Passive Solar Greenhouses - A DIY Design Guide

I'm getting this free ebook in my email by instalments at the moment, and I really appreciate it's insights and quality so far.

It's written and published by Rob & Michelle Avis at Verge Permaculture in Calgary, Canada. Their website is www.vergepermaculture.ca (really good, loads of good resources) or click here for more info about getting the ebook.

The two rather random things I really like are:

1. All the references to dealing with snow, for example the load it can place on the roof, the angle of the roof for avoiding snow build-up, and the design of the knee wall to deal with snow. These are the kinds of details you rarely get in most of the literature I've seen where permaculture sites are in much warmer climes...

2. There's a real emphasis on good graphic design as well as good content. There's a huge need for permaculture to become more mainstream - for hundreds of millions of people to be using it in their daily lives. For this to happen the material needs to be good, and it needs to appeal to people who've grown up in the age of mass advertising. Of course this isn't the only reason for good design - design makes things more accessible in many ways too.

You can also see this emphasis on good graphic design on www.overgrowthesystem.com which Verge Permaculture are also associated with. Check it out - looks great.

Miracle Farms, a 5-acre commercial permaculture orchard in Southern Queb...

This is great, and in southern Quebec I bet they have cold winters like us in Podlasie...

Looking forward to some good eating!

One of the big aims for our land is to make it a fertile oasis full of fruit trees and vegetables and herbs and lots of things to eat - and probably organic ducks and chickens and pigs too... :)

I've known about and been interested in permaculture since 1997 when I first met Andy Goldring from the Permaculture Association, and I think this is the most effective way to achieve this abundance. Recently I've been enjoying and being inspired by Geoff Lawton's excellent short permaculture films, and this has distracted me a little from the housebuilding plans that have been going round my head since the new year.

Although that's the background to this post (and hopefully more to come soon) the WOW moment was when I followed a link from Geoff Lawton to Ben Falk, a permaculture designer and teacher from Vermont. He said (paraphrased from memory a couple of weeks past)...

"The produce from our land is so delicious and so healthy that we rarely get ill, and if we do we recover quickly"

So there's a lot of good new permaculture stuff appearing all over, but my taste buds have been working overtime in anticipation and I thought I'd refer to some other sources of good taste inspiration related to permaculture that I've enjoyed over the years.

So I'll start with our friends Rachel and Martin at Old Sleningford Farm near Ripon. They are certainly dedicated to good food and good living, and everytime we go there they tickle our tastebuds as well as our enthusiasm. They also have the most established forest garden in Yorkshire which is well worth visiting and volunteering in.

There's also Alan Carter from Aberdeen who writes the blog Of Plums and Pignuts which is full of taste inspiration as well as good information and good examples of testing and experimenting in his forest garden. He also has recipes and tips for using ground elder which will be useful as we've got plenty of that!

I'm now realising that this isn't and area that I've got lots of links for after all, but this blog is supposed to be a scrapbook for starting off ideas and developing them over time... It's also true that there are loads of tips for good food and good eating from lots of different permaculture related places. So hopefully I'll be able to share more tasty treats in the future

:-P