Sprouts have higher vitamin content than raw veggies and fruits! You can grow them year-round in your home, without a garden or greenhouse and they are great for kids, too!
Coop la Maison Verte will host a sprouting workshop on January 20th 7:00PM-9:00PM. 5785, Sherbrooke st. West, Metro Vendome + bus #105
Cost: $25. To reserve your place, please call Tara Peters at (514) 722-7127.
Tara will bring several different types of sprouting jars and trays. Expect to get your hands dirty a little bit and bring a pen as there will be handouts on which to take notes.
Forest gardening is usually done in warmer climates, but having the chance to do it in our cold climate is very exciting! Unfortunately, the following series of weekend classes are about 5 hours away in upstate NY. You may go for one weekend or the whole entire 4 weekend course! Discounts and some work trade available.
Join us for a hands-on skill-building experience in forest gardening from start to finish. Learn to transform traditional lawn landscapes into abundant food-producing perennial gardens. Each unique weekend equips participants with the skills needed to get started at their own home or expand the abilities of a gardening business.
Forest gardening yields local abundance, healthy families, and thriving ecosystems. Join us to build your own knowledge and experience and bring these ingredients to your home and community. Imagine a future of homegrown fruits- berries, pawpaws and persimmons, perennial vegetables- sorrel, ground nuts, water celery and more! All of this is possible.
February 26-28: Design & Theory- Dave Jacke, primary author of the Award-winning 2-volume Edible Forest Gardens, will kick off our first weekend with an evening talk. Throughout the rest of the weekend we will begin the design process for a future farm on our host site.
April 16-18: Install & Establish – In our second weekend we will get our hands dirty while we Install and Establish a brand new forest garden. This is the third year in a row that we are planting out forest gardens in the Hudson Valley!
May 28-30: Tend & Caretake – The already existing forest gardens at Camp Epworth will receive our love and attention in the third weekend of the series. We will immerse ourselves in how to Tend and Caretake the gardens to support future food abundance.
June 18-20: Food & Medicine – This leads us to our final weekend with special guest Dina Falconi. In this last weekend of the series we will harvest the fruits of our labor and spend the entire time making Food and Medicine.
Green Roofs for Healthy Cities (www.greenroofs.org) is offering a course from their Green Roof Professional (GRP) accreditation program in Montreal on September 30th. The course is Green Roof Design 101, the first of the 4 GRP courses. The venue for the course hasn’t been announced yet.
In Colorado it’s cold for much of the year, but inside this cozy dome greenhouse, the plants are growing happily. Take a grand tour with Buckhorn Gardens manager and permaculturist Breigh Peterson: the greenhouse structure with its interplay of light and water, warmth and air; curving raised beds of vegetables and flowers; fish tanks moderating the temperature; vertical trellises and shelves to use vertical space. Outdoors, a huge garden of row crops and a young orchard are complemented by free-roaming chickens and ducks.
What do we mean by saving the world? We mean humanity continuing in some fashion without taking tens of millions of species down with us. Today our culture is solely responsible for the greatest mass extinction since the death of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. I say, “our culture,” because humanity has lived in harmony with the earth for three or four million years. The problem is not humanity. The problem it is our culture, our growth, and how we make a living.
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Here is where it starts to get new. We need to embrace a new world view or honestly remember the original one. Chief Seattle in his 1854 speech and Daniel Quinn in his book Ishmael taught that the world is a sacred place and humanity has a place in it. Another way of saying this is that humanity belongs to the earth, our ecosystem, and Gaia.
This is the opposite of the world view that our ancestors created 2,000 years ago that humanity is flawed, we are sinners, and the earth is a proving ground to see whether we are worthy to go to a better place when we die. This belief gave us a “dominion” which we have to relinquish if we, or at least, most of the other species are going to survive.
Permaculture is also based on three central ethics:
“Care of the earth” means that our number one priority is taking care of the earth, making sure we don’t damage its natural systems.
“Care of the people” means meeting people’s needs so that people’s lives can be sustained and have a good quality of life as well but without damaging the earth.
“Accepting limits to population and consumption” is realizing that as a human species we cannot continue to increase and also sustain the planet. Sometimes you will hear this ethic phrased as “share the surplus, invest all of your means in the first two ethics.” This means limiting your consumption so that you can invest your resources in caring for the earth and caring for the people.
These ethics translate to making a living in a way that does not participate in destruction of the earth. This means more than not starting a toxic chemical or genetic engineering lab. This may mean that we will have to shift back to giving support to get support instead of making things to get things. A healthy self reliant local community focusing on each other and on giving support will provide greater cradle-to-grave security than our “all about me” culture.
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Finding a benevolent way of making a living that allows you to do what you love and to not participate in the destruction of the world is a journey of a lifetime.
A new movie about Permaculture (also known as Sustainable Agriculture):
Coming to Boston (the closest screening to Montreal) May 28th, but I have contacted the filmmaker and requested a screening in Montreal…Stay tuned and keep your fingers crossed!
BOOK LAUNCH: Toolbox for Sustainable City Living: A do-it-ourselves Guide by Scott Kellogg and Stacy Pettigrew (South End Press, 2008).
Join author Scott Kellogg in a discussion on urban ecological survival skills. Explore the cross-section of permaculture and social activism including the design of tools and techniques used to secure people’s access to life’s basic necessities: food, water security, shelter, waste management and energy production.
These systems are simple, affordable and are built from salvaged, waste and recycled materials.
They include:
Soil building and asphalt removal
Bioremediation (cleaning contaminated soils using plants, fungi and biological processes)
Rainwater harvesting
Aquaculture (ponds, plants, fish and algae)
Passive solar and bicycle windmills
Biogas and veggie oil biofuels
Natural construction methods (straw bale, clay woodchip)
Do-It-Yourself air purification
Biography:
Scott Kellogg is a co-founder of the Rhizome Collective (Austin, Texas), and the director of its sustainability program. A teacher, activist, ecological designer and father, he divides his time between Texas, and the Albany Free School Community in Albany, New York. Scott is currently earning a Masters in Environmental Science from Johns Hopkins University.
The course, “is an Urban Sustainability course designed to empower its students with skills and knowledge derived from the many burgeoning green movements around the globe.”
It is free and open to the public. Location: 2 blocks west of the Vendome Metro station in N.D.G.
Our remote ancestors succeeded for eons of time in their biological adaptation to the life of the earth, and now if the species is to survive, we must create adaptation at the next turn of the spiral. We can’t go back to wearing loincloths and eating roots and berries. The game animals are gone and the roots and berries are covered by towns. We will have to create a culture that facilitates the growth of life rather than its extirpation.
Human cultures are normally formed over long periods of time by the conditioning of the young through the generations. We do not have that luxury of time. Presently, we have tremendous amounts of information from many cultures which we can synthesize and use for ideas in creating new social institutions. We see over the past centuries a wide diversity of colonies and intentionally created communities that demonstrate creating new human culture is possible.
At the beginning of the 21st. Century the choice to live in a self-sufficient community, self-sufficient watershed, and self-sufficient bioregion, is both a survival solution and a choice to create a new reality of cultural and ecological restoration.
Given that civilization has seriously overshot its resource base and has no future, we need a new idea. Every member of the species taking biological responsibility for their existence on this planet is a new idea. If humans were becoming more responsible, we collectively could sponsor experimental self-sufficient communities in many of the earth’s bioregions. These communities would be experimental in the sense that the central question of “living in balance with nature,” would be addressed. We civilized are not skilled at this and experiments by different cultures in different ecological regions would move us forward.
These would be legitimate “growth” communities concentrating on the growth of living things rather than the growth of money and power over other people. If groups begin at the top of watersheds, commencing ecological restoration and slowly spread downward the test would be that clean water and air come from those areas.
Given the principle of the growth of life, ecological restoration would be the focus. Permaculture, which would grow more food per acre than the industrial system, while restoring the soil, would be used in areas near the habitation. The habitations would be hand-made from local materials.
Though this seems a tall order there are seed communities around the planet now doing this successfully (www.gaia.org). At the end of its time the old oak tree begins to disintegrate; as it does, an acorn sprouts. Our task is to encourage the sprout and to allow the old oak its passing.
Wm. H. Kötke is widely traveled and published. His most recent book, prior to Planet Garden, was the underground classic, The Final Empire: The Collapse of Civilization and the Seed of the Future. He may be contacted at wmkotke@gmail.com.
This course is open to anyone and everyone with an interest in increasing their own eco-autonomy and ethinking the sustainability of our city. Through weekly classes, we will build up a broad knowledge of design techniques inspired by nature and the skills to implement them. The course will be based in a permaculture perspective, in the spirit of creativity and connectedness.
*January 7-April 29: Semester 1, curriculum posted on our website
*May to August: Summer practicum
*September to December: Semester 2 with all new topics
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Some topics covered:
*ecological gardening in the city, water recuperation, the life cycle of soil, composting, permaculture design
*Time: Wednesdays, 17h30-19h30
*Location: MUCS (mucs.ca), 2000 Northcliffe Square in NDG, #218.
*Cost: Free!
*For more information or to register, visit their website at: www.MontrealPermaculture.org or email the MPG at: montrealpermacultureguild@gmail.com
Sprouts have higher vitamin content than raw veggies and fruits! You can grow them year-round in your home, without a garden or greenhouse and they are great for kids, too!
April 16-18: Install & Establish – In our second weekend we will get our hands dirty while we Install and Establish a brand new forest garden. This is the third year in a row that we are planting out forest gardens in the Hudson Valley!
