Category Regulars

Building your own cubby – using things found in nature or your garden or scavenged from waste – is immensely satisfying. Depending on where you live, and the materials you can find, your cubby is going to look wonderfully distinctive: there are always different materials to find, and new designs to try out. Experiment – build a little one or a whole village!

You can try this in your yard, in a neighbourhood park, at a school or community garden, while you’re on a camping holiday or a bushwalk.

Keep it simple and do it with your friends – it’s a great group project. Most eco-cubbies last for at least a day or even a week; some are robust and last for years.

The theme for the Perth (Swanleigh) convergence in October 2016 is ‘Permaculture – designing for resilience’. David Holmgren, Rowe Morrow, Robin Clayfield and Graham Bell are running advanced courses, and some prominent permaculture practitioners have indicated that they will be there.

Registration information

Registration will soon be available on the website, so please check that frequently. All costs, courses, tours and other events will be listed there.

Registration and attendance at APC13 is a prerequisite for any tours and courses that follow. Only PDC holders can enrol in advanced courses.

Here is a product that you don’t have to buy but you can make yourself and simultaneously create connections and community. Nothing quite reminds you of summer than a bottle of preserved tomatoes in the middle of winter. Gather your glut of tomatoes or buy them in bulk from the market and get together with friends to have a passata making day in your own backyard.

For those in Melbourne you can join in the Crowdsaucing day with CERES Fair Food. Register for the event and saucing tomatoes, grown by a local organic farmer, will be delivered to you at your house, a community kitchen or someone’s backyard. CFF will also provide you with sauce-making knowledge, how-tos, free delivery of the saucing tomatoes and labels.

Because ‘at the heart of everyone, there is a little Italian Nonna yearning to get elbow-deep in tomatoes with friends, family and even strangers. Getting together to turn tomatoes into sauce isn’t just about the reward of home-preserved tomatoes in the cupboard, it’s about belonging to a community and doing something good.’

The Ekukhanyeni Relief Project was started in 2003 to support vulnerable children in communities affected by severe poverty and HIV/ AIDS. Ekukhanyeni has created fifteen childcare centres, which incorporate permaculture gardens, to help care for over 600 children in informal settlements around Johannesburg.

Ekukhanyeni* identified that, because of poverty and illness, families were fragmented and parents had diminished capability to provide for their children’s wellbeing. They wanted to help the children, who had no access to good food, care or formal education. While some of the children involved are orphans, the parents of others go away to work all day and the children are left to fend for themselves in the slums.

Ekukhanyeni’s community-led approach creates centres to nourish and educate the children, but the food cultivated and services provided also support the communities around the centres.

After reading Nick Rose’s book, Fair Food; Stories from a Movement Changing the World (UQP 2015), I knew it was going to be the theme for this issue. Fair Food is central to what so many of us are striving for: food that is produced in a way that supports not only our bodies, but the producers who grow it and the wider community as well.

Fair Food goes beyond growing our own vegetables. It’s about creating systems that help build community, such as farmers’ markets and community-supported agriculture. You may not always grow everything you want to eat yourself, but you can support people within your community to grow it for you.

Ideally in each of our bioregions (‘Bioregions: our spirit of place’, page 68) we can provide for the community that resides within it. It is not efficient or practical for most people to be totally self-sufficient as individuals, but collectively it is possible. We can support the local sourdough baker, buy our meat from local farmers (Tammi Jonas profile, page 32), supplement our own vegetables through local producers (Borja Valls profile, page 42) and share and swap what we grow ourselves (Su Dennett profile, page 58). There are certainly alternative realities to the mass food production model.

Sadly, our current reality negatively affects community wellbeing. With the majority of people buying food from the supermarket duopoly, such multinational companies are given ultimate power to dictate the price they pay farmers.

The permaculture movement appears to have reached a crossroads. As a holistic design approach based on systems thinking, ecological principles and energy literacy, permaculture has the potential to have a transformative impact on how we sustainably operate our social, economic and agricultural systems in a period of converging global crises. The eleventh International Permaculture Convergence (IPC11) in Cuba in 2013 formally recognised that the permaculture movement worldwide would benefit from greater coherence at an international level, to follow through on this promise of transformation.

The Permaculture’s Next Big Step project was formed to facilitate a global consultation on what we need, how we can work together, and what we can achieve. This project has brought together some of the best permaculture thinkers from around the world to explore potential pathways for further international coordination across the movement. Project participants include: Andy Goldring from the Permaculture Association UK; Andrew Langford from Gaia University; American activist and author Starhawk; and Australia’s own permaculture elders Robin Clayfield, Ian Lillington and April Sampson-Kelly, among many other talented individuals.

Be inspired by and learn from renowned thinkers and soil advocates.

Millen Farm is hosting ‘Digging Deeper into Soil’, a half-day conference that will set the scene of soil in Australia. Featuring the most recent research from local scientists, see how this research can be used to improve soil health for food production in everything from home gardens through to commercial farms.

Come along to dig down deep into soil topics, debunking some long-held myths about soil management. Our expert speakers, Hugh Lovel, Peter Kearney and Mike Smith, will focus on how to understand your own patch and develop solutions specific for your soil and growing aspirations.

Unearth the complexities of soil through a range of topics including soil testing – understanding outcomes and illustrating how to use test results to improve soil, unravelling the biodynamics of soil and exploring the soil ‘food web’ and the implications for soil improvement.

In late 2013 Patrick, Meg and their family, Zephyr (10), Woody (1) and Zero the Jack Russell, set off on an epic 6000 kilometre year-long cycling journey up Australia’s east coast and back.

Their aim was to live as cheaply as possible − guerrilla camping, hunting, foraging and bartering their permaculture skills – and on a diet of free food, bush tucker and the occasional fresh roadkill. They joined an anti-fracking blockade, spent time in Aboriginal communities, documented edible plants along the way, and braved the country’s most hazardous highways. The Art of Free Travel is the remarkable story of a rule-breaking year of ethical living.

Release date is 1 October 2015. Price is $29.99 plus postage. Pre-order at www.pipmagazine.com.au/shop

Project Bona Fide is an internationally recognised ten and a half hectare permaculture demonstration and education farm situated on the stunning volcanic Ometepe Island on Lake Nicaragua. Its focus is support for community selfreliance and regenerative living.

The project researches and develops agro-ecological systems, and cultivates a diversity of resilient food plants to support greater food security in Nicaragua. It demonstrates permaculture strategies, off-grid living, natural building, and the use of biochar and appropriate technology. It includes a seedbank, extensive nursery, bamboo plantings, forestry plot, diverse orchard, medicinal gardens, terraced vegetable gardens, composting toilets, buildings using local materials, renewable energy systems and water harvesting.

The second book from the author of Whole Larder Love: Grow, Gather, Hunt, Cook (Power House Books 2012), A Year of Practiculture focuses on ‘a way of living where daily choices are made based on their practical outcome’. When you give up your main source of income and stop buying food from the supermarket, you need to know how to survive by hunting, foraging and growing your own food, and knowing how to cook it.

Starting in spring and working through the year, this book takes you on a journey of living with the seasons and off the land. The 100 recipes are interspersed with Rohan’s humorous and honest insights and observations of a life of ‘practiculture’ As always with Rohan, beautiful photography and design make this book a pleasure to read and cook from. It’s about simple food straight from nature, and delicious ways to cook it.

Although Rohan does claim that this lifestyle isn’t for everyone – beware! – you might be inspired to give up your job and spend your days in nature, gathering and providing food for yourself and your loved ones.