Digging & Dreaming

Primary Permaculture

Between now and Christmas I am lucky enough to be working in some primary schools in Manchester supporting the work of Manchester International Festival and its Biospheric Project. This is an innovative urban food project looking at food production and food security in urban communities through the creation of an urban farm in an old industrial building in Blackfriars, Salford. There are two different strands of work that I am doing in the schools:

• Firstly I am working with children who visited the Biospheric Project last summer to recap their learning and create an assembly to share this with the rest of the school.
• Secondly I am working with children who attend the assemblies to support them to think about food within their own community by developing plans for their own urban farm on their school site.

The project is a real pleasure as all of the children are so engaged by the idea of food growing in the city, and they all have brilliant ideas and responses. I have also particularly enjoyed using simple Permaculture design tools to take the children through a design process thinking about how they may make their school site more productive. What is particularly satisfying about this is how going through a simple site survey with them in a space that they are very familiar with allows them to observe the world around them in totally different ways. It has also been a great education for me thinking about the design processes that I use myself, and how to make them accessible to other people.

The notes above were written by one of the children at Marlborough Road Academy. It was brilliant to see what creative ideas they had and how excited they were by the idea of making their school site more productive. I look forward to seeing their final designs and to see which ideas they manage to implement in reality.

Food, Memory and Place

The Mr Seel's Garden project I was involved in earlier in the year and which I am now documenting for my Permaculture Diploma was a dream project for me bringing together the themes of food, narrative and community. Looking particularly at the part that food plays in our relation to place and the people we share that place with.

This project took place in Liverpool which is a city with particualrly fascinating food heritage. In revisiting my notes to write the project up for my diploma I was reminded of the wonderful pictures that we had found as Mr Seel's Garden developed and thought that they were so lovely that it would be a shame not to share some of them here with you.

Cazneau Street Market

A cowkeeper outside their dairy in Central Liverpool - urban dairies were a unique feature of the urban food infrastructure in Liverpool

A potato hut in Everton

A Liverpool milkman

Joynson's Market Garden after it closed

Writing Up - My Action Learning Pathway

Today I was lucky enough to have an afternoon where I could fully focus on my Permaculture Diploma - something I have desperately needed for quite some time. I took the time to make the final touches writing up my design for my Action Learning Pathway. In writing and drawing things together I also had time to think about how I was progressing with my diploma as a whole. There are a couple of key observations that I was able to make about how my learning is taking shape and how my permaculture practice is developing as a result of my diploma:

• I feel that Permaculture design gives me a sense of process and time in the different work that I am doing. This is especially important for me when I am busy and juggling lots of different work as it allows me to think of things as a continuum, a thought process which in itself seems to slow things down and make things calmer.
• Investigation around my own diploma learning has made me more confident in explaining what Permaculture is to other people, and what it means to embark upon a Permaculture design process. This in itself has pushed my confidence in sharing and teaching the field.
• Using a design process allows me to think more clearly about each different decision that I am making and to clarify the detail within. This means an increased level of attention to detail throughout which in turn means the creation of a final result which is better crafted in terms of function and form.

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.

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

Starting My Permaculture Diploma Journey

Since I first discovered Permaculture about 8 years it has been something that really appealed to me. Not so much because the thinking and approach was totally new to me but more because the concepts and practice behind it seemed to be a perfect fit for the way that I was trying to live my life. Since this discovery my knowledge and interest in the field has grown until I finally got around to undertaking a Permaculture Design Course which I undertook with Angus Soutar over twelve months in Lancaster and Chorley and completed in February 2012. Once again during my design course my passion for permaculture continued to grow. I felt inspired by the design framework it provided and the way I could use this to develop and improve the projects and ventures that I wanted to engage in. I was also further invigorated to continue seeing how perfectly everything I was learning and doing fitted with the way that I wanted to be doing things and the decisions that I wanted to make in my life.

My passion for Permaculture was reinforced further by a trip I made to Cuba in late 2011, towards the end of my design course, which illustrated the way that Permaculture design and thinking can have profound and positive effect on the quality of communities and individuals lives within contexts where material resources may initially seem scarce. In this ocean of inspiration I felt that, on completeing my design course, that was not where I wanted my Permaculture journey to end. I felt that Permaculture was now a key part of everything that I did in my life, both personally and profesisonally, and that I wanted to continue developing this as part of an active learning process. It seemed that the perfect way to do this was to begin a new journey undertaking a Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design. This is internationally recognised as the next step for people who have done a Permaculture Design Course and is a way of formally recognising and accrediting a person's permaculture practice. It takes the form of an extended period of self-directed, supported learning. This is based around the projects and activities that you are involved in and that you set yourself and which you document and record in order to create a portfolio. At the end of the process this portfolio is assessed by diploma holders and accredited by the Permaculture Association.

So here I am at the beginning of my Diploma journey. The intention is that I will share my learning and progression here on my blog as part of my portfolio and also as a way to seek comment and feedback as part of my continued learning. I hope my journey is interesting to you and that it may inspire you in some way to find out more about Permaculture yourself.