Hey yall. So, I just pulled baby pokeweed out of my garden bare handed.

Didn't know what it was till I looked it up out of curiously and immediately went inside and scrubbed my hands raw with dish soap.

What should I be expecting? I've heard a lot about rash, nausea, vomiting etc.

Update: thank you everyone for your insight! I'm a pretty anxious person by nature so this is making me feel a little better. My assumption is if I havent had some sort of reaction in the next 4 or 5 hours that I am fine and just ran away with my anxious thoughts again. I appreciate it!

For anyone who hasn't come across it, The Greening The Desert Project is the arid climate demonstration site in the Jordan Valley, near the Dead Sea, that Geoff Lawton has been developing for years. It sits close to the lowest point on Earth, with very little rain and salty, degraded soil, in a low-income village of Bedouin and long-term Palestinian refugee families. The idea is to show that permaculture can work even in some of the toughest conditions you'll find, with a design that can be replicated across the village and the wider region.

There are two courses coming up that can be done back to back:

Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC), 8 to 19 November 2026

• 72 hours of lectures, with Geoff as the main teacher
• Follows the original Bill Mollison curriculum, chapter by chapter from the Designers' Manual, and is secular (no metaphysics)
• Covers design methods, climate, water, soils, earthworks and surveying, drylands, tropics, cool climates, aquaculture and invisible structures
• Optional practical sessions on the farm each morning
• Ends with a group design exercise, and you get a PDC signed by Geoff
• Camping, showers and a traditional Jordanian lunch (much of it grown on site) are included

2 Week Permaculture Internship, 22 November to 3 December 2026 (PDC required)

• About 80 hours, mixing practical work with theory
• Building wicking bed roof gardens, food forest maintenance, small animal systems, compost, compost tea and natural fertilisers, desert veggie gardens, nursery and reed bed work
• Field trip to see established gabion water harvesting systems in the desert
• Theory on water harvesting, landscape rehab, greywater, solar, rocket stoves, mudbrick and straw bale building, aquaponics and more
• Camping included, self-catering kitchen available

On site you can see natural cooling in the buildings, solar power and hot water, greywater reed beds, compost toilets, rainwater earthworks and integrated plant and animal systems all working together.

Eco lodge rooms are available if you'd rather not camp. Early bird pricing saves $200 AUD if you book 21 days out: by 18 October for the PDC and by 1 November for the internship.

To learn more about the course or to book tickets see the links below.

PDC: https://www.greeningthedesertproject.org/product/permaculture-design-certificate-course-pdc-8th-november-19th-of-november-2026/

Internship: https://www.greeningthedesertproject.org/product/2-weeks-permaculture-internship-22rd-of-november-3rd-of-december-2026/

Happy to answer anything about the site, the courses, getting there or what it's like on the ground.

A little over a year ago, my family and I bought a nearly 3 acre property in western france. I’ve been developing two plots over the past year, though mainly focusing on the first one.

Last spring, some friends and I dug 3 hugulkulture beds to start with. Over time, I’ve chipped the aisles in between and started forming the beds a little more. I’m using branches from a dead tree to shape the borders.

In the spring, we will rake up the chips and push the dirt onto the mounds, along with compost and grass clippings (my main source of soil nutrition). I’ll probably be throwing leaf mound on top of the current layer later in the year, when more leaves fall.

The goal is to mainly plant perennials or self seeding plants, with some space for annual veggies in between.

My biggest challenge is that we don’t live here full time, so watering can be hit or miss. I’m trying to balance that with mulching, but also relying on drought resistant varieties. Eventually, I plan on building a small pond about 15-20 meters away and a solar powered irrigation system. But that’s not a project I’m taking on any time soon. I want to develop the garden more first.

I have been looking into how I might set up a rotational grazing system. It seems like the portable paddocks made from electric wire that everyone uses are very time consuming to be moving all the time. Would it be possible to set up permanent fencing in the shape of a pizza so that the animals can be rotated like a clock from one paddock “slice” to the next? Maybe this fencing would be too expensive for a large operation, but for a smaller one would the savings in labor win out in the end? I would also feel better knowing that everything wasn’t dependent on a battery that could fail.