Welcome Julia Fouty!

During the past year, Julia Fouty has resided at Graham's farm in Michigan, starting as intern and quickly being promoted to farm manager.

During the same year, Julia received detailed designer mentoring from Lindsay, helping with an upgrade to Graham's farm design and collaborating on customer design projects. Julia also participated in several onsite consultations with Graham, prepared several site visit reports and also assisted Graham with numerous customer landscape installation projects - all while keeping tabs on the farm operations with Graham as well.

Julia and her partner Shawn have now returned to their native Ohio to participate in lots of very local permaculture initiatives. We wish Julia every success in her budding and blooming permaculture career.

Lindsay's and Azure's Most Excellent Adventure (with zero apologies to Bill and Ted)

Lindsay and her partner Azure have packed their bags and left the colder climes of Calgary for the much warmer parts of central America.

Graham continues to receive updates of their travels via Telegram which have so far included visits to a botanical garden,

a butterfly sanctuary,

a crocodile in a river,

several beaches,

and numerous restaurants with great food. Lindsay and Azure will continue south on the way to Guatemala where they will teach at a storytelling and permaculture event hosted by Creasol Permaculture, then to Nicaragua for a visit to land at Omatepe and then to Panama for Tribal Gathering: A unique festival that draws indigenous ceremony and practices from all over the world to one place. Follow Lindsay on Instagram to see updates on their most excellent adventure over the next several months.

New Partnerships

We've formed a couple of new but important partnerships, both introduced to us via our partnership with Be Agriculture (check out their new website!).

The first is with Bishop Land Design, owned by Scott Bishop, which develops urban architectural projects and which aims to be regenerative in its landscape design work.

The second is with permaculture designers Shaan and Gonzalo of Wild Banana Design, based in South Africa.

Both of these partnerships give us a view towards international work, especially in Africa, as both of these partners (and also Be Agriculture) have activities on the African continent that can be massive in scope and need.

Graham Speaks at Purdue Rooted and Resilient Conference

In early November, Graham attended the Purdue University Extension Service conferenced "Rooted and Resilient Homestead Conference" in Kendallville, IN. Graham presented a short talk on the selection and care of fruit trees and berries on the Friday and then was the keynote speaker during lunch on the Saturday. Additionally, we had an exhibit booth shared jointly with our strategic partner, Steve Koontz of Keep It Watered.

A number of new opportunities will come from the networking at this event, including with the Northwest Indiana Food Council that connects farmers to consumers to create a resilient food distribution system.

We offered a free permaculture consultation by Graham for all the folks who signed up for the newsletter (thank you!) and the lucky winner was Becca Koetz!

That's all of the highlights for this newsletter, but keep reading below for our end of year wrap up for what has been an exciting 2025.

Be the change!

Lindsay Brandon, CEO
Permaculture Canada
(with help from her ghost writer)

The first week of every month on Thursday we've continued our live events with Cormac Harkin of The Permaculture Vine. Join us via Instagram or YouTube for the January edition on 1/15/26 tentatively at 5:00pm Eastern. We've had a lot of special guests and a wide range of topics discussed. You can go back and watch all of these at our channels or Cormac's. Here's a quick link to the October (Harvest Reflections) and November (Agrivoltaics) editions! Cormac has also started a Skool community for permaculture, which you might want to check out.

For other events, podcasts and videos, please see our rumble channel and our YouTube channel. Please subscribe!

In the first quarter of 2025 we had a lot of activity started and some postponed, but a busy three months nonetheless.

We started three new design and installation projects in Graham's home town of Adrian MI, with Lindsay as designer, Julia collaborating and Graham, Julia, Julia's partner Shawn Cook and Graham's daughter Lily doing install work at these customer properties throughout the year.

We had design work scheduled for two locations in southern California, but the fires postponed the work until later in the year. One design has been completed in Rancho Santa Fe and we're just restarted activities at the second in Newport Beach.

We also started a major project with the Jordan River Church in Indiana to provide property selection and design services for a 100+ acre community project with regenerative agriculture at its core. This project was brought to us by our affiliate, Holly Mathis of Blue Wellness. Separately, we have also been working with Holly for over a year developing the business plan for the flagship health and wellness retreat center, along with the members of her team. When that resort is developed, we will be providing property and landscape design services, educational courses and aspects of business management.

We also attended RegenWeek in Austin with Lindsay as a speaker.

The activity continued apace in the second quarter, with Lindsay joining the board of the Permaculture Institute of North America (where she also participated in the judging of the design competition). We started work with Julian Lauzzana in SW Michigan for site visit consultations on four properties (Graham, Julia and Lily). Design work continued for the customers in Adrian, and the installation work started and continued through summer. 

The 3rd and 4th quarters can only be described as hectic, with lots of installation work by Graham and his team for new customers, Melissa Anderson and Cindy Bily, as well as Graham's repeat customers from prior years.

In early September, Lindsay coordinated a permaculture event and mural painting. With funding support from Parks Foundation Calgary, this mural is associated with an urban farm project and will lead into larger permaculture projects as well.

Lindsay was also in attendance as a speaker at the  4th Annual Reclaiming (We Unify) conference in Calgary.

The tree planting project mentioned last newsletter was completed and was an outstanding success. The township inspector, solar farm manager and neighbours were  all delighted with the new trees.

Over 1100 trees were replaced within the scope of a six week project with big cast of team members, including Lindsay's partner Azure, Julia, Shawn, Lily, Erin, Caleb, Aaron, Nehemiah, Cruz, Joe, Melisa, Angelina and Graham. 

BEFORE - Just one of 1100+ dead trees

THE TEAM - At Work?

TREES PLANTED

To round out the year, we've embarked on a major business planning and design project with the folks at Goonieland to assist them in the development of their intentional community, including a Hemple Village.

And, if that wasn't enough for 2025, we also started work on the development of our own Permaculture Design Certificate course which we hope to be offering as an in-person course in spring/summer of 2026.

The list of activities on the calendar already for 2026 is somewhat staggering, but you'll have to wait until the next edition to learn more!

We wish everyone well for the holiday season with best wishes for a happy and blessed new year.

We have over 100 people in our Telegram chat group where we encourage conversations, questions, suggestions and shares~ a place to chat and connect with each other across the interwebs and our world!

Graham's trip to Saudi Arabia for the Recycling Expo in Riyadh on 11-12 November was postponed due to the conference being moved to June 2026. However Graham will be representing ReCircled (his engineering consulting client) and Permaculture Canada at a similar event in January (26-28). The Saudis are committing $32 billion in funding through these expo events towards reducing landfill waste by 80+% by 2030. Some great opportunities for all things regenerative!

And of course, stay tuned for further updates on Lindsay's and Azure's Most Excellent Adventure which continues into the first quarter of 2026!