then… nothing. A couple classes went by. When Kim and the other students visited the garden you could see the disappointment they felt at the lack of plant growth. It seemed their hopes for a flourishing garden were to be dashed… there were glum faces… all their soil preparation, watering and planting had been for nought. Their expressions betrayed their frustration.
The following week Kim burst into the classroom and she was excited. “Oh… the garden… the seedlings… they’re up!”. Last week’s disappointment had turned to elation. The seedlings had undergone a sudden growth spurt.
I saw Kim again about a month later. “That was a great course”, she told me. “I learned so much… learning about observation in the garden, how to consider sunshine and shade in thinking about where to plant seedlings, how to design for easy maintenance… then understanding what we were doing and going outside to do it”.
“And those sunflower seeds we planted in the swale… they’ve come up and they’ve grown so fast, but will the parrots get the seeds when the flowers form, I wonder?”.
Look > Think > Act
Kim has now set out on her own permaculture adventure around the country and what has inspired her to do this was the blending of intellectual learning, the ‘what’ — with practice in the garden, the ‘how’. It’s the blending of these things that makes up experiential capital and makes people more competent and confident in their own abilities. We can see experiential learning as making use of the Action Learning sequence of Look > Think > Act.
But… there’s one more thing that empowered Kim in her new abilities and that is an essential part of learning in gaining experiential capital, and it as this: all of her intellectual and practical learning was done in the good company of fellow students who shared their knowledge with each other, what some call ‘social learning’. And, it had that other essential quality of all experiential capital-building — fun.
Oh, yes, the sunflowers Kim and the others planted did flower and the parrots didn’t eat them.