Learn Regenerative Design Skills Today!
Three month apprenticeship, June 15- Sept 15, 2023, living, working and learning on a permaculture farm in the beautiful Cascade Mountains.
Curricula includes: Sense of Place, Botany Basics, Gardening/ farming practices, Herbal Medicine Making, Foraging, Energy Flows, Mycology, Chickens, Homestead Skills and more!
For more info visit http://www.vivaculture.org contact Terri Wilde
We love Spring and all the smells, colors and aliveness it brings.
In an effort to share this with all of you I will do a series of live video session as well as post some of my observations here for you to enjoy and ponder.
Despite the whole COVID event that is playing out, nature is abundant, resilient and relentless in her determination to move forward.
Join us for a unique permaculture design earthworks experience! This workshop will give you firsthand insights into design considerations and principles based on the clients objectives. We will explain stages of the design process, from observation, working with the client, through to the final design and real live implementation on the property over the weekend. Click here for all the details!
This workshop will cover reading the landscape for water retention and management. Diving into, Mapping, ponds, swales, reed-beds, terraces, key line design, implementation cover cropping and guild planting. This will be a hands-on workshop/installation, with earth moving equipment and lasers!Digging a Pond
OUTLINE:
PROJECT BRIEF: This workshop will implement a permaculture master plan by converting old pasture with invasive grasses into a diversified food forest. The project will encompass 5 of 20 acres. Over time the property will be used to host an educational center for nature based early childhood education and multi-generational skill building workshops focused on sustainable methods of food production and preservation. The long-term goal is to provide opportunities for the local community and visitors to reconnect with each other and nature while cultivating more harmonious and resilient relationships.
Lead Instruction by Brian Kerkvliet co-steward of Inspiration Farm and a 15 year Permaculture practitioner, designer, consultant. A Student of Geoff Lawton in design methodologies and earthworks for Permaculture projects. Brian has designed and installed numerous projects around the county.
When: August Friday 13th 12pm through Sunday 15th 4pm
Here is a short listing of events that will be happening before the PDC this year in May. If you want to visit or talk about the course come find us at one of these events.
Permaculture and Beyond: Transform Your Life, Job, Landscapes, Planet and Consciousness! Thursday, Feb 20 4:30-6:30pm Fairhaven Auditorium
Learn the foundations of Permaculture and explore real-life examples of this powerful universally applicable holistic design system that regeneratively works with nature to provide for human and ecosystem needs and services. Free parking in the Fairhaven lot, it’s marked 12A and is easy to find on maps.
A Free gathering time for People interested in Permaculture from Whatcom county to come together and discuss ideas. Location to be determined
Create your own Fruit Nursery Stock. Fruit Tree Grafting and Propagation from Cuttings. Pruning season is upon us! Remember to save scion wood for the Grafting Gathering! Bring Apple, Pear, Plum varieties from your neighborhood. Share and graft to start new trees!
A Free gathering time for People interested in Permaculture from Whatcom county to come together and discuss ideas. Location to be determined.
Stock up on hardy perennials and trees for early spring planting. Come find us and talk permaculture and pick up some plants.
Sell the weed eater and use a scythe! Maintain your body, not your machines. Learn the sharper points of this elegant tool.
Everson garden club plant sale at the elementary school
Plant a garden, eat for a year, plant a Food Forest Guild, eat for decades! This hands on workshop shares design elements necessary for a perennial food forest.
Learn the skills to work with nature to create integrated Permaculture systems of abundance and productivity! Food, Soil, Shelter, Energy, Water and a lot more: Design strategies and methods for truly sustainable, regenerative human integration with our biosphere. DATES: MAY 2-3; 16-17; 30-31; JUNE 13-14; and 22–26.
About the Chuckanut Center
At the Chuckanut Center we seek to connect those who wish to learn how to grow more resilient through food security, household independence and community resourcefulness. We do this through offering community garden spaces, teaching gardening, cooking and preserving classes, sharing skills and offering opportunities to meet and learn from others.
The Chuckanut Center is an aspiring permaculture education center located on 1.8 acres in Fairhaven that specializes in urban homesteading skills. For the past three years, we have held classes, house concerts, and community gatherings on the property. Through our gardens and our determined cohort of volunteers, we have been able to teach classes on everything from cultivating the soil to growing food and how to preserve it. Outside of our fenced garden area is an area that is yearning to be turned into a food forest. We have apples, plums, pears, and just need a little imagination to really spark our orchard into a a demonstration of abundance through permaculture design. As this is a city-owned property, there will not be any camping onsite. However, it is possible to camp nearby at Larrabee State Park. If a large enough group would like to camp, we can arrange a campsite for the night and shuttle participants as needed.
We are a small band of volunteer community members working together to build a community resource for all to share. Our backgrounds and interests are varied, but we all believe in this place, the importance of a more self-reliant community and the future of Chuckanut Center to become a valued and treasured asset to the city of Bellingham and beyond.
The Chuckanut Center has the potential to serve as Whatcom County’s permaculture education center given it’s advantageous location, history of community gardens, and class potential with the house. During the PDC, the Chuckanut Center will serve as demonstration grounds for what permaculture education can look like in the Pacific Northwest. This means many opportunities for guilds, small demonstration plots, and innovative social design within a site. We look forward to the course offering an opportunity for participants to learn about the importance of energy flows through a site, including the flow of human energy, which we are well-positioned to demonstrate.
Meg All, Board Secretary – 360-961-1516 chuckanutcenter@gmail.com https://chuckanutcenter.org
The Outback is a 5-acre organic farm on the Western Washington University campus. Started in 1972, the Outback is a place of experimentation, learning, reflection, advocacy, and agriculture. We feature permaculture practices and teachings and are home to community gardens, chickens, production rows, a teaching apiary, vernal pools and a delineated wetland. Our students are engaged in ecosystem restoration, community building, and food justice – acknowledging the importance of food systems for empowerment, resilience, and health.
The Outback is a beautiful place to fully engage with permaculture against the backdrop of a long history of learning and experimenting built into the farm. This PDC course starts at the Outback because it provides opportunities for all the hands-on basics, from composting to mushroom cultivation to path design, while enjoying lush native habitat and sheltered classroom areas. We offer PDC students the chance to experience a truly community-based food and farming system and the power (and challenges) of shared governance. We are engaged in addressing food insecurity and issues of justice on campus and beyond, including the permaculture ethics in all we do.
Visit their Website
Contact information:
Terri Kempton, Outback Farm Manager, kemptot@wwu.edu, 360-650-3779
We are working on ways to offer more scholarships to enthusiastic students who can’t afford to pay the full amount for this life changing experience.
As nice as it would be to offer this comprehensive course for free that is just not possible. There are a lot of costs associated with putting on an event of this magnitude and countless hours of preparation. Not to mention fair compensation for all the professional instructors who have years of experience to share in a prepared concise manner.
We would like to invite you to support this important local offering by donating to a scholarship fund so that more deserving underserved students can attend. We are also showing students how they can crowd fund their tuition using a proven service called “We The Trees“
By educating local people in the ethical design strategies that Permaculture has to offer we will help build our bioregion into a healthy, resilient and thriving community.
We are working on ways for you to give to this cause as a tax free donation. Contact us below for more details.
Just use the contact form below to let us know your interest and we will send you the application.
We are so excited that the new posters are finished. Paul Kersley put them together with his wonderful illustrations and sense of design they came together great!
We will have some printed posters available for local people to put up in addition to the collectable hand bills. Let us know if you have a place to put them up and we will get you some. If you need a stash of hand bill to hand out to interested groups of people we can get that to you too. We also have the posters and hand bills available for folks to download. You can use them to send out to your social networks or share with friends who may be interested in this incredible opportunity to take a local PDC with world class instructors.
The variety of subjects covered by a PDC are diverse! The first four weekends are a broad overview of design principles, strategies and techniques. The 5 day campout will dive deeper into practical applications and community building. All together, the Whatcom PDC constitutes the 72+ Hour Permaculture Design Certification Course as originally designed by Permaculture co-founder, Bill Mollison. Students who complete the two-week curriculum earn the internationally recognized Permaculture Design Consultant Certification. To date, thousands of permaculture designers worldwide are certified through PDCs, and comprising a global network of educators and ecological activists. PDC grades around the world have brought permaculture design thinking into the full gambit of modern careers and living environments. They represent groups of committed people working together to change the way we view and design our landscapes and communities.
View the rough course schedule here. The order of topics in a course may change due to the presence of guest instructors, and emphasis on certain subjects may shift due to the needs and focus of the participants, such as urban or rural residents, ect. This course will not make you an expert in any of the individual subjects covered, although, in many cases we go into considerable depth. The point of the course is to introduce you to the relationships and synergies in the systems that make up everyday life. In a sense, permaculture creates an ecology made up of the many tools and concepts used to design sustainable communities. You will learn about tools and how to use them, and when. The PDC will continually demonstrate connections between you subjects leaving you with a whole systems design strategy. In a sense, permaculture creates an ecology made up of the many tools and concepts used to design sustainable communities.
Building on the foundations presented in the first four weekends, knowledge and skills will be expanded and tied together. Leading to a final real life design exercise, mapping and placing elements within a holistic design.
Design groups will present to the class for critique and comment.
Optional on-site Camping with lunch and dinner during the last five days at Inspiration Farm. This will provide opportunities to immerse in the design process and partake in after hour activities.
Let us know if you would like help arranging local off-site lodging if camping is not a viable option for you.
This course teaches you to observe at various levels such as cycles in nature, movements in history, practices across cultures, and patterns in social behavior. It also increase one’s awareness to learn how to interact harmoniously with nature to achieve your goals. The Permaculture Design Course jump starts the learning curve on all these fronts. Permaculture uses ecological principles to design sustainable human communities that are harmoniously woven into the environment, with the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems. Design professionals can add new qualifications to their resumes and offer improved services to their clients. Their designs tend to use fewer resources, work more efficiently, and are easier to maintain. Most participants find the course life-changing, and they form powerful new viewpoints and enhanced social networks.
The Permaculture Design Course is one of the few educational systems in the world of its size that allows so much freedom to students and teachers alike. The course material and presentation is structured to address different learning styles. Each topic expands and deepens our understanding of the previous topics, so the knowledge and understanding of the student is gradually built up. The permaculture design course teaches whole-systems thinking. Systems thinking focuses on the relationships among the parts, the features that emerge from these relationships.
Design Exercises help bring this into application and make corrections. Just as the course material is vast in its size and scope, the course presentation extends beyond the classroom teaching, design exercises and audio-visual sessions. Permaculture flows over to the meals shared, nature walks/garden visits, learning new practical skills and checking theoretical learning with experiments.
With this certificate a graduate may confidently use the word ‘permaculture’ in the promotion of their work or business world wide. This might include:
Whatcom Permaculture PDC info Session Recap Are you interested in learning more about permaculture and the ways you can get involved with the Whatcom Permaculture community? Dive into the world of permaculture design and see what the Whatcom Permaculture Design course offers.
Apply Permaculture principles to real life Earth Care! Three month apprenticeship, June 15- Sept 15, 2023, living, working and learning on a permaculture farm in the beautiful Cascade Mountains. Curricula … Continue reading “Regenerative Earth Apprenticeship Program 2024”
The Whatcom Permaculture events bring together like-minded individuals who are interested in sustainability, agriculture, and community building. It’s a chance to meet others with similar interests, share knowledge, and collaborate on projects.
For additional questions, please contact us.
EVENTS AT INSPIRATION FARM 2023 Hi Everyone! Just wanted to take a moment to let you all know some of what we have planned for this year. Other events may pop up to fill in some gaps but here are the events we have on the books at this point.
As we move closer to the start of our Whatcom Hands On Permaculture Design Course, We wanted to share an update of how things are progressing.
Day 1: Foundations of Permaculture Course overview and logistics; permaculture defined; observation skills; ethics and the basis of ecological design; permaculture principles, indicators of sustainability, and how to use them.
Day 2: Design for Pattern Literacy Designing from patterns to details; natural patterns as a design tool; the permaculture design process; methods of design; the Zone and Sector System.
Day 3: Thinking Like a Watershed The water cycle; Catching and storage water; designing tanks, cisterns, and other water storages. Roof-top water catchments
Day 4: The Path to Water Wisdom Ponds, swales, and key line design; water in the permaculture landscape; grey water and blackwater system design; aquaculture.
Day 5: Soil: The Living Skin of the Earth Soil structure and composition; soil ecology and nutrient flow; creating healthy soil; analyzing your soil; compost, nutrient teas, and mulches; cover crops and green manures; strategies for your own soil conditions.
Day 6: A Revolution Disguised as Gardening How ecosystems work; the home garden; plants of many functions; polycultures; integrating animals and insects into the garden; pest management; wildlife habitat
Day 7: Food Forests, Guilds, and Ecosystems Trees and their many roles; designing plant communities; the orchard; food forest design; hedgerows, windbreaks, and shelter belts; Biomimicry. Design Teams.
Day 8: The Built Environment The functions of shelter; methods of green and natural building; designing shelter for climate and culture; living roofs; site selection; designing for disaster.
Day 9: Energy and Tools for Working Wisely Population, energy use, and Peak Oil; renewable energy strategies; appropriate technologies for heating and cooling, transportation, cooking, and construction.
Day 10: Thinking Globally: Permaculture for Different Climates and Densities Tropical, Dry land, and Temperate strategy review. Designing for urban, suburban, or rural situations.
Day 11: Green Economics, Right Livelihood and Community Building Money, finance, and local currency networks; permaculture in education; green business guilds and networks; building social capital. Community dynamics; intentional communities, eco-villages, and group decision-making processes.
Day 12: Putting it Together: The Design Project Presentations Group design project presentations; Where to from here? Finding your ecological niche.
