Ferndale TimeBank

I recently joined the Ferndale TimBank. It is an organization which allows people of any skill level to trade time instead of money for all sorts of things.

As a member, you can send out requests for things you might need. Other members can earn hours from you by providing the services or items you request. You, in turn, receive hours from other members when you participate in the trading. It is a pretty fantastic idea and I put it off for quite a while because I simply didn't think I'd have time to help anyone out.

I recently gave a short talk and demonstration on building rain barrels for the TimeBank members and I earned 4 hours for doing it! Now, if I need a hand in the yard, or doing something like cleaning my gutters or mowing my lawn, I can request it and spend some of those hours on getting help. Pretty great, huh?

Speaking of rain barrels, I still have 4 full kits available for $40 apiece. This is my cost for the supplies, there is no profit in these. If you are interested, contact me via email, Facebook, instagram or telephone. I can either deliver or you can pick one up. I am also able to build them for you or you can DIY the whole thing.

I'm hoping to plan a plant swap in the next few weeks. I will be sure to update the group on Facebook as well as post it here when I get some details sorted out!

Looking for Lawns article

As a quick follow up to the last post about front yard gardens, here is the link to an article I got a lot of information from. This was written a little while ago, but the information is incredibly relevant, and alarming. Check it out!

Looking for Lawns

Oakland County 115 article

The winter this year was short, but very hard. Now we are seeing a little sun and warmer temperatures peeking in through the windows.

It's time to start drawing up the plans for the gardens and getting some seeds into the trays to prepare to plant in the coming months. The early Spring is also a good time to start making a list of all the projects you hope to accomplish before the weather gets cold and prioritizing them.

One of my big projects this year is finishing the chicken coop. It's pretty much number 1 with a bullet. I also have a lot of garden and yard clean up and organizing to do, which is pretty much a tie for first place on the list.

I recently did a lot of reading about front yard gardens, and one of my clients invited me to give a talk about them at a recent meeting of the Ferndale Garden Club. The talk went well and there were several questions that I couldn't answer. The biggest question seemed to be about the possibility of designers in the area to plan and build these front yard gardens for residents. I personally plan to tear my front yard up one day, but that will be a whole-summer project. I will have to cross every other item off my list for one whole growing season and focus solely on designing and building that system. In the meantime, I have been doing more research and reading and I also had the opportunity to write a guest column for the Oakland County 115.

I hope we get some good discussion and brainstorming on this in the Facebook group this year, among all the other topics I intend to cover. Here is the article link if you want to read about my talk: Oakland 115: Front Yard Gardening

Summer disappeared!

So I haven't updated in a while. This summer kind of disappeared on me. Lots of stuff happened, but none of it was terribly relevant to this blog. I'll be posting some new stuff soon hopefully. Also, I hope to be recording a new podcast soon as well. Stay tuned...

PermaFerndale Podcast 002 - A Simple Definition of Permaculture

I probably should have made this the first episode, since defining the running topic is kind of important, but the Right to Farm Act stuff was time sensitive. So here is my attempt to provide a simple definition along with some examples of how permaculture is relevant to everyone. I hope I was successful in my attempt.

This episode focuses on an attempt to briefly and simply define permaculture. This will include some of the most important elements and also why permaculture is relevant to everyone, even people who don't like or know much about gardening.

When people use the word permaculture, it is nearly impossible to immediately understand what the term means. Breaking it into it's root words only manages to confuse even more. The better phrase to use would be "permaculture design" which implies the purpose of the philosophy. 

Permaculture comes from the combination of the words "permanent" and "agriculture", but as the phrase "permaculture design" would imply, it covers much more ground than simply agriculture. Permaculture design can be applied to economic systems, social systems, urban planning and backyard gardening. It isn't limited by property size, location, climate or budget. There are permaculture gardens in cities around the country. People like Geoff Lawton are reforesting the deserts in Jordan. And people like me are planting fruit trees and other perennial food producing plants in their backyards around Metro Detroit, Detroit and pretty much everywhere else where plants will grow. 

So I guess my favorite definition of permaculture is this: Permaculture is a design science, based on thousands of years of successful human systems, that attempts to follow the patterns found in nature and apply them to every type of human interaction. This includes our interactions with nature itself as well as our interactions with each other. Permaculture teaches us to value community and make every attempt to find every connection we can within our environment. 

A good example of the way our current systems have avoided this connectivity approach is found in the way we compartmentalize all of our current careers and vocations. We have become a society of specialization. Everyone is told to decide the one thing they want to do for the rest of their lives. Then, when we have found something that kind of makes us happy (or makes us a lot of money) we go through a college or vocational program and receive specific training in that one subject. So then what happens when there aren't any available jobs in your target specialty? We are already seeing how that possibility plays out. Another scenario is evolution. What about when a person chooses a vocation that becomes obsolete? Or, what about those of us who choose something and study it for years, only to find out that our true passion lies somewhere else? These are all happening regularly and they are the reason that the higher education system that exists now is flawed. 

What if we all learned many trades and skills in vocational school or college? What if we all had the ability to have several jobs at once that equaled one full time job, but they were mostly things we actually enjoyed doing? What if we all had the ability to try other careers and vocations without having to "quit" the one that we were currently doing? These things are all possible when we deconstruct the status quo and stop believing they "can't" happen.

Agriculture has also undergone this compartmentalizing. Farmers around the country are growing our food, one crop at a time. Mostly corn, soy and wheat. This is referred to as "monoculture" and it is destroying the fertility in the topsoil while also putting farmers into the poorhouse. By reducing the diversity of crop growth on farms, the agricultural system in America is effectively making it harder for farmers to live. If there is a particularly bad drought one year, or too much rain and flooding in one season, a whole crop can end up decimated. 

Was it Aristotle who said "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts"?

So permaculture makes the attempt to reverse this process. Instead of taking a system apart and examining its individual pieces, we look at all of the elements of a given system and find every possible connection between the parts. Once we have established all of the inputs and outputs and requirements of each element, we can see how they function together to complete the system and work synergistically. People are a part of this system. We have been a part of nature since the beginning. We are one more piece to the whole puzzle and we are lucky enough to have the higher brain function and reasoning power to choose where we fit. Up until this point we have chosen destruction. The environment, the atmosphere, even our own bodies and minds. But we have the ability to change this pattern and find our place within the larger image of nature and the universe. 

Permaculture has the potential to be the change we need on this planet. The more people who understand how they fit in with the design of nature and the natural order, the better chance we have to stop making poor choices about our existence and start repairing the damage that has been done and then, further down the path, live in synergy with the natural world. 

I hope I've shared some understanding with anyone who listens to this. I hope that I've allowed you to see inside my mind for a moment and see the potential and positive change that I see happening. I've been ranting about permaculture for about 2 years now and I know that a lot of people probably think I'm nuts or some sort of extremist, and I guess it is true. I'm an extremist when it comes to this stuff because it seems like common sense to me. It all falls into place and when I look at the world now, I see it very differently. I used to look at McDonald's and Red Bull and see so much despair and hopelessness. I used to look at blight in Detroit and see this pessimism. Now I have hope. I have a more optimistic view of how things CAN be. I want to share that with everyone and I want everyone to understand that with a little effort and a whole lot of community, we can affect change in a big way.

Don't forget to check out the actual podcast here: http://permaferndale.podbean.com or you can subscribe on iTunes so you don't miss an episode here: PermaFerndale on iTunes

Review of RLI Fast Track DVD

So I had heard of this FREE Permaculture Design Course and I obviously knew it was too good to be true. But I signed up with my email address anyway, just to see.

Of course it wasn't free. Apparently the Regenerative Leadership Institute offers all the videos of their course for free online but if you want to get a certificate, which isn't necessary but can offer more validity to your consultancy, it will cost you $495. So much for free. And now I get about two emails a week from them offering all sorts of other things, sometimes more free things.

About a week ago I received an email offering a copy of their Permaculture Fundamentals Fast Track DVD for free…well, free after $9.95 shipping and handling. In hindsight, it may have been a mistake to give them my credit card, but I've been dying to know what kind of content this place is turning out. In the email they sent, it was stated that this was a limited run of discs to those of us who are on the mailing list and that the full cost of this specific DVD will be $130 when all is said and done. I find that to be a pretty heavy price considering the quality that lies within, but I'll get to that in a minute.

So I watched the video. It was longer than I originally expected. There are three crude chapters in the menu with no titles. The first chapter seems to cover the first chapter of the Permaculture Designer's Manual almost word for word at some points. This first one was only about 30 minutes, so I assumed the entire DVD was about an hour and half. I was mistaken. The second chapter is a whopping 1:48 and the second chapter comes in at about 1:31. So we are talking nearly six hours of content for $10. I got a deal to be sure, if the information wasn't already something I knew and had read and if it wasn't presented so poorly and in such a lackluster fashion.

This is what I encountered when I first put the disc in my drive:

From Permaculture

As you can see, it isn't exactly professional looking. That's ok though. A fancy menu means nothing if the content is garbage, right? Well, that's where I hit another issue. There were several things wrong with this video's content as well. Mostly technical stuff: it's rather poorly produced, there are no transitions between cuts, the "teacher" lists no credentials and (after a little research) has no discernible internet presence to verify her ability or qualification to "teach". These are just a handful of the issues I have with this particular video.

Here is another screenshot from the first chapter of the disc:

From Permaculture

So hopefully everyone can see the very first problem with the way this video was shot. They put this woman and her easel right in front of a backlit window, causing her to become silhouetted against the beautiful sunny day outside. This gets better and worse as she shifts back and forth nervously and the camera struggles to reset the white balance. She isn't completely in shadow, but there should have been some lighting behind the camera to illuminate her face for this recording.

She introduces herself as Sandra Wolf and after a small amount of google and Facebook searching (using "Sondra" and "Wolfe" or "Wolff" as an option) I found absolutely nothing about this woman. Regenerative Leadership Institute doesn't have a bio about her on their site and there is no mention of her anywhere else on the web that I was able to find. She doesn't tell where she received her training, nor does she provide any other information about herself except that she teaches permaculture.

She doesn't seem to have a solid script from which she is drawing her information, which makes her speech a bit bumpy and rather difficult to engage with. The transitions between scenes are also very rocky and clearly not well planned. There are several times where the editing that has been done interrupts the movement of the presentation; either Sandra stumbles and waits for the camera person to stop the tape, or the transition cuts off her first words in the next topic.

So, now that I've completely dumped on the production quality of this video…let me mention the very minor good points.

The first reasonable part of this entire production was the price I paid to get an introduction to permaculture. I grabbed this DVD when I got an email from Vladislav Davidzon, the founder and CEO of RLI. I figured a "free" offer that only costs me $10 is worth it, as long as I don't get scammed! So far, $10 is all they have taken from me. I had no expectations, so disappointment wasn't originally playing into this either. The eventual $130 price tag is, in my opinion, far too much for what you receive. It is obvious that this is the first three chapters of a much longer course covering the entire Designer's Manual, and as I was watching I made the correlation between purchasing this for $130 and purchasing the first three chapters of Geoff Lawton's course for $260 (Geoff doesn't offer this, but his course was double what the RLI wants for their certification course). I loved the Geoff Lawton course and I feel that my money was well spent, but in spite of the quality and content of his lectures, the first three with no follow up or offer to discount future learning would make it overpriced as well. I say this with the experience of watching many of the videos Geoff has released for free and getting as much, if not more from those than I did from watching this DVD.

The second decent thing about this disc is the material they cover. For someone who has never heard of permaculture the first three chapters of the designers manual are a good basic primer. They cover the intro to the definitions of permaculture design, as well as the ethics and principles that provide the foundation for everything we do. That being said, the Designer's Manual can be found on Amazon for around $100 just about any time. Sandra provides a few examples to help explain what is being discussed, but this video series is essentially just her reading the first three chapters of the book from a large easel pad. Between reading the book personally and looking up designs of swales and hugel beds, I was probably able to get the same amount of information and understanding on my own with the internet. There are people who enjoy this type of long talking explanation of things, I'm just not one of them. There are nearly no images on the pad, and the rare occasions that they show up, they are too small to see clearly. This could be a great intro to the course and to permaculture in general if it was to remain within an accessible range for customers.

So there we have it. Even with no expectations, I was somewhat disappointed. I've been watching the RLI for some time now, wondering what is happening and what kind of content they are providing for "free". Now I know. I've linked the site for the Design Course below. Thank you for reading! I hope I've been of some help to anyone who was looking at this with any interest.

http://www.regenerative.com/program

PermaFerndale Podcast Available on iTunes

Hooray! iTunes finally approved the official podcast for subscription!

Here is the iTunes link so you can click "subscribe" and get every episode as they come out!

Based on the hosting account I've set up, I should be capable of uploading up to 3 podcasts per month. So, with any luck I will record and post a new episode every 10 days or so. Since this is the last day of the month, I'll attempt to get a new episode online in the first week of June, then again by the end of the second week or the beginning of the third and the final episode will come out just before the end of the month.

I think that this will not be too much, but if it ends up being a bit crowded, I may switch to a bi-monthly structure and record a bit of extra content each episode.

Enjoy!