Hello dear ones
What I love the most about the volunteering project, besides the fact that I am learning super cool things and get to create teaching materials, is the friendships I made. Last weekend, my coordinator Mihaela and I decided to spend time together with our families outside the working area, so went to a village called Blatetz, where there is a natural estate with an aspiration to become a LAND center, called “Blagodat”. Our host is a big fan of tree grafting. He has grafted not only the trees in his own estate and but also all around the village on public land. His mission is to make more and more edible fruit trees, whenever he can. He gave us a tour around the village and showed us the grafted trees.
A picture of Ivo and Filip discussing the art of tree grafting.
After the lovely weekend, I continued with the reading of chapter 5 of Bill Mollison’s “Permaculture: a designer’s manual.” But halfway through it, I realized that I hadn’t had a good closure on chapter 4, so it doesn’t really make sense to continue on. What I got as knowledge from the book about the patterns was not very applicable in how to use it in the creation of the design. Except from the herb spiral, there are no other examples of how to implement this knowledge while building the site. So I turned to the good old Internet. The results were not super satisfying, but still there was a lot of interesting information and I found a few good sources. The most valuable one was Geoff Lawton’s work and YouTube channel. The knowledge he is sharing is very resourceful on a variety of subjects considering permaculture.
I am posting the link to his YouTube channel below.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCL_r1ELEvAuN0peKUxI0Umw
While doing my online research I also found a fantastic website called “Permies” that among the videos, podcasts and merchandise it also has a forum where people from all over the world, get to have discussions on the different subjects in permaculture. I saw that a lot of people were having the same question about the implementation of the patterns in the design. It has a lot of different subjects that were discussed on the forum as well, and I highly recommend it, because it is valuable to read from people that have hands-on experience in different climates and sites.
I am posting the link of the website below.
https://permies.com/
The conclusion, which I am not claiming I invented, it just came naturally after everything I read, saw and heard on the subject, is that using patterns is actually applying bio-mimicry to your design. This means to actually mimic nature and the way she uses patterns in order to sustain life on earth and for the energy to flow, on our sites. I can’t give you more direct examples on this subject, but I will soon find them out and at the end I guess it’s about all of us finding our unique ways of implementing these methods, and watch them unravel and grow, and if they are not working improve them or change them.
And of course, for some fun, I found a musical group called Formidable Vegetables Sound System that sings songs about permaculture. I shared it with my coordinator, and she told me she knows them in person. So if you are into listening to some cool music while learning interesting things about permaculture, I am posting bellow their song about patterns
Love
Marija
