Blogs

Earlier, in March 2010, I held an Introduction to Permaculture course, and one of my students came forward eager to change his front lot into a productive edible landscape and design through permaculture principles. On a cool June morning, the students from the course converged on Terry Blume's house for a day of hands-on work. The goal: to change a vacant muddy front lot into a thriving permaculture garden! Read more »

My mother developed these two wonderful recipes for delicious and hardy soups for our Halifax Introduction to Permaculture workshop. They were a hit! Everyone was talking about them, and I even had one student tell me that "this is the best tomato soup I've ever had before!" They are quite easy to make, and based on how well received they were, we have decided that these a regular fare for our Introduction to Permaculture workshops. Read more »

It is very common to hear people talk about how humans are a cancer to this earth, particularly those people in the environmental movement. I felt this myself for a large period of my life, and currently so do many of my good friends. We all hear stories about human greed, destruction of ecosystems, climate change, political injustice, and most recently BP among others. This amounts to a lot of pessimistic energy. Personally speaking, I went through school and work constantly hearing about these stories, and I just felt more and more dis-empowered. I just wanted to start fighting back, but something deep inside me was telling me that fighting would just make the problems worse. Read more »

The modern-day education system is almost entirely bent on creating an army of university professors and other specialists. We have been systematically trained to specialize, and as a result we approach problem-solving by studying parts of a whole, where the connections between them are commonly ignored. Read more »

Calgary has a LOT of fruit trees, but many of them are not harvested. Calgary also has a lot of apple, pear, saskatoon, cherry and raspberry eaters.  But much of this fruit comes from far-off places like New Zealand. This is the context in which the Calgary Urban Harvest Project was created.  Check out the website at www.calgaryharvest.com. We started this project in the fall of 2009 after noticing just how much fruit, especially crabapple, goes unused while carbon emissions increase as we import our food. Read more »

We've been getting a lot of demand for conversion of lawns into productive landscapes such as food forests, and so in response, we are pleased to offer a new service - the Productive Places program! This program is essentially a one-stop shop for designing and implementing a productive and edible landscape in place of your lawn! This program will take you through the whole process, developing your understanding of permaculture applications along the way, including developing the initial concept based on the specifics of your property, developing a final design, acquiring materials, and installing the design. Through this program, you potentially can change your lawn into a beautiful and food-producing system in 1 full day!

Check it out here!

The growing season is upon us, and this year why not design your backyard (and front) to harvest and store water to grow fruit and vegetables in a beautiful edible landscape 

Many homeowners in Calgary have converted their lawns into a food forest.  A food forest is a beautiful productive landscape that you can install in place of your lawn.  It is called a “food forest” not because of tall trees and the like, but rather because all the plants (and animals) in the system are arranged in the same kind of pattern that defines forests.  Read more »

Good soil is nothing without water! Fortunately, there are simple and inexpensive methods available to us for capturing and storing rain water to meet our irrigation needs.  It all starts from a firm understanding of how water flows on your property and designing to make the most use of it. Read more »

We are pleased to announce our newsletter - the Big Sky Bulletin! This newsletter will be published every month, bringing you the latest on our event and courses, as well as all sorts of hand-picked and interesting stuff that we find as we do permaculture! You will learn all about permaculture as it happens in Calgary and Alberta and see just how it works as we will be documenting highlights of our projects for your reading pleasure!

A friend of mine who lives in the UK just sent me this great video series.  See a story about a farmer reared in the laborious and depleting methods of traditional industrial farming embark on an information quest into sustainable methods of food production.  This 5-part BBC video series shows how permaculture design can be used to reduce the need for human labour, fossil energy and fertilizer, and address all the problems that come from the industrial methods! Read more »