When: 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM April 11-12, 2009
Where: MilePost Five Community, Portland, OR (Link)
Taught By: Leonard Barrett and Friends
Course Fee: $150-$90 sliding scale
Wondering how you can participate in land-based solutions to social and environmental crisis, without owning property? Confused about where to start?
For all of those folks who have thought or said “I want to practice Permaculture, but I don’t have any land,” Permaculture for Renters will provide a packed toolbox of strategies and methods that can be used anywhere: on balconies, while traveling, in tiny sideyards, indoors, on rooftops, and more!
Over the two day workshop, participants will come together with diverse members of their community to engage their heads, hearts, and hands in learning a wide-range of useful concepts and techniques that they can integrate into their lives no matter who they are or where they live.
This is a great opportunity for anyone searching for a way to be more effective in creating a more ecologically and social just world. Students, couchsurfers, renters, travelers, and even landlords will come away from the weekend feeling inspired and empowered.
Some of the topics covered in the course include:
- The Ethics and Principles of Permaculture, and how non-Land-Holders can Live By Them
- How to Create Edible Plant Micro-Nurseries to Pay Your Rent and Food-Forest Your Town
- Gardening in Small Spaces
- Mobile Container Gardens
- Plant Propagation
- Edible Mushroom Cultivation
- Guerrilla Gardening
- Land Access for Renters: Creating Interdependent Communities of Land-Owners and Non-Land-Owners
Additionally, you will leave with:
- Your choice of seed, nursery stock, and mushroom spawn to propagate.
- A web-based ‘virtual binder’ of readings and resources for further learning.
About the Instructor
Leonard Barrett is a landscape designer, contractor, educator, and renter based in Portland, OR. Through his firm, Barrett Ecological Services, he has collaborated on land planning projects with some of the regions best and brightest in sustainable design, including Mark Lakeman (Communitecture) and BEAM Development. Most recently he has been a visiting professor in the Environmental Studies department at Pacific University, teaching a 3-credit course entitled “Landscape Master Planning: A Permaculture Perspective.”
April 11-12 is the Easter weekend, so we have family obligations; any chance you will be offering Pc for Renters in Portland again before July?
Thanks.
Carie,
There is another workshop scheduled for June 20th-21st. It’s not posted on this site yet, but you can view the details and register for it at http://www.barrettecological.com
All the best!
Leonard
Will this workshop cover tactics that could be realistically implemented by someone based in NYC (w/access to not much more than a window flower box or fire escape and a healthy fear of cockroach infestation)?
Kara,
The theory covered during the lecture and discussion components of the workshop (about 40% of the total workshop) has been developed to be very useful no matter where you live. In terms of the hands-on and demonstration portions of the workshop, three of the four primary activities (vermicomposting, container gardening, and oyster mushroom cultivation) are extremely well suited to an urban apartment context. The other, backyard micro-enterprise, involves some information about techniques that require (as the name suggests) a backyard. But many of the ideas presented in that section are useful even if you don’t.
If it is any help, I just had some apartment dwellers from Los Angeles in the last workshop, and they found it quite useful for their situation.
Hope that helps!
Best,
Leonard