Here’s our best resources on all things related to permaculture design and whole-systems thinking.
Forage below for designs, processes and resources for creating everything from forest gardens and solar-passive houses to water harvesting systems and urban rooftop edible gardens.
When you’re creating a permaculture design, mapping where the sun falls on your site at different times of the year is central. Why? Because plants need sun. If you want healthy veggies or sweet fruit, you need to place your gardens, greenhouses and orchards where they will get adequate sunshine for the parts of the…
It’s a common dream – get some friends together, pool resources, buy land and grow goodness for the community. But unlike many dreamers, Fork & Hoe Collective are actually doing it. And we love them for it. Fork & Hoe Collective are Natasa, Scott, Thea and Jono, with junior farmers Sen and Jethro. They farm…
Here’s how we built a bunch of mobile micro forest gardens for the 107 Rooftop Garden – complete with wicking beds. Our challenge with this design was to build tree planters that could move around to make space when needed, while providing shade, beauty, pollination and food. Mobile Forest Garden Wicking Planters: Pallet undercarriage so they can…
How do we actually design + implement a secure future for our communities? One that’s resilient, regenerative, positive, healthy and inter-connected. It’s a big question, and one that comes up (multiple times a day) at our Permaculture Design Courses, where a group of students from all over the world are grappling with this very challenge.…
Next in our lineup of Permaculture Design Course grads is Megan Norgate from Brave New Eco, a sustainable design + interior service based in Melbourne town. While the dream of building our own ultra-sustainable, self-sufficient, ethically-made homes from scratch exists for many, the reality of the current age and circumstance is that most of us…
If I’m honest, as we head towards the end of the year and the regular gift giving period…well, I start to get a little bit nervous. While I adore the hot weather, school holidays, early morning swims, slurping on the deliciousness of slightly green mangoes, extra time off the working week, and a generally more…
Those of you who have been around these parts for a while might remember a review we did a few years back of one of permaculture’s essential reads, Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture by J. Russell Smith. Some say it formed part of the basis of permaculture’s origins, as a concept. And so it goes without…
A guild, in permaculture terms, is usually used to define a harmonious assembly of species clustered around a central element (plant or animal) that acts in relation to this element to assist its health, aid our work in management, or buffer adverse environmental effects (Mollison, via Jacke). Dave Jacke has taken this concept further and identifies a…
Rocket stoves are awesome, experimental, and a knowledge stream in flux. Or ours is, at any rate. Our rocket stove water heater has been doing its thing for nearly 3 years now, so we decided to take it apart and do a full examination of how it had fared. So Nick and our current permaculture…
Following on from the cracking workshop we ran with Joel Salatin in Jamberoo earlier this month, here’s the links and resources we devised as post-workshop notes for everyone who came along. There’s so much goodness in Polyface Farm’s regenerative agriculture techniques! And heaps that can be applied usefully, at a range of scales to create…
*Update* – Since writing this article, we’ve deconstructed, improved, reconstructed and cobbed this rocket stove. Have a look here. Way back in the summer of 2009, we built a rocket stove water heater so we could have hot showers at Milkwood. What a revolution. And 2.5 years later, our rocket powered shower is, surprisingly, still…
Where should I buy land? Where’s a good area? What should I be looking for in a landscape? This question is something that Nick gets asked a lot when he’s teaching and consulting, so we thought we’d ask Joel Salatin’s opinion while he was at our farm last Summer. Apparently we’re all in agreement with…
A wicking box is a contained, portable way to grow vegies (or anything else) with very little water. Essentially, it’s a wicking bed in miniature. Very cool. Wicking boxes can be used either as part of an intensive water-wise growing system, or just a good way to keep those herbs alive that you usually forget…