Growing Nutritious Food Workshop: Maximize Garden Abundance through Soil Mineralization

Register at Food Forest Farm

Cost: $47 per person

Are you growing a garden or farm and have soil questions? Wondering how to maximize the productivity and nutrient density of the fruits and vegetables you grow? Struggling with disease or pest problems in your landscape? Regenerating your soil, and raising it’s health to it’s highest potential is critical for long term abundance and is directly linked to maximum human health.

Jonathan Bates will be leading this hands on and information packed event. It took him ten years to create good soil, but in this workshop you’ll learn how to build soil health in half the time by boosting soil biology with minerals.

What you get:
-access to leading thinkers on building soil health
-seeing how soil biology with balanced chemistry creates abundance
-best practices, from taking soil samples to assessing results
-understanding minerals and where to source them
-making mineral blends, and how to add them to soils
-reading signs of nutrient deficiency, or pest problems and how to act
-learn from our mistakes so you don’t repeat them
-hands on soil health demonstrations
-practice mineralizing soil and planting into it

The day starts with a soil health primer, and hands on soil health demonstrations lead by Ray Covino of the Natural Resources Conservation Service. Then David Forster of Forster Soil Management will walk us through the art of soil mineralization. After the lunch break, Jonathan Bates will share his Paradise Lot soil improvement case study, and then we’ll round out the day doing work and planting in Lisa DePiano’s newly mineralized garden.

Supported by Permaculture FEAST, Mobile Design Lab, Food Forest Farm, Forster Soil Management, and NRCS.

You will receive the location of the workshop, located in Holyoke, once registered. This workshop IS NOT at Paradise Lot (but is close by).

This is a “bring your own lunch” event.

Meet the presenters:

Jonathan Bates has experience bringing degraded and neglected land back to a state of thriving. He has learned from experts in soil science and conservation including the Bionutrient Food Association; Northeast Organic Farming Association; and National Resources Conservation Service. He’s attended Acres USA and NOFA conferences on biological farming and soil health, as well as taught his own workshops on these subjects from the East Coast to the West Coast. Paradise Lot, the 12 year old edible forest garden he co-created with Eric Toensmeier, is his living soil laboratory.

Lisa DePiano is a certified permaculture designer/teacher with over 15 years of experience. She has designed and built prominent permaculture projects including the Montview Neighborhood Farm, one of the first public urban-farm and edible forest gardens in the country and the greywater system for Occupy Wall Street. Her work with the worker-owned collective Pedal People is featured in the award winning documentary, Inhabit. Currently, she is a faculty member for the University of Massachusetts and a research fellow at the MIT media lab.

David Forster, and his business Forster Soil Management (FSM) provides consulting and other services for commercial agriculture and home gardening, focusing on economically and environmentally sustainable agriculture, and improving the nutritional quality of foods, through a healthy, mineralized soil. Whether traditional row crops, grains, orchards, vineyards, pastures, or just your backyard, we have the knowledge and tools to balance your soil and maximize healthy growth.

Ray Covino graduated from the University of Connecticut in 2002 with a degree in Natural Resource Management and Engineering with a strong Ecology and Evolutionary Biology background. He started working for NRCS immediately following graduation as a Soil Conservationist in CT. He was introduced to soil health in early 2010. Since then, he has become obsessed with Soil Health and has been working to promote the message in his county, Connecticut, and nationwide. He has held several state workshops for soil health, soil health field tours, and is partnering with groups to further the message. He is also on the Soil Health National Cadre and Training Team, and assists with Soil Health instruction Nationwide.