Design Your Site with Permaculture

We live in uncertain times and while our modern infrastructure is very clever and convenient we’re also learning how fragile it can be.

The spring of 2020 saw unprecedented demand on seed companies and local food producers as many rushed to buy local and grow more of their own. A community garden local to Aranya quickly evolved into a food surplus distribution scheme, community composting, a home-growing skills centre and a network helping people to set up their own growing spaces.

Permaculture offers us the tools to do all of these things really well, minimising wasted time and costly mistakes. From experience, Aranya has discovered that the very best way to learn permaculture is by following a real-life site design, then doing the same for yourself.

This course is for anyone wanting to use a permaculture approach to designing a site, whether it be a home garden, allotment, community garden, forest garden, market garden or smallholding.

This course is suitable for:

• Complete beginners, new to permaculture
• Permaculture Design Course (PDC) graduates
• Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design apprentices

The course is also recommended for people looking to buy land, so they know exactly what to look for. Over the years Aranya has met quite a lot of people who bought land and then did a permaculture course. A lot of them wished they’d done the course first!

The Design Your Site with Permaculture course is new and unique. After teaching over 90 Permaculture Design Courses (PDCs), Aranya has selected the content most relevant to most of us and organised it around a real-life site design process. The PDC is undoubtedly a great grounding in permaculture, but for many students a significant proportion of the content may never be practically useful. Time is precious. This course is very much focused on small to medium scale site design.

The course utilises a design framework called SADIMET, breaking down each part of the process into manageable parts.

Along the way Aranya demonstrates and explains in detail:

• All the things to look for when surveying a site
• How to make a good site map, should you not already have one
• Some simple surveying tools and techniques
• How to clarify your design remit or interview a client
• How to identify the key functions of any design
• How to match your needs to the ability of the site to meet them, then set clear, realistic and achievable goals
• How nature provides us with a set of guiding principles for excellent design
• A selection of different permaculture tools and techniques, and...
• How to use them to choose the best elements to include in your design, and...
• How to assemble these into efficient, resilient and effective systems.
• How to prioritise activities into an implementation and maintenance plan
• How to share your ideas with others in an engaging way
• What Aranya and his partner Jules have been implementing on their own site

The site survey module for example, includes 16 sections, each with its own video, covering topics such as vegetation, animals, structures, soil, water, energy, leaks and limiting factors, microclimates, desire lines and zoning, and more. To see the full list of lessons and activities, click here.

As you progress through the course you’ll learn how to observe, assess, and then improve all these aspects.

For those new to permaculture, Aranya also covers the principles and ethics within the survey module, asking what can we learn from nature and from our ancestors? This can also serve as a refresher for those who’ve already had some permaculture training, including a full PDC.

While the learning is online, Design Your Site with Permaculture is very much a hands-on practical course. Though you’ll get to watch videos and read text, you’re very much invited to go out and put it all into practice for yourself. That’s how the learning gets embedded and how your site will get designed.

Lessons are made available on a regular basis to help pace you through the course. Within each lesson there will be a series of activities to complete and check-off. These are of varying length and you can pause at any point, as the learning platform will remember where you've got to.

A typical activity begins with an explanatory video, between 3 and 50 minutes in duration, followed by an activity, sometimes involving a worksheet, to help you embed the learning. Many activities include downloadable handouts and useful links and may also include polls or discussions.

While you’re free to progress through the course at your own pace, scheduled webinars on specific topics offer some incentive to maintain momentum. These provide an opportunity to check-in, ask questions and meet other course participants. These webinars will be recorded so you can still catch up even if you’re unable to attend.

One of the most life-changing aspects of a permaculture course is in connecting with like-minded people, so by sharing your progress you’ll also contribute to an online community, learning at the same time from your peers.

On completion of the course, you'll have been guided through to the implementation of the first phase of your permaculture design.

Once you've paid for the course you will have lifetime access, allowing you to revisit the design process when you want to tweak your design, and review the material as much as you need.

During the course there’ll be opportunities to ask Aranya questions by email and during webinars and engage with other participants through online forums and discussions.

There will be an additional option to choose 1-2-1 sessions with Aranya, enabling you to get personalised feedback, insights and ideas for your design.

We hope that each participant will share their design after they have completed the course, enabling us to learn from each other.

Start whenever you like and study at your own pace.