How to Choose the Right Permaculture Design Course

Looking for a permaculture design course? There are plenty to choose from—here’s how to find the right permaculture course to meet your needs.

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My First Permaculture Design Course

When I first began hearing about permaculture in the early 2000s, it was barely a whisper in the wind. There wasn’t much of a permaculture presence online so I didn’t know a whole lot about it. Nonetheless, something told me I needed to check it out.

When I stumbled across a permaculture design certification course (PDC) being taught in my city, I signed up.

Hind Sight is Always 20/20!

I should have compared the class I was about to take to other PDCs offered around the country.

I also should have looked at the teacher bios to see if the teaching style of the instructors would resonate with me. After all, 72 hours (the instruction time required to receive the certificate) is a long time!

I should have looked to see if the instructors would frame the information in a way that was relevant to my life, interests, and needs.

Luckily, my local PDC had great value for me and I met some great people who have been supportive of me and my journey. I was able to grasp a cursory understanding of permaculture and enough confidence to continue learning through my own practice.

Actually, this is the goal of any PDC. However, there are rumors of instructors who fail to meet this goal, either through lack of experience or lack of planning.

Nowadays, we’re more easily able to use the internet to connect to people and courses both locally and afar, to hopefully find an educational experience that meets our needs. Taking an in-person course locally is a really great idea. There’s no substitute!

To learn more about permaculture, see my article What is Permaculture? OR browse my other articles on permaculture.

The backyard permaculture-designed food forest includes a number of edible perennials, annual crops, and flowers.

6 Questions to Ask Before Choosing a Permaculture Design Course

If you’re interesting in taking a standard, 72-hour permaculture design certification course, there are many options.

The following is a series of questions to ask yourself when searching for a course. These questions will help you define your goals and interests surrounding permaculture so you find an appropriate course for you. They might also help you save time and money.

1: Why do you want to learn permaculture?

There are a lot of prominent permaculture teachers and “gurus” out there who would be excellent to learn from, but don’t let star status get in the way of picking a permaculture design course that meets your needs.

Unless you have all the time and money you need—then by all means take all kinds of courses and learn from many different teachers! 🙂

For the rest of us, we need to make sure we’re spending our time and money wisely, learning what will be most relevant to propel us further with our goals.

Which leads me to the next consideration: Be specific about your goals.

Front yard pepper plants with sweet alyssum living mulch

You’ll find an introduction to permaculture plus step-by-step instructions for many permaculture techniques in my award-winning book, The Suburban Micro-Farm.

2: Do you have specific needs or interests?

If your goal is to develop a specific site, define whether it is a large-scale, rural property or a small-scale, more urban or suburban property. Many permaculture design courses nowadays focus heavily on a niche category.

Next, consider what the climate is like on your site. A course taught in the desert might be interesting, but don’t expect the lessons to be completely relevant to your temperate climate.

Although a PDC covers skills that should be relevant across many types of scenarios, you’ll likely have hands-on work projects in the course. Wouldn’t it be nice if that work correlates with your own site’s climate and conditions?

Likewise, if international non-profit work is your interest, look for a course that covers a wide range of climates, and even perhaps a teacher who focuses on this kind of work.

3: Do you want to learn by-the-book permaculture or a specific permaculture technique?

The permaculture design certificate (PDC) is a very specific 72-hour course. The standardized course is designed to give students a foundational knowledge of permaculture ethics and principles.

The content is generalized and skims over all climates, soil types, scales of property, etc. Many people start with a PDC, but in my opinion, a certification isn’t always necessary, especially if you’re not planning on practicing permaculture as a professional.

Of course, you’ll have a better understanding of the concepts and principles by taking an official PDC, but you might be able to learn some of the basics by taking an introductory class.

Again, it depends on what your goals are.

Once you have a solid foundation of permaculture principles, you may be more interested in a course that hones in on specific permaculture techniques or areas of study, such as water management, food forestry, plant guilds, etc.

A quick-growing broccoli hedge fills the space while baby currant plants take time to grow.

4: Do the permaculture “extras” interest you?

Permaculture is a design approach for growing food efficiently with ecological integrity, with a focus on the ethics of earth care, people care, and sharing the surplus.

Sometimes the waters get muddied when permaculture instructors dig deeper into socio-political, spiritual, or dietary conversations and apply permaculture ethics to them based on their own perspectives in life.

This can be instructive if you have an open mind.

However, if these “extras” don’t interest you, you’ll want to sift through permaculture design course descriptions and instructor bios to know if these extras will be a focus in the course.

My permaculture-designed fruit tree guilds in the front yard

5: Find the Right Instructor(s)

Have you ever had a teacher you loved but when you mentioned how much you liked her to your friends they were like, ‘I can’t stand Ms. So-and-So!’

We all like different types of teachers. Some teachers are dynamic, funny, personable, and engaging. They go on long tangents with stories that may or may not be on topic. Other types of teachers are no-nonsense, factual, well-researched, and to the point with information.

Whichever style resonates with you, the instructor(s) should be able to communicate clearly and passionately. Their bio, portfolio, and/or testimonials should demonstrate that this is the case.

Seek out those who resonate with you.

My front yard permaculture design with a show-off kitty!

6: In-person Permaculture Design Course or Independent Study?

I can say without hesitation that an in-person permaculture design course will be the most valuable commitment you can make to your progress in learning about permaculture. There simply isn’t a replacement for direct interaction with human beings.

However, if you don’t have time for a big commitment, then self-paced, online courses have really upped their game.

Check out this online Permaculture Design Course that I co-teach with 40 sought-after teachers from around the world!

Or, here’s a 4-DVD set to watch.

One of my favorite books that I recommend for beginning independent study is: Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture.

The Permaculture Yard Class is meeting in my front yard!

Searching online for in-person, local, and/or online permaculture design courses is going to help you find the most choices.

Kick your Learning into High Gear

After my PDC, I went on to practice permaculture in my own front yard, and at my community garden before I began teaching and consulting. It is only through project-based experience that I have the confidence to write the words on this page.

You can read all the books in the world, but official courses—whether in-person or online—and project-based experiments will be what give you the confidence to design appropriately and learn from the results.

Summary

When searching for the right permaculture design course, be clear about what your goals are, and whether a particular course/instructor will meet your needs. Independent study will get you started, but in-person classes and project-based learning will help you soar.

Comments

Braden Trauth says

Great article Amy, A lot of great points, which it can be really confusing out there to find good teachers and you share some good info to find good ones. As a comment, I would add to the Ethics from Mollison’s perspective of “Return the Surplus” or “dispersal of surplus time, money and materials towards these ends (care of the earth and care of people)” – ‘Introduction to Permaculture’. Holmgren states his third one as “Set limits to consumption and reproduction, and redistribute surplus” from his 2003 Permaculture publication, which I would suspect he refers to both people and the earth given his further writing.
Another thing worth mentioning is a student just told me today that in “The Permaculture Orchard” (which was the first time I had heard of that resource) that he interplants with honey locust for nitrogen fixation in his orchard, which if that is true it might be best to avoid as there is limited research supporting it as a nitrogen fixer (only Yale turned up some research that it ‘could’ be an N Fixer as there was some evidence it produced it in the root. It doesn’t have the standard nodules as other N-fixers do. Almost every other resource including the USDA state that it is not an N-Fixer), which black locust, goumi, sea buckthorn or Alder might be a safer choice for guaranteed N fixation.

- Amy says
  
  Great point about N fixation. Would be good to know if anyone follows his example and has success with honey locust. Otherwise the video has been an excellent resource.
  
farmer Liz says

Great post! Thank you for mentioning that you can get a lot from books and your own observations. I personally haven’t done a PDC, but over the past 4 or 5 years I have read every permaculture book in my local library and I own a few myself, including Gaia’s Garden and Holmgren’s Permaculture Principles (which I have read three times). I just have not had time to do a PDC, but I do learn from reading books and trying things for myself, so I feel that I now have a pretty good understanding of permaculture. However I often feel excluded from the conversation because I don’t have the “official qualification”. I think permaculture should be inclusive of people who just want to learn gradually at their own pace and can’t get to a PDC for whatever reason. AND we should talk about it more so that its not so mysterious 🙂 I try to mention it at least once a month on my blog Eight Acres.

- Amy says
  
  Great point–we’ve all learned permaculture in different ways and from different sources. The important thing is that we talk about it more, and share our experiences so we can learn from one another. Feedback from others is super-important, and luckily the internet gives us a lot of opportunity to share and help one another if we can’t find that support locally.
  
  I’ve designed lots of permaculture designs that I thought were pretty cool, but it was the feedback from others (think: two heads are better than one) that made those designs more resilient. Even the “pros” request and benefit from feedback. Great topic–thanks 🙂
  
Sherry says

Have you posted your pdc design anywhere? I’d love to see it! I’d also like to know more about your plantings. I have the same situation with lots of trees, and they aren’t coming down because we rent and they provide much needed shade for hot Texas summers.

- Amy says
  
  Haha. I have no idea where my PDC design is. Those were the days that we did all the designing on paper. Too bad we didn’t do digital copies then! 🙂 My articles on Front Yard Rain Catchment and An Edible Landscape tour will give you an idea of the plantings that worked for me.
  
Sherry says

Thanks!

Asyfar says

hi amy, great write up its an eye opener for me,
i fell in love with permaculture for the pass few months, i am looking for aquaculture teachers that can teach for tropical climate as i am living Malaysia. do you have any recommendations?