The Eldenbridge Institute team is looking forward to teaching another Permaculture Design Certification course this Fall starting August 27th. Permaculture is a design science that focuses on creating sustainable and regenerative systems, so if you are looking for an introduction to the principles and practices of sustainable design, this is the class to start with.

The course will be taught over a series of six alternating weekends and consists of over 72 hours of lecture, hands-on training, and a design project. If you are interested in the course, visit our event page for more information, including what some of our students from last year had to say about the course.

We are also excited to announce that the Eldenbridge Institute is now accepting applications for a full scholarship to be awarded to an outstanding high school student for the 2016 PDC. If you know a high school student (upcoming Junior or Senior) who shows interest and potential in Permaculture design, please let them know about our Fall 2016 PDC Student Scholarship. We are offering one scholarship which covers the entire cost of the PDC. The application can be found and completed online here. The deadline for applying is August 7th and we will be announcing the finalists for the scholarship before August 14th. We are looking forward to meeting all our finalists for an in-person interview to help us decide who will be the best candidate to join us for this year’s PDC.

On the weekend of May 14th, the Eldenbridge Institute teamed up with the Huntsville Botanical Gardens to present our Learning to See Plants class, which focuses on the fundamentals skills needed to start exploring the world of plants, botany, and wildcrafting. Instead of focusing on learning just a handful of specific plants, this class teaches students to see the basic patterns of a plant’s structure so that they will be able to leave the class with the confidence to pick up a field guide and start identifying plants on their own.

Class exercise on identifying annual plants

Many people just starting out with plant identification run into the “wall of green” syndrome, finding that they lack the basic pattern recognition skills required to pull the important details out of all the visual clutter. This class helps students create the search images that enable them to see past the wall of green and actually perceive the specific patterns that let them see the subtle differences between the different families of plants.

Identifying poison ivy

Students took home a graphic step-by-step guide on identifying broad-leaf plants created by Jesse, our media coordinator and resident artist. If you missed the class, you can still get yourself a copy as we’ll be sending it out in the next monthly newsletter. Sign-up for the newsletter here in order to get your copy.

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Building a Thermophilic Compost Pile

We held our Soil Fertility: Compost, Compost Tea, and the Soil Food Web workshop at UAHuntsville on April 9-10, with a really great group of students who all wanted to better understand how to create more fertile soil naturally and without chemical fertilizers or biocides. The class included a discussion of soil life and microbiology, along with a hands-on demonstration of brewing compost tea, creating a compost pile, and analyzing soil samples with the microscope.

Having good soil fertility is the foundation of a healthy garden or productive land. Modern agricultural practices are resulting in the lose of topsoil at an alarming rate. Our goal for this class was to help students learn how to actually create healthy topsoil, a fundamental practice in regenerative Permaculture design.

The theme of the class was how to use biological cultivation, using the microbial processes that builds soil fertility in natural ecosystems, instead of chemical cultivation. Composting is one of the cornerstones of biological cultivation, so we spent time building a hot compost pile (known as thermophilic compost), one of the fastest ways to turn organic matter into high-quality biological fertilizer. We then took some of our compost and used it to make an aerated compost tea, which is used to help inoculate the soil with beneficial soil microbes. We also looked at a vermicomposting system (composting by worms) and how to harvest the worm castings, which many gardeners call “black gold.” Finally, we took some soil samples from the compost tea brewer and garden to look at under the microscope to see how well our soil microbiology was doing. Using an inexpensive microscope to look at your soil turns out to be surprisingly easy and is one of the best ways to assess the health of your farm or garden.

Looking at Soil with the Microscope

We really enjoyed getting to know this group of students and hear about their plans to use all the information they learned. We are planning on teaching this class again next Spring, so keep an eye on our event listings if you missed this year’s class.

Jesse at the Learning Garden

Alan and Jesse attended Seed School Teacher Training (SSTT) last week in Los Angeles, CA. This teacher training course was presented by the Rocky Mountain Seed Alliance and hosted by the Seed Library of Los Angeles (SLOLA). The class came together to deepen their seed-saving knowledge and to learn how to better teach seed saving and biodiversity preservation in their respective bio-regions. The class delved into advanced topics in selective breeding, seed harvesting and storage, seed patents, and the operations of seed libraries and seed banks. The goal was to create additional teachers who are qualified to present the full 5-day Seed School curriculum developed and taught by Bill McDorman over the past decade. Bill has taught Seed School over 30 times during the past few years, resulting in major advances in the preservation of local heirloom varieties of many important crops and the creation of a number of new seed banks and seed libraries.

From Alabama to California, East coast to West, all areas of the U.S. were represented in the SSTT group, each participant sharing their own skills and experiences from different climates and growing conditions. Everybody left better equipped to go out and teach seed saving to others in their communities in an effective and powerful way.

One of the highlights of the class was a visit to the Learning Garden at Venice High School, which is managed by David King of SLOLA. The Learning Garden is also one of several locations housing parts of SLOLA’s seed bank, allowing local high school students to see an example of what an established seed bank can look like.

Heirloom Corn Seed

The Eldenbridge Institute is in the early planning stages of bringing Seed School to the Southeast for the first time, possibly in 2017. Sign up for our newsletter for updates and to learn how you can get involved.

PDC students examine a soil sample to determine the ratio of sand, silt, and clay

After six weekends of intensive lecture and hands-on activities spread out from late August through early November, the first group of Eldenbridge PDC students were awarded their Permaculture Design Course certifications by our lead instructor, Alan Booker, after successfully completing and presenting their design projects to wrap up the course.

Each student had to complete and present a Permaculture design plan for the entire 60+ acre property of Duncan Farms, including a detailed design for integrating production systems that ranged from forest gardens to aquaculture and rotational grazing of cattle and poultry in silvopasture systems.

One of the main challenges faced by students was the fact that a part of the property is located on a flood plain, creating the problem of often having too much water instead of not enough. This required students to include earthworks elements in their designs that help redirect and channel the water into ponds and other water catchments where appropriate while allowing excess water to move smoothly off the land without creating erosion or flood conditions on the property itself.

Heavy early-morning fogs rolling off the surrounding hills contribute to the overall dampness that students had to account for with their designs

All of the design projects showed a good grasp of Permaculture design principles and we are proud to send our first batch of PDC graduates out into the world to start learning and deepening their design expertise.

We are considering scheduling another PDC for the fall of 2016, so sign up for our mailing list if you are interested and we will keep you informed about upcoming classes and events.

The Eldenbridge Institute took over the Cell Biology Lab at the University of Alabama in Huntsville last Thursday night to spend the evening teaching how to use the microscope to assess the health of soil and compost.

Many people are familiar with the idea of chemical soil tests that look at the presence or lack of soil nutrients, but the microscope is actually a much better tool for figuring out the health of your soil when you are farming or gardening using organic techniques. Plants in organic systems get many of their nutrients via a symbiotic relationship with soil micro-organisms such as bacteria and fungi, meaning the best way to understand the fertility of your soil is to look at the health of the soil food web.

After an introductory discussion on how to tell the “good guys” from the “bad guys” in the soil, the class got to go hands-on with the microscopes and look at live soil samples. Several students brought their own samples so they could see how things looked in their own gardens or compost piles.

In addition to the students who are currently taking the Eldenbridge PDC course, the attendees spanned a wide spectrum, ranging from local farmers to graduate students and faculty in the UAH Biological Sciences Department.

The microbial ecosystem of healthy soil is rich in life and variety, with many thousands of species of bacteria, fungi, protozoa, and nematodes connected into a complex trophic web. In order to allow us to sort out the good organisms from the bad, we discussed how to use morphology-simply looking at the size, shape, and color of the organism-to help categorize them all into groups that would tell us the story of what was happening in the soil.

The Eldenbridge Institute is currently planning on offering an hands-on weekend course in soil fertility, compost, aerated compost teas, and soil microscopy coming up next spring. Watch our calendar for dates, or join our mailing list to receive our monthly newsletter.

We are excited to announce that on October 24, 2015, we will be hosting an open house from 5:30 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. at Duncan Farms, a 15 minute drive east of downtown Huntsville, Alabama.

Everyone is welcome to attend and the event is free. We will be meeting in our new 20-foot Sioux-style tipi and sharing our plans for the Eldenbridge Institute for the coming year. We are already planning on a number of great classes on a wide range of topics from Permaculture to nature connection to health and nutrition, and would love to hear about your interests to help us better plan exciting events for 2016.

We hope that you will be able to come enjoy some warm apple cider around the fire in the tipi with us. See our Open House page for more details and to register.

Our new 20-foot authentic Sioux style tipi.

Our head instructor, Alan Booker, recently had the opportunity to present a graduate seminar to students and faculty of the Biological Sciences and Earth Systems Sciences departments at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

An example of erosion taking place along the Indian Creek Greenway.

The seminar, titled Deep Ecosystem Repair Using Permaculture, covered a number of examples from around the world of how Permaculture is being used to repair distressed and degraded ecosystems and landscapes. From the work of Geoff Lawton in showing how to re-green the deserts of Jordan, to Allan Savory using high-impact grazing techniques with cattle to restore prairie ecosystems in Africa, to the techniques being employed by Sepp Holzer in reversing the desertification spreading across much of southern Europe, Permaculture has an impressive track record of solving hard problems in pretty much every biome and climate region.

After a survey of the solutions that Permaculture has offered in other regions, the focus turned closer to home with some pictures of watershed and soil erosion problems in the immediate area of the UAHuntsville campus. Alan finished up the seminar with a discussion of the kinds of ecosystems repair needed in our own backyards and some strategies for starting the process of healing the ecosystems right here in north Alabama.