MANAWATU FARMING LIFESTYLES May 2017
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Suleiman and Verti with a duckling Nelson and the kids working on the farm
‘how can we extract the best practices and make a set of rules, so that we can create landscapes that not only benefit humans, but benefit and restore the earth?” says Dani. Nelson adds that “permaculture is often called regenerative agriculture. Which means you’re actually healing worn out land. You are building the health and resilience of the land.” With Dani and Nelson’s love of the environment, education and community, they became farmers and started the Eco School. “There’s a lot of different ways for a person to lower their environmental impact and for us, going down that path has lead us to owning our own farm, but a lot of people do it different
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ways. “The Eco School itself is more about community teaching. We have programmes from pre-school age up to adults. One of the bigger ones we do is the internship programme. People from all over the world come and live at the site and are able to earn their permaculture design certificate” says Dani. A typical day on their property starts with feeding the animals. “We keep ducks, chickens, goats, pigs, cows and sheep,” says Dani. “For the rest of the day there’s compost to be turned and plants to water and weed. We try to grow our own vegetables, so we harvest on a daily basis. We manually control thistles as we try not to use pesticides and we try to
involve the kids as much as possible. There’s a lot of different systems in play — it’s very interactive,” says Dani. They are only all home three days a week as Nelson works four days for the Palmerston North Council. There’re also their children, one-yearold Suleiman and four-year-old Verti to look after. But with the help of their interns, they make it work. A proud moment in their journey so far has been a previous property being used as an example in David Holmgren’s new book Metro Suburbia, says Nelson. “One of my big gripes with sustainability and permaculture is that
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it’s perceived as a upper middle class endeavour and as being very expensive,” he says. So they blogged their “eco thrifty renovation” of an old house and piece of land into an eco-friendly working permaculture property, “to prove that it can be done cheaply. Finances do not have to be a barrier to a warm dry home and growing your own food,” says Nelson. The couple advises anyone interested in permaculture to “make heaps of mistakes, learn and keep on going. Go on as many farm tours as you can, experiment and just go for it!” says Nelson.
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