Saturday, October 29, 2011

Permaculture Musings

I mentioned in my annual Beginning of the Year post that one of the things I wanted to do this year was take a permaculture course. There have been a few opportunities to get involved with some permaculture activities in the community garden, but I wasn’t able to attend any before we left the area. Regardless, I still want to get into a course, although it looks like it will probably be next year at this point.

I’ve been checking out the Milkwood Permaculture site recently; I found them via the Permaculture Research Institute, which is also interesting but preachier. Milkwood is a bit more my speed. I thought this current blog post on urban permaculture design had some really cool ideas.

There are some permaculture design courses coming up in Sydney and I’m going to try to attend one. I’m going to shoot for the introduction to permaculture class in March (the December one is full). What I would really like to do is attend the two week course for a permaculture design certificate in January. Unfortunately, it’s pretty expensive, but more importantly, I don’t really have the leave to do this and our planned Australia/Japan trips. Plus, I’m still a real newbie to these ideas – I haven’t even managed to plan a proper garden yet – so spending a lot of money on a course seems like it’s putting the cart before the horse. Gardening (and permaculture) rely on growth and development, which require time, meaning of course, that I must have patience. I’ve always been very short on that quality, so this is a good exercise in personal growth.

In the meantime, I’m trying to decide what I want to do in the garden/yard at our new house. We will only be living here a short time, so I don’t want to spend too much, and I don’t want to do too much that’s permanent at the risk of irritating the landlord and spending a lot of time and energy on things that are just going to be sprayed with herbicide in 8 months’ time. I still have some time and room to grow a few things though, so I hope to get to the garden store soon to plant a few veggies to enjoy this summer.

2 comments:

Carlw4514 said...

are Australians more or less interested in environmental issues than Americans?

L said...

I would say so, Uncle Carl, but a lot of it is due the fact that they've had to be. Due to the dryness of the climate and the drought of the past 10 years or so, Australians are a lot more water conscious than many Americans. In general though, I think Aussies have been on the forefront of the environmental movement -- the permaculture movement was started here in the 1970s, for example.