Permaculture Design Course (S2 2025)

Design a life that works for you, your community and the planet.

This Permaculture Design Course (PDC) focuses on the application of permaculture to a wide range of situations. It’s not just about food growing (although that’s a big part of it). Local permaculture experts, Beck Lowe, Ian Lillington and Joel Meadows, will guide you through a 16-week course that may change your life!

This course runs for 16 weeks, every Wednesday excluding school holidays from 30 July 2025 until 26 November 2025, 9.15am - 3.15pm at venues in and around Castlemaine in Central Victoria. 

For more information see our website Castlemaine Permaculture Hub

Investment:

Since it’s beginning, we have always aimed to make this PDC as accessible as possible by keeping the price low, but the rising cost of living is making it harder for us – and harder for many of you to pay for it. So this year we are changing the way the fees are structured to better reflect each individual’s circumstance.

Instead of a set price, we have a minimum price for the PDC (with a concession available), and we ask you to pay what you can above this price. We expect most people will be able to pay a bit more, and that some people will be able to pay a lot more.

When deciding how much to invest in this experience, please keep in mind:

• The PDC includes 16 weeks of classes with very experienced tutors, and fieldtrips to a range of permaculture sites, including the iconic Melliodora, home of permaculture co-originator, David Holmgren.
• Ideas from the PDC may help you save money into the future.
• If you can afford to pay more, this will offset someone who can’t; if we don’t get enough money from enrollments, we can’t run the course.
• Many past participants have described this PDC as ‘life-changing’