Sustainability Expert

Wales Permaculture Festival 2024

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This year I was delighted to teach 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. Somehow I ended up teaching a swing dance class last year 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 Continue Permaculture Story

Macroom Food Festival

Good Vibes at the Macroom Food Festival

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At the end of September I was Invited 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. I was delighted that 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 Continue Permaculture Story

Macroom Food Festival and Permaculture Festival Wales 2024

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It’s busy in the vegetable garden, I’m busy finishing my summer orchard pruning campaign for customers across County Cork, there are new permaculture design projects are coming in and I’ll be speaking at two sustainability related events over the last two weekends of September. 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 Continue Permaculture Story

Summer Pruning Espalier Apples and Pears in Ireland

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I was working locally today pruning some pear and apple espalier trees. What are espalier fruit trees you might well ask? Espalier Fruit Trees Espalier fruit trees are a restricted form of fruit growing that trains the trees to grow in a two-dimensional vertical plane. Usually there is some form of post and wire structure built before tree planting to tie the tree to as it grows. This results in a compact two-dimensional tree that in theory is easier to harvest from. In the Irish or UK climate it is a system often used against a south or west facing wall to take advantage of an the warmer, more sheltered microclimate created there, or along a path to take advantage of more regular attention and easier access that the trees will get on a highly frequented walk-way. Basic Espalier Fruit Tree Advice My basic advice for people who want espaliers 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

An Irish man and an apple tree

Apple Trees in the Mountain Orchard

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I thought the magic orchard was going to be my last winter pruning job this year but I was visiting another neighbour who I hadn’t seen in ages and realised I had another pruning job left to do. I had tended to these trees once (maybe twice) before and I actually grafted the younger ones in my own little nursery back in 2018 or thereabouts. So I was very interested to see how these little trees were getting on, and in particular how they were shaping up.

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

Guru Guide: Health with Dr. Ekberg

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If you have spent anytime looking on the internet for health advice it becomes apparent that there is endless information out there but unfortunately there is little agreement on just how to become healthy. Also many of the experts are specialised in one aspect or another of health and you could spending alot of time finding good advice for each of your health issues. What’s worse, the advice you receive for one complaint from one expert may conflict with that prescribed for another by another. Well it turns out that life and the human body is more like a jigsaw – if you get one part right it will inevitably help the rest of the puzzle, and help is at hand to put the whole thing back together, even it it seems quite broken. Dr Sten Ekberg is an holistic chiropractor who has studied and tested paths to health. His Continue Permaculture Story