This Is What 20 Years of Permaculture Looks Like

Hi, Geoff Lawton here and this is the Zaytuna Farm classroom and this is one of the reasons that you might want to do a PDC, a Permaculture Design Certificate course, with us here at Zaytuna Farm. It's a beautiful classroom and we have a big open space and a beautiful scene behind the camera we've got beautiful trees and a beautiful view. We have a kitchen here if you choose to purchase your food from our gourmet chefs it's there and available otherwise you can self-cater and let me show you how beautiful the scene is and all the features that might make you decide this is the spot, this is the spot to take your Permaculture Design Certificate course. We live this life, we can show you what it's like. This property's been developed over 20 years, there's multiple features all across the site that we can share with you and you can live the experience while you're here. Let me give you a bit of a guided tour. You can walk straight down over a swale, pretty hard not to cross a swale at Zaytuna Farm. This one's quite damp at the moment, it's been raining. We come over a little rock bridge crossing and we're in the camping shelter area. So we have 10 camping shelters, book quick they're going to get booked out. So these camping shelters are in a nice unusual sort of funky food forest and it goes downhill from here with a fire break because we have to have a fire break down to a native regen forest. It's actually officially classified a camphor laurel emergent rainforest. Camphor laurels are a weed tree here but these are our camping shelters. It's a very beautiful place to camp up above the ground undercover so you can just be under a mozzinet if you want or a fly screen or just in a swag or you can put quite a big tent up on these systems and from here there's a track that walks you all the way down to the river. If I turn around then we go back up to our campsite. Now we have an extensive campsite, we're going to cross the swale again and bamboo hedgerows. There's a lot of bamboo here and alternative vehicles like ATVs and there's our water supply. We've got 12 of these 24,000 gallon tanks 115,000 litres roughly so we're oversupplied with drinking water and here is our beautiful campsite. It's a light globe ridge and it's encircled by a swale almost flat it just runs off to the swale on either side so it's very dry it's very open we have fire circles lots of firewood it's quite a scene when a course is running. Just across the driveway from the classroom we have a shower toilet block. All compost toilets here and we're all rainwater showers. We have examples of natural swimming pools, trellis walkways covered in passion fruit and grapes, perennial gardens, main crop gardens to raised bed gardens, food forests with multiple species of fruit trees. We have many variations of these from quite small to very large. You can literally get lost in a food forest here and walk your way through edible species in all directions. We have horses, we even have donkeys and we have our own milk supply. This is Lopsey and Hamida our Jersey dairy cows that we milk every day. We have beautiful little walkways around small miniature water systems driven by solar. We literally have solar streamlines running through food forest crops perennial and annual and little fish ponds dotted through the landscape. Level silt spillways that we demonstrate for you which make really good dog baths as you can see. Solar powered water supply to a lotus paddy fading into winter here but in spring it's just all lotus flowers and of course there's thousands of roots underneath all this that we need. Food forests, well they just pop up everywhere here and July it'll be citrus time so we'll have lots and lots of citrus and there's mixtures of fruit trees everywhere all around us. Right now we have a lot of carambola, asarola cherry, millennia deliciosa, all the exotics they're all here. We have chickens, quite a few flops right across the farm. Goats, quite a few different breeds, baby goats, mum goats, dad goats, all kinds of goats and some are just really noisy like this girl here, aren't you? Well you're not going to do it, there we go, that's an example. Want to come and say hello? Okay then, say hello, see they're even very friendly. Muscovy ducks, here's a breeding pair, Mr and Mrs duck, always happy and waggy. Bamboo and bamboo and bamboo, over 30 varieties and we're still collecting. We've got so many different bamboos it's hard to keep up with it but they're all useful. Ponds and small lakes and dams everywhere in the site and then old food forests that go for great distance, always connected by swales. Swales are just everywhere, top and bottom of all the food forests and the food crop everywhere here. Coffee's coming through here, coffee is a main understory and then we have climbing yams, bananas, loquats, mangoes and many different citrus, custard apples, brazil cherry, guavas, feijoas, the list goes on and on. It's an adventure just to walk through these extensive food forests that are just going really wild actually but they're still great fun and they're very productive with very little inputs. Our main crop bunya pines are dotted all the way through and they're fruiting heavily now, the largest nut crop in the world. This is a classic example of what can be done over time to create absolute abundance. We have road networks set up to harvest water that gets picked up by swales and everywhere there are crossing pipe drains that take water across the landscape under the access ways and through into hydration systems. Food gardens on every site around the property, there's eight households here, everybody has food gardens of some type, shade houses, little nurseries and food forests. Here's a rare black bamboo, a giant black bamboo just above a natural swimming pool. High up in the system we have larger, longer swales that trap very large amounts of water and soak it through the whole landscape. So the whole system is an integrated water harvesting setup. We have emergency swivel pipes that can take water out off the system when we're overloaded. This is 20 years worth of example that you can't see any other way than to actually come and experience it during your permaculture design certificate course, transformational event. There's over 30 ponds and dams on site, all different sizes, shapes and aesthetics. Our tracks around the farm are well maintained and they go right out through the old growth forests that have regrown since we've been here and some that were already here and we've maintained. We have wilderness, we have areas of forest wilderness, we even have wilderness camping sites in the forest itself. All of these are part of our system. This is what we call our zone five with some very large trees in parts of giant mother trees that have helped seed the whole forest over the years. Rainforest regen trees covered in ferns. There are rainforest gullies where water splashes through in rain events. If you're willing to walk off the beaten track through the old growth forest, there's a lot of wilderness to experience here. Well, there you go. I hope you enjoyed my rough cut tour of the site. It's a pretty detailed place. Come and join us. I'll be teaching you right here on this whiteboard. It'd be great to share the experience with you.