I recently had the pleasure of speaking to Florida-based builder, Susan Horn of Artisan Builders, who donates her time to help design and build eco-friendly playhouses (shown left) that are auctioned off to benefit a local charity she supports.
Horn has been building and living green since before there was a definition of “green living.” When her community built a brand new, beautiful (and toxic) school, she and a number of
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I’m always on the lookout for interesting new events that expand my knowledge, and introduce me to new people and ideas. Two such events are coming up over the next week in the Los Angeles area.
First up, this Sunday from 6pm - 8pm, a permaculture workshop will be held at All Shades of Green. For the uninitiated, like me, permaculture is generally defined as, “a system of perennial agriculture emphasizing the use of renewable natural resources and the enrichment of local ecosystems.” In layman’s terms, it refers to the design of agricultural systems that mimic natural systems.
The workshop will cover topics like building healthy soil, attracting wildlife, and landscape design. The facilitator, Melinda Joy Miller, founder of the Shambhalla Institute, is also a renowned feng shui master, so she brings those elements to bear as well.
Most environmentally aware Americans would love a personal organic vegetable garden, but how many people actually have the time to cultivate one?. Thanks to a San Francisco-based company called MyFarm, Bay Area denizens can pay a weekly fee to have a backyard garden designed and maintained by professionals.
Customers choose between a Personal Installation (just enough food for themselves) and an Owner Member Installation (enough food for MyFarm to sell to other members). Owner members receive a discounted membership.
The company leaves no gardening detail ignored. Each garden is tested for toxins and receives a drip irrigation system to automatically water the vegetables. MyFarm even maintains a compost pile and takes care of all pesky weeds that arise.
The Transition Town initiative has been a fast-growing movement in the United Kingdom for over a year, with more than 50 towns currently signed up. Now the United States is catching up as Boulder, CO becomes the first official transition town in the country.
The Transition Town movement started in Kinsale, Ireland when permaculture teacher Rob Hopkins started thinking about the possibilities of applying permaculture theories to entire towns, instead of just to individual plots of land. Hopkins’ Energy Descent Action Plan provides a blueprint for towns hoping to transition to a more sustainable way of life.
Boulder County Going Local is an ambitious effort to prepare the area for the ramifications of climate change and peak oil.
This post is a photo gallery from the East Bay Permaculture Guild’s Permaculture Bike tour in Berkeley this past Sunday. It was glorious day and a slew of people came out.
But first a little background on permaculture:
The word permaculture, coined by Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren during the 1970s, is a portmanteau of permanent agriculture as well it is was permanent culture. Through a series of publications, Mollison, Holmgren and their associates documented an approach to designing human settlements, in particular the development of perennial agricultural systems that mimic the structure and interrelationship found in natural ecologies.
This tour shows what some folks in Berkeley are doing to live more sustainably: growing their own food, raising chickens, capturing, heating, and conserving water, and generating electricity.
This tour brings together two things that I think are very important - biking and permaculture. A $5 donation is requested, but no one will be turned away for lack of funds. We’ll have a snack break around the middle of the tour, with light snacks provided. Please bring water, weather appropriate clothes, your favorite munchies and your thirst for knowledge. See you there…
That’s right, it’s time for this year’s East Bay Permaculture Guild bike tour in Berkeley.
The
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I’m celebrating Boxing Day in a new way this year - I’m putting all the cardboard boxes saved up from Shipping Month, aka December, to use in my Permaculture garden, by making sheet mulch.
Google sheet mulch and Permaculture. (For those not in the know, Permaculture is a fairly recent term for cultivating an edible landscape that establishes positively reinforcing relationships between water, soil, insects, microbes, sun, etc…for the purpose of sustainably and organically feeding its designing human.)
Sheet mulches are an easy way to ‘compost in place’, delivering all the water-borne yummies to the plants instead of under the compost pile. Design-wise, sheet mulching also avoids the not-so-Neighborhood-Association-Friendly look of compost piles, so it’s a tricky way to subvert the negative effects of suburban sprawl - grow a food landscape!
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