gardening

Are you looking forward to starting your own backyard flock of chickens? Join us for another event from our Resilient Garden Series on Tuesday, April 13th, from 7:00pm to 8:30pm. Adding poultry to your backyard, or farm can build your soil nutrients, control pest populations and even clear land while supplying you with healthy food. Our instructor, Kirby Lecy will present all the things she wished she had known about natural chicken keeping before adding them to their small farm. We will cover all the basics of keeping poultry for eggs

Food and medicine are abundant in the natural world and foraging connects us to our places in an important way. Join us for another event from our Resilient Garden Series to learn more. The Bay State is home to over 150 species of edible wild plants, some of which are more nutritious and/or flavorful than their cultivated counterparts. We will learn from wild foods enthusiast Russ Cohen, author of Wild Plants I Have Known...and Eaten, about more than a dozen wild edible plant species commonly encountered in and around organic farms and gardens. Priscila Espinosa, Founder of SproutChange, will present on the wild medicinal plants available to forage in April, how to preserve and various ways to prepare them.

Do you want to be surrounded by a landscape that provides wildlife habitat, fosters healthy soils and provides a variety of edible fruit? Join us for another event from our Resilient Garden Series on March 30th, from 7:00pm to 8:30pm.  Bringing perennial plants into the garden can help your garden become more resilient and beautiful. Ruth Green of Green Arts Gardens in the Berkshires will inspire us to consider the ecological benefits and design ideas when planning our perennial plantings.

Do you want to have healthy soil, eat nutritious food and sequester carbon? We can do it all! Join us for another event from our Resilient Garden Series. Long time no-till gardener, Sharon Gensler will present garden practices that minimize soil disturbance, maintain living plant cover and utilize mulch as the key techniques you can easily employ to achieve all these goals in your garden.

Would you like to learn more about balancing the minerals and soil biology in your garden? Join us for another event from our Resilient Garden Series as we will learn from soil experts about the mineral and biological amendments that help our garden soils produce the healthiest vegetables possible. The first step in choosing which minerals to add is a soil test.  Laura Davis, vegetable farmer and soil consultant for NOFA/Mass, will help us interpret our soil tests and choose mineral amendments.  Life in the soil ensures the plants we are eating have the most available nutrients. Marco Thomas, a natural farmer and founder of Microbes by Marco, will discuss the various options for biological amendments.

The more we understand and can learn about life in the soil, the more we will respect and help it thrive. Join us for another event from our Resilient Garden Series. The plants in our gardens will thrive in soil that supports a diverse range of microbial life. During this event we’ll meet some of the beneficial microbes that live in healthy soil, and learn how to increase their populations by providing the best habitat for them in our gardens. Our instructor, Monique Bosch will give us a view through her microscope to see what life in the soil looks like and talk about the role living soil plays in growing healthy food.