Permaculture Design Course (PDC)

Joel Meadows is an educator, designer, builder, illustrator, sculptor, grower and musician. Joel runs The Green Hand Institute offering permaculture education and developing technologies that make living sustainably more achievable: think rocket stoves, innovative beehives, human-powered transport, biochar makers and more. He has illustrated two books: David Holmgren’s ‘Principles’ and ‘The Rocket Powered Oven’ with Tim Barker. Joel lives with his family on the fringe of Castlemaine in their owner designed and built passive solar straw bale home(which we are lucky enough to visit in the course).

Kat Lavers is a small space food gardening specialist with a background in permaculture design, teaching and facilitation. She has a breadth of training experience working with residents and local government as well as refugee communities, aid agency staff and even Mongolian nomadic herders. Her award-winning house and garden, ‘The Plummery’, is a 1/14th acre urban permaculture system that produces almost all the vegies, herbs, fruit and eggs consumed (more than 450kg in 2020), as well as recycling all organic waste on site and harvesting the majority of power and water used by the household. When she’s not teaching permaculture and organic gardening, Kat designs community gardens and urban agriculture projects with local councils and communities.

Beck Lowe is an experienced permaculture educator and practitioner with over 25 years of experience working in inner city, suburban and rural areas. Her 60 acre permaculture farm on Taungurung country has vegetable gardens, orchards, tree plantations, animal systems and bushland.

Beck worked in partnership with David Holmgren on the book RetroSuburbia and they co-authored the picture book Our Street, an exploration of how suburban life has changed over time, and a positive vision of where it may go. She runs RetroSuburbia workshops as well as permaculture courses.

Adam Grubb is the co-founder with late great Dan Palmer of the permablitz volunteer backyard makeover network and the business Very Edible Gardens, where he continues to design and build permaculture inspired gardens. He’s a Triple R alumni as host of Greening the Apocalypse for many years and is the co-author with Annie Raser-Rowland of The Weed Forager’s Handbook and The Art of Frugal Hedonism and the kids’ book Let’s Eat Weeds.