Scott and I both volunteer as Kansas Permaculture board members and we both enjoy the many opportunities this has offered us. We love engaging with the community of like-minded friends and experts and meeting the students who are earning their permaculture design certificates each year. We also enjoy manning the conference booth at local conferences around the state to talk about the organization and permaculture in general, and we love to help organize the annual farm tour, which gives people an opportunity to see how others in Kansas implement permaculture principles in their local designs, enjoy a local foods lunch, find new farms to shop local, and make new friends.
My favorite thing is when we are able to host the PDC students at our farm for one of the course field sessions, where they get to take what they have learned in the course lectures and reading and apply it in a real-world scenario. Even during this pandemic year, I was able to host the students for their local foods field session (with appropriate distancing and masks, of course!). Typically, this session would involve a canning activity in an indoor setting. This year, we worked in the high tunnel and focused on fermentation, a method of using salt to preserve vegetables so they can be enjoyed for many months without spoilage. The students also learned about sheet mulching and lasagna gardening, a technique where layers of green and brown materials can be built in layers and aged to create planting beds with rich soil.
I love spending an afternoon with students and I always learn something new from them, whether it be a great new local restaurant or about their dreams and visions of a more sustainable future.
