Introduction to Permaculture - Calgary, Alberta

Welcome to the inspiring and informative Introduction to Permaculture course!

We have designed this course to provide you with a balanced and thorough introduction to the exciting world of permaculture.

Be prepared to receive a huge dose of realistic, practical and positive information centered around clear and applicable design strategies that you can apply to your garden, your home, your profession and your life.

We pledge that you'll come out of this course with an entirely new way of looking at your home and garden, and that you'll be bursting with ideas. We are going to provide you with a different perspective for understanding the challenges each of us face everyday.

Here's what we mean:

The Situation:

Most people are acutely aware of the problems we face today regarding the health of the environment as well as our communities. Pesticides getting into ecosystems and our bloodstream, soil and nutrient loss, water losses and scarcity, and food security are just a few of these. 

The fact is, most of us are also unaware of the multitude of practical and effective solutions available to all of us toward solving these problems.

The more we teach this course, the more we notice that once people become more aware of these solutions, they begin to generate a whole lot of creative energy toward productive results. Aligned to their strengths, they become active pioneers of positive change.

This makes us really excited, and that is why we love teaching this course so much.

Solutions Oriented...

We're going to spend lots of time introducing some of the most accessible and effective solutions out there in permaculture, applied as design. Here's a few we will highlight:

• How using simple design strategies can lead to independent and secure water resources for households and gardens, without the need for draining aquifers and rivers systems. We'll take a look at these strategies applied in some of the driest inhabited places in the world.
• How families are meeting much, if not all, of their healthy food needs through the design of productive landscapes that don't require application of pesticides and herbicides, and countless calories of energy expenditure to supply their food from far away, and how they are doing this without spending unnecessary energy and time!
• How soil is being created through the design of human habitat. You'll quickly see how a healthy soil is the beginning of the solution to so many problems.
• How we can provide for much of our energy needs through a small amount of well placed strategy.

Above all, you're going to see how things fit together...it's the connections that really matter!

This course is a starting point for you to get a short yet thorough introduction to the strategies, philosophy, and applications of permaculture.

The Introduction to Permaculture course goes into the principles behind resilient and regenerative natural systems, presented as practical design strategies you can start using right away. When you learn these principle, you'll quickly see that they can be applied to every facet of your life, leading to lasting and regenerative relationships, businesses, gardens, homes and much more. These principals will inspire you to you see your property, house, and watershed in a new way, and will get you started in applying the design principles for positive effect.

We are then going to give you a steady dose of real examples of these principles at work, applied as design in the real world. So, by the time we've taken you through these stories, we think you will have a pretty good handle on how accessible these design principles really are. We've had so many students at this point already thinking how they're going to redesign their properties!

But it doesn't stop there. You will then have a chance to create a basic permaculture design for a real property using the strategies you've learned, with lots of room for questions.

To allow you to actually apply what you've learned in a practical setting, there will be a third optional hands-on day where the students will install a garden for a client.

The course comes with a delicious home-made meal, and the Introduction to Permaculture book ($35 value) as well as a detailed reading list and hand-out materials. 

You'll come out of this course with knowledge and inspiration to get started with conceiving a permaculture design for your property, and the principles you'll learn will apply to a lot more that just your yard!