Maya Mountain Research Farm is a well established permaculture project with over 24 years worth of work. We offer an excellent opportunity to plug into an ongoing experiment in agroforestry, permaculture and renewable energy.

Here are the adventures of Gaiacraft Team members Delvin, Ali Ma and Tamara taking advanced permaculture teacher trainings with some of the masters and maestras of the movement. This document will share the experience and some of the learning highlights from this adventure in education. Ch...

Today's first task: building seedling flats so the villagers can germinate and tend to their seedlings before they're strong enough to transplant to the field.   We bought wooden planks and saws and began measuring and cutting the necessary pieces to build the seedling flats. 26 in total. W...

Today I have drawn my map of jobbies that I would like to see carried out on Saturday, which is when the first Permablitz that I know of will take place at my home. I am fearing (but loving!) a great assembly of people from many corners of the island, therefore I need to have very clear what I ca...

Planting seedlings into the vegie beds needs to happen while it's cool, hence the need for an evening gardening session. This session is open to the public - just enter the garden from Vannam Drive, Ashwood opposite Beechwood Terrace. We'll start at 6pm, eat a picnic dinner (BYO), then get stuck...

So Nick and our current permaculture interns set to work completely dis-mantling the rocket stove water heater and examining all its components. We made new discoveries and adjustments,  put it all back together, and then covered the whole thing with mud. Read More »

  We’ve snared Adam as a special guest teacher on our Urban Permaculture Design Certificate in Sydney in January 2012, where he’ll be taking the class through the mechanics of good urban permaculture design. In the meantime, however, I thought I’d share some of the design work that VEG h...

Since solving this problem is both necessary and interesting, we decided to develop an intern project around it. The brief: design, implement and plant a system that makes use of intermittent excess water, shelters the intern camp and shed, and provides a useful yield. Go, you fabulous ...

  It’s been an adventure of epic proportions to get to this point. But thanks to our amazing crew, and to Joyce and Michael of Allsun farm, it looks like this whole market garden thing might just work… Read More »

Forest garden in early spring (ie still plenty of frosts) Garlic coming up, and all the chickens a-laying... Spring is slowly but surely springing at Milkwood, and our new forest garden is beginning to wake up from the cold and grow, grow grow! Read More »

Above: The contour dam with the level spillway working   Above: The lockpipe at work   Above: The rain falling into the dam   Above: The Diversion channel feeding the dam

First day in the field – making compost!! Yesterday we gave the Pygmies one assignment: to clear the land we will be farming on, and collect all the weeds and foliage in piles. This morning we were thrilled to arrive and see a perfectly clean field, with green piles on either side. I...

The changeover from a classical suburban garden with a lot of exotic decorative plants to a permaculture garden that idealy would provide all the vegetables and herbes for our family and be a wildlife haven in the neighbourhood.

My home was designed as a final excercise in the PDC I attended in Oct 2011, and I thought upon coming home again... why not make the design reality??

  Around Moraro, there is food to be had for free. Forest fruit trees are every where but the choice is not up to us but to the season. One favourite is palm fruits. There are quite a few species and sometimes we have to brave thickets to get to the trees but the adventure is worth every effort...

We are always thinking of ways to reduce, reuse and recycle so recently, when I realised how common it is to see wood pallets thrown out in nature, on the side of roads, parking lots or junkyards, I thought 'what can I do with those?' The good news is that with a bit of imagination and some DIY,...

Today was a wonderful day, the perfect start to this project we’ve anticipated for so long!! Dom picked us up in the morning and we were off to see the Pygmies!  We drove along the edge of gorgeous Lake Kivu, past hundreds of people hard at work, tending to their plots of land… the...

We drove to the border. First we stopped at Immigration on the Rwandan side. During our 10 minutes there, we saw 3 United Nations vehicles with soldiers cross the border (both coming and going) and a USAID vehicle. So we got our stamp and carried on, across the wooden bridge that passes ...