I'll be on the radio

I'll be talking about Fairtrade and Fair Trade Fortnight on the Radio Africa program on Edge Radio 99.3FM, this Sunday 18th Feb, 6-7pm. Can someone tape it for me or give me feedback on how it went?


Stay tuned for more about
Fair Trade Fortnight 07
28th April - 13th May

An energetic committee is organising some exciting events in Hobart to promote Fairtrade - so more people buy it and more people sell it. We will have a coffee farmer from Costa Rica coming to speak right here in Hobart. Click here for previous posts about Fairtrade & here. Contact me if interested in helping out or wanting to receive info about the events closer to the dates. Or check out the website.

Back in the city

I have finished the Permaculture course & now have a Permaculture Design Certificate. Yay! It's quite satisfying to have completed this course seeing as I had wanted to do it for 6 or so years now. I learnt more than i realised and have been thinking that maybe i didn't really know what Permaculture was before i did the course. I didn't know what i didn't know. There was so much interesting stuff in the course. One of them was how land that seems dry and barren can be turned into lush & productive areas - by adding swales & dams & forests & plants to build soil according to the contours & shape of the land. Our teacher is doing work in deserts in Jordan, in the Dead Sea Valley.
Most water that falls around us just gets washed into the storm water drains, or on acreages just runs off the land without being used that much. One important concept in Permaculture is to slow down water and use it as many times as possible before it runs off a property (the same goes for any other resource). Another is the importance of building soil - using the right plants & mulch to do this. Some plants can be living mulches for other plants (e.g a ground cover around a tree drops leaves & traps bugs & animals that break down into the soil)

These photos are of the quick compost that we made - day1 to day 12 (we needed a couple more days to finish it).

Permaculture is about observing creation and and connecting many different disciplines and making the best of all the ideas work together to look after themselves and make the land better rather than degrading it. For examples, forests build soil and provide food for animals and look after itself without any help from humans. We can copy this natural pattern and but select our own combination of species that (especially ones we want to eat - fruit & nuts) and species that help other trees to grow (nitrogen-fixing), forests contain talls trees, understory trees, bushes, climbing plants. These are called Food Forests. This is just one of the good ideas used in permaculture.

I hope to have more opportunities to do some Permaculture Designs and make them happen on the ground.