Organic Allotment

Diploma Tutorial - Looking Back & Looking Forward

Last week as I began organising my planting and growing plans for the coming year I also took an hour out to have my first tutorial as part of my Permaculture Diploma. As I live in Manchester and my tutor, Hedvig Murray, lives down in Brighton this meant arranging time to hook up on Skype and spend an hour talking about where things are up to with my Diploma. Tutorials are an important part of the Diploma process as they are a great way of stepping back and considering where you are really up to with things and where you would like to head with them next.

I have to admit that before the tutorial I was a little apprehensive as life has been very busy for me so far this year meaning I was not sure how much progress I had actually made on my diploma. I knew I had been doing things (though not as much as I had wanted to!) but a lot of this doing had not been recorded meaning I was feeling a bit behind in the documentation aspect in particular.

We began the tutorial by talking about where I felt I was up to with things - this is where I outlined to Hedvig the things I have just shared with you in the previous paragraph! Despite the seeming setbacks, in talking to Hedvig, I realised that I was actually well on track with things and that it was just me documentation that had slipped a little. In order to start things moving forward with this we talked about different tactics that I could used to start getting my projects and ideas on to paper.

From my tutorial it became clear that my key learning so far had been:

• increased understanding of the Permaculture Design process and how it fits into my personal and professional practice.
• increased confidence in explaining what Permaculture means within my practice to other people, who may or may not know about Permaculture.
• developing my Action Learning Pathway.
• developing a design process that suits my work, and the predominantly non-landbased projects that I am working on.
• clarification of what my diploma guild was and how it would support my learning.

I also became clearer about the key objectives that I have for my diploma in the coming months:

• to research and develop ways that work for me of recording my work as I go along.
• to use my blog more as a way of documenting my learning and development.
• to complete the documentation of my first two designs and to allocate time to proper development of my third design - creating a eco garden for my friend Anne.

All in all my tutorial felt like a very positive experience and I am looking forward to putting the actions that I have identified into practice.

The Days Are Stretching Out Again

On my allotment rhubarb is normally the first splash of colour each year. As if by magic the bright pink of baby stalks suddenly emerges from the cold, wet soil, tantalising everybody with hints of a warmer, brighter spring that is now just around the corner. At the same time that the rhubarb appears the days start to draw out and each evening it seems a step closer to the moment when planting, picking and weeding will be possible at the end of the day.

This appearance also means that other preparations are starting to take place on Plot 45. The broad beans and sweet peas are in pots, the garlic shoots are showing, and this week the chili seeds will be planted in the heated propagator in the kitchen at home. All of this combining to make early February a time of hope and expectation for growers like me. The full flow of summer is still a long way away but suddenly the hints of spring making their way out of the winter darkness make it clear that, once again, the time for real focus on growing is tantalisingly close.

Memories of Mr Seel's Garden

If you are in Liverpool walking along Seel Street you may come across this plaque on the wall just around the corner from Liverpool ONE's Tesco Superstore. In the centre of this commercial centre it's hard to imagine that it was once a green and pleasant space but this plaque reveals that the area around Hanover street, including the land the Tesco now sits on, used to be full of market gardens.

Memories of Mr Seel's Garden is a collaboration between Transition Liverpool, Friends of Everton Park and the Friends of Sudley Estate, as well as academics from Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow and Edinburgh. The main aim of the project is to explore how engaging local communities with the changing patterns of urban food production might contribute to current grassroots efforts within Liverpool to raise awareness around current food issues. The project team have been collecting examples of stories inspired by local food heritage since February 2012, wondering if knowing more about where we used to get our food from might inspire other radical ideas about where we could grow our food in the future.

I was lucky enough to meet Michelle Bastian who is one of the researchers working on the project and she asked if I would like to come on board for the final stage of the project to develop a performance sharing stories that have been gathered as part of the project as part of a final celebration event that will take place at The Bluecoat in Liverpool on the 27th January. I am delighted to be part of the project and also really excited to be able to use the process I am involved in as one of the projects for my diploma portfolio. It is great to be part of such a brilliant project which also allows me to put my permaculture design learning into practice within a real life context.  I will keep you updated as the project develops. And maybe some of you will be able to join us for the sharing on the 27th January 2013? Hope to see you there!

Post Permaculture Diploma Gathering - Thoughts and Observations

I have just returned from a stimulating and inspiring weekend at the National Permaculture Diploma Gathering in Birmingham. The idea of the gathering is to create a space for diploma apprentices, graduates and teachers to come together to share learning and thinking around their personal experiences of the Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design. It was a great privilege to spend the weekend with 100 diverse and dynamic people all involved in the diploma in one way or the other.

The weekend also served as the perfect forum to meet with my own diploma tutor Hedvig Murray and undertake my diploma induction. This means that I am now officialy a permaculture diploma apprentice - a prospect that I find hugely exciting! As well as my induction I took part in a range of thought provoking workshops and discussions which really helped clarify some of the ideas and aspirations that I have got around my diploma, more particularly around my action learning pathway.

Being in Birmingham also afforded me time out to think a little more about my observation of my personal wants and needs around my diploma journey. Revisiting my original mind maps it became clear to me that this can be divided into three main areas:

• Developing permaculture design as an underlying foundation for all the work that I do.
• Building and extending my own links within the Permaculture community.
• Developing my permaculture learning  the structure / framework of the diploma.

I then thought about how I could define my own key aspirations more succinctly. It seemed to me that they could be encapsulated as:

• Structure - Practice
• Community - Communication
• Knowledge - Learning Application

My next challenge as I develop my learning pathway is to consider how these key aspirations will manifest themselves within my diploma, and be reflected in the process for each design that I develop.

Creating an Action Learning Pathway

 
My Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design will involved creating ten different designs using Permaculture Design as their basis. The first of these designs will be the creation of my own Action Learning Pathway which will form the basis of my whole Diploma and the learning upon which I am about to embark.

The design framework that I have decided to use to develop this design is SADIM - which stands for Survey, Assess, Design, Implement, Maintain. For simplicity and consistency this is the same framework that I will be using for all of my designs throughout my Diploma.

Using SADIM the first stage of the design process is to Survey the background and context to the design which I am focussing upon. In this case that means observation of my own aspirations and desires as I being my Diploma, in order to develop a design which will allow me to fulfill these objectives. On a more complex project this could mean a site survey, or interviews aith a number of partners and stakeholders. Fortunately for my first design the necessary observation is much simpler than that.

The first thing that I did within my survey was to consider my own context and heritage with relation to my diploma. This was relatively straightforward to investigate and can be summarised as follows:

• I completed my Permaculture Design Course with Angus Soutar in Lancaster and Chorley in February 2012.
• I have a longstanding personal interest in Permaculture as a discipline and have been developing my knowledge in the subject in informal ways over the last five years.
• I have a professional background in developing creative community engagement and development projects which have come to involve some aspects of Permaculture Design in their creation over recent years.

Following this I went on to consider what I wanted to achieve through engagement in my Diploma:

• A development of my Permaculture Learning within the structure and support that the Diploma offers.
• A way to create a cohesive framework within which I can further integrate Permaculture into my creative and professional practice.
• The opportunity to develop a range of land and non-land based designs that reflect my interest and practice but that also push me out of my comfort zones in terms of the work that I am used to doing.
• Increase my learning around Permaculture Design within urban contexts.

Now that I have outlined this context the next stage of my design process will be to Assess these observations in order to consider how to create a functional learning design which will meet these aspirations