The long awaited PDC course, the first one in Finland probably for 15 years, just finished in Turku. It's been great to see things build up little by little and finally have a full PDC course to contribute to. So far most people (including myself) have had to go abroad to get the first immersion into permaculture in form of a PDC, and although the principles of permaculture apply in the same way anywhere on Earth, the cold north still is a quite unique environment for developing strategies for resilience and sustainability. 

We did import our main teacher from the UK, but also had many interesting local guests giving presentations about wild edible plants, urban foraging and gardening, Finnish forest gardens and permaculture applications in broad acre farming. The community and local resource base is surely building up! The venue, Koroinen, was a great place for having the course, being a rural oasis in the middle of the city of Turku. There are plans for developing the site towards a permaculture demonstration center, so the group also got in touch with a real life design challenge.

In addition to its northern location, the course was a bit unusual for a PDC in a sense that for foreign participants it was totally free of charge (including travels) thanks to funding from Grundtvig- the EU life long learning programme. For the Finns the price was also lower than usual, just enough to cover food and other costs. The flipside of this arrangement was that the 72 hour content, usually delivered over 14 days, had to be squeezed into only 10 full on days, which was sometimes quite challenging. For the organisers the tough bit had been selecting the participants from a huge number of applications, over one hundred of them! I must say however, that Aranya navigated through the content really nicely, with lots of activities and outdoor time. Or maybe the secret of successfullness was the Finnish wooden heated sauna we enjoyed in many evenings :)  

Despite the tough schedule the course was a great event, thanks to all the organisers, Aranya, all the participants and a great kitchen staff!