Calendar for Renaissance Farms Permaculture
Courses and Events at Renaissance Farms Permaculture
RetroSuburbia: Making Your Home, Life, and Neighborhood More Earth Friendly
1 November @ 8:00 AM – 29 November @ 5:00 PM EDT
This is a course based on the book of the same title by David Holmgren, co-originator of Permaculture. This will form our spine, with other books brought in for support and inspiration.
This is probably the most important course I will offer to American students. We’re going to talk about how to completely retrofit your suburban home and property to go beyond even sustainability and carbon-neutral to being regenerative – having a POSITIVE impact on your own health, the environment, and on your neighbourhood.
We will meet for weeknights over the course of one month. We will work on understanding how to design a home using principles that can be applied to ANY property. Saturdays and Sundays are practicum. Students will come to the project site for hands-on work.
This November, the project site is at the farm. We will be retrofitting part of the original farmhouse. We will be installing a dual fuel furnace to reduce or eliminate reliance on heating oil, and we will be building a Walker stove to eliminate reliance on propane.
By the end of the course, you will be well prepared to start designing and installing systems for your home that reduce your energy consumption, your reliance on expensive inputs, and shrink your resource radius.
Connections formed with fellow classmates, I hope, will provide you with a network of folks to are able and willing to lend a hand on each other’s projects.
If you haven’t taken a PDC, it is highly recommended that you take that course to help you better understand the concepts we will cover in this course. That does not have to be done prior to this course, but you should plan to take it within a year of this one.
