Take nature’s lead •
In 2011, in celebration of his 40th birthday, Jaco Brand ( pictured below) flew to Italy with friends to attend a cookery course in Florence. “We had to go to the market every day to buy fresh ingredients for our class,” he says. “One day at the market I was standing with a basket full of the most beautiful basil, eggplants and tomatoes, and I suddenly realised what I wanted to do when I got home was create my own fresh-produce market where people could experience the same sense of abundance.”
Shortly after returning from Italy, Jaco met Kobus Kritzinger (pictured on the right), a teacher who had just completed a design course and internship in permaculture.
Today, Jaco is the owner of Picardi Place, a 1ha smallholding on Slanghoek Road near Rawsonville. Picardi Place has a permaculture garden that is 16m long and just as wide. In this lush vegetable paradise, chickens scratch in the dirt inside a moveable chicken tractor. In one vegetable bed, blood-red beet spinach stands tall, and freshly harvested butternut squash are piled high on a wooden ladder nearby.
Ducks and frogs share a little dam, a lime tree bears fruit, and mushrooms peek out from under a thick layer of straw used as mulch around the base of broad beans, strawberries, chilli, garlic and herbs growing here. It’s a mini ecosystem where Jaco’s students can now pick their own ingredients as part of the cookery classes he offers at Picardi Place.
What is permaculture?
In the 1960s, an Austrian farmer named Sepp Holzer decided to abandon conventional farming methods and let Mother Nature take her course. On his mountain farm, he stopped pruning his fruit trees (so they would be able to withstand snowfalls better) and allowed his pigs to root around in the vegetable beds (to save on labour and to disturb the ground as little as possible). Old Sepp was branded a “rebel farmer”, but his farm in the Alps is still flourishing today. He is regarded as the pioneer of permaculture.
On the other side of the world, in the late 1970s, Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren were looking for alternatives to the industrial farming methods used in Tasmania at the time. These methods relied heavily on the use of non-renewable energy and reduced biodiversity, and polluted the soil and water with chemicals.
Their solution was permaculture, a considered design approach inspired by nature. The term – a contraction of the words “permanent” and “agriculture” – was later expanded >