Permaculture Part 2

Dear Friends,

Aren’t the two photos in this Forward Thinking priceless? Kids are naturals when is comes to connecting with nature. A connection that we have lost and must now work hard to rekindle. Fortunately, we have organizations like Permaculture to hold our hands on the reconciliation journey.

Isn’t it often the way it is, as we focus on something that has become of interest to us, we often find it right under our noses, right in our own neighborhood. Check out this website on Orcas Island in the San Juan Islands of Washington State: Bullock’s Permaculture Homestead. Just a stone’s throw away from where I live in Seattle by ferry. I am amazed and have already emailed them about a visit, to which they have replied via email, welcoming us to come up for a visit. I am rounding up our friends to do so and will give you a first hand report. Here’s another site to check out: Terra Phoenix Design. They are a collection of experienced designers, educators & consultants focusing on whole systems design and productive ecological landscapes. The core of their team is drawn from the Bullock’s Permaculture Homestead – a 25-year organization –a pioneering collective in the field of ecological landscape design.

What do Bill Mollison and David Suzuki say about the Bullock’s Permaculture Homestead and Permaculture in general? Listen to what they say, it is important!

The Bullock brothers up on Orcas Island have always been great, you know, mixed system, marsh and hillside and there are many others, I’m sure. But for every Bullock brother, there are a hundred woo woos spinning around in circles.- Bill Mollison, Permaculture Founder.

What permaculturists are doing is the most important activity that any group is doing on the planet. We don’t know what details of a truly sustainable future are going to be like, but we need options, we need people experimenting in all kinds of ways and permaculturists are one of the critical gangs that are doing that. – David Suzuki, International Environmental Advocate.

A Farm for the Future

What will it take to make a family farm fit for the future? This is the question the wildlife filmmaker Rebecca Hosking asked as she moved back to her parent’s farm (the family farm) to help her aging father who was finding the farm life he loved too physically challenging.

This is a truly amazing documentary. Rebecca’s journey is the journey that farming in general must take. It is a beautiful, touching, and important masterpiece. It is made up of five segments, each ten minutes long. She artfully lays out before us the fundamental problems in farming today and gives us a doable solution— showing us the Garden of Eden principles in action. We witness her evolution into the magical world of permaculture.

Here are key thoughts from A Farm for the Future:

• The energy crisis is producing a revolution in farming. It will affect what we eat and where it comes from. The key question is: How to make a family farm fit for the future?
• People think that there are two ways of managing a small farm: the drudgery of hard manual labor or throwing a lot of fossil fuel at it—tractors, trucks, petrol run vehicles and machinery. Today, all farms are dependent on fossil fuels, even the organic ones.
• There is a third way, and that is the way of Permaculture. Permaculture challenges all the normal approaches to farming. It is an approach governed by design. One designs a system that reduces both the need for labor and energy. It is a design inspired by nature.
• You can feed ten people per acre on a permaculturally designed plot. That is double what can be fed by conventional farmland. Once properly set up, a permaculture plot can provide all this food with one day a week of manual labor.
• A vegetable garden with an experienced permaculturalist can produce up to five times more food per meter than a large farm. A host of vegetable plots and smallholdings can feed a community.
• The bottom line is that we can say now without a doubt is that petroleum in the new future will be gone and we have to figure out a way to farm without fossil fuel.

You will love and be enlightened by this link. Enjoy: The Farm for the Future.

Sincerely yours,

Seann Bardell

BioImmersion.com

Clinical Note:

It is springtime and therefore Dohrea’s favorite time to clean and spruce up the house. And being in tune with nature, it is time to do a little spring-cleaning of our bodies. Get yourself a power drink to clean and rebuild: Mix the Beta Glucan with No 7 Systemic Booster, add a young coconut milk or just pure water, blend newly picked berries (they are called by Dohrea first fruits and are traditionally the ones that were used for the celebration of Shavuot) and add any fruit of your choice. Take with 2 capsules of Cruciferous Sprouts, 4 tablets of Chlorella, and 1 capsule of Wild Blueberry Daily. This is your two to four weeks regime for the new season. Enjoy your good health!

The Last Quiz Answer:

Delphinapterus leucas, the beluga or white whale, is an Artic and sub Artic species. Because of its songs it has been called the sea canary. They are opportunistic feeders, eating a varied diet of fish, squid, crustaceans, octopi and worms. Beluga whales are very social animals and congregate in pods of 2-25 whales. Several pods may join together, forming groups of 200-10,000 belugas. How would you like to be in the water with 10,000 belugas?

Congressional leadership now intends to use the current budget bill that funds the government to the end of September as a vehicle to eliminate federal protection for wolves. The Defenders of Wildlife enables us to efficiently lend our voices towards the protection of wildlife and biodiversity. This is an urgent call for you to do so for wolves.