Imagine a garden with no irrigation or fertilization that uses up old wood and gives you more plant miles for your space than any other form of raised garden bed or otherwise. I’m so excited about Hugelkultur and Paul Wheaton’s article on how to do it.

We live in the rural back hollers of the N. Georgia mountains. The elders here, those in their late 60′s and above, all remember how to be poor and successful. Their success wasn’t about accumulating stuff or status or money, it was about surviving on the land.. Those of us who are learning to be poor are gonna be well placed to survive the coming turmoils…

There’s an abundance available to us, if we cooperate with Nature. An abundance on the material level, and on the spiritual level. It’s like when the two-year-old discovers the joy of cooperation with its parents, you discover “what a wonderful childhood I can have!” What wonderful things we can do together, when we cooperate together.

Once we get over this two-year-old tantrum crisis and learn to cooperate with Nature, to do green chemistry instead of toxic chemistry, eliminating cancer, and asthma, and Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s (all of which come from our relationship to our lousy food and our toxic chemicals getting into our bodies) – all that can be gone! We can get back to healthy living for a good, hundred-year lifespan. We can live within the abundance of Nature.

Brownies [matured'greenies']know that we have to go beyond the ‘green’ concepts of water-saving flush toilets and store-bought organic fertilizers.

If you are going to ‘brown down’ and live the simple life, then a composting humanure toilet and a compost pile are prerequisites. In this piece we include two great videos on how and why composting toilets are so ‘brown’; how to make compost and photos of our own humanure pooper as well as a recipe for compost tea. Click the title to read more..

The same human genius that went into overdrive and got us into this mess can be harnessed to get us out of it. Our creativity knows no bounds, it is guidance and right thinking that we lack. When we begin to harness our genius for the good of Earth and the survival of all living beings not just man, we will begin to heal life on earth and maybe leave a decent legacy beyond 900 years into the future…Read more about the road ahead by clicking the title.

On a course in permaculture design, we do actually have to submit a design. And designs mean maps and maps mean numbers.   Ever since school, where, the relentlessly uninspiring Miss Nash put me off mathematics for ever, I have experienced a sort of cartoon eye spin when figures, numbers and calculations are mentioned.    As you can imagine,  I [...]

‘Permaculture is revolution disguised as gardening’. Will Hooker. Oooh as a revolutionary activist at heart, that got me good and proper.  This morning was filled with profound statements and stories about permaculture, what it is and what it means to us… Ask most people who aren’t overly familiar with it, they’ll probably tell you it’s [...]

Arriving last night after dark at Koininia farm where the permaculture course is being held, was a breath of fresh air. The prettily painted signs told us we were entering another world and in a way we were. You can smell and feel the peace here.

Situated in over 500 acres, this Christian peace community is pretty laid back. It’s well known for it’s pecan trees… so finding pecans scattered on the ground was one of the many delights of this place..

I’m taking a permaculture design certificate course. It’s part of our grand plan to encourage people to grow food forest gardens everywhere. I’ll be blogging my experiences on a regular basis over the next two weeks… only two days to go and it begins…

Frank Herbert, author of Dune, used his writings to spread a spiritual vision in his stories of the desert planet Arrakis.

Part of this was foundated on the concept of permaculture.

‘The thing the ecologically illterate don’t realize about an eco-system’ Kynes said, “is that it’s a system. A system! A system maintains a certain fluid stability that can be destroyed by a mis-step in just one niche. A system has order, flowing from point to point. If something dams that flow, order collapses. The untrained might miss that collapse until it was too late …click the title to read more..