DonorTec provides donated software and hardware from companies such as Microsoft, Cisco, Flickr, Symantec and others to eligible Australian non profit groups with Income Tax Exempt Status (ITE). Via this program you can get the latest products.
This is an exciting program to assist Australian non profits build their ICT capacity and has already assisted hundreds of groups to make huge savings in their operations!
The Donortec Program is provided by Community Information Strategies Australia Inc CISA (trading as Connecting Up Australia) in partnership with TechSoup. Both CISA and Compumentor/TechSoup are nonprofit organisations that are part of a global partnership for technology donations with companies such as Microsoft and Cisco and more companies to come.
Japan is aiming to collect solar power in space and zap it down to Earth using laser beams or microwaves.
The island nation’s government has picked companies and researchers to turn the multi-billion pound dream of unlimited clean energy into reality by 2030.
Japan has few energy resources of its own and is heavily reliant on oil imports.
The predicament has forced the country to become a leader in solar and other renewable energies.
This year it set ambitious greenhouse gas reduction targets, but its boldest plan to date is the Space Solar Power System.
If we speak of a healthy community, we cannot be speaking of a community that is merely human. We are talking about a neighborhood of humans in a place, plus the place itself: its soil, its water, its air, and all the families and tribes of the nonhuman creatures that belong to it. What is more, it is only if this whole community is healthy…[and] the human economy is in practical harmony with the nature of the place, that its members can remain healthy and be healthy in body and mind and live in a sustainable manner. ~ Wendell Berry
Back in March of 2008 a friend of ours gave us a large bunch of leeks she collected from an abandoned lot in her neighborhood where they had perennialized. I divided the bunches into individual plants and set them out next to theasparagus beds. Never having heard of perennial leeks, I was eager to observe their behavior so that i could establish them as perennials here at The Funny Farm. They grew for a few months then, at the beginning of the summer, the tops died down. I pretty much forgot about them until the fall when they sprouted back up They continued to grow though the fall and by early spring they were ready to harvest. I suspected that if i left some in the ground they would produce offset bulbs that could be divided and planted out so i harvested about half of them and left the rest. Later on they began to bloom. We harvested some of the flower buds and cooked with them as you would with garlic scapes. As the remaining flowers opened up i harvested some, cut off the florets and cooked them too. So we were able to get a yield from 3 different growth stages.
As i expected the leaves yellowed and the plants went dormant during the summer. A couple of weeks ago we cleaned up the asparagus beds and saw that the leeks were starting to emerge again. This time there were not 1 but 3 – 5 shoots coming up. The bulbs had multiplied just like i had hoped they would. Today Laurel and i dug them up and divided them. We replanted 1 bulb back in the original place, filled in the places where the leeks were harvested in the spring and had enough to plant a new row and for Laurel to plant in her garden to start her own perennial leek bed. Yet another yield was produced.
Through observation and interaction we have been able to produce a yield this year and insure an even larger yield in years to come.
That’s Permaculture.
If you are planning to be food sustainable a permaculture garden is an excellent idea. A permaculture garden can be built in a rural or urban area. Just select the space you want your garden. In permaculture practices the place chosen to built the garden is often referred as “site” and the process is called “site design”.
Efficiency is a key in these designs, we should observe the conditions andpatterns in the area so that with the minimum effort and resources we can obtain the best results or what is called “higher yields”.
There are some steps that should be followed to start your permaculture garden, you can take notes of your observations:
Take the necessary time to observe the area like the following:
Plot the sun/shade patterns to see if there is enough sun and shade
Type of soil. Is the soil adequate for what you are going to plant?
Available resources. Use first what you already have, then look for outside sources. An example is collecting your rain water for your plants.
How much is the effort will be needed to maintain it.
Make a plan using the information collected:
Make a drawing specifying what and where you are going to plant.
Specify a timeline for your project
Start implementing your plans
Some of the purposes is to obtain high yields, lets say, high outputs with the minimum inputs, and to protect the earth at the same time. You can start with a small area then expand. Also you can work it with a group of friends or family.
In the next article I will be starting a series for understanding soil explaining in more details its concepts. Feel free to make comments or ask questions.
Article first published in ‘Permaculture Magazine’ No. 10.
In 1990, when Matt Dunwell and Jan Davies took over Ragman’s Lane Farm in Gloucestershire, England, the Valuer commented that its 50 acres of grassland could only provide half of one salary.
The following spring, Bill Mollison gave a permaculture design course on the farm which was well attended by a number of serious students and teachers. It propelled them into the ‘murky’ world of permaculture – more specifically to try and adapt some of the principles so that they made sense in a commercial setting.
Today, vegetables, an orchard, woodland, pigs, chickens, a pond, a blacksmith’s forge and a direct selling set-up have all been added to the cattle, sheep and grass.
In this article Matt Dunwell introduces the subject of broadscale permaculture and describes why it is different from doing it in your back garden…
Swales are an excellent technique in rainwater harvesting. Theycapture surface runoff and send it deep into the aquifer, both nourishing trees and reducing erosion. The berms beneath them make great fertile planting beds. And best of all, swales can be dug by hand and cost you nothing.
Principle 12: Creatively use and respond to change
Our society wastes so much. I’d written about an opportunity that I’d missed out on in December last year when a house was being demolished and I couldn’t get access to the site. Houses get demolished quite regularly in our society and most of the material gets smashed up and sent to landfill. It seems that it’s ‘uneconomic’ to deconstruct and reuse materials, but I proved that wrong in the decontruction of the original building on site – it works on a small scale. Going through all of the red tape to access the site is another matter entirely.
Before I decided to buy the house in Seymour I was involved with a group of people interested in collectively buying the “Town and Country Hotel” which was erected in 1865 as the “Canadian Hotel”. The original verandah was removed and replaced in 1939, giving it an art deco feel. It backs onto the gorgeous Goulburn River, with it’s magestic Red Gums and walking track. We were interested in transforming it into a community / local food / restaurant type venture.
More from Geoff Lawton of the Permaculture Research Institute on the challenges behind “Greening the Desert” project in Jordan – from the DVD Harvesting Water the Permaculture Way.
Creating a Financial Permaculture is a design endevor that ask us to circulate money locally, and find innovative ways to promote trading and exchange systems that align with ecological patterns and boundaries.
Finanacial Permaculture ask us to remove our time, attention and money from investments in global corporations that destroy local culture and ecology for profit, and re-invests capital in local enterprises that put people and planet on their bottom line ledger.
Financial Permaculture is the conscious whole system design of human financial systems to create a zero waste economy that cares for the earth, the people and distributes surplus of material, currency and knowledge in a fair and equitable manner.
Financial Permaculture, like a Permaculture Design, is context dependent. each Financial Permaculture design will be a different arrangement of design elements such and Local Currency, Local Investment, Green Business, Coops, and ZERI industries to create the most mutually beneficial and symbiotic relationships between different elements in the human ecology that defines a particular community.
The Financial Permaculture Initiative in Hohenwald Tennessee is intended to help create a local participatory design for green businesses that can address the needs of the local community in a sustainable manner. The hope of the Financial Permaculture Steering Committee is that this initiative can become a template for other initiatives, network with other existing movements and initiatives and add new voices and wisdom to the collective and cooperative movement towards a regenerative human community.
To add your voice to help co-create the definition of what financial permaculture is, and what it means to you leave a comment or email info[at]financialpermaculture.com ATTEN definition and we will share your voice on this forum of discussion and discovery.
I love permaculture! To help others learn a bit more about permaculture, I have built a blog to support other peoples efforts and provide links to useful resources that are online.
I always link my posts [at the bottom of each post] to the content's source as I do not write the material provided. I just gather useful permaculture content for others to use in their own research.
I only ask that you please respect the source/owner of the original work where possible.
I hope it can help you in your permaculture quest!
They continued to grow though the fall and by early spring they were ready to harvest. I suspected that if i left some in the ground they would produce offset bulbs that could be divided and planted out so i harvested about half of them and left the rest. Later on they began to bloom. We harvested some of the flower buds and cooked with them as you would with garlic scapes. As the remaining flowers opened up i harvested some, cut off the florets and cooked them too. So we were able to get a yield from 3 different growth stages.
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