Permaculture at Nant-y-Cwm

Can you tell us more about your gardening lessons at Nant-y-Cwm?

It’s gardening for the spring and summer terms because they’re the growing seasons. In the winter we do land care, like coppicing the trees, nurturing the soil, and activities that strengthen the children’s connection to nature.

What would a nature connection activity be?

We might go and try and identify the trees in winter, learning about the different shapes of the bark and different things like that, which is a nice skill. We might look for animal tracks, or we might go for a quiet walk and try to listen to birdsong. It’s about trying to weave the children back into the natural world so that they feel connected to and in relationship with nature, and that they become familiar with its language. They’ll know their plants and trees and animals and just feel at home there

What sort of activities are the children involved in during winter?

We do lots on the ground, so we are clearing, cutting back, and pruning the trees, and we’re pruning the orchard. We give plant food to different things while they’re in the dormant season, and we’re collecting up leaves to use as mulch for the gardens next year, always thinking about that season ahead.

We also do natural crafts using the things that we find, for example, weaving. We like to bring in some natural dyeing with things that we forage and harvest too. Then as soon as it gets to March or April time, we start in the growing season, learning all about the different life cycles of plants.

What do the spring and summer terms look like for the children?

It depends on the age of the children, with the youngest ones we’re doing basic seed planting and tending, and some garden care, but it’s very foundational level. The younger years are learning about the growing processes, and feeling at home in the garden, but not so focused on the outcome. They learn about where the little creatures live, and what all the different plants are. Which we can make medicines from, and some we dry for kindling to make our fires with.

With the older children, we’re learning about making plant medicines, compost teas, microbes, and the soil food web. They also learn how to spot different diseases and pests in plants and what we can do about it, and caring for the soil has been a big thing this last year. They learn how to mimic nature when growing – which is permaculture.

How else do you integrate permaculture into the curriculum?

Permaculture is about learning from the natural world and then using that wisdom to redesign things in our lives, such as our gardens, our food, our communities, and projects. It’s about doing everything in harmony and relationship with the living world around us and in a regenerative way. In the winter months, we talk about the energy use in the school, and the waste, and look at how we can take the ethics and principles of permaculture and apply them to the rest of their lives.

Every so often we’ll have, we’ll recap on some of the theory and ethics of permaculture, such as ‘’ Earth care, people care, fair share’’. We always hold this in mind when we are outside.

There are 12 main principles of permaculture, ‘small and slow solutions’ would be one, for example. The principles get woven into the activities, and so it just becomes natural for the children to think in this way. Then there’s the permaculture design process, which is a really great way of making decisions about everything we do in life. It starts with a really deep observation phase of ourselves and of everything around, so we can learn from what’s there. For example, if you’re making a garden, first you would see what plants animals are already living there, and then you would think about what you’re trying to create.

With some of the older years, we’ve been observing the land and making maps, using water levels to mark out the contours of the school grounds. They’ve been going around the whole school the last couple of years and asking for ideas from all the different children about what they would like to see and what they’d like to do on the school grounds, and we’re putting together a design to change and develop the grounds

It’s like design thinking?

Yes, absolutely. Design Thinking is based upon the patterns and principles in nature, and guiding the children through that. We do things like observe the wind, the sun, and the shade, so we know where to put gardens, and we play games and activities incorporating this. It’s just becoming natural to the children. The idea is that these skills become ingrained, which is brilliant if they’re about to do any kind of design engineering.

When I first started with them, there were lots of children who didn’t want to touch the dirt. They didn’t want to touch worms, they found things gross. They called it dirt, and they didn’t want to get ‘dirty’. It seemed that some of them felt separate from the living world around them. The regular immersion that these permaculture lessons provide, including the activities and games – such as playing hide and seek and having to hide in the undergrowth, or when they get caught up in creating a pond because they really want to see wildlife coming in, and they just don’t even think about being dirty anymore. Then they don’t call it ‘dirt’ anymore, they call it soil because we’ve worked on knowing that it’s not a dead thing, it’s living and we have to care for it. And so little by little, you see them changing in the way they’re interacting with the world around them, which is really beautiful to see.

How many hours do the children spend gardening at Nant-y-Cwm?

For the last term, class one and two have the whole of Friday as an outdoor day. Sometimes we stay on site and we make fire. They learn how to collect their own tinder from the nearby wood. They’ve been doing, a ‘plant of the day’, where they learn a different plant every week, and they learn about its uses and the history and the legends, and we sing songs and stories about it, and we use it for something. Sometimes we go for adventures, and they have a bit of child-led time as well. We’ll go after the climbing tree, and we’ll go to the river. Last week they all built a lot of boats with sticks and string and with sails, and we went to the river and we sailed them.

Next year we will be doing double classes with the older children, which means we can really work on bigger projects, so we’re not just maintaining the garden and running back. They’re getting towards this stage in the curriculum where they would be learning agriculture anyway.

This winter, we’re going to work on natural building and rebuilding the pizza oven, as well as developing the grounds and the gardens, and coppicing tree work and we begin a lot of adventures and nature connection activities and tree and plant identification and making medicines

Are you able to connect gardening to the other subjects at the school?

That’s definitely something we are working on developing throughout the curriculum. For example; Class Five last year was studying Indigenous America. So, we started choosing seeds that were sort of from the Trail of Tears and from the migrations across America. And we were talking about the history and how these seeds were so precious because they’d been taken with these people on this journey, and they all knew about the journey. And brought in some stories and things around that. To grow those seeds that they had just learned about the history of these people was amazing. That’s definitely an ambition of mine, to weave everything together, which feels very authentic to Steiner Waldorf education.