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PERMACULTURE DESIGNS

In this section I wish to present you with my designs in Permaculture so far.  This should take me to a Diploma in Permaculture one day... Meanwhile, I enjoy the learning, am grateful for the experiences and the connections with people and nature I make along the way. 

If any one of these designs inspires you, please do share your thoughts with me. Together we can do great things. If any of these designs makes you want to hire me as your Permaculture Designer/Educator, by all means, jump to the contact page and get in touch. If any of these designs seem sheer lunacy to you, I'd like to get better at designing and value constructive feedback. Hereby I offer you an insight in my Life...

PERMACULTURIZING

--  Applying Permaculture throughout life  -

This is where I lived when I learnt about Permaculture at a Gaia EDE course in Son Rullan - Deiá in June of 2011. I had just had a miscarriage and was kind of sensible, maybe this is why Permaculture grabbed me in the way it did! 

Darren Doherty visited the island that summer and I joined an open consultation in Banyalbufar. Later in the same year I had the opportunity to creatively pay for a PDC course held in Esporles in (October 2011), I will be forever grateful Christer Söderberg! Thanks also go to Richard Perkins, who showed me that Right Livelihood is the way to go and who'se daughter Grace was a true inspiration.

 

A couple of weeks later we held a Permablitz at Can Curt: 27 abled bodies showed up. We planted trees and hedges, made a hot compost, built a chicken house, laughed a lot and had a fantastic cooperative meal. 

 

Just over 1 month later we moved home, as an opportunity to go bigger (what with man, kids and dog) came along, we spent New Year's Eve in Can Servus...

 

I had left my job in real estate in 2009. I had travelled as a volunteer to a school in India and worked with kids in Senegal. 2 young ladies had arrived in my life pretty full-on and then I had had a miscarriage too. It seemed as if I wanted to work with children. In 2012 I was going to teach Permaculture to the young ones, inspired by the PDC for kids at El Manzano in Chile. Life and its costs called me back to a "normal" job though, and the business plan still sits in a folder somewhere on a shelf in my living room. 

We currently live in Can Servus, since Christmas 2011. Right after my PDC I made a proposal to the owners of the property which was accepted and we still live by the agreement today.  The property had not been tended to for a couple of years and we have spent a long time cutting back the jungle the garden had become. Now we are really enjoying the vegetable garden, the beautiful flowery patches all around the swimmingpool and garden area, and the cosy barbecue corner under the mulberry tree. We hope to get down to further projects in the course of this year such as storing rain water, heating in a more sustainable way, cultivate the food forest, using the space we have creatively and really make things pretty. 

When I first left real estate in 2009 I was totally done with the subject, it was a war out there and a lot of money made a lot of people very sharky. When I learnt about Permaculture though, I thought that there might be a way to combine my sales skills learnt over the last few years with the ecological way that was winking at me. 

Home Sweet Homes Mallorca was going to be the project of the future, a eco real estate agency on Mallorca and maybe beyond! I pumped my last savings into a non-dynamic website and then realized I could no longer cover the basic living costs so I had to go and get a "normal" job. I no longer paid for the website hosting, the work was lost but the idea is still there and one day it might be the right moment...

The association that is fruit of admitting a jealous feeling I had towards someone :-) 

 

May East showed us in the Gaia EDE (World Vision Module, Nov 2011) that the strength of women lies in pulling together, and that jealousy shows us a facet of life that we ourselves would wish to dominate. What better way to get there than to get closer to the example, rather than pull away and wave your finger at it. 

 

All these years later Permacultura Mediterránea is a succesful entity, its vision ever more recognized and its mission ever stronger felt. 

 

Ups and downs are part of life therefore part of a project... I thought! Good design however can and should help us flatten out these ups and downs and get to a steady and sure line of clear direction towards its vision of a connected and happy community of people living off of the abundance nature offers us when we don't abuse its resources. 

 

Key to the survival of the association lies with the people, as often the case. I would like to design a horizontal and transparent permaculture education organization, that respects the human resources available at any time and that aims to give the highest quality education possible through demonstration sites, workshops and courses, fun events and celebrations. 

 

Especially the marketing side is of interest to me: when and where to expose our association (who do we really want to attract, study the demographics of who is "easiest" to capture and/or who should be woken up), how much and when to stop using a certain media (when human resources are not able to cover the demand - the latter of these reflections was put into my mind by Juan Del Rio of the Spanish Transition Network - thank you!). 

 

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