Creating Resilient Communities

London Permaculture Design Course

Resource Page

Find below handouts, links and other resources related to the London Permaculture Design Course. Additional resources will follow after each weekend of the course.

Weekend 2 - Survey, Soil & Food

To do: Map and Overlays

To help with the integration of your learning, we recommend you put it into practice. Chose a spot close to where you live, either your garden, balcony, a small local green space or even a room in your home and create:

a sketch map that will help you jot down the measurements of the space,
a base map, which you can create using the collected measurements - this map is to scale,
and a few overlays with zones and sectors for the space. Some of the sectors you could include are, sun, wind, wildlife, desire lines, view, noise, pollution, etc.

On the first resource page, I shared the design process worksheets from Aranya. The 2nd one is on base map making, which can help with this exercise.

To do: Soil tests

Use the soil testing handbooks to try the soil tests at home. We suggest you try at least the drainage, earthworm, texture and structure tests. If you have pH strips you can try the pH test too.

To do: ‘Kiss the Ground’ Film

We recommend you watch the documentary ‘Kiss the Ground’ on the subject of soil. You can watch it on Netflix or rent it on Vimeo: https://kisstheground.com/support-the-film/

“Released in September of 2020 on Netflix, Kiss the Ground the movie narrated by Woody Harrelson is a full-length documentary shedding light on a “new, old approach” to farming called regenerative agriculture, a practice with the extraordinary ability to balance our climate and feed the world.”

Additional handouts and resources:

Here an optional although recommended additional session from the online course exploring ecology and ecosystem functions.

These webpages can help you with collecting sun and wind data: suncalc.org, windfinder.com.
You can download google earth pro for free here and play around with adding contour lines here.
The soil test handbook, record sheets and advice handbook can be found here.
These pH strips have worked well for me.
Drainage in dry and wet soil due to structure of the soil.

Slides from the course:

Videos:

The first video shows you how to estimate the hight of a tree, with a tape measure (or your pace) and a walking stick. The second video is Charles Dowding talking about making compost. From here, you can go down a rabbit hole watching Charles Dowding videos on no dig gardening. You can go down a similar rabbit hole listening to Farmer Jessie from No-till Growers or others really.