We’re planning a number of exciting new titles to be released in 2011.

Urban Permaculture DVD

One of the complaints we often get from people living in the city is that we focus a little heavily on Permaculture titles that require a large scale farm to get the most benefit from practicing Permaculture.

So we are happy to announce that in 2011 we will be working on the Urban Permaculture DVD with Geoff Lawton.

Actually we really started shooting a lot of footage already that we were going to include in the Permaculture Soils DVD that we completed, but for various logistic reasons we found the segments would work best in a video that focuses in detail on adopting Permaculture techniques in small scale domestic environments.

From courtyards to backyards to places where you thought you could never do anything with, we want to make this DVD a Permaculture techniques DVD where people can be inspired by what is really possible.

Here’s an example of the kind of thing we mean:

A sneak preview of Geoff Lawton visiting a beautiful Mandala garden in an urban Permaculture garden. It shows Permculture can be aesthetically pleasing to the eye with a richness of patterns as well as a productive food source.

Along with the Urban Permaculture theme, we’re going to focus on one of the creatures that most Permaculture people can’t live without in their backyard – the humble Chook or Chicken as it’s known to our overseas friends.

Backyard Chickens DVD

If you’ve ever been interested in raising chickens from incubating your own fertile eggs, or raising baby chicks to adult hens and want the details on what breed to choose, meat or egg layers, how many to fit into your suburban backyard, what to feed them, how to house them, how many eggs to expect, and how to cure them if they get sick – then Permaculture Cheese-maker and now Chicken wrangler Elisabeth Fekonia will guide you through the whole process. From building a perfect coop for your backyard or a sleek mobile chicken enclosure, this DVD is going to drill right down in great detail and show you everything you need to know to guarantee success.

We’ll also investigate Permaculture Chickens. Does such a breed exist and why would you want to choose heirloom chicken breeds in the first place? Chickens do in fact make great pets if you manage to handle them and tame them, they end up being very inquisitive birds. You’ll meet some of the people that love them as they share their experiences in raising these fascinating productive animals.

This is an intensive DVD designed to get a newcomer up to speed on keeping chickens in a suburban environment. Even if you’ve never kept a chicken before and are curious to start from scratch, you’ll get a lot out of this title as we will cram a lot of helpful knowledge, practical tips, lessons and fun things on owning your own small flock of birds for egg laying purposes and err…meat processing. We’ll even show you how to pluck them and carve them -if you’re game enough to watch.

DIY Aquapoics DVD

Then there’s the DIY Aquaponics DVD thats been already announced elsewhere. Murray Hallam is eager to get this one out around February so check back here regularly to see what little clips and tips and short You Tube video’s we’ll continually add and blog and share with you.

We’ve enjoyed working with Murray and Geoff and Elisabeth over this last year. Its always been a pleasant and creative experience. Its never been tense or difficult. The odd thing is that we as filmmakers have learnt so much working with these creative and inspiring teachers that it kind of rubs off on you. We had no intention of getting into Aquaponics but when we saw how well it all worked -we were hooked. With Geoff, we have a modest sized food forest system planted where our front lawn should have been and now we also have four free ranging chickens digging holes in our backyard as well!  That’s the side benefit you get making films with these crazy Permaculture people – you end up with a lot more knowledge than you began with.

Oh, its not too late to add your thoughts and tell us what you’d like to see covered in any of these films, except the DIY Aquaponics video as its pretty well locked in and complete.

So ends 2010.

School Gardens are taking off in a big way and there’s no better designer in our view than Leonie Shanahan. Yesterday we had the pleasure to start filming with Leonie a new DVD that we are producing next year on planning an effective school garden that really works. The DVD on Edible School Gardens will is a much needed resource that shows permaculture designers and teachers the practical aspects of working with school principals, teachers and more importantly – school kids to help design and build a permaculture garden that delivers fresh fruit and vegetables and teaches kids all about growing food and better nutrition.

School Garden central location site

Leonie has built over 16 school gardens, but what makes this garden unique is the way it has been designed into a central location.

In the past, school gardens were usually assigned a bit of scrap land tucked away behind the sports oval, consequently very few people visited the site. But at this school, Leonie was given a prime location to build her dream garden.

Visiting teachers from the Gold Coast were knocked out by the location, as this garden was built right in the center of the school. You need to walk through the garden to get to the sports oval. Leonie has implemented many permaculture design features into her unique design. Spiral herb gardens and worm towers are tucked away in unusual spots. Climbing beans covered bamboo tripods. Arrowroot plants and bathtub worm farms appear suddenly as you weave your way through the arching pathway. Kids need to walk through an edible archway to enter the garden. Its covered in climbing passionfruit vines.
A scarecrow suddenly appears in the corner. Its use is to scare the neighboring crows and birds that suddenly appear at the school.

Leonie Shanahan in the school garden

A lot of the elements were designed by the kids themselves. Leonie says its very important in the planning stage to give the kids a free rein in designing the shape of the garden. Her role is to tie all the ends together and make sure all the design aspects work.
Because the garden was on a sloping site, Leonie designed the site to harvest rainwater runoff to soak into the slope. She implemented a line of arrowroot plants to suck up and hold nitrogen into the soil.

To prevent easterly winds from scorching the vegetables, shade trees are used as well as a line of fruit trees are cleverly designed into the system to act as windbreaks.

Kids enjoying the vegetables

The garden has been growing now for two years and speaking with the children its clear that they enjoy visiting and picking vegetables from garden. One boy said, “I used to not recognize any of the plant bushes. I used to say – that’s just a bush…that’s another bush and so on. Now I recognize the individual tomato plants, basil plants, onion plants…”

Understanding where food comes from means the kids are more keen to try tasting fresh new vegetables.

Yesterday was Harvest Day at the school. It was the moment when kids pick all the produce and get busy in the kitchen. It was a culmination of two years of hard work for Leonie and a chance to step back and reflect.

Visit Leonie’s website.

Its not often that you get to meet a living legend everyday and lets face it, the term is bandied around for all sorts of people, sportsmen and even celebrities – all the time. But Peter Andrews is different. Here is a guy not afraid to speak his mind and more importantly – back it up with evidence. We were invited down last year by Tony Coote the owner of Mulloon Creek Natural Farms to look at the possibility of doing a documentary explaining  the work done on his farm.

Tony had seen our Water Harvesting DVD that we made with Geoff Lawton and was keen to put in a major network of swales on the surrounding hills of his property.

He had already started work on the creek with Peter Andrews and his Natural Sequence Farming technique to re-hydrate the creek and flood plains during one of the longest periods of drought in living memory. To be honest, we weren’t really that interested in the project as we had seen Peter Andrews already featured on ABC-TV’s Australian Story and felt that his system was well explained already.

But we were wrong.

Walking around the creek in the late afternoon, you couldn’t help but marvel at the network of leaky weirs and the chain of ponds that were restoring a featureless eroded channel into a wetland, complete with reeds, willows and a wide assortment of biodiversity. And yes it even looked beautiful because it looked – well – Natural – the way you would expect a beautiful creek to look. I was hooked. I took a heap of photos. I wanted to know more. How do you build something like this? What is the hydrology like under the soil? How would you explain it all?

So we flew down to Canberra in the winter of 2009 and started filming the Mulloon Creek Project.

Fast forward to the Field Day held here on November 1 2009 and Peter Andrews is the guest speaker. 250 people from all over the country have assembled in the barn to hear him speak.
Its 9am but the day is already warm.
Tony Coote introduces my wife Jane and myself to him around the back of the barn. Peter is sitting under a tree eating a peach and cracking a joke about Tony being the “headmaster” of the show.
He reaches down into the green grass and pulls up a clod of dirt and inspects the mulch in his hand. He explains that his system is quite simple, yet most people fail to understand it.
He points out the gleaming droplets of dew glistening on the grass and explains how the natural system functions.
You suddenly realise that this bloke is actually looking at the landscape like someone with uncanny x-ray vision – he’s pointing things out that we are not even aware of.

Over the course of the day, people are broken into groups and given a guided tour by volunteers who have studied what Peter has accomplished. The next day we meet Sue a tour guide on the farm who describes herself as a “rocket scientist” who studied physics at university but feels that what has seen and learnt at Mulloon Creek is of far more practical value.
She describes one of Peters engineering accomplishments. Diverting rainwater run-off down a steep slope into the creek. In a sudden downpour water is diverted off its course by building a large earth barrier near the creek to turn the rushing torrent and make it turn and hit the stream head-on. Whats the point of that I ask? She explains its elementary physics. When two forces meet they cancel each other out. The end result is that the water is pacified and slows down any removal of precious topsoil. Its simple techniques that looks rudimentary to us but is subtle enough in an elegant solution when applied to the natural system. Like boulders sitting in the middle of the creek. We grill Peter in an extensive interview why they are there. He looks at us like an exhausted parent does with a dumb child.
“Its like a Kayaker rushing down a mountain stream.” he says “Ever seen that on TV?” Apparently nature doesn’t move in a straight lines from A to B – but in elegant arcs and figure eight patterns. Peter harnesses those patterns in his design to mimic nature and divert water to flow naturally and improve the landscape.

Its slowly making sense. You realise how little we really do know.

The next day we meet for our agreed interview but Peter is missing. He’s up the hill above the homestead treating a horse with a foot problem. Mixing a secret ingredient he applies the remedy directly to the hooves of the horse and seals the poultice with a plastic bag wrapped around the foot.

“The vets don’t know about this.” he adds.

By this stage – I’m beginning to believe him.

The man has a love for these horses as he talks to them gently saying they are more sensible than humans.

“Horses were my living laboratory.” he says.”They taught me a lot.”

Later that morning we go down to the creek and record our interview with him. He grabs a thistle and sticks it in one shirt pocket and another weed Paterson’s curse is placed in the other top pocket. Hi knows this action will provoke some farmers who strive to poison these weeds from their property. But Peter sees weeds as fundamental to good pasture management. He looks like something out of a Thomas Hardy novel with those weeds bulging out of his shirt, as he sits perched on a rock grinning at us with good humour ready to reveal all.

And he does. Much more than I can say right now.

In this documentary we travel through much of Peter’s early life and in the course of this story he explains Natural Sequence Farming techniques and how it can be adopted to build fertility back into farm soils. But not before taking a swipe at multinational chemical companies who peddle their herbicides. He describes them as snake-oil salesmen. “We used to tar and feather them and run them out of town years ago!” he grumbles with a wry smile.

We hope to illustrate his theories with animation to show how the NSF process works. In the coming weeks we hope to post small video clips that highlight some of his ideas. His parting comment was “Don’t mix me up with that mob – Permaculture!” He has firm views about where he wants to take Natural Sequence Farming.

As we part, he sits in his car talking on his mobile phone. He winds his window down and extends his hand to me as I walk up to the vehicle. We shake hands.
I say to him. “You know Peter – You’re a living treasure.”
His soft brown eyes turn away and look somewhere else. He doesn’t say anything. He looks embarrassed.

The Peter Andrews documentary on Mulloon Creek will be released in 2010.