Learn how you can permaculture a suburban or urban property
Discover planting techniques for a variety of locations in towns and cities – from window boxes and balconies, to green roofs and courtyards. Explore the many benefits that trees can bring to urban areas, and how permaculture ideas can help make cities more energy efficient. Find out how to set up a community garden, or consider joining a co-operative farm project.
This course offers a comprehensive overview of how permaculture principles and practice can be applied to towns and cities.
The skills you will gain in this self-paced online course:
- Appreciate the differences between different types of window box
- Know which window box conditions a variety of plants prefer
- Learn how to grow a wide variety of plants on high-rise balconies
- Recognize the best way to cultivate fruit trees in courtyards
- Understand the requirements for starting a roof garden
- Discover two types of green wall cultivation
- Appreciate the wide range of benefits trees bring to urban areas
- Gain knowledge about using permaculture to make cities more energy efficient
- Learn the numerous benefits community gardens can bring to a neighborhood
- Know the steps required to create a successful community garden
- Understand how land share schemes work
- Appreciate the benefits to all parties of a co-operative farm
You’ll learn what you need to provide in each of these situations to ensure robust plant growth and good crop yields. We’ll look at different types of containers in which to house your plants, the sort of soil that makes the best option for box and container gardening, the importance of effective irrigation in urban agriculture, and precautions to take against potential climatic conditions that urban locations are particularly prone to. We’ll also highlight some of the crop species that are suitable for each type of growing location, and show you how you can best ensure healthy plants.
The course also explains how access to a courtyard expands your growing options to take in fruit trees – which can be grown in containers a lot more easily than perhaps you might first think. Beyond individual growing opportunities, the course also examines collaborative cultivation strategies for urban areas.
The many benefits that community gardening projects can bring to a neighborhood include the following:
- Providing reasons for community engagement
- Providing fresh, healthy, seasonal food
- Improving local air quality
- Offering learning opportunities
From there, we’ll guide you through the steps to take if your wish to start your own community gardening initiative. You’ll learn how to work out the aims of the project, which services your local authorities may be able to provide, who to approach to source a site from, and how to maintain community engagement with the garden over the long term.
Build your self-sufficiency skills with a self-paced online learning experience
Leading on from community gardening, the course also explores two other options for collaborative permaculture practice – land share, and co-operative farms.
We also explore how permaculture principles can be effective in urban areas in ways other than food cultivation. So, for instance, the course looks at the many benefits that trees can bring to urban inhabitants – from muffling noise and reducing air pollution, to modifying temperatures given how the concrete an asphalt of tons and cities can raise the ambient temperature by several degrees – and how planting strategies can be used to make urban buildings more energy efficient.