To date you never touched yet the concept of Permaculture, mostly because you wouldn’t want to say the wrong things, you do not know enough about it to even attempt a broad insight.
All you can do is cut-n-paste writings on the subject, like the Wikipedia definition for the concept of “permanent agriculture”:
The word permaculture, coined by Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren during the 1970s, is a portmanteau of permanent agriculture as well as permanent culture. Through a series of publications, Mollison, Holmgren and their associates documented an approach to designing human settlements, in particular the development of perennial agricultural systems that mimic the structure and interrelationship found in natural ecologies.
Permaculture design principles extend from the position that “The only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children” (Mollison, 1990). The intent was that, by rapidly training individuals in a core set of design principles, those individuals could become designers of their own environments and able to build increasingly self-sufficient human settlements — ones that reduce society’s reliance on industrial systems of production and distribution that Mollison identified as fundamentally and systematically destroying the earth’s ecosystems.
But you are a lucky person, and sure enough in the next 3 months two budding Permaculture’s-concept-propagators are giving a series of talks in NSW, Australia, the first one being conveniently held within 5 minutes bicycle from your garden, see Milkwood Permaculture for details and bookings.
The Milkwood duo, Kirsten and Nick, will deliver the workshop, defacto actively doing something to reconnect people with land, spread the need for a sharper conscience towards nature and acknowledge the biosphere we’re part of.
I would also like to draw attention to their blog Planting Milkwood which is filling with great DIY videos and reviews published as we reading.
This guys interest you no end also because they are in the country, living a reconnection, from cities to land.
Here is one of the recent entries, where Kirsten go to an abandoned orchard to collect cuttings from an old Fig Tree:
Something you didn’t know and should be added to the Weedyconnection Database is another usefull information about willows, the leaves are used in this video for their high level of “growth hormones”.
Thanks Milkwood!