I first arrived at Student Village at the first week of August. During the first two weeks, before the students arrived, my team and I talked a lot about our vision for the village. The boarding program had reached a pivotal moment last year when a combination of poor leadership, unhealthy food, and a lack of discipline and respect caused the boarding students to be just plain unhappy. The program needed a solid vision based on high moral values in order to be successful. That’s when Pak Edu and the “dream team” came together:
Pak Edu & Natale AKA Polentale by Carol
During these weeks, we spent hours and hours talking about food. The village had tons of unused space that we wanted to turn into food production. We wanted to cultivate the vision of Green School by turning Student Village into a living example of applied knowledge. Simply put, we want SV to “walk the talk” of Green School!
Luckily our friend Orin Hardy from Kul Kul Farm was enlisted to help us with the process of planning our site. He developed a permaculture design for the village that helped a lot with identifying the sector analysis, zones, and a super-doable master plan that you can view here. (Just between you and me, though, I remember when I saw this I thought to myself “GAH that looks so easy”– this has everything to do with me spending hours and hours in Steve’s Permaculture program earlier this year drafting and hand-drawing my design, which was FUN but a lot of work).
Developing the physical site was one thing– Developing the actual menu for the students was (and still is) a completely different challenge. Our mission (and the guns that we stick to!) is having a LOCAL & ORGANIC menu for the students. That’s a super easy thing to do in Olympia, WA where there are local farms on every corner, but in Bali it’s been a real test of commitment. More on this later.
After all of this talk about food, we wanted to introduce the program with a hands-on workshop with the students. After all, it is THEIR village! If we are going to prove to be committed to permaculture practices and sustainability, we had to get them involved.
Penny and The Worm Farm by Carol
We were so lucky to have Penny Livingston, a globally recognized permaculture teacher and designer, in town for Kul Kul Farm’s Permaculture Design Course. We asked her if she’d put on a 2-day Introduction to Permaculture workshop with our students, their friends, and a handful of Green School parents. She said yes!
If you’ve ever studied Permaculture before, you know that there’s the ever-popular theory behind it… and then there’s actually doing it and learning from nature (which people have been doing for thousands of years). In my humble opinion, it’s hard to think about Permaculture theory without getting your hands dirty. Which is precisely why we got so dirty:
Natale & Boarders by Carol
Penny taught us how to build and maintain a worm bin:
We learned about some tropical plant guilds that we used in our final plant design:
Of course went over Mollison’s Permaculture Principles and did a funny and slightly impossible game of charades on them.
We split into groups and designed the layout of our Permaculture garden. I was a smartass and made my group do a site evaluation before the design 🙂
My Site Evaluation by Carol
And then we started digging into our future garden!
Marcel Digging In by Carol
It was a wonderful experience working and learning with Penny Livingston. I do hope she comes back soon to see how the garden has progressed.
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