We’re excited to share our surplus from previous courses by offering 4 bursary places on our upcoming Online Permaculture Design Course!

One of the projects I work on is a private garden in Totnes. It is just under 1000 sq meters in size, has a couple huge yew trees and large laurel hedges surrounding it, which give it quite a lot of shade. It's been mostly kept as an ornamental garden, but includes some fruit trees and some nice edibles with ornamental value such as solomon's seal on the second picture. The brief for me is to turn the garden from an ornamental into a food forest, which is right up my street.

This a great time of the year to harvest stinging nettle (one of my absolute favourites) and have fresh in soups, stir fries, pestos or teas.. or as you see here, I’m drying the tips for tea later in the year..

As part of our online Permaculture Design Course, we encourage participants to spend time in nature to observe. Here are some reflections from Naomi, course participant in 2022/23 on observing flow, also published on her own blog livinglearninggettingolder.com.

Another Permaculture Design Course comes to an end. This was my first in-person course in a few years. I’ve really loved working with this group of talented and inspiring participants. I feel humbled by the course and encouraged for what’s next.

As, on these courses, we’re all learning from each other, we like participants to award the certificates to each other. Here are photos of some of the proud new certificate holders.

I am looking for one or two volunteers to support me on the upcoming London Permaculture Design Course and the Online Permaculture Design Course, both starting in November 2022.

Hi I’m Liz and I am very fortunate to live in the Stroud Valleys with my partner. I am originally from the West Midlands and am proud to consider myself as a Black Country “wench”, having grown up in a former mining village next to a steel making town, all now long gone. That background, where folks don’t have much, has inspired a resilience in me to make the most of what we have, help who we can and grow as much food as possible.

I’m in my early 30s and have spent much of the last decade ‘being a comedian’ which has mostly meant doing stand up, until the last few years during which I’ve been lucky enough to spend most of my time writing and acting in sitcoms for the BBC. I feel lucky and I enjoy it, but nevertheless I increasingly felt like something was missing from my life and more specifically I felt disconnected from nature and like I didn’t spend enough time outdoors, which I suppose is what ‘led me to permaculture’.

Here is the link to our latest Newsletter with links to our Online Courses.

Can you Imagine the end of our civilisation, the end of our world, the end of you?

People come to take Permaculture Courses for a number of reasons: some want to adopt a new way of thinking and bring more creativity into the work they are already doing, others don’t find meaning in their current occupation and are looking for alternatives; some are looking to buy land hoping to run a homestead, while still others have a small garden at home and would like to get more in touch with the soil and produce a few things for themselves.

People come to take Permaculture Courses for a number of reasons: some want to adopt a new way of thinking and bring more creativity into the work they are already doing, others don’t find meaning in their current occupation and are looking for alternatives; some are looking to buy land hoping to run a homestead, while still others have a small garden at home and would like to get more in touch with the soil and produce a few things for themselves.

Find our January 2019 Newsletter with a look back at last year and new plans here.

On our yearly London-based Permaculture Design Course we’ve made it a tradition to spend one weekend away from the city. We had photographer Amy Behrens Clark join us to document some of our journey and asked a few of the participants about their experience learning about Permaculture.

Organising a Permaculture Design Course (PDC) is generally a great opportunity for a project or a community to integrate more of the Permaculture principles into their workings. Developing a well functioning Permaculture system however takes time… This is why I am excited to go back to Tribewanted Monestevole this coming October to deliver a second fully accredited PDC. It will be an opportunity to build on the lessons learned from last year’s course while continuing to build the Permaculture community across Europe.

Permaculture your life with us this year... Courses in London, Portugal, Spain and Italy.

For some time now, Social Landscapes has been developing the idea of a bike tour to raise awareness of these projects, tell the stories of the people behind them and get people thinking differently about city living.

What have we been up to? Cycle tour, Permaculture Courses, gardening sessions, blog posts. What is coming next?

When did it happen that time became a forward line? When did the idea of an inevitability of progress settle in the psyche of the western mind? When did we as human beings set ourselves apart, thinking that we are at the head of the parade? And how does all of that affect our relationship to place and planet? These are questions I have been asking myself for a while, questions I might never have the answers to.

In a time that often seems dominated by conflict, economic deprivation and environmental destruction, Permaculture points into a different direction and offers opportunity.