BURBSTEADING: Designing your Urban Permaculture Homestead (Intensive 3-Day Course)
What: Learn the basics of permaculture design to create your backyard homestead
Where: TBD
When: Day 1: Webinar 7pm-9pm (Or recording sent)
Days 2&3: 8:30am - 1:30pm (Lunch break from 12:00 PM - 1:00PM)
Cost: Suggested Donation $175
- Continental breakfast served in the morning on days 2 & 3. Please pack a brown bag lunch, bring plenty of water and be prepared for warm weather.
- Each student will receive a workbook.
There are over 43 million acres of lawn in North America. That's 42,758,000 MORE acres than the largest private farmland owner. Together, our combined lawns could be considered the fourth largest agricultural land holding in the United States!
This 12-hour course helps you transform your property into your own private homestead in the city. You will learn basic permaculture, natural farming, horticultural and market gardening principles that will help you design, develop a plan to turn your property into a beautiful, functioning homestead, tailored to your specific needs and wants.
These principles can be scaled up or down. So whether you live in an apartment, HOA or have acreage, by the end of the workshop you will have a peer and instructor reviewed site design of your property, complete with plant, animal lists, and a plan to implement your design and make it a reality!
BURBSTEADING CURRICULUM
Day 1 (Online):
- 1. Sense of place & Observation & Asset Inventory: Get to know your bio-region and discover your sense of place within it. Take an inventory of what you have and note what the limitations are so you can create a framework for your design.
- 2. Permaculture 101: Learn the basic design principles and systems approach to plan for production and abundance on your property.
Day 2 (In Person)
- 3. Soils: Overview of natural farming and KNF. Learn about cleaning soils with phytoremediation, mycoremediation installations and bioremediation. Learn inexpensive ways to build soil, keep it clean and cycle waste with different composting methods.
- 4. Water: Learn the many ways to “plant water” within the landscape matrix with trees and plants, ponds, swales, rain gardens and cisterns as well as how to purify water. Build a simple design tool to survey and map out the contours of your property.
- 5. Sun & Weather: Growing Food in Harsh Climates. How to work with our crazy seasons and plant for a four season harvest.
- 6. Perennial Food Forests & Adaptive Plants: How to design food forests and guilds for succession harvesting with a combination of wild plants, calorie crops, nutrient dense foods, fruits, herbs and perennial vegetables.
- 7. Market Gardens: How to plan and grow for your own needs and expand to sell or trade surplus.
Day 3 (In Person)
- 8. Urban Animal Husbandry: Decide which animals you should raise, their shelter needs, fodder plants and feed recipes. We will cover backyard poultry, aquaponics, beekeeping, keeping mini goats and how to work within city zoning laws.
- 9. Appropriate Technology: Learn low-tech and no-tech ways to meet some of our needs to keep costs down or in case of a power failure.
- 10. Seed Saving, Preserving Harvests: Learn when to save seeds and how to store them for the next season as well as how to preserve harvests in the ground as well as dehydrate, can, freeze and ferment.
- 11. Propagation: How to make “free” plants by seed, division, stem cuttings, grafting or layering.
- 12) Putting it all together: Using Google Maps, your plant/animal lists, your understanding of rainfall, winds, sun patterns, priorities and limitations, begin your design and learn how to keep good records to plan for each season.
ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR:
Kirsten is the owner of Good Tilth Farm and Nursery and Lorica Tea. She is a certified permaculture designer from the Permaculture Research Institute of Australia and has and been working in the urban agriculture industry, as a market gardener, nurseryman and designer since 2009.