The Permaculture Podcast

Donate to The Permaculture Podcast Online: via PayPal Venmo: @permaculturepodcast My guest today is Chris Gilmour. A permaculture practitioner and emergency manager, Chris works with individuals and organizations to map their community assets and help prepare for uncertain events We recorded this conversation during the emerging COVID-19 pandemic to discuss practical solutions we can apply right now to make sense of the situation and prepare a response appropriate for our individual lives. We begin introducing the four pillars of emergency management and a six-question approach. Chris finds this method useful when creating our assessments. We then move into a conversation about personal actions for each of us to take in the moment and as part of our long-term planning, using examples from Chris’s life to show the theory in practice. Throughout, we repeatedly return to what we can do to lighten the emotional lo

Donate to The Permaculture Podcast Online: via PayPal Venmo: @permaculturepodcast I’m joined by Robyn Mello, a permaculture teacher and designer, as well as the singer, songwriter, and herbalist, behind Edenspore. She spoke with me while I am currently self-isolating and wanting to record new interviews. I’ve known Robyn for many years. As a past guest of the show, we started the conversation before I had a chance to start recording. This episode then begins with us talking about how we’re handling and thinking about the state of the world during the spreading COVID-19 pandemic. We then turn to building resilience and community and her work as a long-time permaculture practitioner working on lifestyle design. She shares how early motherhood has changed her perspective on future care and what we need to do to move away from a place of fear, as we trust ourselves and one another. We wrap up with a message of o

Donate to The Permaculture Podcast Online: via PayPal Venmo: @permaculturepodcast My guest for this episode is Holly Brown of Island Creek Farm, a small permaculture farm located in Huddleston, Virginia. Holly and I sat down at her home on a mild day in October to talk about her origins as a farmer and what it is like to run a permaculture-based farm on imperfect farmland in western Virginia complete with heat and humidity during the summer and the occasional hard freeze in the winter. On less than one acre farmed organically the farm supported herself and two interns financially, while keeping three restaurants stocked with vegetables, provided fifteen CSA shares, and also fed herself, those interns, and her extended family. She even had enough left over to give to local food pantries. She accomplishes all of this while married with two children, and without the use of insecticides, herbicides, or any tilling. I

Donate to The Permaculture Podcast Online: via PayPal Venmo: @permaculturepodcast My guest is Natalie Bogwalker, the visionary behind Wild Abundance, a permaculture skills center and homestead near Asheville, North Carolina. As a primary instructor at Wild Abundance, she teaches a variety of classes, including tiny house building workshops, women's carpentry, and permaculture design courses. She likes to share her passion with others to help them live in an empowered and Earth-centered way. As a founder of Firefly Gathering, one of the most significant primitive skills events in the United States, Natalie brings years of Earth-focused skills and living to each of her classes. This focus forms the center of what she joins me to talk about today, as we discuss including hands-on primitive skills to create a more in-depth, grounded permaculture education. We also touch on how an extended experience, as her Earth-ski

Donate to The Permaculture Podcast Online: via PayPal Venmo: @permaculturepodcast To honor the release of Pascal Baudar’s new book, Wildcrafted Fermentation, I’ve re-mastered and re-released our conversations about his earlier works. Today, you can listen to our interview about The Wildcrafting Brewer. The episode posted last week covered his first book, The New Wildcrafted Cuisine. Thanks to the great folks at Chelsea Green Publishing, who publish Pascal’s three amazing books, I am giving away a copy of Wildcrafted Fermentation through Saturday, March 21st. Giveaway: Wildcrafted Fermentation --- Author, teacher, and forager Pascal Baudar joins me to discuss his exploration of primitive brews and fermentation, the basis for his book The Wildcrafting Brewer. He shares with us the way we can combine local ingredients as flavor,  with water, sugar, and yeast to create sodas, beer, wine, and mead with local fla

Donate to The Permaculture Podcast Online: via PayPal Venmo: @permaculturepodcast To celebrate the release of Pascal Baudar’s new book, Wildcrafted Fermentation, this and the next episode are about his earlier works, The New Wildcrafted Cuisine and The Wildcrafting Brewer. As this episode comes out, all three books are on sale at ChelseaGreen.com.   Thanks to our friends at Chelsea Green, I am also giving away a copy of Pascal’s Wildcrafted Fermentation! You’ll find that giveaway at patreon.com/permaculturepodcast. Pascal takes foraged food and elevating them to more than just something to eat, and creating rich meals from the common, such as wild mustards or acorns, to the uncommon, like lurp sugar or sand fleas, building on years of experience and hundreds of classes on primitive, wilderness, and survival skills. He ate with fervor at the plate of knowledge so that now we can dine upon meals of wonder with f

Donate to The Permaculture Podcast Online: via PayPal Venmo: @permaculturepodcast In this episode from 2014, one of my favorite people from the permaculture community, Karryn Olson-Ramanujan, joins us to share a pattern language she’s identified for women in permaculture, which we can use to create a constructive permaculture movement so that together we can design a world with ever greater beauty, abundance, and inclusivity. The starting point for this conversation is Karryn’s article, which forms the title for this episode, “A Pattern Language for Women in Permaculture.” In this powerful piece Karryn outlines the patterns and provides solutions to create an environment for women’s full participation and leadership in the permaculture community, and be recognized as the permaculture superstars they are. The eight patterns, some of which we discuss together, are: Shift our “Mental Models” Understand and Advoca

Donate to The Permaculture Podcast Online: via PayPal Venmo: @permaculturepodcast Joel Salatin shares his thoughts on farming, the importance of experience, and the role of mastery over ourselves and our chosen discipline. These topics layout the major themes of the conversation that follows but touch only on the barest of the depth you’ll hear. Together  Joel and I explore land access for new farmers, living frugally,  agriculture based on skilled people, mentoring and apprenticeship, the nature of wisdom, and what it means to be well-read and with it well rounded: to be an interesting conversationalist with something to say and a provocative way to say it, so others find us and our message appealing. I left this conversation thinking about the personal changes we can make now to become experts in our chosen field and how that serves as a model for others that continues the change that already began. Eventual

Donate to The Permaculture Podcast Online: via PayPal Venmo: @permaculturepodcast My guest for this episode, which originally aired in 2014, is Mark Shepard, owner of New Forest Farm and author of Restoration Agriculture. This is the final piece in a series of three interviews Mark and I recorded to talk about Restoration Agriculture practices and to answer listener questions. In this episode we discuss four topics based around listener questions. What is Mark’s “Oil Cartel?” What place does keyline design have on a small scale site? What techniques does Mark suggest for water retention on a flat area? What tips does Mark have for starting seedlings where you are unable to water daily or weekly? I enjoyed these conversations because of the different voice and perspective that Mark brought to the table. These really expanded my thoughts on how we can practice permaculture in many different ways underneath th

Donate to The Permaculture Podcast Online: via PayPal Venmo: @permaculturepodcast (Originally Aired: 17.September.2014) My guest for this episode is Mark Shepard, owner of New Forest Farm and author of Restoration Agriculture. This is the second of three pieces that Mark and I recorded together to talk about Restoration Agricultural practices and to answer listener questions. In this episode we discuss four topics based around listener questions. Mark’s nursery techniques. Grafting vs. Seeding. What tools and infrastructure are needed to start a nursery project? How Mr. Shepard markets his tree crops locally or otherwise. We also discuss the importance for each of us, that means you and me, to be growing, selecting, and breeding our own plants from seed. To make this easier Mark shares his STUN method of seeing what plants are best. What does STUN stand for? Sheer Total Utter Neglect. After listening to this epi

Donate to The Permaculture Podcast Online: via PayPal Venmo: @permaculturepodcast My guest for this episode is Mark Shepard, author of Restoration Agriculture. As you might expect from this show we start with his biography and background, work our way through a call to action for permaculture practitioners and a need to be realistic in our efforts, and finally wrap up this conversation by discussing his work of restoration agriculture. Don’t worry though, this is the first piece that Mark and I recorded together, so there will be more on this subject to follow, including listener questions in episodes two and three. I’m can produce episodes like this one, and those that follow in this series, because of your support. You allow me to schedule large blocks of time to have expansive candid conversations with interesting guests for the good of the permaculture community and beyond. If you value this show and these experiences, and I think you

Donate to The Permaculture Podcast Online: via PayPal Venmo: @permaculturepodcast Browse the Archives.  

Donate to The Permaculture Podcast Online: via PayPal Venmo: @permaculturepodcast My guest today is Andrew Slack. He joins me to share his thoughts and personal experience on how to use storytelling to create social change. A climate activist and former head of the non-profit Harry Potter Alliance—which used the collective fandom of J.K. Rowling’s Wizarding World to create a movement of good-will in the real-world—we talk about his approach of using the arts to catalyze movements through the stories we share, as fans of fiction, from our culture, or our individual lives. He also asks some questions of me about why permaculture matters, in a conversation that wound up personal for both of us. You can find out more about Andrew's current project at savesantashome.us. I’ve also included links in the resource section of this episode to The Harry Potter Alliance and other places you can find more about him and his work i

Donate to The Permaculture Podcast Online: via PayPal Venmo: @permaculturepodcast My guests for this episode are Joshua Hughes and Amanda Wilson of VerdEnergia Pacifica and Blacksheep Regenerative Resource Management. On the ground practitioners of permaculture practitioners engaged in restorative business, Joshua and Amanda are the founders and, respectively, the CEO and CMO of Black Sheep Regenerative Resource Management. Together they’ve co-managed VerdEnergia Pacifica, a permaculture farm, education, and resource center in Costa Rica, for the last five years They join me today to discuss how they are scaling up Blacksheep Regeneration Resource management. We also continue the earlier conversation from earlier interviews with Joshua about creating a compassionate future, the role of regenerative investing in saving and repairing the land, and the transitional ethics required in this period of change. Find out mor

Donate to The Permaculture Podcast Online: via PayPal Venmo: @permaculturepodcast "What have you seen through your lived experience and via your increasing network that gives you not only aspirational hope, but also 'perspirational' perspective & confidence of moving past demonstration projects and moving toward broader-scale impact?" Posted by Christopher Kopka during the May Ask Me Anything on Patreon. I don’t see the land and agriculture-based permaculture movement pushing past the point of small or demonstration projects in the near future because of the expense and labor required to create, manage, and harvest from fully integrated systems. Compared to modern agriculture, the tools currently do not exist to scale-up without a large investment in human labor, which drives the price of on-farm production. Farm labor is skilled labor and we must not only train those people but also pay the costs up-front. Comp

Donate to The Permaculture Podcast Online: via PayPal Venmo: @permaculturepodcast Browse the Archives. (Pictured: The Design Squiggle, by Damien Newman as mentioned in this interview. CC BY-ND 3.0 US) Today I’m joined by Rob Avis and Takota Coen, two Canadian permaculture designers and teachers, who, working together, created a systemized approach to permaculture and landscape design. This process, called The Adaptive Habitat Program, reduces drudgery and simplifies complexity by using the best information and techniques currently available from permaculture and related disciplines.

Donate to The Permaculture Podcast Online: via PayPal Venmo: @permaculturepodcast Browse the Archives. In this episode, my guests are Meg Toben, the co-founder and director of The Eco-Institute at Pickards Mountain, and Jimi Eisenstein, one of the facilitators for the Rising Earth Immersion course. They join me to discuss this ten-week, on-site intensive offered at The Eco-Institute, located near Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Donate to The Permaculture Podcast Online: via PayPal Venmo: @permaculturepodcast Browse the Archives. My guest is Emmet Van Driesche, author of Carving Out a Living on the Land: Lessons in Resourcefulness and Craft from an Unusual Christmas Tree Farm. He joins me to share his life transitioning to farming. How he became a Christmas tree farmer, who coppices softwood balsam firs rather than cutting and replanting. How he earns an additional on-farm income through spoon carving. And we end with his thoughts on planning for long-term succession, both of the land as he considers how to leave this patch of earth for future generations, and the process of transitioning a farm between non-family members, as he took over responsibility and ownership of the Christmas tree farm from his mentor Al.

Donate to The Permaculture Podcast Online: via PayPal Venmo: @permaculturepodcast Browse the Archives. My guest today is the adventurer, activist, and humanitarian Rob Greenfield. Rob joins me to talk about the Food Freedom project he launched in Orlando, Florida, where he is growing and foraging for all of his nutritional needs.

Donate to The Permaculture Podcast Online: via PayPal Venmo: @permaculturepodcast Browse the Archives. In this episode, David Bilbrey sits down with Melissa Peet to talk about her work in learning to trust one’s inherent knowledge. As the first of a two-part conversation, she provides the background to her research and establishing trust in our personal understanding; that which we already know and that which others might draw out of us through education or transformational experiences.