NOW BEGINNING ENROLLMENT FOR THE 2017 SEASON!

The class that takes you through every step of designing your own forest garden and learning how to use what you grow. Each class we’ll review monthly yields, bloom schedules and maintenance tasks, in addition to the curriculum. Every class date will also include a workshop, in which we start putting our learning to work planing and installing our own forest garden projects.

Forest Garden Design Basics – May 2017

– Aesthetics: we’ll review a wide variety of forest garden aesthetics and help you choose a look that you love.
– Integrating social uses: Social functions are part of the definition of successful forest gardens. We’ll look at how you want to use the space and design a forest garden to enhance your use.
– Site mapping: using free site mapping tools to create a base map for your site.
– Workshop: Picking aesthetic ideas for a journal and visioning our own home paradise.

Regenerative Design – June 2017

– Energy efficient design
– Zones: the classic Permaculture tool for making gardening easy and energy efficient
– Sectors: Identifying energy streams we can put to use.
– Review
– Workshop: Zone and sector analysis on our basemaps.

Advanced Forest Gardening Design – July 2017

– Water-wise design
– Polyculture basics: Not just one plant, but many, living together as a community. We’ll start discussing how to design functional ecologies.
– Soils and how to build them: We’ll discuss how ecosystems build soil, and how we can copy them to create amazingly fertile gardens.
– Mulch types: Picking the right mulch type for the job!
– Workshop: Identify opportunities and strategies for a water-wise garden, add them to our basemaps.

Designing Plant Communities – August 2017

– Guild Design: we’ll discuss strategies for designing great ecologies at the micro level.
– Lillie House Pre-designed guilds. We’ll give you descriptions of the guilds we use to import into your project, or as a template for designing your own.
– Workshop, begin selecting trees and bushes, arrange them in functional guilds onto our basemaps.

Paths and Beds Design  – September 2017

– Paths: the most difficult part of any garden to design. We’ll discuss path design and materials and how to maintain them. We’ll cover case studies of different forest gardens and their outcomes with different path types.
– Bed Preparation: We’ll discuss a variety of strategies for preparing beds and planting them to minimize maintenance
– Workshop: Mid-course project review: We’ll look at our base maps and assess how we’re doing.

Installation – The Permaculture Way! – October

– Permaculture Community Organizing.
– How to organize, outreach and plan a fun and educational get-together of family and friends to help build your forest garden. If that isn’t an option, we’ll help provide other strategies to make your forest garden a reality.
– We even provide promotional materials and letter ideas for your outreach.

Forest Garden Project Review – November 2017

– Review Course, final discussion.
– Project presentations (optional.) Our students share their own design projects with each other. The opportunity to participate in the design and implementation of multiple forest gardening projects will make you one of our region’s most experienced forest gardeners.
– Workshop: Final project review and recommendations.

For 2017, we will be offering 2 sections of the course, one on 3rd Saturdays, from 9 – 12 May-November, and one on third Thursday evenings, from 6 – 9.

To reserve your spot, visit our store!

Or see our other membership packages.