Spring Permaculture Design Course – Tucson
After 22 years of managing the Permaculture Design course and 35 years of teaching Permaculture, Dan is taking a year long break from organizing it. Permaculture team teachers are currently discussing taking on course organization and promotion and will post an update early in October. If you are interested in attending the Spring 2025 course please email the team at beantreefarm@gmail.com.
Please do not send funds for the course to the SPG PayPal site linked to the ‘Buy Now’ tab below. An alternate payment system will be set up for the 2025 course if it is a go.
The 2025 weekend course dates will be posted in early October if the course is a go. Thanks for your patience- and thanks to Dan for years of coordination!
Permaculture Design Course Participants – Spring 2024 below
Permaculture Design Course Participants – Spring 2023 below
Permaculture Design Course Participants – Spring 2022
Permaculture Design Course Participants – Spring 2021
Permaculture Design Course Participants – Spring 2020
Permaculture Design Course Participants – Spring 2019
Class generally runs from 9AM to 5:30 PM each day. The cost for the course is to be determined. There is an OPTIONAL textbook – Introduction to Permaculture by Bill Mollison for supplemental reading. You can complete the course with the 160 page notebook, which is supplied as part of the course fee. Also highly recommended is Brad Lancaster’s Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands Vol 1. A limited number of partial scholarships are available for the course plus no interest payment schedules.
To give a high quality educational experience, we limit the size of the class. Contact Barbara Rose at beantreefarm@gmail.com to receive more info on the course.
This Permaculture certification course covers all aspects of sustainable design with a Southwest dry lands flavor, including a balance of hands on experience, classroom time, and design practicum. Dynamic exercises encourage pattern recognition, noticing the links between plants and animals, climate, and landforms that make up natural ecosystems. The course focuses on dry land communities with a strong urban, suburban, and semi-rural emphasis, addressing individual site and neighborhood “problems”, such as storm water flooding. Students learn to read the landscape, to map and analyze energies flowing through a site, and to develop integrated designs for sustainable systems. The weekend format of the course makes it easier for people who hold a week day job to attend and promotes better integration of the course material into daily life. Our course follows the format developed by Bill Mollison and others.
Course topics include agroforestry, appropriate technology, building design, design principles and patterning, site analysis, drylands gardening principles, ecosystem restoration, philosophy and ethics of Permaculture, regenerative community economics, soils and erosion control, village and community design, water harvesting, invisible structures, and many other topics. The main classroom site is located a mile and a half north of downtown Tucson, and we will visit other Permaculture sites in the Tucson area. Most of the class is held outdoors. This course is taught and facilitated by Dan Dorsey and Barbara Rose, each with thirty years of Permaculture experience, as well as our younger experienced teachers Erick Meza and Emma Stahl-Wert. Also Brad Lancaster will lead a tour of his place during the course. See the profiles for the core teachers here. See pictures from previous design courses and one day workshops here.