February and March: Weekend PDC Permaculture Design Course
TAP INTO YOUR LOCAL ECOSYSTEM AND ITS INHERENT RESILIENCE WITH THE CINCINNATI PERMACULTURE INSTITUTE/ TREEYO PDC!!!!!
DATES AND TIMES: 5 WEEKENDS at Treasure Lake with Supplemental online content
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WEEKEND ONE: Saturday Feb 21st // Sunday Feb 22nd, 10am-5pm
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WEEKEND TWO: Saturday Feb 28th // Sunday March 1, 10am-5pm
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WEEKEND THREE: Saturday Mar 7th, 10am-5pm // NO CLASS SUNDAY
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WEEKEND FOUR: Saturday Mar 14th // Sunday Mar 15th, 10am-5pm
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WEEKEND FIVE: Saturday Mar 21 // Sunday Mar 22nd, 10am-5pm
Early bird registration closes January 2, 2026. Regular registration is open through February 13.
Locations: Treasure Lake Permaculture Farm and supplemented from TreeYo EDU Online PDC handbook.
Facilitator: Doug Crouch
Course Fee:
- $900 ($250 deposit) By January 2nd
- $1000 ($250 deposit) By February 15th
**includes catered staple lunches**
For more information and to register details contact the following:
Register Here – Scroll to the bottom and fill out the contact form
THE COURSE: Format and Content
This weekend courses features in person learning at an advanced Permaculture farm in the Northern Kentucky, Cincinnati tri-state area. It will be supplemented with an online book and prerecorded lectures to allow for more time touring the property and learning through working systems. Each week students will need to prepare for the next week by watching some content. However, the vast majority of content will be covered in person. The breadth of Permaculture will be covered seen in the topic selection below. We will dive deep into agro-ecology literacy, giving you confidence to grow with nature rather than against. The information and ability to recognize patterns will be your first step into the world of Permaculture Design.
To increase learning potential, Doug’s Treeyo EDU online handbook will be a pivotal reading and media resource that he has been working on since 2010. The course will be a certified through TreeYo Permaculture/ Cincinnati Permaculture Institute as we are guided by Bill Mollison’s curriculum that comprises the 14 chapters of his book “Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual”. Our schedule reflects this commitment and has a strong emphasis on how the design principles and process influence site develop and systems management.
We will cover the following topics throughout the course:
- Ethics, Principles, and Methods of Permaculture Design
- Pattern Understanding: Interpretation and Application
- Climatic Factors: Broad Climatic Zones and Microclimate – Effects on Landscape and Design
- Water: Harvesting, Conservation, and landscape hydration with Earthworks
- Trees and their Energy Transactions: Tree Systems for landscapes and Tree Identification
- Soils: Classification, Food Web, and Restoration
- Aquaculture: Food Web, Aquatic Plants, Chinampas, Tyre Ponds, Water Quality Parameters
- Animal Systems: Integrate worms, chickens, goats, and many other animals in your design
- Strategies for Tropical, Dryland, and Temperate Climates: Influences on Vegetation, Housing, and Earthworks
- Introduction to Natural Building: Earth as a Building Material
- Fermentation and Nutrition: Sauerkraut, Kimchi, Sourdough Bread and Pickles
- Social and Economic Permaculture: Bio-Regional Organization, Living in Communities, Transition Towns and Local Resiliency
- And last but not least: A journey into our local ecosystem that is incredibly biodiverse and a unique food forest in its natural structure. The connections made here in this class will forward your environmental literacy and build community with other proactive stewards.
FINAL DESIGN PROJECTS
The course will end with the required student design projects that will utilize an evolving process due to the uncertainty of gatherings. The design project process increases learner retention by allowing for immediate application and direct practice of learned skills while offering a means to evaluates students’ comprehension of the theory and lecture sections of the course. All of which are necessary to become successful, effective, and certified Permaculture designers.
The final design project is also considered to be a direct hands-on project because students will be engaged in a process that will yield a viable design proposal.
LEAD TEACHER
Doug Crouch: With 40 plus PDC’s facilitated across the globe, TreeYo Permaculture facilitator Doug Crouch will be facilitating this weekend PDC. After years of permaculture teaching and project management on five continents, Doug has developed a functioning permaculture homestead on his families 60 acres. His formal
background is in the ecology of the local forest type and has been practicing and teaching Permaculture since 2005. He holds a Diploma in Permaculture Education, which demonstrates his commitment to crafting his creative facilitation style. Click on the following link to read more about this facilitation style and the resources we are happy to share. Furthermore, to view some of the material you can expect during the course, please visit Doug’s TreeYo EDU site. He continues holistic land development through Edible Landscaping work.
The HOST
Treasure Lake Farm
Treasure lake is local small business/ homestead focused on agricultural production, research, and education. The property has been in the Crouch family since 1983, making Doug’s efforts third generation. It’s a wonderfully scenic place hidden in the hills of the Northwestern Corner of Northern Kentucky within Boone County. It is only two exits from the airport off I-275 and only 22 miles from downtown Cincinnati (2590 Lawrenceburg Ferry Rd). We have been hard at work developing the broad acre forest for bio-diversity and wild food abundance for 20 plus years through active forest enhancement techniques pioneered by Doug. Furthermore, the following Permaculture Homestead elements and functions that can be experienced are:
- Animal Husbandry including goats, sheep, and chickens to manage succession and build soil whilst providing food and manures
- Integrated Alley cropping orchard gardens for food production and plant stock
- Extensive Native Food Forest complimented with Tree Crops and specific management techniques to enhance this
- Hot & Cold Composting (Vermiculture) systems for boosting soil life, picking up on waste streams, and cycling nutrients
- TreeYo Permaculture Edible Landscaping Business Headquarters, nursery, and research site
- Community Building through energy cycling and regenerative education
THE REGIONAL CONTEXT
Cincinnati and the tri-state region provides a wonderful backdrop for Permaculture in this unique Midwest context. Its uniqueness is defined by its topography, hilliest city in the Midwest, and the subsequent challenges with landslides because of our high rainfall totals on clay soils. We also are in a fairly conservative market, this isn’t Portland or Burlington where sustainability took off many years ago. Rather we have been pushing the envelope here to increase people’s consciousness around food security, social justice, and rebuilding a skill base that will take us into an abundant city scape. The city is dominated by many Fortune 500 companies but our grassroot organizations within the Cincinnati Permaculture Guild have allowed us to work with these giants and the local councils, not just against them.
TreeYo Permaculture 