Gentle Earthworks for Abundance

Go Easy There’s more than one way to shape the land and direct water to your gardens. Most people can’t afford machinery to shape the land and build abundance. So, they usually abandon hope of reshaping their site and work with what is there. Why bother shaping the landscape? We can shape the landscape to: collect surface water when it rains store water in shallow ponds provide water for birds, lizards, frogs encourage beneficial insects improve the soil water the plants prevent erosion and nutrient loss What are our no-dig options? We can use animals (pigs, chickens, guinea pigs) or …

Introduction To Permaculture One-Day Session Sunday 6th March

This will be a fun full day of ideas and practical solutions and then application with a mini-practice design. Learn the art of Permaculture design with designer, creator, artist and international permaculture teacher April Sampson-Kelly on her mature demonstration property: a food forest integrated within a buzzing community. We will start the Introductory Day at our permaculture site [Silk Farm], have lunch together, then pop over to a local site to put our new found skills to the test and do a permaculture concept draft plan for their site. Your chance to learn what Permaculture is about and how it …

How To Build A Swale When You’ve Got No Soil

In 1956 someone built a path.  Not a lot of thought needed to go into the path. People trod this path every day back and forth people as they walked to the letterbox, to friends houses, to school, to uni, to work, to orchestra, to the buses, to the city, to the beach, and sometimes to the rest of the world. But the path had a dark side. It also worked very well to harvest water and direct it straight to the house.  So, finally, we built a new path that is happily compacted and maintained by the foot-traffic and …