My oldest son is living sponge for permaculture and all things sustainable. He has watched almost of all Geoff Lawton's and Bill Mollison's videos, read a fair amount of our permaculture books and has helped us with many permaculture workshops and events locally. He feels so close to permaculture when he talks about it with us he mentions 'Geoff and Bill' as if he knew them personally (we all wish!).

His first permaculture design was done with beeswax crayons on a huge piece of butcher paper. He worked on it for about 2 weeks during his summer break when he was 8 years old. It was then my husband and I realized that sitting there right in front of us was hope for the future -teach children permaculture! (We also realized just how much parents have to learn from their children!)

Ronan, my eldest, based his drawing on a design my husband and I created for our small backyard. One I thought would work out very well considering we spend most of our time as caregivers of other peoples land. Ronan utilized many of the principles we applied to the design (produce no waste, planned redundancy, increase functional diversity) but he connected a principle we hadn't spent enough time with -appropriate scale. One of elements in the design is a spiral garden where the turf used to be... the management of this spiral (as beautiful as it turned out) ended up to be more time consuming than we had hoped because we made it too small. The spiral beds were too narrow for the specific plants we wanted and the outlying forest garden was too close to the spiral as well.

Ronan came up with a better design that included smaller beds, more like a mandala... he had harvested and weeded in the narrow spiral too much! Unfortunately we will be moving before we can implement his ideas but we know his design would have worked much more efficiently. His observation of what worked and what did not, then making the appropriate changes, was incredible and inspiring.

Ronan and his father will be attending their first permaculture design course next week in Nevada City with Cathe' Fish and Neil Bertrando. Ronan has already told us he is very excited to learn more and to be able to teach his friends and neighbors permaculture when he returns home.

And so the flow of permaculture continues... and we have more hope for the future than ever.

(When I have the chance I'll photograph his design and post it up)