European Permaculture Network

by Amelie Toft, landscape gardener from Denmark

Permaculture needs more educators and this is why Permaculture Denmark has decided to send some of us PDC holders to the Permaculture Teacher’s Training Course in Sweden this November. The course is based on Rosemary Morrow’s experience and on the Permaculture Educators Course. This course is facilitated by Alfred Decker and Cathrine Dolleris and Helena von Bothmer is hosting on her amazing permaculture nursery, Kosters Trädgård in Sweden. Courses like this takes place all over Europe with different teachers involved.

The course has the overall focus on us becoming more inspiring, effective and confident teachers and facilitators and to make our teaching more transformative, fun and inspiring. We are diving into adult learning, methodology and tools and in the course we are putting it into use through micro-facilitation and creating learning resources.

It was freezing cold when we on Tuesday reached Strömstad in Sweden to catch the boat to Koster. “We” were a mixture of Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes, and at Helenas place two Bulgarians joined us. We are right now excited about the facilitation by the inspiring and experienced Alfred Decker and Cathrine Dolleris. Some of us had also heard about Helena von Bothmer’s thriving place, the permaculture plant nursery and restaurant “Kosters Trädgårdar” and we are exited to be here and see it firsthand.

During the week here we are looking at learners’ roles, challenges and behaviours – and also on the roles, challenges and behaviours for us as teachers, knowing that we influence and set the tone for our learners and thereby their learning.

Yesterday the wonderful Rosemary Morrow offered to be on a video call with us, and she told us about her work in conflict zones, and how she approaches it. She also emphasised that some of the most important work to be done right now, is to spread more permaculture in our local communities through teaching, demonstration and community engagement.

The coming days are focused around teaching tools and methods and on more micro-facilitation in groups. Alfred, Cathrine and Helena are an amazing team and our group has come beautifully together, so even though it sometimes feels a little tough to challenge our own teaching skills, we know that this is a safe space to do it. We are grateful for Erasmus+ to have invited us here.

I would like to mention a few events from the Czech permaculture scene. There are some new publications, courses, and PDCs, but I will only mention events that have some international overlap.

We are lucky to have Tomas Remiarz, a very experienced British permaculture teacher, lecturing and teaching in Prague these days. He had a public talk and discussion about forest gardens in the urban landscape at the Czech University of Agriculture on Tuesday 5.11. It´s followed by the advanced design course – Changing the urban landscape with forest gardens, that takes part until Sunday 10.11.

Tomas also participated in our annual permaculture conference, held in Prague on the weekend of 1.11. – 3.11. This year´s topic was edible forests and fruit in general. There were presentations about forest gardens, extensive fruit production, heirloom varieties, choosing the right varieties with climate change in mind, agroforestry and so on.

A group of 6 Czech delegates participated in the tour to the centers in LAND (permaculture centers), GEN (ecovillages) and WWOOF (volunteers on organic farms) networks in Hungary and Slovakia. It was organized as a project within the Visegrad and beyond Permaculture Partnership, a partnership between Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, Polish, and Ukrainian permaculture movements. There were about 25 participants from all 5 countries.

In Hungary, we visited Valaha Tanya permaculture farm focusing on fruit preserves, BioSphere – a CSA with sea buckthorn production and Biofalu in Máriahalom – a kind of one-man-ecovillage full of beautiful natural buildings with a retreat eco-center. He is looking for families to move in:-). In Biofalu we also had a networking festival.

In Slovakia, we went to Lovinka – booming eco-community with a spacious event center, Lavender farm Statok na výšinách – family enterprise based on a project made during a PDC and Sosna – Slovakia´s oldest educational eco-center featuring some amazing examples of eco-living solutions.

There are videos from the tour and presentations about each country´s GEN, LAND and WWOOF networks available upon request, just contact me at co2neutralfarm [at] gmail [dot] com .