Holistic Management For Life
Assimilating permaculture design as a fluent part of your repertoire takes years of practice. Along the way you inevitably adapt the way you design to suit your style and context of application.
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Shanaka Fernando: Social Entrepreneur
Almost fifteen years ago, a young Shanaka Fernando dreamed of a world based on need rather than greed. He wished people would focus less on money and more on each other, and wondered if the act of giving would make a difference.
Save Your Seeds: How To Save Tomato Seed
If you grow them at home it’s easy to save your own seed for sowing the following season.
Bamboo in Permaculture
I love bamboo: growing, eating, crafting, building, and listening to the sounds of creaking culms and rustling leaves in the wind. It provides me with microclimates, windbreaks, privacy screens, animal fodder, wildlife habitat, an endless supply of mulch, delicious tender eating shoots, lots of materials for the garden and building small structures. My patch also sequesters the amount of CO2 generated by two overseas work flights to Asia each year, or one flight to Europe or the Americas, to teach permaculture.
Eat Your Weeds: Chickweed
Description: creeping annual ground cover herb, with tiny white flowers and oval shaped leaves; stems can reach up to 60 cm in length.
The Age Of Food: Healthy, Sustainable, Sufficient
Food is poised to change, more profoundly than ever before: what people eat in 2114, how it’s made and consumed, would be as strange to us as the foods our own ancestors grew and ate before the age of cold storage, takeaway
and cooking shows.
Fermenting for Health
When I first heard about permaculture I was drawn to how it provides tools for living in sync with the planet, as a designed approach with ethics and principles. What I wasn’t prepared for was how it could be applied to so many aspects of life. So, when I was introduced to lactofermentation it was no surprise that it did the same thing, but on a microbial level: we have a gut food web similar to the soil food web, which can be nourished, maintained or killed by the choices we make.
Rare Breeds: Ryeland Sheep
Ryeland sheep are a very old, white-faced, polled (no horns), small to medium sized breed, which produces a fine, down type of wool. The breed was developed by monks at Leominster in the rye growing district of Herefordshire, England, in the 15th century.
Permaculture Plant: Feijoa
Description: an attractive evergreen shrub with edible fruit; the rounded leaves are green on top and cream below; flowers are pink with prominent red stamens; fruit is oval and green.
Compost-powered Shower
Whether you are a gardener with a passion for compost making, or a child who has felt the warmth of a pile of grass clippings, you will be familiar with the heat created by decomposing material. Our aim is to capture and use this heat to create hot showers.