Permaculture offers positive solutions for creating sustainable human settlements, and the Permaculture Design Course (PDC) is the classic way to learn about permaculture. PDCs have been held across the globe since the 1980s.

This PDC covers the topics of the classic PDC, with a particular focus on our local bioregion. These topics include: permaculture ethics and principles, food growing strategies, energy descent, retrofitting and permaculture design techniques.

Classroom sessions are balanced by many fieldtrips in the local area, allowing you to experience working permaculture properties first-hand, meet a range of experienced permaculture practitioners, and gain inspiration for your own place.

As with all traditional PDC, participants are expected to produce a permaculture design to present towards the end of the course. This PDC allows participants to tailor their project to their own needs – most participants use this opportunity to create a design for their own place, both the physical space and their way of life, but there are other options too.

Beck Lowe, Ian Lillington and Joel Meadows are experienced tutors who have been practicing (and teaching) permaculture for decades. Their particular areas of specialisation, slightly different approaches to permaculture and overall wealth of knowledge allow the participants insight into the different ways that permaculture can be applied.

One-day-a-week PDCs have been running in Castlemaine since 2008, with hundreds of enthusiastic graduates. All three tutors have been involved in these Castlemaine PDCs over many years (with Beck & Ian having been there from the start). Although the hosting of the PDC is switching to Castlemaine Permaculture Hub in 2022, the format, content and fieldtrips remain much the same as the previous much-loved local courses.