Permaculture Design Certificate

What a busy time here on the farm. I hate to use the word “busy” because it seems to imply that we’ve been running around doing so many things that we haven’t had time to stay connected with people that mean so much to us. Yes we’ve been focused on some pretty big projects. And yes there’s always something new that pops up and throws our plans out the proverbial window. But staying connected to family and friends is really important, especially during these crazy global times. I like writing my blog but it just hasn’t been the best way to stay in touch. I am using Instagram and FaceBook to post quick short posts as things happen and am using Messenger, Telegram and LinkedIn to communicate with friends and family. Please follow me on any of these apps if you want to see what we’re up to as it happens. I’m going to continue to tell the larger stories through my blog but these will continue to be less frequent.

The big story for this blog is to announce that I successfully completed my Permaculture Design online course with Geoff Lawton’s Permaculture Research Institute. I can now officially call myself a Permaculture Design Consultant. You may remember a previous blog when I announced starting an online course (February 5, 2019). Being the keaner that I am, I registered for the early bird special and had access to a lot of bonus material. The course went live on Jan 31, 2020 and we were given 1 year to complete the online modules and submit the Final Design Exercise. I have taken a few online courses before but I have to say this was the best online course I have ever taken. The online learning platform was intuitive and easy to use, didn’t crash my computer, accessible with limited internet access, and didn’t tax my limited wifi data limits. The content was well paced, engaging, informative and delivered in a combination of videos, downloadable pdfs, Q&A sessions, practical activities, and knowledge checks. As well there was great support through the TAs and an ability to engage with other students from around the world through a discussion forum and through a FaceBook group page. It did take me a little longer to get through the 28 weeks of course material, hard to stay on track when you’re living on a farm. I found early mornings my best time to work on the modules. For those of you that know me, I’m not an early morning person but many mornings at 5:45am I’d be up and working through the next modules.

The Final Design Exercise (FDE) was initially quite taunting. It involved developing a full Permaculture Design for a property of our choosing. Although it was recommended not to use your own property, I’m glad I did. I don’t think I would have had the time to do a thorough job on someone else’s. The site visits would have taken too much time away from our farm. Plus I need to be able to demonstrate success before promoting permaculture to someone else. Again thanks to a great online platform, a structured outline for the FDE was provided which forced me to think through each component of the design in a logical sequence. There were a few steps I would gladly have skimmed over if I could have, however I was not allowed to advance through the online outline until each step was completed in sequence. Sometimes this meant I had to do a little more internet digging for information, or download a sunmap app or a plant identification app, or figure out how to use google earth to give me a contour map of our property. Lots of new learning!! I did try to learn how to use SketchUp to draw my design but that learning curve was too steep for the timeframe I had. I resorted to manually drawing all my drawings and scanning them. Thank goodness the deadline was extended to the end of March. I submitted mine on March 20, 2020. This past week I received notification that my final design was approved and that I had passed the course and completed all of its requirements. I received my certificate on August 28, 2020. Hurray!!!

So what does this all mean for our farm. The design has provided us with a development framework for the next 3 to 5 years and will help us to stay focused on the priority projects. That’s not to say that we will not be side tracked by new things that come our way but we have a tool that can bring us back to focus. Here’s a drawing of the area surrounding our home. This is the area or zones that we’re focusing most of our efforts on right now with the construction of a garage, new toilet and shower facilities and a root cellar.

I know its a bit hard to understand what all the different coloured circles mean but at least you get an idea of the scale of the our project. In my next blog I’ll try to give descriptions of what we’re doing and planning to do in the different areas of the farm.