Courses

A unique opportunity to immerse yourself in 9 days of integrated forest garden and advanced permaculture design with the world's best - Dave Jacke, primary author of the award winning Edible Forest Gardens and leading forest ecology designer, thinker and teacher.

This design intensive, never before held in Australia, is a one-off chance to accelerate your permaculture design skills and knowledge to the next level, and enable you to become an accomplished and able permaculture designer.

Dave Jacke and his Australian teaching team will offer lectures, site walks, and intensive design exercises to help you understand how the architecture, social structure, underground economics, and successional processes of natural forests apply in the design of edible ecosystems of all kinds. 

You'll learn a variety of ecological design processes while designing a range of food-producing ecologies for both rural and urban sites.  You will leave inspired and empowered to confidently design food forests in both rural and urban settings.

This course is recommended for active permaculture teachers, designers and practitioners, from beginning to experienced, in order to truly grow their design skills.

This course is also recommended for landscape designers, farmers, community gardeners, teachers, horticulturalists, homesteaders and anyone else wanting to progress their abilities to design and create stable, successful, resilient food producing forest ecologies on any scale.

Forest ecosystems exhibit many beneficial properties we humans would be wise to emulate in our culture, agriculture and horticulture:

• they maintain, renew, fertilize and propagate themselves without human inputs
• they build, store, and conserve clean air, clean water, nutrients, soil quality, and biodiversity; and they exhibit stability, resilience, and adaptability.

These qualities emerge from the dynamics of the forest as a whole system, not from any one or more of the elements that comprise the forest alone.  To design productive edible ecosystems that express these same qualities, we must understand forest structures, functions, patterns, and processes and use this knowledge wisely.

Students of this design intensive will receive extensive resources from Dave Jacke and Milkwood Permaculture to support and further their future design process.

Your course fee includes Milkwood Farm's famous and fabulous farm-grown catering, including breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks, as well as tea, coffee and fruit throughout the day.

Your course fee includes use of the Milkwood Farm campground (BYO camping gear) and use of our student facilities.

About the teachers

For this unique intensive, Dave Jacke is the lead teacher and will be present throughout. To better facilitate intensive design exercises in small groups, Dave has asked us to draw together a team of best-practice Australian permaculture teachers and designers to ensure the aims of this design intensive are met for all who attend.

Cam Wilson's passion is landscape repair. He thrives on designing, planning and building fertility and resilience into landscapes, and on making it as easy as possible for people to fulfill their goals. He has worked closely with numerous on-ground pioneers as well as research scientists, and is known for interpreting and presenting their intuitive ideas or complex language with great practical value. Cam is acknowledged by peers, students and clients as being exceptional in both his understanding of complex natural processes, and how to work with them to best heal our Australian landscape. www.earthintegral.com

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.

Background reading

While not required reading for this event, we highly recommend Edible Forest Gardens by Dave Jacke and Eric Toensmeier as an exceptional set of reference books on this subject.

"This comprehensive two-volume book constitutes an in-depth course in ecological garden design. Written in a passionate, clear, and engaging style, it integrates the vision and ecology of forest gardening with practical design, establishment, and management strategies. While Edible Forest Gardens was written as an integrated whole, each volume can stand alone as valuable learning tools and references."