permaculture

["darren simo" <wannafarm@hotmail.com>]

I have always dreamed of onwing my own farm, nothing huge just a little 
place where my family and I can get away from the ratrace. Our own little 
piece of paradice.
I'm just new to the whole idea of Permaculture, but have been gardening 
organically ever since i was knee-high to a grasshoper. My father taught me 
how to, back then it was not anything special, it was the way he had been 
taught. We did not call it "organic", it was just the way we done it. It was 
smarter and cheaper to use compost, manure& mulches rather than buy 
fertaliser.
Later I learned about agroforestry and reforestation. These things make 
sence to anyone who loves the land.
Finally I found a book called Permaculture Two in the gardening section of 
my local libary. It was amazing this book not only tied together all of the 
things that I had learned, but also things i had not even thought of like 
water management. Not only this but it was also designed to be as labor 
saving and cost efficent as possible.
Then reality sinks in when I started looking all this up on the net. All the 
courses to learn how to design a system are full-time, hard to do when you 
have work to save for your dream and support your family. Not only that but 
there are bugger all courses on offer in the western suburbs of melbourne, 
even David Holmgren who lives just around the corner no longer has the base 
level course.Then the worst blow of all I join a mailing list to learn from 
the advise of experts and I find it full of political infighting and just 
plain nastiness on both sides.
I think the way things are going, I may give up the idea of a "PERMACULTURE" 
farm and just muddle out how to build paradise by myself.
Please tell me is there a brighter future to all this.

                  Darren


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