A well-run Permaculture Design Certificate can be the most fun and intense learning experience you’ll ever have in your life. It can change the very way you look at the world.  It can help you develop a framework for thriving in a changing earth. It can help you learn skills to heal damaged landscapes, while producing for your own needs. For us it was all of these things.

Now, after years of designing and implementing permaculture systems we’ve developed some new approaches to make this PDC even better.

So what makes this PDC special? Let us count the ways:

1. OK. Numero uno. We’re committed to creating a collaborative atmosphere where facilitators and participants combine forces to take 100% real designs for 100% real clients from inception to completion and beyond.  (That puts the pressure not on you, but on us, to teach well, share well and support well!)  Why is that important? Well, it’s easy for PDCs to give people some pie-in-the-sky ideas. We keep it inspiring and real.
2. Interactivity, fun and games and real-world challenges. Yes, there’s some class room time, and we need that, but unlike many PDCs, this is not a primarily lecture-based course. It engages the mind and the senses.
3. Our primary facilitators (as in those with you every day of the course) are professional permaculture designers. This means a passion that is actually matched by experience.
4. With your design project on the go throughout the course, every new concept is immediately relevant and applicable, so you get to store the learnings deep in your very bones!
5. You meet some of the world’s leading authorities, face to face, at home, in their natural habitats.  Including The. David. Holmgren. Legend, and lovely guy. Who co-founded the whole thing!
6. Almost every day of the course takes place in a demonstration property, so you see lots of genuinely inspiring, working examples of permaculture properties.
7. We have consciously designed our design course, making the medium the message and systematically unveiling topics, concepts and tools in a digestible sequence.
8. Funny.  We’re quite funny.  At the very least we amuse ourselves.
9. We help create a warm, friendly, open environment. You’ll likely learn as much from the other participants and form friendships that will last long after the course finishes.
10. Tools for working in organisations. You’ll be working in a design team. Group work can be challenging, and on some courses it goes bad. We provide you with some frameworks to make group processes much smoother, more productive and enjoyable. Lots of participants take and use them in the rest of their life, including their businesses and community groups.
11. 100 hours of class time. Most PDCs are only 72. The extra time is largely devoted to improving practical design skills. And that’s not counting all the social time, campfire chats, shared meals and other fun times.
12. Notes. We call them notes, but we have effectively written and are continuously evolving a 250-page book especially for this course. It correlates directly with the flow of topics throughout the course – all key ideas, images, diagrams, details laid out and explained clearly with continuous flowing text. Something you can use to recap and prepare between sessions during the course, and that you can refer back to far into the future. Trust us, this is rare. As of 2024 we’re going largely paper free but this means you’ll have access to the ebook version in all its updates going forward!
13. The course includes camping in a beautiful location in the country so it’s like a holiday too, only educational.  Edu-vacational!
14. We constantly seek your feedback and use it improve and steer the course as it goes.
15. After the course you join the VEG PDC alumni community, with ongoing events, networks, mentoring, design experience opportunities and significant ongoing discounts on all of VEG’s other workshops. We often help manage to organise a permablitz at one of the student project design sites after the course, a great way to get extra hands on skills.

Basically, if you’ve been thinking of doing a course like this, this is the one you’ve been waiting for!