Hands-on Permaculture Design Classes 2025
Ellenville, New York
May 31st - June 29th - 10am - 4pm - Weekends
Come and Learn how to capture, hold and store pure high quality rain water. A free gift in a place that gets 49 inches of rainfall a year! You can catch .6 gallons per inch of rainfall, for each square foot of roof area you connect to a tank.
Topics:
-
Calculate your water harvest
-
Install a rain tank system
-
Use Gravity for water pressure
-
Off grid sinks and showers
-
Connect your overflow or downspouts
-
Design a series of dynamic diverse, flowering rain gardens
-
Create havens of biodiversity and beauty fed by rain tanks!
Celebrate the abundant gift of rain water and solve water problems on your land with one action. Learn to create gravity fed rainwater supplied irrigation systems for gardens and livestock. You will learn how to connect a big rain tank to your house and how to properly plumb it to use for watering needs on your land and for fun!
Permaculture & Biodynamic Gardening
Saturday, June 7 - 10am - 4pm - $100
In this workshop we will have hands-on activities taking you from seed starting to bed prepping and planting an organic market scale garden.
Come and join us at our one of a kind of Permaculture farm in Ellenville. The Center for Bioregional Living is a demonstration farm designed specifically, as our example to the regional food movement Offering opportunities and approaches for addressing our food needs with more of an integrated, ecological, permaculture approach.
-
Discuss preferred seed sources
-
Explain the Biodynamic Calendar & how we use it
-
Prep and plant beds in our garden
-
Explain our rain water catching system
-
Discuss permaculture in the fruit & vegetable garden layout
-
Explain when we use the tractor and when we use hand tools
-
Show you amendments that we use in our garden and why
You will get a chance to plant seed and prep beds and learn experientially about some key biodynamic and permaculture gardening insights and approaches to take home to your family and farm.
Permaculture Whole Site Design
June 21st & 22nd - 10am - 4pm - $400
Meals and Camping included!
Learn to lay the groundwork for an entire land development project; establishing ecological businesses, community farms, eco-villages, co-housing and homesteads. Siting buildings and integrating the entire project through a solid phase plan. Hands-on activities: siting buildings and infrastructure, laying out and establishing earthworks and infrastructure.
Topics:
-
Identifying Trees
-
Understanding Water
-
Creating Habitats
-
What Pollinators Need
-
Reading the landscape
-
Making use of topography and hydrology Identifying biological indicators
-
Whole site analysis, mapping techniques
Come participate in the Center for Bioregional Living’s Permaculture Design Educational center where we will help to teach people the essentials of high quality ways of living abundantly now and into the future.
Naturally Built Tiny House
Saturday June 28 and 29 - 10am - 4pm - $400
Meals and Camping included
Healthy Buildings = Healthy People
Applying the permaculture principles throughout the building process. This hands-on workshop series will teach you about creating buildings with trees cut from the land, maximizing on-site and local raw materials and framing with rough cut local lumber. Natural, local and bioregional buildings contribute to ecologically sound local economies and create beautiful, healthy homes and villages to live our lives in.
Topics:
-
Passive solar design
-
Phased and integrated site development and building techniques.
-
Building structures and sacred sites with good feng shui and natural energy.
-
Insulating naturally, using rainwater for domestic needs and greywater for gardens.
How to use Straw bales:
-
Earthen Plasters, Light Clay straw
-
Passive solar hot water systems for domestic heating
-
Off grid Energy systems
-
Minimizing household sources of Electro-Magnetic Fields
-
Using gravity and low energy pumps and systems for indoor/outdoor plumbing systems
When you complete this entire series you will know how to create a beautiful natural building from the ground up and set it up to be fully off the grid! Come and learn how to create healthy, natural reasonably sized homes, outbuildings and communities . We will teach you how to analyze building locations and materials to determine how ecologically safe and sound they are. Most of our time will be spent outdoors and there will be plenty of hands-on work. Home cooked and locally sourced meals included! Lodging options include limited indoor common area as well as tent space on our beautiful 14 acres. Bring tents, sleeping pads, sleeping bags.
Going over plans - Permaculture Training with Andrew Faust - Ellenville NY Steve Pagan Photography 2018
Going over plans - Permaculture Training with Andrew Faust - Ellenville NY Steve Pagan Photography 2018
Going over plans - Permaculture Training with Andrew Faust - Ellenville NY Steve Pagan Photography 2018
Going over plans - Permaculture Training with Andrew Faust - Ellenville NY Steve Pagan Photography 2018
Come on up to our Permaculture educational campus in Ellenville,NY!
Join us in the co-evolution of our Center for Bioregional Living where we teach the essentials of high quality ways of living well with how the earth works. Everything that we will be working on here will be used and enjoyed by future visitors and students for many years to come. Camping is encouraged on our land and taking in the sights at one of the many nearby gorgeous hiking areas (Lake Minnewaska, Sam's Point, Peter's Kill to name a few...)
Center for Bioregional Living is a seminal destination for permaculture education. Andrew Faust and Adriana Magaña have been applying permaculture design for more than 20 years and in 7 years they have graduated over 500 students in NYC. They have developed advanced permaculture design courses and workshops on there 14 acre property in Ellenville, New York They are turning their dreams into reality by developing hubs of permaculture design in New York, Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx and the Tri-State area.
One of our main objectives is to offer an immersion learning environment for Permaculture design certification graduates. A place that is a Permaculture farm run, off grid growing market scale vegetables, nuts and berries using biodynamic and permaculture techniques. From using rain water gravity showers, cooking and eating from on site to drinking fresh springwater. With the help of our apprentices, advanced courses and volunteers we have created a beautiful rain catch humanure outhouse with urine separation, a gravity fed shower, a temporary kitchen which we will finish this fall and grew a bunch of food that we eat stored in our interim root cellar and sold to Saltie and Roebling Tea Room in Williamsburg, Brooklyn
Extensive berry & orchard plantings, a chestnut coppicing woodlot and more. Natural building techniques and materials are displayed in all of the structures An extensive series of ponds add diversity, beauty and many growing opportunities such as chinampas and rice paddies. Highlights include a wide variety of fruit trees, medicinal herbs and berries planted close to their home making use of micro-climates, no-till and hugel culture garden beds, a pond plumbed for watering and their team of rotationally grazing chickens.