Permaculture is a design system which can help us make more appropriate choices. Permaculture was conceived of in the 1970s by David Holmgren and Bill Mollison, and its ideas have now spread around the world. Its name comes from the idea of a PERMANENT human CULTURE (originally: Permanent + Agriculture = Permaculture).
Here are some places to learn about Permaculture quickly. Continue Reading
We’re designing a Food Forest garden, to be built later this spring. We’ll be tearing out asphalt, cleansing and rejeuvenating the soil, and recrafting the space as a community gathering area with a cob bread oven and food forest.
Today I’ve been studying cover crops and compost crops for the “rejeuvenating the soil” part. Continue Reading
Last Saturday we had the kickoff meeting for a new project: building a community bread oven out of cob.
What’s cob? For us in Southern California, the easiest comparison is to think about the adobe bricks used for the missions; cob is kinda like “freeform adobe.” (there are differences, but that’s enough for this discussion).
The wonderful thing about cob is, in many locations it is free (you dig the clay material at your site). And you can build it yourself with a community of people ( = fun). And you can make gorgeous freeform shapes (here’s an eagle).
Ours would be part of a forest-garden-style community gathering space, which Milkwood Permaculture describes as “a lush, shady place, dripping with fruit and springing with herbs, flowers and tubers.” Ours would be an addition to our already existing community garden.
Imagine a beautiful front yard — a sculpture in three dimensions — that you can walk through and enjoy, that will feed you luscious organic food!
How does one design such a thing? This spring I’ll be teaching “The Art of the Edible Landscape” at Otis College of Art & Design.
Call it landscape design. Call it sculpture in 3 dimensions (or 4 dimensions, if you count how a garden evolves over time, the 4th dimension). Call it permaculture. It’s all of the above. And your garden will have the infrastructure of sustainability.
If you’ve enjoyed the classes I gave at the Community Garden at Holy Nativity, and wish they were in one neat tidy package, here it is: 10 sessions, 10 Saturday mornings, starting on January 31. Come and join the fun!
To join this course, You must register through Otis Continuing Education.
