We are currently preparing the site here in Anse-Pitres, Haiti to host a Creole Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) course from the 3rd to the 14th of June.

We are delighted to offer this opportunity in collaboration with the SOIL (Sustainable Organic Integrated Livelihoods) organisation based in Port-au-Prince who are doing wonderful work there transforming wastes into resources. More can be found on their website here - http://www.oursoil.org/soil-to-help-host-a-permaculture-design-certificate-course-in-june/

The main teacher will be Jean Arnaud, SOIL’s Sustainability and Capacity Development Consultant. Jean was part of the award winning group, UMass Permaculture, which last year was recognized by President Barack Obama in Washington DC as Campus Champions of Change. He will be assisted by a local team trained by him in permaculture last year. We hope this will open up a huge amount of time to share with everyone involved in the course.

Creole PDC with Jean Arnaud

The course will be the standard 72 hour syllabus with a high emphasis on local practical applications including all topics as below:-

* Theory and principles of Permaculture

* Eco-friendly house placement and design

* Energy conservation techniques

* Recycling and waste management

* Organic food production

* Water harvesting and management

* Ecological pest control

* Drought-proofing

* Soil rehabilitation and erosion control

* Catastrophe preparedness and prevention

* Windbreaks and fire control

We no longer have any more places left on the course and so this page is mainly to ask for volunteer support in helping to with the logistics of the course such as cooking, site preparation work, hygiene management and all else that needs to happen to keep the course running. You will not receive a PDC but by giving this time you’ll have the opportunity to share a lot with all the participants, be a part of some of the lessons and so learn a great deal from the experience.

Please email us at sadhanaforesthaiti(at)gmail.com for further details in getting here and how you can be a big part of this course.

We hope to see you here soon…

This month we have been super busy with infrastructure work so that we can host a Creole Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) course in June 2013.

Firstly, a 70 year old architect came to build an amazing structure that he designed, built efficiently from locally available materials that gives excellent ventilation and can also survive a hurricane or earthquake. We liked the design so much, http://openarchitecturenetwork.org/projects/kreole_house, that we decided to build two.

We decided to place them in the back of our land where we have a big plate of bedrock that would be ideal for the huts to stand firmly on. Also in our overall site design the growing food forest will soon provide privacy to the huts too. We then played with the orientation using a template frame so that we got the best airflow through the huts from the natural site winds.

Setting the hut template with Bernard Fredette, the architect, in red shorts and the two Haitian young men that we trained to build more in the future

Once we were happy with the design we started to build, first the cement plate and then the wooden structure.

Building the wooden frame and sleeping lofts

As you can see from above it is a wooden structure of 2″ by 4″s.  It has a central pyramid that has 4 tetrahedrons (a polyhedron of four triangle faces) on each side, the face in the cement you cannot see. All those a fan of Buckminster Fuller will know that these structures are extremely strong due to being based off triangles. They are pinned together with metal pins and rebar in the cement plate.

Metal pins that hold the 2″ by 4″s together

This main frame was then strapped with more wood so that the metal (Aluzinc, made from recycled aluminium) roofing could be installed.

The final pieces of the roofing go on

Here’s how they look finished in the landscape.

After thirteen days hard work!!!

The two huts flying to the moon, with our up and coming food forest in the foreground

The huts are designed so that four couples can sleep in the triangle loft peaks and then the downstairs can either be used as a social/workshop space, or we can put bunk beds and so house up to 24 people in each structure.

This could be your morning wake-up view, watching the forest grow around you…

After finishing these huts we finished the roofing of our main hut teaching space so that we can comfortably host the Creole PDC course with SOIL that will run from the 3rd to the 14th of June. If you want to come join us in our work and sleep in one of these great new dorms then email us for more details at sadhanaforesthaiti(at)gmail.com

The site: Kitchen on the left, main hut teaching space middle, nurseries to the right, dorms in the background and the forest growing all around us!!!

We have just finished another 9-week vegan PDC course here in Haiti. 15 participants came to share and learn sustainable living whilst putting it into practice on-site, which bolstered our community numbers to over 30 at one stage. Having this many people allowed us to plant and look after thousands of trees in Anse-Pitres.

Sadhana Forest Haiti says “PEAS”

The long and on-site nature of this course format allowed us to go into real depth on the PDC syllabus and also carry out extensive practical applications. We energy cycled from our natural sponges to make raised bed gardens and created hot compost with the excess green manures.

We re-designed our existing gardens using natural patterns and planted more polyculture guilds of plants, as below with bananas, papayas, velvet beans, runner bean, pigeon peas, peanuts, pineapples, maniocs, sweet potatos, sunflowers, marigolds, edible leaves and local medicinal plants.

Classic Keyhole raised bed design growth

We also started techniques in soil building so we can build many more beautiful productive gardens. The one below is called Amrut Mitti, replicating nature using leaves to create soil.

We even put the start of a food forest on site by creating a system of Swales, Permy water conservation feature, on our land. We then planted them with a leguminous cover crop mix of alfalfa, beans, peas and pumpkins. The cover crop is beginning to come up already. We will soon plant a mix of leguminous (to fix nitrogen to the depleted soil) and fruit bearing trees; in the years to come we will be picking papayas, bananas, edible leaves, guanabanas, tropical almonds, custard apples, mangos, citrus fruits, coconuts and of course lots of Mayan Nuts.

Food Forest Swale

The course culminated in the design of two community gardens, one in a local kindergarten and the other around a family’s aquaponic system. By applying the design principles to real life scenarios the students got to put into practice what they had learnt from the course. We also got to implement some parts of the designs.

We also constructed rocket stoves from home-made bricks in local people’s houses.

Building “Home made” Rocket Stoves

Stay tuned for the announcement of our next PDC course with a team from SOIL that will be tuned to the local population being taught all in Creole with many local practical solutions. Let us know if you’d be interested in helping out…

That’s Sadhana Forest Permaculture!!!