Flood and Drought Resilience Event

Making Your Horticulture Enterprise Drought and Flood Resistant – Free Webinar!

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I’m delighted to present at a Lantra Wales “Farming Connect” webinar titled: “Making Your Horticulture Enterprise Drought and Flood Resistant”. The event is free of charge courtesy of Lantra Wales. The event will take place at 12.30pm on Tuesday the 16th April 2025. I’m looking forward to maintain and grow my Wales Permaculture Connection and to listen and learn from the other presenters. Event listing and how to book: https://wales.business-events.org.uk/en/events/making-your-horticulture-enterprise-drought-and-flood-resistant Flood and drought Resilience Webinar Details This is the event description on the Business Wales Event Finder: “In a time of accelerating climate change, this webinar aims to address the vital techniques we might use to make our farms resilient in the face of both flood and drought. We aim to move beyond the paradigm which frames water management as a problem, to one which recognises water management as an opportunity; we will discuss ways of using living systems and Continue Permaculture Story

Energy Resilience Workshop March 10th 2025

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Energy resilience workshop I am delighted to give a talk and workshop on the topic of energy resilience on the 10th March 2025 in Ballingeary Co. Cork. Energy workshop topics This workshop is complimentary courtesy of Comharchumann Forbartha Mhúscraí Teoranta, which is a community development co-operative operating in the interest of the Muscraí Gaeltacht area in Co Cork. More info here: https://muscrai.org/ Energy resilience workshop details The workshop will commence at 7.30pm at the Gteic co-working office hub in Ballingeary, Macroom, Co. Cork, Ireland. Workshop Venue: Páirc Ghnó Bhéal Átha an GhaorthaidhCo. ChorcaíP12 PX22 Energy workshop poster Irish Language Sustainability and Resilience Wisdom The workshop will be bilingual, in Irish and English. Most of the verbal presentation will be in Irish with most of the visual presentation in English. This way we aim to cater to users of both official languages and foster an environment where Irish can be learned Continue Permaculture Story

Solar panels cleared of snow

Snow is Nice for Off-Grid Winter Jobs

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It’s deep winter in Ireland and the countryside is covered with a blanket of snow. In the winter months freezing weather isn’t uncommon in Ireland but it is usually accompanied with dry weather and clear skies and disruption is therefore usually minimal. Cold weather with snow and ice however is a relatively rare phenomenon in Ireland and may occur for brief spells only once or twice a year in the low lying parts of the country, if at all. I’ve had a nice winter break visiting family and friends and have had time reflecting on the year gone by and intentions for the year to come. So it’s time to get busy again! Hawthorn Wine Besides general everyday cleaning and tidying I had a job hanging over from last year – straining out the batch of Hawthorn wine I set brewing last year. I don’t brew much these days except Continue Permaculture Story

Sustainability Expert

Wales Permaculture Festival 2024

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This year I taught a permaculture design workshop at the Wales Permaculture Festival on the last weekend of September 2024. I’m making a habit of late September trips across to the UK, having attended the UK Permaculture Association Festival at Lambourne End just outside London in 2023. I had a great time there last year meeting wonderful people including Nim Robins of Cynefin Farm in Wales. This year Nim and her Wales Permaculture colleagues organised the festival and invited me to get involved. Last year I taught a swing dance class at the London festival, which was to be repeated this year, along with (more importantly?) a serious permaculture and keyline design workshop. I had a pretty crazy week leading up to the trip, with suspected food poisoning hampering my preparations and putting everything in jeopardy. During the week leading up to the trip I did some intermittent fasting which Continue Permaculture Story

Macroom Food Festival

Good Vibes at the Macroom Food Festival

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At the end of September local organisers invited me to speak at the Food Festival in my home town of Macroom in County Cork, Ireland. I was delighted to be back in the Town Hall in Macroom. I played table tennis here with the Macroom Table Tennis Club on Friday and Saturday nights for many years from the late 90s, but like many minority sports clubs in Ireland it has been dormant in recent years… anyway back to the good vibes! The Good vibes forum was part of the Macroom Food Festival and hosted stalls and talks from local sustainability and health practitioners in our local town hall. Majella O’Riordan from Dandelion Health had a stall next door so could catch up and compare notes during the day. I took several pointers from her amazing stall that I will try out next time. The speakers each only had 15 minutes Continue Permaculture Story

Permaculture Events: Macroom Food Festival and Permaculture Festival Wales 2024

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It’s busy in the vegetable garden, I’m finishing summer orchard pruning for customers across County Cork and new permaculture design projects are coming in. I’ll also be speaking at two sustainability related events over the last two weekends of September – busy time! Macroom Food Festival 21st -22nd September 2024 First up is the Food Festival in my home town of Macroom in County Cork, Ireland. I’ll have a stall with permaculture information and business leaflets and will be on a panel with other food sustainability experts at the Good Vibes forum on Saturday the 21st in the Town Hall 10am to 1pm. It’s a cool weekend and lovely to have Macroom town square busy with people enjoying themselves. https://www.macroomfoodfestival.com/ Festival of Permaculture Wales 27th – 29th September 2024 The following weekend I’ll be off to Wales to the Welsh Permaculture Gathering at Three Pools Farm near Abergavenny. I’ll be Continue Permaculture Story

Permaculture Summer Pruning & Orchard Care Course, Sat 27th July 2024

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I’m looking forward to running another pruning course this weekend! There are still some places so please get in touch if you are interested. Here are the details: Summer Orchard Pruning Workshop 2024 Orchard Summer Pruning Workshop Details Saturday 27th July 10am -16.00pmBallingeary, Co Cork Join Paul Lynch for a workshop on the theory and demonstration of orchard care from a permaculture perspective, focusing apple pruning. Here is an article introducing the subject: https://permaculturedesign.ie/orchard-pruning-cork/ Course topics: Bookings & Information To guarantee a place on the course contact paul@permaculturedesign.ie for bank transfer details and directions to the venue. Or ring 089 2553096 for enquiries. About the course leader: Paul is a professional permaculture teacher designer and orchardist based in West Cork, Ireland. Paul’s teacher bio: https://www.permaculture.org.uk/user/paul-lynch Permaculture orchard pruning – photos from previous courses Here are some photos from the 2022 summer pruning and orchard care workshop at the Ansa Permaculture Continue Permaculture Story

Magic West Cork Orchard

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I was orchard pruning recently for one of my neighbours and here are some of the photos. The trees are overly shaded to the south by some big Cupressus Leylandii trees making the situation not ideal from a fruit growing perspective but there is an absolutely magical feeling in there. The farm itself and setting is beautiful but stepping into the orchard is like like entering another world. Most of the work I did was cutting off dead dying and diseased wood (very little disease given the circumstances) and thinning and restructuring the trees to a natural shape. In some cases I kept branches that didn’t fit the future structure I was setting but were healthy with plenty of fruiting wood – they can always go later on as the replacement branches are developing. You can see in one of the photos I have splayed potential new scaffold branches from Continue Permaculture Story

The Algorithms are our Common Enemy in Pandemic Fallout.

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Do you have friends who seem to have lost their good judgment  lately? Maybe don’t judge them too harshly – it’s a stressful time, often with too much to take in, and abounding with people (some of them possibly with dubious political leanings) offering solutions to this crisis. Furthermore, because we see each other less and less, we get an even greater part of our information online, and with each of us on different media diets we are consuming different and often opposing material. We also know that the social media algorithms work to show us what they think we want to see in order to drive more media consumption (of the advertising that they rely on), so our existing views and biases get more and more re-enforced until we end up living in an echo chamber. The problem  then arises that when we do meet or even encounter each Continue Permaculture Story