The main facilitators are VEG’s Adam Grubb and all round legend Kat Lavers. And we also go visit in their natural habitat some of the finest quality doers, thinkers and facilitators during of the course. 

Adam Grubb

Adam left a career in IT to pursue becoming backwardly mobile after learning about climate change and global energy issues. He founded the energy news clearinghouse Energy Bulletin (now resilience.org) in 2003 which became the most popular website about energy depletion on the net. He got into permaculture in 2004 and helped his friend Dan Palmer to get the global permablitz movement off the ground a couple of years later. He then co-founded with Dan, and now directs, the urban permaculture consultancy Very Edible Gardens (VEG) in Melbourne, and is in demand as a designer, garden creator and educator. He is a wild food enthusiast, runs popular edible weed walks, and is co-author with Annie Raser-Rowland of The Weed Forager’s Handbook (CSIRO Publishing) and Let’s Eat Weeds (Scribe), as well as The Art of Frugal Hedonism (Melliodora Publishing) which have collectively sold over 100,000 copies. For five years he hosted 3RRR’s permaculturish-themed show Greening the Apocalypse. His teachers have included luminaries such as David Holmgren, Bill Mollison, Darren Doherty, Elaine Ingham and others. He has been a caretaker of Su Dennett and permaculture co-founder David Holmgren’s Melliodora property, and has collaborated with David on his Future Scenarios work. He’s currently colonising the lawn of his rental property and making a productive and beautiful garden in West Brunswick. 

Kat Lavers

In 2008, before Very Edible Gardens was even a registered business, we put a test bed in the car space of this little backyard in Northcote. It was the first and last time we built a veggie bed out of the very heavy railway sleepers! It was the new home of Kat Lavers, who at the time was an impressive young coordinator of Monash Uni’s sustainability leadership program, but wanted to learn more about hands-on permaculture. And 15 years later she’s one of the most informed, thoughtful, warm, authentic, persistent, innovative and inspiring experts in the field. Honestly, permaculture is just lucky to have her. (As is this PDC!)

She’s now a small space food production specialist, gardening educator and permaculture designer. The afore mentioned property is an award-winning urban permaculture system known as ‘The Plummery‘, and while being a mere 1/14th acre, it produces almost all the household’s veggies, herbs, fruit and quail eggs (more than 450kg in 2020!). She and her garden are internet and Gardening Australia famous with millions of views on youtube, and are a case study in David Holmgren’s RetroSuburbia book. When she’s not teaching permaculture and organic gardening, Kat designs urban agriculture projects and education programs with local councils and communities including coordinating the award-winning education program My Smart Garden. She’s been teaching for 20 years now! Which has taken her from working with refugees in Malaysia to nomadic herders in Mongolia, and she’s facilitated courses alongside international permaculture names like Rosemary Morrow, David Jacke and David Holmgren. 

Dan Palmer (1974-2022)

Dan was Very Edible Gardens’ co-director and a very widely loved father, friend, teacher, thinker and mentor. He very tragically passed away in 2022 in New Zealand, leaving behind his partner Amanda and daughters Robin and Nikkal. 

Despite this Dan will be very influential over this course. Around 2011, lead teaching on another institution’s PDC in NZ – and frustrated at its lack of coherence – Dan wrote an unsolicited curriculum and tested it out to much success. And this subsequently became the foundation of the first Very Edible Gardens PDC in 2013. Over the next eight years Adam and Dan would reshape and grow the course through a very fruitful teaching collaboration. Dan spent much of that time living between NZ and Australia, and 2024 won’t be the first time VEG has run a PDC without him, but it will be the first time we’ve run it without being able to workshop ideas and feed of his enthusiasm before hand – and the first time without him around to goad with testimonials of participants, and inspire his jealousy on missing out afterwards. We miss him greatly but his influence is threaded through every aspect of the PDC, from tone, format, content and spirit.

Dan was also co-founder of the permablitz movement, and had a multitude of projects like Making Permaculture Stronger, Holistic Decision Making and Living Design Process. You can read Adam’s tribute to him here.

The following folk you’ll get to meet in situ in their natural habitats, as we go visit them at their properties:

Joel Meadows

Initially we invited Joel to teach our day on appropriate technology and sustainable building because he draws on a deep well of experience (as an energy auditor, sustainable transport consultant, environmental educator among other things) which he combines with a rare knack for explaining technical issues in a clear and engaging way that cuts straight to the heart of matters. He’s now become one of the most sought after permaculture teachers in the country.

We’ll get to visit his permaculture-designed property and truly beautiful owner-built strawbale house which features impressive passive cooling, heating, lighting and water strategies and a beautiful curved roofline that follows the path of the winter sun. Soon we began working more deeply with him in his capacity as an innovator in DIY technology and he became one of the forces behind VEG’s Appropriate Technology workshops and helped design and illustrated the revolutionary cooking method in the publication The Rocket Powered Oven. When he’s not doing these things, Joel makes sculptures of steel and wood, runs cider workshops, is a cooker of food, an avid gardener, radio DJ and musician. Phew. 

David Holmgren and Su Dennett

David Holmgren is one of the co-originators (with Bill Mollison) of the permaculture concept.  Unlike Bill he spent decades out of the public eye refining and testing his vision and developing several permaculture properties including what is now one of the best demonstration sites in the world, the semi-suburban, semi-rural Melliodora in Hepburn Springs.  That’s where we’ll spend a day with David and his partner Su Dennett (see below) on this course.  In 2002 he published the seminal Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability, which redefined permaculture and brought him back to international attention as one of the deepest thinkers in the grassroots environmental movement. He’s also author of Future Scenarios: How Communities Can Adapt to Peak Oil and Climate Change (2009) and the epic Retrosuburbia: the Downshifter’s Guide to a Resilient Future (2018), and has published on topics as diverse as holistic bushfire safety, the ecosystems of Central Victoria and the ecological role of weeds. We doubt we’ll ever stop being impressed by both his insights, and his impressive skills in areas such as reading landscapes and sustainable carpentry!

At turns playful and fun, and equally fierce and committed when facing challenges, Su Dennett’s persona and commitment to practising all aspects of sustainability makes her one of the deepest inspirations to us.  Both in the community and on the farm, Su lives a life of powerful values and deep integrity. www.holmgren.com.au

(Photo: courtesy Milkwood)

Katie Finlay

Katie Finlay is a living legend and with her partner Hugh and dad Merv long-term organic fruit orchardist in Harcourt with Mt Alexander Fruit Gardens. We’ll hear from Katie about the amazing steps currently being taken on their farm where a new organic coop is bringing together the orchard, a fruit tree nursery, a market garden, and a micro-dairy.

More to come!