Courses

Forge your path beyond sustainability and create a regenerative life, habitat and livelihood with a Milkwood Permaculture Design Course. This 2 week intensive course will arm you with the design thinking and skills to create resilient, synergistic systems for living, working and community.

Join us to get inspired and skilled up for creating abundance in a world out of balance, no matter where you live. This course offers you the opportunity, skills and knowledge to design and implement fundamental and life-changing resilience into your everyday home, community and beyond.

Permaculture is set of principles that result in sustainable and productive systems. Systems for living, architecture, food production, land management and community. No chemicals and no excuses. Just good, thoughtful, innovative and effective design for the needs of our species.

By observing nature we can use natural patterning to design and implement ideas and systems that build on natural processes with energy efficient, low cost and high yeilding results. Milkwood Permaculture PDC graduates leave this course ready to design and implement permaculture into a wide range of scenarios; from urban permaculture systems to small farms and community projects.

"The entire two weeks were truly awesome. I learned so much and I am excited to start implementing some of my personal design ideas back at home, as well as many of the ideas I picked up from the teachers and fellow students" - Graduate of Nov 2012 Milkwood PDC

A Milkwood Permaculture Design Course curriculum includes:

•    
Permaculture principles and ethics
•    Permaculture design for urban and rural situations
•    Creating a balanced soil food web
•    Pattern Understanding
•    Designing water into landscape
•    Water harvesting and drought-proofing
•    Intensive annual and perennial food and animal systems
•    Orchard and food forest design
•    System planning + integration
•    Design for different biospheres: tropics / drylands / cool climates
•    Appropriate technologies for future communities
•    Trees, water and energy cycling
•    Strategies for building healthy, resilient communities

We also blend into our established and certified curriculum new material from a range of other world-leading thinkers and activators on subjects like transition, food security, regenerative agriculture, urban water harvesting and much more.

"You helped me to open another door to see the world, thanks" - Graduate of Nov 2012 Milkwood PDC

Why do your PDC with Milkwood Permaculture?

We work with a world-class teaching team of communicators who are not only deeply involved in the theory and practice of Permaculture on a daily basis, but who can also effectively pass their knowledge on to you. We know from experience that there is no 'one way' to design a system with Permaculture, so we don't pass on cookie-cutter techniques as the basis for permaculture design.

We teach principle-based permaculture design, so that students emerge confident to design regenerative systems all over the planet, not just where certain bioregion-specific techniques for water harvesting, food production etc will work.

We offer a pragmatic and down to earth approach to permaculture as a design science; metaphysics and ideologies are not included in our curriculum. Students of all backgrounds and religions are welcome and respected.

Our people care and our catering is exceptional. During this 2 week intensive experience you may experience challenges in terms of the knowledge communicated and what that brings up for you at this point on Earth, and we understand that. The food you will eat while on your PDC will be delightful, nourishing and mostly Milkwood Farm grown, your drinking water fresh from the sky and the student facilities comfortable to enable you to make the most of this experience.

We do Permaculture farming and education full time, as a livelihood. You will not find a more committed crew of people actively being the change they want to see in this world. We are growers, teachers, parents, academics, writers, designers, mechanics, cooks and homesteaders, who have made successfully made Permaculture their lives. We're here to share what we've learned with you, so that you can forge your own path towards a regenerative and resilient future.

We empower students to become competent designers with a wide range of scenarios used as student design exercises during the course. We encourage students to bring maps or resources in order to design their own projects as part of the course, to enable you to hit the ground running when you get home, with a supervised, workable design that you're ready to activate as part of your course outcomes.

We support our students after they leave with complimentary registration to your nearest permaculture group, as well as the ongoing support you'll receive from the Milkwood Permaculture alumni network - it's growing into an amazing collection of folks from all over the world, many of whom have gone on to implement permaculture effectively at many levels of home, community and beyond.

"My experience with Milkwood was not only wonderfully educational, it was very inspirational. The teaching methods were excellent and i feel i have absorbed all of the information and now have the resources to explore, create and implement all that was learned." - Graduate of Jul 2012 PDC

Internationally Recognized Certification

The Milkwood Permaculture Design Certificate contains the standard curriculum as set out by Bill Mollison (Co-originator of Permaculture as a design science) and the Permaculture Institute. It is a standard 72 hr curriculum and covers the 14 chapters of Permaculture: A Designers Manual, which students will receive as a class textbook.

Apon successful completion of this course, graduates are awarded a Permaculture Design Certificate from Milkwood Permaculture, which is recognized by the Permaculture Research Institute and many other academies world wide. Graduates may then progress towards a Diploma in Permaculture if they wish.

Additional workshops and tours

Course hours are 9am - 5pm each day with a day off on the middle Saturday. Outside course hours there's optional hands-on workshops, farm tours, and the opportunity to participate with on-farm chores. Students can learn more about and/or get their hands dirty with:

• Compost making
• Market gardening
• Integrated animal systems (chickens, pigs, sheep, ducks)
• Forest gardening
• Appropriate technology
• Natural Building
• Natural Beekeeping

"Just all round bloody fantastic." - Graduate of Jul 2012 PDC

Booking into the course

You can pay for your course below with your credit card, or get in contact with us to arrange payment by credit card, cheque or direct deposit.

About the teachers:

Nick Ritar is a permaculture designer, consultant and educator who works extensively across a wide range of bioregions, farms, watersheds and city environments. He is recognized nationally as a leading advocate on how permaculture principles can contribute to food security through good design and regenerative farming and living. Nick divides his time between extensive permaculture teaching, permaculture consultancy, writing and farming in central western NSW. Nick's full profile.
Floyd Chris Constable is an experienced permaculture designer and teacher whose most recent appointment was permaculturalist-in-residence at Soneva Kiri by Six Senses  in Thailand, which included establishing tropical market gardens and extensive aquaponics systems. Floyd has worked in many parts of Australia with indigenous and local communities to design and actualise resilient food systems. Floyd is now designing and establishing a range of integrated small-farm animal systems to build the fertility, diversity and food production capacity of Milkwood Farm.
Michael Hewins is a market gardener with a background in permaculture and horticulture. He's run his own Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) scheme in northern NSW and knows a lot about integrated pest management, as well as how to grow great vegies! Michael is in charge of Milkwood Farm's market garden production and education.

Included in your course fee:

The course text Permaculture: A Designers Manual (RRP $120) is included in your course fee. We also make available our extensive library of Permaculture and associated texts.

Your course fee also includes extensive take-home resources on all subjects covered in this course, as well as our ongoing advice and assistance in questions that might arise beyond the course completion.

Your course fee is all-inclusive for the duration of your stay at Milkwood Farm, including full organic catering for 13 days, and camping on-site (BYO camping gear).

Meals are organic country cooking with omnivore or vegetarian options, with a high ratio of yummy organic produce coming from Milkwood Farm itself. See our Staying at Milkwood page for full info on accommodation and facilities.

So if you're passionately curious about how to start making a difference in your community and designing an abundant place to live, please join us!

Some resources to get you thinking:

• All our articles on Permaculture
• Video of a Milkwood Urban PDC
• Some of our student's previous permaculture designs
  
• David Holmgren's Permaculture Principles