From the Bottom Up – A DIY Guide to Wicking Beds
Conservation, Food Plants - Annual, Food Plants - Perennial, Irrigation, Land, Urban Projects — by Rob Avis June 20, 2011
by Rob Avis
Wicking beds are a unique and increasingly popular way to grow vegetables. They are self-contained raised beds with built-in reservoirs that supply water from the bottom up – changing how, and how much, you water your beds. In this article, we’ll talk about how wicking beds work and why we love them. We’ll also show you some great examples and leave you with ideas and instructions for creating your own.
Comments (8)The Grass Isn’t Greener…
Biodiversity, Consumerism, Food Forests, Food Plants - Annual, Food Plants - Perennial, Food Shortages, Land, Medicinal Plants, Plant Systems, Society, Soil Erosion & Contamination, Urban Projects, Water Contaminaton & Loss — by Rob Avis May 13, 2011
by Rob Avis
If you’ve been following permaculture, then you’ve probably been hearing about Permablitz – the transformation of lawns into productive, abundant landscapes. (For those of you in our region, here in Canada, check out this site.)
You may be thinking: why food? Why not lawns?
Comments (19)Listen to the Beavers
Biological Cleaning, Conservation, Irrigation, Regional Water Cycle, Storm Water, Waste Water, Water Harvesting — by Rob Avis April 18, 2011
A 13 year old in Saskatoon Canada put this together.
Further Reading:
Comments (3)Everything You Need to Know About Composting With Worms
Compost, Rehabilitation, Soil Biology, Urban Projects, Working Animals — by Rob Avis April 2, 2011
by Rob Avis
Following my recent blog post on the Do-It-Yourself Vermipod, I’ve been receiving a ton of questions from folks who built Vermipods and are looking for information on how to manage and maintain their new pets. So here’s a compilation called Everything You Need To Know About Composting With Worms….
Comments (12)How We Designed Our Solar Greenhouse
Building, Energy Systems, Food Plants - Annual, Nurseries & Propogation, Urban Projects — by Rob Avis February 11, 2011
by Rob Avis
We live and garden on an urban lot in Calgary, Canada, located on the 51st parallel north and approximately 80 km east of the front ranges of the Canadian Rockies. This northern climate presents many design challenges, including less than one hundred frost-free days, an annual mean temperature of 4.1 degrees Celsius and summer cyclonic weather patterns (i.e. high risk of hail). We are also considered to be a moderate temperate desert as our precipitation is around 500mm including snow. However, one of the advantages of growing food up north is the long summer days. There is no better place to observe this than in Alaska which also has an average of 100 frost free days but is renown for growing the largest vegetables in the world. Also, despite being cold in the winter, it is rarely overcast and we enjoy mostly sunny days. These two factors combined result in Calgary having nearly the same solar potential as Florida.
Rob’s DIY Vermipod
Compost, Rehabilitation, Urban Projects, Waste Systems & Recycling, Working Animals — by Rob Avis November 10, 2010
by Rob Avis
For some time now I’ve been anxious to get a worm composting system for our kitchen scraps to turn our “waste” into a valuable resource – soil! Inspired by some pretty neat worm systems that I found on the web, I set out to design something that would work very well, yet could be built with scrap or easily available material.
Comments (10)Why Permaculture Design?
Courses/Workshops, Deforestation, Soil Erosion & Contamination — by Rob Avis July 28, 2010
Peak Oil, loss of diversity, species extinction, conspiracy, oil spills, food insecurity…. The problems that we face seem to increase both in size and complexity every day. However we can simplify all of these global issues and emphasize three primary concerns. In order of increasing priority, the three biggest issues are:
- Pollution
- Deforestation
- Soil destruction and erosion
Old growth forest we visited in Tasmania
The Story of Soil
Compost, Fungi, Rehabilitation, Salination, Soil Biology, Soil Composition, Soil Conservation, Soil Erosion & Contamination, Structure — by Rob Avis June 17, 2010
by Rob Avis
What is the difference between soil and dirt?
Soil is alive. Dirt is dead. A single teaspoon of soil can contain billions of microscopic bacteria, fungi, protozoa and nematodes. A handful of the same soil will contain numerous earthworms, arthropods, and other visible crawling creatures. Healthy soil is a complex community of life and actually supports the most biodiverse ecosystem on the planet.
Modern soil science is demonstrating that these billions of living organisms are continuously at work, creating soil structure, producing nutrients and building defence systems against disease. In fact, it has been shown that the health of the soil community is key to the health of our plants, our food and our bodies.
Why is it then, that much of the food from the conventional agricultural system is grown in dirt? The plants grown in this lifeless soil are dependent on fertilizer and biocide inputs, chemicals which further destroy water quality, soil health and nutritional content.
How did we get here? How do we turn this around? This is the Story of Soil….
Comments (18)The Transformation of Our Urban Home
Biological Cleaning, Building, Energy Systems, Retrofitting, Urban Projects, Waste Systems & Recycling, Water Harvesting — by Rob Avis May 28, 2010
by Rob Avis
In August 2008, my wife Michelle and I returned to Calgary, Canada, after spending one year traveling abroad in search of sustainability solutions. With backgrounds in mechanical engineering, our “sabbatical” started off in Denmark – we were drawn there by the lure of technological solutions to energy issues. After several months of volunteering and filling our brains with information (wind energy, solar applications, passive buildings, biogas, plant oil engines… and more) we ended up back in North America prepared to explore the U.S. and Mexico in our plant-oil powered Westfalia.
We knew that something thus far in our sustainability search was missing and were starting to suspect that the missing link might be permaculture (although we didn’t really know what it was quite yet). Our travels brought us to several eco-sites, including an ecovillage near Mexico City. We stopped to do some WWOOFing at a permaculture farm and then headed further south to visit the indigenous Mexicans of the Chiapas, interested to learn about their agricultural practices. An Earthship workshop and geodesic greenhouses in New Mexico and an education center and CSA project in Colorado to name a few other adventures. And to culminate this amazing year we signed up for a Permaculture Design Course at Bullocks Homestead in Washington. The entire experience was nothing short of amazing.
Next task – put all of this information to productive use! Oh boy.
Comments (9)Life at Zaytuna – Swales in Landscape
Conservation, Demonstration Sites, Education Centres, Land, Rehabilitation, Swales, Water Harvesting — by Rob Avis April 16, 2010
Rob Avis, of Canada-based Verge Permaculture, explains how swales at the Permaculture Research Institute of Australia work to re-hydrate the landscape and re-charge aquifers.
The Calgary Permaculture Community Group Presents, An Evening of Permaculture with Geoff Lawton
Community Projects, Conferences, Courses/Workshops, DVDs/Books, Social Gatherings — by Rob Avis April 14, 2010
The newly formed Calgary Permaculture Community group is proud to be screening Geoff Lawton’s Introduction to Permaculture DVD followed by a Q&A session with Geoff Lawton of the Permaculture Research Institute of Australia. The event will be held on April 17th at 6:00pm at the John Dutton Theatre. After the screening of Introduction to Permaculture, Geoff Lawton will be skyping in from Australia to answer all of your permaculture related questions.
Click here to open a 390kb PDF of details.
For more information please contact calgarypermaculture (at) gmail.com
Permaculture Calgary website: www.permaculturecalgary.org
Comments (0)Life at Zaytuna – Rob the Milkman
Livestock — by Rob Avis
Zaytuna Farm (Permaculture Research Institute of Australia) has a small scale dairy. In this clip, Rob Avis explains what steps are taken to ensure healthy cows and a healthy farm.
Comments (8)Rockets That Don’t Fly
Energy Systems — by Rob Avis April 7, 2010
by Rob Avis
Living in Canada makes staying warm in winter an interesting challenge. In such a cold climate I have long wondered how to continue to keep humans warm (care of people) without bringing down forests or using fossil fuels (care of earth). Even the most energy efficient home with passive solar design will require some sort of external heat input during our winter.
Biomass is simply “ordered” carbon through the process of photosynthesis – ie. stored solar energy. Biomass comes in the form of straw, wood, stover, or generally any matter from living organisms. Wood is a premier choice for heating as it has a high carbon content and will burn hot. However, if there was a massive shift to heating with wood we would quickly deplete our forests and significanlty affect the climate. How do we heat ourselves without bringing down the lungs and life support system of the planet?
Recently we visited Nick and Kirsten of Milkwood Permaculture. I was immediately drawn to their shower block built from an old sheep dip and using rain water heated by what’s called a rocket stove.
Comments (14)The Calgary Permaculture Community Group Presents, An Evening of Permaculture with Geoff Lawton
Community Projects, Conferences, Courses/Workshops, DVDs/Books, Social Gatherings — by Rob Avis March 31, 2010
The newly formed Calgary Permaculture Community group is proud to be screening Geoff Lawton’s Introduction to Permaculture DVD followed by a Q&A session with Geoff Lawton of the Permaculture Research Institute of Australia. The event will be held on April 17th at 6:00pm at the John Dutton Theatre. After the screening of Introduction to Permaculture, Geoff Lawton will be skyping in from Australia to answer all of your permaculture related questions.
Click here to open a 390kb PDF of details.
For more information please contact calgarypermaculture (at) gmail.com
Permaculture Calgary website: www.permaculturecalgary.org
Comments (1)Zaytuna Farm Yields
Demonstration Sites, Education Centres — by Rob Avis
Photos and text by Rob Avis
History has shown time and time again that civilizations have risen and fallen based on the quantity and health of their topsoil. Since food is the basis of civilization and topsoil is the basis of food this is not a difficult concept to understand.
What is difficult to understand is why we continue to follow the same patterns as past civilizations: de-forest, plow, crop, irrigate, and graze until the soil can no longer support life. While this pattern has historically lead to collapse we have managed to perpetuate it by introducing a petroleum-based agricultural system which grows food in lifeless soil.
I saw Greening the Desert on YouTube in the fall of 2006. I was instantly captivated by the idea of a design system that could break this hardwired pattern of land degradation in even the harshest of climates. After several years of research and travel, a permaculture design certificate and a few projects under my belt I found myself three years later, November 2009, on a Boeing 777 from Canada headed to Australia to volunteer as a WWOOFer at the Permaculture Research Institute (PRI) and fully immerse myself at a permaculture education centre for several months.
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