PERMACULTURE DESIGN
CERTIFICATION COURSE

A community-based online permaculture course that empowers
you to enact change in your life and communities.

10-week online course
April 12 - June 4, 2021

What is this course?

In this 10-week Permaculture Design Certification Course (PDC), Quail Springs offers you the tools to create meaningful change in yourself and your communities through permaculture design, a system of design for sustainable human settlement based on observation of the natural world and land-based ways of knowing. Guided by the three core permaculture ethics - people care, earth care, and fair share (redistribution of surplus) - this course empowers us to design our lives to create the lasting change that our world needs.

Quail Springs Permaculture Design Certificate Course from Quail Springs on Vimeo.

Why this course?

Constant exposure to stories of environmental and social crises can leave us feeling immobilized and unsure of how we can effect positive change in our world. Many of us are left feeling as if our actions towards positive change aren’t enough under the weight of these ongoing crises. This course focuses on providing you with the scalable tools to mobilize for change - whether it’s in your home garden, your neighborhood, or your region.

This online Permaculture Design Certification Course takes students through an integrated curriculum that is self-aware, actionable, and community-based. This course is a 72-hour curriculum that includes a Permaculture Design Certificate through the Permaculture Research Institute upon completion of the course and design project.

" There aren’t words for how this course has impacted me… I know that this has altered the trajectory of my life, both personally and professionally. "

Ciara Butterfield

Former PDC Participant

Why Quail Springs?

Quail Springs has been teaching in-person Permaculture Design Certification Courses for over a decade. More than 1,000 students have gained their Permaculture Design Certification with us and have gone on to do change-making work in their communities and in their own lives.

Our teaching staff are farmers, activists, builders, and thinkers who not only teach, but also advocate at a regional level for policy change from agriculture to building codes. Quail Springs’ teaching staff includes both instructors who are residents at Quail Springs’ site, and instructors who live elsewhere and have contributed their expertise to this virtual course.

" I do not think that I would have had the same experience had I taken the PDC somewhere else. The instructors, their knowledge, and the information was exceptional. "

Nyakio Kaniu-Lake

Former PDC Participant

Together. Online.

It is with excitement that we shift this flagship Permaculture Design Certification Course online, and invite you to join us for the experience. Quail Springs is committed to community-building as a core value of this course even when we are sharing space virtually. This course centers on connecting and uplifting the world's greatest resource: you.

Registration Information

Enrollment Opens: February 15, 2021
Sliding Scale Cost: $700 – $1000 — What is Sliding Scale?
Alternative pricing options available for BlPOC folks, and need-based scholarship opportunities available. Contact us here with any questions.
This course will be capped to keep the course connective, and we expect it fill up fast! Mark your calendars, or guarantee your spot by pre-registering below to get exclusive access to early enrollment.

Preview the course curriculum

WEEKS 1 – 4

Introduction to Permaculture

Why Permaculture
Permaculture Worldview
Ethics & Principles
Permaculture & Science

Patterns in Permaculture

Patterns in Nature
Pattern Application in Design
Reading the Landscape

Design Methodologies and Process

Design Methods
Permaculture Processes in Design
Resilient Community Design Methods
Design for Catastrophe

Water

Hydrology 101
Water in the Landscape
Regenerative Groundwater Management

Earthworks

Earthworks for Rainwater Harvesting and Resilience
Earthworks in the Field

Soils

Living Soils
Exercises for Soil Classification

WEEKS 5 – 6

Trees and Forests

Forests and Food Forest Functions
Food Forest Design
Food Forests in the Field

Growing Strategies and Methods

Garden Strategies for Water Conservation and Soil Building
Drylands Strategies
Kitchen Gardens
Seeds and Seed Saving
In the Quail Springs Garden: How-To’s Bundle
Urban Agriculture

Animals

Integrated Animal Systems
Animal Ethics
Introduction to Quail Springs Animal Systems
Introduction to Beekeeping

Broadscale Landscape Design

Agroforestry
Regenerative Grazing as a Broadscale Technique

What About Waste?

Building and Using Greywater Systems
Compost and Vermiculture

WEEKS 7 – 10

Appropriate Technology

Introduction to Appropriate Technology
Appropriate Technology at Quail Springs
Rainwater Harvesting for Home and Growing Systems

The Built Environment

Natural Building Methods and Materials
The Built Environment
Fire Resilience & Housing Sovereignty
Naturally Built Structures
Building with Cob

Conscious Social Design

The 8 Forms of Natural Capital
Community/Neighborhood Design
Permaculture Network & Projects to Watch
Advocate for Our Future: Quail Springs How-To Training Guide on Becoming a Regional Groundwater Advocate

Design Projects

Design Submission

Frequently Asked Questions

The course will be mainly self-guided week to week, with the bulk of the content being pre-recorded video and written content. A core part of this course (and all PDCs!) is the individual permaculture design project that you will be creating, which students will work on week-to-week on their own (with clear guidance). Although the content is available to move through at your own pace over the ten weeks, we do expect students to follow the weekly cadence of the course (i.e. that you will stay on track and complete your weekly design project work, etc.).

This course will use a few different platforms. Besides the main website where you will be following the curriculum, your individual permaculture design project will be using Google Slides, and our interactive course discussion forum will use Slack.

All students will be asked to join the course Slack workspace (what is this?) before the course starts — this is where students will get the chance to interact with one another and instructors, ask questions, and share resources and projects if you wish! Before the start date of the course, students will receive a Slack invitation with instructions on how to join.

To use Google Slides you will need a Google Account. If you don’t have a Google account, sign up here.

Below are our favorite tutorials on how to use these platforms. We highly encourage you to familiarize yourself as much as possible and find other tutorials on these platforms if you don’t feel confident, so we can all be ready to jump into this together.

Tutorial for Slack
Tutorial for Google Slides

Meet Your Instructors.

Sasha Rabin

Sasha first came to Quail Springs on a cold snowy night in early 2008 to visit friends who had recently started calling the place home, and the warmth of the people there brought her back. She is passionate about creating a beautiful life, including the structures that house us for so much of our time. This passion leads her to practice those things that help us remember who we really are and why we are here – activities and creations which remind us of our connections to each other, our food, our shelter and the earth.

Daniel Parra Hensel

Daniel Parra Hensel is a full-time permaculture educator, consultant and designer. In 2015 Daniel joined the Environmental Horticulture department as an adjunct faculty member at Santa Barbara City College where he teaches two permaculture design courses. Daniels' work is focused on teaching political agroecology which explores the political, economic and ecological challenges in our food system and society. His passion lies in ecological justice and aims to co-create mutually beneficial alternatives

Lindsay Allen

Lindsay Allen is a farmer, educator and activist from Boston, Massachusetts. She has been farming for the past 11 years and currently works with Higher Ground Farm as the Operations Director and as the Farm Manager of the 7,000 square foot Rooftop Farm at Boston Medical Center. In addition to rooftop farming Lindsay holds a Masters in Agroforestry and is also a Permaculture Design instructor and a guest lecturer at Tufts University. When Lindsay is not teaching or growing food, she can

Warren Brush

Warren Brush is a mentor, storyteller, a certified Permaculture designer and teacher, as well as a husband, a father and a grandfather. He has worked for over 25 years in inspiring people of all ages to discover, nurture and express their inherent gifts while living in a sustainable manner. He is co-founder and a tender of Quail Springs Permaculture, Regenerative Earth Enterprises, Sustainable Vocations, Wilderness Youth Project, Casitas Valley Farm and Creamery and his Permaculture design company, True Nature Design.

Natalie Buckley-Medrano

Driven by the profound awareness of our society's growing lack of connection to the natural world and food production, Natalie concentrated her university studies on both urban planning and land use law as well as the effects of urban development, food industry demand, and climate change on marine and coastal ecosystems while attaining her bachelors degree in Environmental Studies from UCSB. After college, these passions led her to complete her Permaculture Design and Green Gardener Certifications and to work

Brenton Kelly

Brenton Kelly was born in Lusaka, Northern Rhodesia. By his first birthday he saw the peaceful liberation and birth of the nation of Zambia. By his tenth year he had witnessed a variety of civil & revolutionary conflicts across Africa. His father was a Voice of America radio corespondent who then took his family over to Southeast Asia to cover the communist insurgency in Vietnam. The world was as big as domesticated elephants and was filled with sustainable handcrafts like the banana leaf to-go

Susan Cousineau

Growing up farming in a remote mountain valley in British Columbia, Canada, Susan’s early years were influenced by an eclectic mix of gardeners, environmentalists, farmers, and loggers. She completed a BSc in ecology and MSc in evolutionary biology, with a focus on infectious diseases. These studies opened the gates to field research in Costa Rica, Amazonian Peru, western Canada, and East Africa — in addition to bioinformatics and mathematical modelling. Throughout, her goal has been to

Marta Gaunt

Marta grew up with a love of trees and wild places, and a fascination with the dark fecundity and mysterious denizens of peat bogs and muddy tide flats. She has been sowing seeds, talking to snails, and digging in dirt for as long as she can remember. Many years ago she left a PhD track in Spanish Literature to pursue a career in professional cooking, where she mastered the art of transforming parsley into a fine dust and cooking the entire head of a pig. With the beauty of haute cuisine also came a sobering look into the underbelly of our industrial

Jack Thrift-Anderson

After 6 years working with the livestock, landscapes, and mission of Quail Springs, Jack became enchanted with native California range and the role of ruminants in it. As Rangeland Manager at Quail Springs, he studied the high desert, oak savannah, short grass prairie and chaparral communities of the California Central Coast and developed a plan for managing their 450 acre site. He was the caretaker of the 4,000 acre Cornelson Ranch in Fairview, Oklahoma, where he was mentored by long time holistic management

Jenya Schneider

Jenya Schneider has focused on regenerating ecologies for a decade. In college she studied theories of religion, decolonialism, and ecology, graduating from Brown University in 2010. Since then she has worked toward the restoration of ecosystems, including the Elwha River watershed, and the restoration of healthy human communities, helping to develop a nature-based mentorship program for girls in the San Francisco Bay Area. After meeting Jack at Quail Springs in 2016, the vision of restoring native California

Jan Smith

Jan Smith was born in 1961 in New Orleans, Louisiana with an upbringing steeped in social activism, art, music, and culture. Jan's mother is an artist and educator, and taught in inner city high schools during the 60's and 70's, creating inspiring, and relevant curriculum, and supporting cultural literacy during a time when southern schools didn't mention African American contributions to art, history, politics, or culture. Her father was an internationally respected documentary photographer, and cultural historian

Laine MacTauge

Laine relishes the insights gained from the interplay of disparate schools of study. He earned simultaneous degrees in wildlife biology and literature. He has worked in fields as varied as biological consultancy, real estate investment, and research oenology. He even spent several years working as – of course – a handyman. Working in education / facilitation has been a constant in Laine’s life. The subjects vary: Personal development, algebra. Falconry, writing. Adventure motorcycle riding, geometry, rock climbing… Laine would say that every subject provides a measure of insight into any other subject.

Sarah Brooks

Inspired by permaculture and concerned about the imminent crises of the planet, Sarah left Seattle and a ten-year career in business consulting, entrepreneurship, and data analytics to learn more about growing food and living in connection with the land. Three months of working on permaculture farms in New Zealand led to nine months of immersive nature connection study with the Anake program at Wilderness Awareness School. During that year Sarah completed her Permaculture Design

Nicholas Holmes

Nicholas Holmes is an ecological designer-builder with a passion for all things nourishing. He is co-founder of The Nourishing Tree, a mixed-use center for healthy & sustainable living located in Joshua Tree, CA, and runs his own design-build company, Holmes Ecological Design & Construction, as well as Solstice Eco Building Supply. For the last 10 years Nicholas has been based in the Mojave Desert community of Joshua Tree, CA, working professionally as a consultant, designer and builder on a wide range of

Vivien Sansour

Vivien Sansour is an artist, storyteller, researcher and conservationist. She uses image, sketch, film, soil, seeds, and plants to enliven old cultural tales in contemporary presentations and to advocate for seed conservation and the protection of agrobiodiversity as a cultural/political act. Vivien founded the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library as part of this work with local farmers, and has been showcased internationally, including at the Chicago Architecture Biennale

Oscar Carmona

Oscar Carmona is a consultant and educator with over 35 years in small-scale, regenerative food production and sustainable landscaping. He serves as an adjunct faculty member at Santa Barbara City College where he co- created and has taught the Green Gardener Sustainable Landscaping Certification Program for the last 20 years and summer term 2021 will be teaching a new, Small Scale Home Food Production course. In addition to teaching, Oscar owns and operates Healing Grounds Nursery which grows seedlings using Biodynamic

Brad Lancaster

Brad Lancaster is the author of the award-winning Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond and co-founder of DesertHarvesters.org. Since 1993 Brad has run a successful permaculture education, design, and consultation business focused on integrated regenerative approaches to landscape design, planning, and living. In the Sonoran Desert, with just 11 inches of annual rainfall, he and his brother harvest about 100,000 gallons of rainwater a year on an eighth-acre urban

Abudu Nininger

Abudu is a urban farmer, natural builder, garden artist, lover of fungal dominant compost & collective liberation. Specializing in fruit tree care, he spends most of his days working with the Fruitsitute, and tending land & community at Wildseed Farm. He is passionate about helping to restore & re-energize a conscious relationship between people, plants, soil & our many relatives of diverse expressions. Akwaaba Urban Food Forest is his current community empowerment project.