It’s the morning after. We’ve just said good bye to another incredible group of people who put aside two weeks of their lives to come and live and learn at Fair Harvest. It’s a big thing to do! Organising work holidays, families, child care, finances, life. Arriving here with camping equipment and an idea of learning then slowly realising the intensity of a two week, live in, immersive course with 24 other people.
The result of course is life changing, and 30 years on from being a student on a live in PDC I still think of this as one of the pivotal times in my life.
Reading the review forms confirms this in the most joyous way…
“You guys have rocked my world in the most phenomenal way. I value how you teach, share and care and your honest humour. Lots of laughter, profound revelations and straight forward and clear solutions on how we can contribute to a better world.”
and
“This course is one part inspiration and one part instruction to living a sustainable life. If resilience is what we need going forward Fair Harvest is the place to get the knowledge, skills and community.”
and they go on… there’s a little pile of them sitting on my bedside table, we study them as we always do, seeing what worked and where we could do better. Each course evolving from the last as we aim to provide the best learning and experience we can. What worked so well that it needs to be included next time…well the pizza night of course! What could we do better….a longer lunch break. But seriously, as the years tick by the feedback is landing more and more where we always aim for, the positive column!
Pizza night
It’s something we’ve worked hard at. When we ran our first PDC in May 2012 our wonderful teachers were still pretty happy to talk and use powerpoint (as they had been taught and probably missing the powerpoint), but feedback of course was that people wanted to be out there, doing. This is tricky in a PDC as it’s not a gardening course, it’s a design course and there’s just a lot of info that needs to be included, but still, we get it, sitting listening to (even inspiring) people all day just doesn’t work for most peeps.
Thanks to inspirational teachers like Rosemary Morrow permaculture teaching has come a long way, and we’ve gently encouraged, nudged and trained our teachers to be wonderful examples of interactive teachers. Now I read reviews like this..
“The Fair Harvest PDC was an incredibly well managed and inspiring course. The combination of information, activity and participation, with the experience of being on the farm, and enjoying the farm produce gave a fulfilling and wholesome embodiment of permaculture principles which can easily be integrated into life going forward.”
Working on design projects
So thank you. Thank you to all the students who have put their faith ,time and money into this experience (and there’s been hundreds of them over the years), thank you to our awesome teachers who continue to learn and share. Thank you to the all the people who provide inspirational examples of Permaculture , earth care, people care and fair share.
We owe a lot to the very special Rod Hughes, teacher and facilitator…here he is teaching care of oceans
and if you want to join in
“…it’s a magical life changing, life affirming dive with delicious food, water, veggies, animals that I recommend for anyone at any age or stage in life.”
Sept 2024 PDC graduates
In the Fair Harvest garden
Our very own Dorothee Perez, inspirational gardener and teacher
Permaculture elder Jeff Nugent with upcoming star Joelie Russell
Our next two week live-in Permaculture Design Certificate is January 12-26 2025
Best, most life changing experience i have done to date! It was just as much a mental cleanse as it was a learning experience.
Went in stressed. Not happy and came out a different person ready for change.
Beautiful teachings, great people and what you learnt was incredible. Miss everyone already. Thank you so much.
Thanks Courtney, so good to have you here and to see what you’ve done since your (only one day ) home!