The Chatelaine's Keys

admin January 13th, 2011

I’ll be offline until Tuesday of next week, running my winter apprentice weekend (or Goat Camp as one attendee called it ).  The next one will be offered in May, and will be a family-friendly long weekend (tentatively Memorial Day weekend - I’ll confirm that in the next week).  You can bring the kids, stay with us or camp, and we’ll have baby goats and chicks along with a chance to do herb growing, milking, dairying, tree fodder crops, and many other projects!  If you are interested in a spot email me at [email protected].

In the meantime, Aaron Newton and I will be running our annual Garden and Farm Design class for six weeks in February and March.  This is the perfect time to plan the garden season, expand what you’ve been doing and try new things out.  The class is online (ie, you don’t have to live near us, which is good, since we live 1000 miles apart in New York and North Carolina ), asynchronous (ie, you can be working on the class material whenever it is convenient, on your own schedule) and designed to make sure that you have a garden plan that is actually implementable.  We’ll cover everything from the basics of fertility, water and annual gardening for new gardeners to perennial agricultural crops, orchards and forest gardens, small space, container and vertical gardening, urban and community gardening, cover crops, seed saving and small scale home breeding, and integrating livestock into the small farm or garden.

Aaron’s training is as a landscape architect, but he’s also been a CSA farmer and is presently his county’s local food Czar.  Me, I’ve been growing gardens that range from balcony gardens in cities to a 22 person CSA for a long, long time, and running the farm here for a decade and I’ve now made every mistake humanly possible, just out of the goodness of my heart so that you don’t have to .  Aaron gardens in a hot climate in a small city, I garden in a cold climate in the country, and between us, we can cover a pretty good landscape.  As you know, we wrote _A Nation of Farmers_ together, and we want everyone to have a great garden!

Classes begin on February 1 and run until the second week of March.  Cost of the class is $175.  I do have a limited number of spaces available to low income participants who are unable to pay.  We welcome donations of additional spots for low income participants - 100% of your donation goes to making more spots available.  Email me at [email protected] for more details, to register or to inquire about scholarship spots.

Also, just to let you know, I had a lot of people ask about the next time we would offer our Adapting in Place Class.  We will be offering it from April 5 to May 10 of this year. I’m not presently taking reservations, but will announce the class shortly, but if you are planning ahead, this is your heads up.  Also, we plan to offer Adapting-in-Place 2 in the early fall of this year.  We strongly prefer that people taking AIP2, which will focus on psychological adaptation, community organizing and adaptation, and how to integrate your preparations into the life we’re living now, have taken the first AIP class.  So if you’ve never taken AIP and are interested in the second class, April and May are your opportunity!

Have a great weekend everyone!

Sharon

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