18 Nov, 2019 | Permafund, General
Supporting capacity building and the establishment of permaculture food gardens to improve nutrition and a place to demonstrate and learn.
Introduction to permaculture workshop in a demonstration permaculture garden, Kambiri Kenya
Introduction: Thank you to Permafund and all those who contribute to it, for supporting programs that help vulnerable women and children in East Africa with a $1,000 grant.
In December 2018, I was invited to Uganda and Kenya by small community-based organisations to support local permaculture education programs particularly with women and children. I went as a volunteer and took my two eldest children, Maia and Hugh (then 12 and 10). As well as being helpers along the way, they also graduated with their PDCs from the course held at the Sabina Primary School led by young people from Uganda, Kenya and Liberia. The core goal of this course was to teach teachers.
(Note: As volunteers, my children & I paid for all our expenses & received no payment for our work.)
My children meeting the women’s self-help group leaders who are sharing permaculture in the local village and schools
Goal: The overall goal of this project was to enable communities to vision, design, implement and manage permaculture food gardens for education, food security, and sustainable livelihood capacity-building.
The project: The funds donated by Permafund were spent on helping to develop the practical land-based centres for learning about permaculture at two main locations.
A: Sabina School, near Rakai, south west Uganda
The school at Sabina is important for a number of reasons.
- It is a place of learning for hundreds of local children
- It is a becoming a teaching garden for permaculture teachers
- It is becoming a teaching garden for school teachers
The funds were used to buy tools, fruit trees, seeds, building materials for compost systems, animal enclosures and animals, and provide educational materials.
This school was also the site of permaculture design course in December 2018 followed by local farmer training and local school teacher training programs.
The ongoing management of the project is the responsibility of the school, with the permaculture trained teachers and school students who attended training. A local permaculture organisation, BEU Permaculture is regularly checking in with progress.
Children at Sabina School learning permaculture with my children.
B: Women’s Self-help Group, Kambiri Village, Kakamega, Kenya
This region of Kenya is experiencing prolonged drought and the women have come together to find solutions. Permaculture makes good sense to them. Through additional crowdfunding, Ethos Foundation sponsored 5 people from this region to attend permaculture design courses at Sabina School in Uganda.
In December 2018 in Kambiri I offered an introduction to permaculture workshop and undertook an assessment of the area to understand the needs for developing a permaculture education centre. During this introductory workshop we undertook a collaborative process and drafted a design for the demonstration gardens. We also helped start a seed-exchange program.
The demonstration gardens are now being developed and a Permaculture Design Course was held in August 2019. Participants of the PDC were mostly women and they have returned to their communities to share permaculture design ideas and strategies.
Jane Amunga – the initiator of the Women’s Self Help group at Kambiri.
The Women’s Self-Help group leaders, Kambiri Kenya in their permaculture demonstration garden
The Permafund funds were used to purchase a water tank and seeds, set up for the permaculture training, pay a local translator and distribute educational materials.
Ethos sponsored four local leaders to complete their PDC in Sabina School, Uganda – principal, agriculture extension worker, support worker for girls health, disability advocate. These people are now teaching locally and supported the Women’s group PDC in August 2019.
Permaculture and the government: It’s also interesting to note that while in Uganda, we met with the East African Minister for Agriculture and the Ugandan Minister for Education, as well a number of local and regional officials. All of them are very keen to see permaculture developed further in the region. One particularly interesting discussion was around having permaculture taught in university to teachers, and there being a series of schools around Uganda where teachers could go and learn in-situ. It was identified that support was welcomed in helping to develop curriculum and teaching those who can lead such programs in university.
Meeting with the Minister for Education at her home in Uganda.
Permaculture and the refugee council: Also interesting to note is the community resilience work of the Danish Refugee Council, particularly that of Natalie Topa, in her role of Resilience Officer. I spent some time with her in Nairobi and was delighted to hear about how much her work is based on permaculture throughout East Africa and Yemen.
Natalie Topa with Morag Gamble in Nairobi. Natalie Topa works with the Danish Refugee Council and implements permaculture throughout her work.
Ongoing: Ethos Foundation is continuing to provide some additional support for the development of these gardens and is dedicated to sponsoring permaculture education programs that will help people implement and manage more of these types of local permaculture demonstration gardens. The aim is to create a network of permaculture gardens in local communities – places to learn, to demonstrate, to access resources and connect with others wanting positive change.
Impact: Several gardens have been renewed and/or established where people can come to learn about permaculture. Gardens and systems are developing for the seeds and plant materials to be freely exchanged. New networks of local permaculture teachers are being established.
About Ethos Foundation: The Ethos Foundation, a sister organisation to the Permaculture Education Institute, is a small registered permaculture charity dedicated to:
- supporting the spread of permaculture education through practical community-based projects led by local people to address local needs in their local communities
- mentoring, enabling and supporting local permaculture leaders and educators
- providing micro grants to local projects to access the resources needed to implement sustainable food garden initiatives.
A sincere thanks again to Permafund for supporting these communities. I encourage you to continue donating to Permafund. The difference that can be made with a small amount of resourcing is quite phenomenal.
Report by Morag Gamble, Executive Director (volunteer), Ethos Foundation
Permafund is managed by Permaculture Australia and provides small grants to communities in Australia and internationally. Donations over $2 are tax deductible and are accepted as ‘one off’ or recurring donations. Find out more including how to donate here: https://permacultureaustralia.org.au/permafund/donating-to-permafund-is-easy/
23 Oct, 2019 | Permafund, General
The Permafund team has received a positive mid-term progress report from the Kiini Sustainable Initiative based in Nyeri, Kenya. Following their receipt of an AU$2,000 micro grant in 2018, they’ve reported that the overall project is progressing well in terms of accomplishing their objectives and adhering to their February to November 2019 timeline.
In a community where farmland and the environment have been degraded and natural resources like rainwater are being under-utilised, the project has aimed to encourage the wise use of resources to improve community food security and overall productivity.
Students from the Nyeri Farm View Academy learning about compost making
Deforestation, over-cultivation of farmland, loss of topsoil through water and wind erosion, indiscriminate use of insecticides and inorganic fertilisers, loss of biodiversity and pollinators have inspired the Kiini Sustainable Initiative to introduce permaculture education and activities as tools for change.
Through education about permaculture principles the Initiative’s goal is to inspire attitude change and transformative thinking in the community to better use their natural and human resources to: –
- harvest water and improve water quality
- improve land management practices
- reduce erosion
- increasing biodiversity and
- restore the environment
On site permaculture solutions have included the installation of water tanks on homes to harvest roof run-off for domestic use and irrigation of food crops, construction of a simple water recycling system including grey water collection and terracing to slow erosion allow improvement of the soil.
A simple grey water recycling system
At the Nyeri Farm View Academy children are learning about permaculture through the creation of a kitchen garden assisted by teachers, parents and the community. Other schools in the area are interested in the project which could expand if more funding support becomes available.
Junior students visiting new gardens
The Kiini Sustainable Initiative is optimistic the project will achieve its objectives despite the challenges of drought conditions, the proliferation of pests due to the high temperatures and the slow adoption of permaculture principles among some community members.
Donations, tithes and pledges to Permafund are assisting projects like this overseas and in Australia. Donations of $2.00 and over are tax deductible and a recurring donation facility is available on the Permaculture Australia website.
25 Apr, 2019 | Perma-thinking
With national housing unaffordability making many young people feel home ownership is out of reach, it is high time for some out-of-the-box thinking. Permaculture Principles and PA Member Richard Telford certainly applied that kind of thinking more than a decade ago when he bought a rundown cottage in Seymour, Victoria.
The goal was to deconstruct the cottage and re-use the materials to construct a new one along permaculture principles. The result was Abdallah House.
The sun facing living space of the house
And while Richard concedes he made a few mistakes along the way – such as overestimating the value of the original building when it was broken down into materials, he has some sage advice for anyone looking to do the same. “Choosing the right house to start with if you are buying a place. I bought the cheapest place I could possibly find and I bought something nobody else wanted. So I would say: be ready for an opportunity, rather than being attached to a particular thing. Have money saved up and be ready to go.
He says once you have bought – if you are going to rebuild, another thing he would do differently is to buy good quality items such as ceiling fans as this will save you later on having to replace them. And if you are going to build, collect more materials if you are using second hand, before you start. Build a place to store the materials on the site and put them undercover. Have a place undercover to work too,” he said.
Abdallah House is a great case study to examine if you are looking to build your first home. See: https://retrosuburbia.com/case-studies/abdallah-house-case-study/
By Yvonne Campbell
14 Apr, 2019 | Remembering Bill in Print
Mining the archive
Our permaculture past revealed through stories from Permaculture International Journal.
In this article from edition 45, December-February 1993 of Permaculture International Journal, Robyn Francis discussed options for reducing our energy use..
Author: Robyn Francis.
Mining the archive series editor: Russ Grayson.
Design with energy in mind
Permaculture designer, Robyn Francis, looks at a variety of design strategies for using energy responsibly and sustainably.
Robyn Francis
THE PRACTICAL ‘down-to-earth’ farmer, gardener and layperson will often find the theories surrounding ecology and energy very heavy going, if not downright confusing. What I would like to do is offer some practical perspectives on how we can use resources responsibly.
Energy, in an holistic sense, involves much more than electricity and the use of fossil fuels, although these are certainly central to the energy issue. In permaculture design, energy and resource management are virtually synonymous and it is often difficult, if not impossible, to separate the two.
The statistics quoted in this article are for Australia, as they are the facts that are available to me, but the trends and general concepts can be applied to any industrialised society and need to be carefully considered by developing countries in the rapid process of ‘modernisation’.
Domestic Energy Use
The most tangible form of energy, in terms of understanding and immediate action, that most of the people living in homes in Australia use, is electricity. This accounts for 20 percent of the country’s total energy in electricity and fossil fuels, with 8.3 million private motor vehicles consuming almost another 20 percent. So in the household, with electricity and motor vehicle use, there is immense scope to have an impact on 40 percent of the national ‘energy’ picture. These two factors also account for nearly 40 percent of Australia’s total carbon dioxide emissions.
Another aspect close to the heart of every household is the issue of waste. This can be seen as energy lost, a loss that also incurs a lot of energy in both its generation and disposal. Domestic waste makes up 71 percent of Australia’s garbage, over six million tonnes a year.
This article appeared in edition 45, 1993 of International permaculture Journal.
Recycling is important but not enough — we need to look very carefully at everything we bring home and how much of it will leave. Then add to that the waste of domestic sewage and the valuable nutrients it contains along with grey water from our bathrooms and laundries: this too needs to be counted as energy lost.
It is important to remember that although industry is guilty of consuming even more energy and generating more waste than domestic activities, it is largely our support as consumers using their products, and our consumption of imported goods (resulting in the need to over-produce for export), that helps perpetuate the industrial process.
At this point one could easily diverge into political aspects of the picture, so I think it appropriate to get back to the point of what we can do in a realistic and practical way.
As individuals we can approach energy and resource conservation on three different levels: behaviour, design and technology.
(Janet MacKenzie takes a close look at behaviour in her article in this issue on p 22, so I will deal with only design and technology.)
Design strategies — skylight versus electric light
House Design
Appropriate house design creating a comfortable indoor climate can substantially reduce the heating bill in winter and cooling bill in summer. The average Melbourne house uses around 50 percent of its energy on heating. The use of thermal mass, insulation and ventilation, the addition of well-placed pergolas, verandahs and glass houses and the design of surrounding landscape can support and enhance the house microclimate.
Windows and skylights can be designed to make better use of daylight — it amazes me just how many buildings need the lights on in the middle of the day to read. There are many excellent books available on passive solar and energy conserving house design to explore, not only for building a new house but also for renovating or retrofitting an existing house.
Beyond the Home
There are numerous ways we can approach energy conservation in design beyond the home, in the garden, in our neighbourhood and on the farm. Often, we need to import energy in the form of resources to get a system going — things like seeds, plants, mulch and manures to establish our gardens and orchards, bulldozers to construct swales and dams to collect water. When we design our strategies in time and consider these initial inputs as capital investment, we need to ensure that they will yield many times that investment over their lifespan.
A fruit tree will yield many times its initial investment cost if it’s well managed, but not if we drive many kilometres every year to collect manure and straw to mulch it. We need to design the system surrounding the fruit tree so that its needs are met on site. We can plant comfrey and lucerne as a living mulch under the tree to provide some of its nutrient needs and give a chicken a good life providing it with manure and managing its pests.
Don’t just plant a windbreak, plant a sun trap, bird habitat, bee forage and fuel source, some wild foods and a fire break — these are all things a windbreak can do with good design and plant selection, and consider the energy saved by stacking all those functions into that one element. These are basic permaculture design principles that address energy conservation in a very practical way.
The principles of zonation are similar, looking carefully at the inputs a particular species or system requires for maintenance and harvest, and placing it according to convenience within the landscape. For example, the chickens need to be visited twice a day for feeding, collecting eggs, letting into the orchard to forage and to be locked up safe from the fox at night. What else needs to be done on a daily basis that can be linked along the pathway to the chookhouse? It can be the vegetable garden, compost heap, wood heap, nursery — to name a few. So zonation conserves the time and energy we would have wasted if we had spread things all over the place.
Human settlements
In the design of human settlements, communities and villages, much energy in the form of providing services can be saved through cluster placement of housing. Design can reduce motor vehicle use by ensuring that social and commercial centres and facilities are within easy walking and cycling distance of residential areas, and preferably the two should be integrated as in traditional village cultures. A rural community l consulted for earlier this year consisting of 23 adults, located about 20 kilometres from town, spent over $55,000 a year on motor vehicle maintenance and running costs.
Technological strategies — solar, pedal power and gravity
Here we need to consider the appliances and technologies that consume energy and the technologies that generate energy. In south-east Queensland (subtropics), 50 percent of domestic energy is used for water heating — imagine what could be saved if building codes made solar water heaters compulsory!
The major electricity consumers in the home are:
- water heating (30 percent)
- space heating (22 percent)
- refrigerators (14 percent)
- cooking (9 percent)
- lighting (6 percent)
- freezers (4 percent)
- TV and VCR (4 percent)
- clothes washers (3 percent)
- clothes dryers (3 percent)
- dishwashers (3 percent)
- airconditioning (2 percent)
These percentages are the national average (ANZEC, 1990).
Good solar house design, solar hot water systems and energy efficient appliances can make a big dent in domestic energy consumption. Also, gas is cheaper than electricity, less polluting and generally more energy efficient.
Wood stoves can be used for cooking and space heating but do check their energy efficiency rating and remember that fire wood costs. Energy is used in cutting and transporting firewood, and collecting and cutting it yourself also costs time, effort and often fuel for chainsaws and transport. In dense urban situations wood and coal stoves and heaters are a major source of air pollution during winter. Most of the non-grid appliances (gas and DC) are more expensive than regular AC appliances and all appliances represent energy in the extraction and processing of their raw materials, manufacture, distribution and ultimate disposal. This all needs to be assessed.
Water conserving devices such as control flow shower roses not only save water but also energy to heat water. Nearly 40 percent of domestic water consumption can be eliminated by installing water conserving devices like dual flush toilets, aerating taps in hand basins and sinks and front loading wash machines. Rainwater collection tanks should be standard practice along with greywater recycling for garden irrigation. Use gravity where possible to eliminate the need for pumping.
In remote situations where stand-alone water and energy systems are necessary, good design and choice of appliances are critical.
Where homes are connected to a central water supply and grid power, good design and conservation are equally critical if we are concerned about our long term security.
Checklist for technology systems, appliances and building materials
- does it conserve/save energy
- is it resource-conserving
- is it efficient (inputs vs yields or doing the job)
- what are its costs/benefits in terms of energy, materials, maintenance, life span, disposal and economic liability
- is is durable/repairable
- is it recyclable
- is it non-polluting
- does it use local resources/materials
- does it suit local conditions
- is it necessary — what alternatives are there and how do they compare to the above criteria.
Private motor vehicle use
In Australia every year:
- 33,214,300,000 km are travelled commuting to and from work
- 67,311,600,000 km are travelled for other private purposes
How people commute to work in Adelaide (1991):
- motor car (drivers) 51%
- motor car passengers 17%
- public transport 16.8%
- walk 10.4%
- bicycle 3.3%
- motorcycle 0.9%
Editor’s note
The author of this piece, Robyn Francis, now operates the Permaculture College Australia from her Nimbin, northern NSW, Australia smallholding, Djanbung Gardens.
19 Jul, 2007 | Education
[styled_image w=”400″ h=”300″ lightbox=”yes” image=”http://www.permacultureaustralia.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/rcc-training_garden-300×218.jpg” align=”right”]
…by Russ Grayson
An Eastern Suburbs council hires a local permaculture designer and commercial landscaper to set up a training garden for its home food gardening courses.
Sydney landscape architect, Steve Batley, has installed an organic training garden at Randwick Community Centre. Steve, who completed an urban permaculture design course in Sydney some years ago, operates his own landscape design and construction company, Sydney Organic Gardens (www.sydneyorganicgardens.com.au).
The garden is used by participants in Randwick City Council’s Sustainable Gardening courses. The free courses consist of five Saturday meetings at which participants learn organic growing practices, site analysis, water conserving irrigation, garden design, soil improvement, plant characteristics, composting and mulching as well as pest and disease management. The most recent course attracted a total of 45 participants, some from outside the Randwick Council area.
The garden includes a keyhole bed sized to accommodate a large number of participants. Keyhole beds have been popularised by permaculture educators and the idea has spread beyond the permaculture milieu. Like the bed at the community centre, keyhole beds are sized so that gardeners can reach about half way across the garden from both sides, providing full access to crops and avoiding the need to trample the soil by stepping into the garden.
Native legumes an experiment
Elsewhere in the garden, indigenous legume shrubs are being trialled as interplants with herbs and vegetables to provide the plant macronutrient, nitrogen. These will later be coppiced and the foliage used for mulch.
Integrating native plants, including flowering species that attract pollinators and other beneficial insects, forms part of the garden design to demonstrate integrated pest management. It also accommodates the wish of some course participants to learn about native plants, although Council offers workshops at its community nursery on this topic. The planting of perennial natives involved Council’s Bushcare Officer, Tina Digby, who is responsible for bushland regeneration.
The garden adjoins a large area of native vegetation that is to be rehabilitated, so care was taken in plant selection to avoid species that could become bushland weeds. Sometimes, kestrel can be seen hovering over the bushland near the garden and Steve uncovered a blue tongue lizard – a beneficial species because of its appetite for snails – when he moved a plank.
Making use of waste
Mulch for the garden consists of sweepings from the NSW Police stables in Redfern, a source also used by the nearby Randwick Community Organic Garden.
The sweepings are heaped and left to mature to start the decomposition process and to allow any veterinary chemicals to break down.
Course participants contribute their own kitchen and garden wastes to the compost making lesson.
Qualifications and experience provide reliable information
As a qualified landscape architect, Steve teaches the garden design topic. He also advises householders on the concept designs they draw up during the course, and leads the irrigation and water harvesting topic. Emma Daniel, a TAFE qualified landscape designer and horticulturist, and a spokeswoman for the Randwick Community Organic Garden, assists in teaching. Fiona Campbell, as Council’s Sustainability Education Officer, organises the courses. The experience and qualifications of the trainers meets Council’s need to provide reliable information that participants can safely act on.
The small training garden is a temporary installation. Eventually, it will be replaced by a larger one in a different location an the community centre.
You must be logged in to post a comment.