Wonderful memories! This summer marks two years since I completed a Permaculture Design Certification Course with Sowing Solutions at the Sirius Ecovillage in western Massachusetts. The training was very broad and diverse. We learned about stacking firewood, harvesting and drying garlic, sheet mulching, using a A-frame to measure slope, calculating rainfall on a roof, identifying wild plants, building a hugel mound, and a lot of talk about swales!
I also learned an incredible amount of stuff from my classmates, who came from many different backgrounds including an academic, a certified organic farmer, an Italian chef, and an herbalist. We spoke at every mealtime around a table of amazing homemade organic food, much of which was harvested on the grounds of Sirius.
At Rutgers I now teach a freshman seminar course entitled "Permaculture: Enabling Change for a Regenerative Future," and draw on a lot of the concepts and techniques I learned from the PDC course.