Free online permaculture classes
Without an intern, Mark and I
are back on the job of not only fulfilling chicken waterer orders, but also building
the kits and premade units ourselves. We've really streamlined
the operation over the last year, so the actual construction only takes
us each two or three hours per week. Still, those hours always
call to me to work on my weaknesses since my mind is free and my hands
are busy.
This summer, I've opted
to use my construction time to take a refresher course on basic
permaculture while also improving my shoddy listening comprehension
skills. North Carolina
State University's free online permaculture class seemed like the perfect way
to kill both birds with one stone since the course format is videos and
the information is pretty local (from about 280 miles southeast of
us). As an added bonus, the required texts for the course are two
books I skimmed years ago and have been meaning to reread with a
fine-tooth 
comb --- Gaia's
Garden and Introduction
to Permaculture.
I'm not committing to listening to all 38 lectures since I think the
summer may be long over before that happens, but I'll post about the
tidbits from the lectures I do make it through. Feel free to
listen along and comment with your own thoughts!
(As a side note,
Regenerative Leadership Institute also has a free online
permaculture course.
I chose NCSU's instead because they're physically closer to me, plus
RLI's videos weren't online when I began listening (although a beta
version is up now). I'd be curious to hear from anyone who
chooses RLI's course instead, or listens to both and would like to
compare and contrast. Or perhaps you've found yet another free
online course you prefer? Or maybe you paid for an online course
and thought it was worth the money? Please do comment if any of
those possibilities sound like you!)
And don't forget to tune
back in tomorrow at lunchtime to read my thoughts after listening to
lectures 1 and 2....
Or explore more posts by date or by subject.
About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Hi Anna and all,
I found Bill Molison's 4 global gardener videos (approx. 30 min each) very informative but the accent was a little hard.
I started the ncsu series but found myself getting impatient, so I am looking forward to your [ anna ] reviews to see if I should just stick it out.
John