Creating Your Permaculture City: 7 Steps to Ecological Abundance

7 Steps to Ecological Abundance

[Video coming soon]

Do you want to...

• Learn how to grow huge amounts of food in small spaces?
• Save money on your energy bills?
• Drought-proof your yard and use less water?
• Discover how to create more livable neighborhoods?
• Reduce your reliance on money and build social capital?

In this online course you'll gain practical tools for growing food, designing comfortable, energy-saving outdoor and indoor living spaces, creating habitat, conserving and harvesting water, reducing and recycling waste, and shrinking your energy footprint. You'll learn ways to create and empower community where you live, make your own city or town more livable, and find meaningful livelihood and a more sustainable relationship with money.

We'll develop a complete urban and suburban permaculture toolkit using real examples from innovators in cities, towns, and suburbs. Based on Toby Hemenway's book, The Permaculture City, but going into greater depth, this course offers timely and easy-to-implement solutions grounded in permaculture principles and practice to the challenges that our increasingly urban world faces on the personal, local, and community levels.

Meet Your Instructor: Toby Hemenway

Toby Hemenway is the author of Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, which was awarded the Nautilus Gold Medal in 2011, named by the Washington Post as one of the ten best gardening books of 2010, and is the best-selling permaculture book in the world.

What You Will Learn:

This 7-week online course gives you both the theory and practical tools for using permaculture to enhance your life from the individual to community level. You will:

• Learn about growing food, designing comfortable, energy-saving living spaces, creating habitat, conserving and harvesting water, reducing waste, and shrinking your energy footprint — all using permaculture principles
• Discover ways to empower your community and make your city more livable
• Explore ways to develop meaningful livelihood and foster a more sustainable relationship with money
• Develop an urban permaculture toolkit using real examples from innovators
• Learn permaculture-based solutions for problems faced by our rapidly urbanizing world

The 7 Classes:

01 — Permaculture Design with an Urban Twist

How do we work constructively with the special conditions in cities, suburbs, and towns to grow food, build habitat, conserve water, use energy wisely, and live well? We'll explore how meeting our needs in town differs from the country, and introduce the four basic tools of permaculture design — zones, sectors, needs-and-yields, and highest use — with examples in small yards, homes, relationships, and work.

02 — Super-Abundance in the Small-Yard Garden

We'll see how the design tools from Session 1 help us grow huge amounts of food in small spaces, reduce pest problems, save water, shrink heating and cooling costs, boost biodiversity, and shrink the amount of work needed. We'll also see how classic permaculture ideas like guilds and herb spirals can be tweaked to fit the special conditions of the small yard.

03 — More Small-Space Strategies: Finding More Room for Gardening

You'll get familiar with specific methods for growing lots of food in tiny spaces, and how to assess what plants will be right for your own conditions and lifestyle. We'll look at vertical gardening, walls, containers, and mobile garden beds, and how to deal with toxic soils that often exist in city yards.

04 — Water Wisdom, Metropolitan Style

How can we reduce our water bill and the burden we put on city infrastructure? This session covers rainwater harvesting, graywater use in the small yard, and how to save water in the home.

05 — Energy Solutions for Homes and Communities

Tools for thinking about energy and how to use less of it without drastically affecting your lifestyle. What is the best kind of fuel or energy to use for different tasks? We'll learn to make wise decisions about energy use and shrink our carbon footprint.

06 — Livelihood, Real Wealth, and Becoming Valuable

We'll look at ways to reduce our dependence on money with innovative ideas like the eight forms of capital, and see how to create income security by becoming more valuable to our community. We'll also explore ways to find meaningful work and livelihood.

07 — Placemaking and Tools for Creating Empowered Communities

How can we make our cities and towns more livable? How can we help our neighborhoods become places of safety and community? This session looks at placemaking, re-shaping our neighborhoods to be more cohesive and vibrant, and how our local governments can be made more responsive to our needs.

What Others Have to Say:

"This has been nothing short of a life-changer, something that has already had a big impact on my perspective. Big ripples to come! Where do I plan to apply the knowledge I've gained in this course? A shorter list would be where this knowledge isn't applicable!"

— Greg Nelson, Healdsburg, CA

"I wish I had taken this course before I was vice-mayor. The regenerative design tools and strategies presented are so needed in local government. Other government officials would certainly benefit from these tools, which can be applied to crafting solutions to the toughest challenges, by taking an integrated approach to doing more with less."

— Tiffany Renee, Former Vice-Mayor of Petaluma, CA

"I want everyone I work with to take this course. The format and affordable price make this class very accessible to all. We are very blessed to have a great teacher like Toby."

— Soneile Hymn, Petaluma, CA

What You Get:

• Seven pre-recorded full-length online classes — always available at your leisure
• Weekly downloadable content in the Urban Farm U Member Site — videos, webinar links, PDFs, books and programs. Topics include insect- & bird-attracting plants, keyhole beds & herb spirals, aquaponics, container gardening, small-scale guild design, installing drip systems, stormwater harvesting, and more
• Access to the private, member-only Urban Farm Facebook group — get your questions answered by gardening experts, post garden photos, and feel supported and inspired
• Tons of extra content and resources — including a free e-book on microclimate, a DIY solution for chlorine-free water, and thought-provoking articles designed to inspire you to use permaculture to enrich your life and build livable communities

Plus, a FREE Bonus:

• GrowPhx Summit Videos — lectures on seed saving, regenerative design, backyard eggs & dairy, and using wood chips to create an oasis in your yard

Why This Matters:

Over half of the world's people live in cities; if you include suburbs, it's nearly 70%. Reaching people who live in cities and towns with tools for sustainability is a must if we are going to be good stewards of this planet. But beyond those social and ecological benefits, there are good personal reasons for taking this course: you'll learn ways to save money, save effort, save resources, and become more secure in food, energy, and livelihood. Plus, your yard will become a more beautiful, abundant sanctuary for you and for wildlife.

By taking this course, you'll enrich yourself in many ways while helping preserve this marvelous planet for future generations and for the rest of nature, too.