**Note Location Change!**
Theme of the Month: Food Production
This weekend will focus on Food Production…The how, what and where we can grow food for ourselves! Whether you want to grow sprouts, a windowsill garden, or a food forest around your home, this class will cover the practical aspects and options for food production, teaching you how to assess your home, develop a plan and optimize your time involvement while implementing it. We will be looking at what can be grown at our home... like sprouts, mushrooms, bees for honey, chickens, fruits, veggies, etc. We will also cover the various necessary components of producing food, i.e. the garden plan, soil testing, soil amendments, irrigation, composting, worm bins, animal husbandry, insectaries, etc.
We have 3 wonderful guest speakers/instructors this month; Courtney Dellello, Robin Burton and Julia Valentine. Courtney Dellello designs beautiful and bountiful food gardens that provide for the exquisite cuisine of a well-known winery restaurant in Napa, and who also teaches a myriad of gardening and growing classes for the Santa Rosa Junior College at Shone Farm. She will help you design a garden that provides for the exquisite cuisine of your home dining. Robin Burton from Sonoma State University teaches Native Plants and Agroecology. She is also a certified organic grower who you may have seen at our local farmers market in Sebastopol. She will walk us through each element of producing food in our gardens. Julia Valentine teaches Permaculture, and is also on the initiating team for Transition Sebastopol. She will be hosting us at her home in the late afternoon, after we have toured a couple of gardens along the way. There she will talk about transitioning the land around a home, show you how she built her hoop house, the seasonal sowing therein, and give you hands on instruction of the different techniques for handling soil, planting and optimizing growth yields.