I’ve just received the list of courses at Northey Street City Farm in Brisbane for the rest of the year.

Two bits of good news:

First, they are offering some of their Permaculture Design Course elements as one-day courses.  Apparently people who aren’t enrolled in the full PDC can sign up for individual courses.  I haven’t seen this before, so maybe it is a new initiative by Northey Street, but anyway it is very welcome.

You can see the details of the PDC elements here, and you can sign up for individual one-day parts of it here.  The courses available as one-day workshops are:

• Trees in Permaculture (5th September)
• Understanding & improving your Soil (12th September)
• Water in Permaculture (26th September)

All are full-day courses, 9.00am to 4.30pm, and cost $85 or $65 for a health care card holder.  Better get in soon if you want to attend, they are likely to be very popular.

The second bit of good news is that Tim Heard is going to do a one-day Native Bee Keeping course at Northey Street on 13th December.  Price is the same as the PDC workshops.

I attended Tim’s one-day course when he ran it in Ipswich earlier in the year.  Here’s what I said in an email to a friend:

“The workshop was fantastic.  The best workshop I can remember.  Tim Heard is not only very much a theoretical and practical expert on native bees, he’s a gifted teacher.  So much information for me to think about and digest, but I know I learned a huge amount.

“Apart from a lot of information on the types and evolution of stingless bees, design and management of hives, he split two hives in front of us, taking time to make sure everyone saw what he was doing and understood why he was doing it, and also used the hives to illustrate all the things to be aware of.  He also harvested honey from one hive (with a double honey top) while we watched”

You can book for this course here.  You won’t regret it.