Dan Hemenway
***
Barking Frogs Farm
Home of Yankee Permaculture and Elfin Permaculture
P.O. Box 52, Sparr FL 32192 USA Email: Permacltur@aol.com
Dear Brothers and Sisters:
Greetings from our new permaculture center, Barking Frogs Farm. Our new
place is on good-old Florida
wetland, real alligator and cotton-mouth snake country. We were just looking
for a temporary residence, to avoid
paying rent, when we found this place. It is so beautiful we both
immediately wanted to settle.
So here we are, under giant oaks, huge water hickories and gorgeous sabal
palms, polishing up our design
for the place and trying to get our various permaculture programs under way.
We have acquired two adjacent
homesteads, one house for a permaculture center with room for guests and the
other for our private residence.
Since 1981, we subsidized our permaculture work, particularly the
publications, with other earnings. Now
we intend to make permaculture pay for itself. Permaculture outreach does not
pay. But our land-based projects
have profit potential, so that they can help retire the mortgage on the
permaculture center.
So what's new. The most exciting new event, after our new home, is Dan's
development of a
Permaculture Design Correspondence Course for the internet. The course
combines the practicality of good old
fashioned book study with the dynamic of an email classroom. Dan appears to
be the last hold-out for the three-
week live course, preferring the longer formats, and the new course fits the
bill. It runs between 20 and 26
weeks, depending on the needs of the particular group. Students in the
course have gained a good grasp of the
design principles and we are sure that the longer course duration makes it
easier to integrate them into daily life.
For more about the course, email us at <Permacltur@aol.com>. Ask for a course
protocol and reading list.
Tuition is $1,000, of which half covers individual assistance on the
student's personal design project.
Monitors pay $100. The course may be taken in segments--it has three parts
plus the design project. We do not
charge extra for permaculture course graduates who wish to do advanced work
in any of our programs.
The next email course begins in October 1997. Enrollment is limited to 20.
We also offer a similar
program as a conventional correspondence course, but because the program is
one-on-one, tuition is higher. We
feel that the new email format enables people in remote areas to attend as
well as folks who cannot take off 3+
weeks to attend our conventional course.
Here at Barking Frogs Farm, we now can accept residential students in our
APT (Advanced Permaculture
Training) program. (APT also allows for advanced students to work at home or
in the field.) By the time you get
this, we will have room for a total of two APT students and interns. Interns
have the opportunity to work on our
publications, help in documenting our permaculture design, and assist in such
projects as our aquaculture,
agroforestry and chinampas systems, all, obviously, in the early stages of
development. APT students design
their own programs, which include producing a design, implementing it, and
participating in some form of
research and outreach.
Not all was progress. After four different residences in 1996, our
publications program slowed
considerably. We continue to upgrade some publications, most recently with
an improved rendering of John
Fargher's The Oaks (Yankee Permaculture Paper #12.) We issued no new
publications. Pending publications
are listed on the reverse of this sheet. We are hopeful that we will get a
publications intern interested in benefiting
from Dan's 40 years of editorial experience.
Our involvement in the Kenya project is now minimal, as the local organizers
have identified a suitable
permaculture expert right over the border in Uganda. This is much more
practical. We may offer a program in
Paraguay. Contact us in three months if you want details. Otherwise, we have
done little in the way of marketing
workshops and courses. Dan likes staying at home.
Plans include development of two poultry forage systems: a movable chicken
coop that we can haul to
places where we want weeds or insects cleaned up and a hexagonal array of
fenced forage areas so that we can
move chickens around to harvest or glean in various rotation schemes. (Well,
there are two other poultry systems
in the works, but we will limit this report to one sheet of paper.) We hope
to acquire a few Asian water buffalo as
draft and meat animals that can pasture in part on the weeds that clog our
waterways. One of our main thrusts is
developing a system of chinampas. Dan has a grant proposal out seeking funds
to document chinampas still
operating near Mexico city. He has a few other grant prospects in mind.
Suggestions are welcome. Meanwhile,
the first prototype Barking Frogs Farm chinampa is nearly finished and
promises to be as high yielding as
reputed.
Cynthia has taken the next step as a Certified Nurse Midwife, and is
teaching at the nearby University of
Florida. She is very interested in identifying medicinal herb crops suited
for our place, particularly those that we
can process with value added steps. Wetland species of hawthorns, including
mayhaws, fit the bill perfectly. We
have started planting them. We have also found that the old standby,
echinacea, does well on our sandy land
where moisture hungry sabal palms create arid conditions, regardless of
rainfall.
We invite you to pass the word about our email course and internships. This
is a good time to be thinking
about getting presents for the Solstice season holidays. Please check out
our order form to see if there is
something you would like to give, maybe to yourself. We are still willing to
do a limited amount of away-from-
home teaching and consulting.
We know that most of you are also working hard for Mother Earth in many
ways. We thank you for your
efforts and look to join forces when appropriate.
For Mother Earth
Dan Hemenway
Cynthia
Hemenway