Permaculture at Kerry Earth Education August 11, 2009
Posted by Graham in : Forest Gardening, Permaculture , add a commentKerry Earth Education Project (KEEP) hosted a 2-day Introduction to Permaculture and Forest gardening course which I led for 18 participants last weekend.
The course was wonderfully hosted by Niamh and Ian and Cathy of KEEP at their centre at the Gortback Organic Farm, near Tralee, Co. Kerry.
On the course we looked at Permaculture design Principles; the theory of natural succession; forest garden design and plants; and mulched and planted the start of a forest garden.
Gortbrack Farm is a 10-acre smallholding established in 1991, and the dedicated team have been promoting and teaching organic gardening, school gardens, teacher training and biodiversity programmes since then.
They have recently put up some very pleasant timber “eco-cabins” complete with solar water heaters and wood burning stoves which are available to rent for holidays and courses, where I was very comfortably ensconced for the two nights of the course.
KEEP have also just produced a wonderful 50-page booklet on The Year Round Organic School Garden written by Lucy Bell, Niamh Ni Dhuill and Aine Ni Fhlatharra, complete with garden designs, steps to setting up a garden, monthly garden projects and many more resources.
This is an essential resource for teachers, parents and anyone interested in seeing a school garden be established in their school. Contact KEEP for details.
Thanks for everyone’s support and participation on the weekend and good luck to you all with future permaculture and forest gardening adventures.
Forest Gardening in the Irish Times June 22, 2009
Posted by Graham in : Food, Forest Gardening, Permaculture , add a commentWe were fortunate enough to have Irish Times columnist John Gibbons attend our last permaculture course in Cloughjordan, and he had a great write up in his column last week:
Permaculture offers one vision of a future where human ingenuity and adaptability will allow us to survive, and indeed thrive, in the age after oil, writes JOHN GIBBONS
High time agriculture got back to its healthy roots
IF YOU go down to the woods today, prepare to be surprised. A new movement is taking root that in a low-key way challenges almost everything we think we know about agriculture and our relationship with food. Last week’s column asked: how can we feed ourselves without ready access to the fossil fuels upon which conventional agriculture depends utterly? It wasn’t meant to be a rhetorical question.
The basis of all agriculture is soil. Healthy soil positively teems with life, including earthworms, fungi and essential bacteria. Mature topsoil is the product of hundreds, even thousands of years of slow growth, decay and decomposition. Within human timescales, soil is essentially a non-renewable resource.
The plough has shaped human history even more profoundly than the sword. Where for 10,000 years we depended on a delicate balance of nutrients to maintain the soil upon which our civilisations stood, the energy revolution and industrial farming in the last century saw us throw away that rule book. Full Article here
