 Hi it's me with another question and this one is what makes a permaculture design course worth two weeks of my life well that's a good question I mean it is a significant investment of time if not money to do a permaculture design course and when I did mine I suppose I was pretty interested in the topic and I read a little bit about it but the course was taking place in the house that I was living in the shared house so essentially I felt like permaculture had come to me and I had to be on the course but if I was to do it again I would say well what do you learn on a permaculture course I guess that varies to some degree depending on who you learn with and where you are certainly in Britain we have what's known as the core curriculum so the permaculture association defines a number of things that a permaculture design course should cover and if they provide the certificates then those things need to be in the course and they're obvious things for me as a permaculture designer the obvious things to do with and what is permaculture the ethics the principles design process and those kind of things and then different aspects of how you apply those in different areas like soil and water and energy and buildings and so on so all of those things are in there what kind of level of detail do you have I think one of the nice things about a design course rather than just watching a video even like this one is that you can ask questions so the course when I'm teaching one of the first things that we want to know when people come on the course or apply for the course is what is your background what do you want to get from the course what do you know and what do you want to learn because then it's easy to pitch pitch what we're teaching to the needs of the people in the room and of course there's the interactivity of questions and being able to answer those questions whilst also trying to follow a basic path that meets everybody's needs in the room so there's a potential you know on a PDC as we say to get things from the PDC if you if you come along in person rather than doing a course that's perhaps all on video because the video just tells you what the video is going to tell you so on a design course that I teach the design courses I teach are the first quarter of the course the first kind of 25% or so focuses on the basics of what is permaculture what are the ethics the principles whether they come from what is systems thinking because that for me is very important we inhabit system we are systems we inhabit bigger systems that feed us and then we output waste products into and when we're putting things together in the landscape when we're deliberately constructing systems to grow food or contain heat for instance in the building and such then those things we need to understand the relationships between things so systems thinking gives us a very important foundation if you like those things I'm also very interested in pattern and how nature uses shape to solve problems and how we do that in a very obvious way in our homes now in the sense of flat sheets very good for collecting and for distributing so radiator and a hot water heating system in a house is very much flat it has lots of surface area to give off that heat but also in the same way if you build a solar collecting panel whether you're trying to generate electricity or catch the heat of the sun into water again that panel is quite flat it has a big surface area but when you're storing water and you want to retain that heat and the tank is not flat because the tank would then lose a lot of heat so the tank uses a different shape so you bring water from the panels or your panel into a tank which is much more rounded cylindrical usually because that's a strong shape but also has low surface area so it can contain that heat and then when you want to spread that heat out you deliver it to a flat sheet again so pattern we use it throughout our world but sometimes we use it badly and so understanding pattern helps us to understand that the things we see and not always the best shape they are often there's some reason why things are a particular shape it might be because it's easier to transport for instance than it actually being a better shape for a compost bin for instance so so we look at the basics of permaculture and then we'll go into the realm of soil soil is critical because everything comes from the soil the soil is what is made by life the beginnings and endings of life make soil and provides a home for life to grow out of including ourselves that everything that we eat comes from the soil via one or two or three different stages and so how we care for soil and also how we care for water is really important and even people that come from backgrounds with the done soil science will often comment on why didn't I learn this at university because there are aspects of those things that it's more to do with the connectivity of things rather than just breaking things down into the small elements of what are the different parts of soil so we also want to know about what are the relationships and soil and how does how does soil what does soil need to be healthy and so on so then things like water so we do a chunk of time on water and how water flows what it needs how it what its qualities are what we need to do to look after it trees obviously very important as well and so we look at trees and how we can use trees in agricultural systems and for ourselves on a smaller scale we look at energy and buildings and even small a little bit on financial systems and so on and then the other key aspect of a permaculture design course is the opportunity to take that knowledge that learning and apply it to a real site so on a weekend-based course you might go away and be doing a design at home for your house or your garden or possibly even your livelihood or something if you're feeling a little bit more creative or challenged I would like to challenge yourselves and if you're doing a two-week residential then you'll be very much doing a design on the site with a real client looking at a real site with real limits and and thinking about how do you apply a permaculture in that context and by going through a process which is something that I use my book to help frame that journey we can start to look and notice the things that we didn't see that we haven't fully understood yet so I see it's a nice analogy for me as my mum likes to do jigsaws and you can't just open take the box and take off the lid and look in the box and say is it all there so she used to she for many years worked in a charity shop and they'd be given jigsaws and she would volunteer to take them home and to make them in order to find out are all the pieces there and so for me the process of doing a design helps to illuminate which are the pieces that are not there yet so we can say oh I didn't fully understand how to use zoning in this context and then we can go into okay so let's look at that again so for me permaculture design course it's I think it's a way to really kind of put permaculture together and fully understand at least at the beginning how to start to apply it in the real world and you'll still walk away from those two weeks thinking well there was a lot of stuff in there and how do I make sense of that for me but at least you'll have the basic pattern and for me it took me a little while to really focus on what is it that I really wanted to do and what was important to me and to begin with that wasn't being a teacher that took me about 10 years to get to the point where I started thinking hey maybe I should start to teach this stuff because I'm really fascinated by it but PDC I would say if you get the opportunity to do one and many people say to me it was life-changing I would certainly agree