Imagine your home garden, farm or orchard looking as lovely as a woodland edge, producing an abundance of food, medicine, soaps, and other useful resources, and needing no digging, weeding, watering or pest control – this is ‘an edible forest garden’.
Forest gardening is a way of growing food where nature does most of the work for you. Modelled on how a natural forest behaves, crops are grown in different layers from canopy to roots, ground cover to climbers. Through careful planning, plants are chosen which have beneficial effects on each other, creating a healthy system that maintains its own fertility. Once established, your main task will be harvesting!
This 2 day workshop will give you a basic understanding of how to design an edible landscape (forest garden). You will learn the basics of permaculture and permaculture design with a view to designing edible landscapes. We will look at the benefits of this low maintenance high yielding system, and how it creates abundance for you as well as all animals, birds, insects, etc. We will look at how to create soil fertility; ensure the system has sufficient nutrients to maintain itself without external inputs. Most importantly we will learn how to observer and learn from nature, how to place the right plant in the right place, to ensure the system is low maintenance. By the end of the workshop you will have made a design of your own space or participate in the case study design of the AMURTEL Poieni Farm.
Where:
The course will take place at the AMURTEL Poieni Farm near the town Patarlagele, Buzau County, in ROMANIA located 120 km from Bucharest and 50 km from Buzau.
The organic farm grows fruits and vegetables for AMURTEL’s nearby children’s home and after-school center, as well as providing vegetables through a Community Supported Agriculture agreement with a group of consumers in Bucharest.
Workshop will be led by:
Rakesh “Rootsman Rak” Bhambri, an experienced Permaculture designer/teacher and Forest Garden specialist from the UK. He has been designing and teaching forest gardening for the past 5 years. Rakesh has designed and implemented forest gardens from small-scale private gardens and schools, to farms, community gardens, communal nature gardens, as well as designing a forest garden on part of a 30-hectare ecovillage in Croatia that he co-owns. Rakesh is also passionate about sharing his journey of self empowerment (learning how to make all the things you need for yourself rather than relying on the system to provide for you), this includes eco architecture (low impact housing); capturing and storing energy (electricity, heat, lighting, etc); fuel efficient heating systems (rocket heaters and stoves); water capture, purification and recycling systems, natural bee keeping and so on.
Syllabus
The workshop will start at 9:30am and conclude at 5:30pm on both Saturday and Sunday.
Day one will concentrate on the basics of permaculture design, observing nature and exploring for ourselves how nature works and how we can help nature to create abundance.
Day two we will look at how to turn our observations and conclusions to practical use, by making creative, yet systematic edible landscape designs.
Cost of the course:
Romanians: 400 RON
International: 150 euros
Prices include food and accomodation. Please note that there are a limited number of beds and will be given to those who request them according to the order in which they enrolled. Those using tents will receive a 50 RON discount (Romanians) or a 15 euro discount (outside of Romania)
The Forest Gardening Workshop will be followed by a Permaculture Design Course from March 18-31st. For those that will be also participating in the PDC, there is a discount price of 85 euros for those coming from outside of Romania, or 250 RON for local Romanians.
Deadline for enrollments:
March 1st 2013