About…

… me

I’m travelling to work on small farms so I can learn about permaculture. It’s called WWoofing (pronounced Woofing), which now stands for World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms. It used to mean Willing Workers on Organic Farms. Farmers get some labour, and in return they put up the WWoofers and feed them. WWoofers get food, board, education about organic farming and a cheap way to travel.

A lot of these smallholdings are designed on permaculture principles, so I get to see permaculture in action. A lot of these people have developed some really ingenious, fun solutions to seemingly impossible problems, and all in the name of creating beautiful, sustainable habitats for plants, animals and people.

Here you can also find out more about permaculture, though I’m no expert, far from it, and that’s why I’m doing the Wwoofing. I’ve also included a little bit of info about this site, how I  set it up, what the its rules are and all that sort of fun stuff (yeah, right).

… permaculture

Permaculture is a design method that creates sustainable habitats for plants, animals and people.

Call it lazy’s man’s gardening. Permaculture uses natural principles to do the heavy lifting, so you don’t have to.

Grow potatoes to help break-up new ground. Plant trees to suck up excess ground water, or shelter your garden from harsh winds.

Use perennial vegetables so you plant once but harvest often. Build ponds upslope, so gravity can deliver water to plantings below.

Provide high-power air-conditioning by designing ventilation to take advantage of convection. Use white paint on walls to reflect sunlight onto nearby plants to improve ripening; use black paint to increase the heat absorption of walls and paths and balance the thermal load between night and day.

Get really sophisticated and use plants to take care of seasonal variations. Say you have a south facing conservatory that gets too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter. Plant some deciduous vine, say a hardy kiwi, that leafs out in summer, providing shade, and then sheds for the winter, allowing the sun to warm the interior. It will also provide habitat for animals, pollen and nectar for insects, food for people and birds and beauty for everything. Once the kiwi is well established, use its branches as a trellis for some other plant.

These are well known ideas used for millennia by communities in every corner of the globe. Permaculture uses simple design tools to apply this type of thinking to the landscape for the benefit of plants, animals and people.

Lazy man’s gardening? Maybe so, but lazy doesn’t mean stupid; often it means quite the contrary.

PS: Graham Strouts, who took the picture above, is an inspiring permaculture teacher and an all-round nice guy. Check out his blog Zone5.

… the trampervan

This tramp is no lady.

 

The TramperVan, the oldest picture I could find. It used to look even worse. It’s held together by tape, paint and pure blind faith.

Here’s the van after a little TLC: