Congratulations to another group of Permaculture Design Certificate graduates, this course has certainly become one of the highlights of our year and each one just seems to be a little bit better than the last.

This year saw two, new, young teachers introduced to the course, Byron Joel from Oak Tree Designs, a passionate and knowledgeable fan of food forests and Mediterranean tree species and Sparkles Anne Murphy author of “The Odd Fodder Cook Book” with a passion for edible weeds (and other great uses for them).

The combination of young enthusiasm and old hand experience such as Jeff Nugent (author of Permaculture Plants), PB Foreman (one of the for runners of Permaculture in WA) Bee Winfield (commercial organic grower at Merri Bee Organic Farm) made for a fantastic and stimulating course.

Our primary teacher for the first week this year was Jamie McCall from Burnside Organic Farm who will be the first presenters in a series of public talks to be starting later this year. The course was also full of property visits including an abundant, local edible garden, a natural swimming pool, a straw bale house build and a extensive tour of Jamie’s well managed commercial property.

We also had some inspiring evening talks from guest speakers including Lucinda Giblet from Stellar Violets and Jeff Pow from Southampton Homestead………..thank you so much to all our teachers and guest speakers.

Our project design this year was created for a former PDC student who has since hand built his own home and is ready to start planting. As usual after a little bit of stress seeing the high quality of designs produced in previous years everybody started working solidly in their groups and created another set of beautiful, workable designs.

This course is structured to create individual confidence while introducing students to the strong network of skilled people in the region.

One of the many great testimonials we received…….

“Today I completed the PDC with Fair Harvest. I was once told by a PDC graduate that this course changed your life- I giggled at the absurdity of that statement. Holy crap…how wrong was I!!! This course should be taught in schools as part of the curriculum. It is thought provoking, comforting, exciting, practical, informative, mind blowing and disconcerting all at the same time. Thank you Fair Harvest and I mean that from the bottom of my biodynamic, biology filled, beautifully humus filled compost xxxxx”

A few pics………..