Part 0 · Orientation
How This Course Works
Self-paced, free, no certificate, no gate. Here is exactly how the course runs, what saves your progress, and what the donation link does not do.
The course has no fee, no enrolment window, no cohort, and no deadline. Open any lesson in any order. Come back in a month or in a year. Nothing expires and nothing is held back until you pay.
There is also no certificate. A certificate would be a second product sold beside the first, and this course does not have a second product. What it has is the material and the source list behind it.
Self-paced means self-paced
Nothing here is scheduled. There is no start date, no live session to miss, and no seat count. Work through a lesson in an evening or spread one across a season. The lessons in Parts 1 through 6 are written to be read in sequence, because each one assumes the ground laid by the one before it, but the sequence is a recommendation and not a lock.
Each lesson asks for two things. One is a piece of work on real ground: a walk, a measurement, a planting, a repair, a conversation. The other is a source, the earlier writer or system where the idea was first written down. Those two threads run through every lesson from here.
Your progress
Read the course in the browser and your place is kept in that browser. An account that saves your progress across devices is coming soon. Until it arrives, the browser copy and the offline copy below are the two ways your place is kept.
If you change machines or clear your browser, the browser copy forgets. That is a known limit, stated here rather than discovered later.
The offline build
The whole course is also built as a single offline program, written in Rust, that you download once and run on your own machine with no connection at all. The lessons, the source list, and the exercises travel with it. It runs on a metered connection, on a laptop in a barn, on a machine that is never online. The offline build keeps your progress on your own disk.
This matters for the same reason the rest of the course cares about where things come from. A course that only exists while a distant server answers is a course you do not own.
The donation link
There is a donation link, and it does not gate a single lesson. Nothing on this course is withheld until you donate. Nothing that is free becomes paid. The donation funds the work of writing and filming the material, and it changes nothing about what you can open. If the donation stopped tomorrow, the lessons would remain free and open.
What is not here
No countdown timer. No scarcity, no "twenty seats left," no price that rises when you come back. No certificate, no badge, no title. No upsell at the end of a lesson to a paid course that holds the part that matters. If that is the shape of teaching you want, other providers sell it, and Lesson 003 prices it honestly.
How to read a lesson
Every lesson carries the same parts. Prose that states a problem and a cause. At least one block naming an earlier writer where a modern permaculture idea already appears. Exercises you can do this week. A warning where there is a real way to fail. And a shot list of the images and video Jason needs to make, because the filmed version of this material is still being produced.
Exercise
Start the field journal
Get one notebook and one pen that lives with it. Open to the first page and write the date, the weather, and one thing you noticed on the ground: where water stood, what leafed out, what the animals did. One line a day is enough. This journal is the raw material for the whole course.
Fieldwork
Walk the ground at first light
Before the next lesson, walk your land once at first light and once after the next rain. Note the cold air pockets, the wet ground, the paths the water takes, and the spots the deer or the birds use. Write it in the journal the same day, while you remember it.
Failure mode
The failure mode of this course is a learner who opens all seventy lessons, follows every argument, feels informed, and never puts a spade in the ground. Reading digs no swale and fills no grain store, and understanding the water cycle feeds nobody. What breaks the pattern is the fieldwork each lesson sets, so do it on real ground in the week you read the lesson or the reading quietly replaces the farm.
The farm's position on money: we believe the knowledge should be free to anyone who wants it, and that paying for work freely chosen is honourable. The donation link is for the second part. It never touches the first.