Neighbourhood Farm, an NGO in Cape Town South Africa, partnered with us to design and install their market gardens at local schools and at our shared site which was part of a hospital. We were also commissioned to design their permaculture gardens for the outdoor classrooms. We shared the hospital site with them for a period until relocating back to the UK in September of 2018. You can read more about their project here https://neighbourhoodfarm.org/about/
When we were living in Cape Town, we opened a Permaculture teaching centre on a farm which was called The Cape Farm House. It was located very close to the Cape Point nature reserve which brought many challenges, namely invasion and destruction from roaming baboon troops as well as porcupines and other wild critters. As the area was quite large we were not able to fence it in so we decided to rather teach permaculture which launched us on our teaching career. We ran workshops from the site where we pioneered our modular PDC which consisted of students attending once a fortnight to do one module of the PDC at a time. This system of doing a PDC was quite popular as it was also economical and allowed students to really integrate what they had learnt at each session before learning the next module.
The site was also a great space to teach other courses as seen below
GEODESIC DOMES & STRAW BALE GARDENING
Sweet Water Farm was a collaboration between 4 families where we attempted to grow organic crops inside a 25 metre, 5-span poly-tunnel. Although it was a fantastic learning experience, the project only lasted 4 months due to various reasons e.g, poor state of the tunnels, white fly and powdery mildew infestations and financial constraints when one of the partners had to leave the cooperative early on. We still got some great crops in those few short months
Urban Farmers is aimed at educating people in urban areas about the benefits of growing vegetable gardens, focusing on water saving methods. As we lived in quite an arid area, these workshops were very popular, especially during the severe 2 year drought. One of our most popular workshops was about Composting toilets as Cape Town had rationed everyone on 50 litres a day, which had to include all your cleaning, cooking, washing and toilet flushing. During this time we were also commissioned to put wicking bed gardens into private homes which really helped with keeping the plants hydrated during the sweltering heat.
EDIBLE EDUCATION IN SCHOOLS
Various growing programmes based on the schools' needs.
We began our journey when we were invited to be part of the founding members of the Eco Community for the Eco Island Project that was launched on the Isle of Wight in the UK. Pete went on to study Permaculture and Germaine studied Design for Sustainability and Eco Village design after this launch
