Courses and Education

Spring 2009

The Permaculture Design Course: Sustainability Strategies for the Blue Ridge

1/15/09 UPDATE: COURSE IS FULL. Contact Terry Lilley at tygerlilley@gmail.com to be placed on the waiting list. Thank you for your interest.

This Permaculture Design Course lays the foundation for understanding and working with natural systems to design sustainable environments that produce food, shelter, and energy. It also provides participants with models of community development and extension by which they can create networks of support for themselves and empower others to do the same. The course provides tools to help design and develop urban or rural properties or neighborhoods in a sustainable manner, revitalize local communities, and restore ecological balance.

Permaculture promotes land use systems that work with natural rhythms and patterns to create regenerative cultivated ecosystems. Participants will learn how to design and build gardens, homes, and communities that model living ecosystems. By understanding patterns in nature students will learn how to grow food, manage water catchment and storage, utilize renewable energy and build community.

The 72 hour certificate course covers themes such as: ecological systems understanding, organic food production, natural soil improvement, watershed restoration, water conservation and management, edible forest gardening, native medicinal plants, natural habitat restoration, healthy buildings and human settlements, community and consensus building strategies, renewable energy systems, sustainable community development, local economics, and ecological planning and design methods.

This 72 hour certificate course is a rare opportunity to learn from some of the best teachers in the permaculture movement including Ted Butchart, Christine Gyovai, Dave Jacke, and Dave O’Neill and Joel Salatin (teacher bios below). The spring class will be held over five weekends Feb. 13-15, Feb. 28-Mar. 1, Mar. 14-15, Mar. 27-29, and April 4-5, 2009. The cost for the course is a sliding scale of if registered on or before January 15, 2009 is $895-$1200 and after January 15 is $995-$1200. For more information contact Terry Lilley at tygerlilley@gmail.com.

Spring 2009 Permaculture Design Course Teacher Bios:

Ted Butchart is a Naturopathic Physician and a cofounder of Virginia Natural Health in Charlottesville and Staunton, Virginia. Ted is a natural builder and was the founder and Director of the GreenFire Institute in the Pacific Northwest where he focused on teaching owners, architects, engineers and building officials about natural building materials. Ted is a founding member of the North American Natural Building Colloquium, a peer organization of builders, designers and suppliers in the natural materials construction world, and has contributed to several books on straw bale construction.

Christine Gyovai is Principal of Dialogue and Design Associates, is a plant lover, and an avid permaculture designer. She is an environmental planner and educator with over twelve years of experience in facilitation and training with a focus on increasing community and environmental sustainability. Christine holds a M.P. in Urban and Environmental Planning from the University of Virginia and a B.S. in Environmental Studies from Burlington College, and is certified in mediation and permaculture design. With authors Ken Haggard and Polly Cooper, she edited and did graphic design for the book Fractal Architecture: Design for Sustainability. A native of West Virginia, Christine was an environmental education teacher and sustainability consultant in California before returning to the Blue Ridge bioregion. She is currently living in the straw bale house that she and her husband Reed designed at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains with their one year old son, Elijah.

Dave Jacke is the author of the Two Volume Edition of Edible Forest Gardens and has been a student of ecology and design since the 1970s. He has run his own ecological design firm—Dynamics Ecological Design—since 1984. Dave is an engaging and passionate teacher of ecological design and permaculture, and a meticulous designer. He has consulted on, designed, built, and planted landscapes, homes, farms, and communities in the many parts of the United States, as well as overseas, but mainly in the Northeast. A cofounder of Land Trust at Gap Mountain in Jaffrey, NH, he homesteaded there for a number of years. He holds a B.A. in Environmental Studies from Simon's Rock College (1980) and a M.A. in Landscape Design from the Conway School of Landscape Design (1984).

David O’Neill is the owner and operator of Radical Roots Community Farm and former director of the Edith J. Carrier Arboretum at James Madison University. He has studied permaculture systems in New Zealand and Australia and designed regionally adapted systems and gardens for the Shenandoah Valley. Dave teaches permaculture design and organic gardening classes at Blue Ridge Community College and has experience in landscape design. He is committed to social change through creating a community farm that fosters connections between people the land. Since 2000 the farm’s mission has been to grow high quality, organic vegetables and herbs in a sustainable way. Whether gardening on intensively cultivated, beautiful garden soil, growing permaculture plants in a 3,000 square foot greenhouse, selling produce and plants at the Charlottesville City Market or through a 40 member CSA; Dave is always pushing the edge of productivity.

Joel Salatin is a fulltime farmer in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. A third generation alternative farmer, he returned to the farm fulltime in 1982 and continued refining and adding to his parents’ ideas. The farm services more than 1,500 families, 10 retail outlets, and 30 restaurants through on-farm sales and metropolitan buying clubs with salad bar beef, pastured poultry, eggmobile eggs, pigaerator pork, forage-based rabbits, pastured turkey and forestry products using relationship marketing. He holds a BA degree in English and writes extensively in magazines such as Stockman Grass Farmer, Acres Usa, and American Agriculturalist. The family’s farm, Polyface Inc. (“The Farm of Many Faces”) has been featured in Smithsonian Magazine, National Geographic, Gourmet and countless other radio, television and print media, including the New York Times bestseller Omnivore’s Dilemma by food writer guru Michael Pollan. He has authored six books, four of them how-to types, including Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal: War stories from the local food front, and You Can Farm: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Start and Succeed in a Farming Business. His speaking and writing reflect dirt-under-the-fingernails experience punctuated with mischievous humor. He passionately defends small farms, local food systems, and the right to opt out of the conventional food paradigm. His mother Lucille, wife Teresa, daughter Rachel, son Daniel, daughter-in-law Sheri, grandsons Travis and Andrew, and granddaughter Lauryn, work fulltime together on the family farm.

Past Courses

Fall 2008

Introduction to Permaculture:  Sustainability Strategies for the Blue Ridge

Rain Barrel Workshop

Spring 2008

Drawing for the Permaculturally Inclined

Plant Propagation

Fall 2007

Permaculture Design Course: Sustainability Strategies for the Blue Ridge

Spring 2007

Permaculture Design Course: Sustainability Strategies for the Blue Ridge