What We Can Help With

• Permaculture Design
• Pre-purchase Property Asessment
• Soil Food Web Consultancy
• Education
• Chook Tractors
• Seeds and Plants

• Herb gardens supplying food, flavour, tea and medicine
  
• Diverse and productive organic vegetable and fruit gardens
  
• Compost bays and worm farms
  
• Poultry (including chicken tractors)
  
• Orchards and food forests
  
• Maximum efficiency watering systems
  
• Fertility-enhancing tree, plant and animal systems
  
• No-dig and raised garden beds using natural contours to full advantage
  
• Beautiful and functional mandala and keyhole gardens
  
• Water harvesting earthworks for drought and flood proofing (integrated swale and dam systems)
  
• Wastewater treatement and utalisation systems (e.g., Greywater reedbeds where biologically filtered greywater irrigates fruit tree crops)
  
• Native bird habitat
  
• Rehabilitated wetlands
  
• Wildlife corridors
  

• Catching and storing water as high as possible in the system for gravity-fed irrigation to points of use
  
• Functional zoning to decrease labour inputs
  
• Retrofitting existing gardens and orchards for increased productivity and energy efficiency
  
• Whole-site food, energy and water security issues (including audits and whole-site management plans)
  
• Peak-oil and climate-change related disaster planning
  

• Assess your starting soil chemistry and biology
  
• Determine any gap between your soil ecosystem and the soil ecosystem appropriate to the plants you wish to grow
  
• Provide or help you create quality compost inoculated with any missing microbes
  
• Provide or help you create aerobic compost extracts and teas to successfully introduce the necessary microbes and foods to your soil
  
• Trouble-shoot any pest or disease problems and help develop biological controls
  

• The Soil Food Web
  
• Letting food be your medicine! Medicinal plants in the permaculture garden
  
• Composting: Hot and cold, fast and slow, big and small
  
• How to have a million hard working employees - making worms work for you
  
• Growing using grafting and cuttings
  
• How to bottle, dry and preserve your excess produce
  
• Seed saving
  
• Cheese and kefir making
  
• Sourdough and Essene Bread making
  
• Sprouting and baby greens: Super-nutritious micro-gardening possible no matter where you live!
  
• Cooking up a storm with just a garden and spice rack: Eating from your garden in season
  
• Making your own herbal preparations
  
• Organic poultry care
  

Eniquire about our latest series of workshops here.


Chook Tractors
Permaculture Solutions has extensive experience in systems known as chook tractors. In essence, the chook tractor concept is very simple: build a bottomless chicken run, let the chickens scratch and fertilise the soil, then move the run on and plant vegetables where they've been. Chook tractors are a brilliant way of establishing a new garden and a fantastic addition to an existing garden. With a little careful planning, you can sit back while the chickens de-weed, de-seed, de-bug, fertilise, prepare compost, feed themselves, and provide you with a steady supply of delicious yellow-yolked organic eggs! While in the past we have offered chook tractors and related products, in coming to focus more on our whole-system design work, we now encourage people to build and try out chook tractors themselves, though we can offer advice and guidance as well as recomend particular suppliers. Linda Woodrow's The Permaculture Home Garden is a must read if you're interested in learning more. You should also check out McCallum made Chicken Tractors for some examples of systems you can purchase ready-made and that we distribute in Melbourne.


Seeds and Plants
Through our close partnership with a range of suppliers we are able to supply a diverse range of plant seeds and seedlings. We specialise in plants appropriate to permaculture gardens including small fruit trees and vines, vegetables, herbs, ground covers/green manures, medicinal plants, and appropriate natives. We also manage a series of 'plant banks' focused on a variety of excellent low maintenance and high-yielding survival foods (such as flour gourd, climbing yam, rice bean, pepino and chia). Obtaining your plant stock through us not only saves you the large costs and hassles of sourcing locally-adapting plants yourself, but means your garden can evolve/emerge faster than you would have thought possible!