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“Essential Permaculture” Weekend Training
Designed with Transition in Mind
Pricing & Schedule Below
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This training is for people would like to learn about the most essential and useful aspects of permaculture.
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What is Covered over these Two Days?
– What Permaculture is All About.
– How to Design to Minimize Work, Increase Beauty and Yields, Restore the Environment.
– 12 Essential Permaculture Projects & Ideas for Home, Farmette, Apartment and/or Neighborhood.
– Using Permaculture Thinking to Transition our Towns.
Permaculture Students – All Ages – All Walks of Life
Click Here for a short video of our Free 18-Part YouTube Series about
The Case for Permaculture
Why we are introducing this Training
The 72-hour Permaculture Design Certification (PDC) Course is a great training, but it does require a substantial commitment in time (8-days) and money.
The purpose of this training is to extract some of the best of the PDC to give participants the basic concepts of permaculture design along with some of the greatest ideas.
Our goal is for students to leave this training seeing the world through a new pair of eyes and possessing the confidence, know-how and inspiration to begin their own projects.
Topics Covered over the Two Days:
– Foundations of permaculture living and thinking
– Gardening for bounty while reducing labor
– Reducing energy use & Producing our own
– Generating income from one’s home or lot
– Jobs and business opportunities to come
– The heart of creating ‘permanent-cultures’
- 12 of the best permaculture projects we know…
…such as digging rain gardens, installing efficient rain tanks, grey water harvesting techniques, digging swales, growing food on concrete, on rooftops & in apartments,
backyard aquaponics systems, simple greenhouse ideas, hugelkultur, building earth berms, compost teas, energy generation from biomass, energy conservation,
and more.
Come Away With:
Besides a deeper understanding of permaculture, we will provide a wealth of handouts and links that will assist in anchoring the training and help to facilitate one’s continuing education.
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Learn about Backyard and Apartment Sized Aquaponics Systems |
We feel that this new 2-day training is our most comprehensive, insightful, and practical introduction to permaculture yet.
It was also created for those involved in Transition Town Initiatives so that they might better understand the foundations of the movement.
This training is for those who want to deeply understand this life giving way of thinking and designing in as short a time period as possible. This will certainly be a concentrated learning experience.
Click here for more about this training (further down on the page)
Instructors
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Lead Instructor – Bill Wilson
Bill holds two Permaculture Design Course (PDC) certificates and has taken advanced trainings in Permaculture Design and Permaculture Teaching.
He is cofounder of Midwest Permaculture with his wife Becky and has taught at over 30 permaculture courses.
Bill and Becky have lived the last 34 years in a sustainably oriented community, and have been intimately involved in its daily life and in it’s various transitions.
More on Bill
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“My mind has been working overtime thinking about permaculture! I have learned so much this weekend. I will use it the rest of my life. Thank You Bill…!!!”
Ashleigh B. of Detroit
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Additional Trainers
Milton Dixon |
Milton Dixon holds a PDC and an Advanced Training certificate in Teaching Permaculture. Besides being Midwest Permaculture’s tech support, he is an avid urban permaculturist. If we’re lucky, he will share some of his homemade wine with us. More on Milton…
Becky Wilson is co-founder of Midwest Permaculture and will offer her insights throughout the week. She is the lead designer for the Midwest Permaculture’s property (our home), has her PDC & Teacher Training certificate, and is active in community and the Transition Town Initiative. More on Becky…
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 Becky Wilson
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“I want to thank you. I came looking to learn something new and I went away changed. I think about permaculture a lot now.”
Bill K., Naperville, IL
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A Great Book
(Handed out at the Training – Included as Part of Tuition)
Gaia’s Garden
The New Edition
by Toby Hemenway
Toby does a great job on explaining the basics of permaculture, especially as it relates to suburban and urban landscapes.
Gaia’s Garden goes into great detail on specific permaculture techniques, such as: organizing your garden in to “zones”, creating and maintaining your fertile soil, and explanations about companion planting and permaculture plant guilds.
It is one of our favorite permaculture books.
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Other Details about the 2-Day Training
The details about each specific training can be found in the descriptions at the bottom of this page, but in general, one can expect a classroom/auditorium learning environment that includes presentations, videos, exercises and discussion.
Lunch may or may not be provided. See the individual training description below. If it is included, we will attempt to source the food from local farmers/vendors.
How to Prepare?
There are no prerequisites for the training. Any interested in permaculture will benefit from this training. Students will receive a few pre-training study materials sent via email after registering.
Schedule
$100 Credit Towards a PDC Training
Should a student of this “Essential Permaculture” weekend decide to take a Midwest Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) Course at some point, they will receive a $100 credit toward the training of their choice. This credit is good for up to three years.
Price of Training - $195 +/-
The price may vary from training to training (see each scheduled training below) but in general this is a $195 training which includes:
– pre-training study materials (not too much);
– a copy of Gaia’s Garden by Toby Hemenway, handed out at the training;
– and lunch on both days.
There are often early registration discounts too. See individual trainings.
Further Details … Why This Training?
Our world cities and suburbs are drivers. Not only are they the major consumer of the worlds goods, thus driving our current world economies, they are also the collecting place of genius, creativity, science, the arts, education and more. Our cities and suburbs have value and advantages, but they are also incredibly dependent upon support from the outside. Except for the air and sun, possibly water, almost every other need is generated and collected elsewhere and brought into the cities and suburbs, everything from food, to clothing, to building materials, to power, to transportation…everything. Within the coming generation (coming years possibly) the imbalances we have created in the world economies, the supply systems and the natural world will become even more apparent, more immediate. There are stresses everywhere in our culture with peak oil, peak water, peak soil and climate change pushing us even more.
Bottom Line
The time has arrived for us as urban dwellers to build some resiliency back into our communities. As a culture we have become de-skilled on a monumental basis. 100 years ago everyone knew how to grow food – today it is likely less than 10% of us. What we must have to live securely is good food, clean water and enough energy for heating and cooling (for ourselves, our homes, our food). And whether we know it or not, we need each other too. We need community… an authentic connection with each other.
How Permaculture Fits In
Permaculture is about relationship – our relationship to everything and everyone around us. It is a design approach to creating living systems that mimic the patterns found in nature. One idea is to integrate the surrounding natural areas with our homes, apartments and other buildings — to produce an abundance of food, shelter, energy and other services with a minimum of work.
Once a permaculturally designed system is set up and functioning, the effort involved to maintain it so that it can provide for our real needs should feel more like recreation then work.
But permaculture thinking looks even deeper than the physical world. It looks at how we relate to one another in community. Do our relationships with each other create cooperation and sharing, or competition and separation? One produces long term contentment and security, the other, not.
Who is this Training For?
This two day training is designed to make available to the everyday suburban or urban dweller a solid understanding of permaculture design and techniques so that they can implement this life enhancing knowledge into their immediate and local surroundings.
Vision
Even Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts are taught to leave a campsite in better condition than when they found it. As a culture, imagine if every generation left their part of the world in better condition then when they found it.
Is it Possible?
This is not hard to do. This training will make that perfectly clear. We can create a culture and a way of living on this planet that is bountiful rather than consumptive, that creates healthy soil, water and air instead of pollution, that creates beauty everywhere instead of just a few places.
We can live in abundance while still improving the planet for future generations. That is what this training is all about. How do we learn to observe what is truly going on? How do we use the natural abundance that surrounds us to provide for our needs? How do we do it in such a way as to create no pollution or waste?
We can create abundance, beauty and healthfulness everywhere on the planet and for everyone. It all comes down to desire and design.
Think of the amazing things we as humans have created with our science and technology in the last few generations. We have gone from the horse and buggy to space travel. There is no reason that we cannot use the same creativity and ingenuity to redesign the way we supply or food, water, clothing, buildings, education, health care, and more.
And even better, permaculture is relatively simple and based on common sense. It’s not rocket science.
And it is work that we as individuals can do, and do now. We can be the change.
Bill Wilson
Midwest Permaculture
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“This training was like a breath of fresh air. I knew that there had to be a way out of the energy and societal challenges before us, and now I see it.
Very inspiring and hopeful…!”
Cathy P.
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Schedule
“Essential Permaculture” Trainings
More Trainings will be Posted as they are Scheduled
Planning one for Chicago and another at Midwest Permaculture for sure. Check Back Please.
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