We did it! Hurray!

We've all been busy over the past couple of days, working in groups to complete the survey, analysis and design for our assigned permaculture sites.  Then we had to design a presentation to show and tell an audience about the process we went through.

Now, one day after the official closing ceremony of the first Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) course in Lebanon, I am proud to present the first batch of permaculturists graduating right here in Lebanon:

1st PDC Graduates in Lebanon
Saidoun (Jezzine caza), May 18-31, 2014

• Bassam Al Khawand
  
• Ghassan Al Salman
  
• Tony Chahine
  
• Jihad Chanehsaz
  
• Joey El-Khoury
  
• Dana El-Sayyed
  
• Maya Karkour
  
• Salim Khalil
  
• Sarah-Lili Yassine
  
• and myself, Alexis Baghdadi
  

What a fantastic group! Thank you for all your energy and enthusiasm; you made this an unforgettable adventure!

And to our wonderful instructors, Klaudia and Betty, we owe you so much and we really value your knowledge and your kindness. 

The permaculture seed has been planted in Lebanon!

Now the real work begins: to put the learning of permaculture and permaculture design into practice.

There's not much time to blog tonight. We've been thinking of designs and mapping our design sites almost all day, only to find out we hadn't given a thought to presentations yet!

And to make things worse, Betty isn't here anymore!

Thankfully, Klaudia has been really there for us all day, even taking on us on a short foraging expedition that proved to be hugely fun and instructive. All we did was walk some 200 meters along an small asphalt road within Saidoun, and we came across almost 20 interesting wild plant and tree species, both medicinal and edible ones! Combining the invaluable local plants savvy of Bassam Khawand and the impressive encyclopedic knowledge of Tony Chahine with Klaudia's herbal lore was quite a treat, and we had the opportunity to put some of this into practice: 4 days ago, Joey Khoury had been playing too close to some beehives and one bee had stung him in the calf and caused him a serious inflammation. A commercial treatment didn't do a thing to improve Joey's condition, but as soon as he followed Klaudia'a recommendation to chew some plantain and apply its juices on the sting area, the red swelling started subsiding!

We have to complete our designs and presentations tomorrow! So we'll talk later.

Wish us luck.

Today our PDC co-instructor and new friend Betty Khoury said goodbye to us after lunch to head back to the airport and fly to Cairo where she had prior engagements.

Not having Betty around was a real downer for us, as we had become addicted to her smile and her cheeriness since she arrived. She never missed an opportunity to share her knowledge and resources with us, and was always ready to offer advice and support.

This was also our third day in the field, measuring and sketching away on our design sites and feeling a little lost. Our permaculture designs are slowly starting to take shape on paper but we have no idea what to do with them.

This will be a short post since I have to go think about the design I am working on with my team.

Until tomorrow then.

Betty, if you are reading this, we love you! Please come back!

The Jlal at-Tormos organic farm proved to be a very interesting site to visit - and it gave us the chance to share a bus ride. It was an hour-long ride to Joun in the Chouf caza but it was well worth the trip.

Jlal at-Tormos is located on an arid slope that has seen extensive grazing and wildfires for a good number of years. Nestled inside a wind barrier of fir trees, Jacqueline Jreissati and Mostafa Sleiman have single-handedly regenerated the soil and planted different varieties of fruit trees and vegetables the organic way. The farm sends fruit and vegetable baskets to subscribers all year and constantly experiments with new varieties.

It was interesting for us to see some of the permaculture concepts we learned about being applied in this small spot. The famous "3 Sisters" guild of beans, corn and pumpkins was especially visible on many terraces. Betty and Mostafa traded recipes for promoting effective microorganisms as we made our way downhill to the farm's chicken coop.

After we got back to Saidoun and had a hearty lunch, we talked a little more about group dynamics and non-violent communication. We then returned to our assigned sites and continued mapping under a hot sun until dinner.

The evening was a very special one as we initiated a talking circle and really opened up to each other.

We now come to the bittersweet realization that we are three quarters into the course and we are really intent on making the best of the time we have left.

See you tomorrow.

So now we've officially embarked on the design phase of the PDC, and we couldn't wait to see the sites set up for us to design.

3 sites in Saidoun and nearby Rimat were outlined for us, including the land around the houses of Rita Khawand and Bassam Khawwand from SOILS. But before we got to go there, we talked about working in groups and understanding the dynamics of teamwork. In any group, there is a normal progression along different phases from forming to norming, storming, performing and finally, celebrating.

As the suspense mounted, Klaudia Van Gool gave us an extensive crash course in basic mapping for permaculture, refreshing in our minds lessons about geography we had learned as kids. Then we had one more practical session where our instructor Betty Khoury taught us to build an A-frame and a "Bunyip" (basically a transparent tube folded in a U-shape and filled with water to reach equal levels) to trace contours along a slope. It was quite an exciting and  challenging exercise. For Sarah Lily Yassine and Maya Karkour who are actually urban landscapists and architects, it was fun to go back to these basics in their specialization.

Finally, equipped with pen and paper, we formed 3 groups which headed for each of their designated sites with a single instruction: map, don't design. With all the possibilities that Klaudia and Betty opened for us in the past week, it was a little hard to stick to this, but we carried on.

Over the next few days, we will have more visits to our sites and gradually understand their location, soil and other specifications so we can come up with permaculture designs for them.

In the evening, several of us organized a sharing session where they demonstrated skills which could definitely be of use to us in permaculture or for recreational purposes. Bassam gave an expert presentation on grafting according to local lore, Joey El Khoury brewed some Kombucha tea with a mushroom he had brought with him from Canada, Sarah got us sketching and understanding light and shadow, then Joey and Jihad Chanehsaz got technical with photography. Then before calling it a night, Ghassam Al Salman and Salim Khalil, the "Gusleem Band", broke down playing the guitar and percussions for us. What was meant to be an hour-long session actually extended to 3 full hours of fun which we had to cut short so we'd be awake for our visit to an organic farm tomorrow.

We'll tell you all about this in our next post. For now, goodnight and good thoughts.

On Saturday we went mostly with how we were feeling, but we managed to get a lot of information and meet interesting new friends who shared their knowledge and positive energy with us.

In the morning, we were joined by Fadi Kanso, an eco-consultant and grower who only recently returned to Lebanon started growing natural food. Fadi brought with him delicious peppers, eggplants, cucumbers, tomatoes, capsicums, lettuce, thyme and mint from his garden. Together we talked about sustainable energy in an around buildings. The first step in meeting the energy requirements of a house or any other building involves a survey of its needs and available solutions in terms of feasibility, cost-effectiveness and sustainability, ideally making use of the building's placement and location, as well as locally available materials.

Klaudia then explained the inspiring ideas behind transition towns and how permaculturists, envrionment activists and other health-conscious citizens have started making the transition to more eco-friendly cities.

This brought us to talk about natural techniques of building houses, using earth, wood (even living wood!), stone, straw and even recycled materials. Our friend Nathalie Rosa Bucher also dropped in with Joseph Brakhia, a permaculturist and architect who told us about his experience in introducing people in Lebanon to permaculture. A bit further south from Saidoun, Joseph has completed a permaculture garden of 1,500 square meters with 50 different species of trees and food plants, some trees producing food. For him, seeing us hold the PDC for the first time in Lebanon - 20 years after he completed his own PDC in Australia - was an encouraging sign of hope for the growth of the movement.

For Joseph permaculture is the optimal production of food on a small piece of land, for which it is crucial to know botany, particularly local indigenous plants. “I never made a penny out of permaculture, but I made amazing friends and had great food, here in Lebanon we’re still in the preaching phase," he said.

Later in the afternoon, our PDC co-instructor Betty got all of us busy trying to produce biochar using a home-made Beaner Stove. Biochar is similar to charcoal and is an effective way to sequester carbon in the soil to enrich it. It is obtained by burning biomass in a low-oxygen environment (pyrolysis). To produce pyrolysis, we experimented with 2 soda cans in which we cut out holes and tried to burn wood using a low flame for low consumption. We met with some mitigated success but it is worth looking into the process in more detail.

Sunday was our day off where some of us took a long hike on the outskirts of the village while others joined the villagers to watch the Jezzine rallye passing through Saidoun and make new friends. It was a good opportunity to relax and slow down after an exciting first week.

Tomorrow starts the second week of the PDC and we can't wait to get started again!

A PDC is not any regular boring course; it is an organic thing that takes a life and rhythm of its own and adapts to meet the participants' needs and the challenges along the way.

Today's "program" shaped up to be an interesting melting pot of topics. First, we talked a little about the flaws in the current prevailing consumer system from production to waste in most "developed" countries. The Waste Hierarchy pyramid ranks the different ways of treating waste from the worst (dumping and landfills) to better solutions like composting, reusing and reducing consumption, up to prevention and elimination (no waste). Rita Khawand from SOILS then showed us a beautiful selection of her own hand-crafted creations made from waste, as well as the tote bags made from fabric scraps by the women of Saidoun last month in the capacity-building sewing workshop we had organized.

We then talked about trees and their many functions from an ecological standpoint (climate control, erosion prevention, habitat for birds and small creatures, windbreaks, etc.) as well as a human one, covering building materials, comfort and wellbeing, inspiration for art and many other beneficial uses - have you ever hugged a tree?

This brought us to agro forestry, which concerns growing food in forests and grazing animals while preserving the forest aspect of a land and harvesting its natural resources. This is most effective in forest edges where plant succession is apparent and needs to be accelerated and maintained. The idea is to make use of stacking (the different levels of growth) and mimic this dynamic to encourage bilateral relations between forests' productivity and agricultural yields. Guilds in nature consist of different plants (trees, shrubs, herbs) in symbiosis that can serve as model in designing a forest garden. Other strategies include alley cropping and combining animals with forests.

For the practical session today, we got a fun taste of cob building. We walked to the nearby village of Hidab where Marie, a local woman, has preserved a technique of building small stoves and ovens out of clay and straw. As soon as we got there, all mud broke loose! We thought yesterday's soil experiments were messy, but we hadn't seen anything yet! All of us dug into the wet clay and straw, and started molding individual U-shaped open stoves the old-school way. Working together, we also built a large model designed to hold the metal plaque for the traditional Lebanese saj bread. Marie said she'd let our creations dry overnight then send them over the next day. We just can't wait to start cooking on these babies!

Stay tuned for more fun in store for us tomorrow when we talk about natural building! Plus, we're having visitors over!

For those of us who were lucky enough to grow up when it was still possible to play in the dirt - not on concrete or asphalt playgrounds - today's session about soils was a welcome trip back to a happy childhood.

As for us at SOILS Permaculture Association Lebanon, it felt like today was our birthday and everything was really about us!

We started the day by shaking hands with soils: clay, loam, silt, and their distant cousin humus. It's important to tell what kind of soil a land has, to determine what types of plants are suited for it or what regeneration methods might be needed. Instead of going to a laboratory, there is a fun and easy way to determine a soil's composition: playing with it! The texture of a soil, its color, how easy it is to roll it into a mud ball, and other "tests" are usually a good give-away. Mixing soil with water in a jar and letting it rest also helps observe its different components as they deposit in layers, starting with the heaviest.

We took a glimpse into the relationship of soil with everything around it, from water to trees, decomposing matter, microorganisms and bacteria, mycelia, small animals, etc. Klaudia then talked us through connecting with the soil in a longer meditation exercise to become part of all the interconnected elements it supports.

Our friends from the neighboring villages had heard about our "soil testing" so each brought us soil from their village for comparison in the spirit of good-natured competition.

In the afternoon, we all worked on building a bed with mulch sheets in the garden of Bassam Khawand, our friend and a member of SOILS who is also participating in the PDC. The finished product looked so nice he immediately adopted it and promised to look after it.

That's it for today. Stay tuned to find out the secrets of trees after tomorrow's sessions.

We've all learned about the water cycle in school and we take it for granted, but we never imagined it could be fun to revisit it until today.

The day started under a hot beating sun until we "experienced" the water cycle with a meditation exercise that left all of us in awe. No sooner had we finished than we heard the rumbling of thunder in the distance and a light rain started falling. It kept drizzling well into the afternoon and gave us a unique chance to witness not the one but 2 rainbows that can rarely be seen together with the naked eye.

Klaudia and Betty explained Bill Mollison's 4 directives when it comes to water. The guiding principle behind these can be summarized in 3 words: Slow, spread, sink. They concern methods of reducing water waste and soil erosion (we soon found out water and soil are very intimately linked together), harvesting rainwater and moisture, and also using clean water both for our bodies and when releasing it back to the earth.

It was then time for our afternoon practical session with our friends from the village. Betty surprised us once again with exotic recipes using natural ingredients to encourage effective microorganisms in plants and in soils. Preparing these formulas turned into a treasure hunt around the village, looking for such things as green shoots, bran, chicken manure, coal, rice water and other unlikely ingredients.

And that effectively laid the groundwork for tomorrow's topic: soils.

Learning about permaculture zones turned out to be really cool! It felt like being a child again, looking over the map of a terrain and letting your imagination run free to decide the best place for all the exciting elements we can use in permaculture: the chicken coop, fruit trees, vegetables, the compost heap, the cattle, etc.

After we got a little carried away with designing our interactive 3D map and making grandiose plans, Klaudia helped us take a step back and put things into perspective with the mind-mapping technique. This came in handy when we started thinking a little more rationally about the design for a kitchen garden (Zone 1 in permaculture) and the types of vegetables, water harvesting systems and compost location we should have close to the house (Zone 0) in this zone.

Here, we should mention that we have been eating like kings since the beginning of this PDC thanks to the cooking skills and the kindness of Hoda (Em Rabih), a lovely lady from Saidoun who has made it her mission to fill our bellies with the best she can conjure in her kitchen.

So it is with sated appetites that we once again went back to our learning discussions and the subject of the afternoon: Integrated Pest Management (IPM). When you opt for IPM, you resort to a number of strategies that replace spraying when it comes to controlling pests. The starting point is having a healthy soil and healthy plants by providing enough natural nutrients and increasing crop diversity, and, ultimately, cooking up some liquid natural pesticides.

Our friends from Saidoun and nearby Rimat joined us again for Betty's interesting demonstration of natural pesticides. Her recipe consisted of dried chili mixed with garlic or onions in water. After 24 hours of maceration, this solution should be diluted in water and sprayed over the pests attacking a plant. Afterwards, Betty explained how to start seeds in pots or planters, as well as ways of preserving seeds and labelling them.

Tomorrow we'll go into more details about water harvesting and other garden aids.