Arts Factory Backpackers – Photo Update
Community Projects, Demonstration Sites — by Geoff Lawton February 1, 2012
I was visiting Byron Bay on my last Sunday off in conditions where we have had a large amount of rain and some very unsettled weather with lots of storms. With the winds from the north, the surf conditions where very messy and unfavorable, as also were the fishing conditions, the sea was really unsettled and a lot of fresh water was flowing into the ocean.
So, I instead took the opportunity to visit some of our project work and was fortunate to visit the Arts Factory Backpackers’ garden. This was installed during a permaculture urban landscape course, reference the links below:
Comments (6)O-Farm Community Gardens, Hong Kong
Community Projects, Food Shortages, People Systems, Social Gatherings, Society, Urban Projects, Village Development — by Geoff Lawton March 10, 2011
O-Farm Hong Kong is championed by PDC graduate Yip Tsz Shing. It is a wonderful community garden where very small spaces, just a few metres (8 square metres on average), are rented by Hong Kong residents.
Some may travel up to an hour and a half each way to come and garden fresh organic food and have social interaction with other community gardeners.
Comments (2)Chinese Salt Water Fish Ponds
Aquaculture, Fish, Land — by Geoff Lawton March 7, 2011
Like the Hawaiian salt water fish ponds, there are some traditional Chinese salt water fish ponds that work very well. Many of these have been modernised into fishing and angling ponds to capitalise on the urban population, but when you look into the traditional systems there are some very interesting variations.
Comments (7)Options for Alternative Buildings
Building — by Geoff Lawton March 5, 2011
Here we are looking at options for building alternative structures, especially small buildings for the suburbs which can accommodate people in a sustainable way in urban gardens.
Small buildings made of natural materials like rammed earth, cob and straw bale with bamboo, timber, tile, slate and small stone inclusions, can all be built by hand in small urban permaculture gardens that provide good human food and sanctuary.
Comments (21)Design Exercises in Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) Courses
Building, Courses/Workshops, Energy Systems, Land, Retrofitting, Waste Systems & Recycling — by Geoff Lawton March 3, 2011
Melbourne PDC Design
Photo © Craig Mackintosh
It is standard format, in the PDC curriculum, that students are given an exercise to design a landscape with a design brief so they can make the move into design while being mentored by their Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) teacher. This is not a test but an exercise, enabling students to make the first step into design while still taking part in the PDC program.
During the 72-hour course students receive a body of diverse knowledge which, despite covering a number of disciplines and emphasising the connectivity between those disciplines, can seem surprisingly simplistic and easy to understand until students are put into design groups and given a challenge to design an area of landscape with a design brief. If the brief is likely to be a real life scenario then the possibilities expand and the design system complicates itself into innumerable choices of interactive complexity.
Comments (17)Community Gardens Visited and Observed: Veggie Village in Peregian Beach
Community Projects, Demonstration Sites, Eco-Villages, Education Centres, Food Shortages, Land, People Systems, Society, Urban Projects, Village Development — by Geoff Lawton February 18, 2011
Community gardens are a very valuable demonstration of how a community can grow its own food, provide its own power, harvest its own water from roofs and build appropriate buildings and infrastructure. They are a wonderful element in the community and permaculture people all over the world should support community gardens in all their forms.
An interesting observation is that often a community has already used all of the most valuable land by the time the population has grown to a stage where it requires or requests that a community garden be installed. Therefore often a community garden is given land that is not valuable for the local real estate market but can be surrounded by local real estate development. It has become a regularly repeated phenomenon that land given for the installation and development of community gardens is flood prone and generally a poor landscape. There is therefore quite an emphasis on raised garden beds, this is something we have observed as we visited different community gardens around the world and in Australia.
Comments (8)Advanced Solar, and Independence, at PRI’s Zaytuna Farm
Energy Systems, peak oil — by Geoff Lawton February 12, 2011
Zaytuna Farm, home of the Permaculture Research Institute of Australia, sets up an advanced solar electric system to demonstrate the best example of stand-alone solar electric power we can find.
Here at Zaytuna Farm we have endeavored to demonstrate the efficiency and advantage of a stand alone power system. This is especially relevant now in times when large areas of Australia, and elsewhere, for that matter, have been flooded. Everyone that has solar/electric feedback to the grid still loses their power if the main grid goes down. We provide our own power and we store our own energy, and, although we could, we don’t feed back to the main grid because that just props up an inefficient system that runs on a very large amount of over-supplied fossil fuel power, or some other type of unsustainable energy system.
Comments (26)Saudi Arabian Philippines (with Tropical Desert Possibilities) – Discovering the Cultural Edges
Building, Energy Systems, Gabions, Land, Swales, Village Development, Waste Systems & Recycling — by Geoff Lawton December 3, 2010
A Filipino garden — in Saudi Arabia!
Working in Saudi Arabia on a large project, in this case the Al-Baydha project, involving Bedouin People who have been resettled into villages for the past 20-30 years, is an interesting broad landscape affair as it covers about 700km2 and 9 villages. The culture of Bedouin rangeland management, with large herds of animals moving across the landscape, has been a stable culture that didn’t originally damage the environment, in fact it probably enhanced it, by good stock management and moving at the right time with the grazing patterns and seasons. The hoof prints of the animals would have accumulated manure, nutrient and seeds which would have germinated by the next rainfall, improving the landscape and therefore continuing the culture — but this relies on the people being able to move freely in a sporadic pattern that is responsive to the conditions; harmonious and regenerative.
Comments (9)Constructing a Fishpond Dam
Aquaculture, Biological Cleaning, Dams, Fish, Land, Natural Swimming, Plant Systems, Water Harvesting — by Geoff Lawton November 26, 2010
The spillway that sets the height of the water and allows for passive
discharge of surplus water during large rainfall events
We can build a dam to serve specifically as a fish pond and which can be designed to be more productive for aquaculture systems generally, compared with stocking an existing farm dam with fish. As most of the production occurs in the upper levels of water, a depth of under 2 metres allows you to feed and harvest the fish easily and bring them to a desirable size as quickly as possible. Using an example of the chicken tractor, infrastructure design can also be applied to fish to create a more intensive system where resources such as the animals’ manure are cycled and productivity is increased whilst benefiting the surrounding systems. The ideal style of dam for the purpose of fish production is the contour dam, which is dug into the side of a shallow sloping hill (on a reasonable flat landscape) with a dam wall of a semi-circular curve or a semi-square shape. The profile of the dam floor can be easily constructed so that it is flat, and the inner walls and back-cut of the dam can be reasonably steep, maximising the volume and minimising the challenges of harvest, whilst maintaining a consistent temperature.
Comments (16)Gabions: Water Soaks in the Desert
Conservation, Gabions, Irrigation, Land, Rehabilitation, Soil Conservation, Water Harvesting — by Geoff Lawton November 25, 2010
Gabions are one of the crucial feature elements of dry land landscape water harvesting design. A gabion is a leaky rock dam wall built in a wadi, valley canyon or water flow, at a point where there would be a reasonable amount of water caught if there was a dam wall in the same position, but the gabion instead leaks through the rocks, slowly releasing a steady flow of water and retained moisture over time. As the water is slowed down by a gabion, it drops its sediments, organic materials, behind the rock wall. Desert catchments are often large and feature very infrequent rainfall events, and are an actively eroding landscape that is continually being blown away, with sediments either eroded or deposited by the wind if there are wind traps like desert tree systems and forests, but also by water flows which are usually strong and can carry large amounts of organic material and sediments away with them.
Comments (9)Permaculture in Mecca
Aid Projects, Community Projects, Demonstration Sites, Education Centres, Land, People Systems, Village Development, Water Harvesting — by Geoff Lawton November 18, 2010
Geoff Lawton reports from a consultation trip to what will become the Al Bayda Project, Saudi Arabia
The Al Bayda Project in Saudi Arabia aims to help rehabilitate a large area of land, roughly 35 x 20kms (700km2 in total) containing 9 villages of Bedouin people who have been settled for 20-30 years in very basic conditions. The main mission is to develop a sustainable design demonstration system for how they can develop their villages and manage their environment and quite large herds of animals. Traditionally they would move with seasonal conditions around good grazing range-land patterns of management. Now, in settled villages, they don’t have the possibility to manage good range-land grazing with the appropriate patterning, and so the environment is greatly suffering from over-grazing and cutting of trees for firewood. As this grazing is their cultural heritage, they are not prepared to let it go and yet they don’t exactly fit into modern systems of settlement either.
Comments (18)Jordan Valley Permaculture Project – November 2010 Update
Aid Projects, Biological Cleaning, Building, Community Projects, Conservation, Demonstration Sites, Education Centres, Irrigation, Urban Projects, Waste Systems & Recycling — by Geoff Lawton November 17, 2010
The Jordan Valley Permaculture Project (aka ‘Greening the Desert – the Sequel’) in Al Jawaseri in the Dead Sea Valley (lowest place on earth), continues to develop as we gradually fund the project into action with our own permaculture education programs, volunteers and funding from Muslim Aid Australia and Kids are Sweet of Wisconsin, USA. The male and female shower and compost toilet block is now reaching completion using a basic faralone design system (PDF, with others composting toilet resources here, here, here, here and here). A reed bed has just been built as part of the shower block waste water system so that we can demonstrate grey-water reuse for garden crops. A small nursery has been funded by one of the volunteers involved in this project, Damien McAnany, and it is now producing a selection of vegetable, fruit and tree seedlings. Damien organized his own fund-raising initiatives in the USA then volunteered for a few weeks on site. Other volunteers Jesse and Tanya Lemieux, Eric Seider, Wade Tait, Dave Spicer have all put in time and work to help push the project along. The trees planted on the site have just survived one of the hottest summers on record and are still growing well. The lower areas of the site now have quite extensive vegetable gardens which are coming into their first winter production.
Comments (8)Piped Swale Crossings
Conservation, Earth Banks, Irrigation, Land, Soil Conservation, Storm Water, Swales, Waste Water, Water Harvesting — by Geoff Lawton November 13, 2010
Permaculture is a connecting system between disciplines and elements in a matrix of design, and swales are a mainframe element. The efficiency of swales is that they can interrupt water surface flow high in a landscape where it is then infiltrated relatively quickly, on contour, and moves incredibly slowly through the landscape soil and subsoil profiles. This becomes a great advantage to the potential productivity of any property, especially a property that is designed to be diverse and interactive with many ecosystem elements. When you design a property this way, a mainframe approach as a consultant designer is:
Comments (2)PRI Seeks Services of Electrician
Demonstration Sites, Developments, Education Centres, Energy Systems, Project Positions — by Geoff Lawton October 27, 2010
We need a registered electrician in NSW to help us finish wiring our three bedroom extension with lights, power points and smoke alarms. The building is straw bale construction and is council approved. We just need the final inspection for council approval for an occupation certificate. Once completed we will be refinancing the residence to secure finances for development of the commercial kitchen, classroom, ablution block, and five straw bale accommodation cabins to complete our educational infrastructure.
The electrician could then secure the contract to work on the whole project development.
Zaytuna Farm, next to the village of The Channon (near Lismore), is now powered by a huge state of the art solar power station mounted on the new 200 m3 commercial shed complex at the front gate — using the latest technology copper indium selenium panels. There are no silicon crystals involved. We can now arc weld and run large power tools all at the same time. This is also an opportunity to get in on a new technology shift that is far superior to anything before — we are the only ones in Australia with the technology so far. The people I am working with have imported the first container of panels into the country. These panels do not derate with temperature and partial shade.
Comments (3)How to Establish a Small Space Intensive Food Garden
Animal Housing, Bird Life, Compost, Demonstration Sites, Fencing, Food Forests, Food Plants - Annual, Food Plants - Perennial, Insects, Land, Livestock, Medicinal Plants, Plant Systems, Rehabilitation, Seeds, Urban Projects, Village Development, Waste Systems & Recycling, Water Harvesting — by Geoff Lawton September 20, 2010
Editor’s Note: This post is a good reminder to ensure you take good before, during and after photos as you implement projects! Case studies like this become an awesome portfolio for yourselves, and help people to see the practical potential in permaculture. It can be totally inspiring, and help get people moving on the ground!
Case Study – Noela’s Garden, as installed by Geoff and Nadia Lawton
This is a story about a garden that Nadia and I were asked to establish in 2006. It’s a very small space – the area is 95m2. A friend of a friend asked if we could get involved to help to design and implement a garden. Nadia had only recently arrived in Australia and I wanted her and I to put a garden in together as a ‘start to finish’ job so she could get a feel for how we establish small space gardens in Australia, as she already had experience in small space gardening in Jordan.
The area on the North side of Noela’s house.
