Upcoming Events
June 2019
Greetings all,Below are several awesome upcoming events in our bioregion, including a Festival of the Plants today and a regional Permaculture Design Course this fall. Folks can sign up for the BRPN e-newsletter here. Send us announcements to: blueridgepermaculture@gmail.com, or click here to view this email as a webpage. And check out the BRPN on Facebook here. Want to add your permaculture project or business to the BRPN member page? Just send us an email.
Best,
Christine, Terry, and the BRPN team
www.blueridgepermaculture.net
1.
Festival of the Plants in Afton, VA
Hosted by Botanica Mobile Clinic and Farfields Farm
Today, Sunday, June 30th at 12 PM – 5 PM
Farfields Farm
40 Farfields Ln, Afton, Virginia 22920
https://www.facebook.com/events/905512996451727/
2.
Fall 2019 Permaculture Design Course (PDC) in the Shenandoah Valley
Shenandoah Permaculture Institute
featuring Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm
Registration for our annual Fall PDC based in the Shenandoah Valley is now live!
Course Dates: Sept 20-22, Oct 19-20, Nov 9-10, Dec 7-8
Cost: $1,100
Early Bird Pricing until June 30th: $900
ABOUT
Permaculture is an ethically based design approach to creating sustainable human communities. Although rooted in agriculture, Permaculture design also touches on ecological restoration, community development, urban planning, energy systems, and architecture.
This Permaculture Design Course (PDC) is geared towards serious homesteading and profitable Permaculture farming in the Mid-Atlantic. This is an opportunity to learn Permaculture Design from professional farmers who are doing the work!
We base our courses in hands-on, practical Permaculture, and we focus on demystifying foundational concepts to give our students the confidence and skills to jump right into their own projects. We work to hone design skills as a group and as individuals, and we also really lean in to social Permaculture, giving students important framework for success in their communities.
TUITION:
$1,100 Payable to the SPI on our registration page (scroll down for a link). Heavy snacks are provided, and camping is available free of charge. Showers and indoor bathrooms may not always be available for campers depending on the weekend and base site.
COURSE STRUCTURE:
Our days will run from 9 - 6pm, with an hour off for lunch midday. The course will be taught (in Permaculture fashion) by moving from patterns to details. We will learn foundations and core concepts first, drilling down into the details as we move along. Each day we will spend time both indoors and outdoors as we focus on observational skills and skill-building activities.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Contact us at shenperminstitute@gmail.com
http://www.shenandoahpermaculture.com
3.
Planting the Perennial Polyculture with David Rain
Hosted by Farfields Farm
Wednesday, July 24, 2019 at 6 PM – 9 PM
40 Farfields Lane, Afton, Virginia 22920
Whether in a lawn, garden, or on land, a perennial polyculture offers its keeper food, forage, and function. Join David Rain to explore Farfields Farm’s many perennial plantings while discussing design and care of a landscape of complimentary species. Learn and confer how we might steward land into mixed usefulness, creating abundance of lower maintenance and more resilience.
After walking and talking, we’ll talk together more while enjoying the fruits of biodiversity. A spread from the Farfields pantry and locally produced beverages will be provided.
About the Instructor: David Rain is the ecological landscaper and regenerative forester at Farfields Farm. He has gardened in Central Virginia his entire life.
Our rain date for this event is the following Wednesday, July 31st.
https://www.facebook.com/events/1241566339364977/
4.
Nursery Sales from Blacks Run Forest Farm!
Happy Summer! Our plants are wide awake and photosynthesizing, but Fall Plant Sales are now open! When the plants are sleeping but the soil is thawed, sometime around October or November, we’ll start digging up your bareroot orders for pickups and shipping. We think our plants are hardy, healthy, and easy to propagate so you can grow more of them at home. And contact us directly if you're looking for potted selections.
Blacks Run Forest Farm is a riparian nursery and folk school rooted in love and living soil in Harrisonburg, VA. In our nursery, we grow beautiful and useful trees (and other plants) that give us food, fuel, fodder, medicine, mulch, air conditioning, carbon converting, soil building, water restoring, and beauty! We offer bareroot plants propagated from seed, cutting, division, and layering in healthy soil made from compost, woodchips, and biochar. Our nursery grows along the banks of Blacks Run. We don’t own the land we tend, instead caretaking neighborly forest gardens, backyard beds, and planting riparian buffers to nurture the stream and serve as orchards, woodlots, and seedstock. We speak and farm in ways that honor our plants as fellow creatures with histories and gifts, respecting their lives and the human cultures that cared for them. Our nursery also grows us, teaching us to be the kind of people we want to be.
Your purchases and donations support our ability to care for plants, restore our watershed, and share the wealth.
https://www.blacksrunforestfarm.org/nursery
5.
City Schoolyard Garden is currently hiring for a Youth Engagement and Garden Coordinator. This job has three main goals: to engage youth in garden-based programming that builds leadership and equity, to maintain vibrant and diverse schoolyard gardens, and to create connections among the community, schools and CSG. If you know someone that enjoys working with elementary school children and gardening, then please pass this job description along. The application call is attached below and due July 9th.
The City Schoolyard Garden cultivates academic achievement, health, environmental stewardship, and community engagement through garden-based, experiential learning. Visit us online at www.cityschoolyardgarden.org.
6.
Living Earth School Specialty Family Summer Camps
w/ master craftsman Peter Yencken
Family Archery: Making a wooden long bow or quiver and arrows
Have you dreamed of making and shooting your own handmade bow and arrow, let alone making one with your child? What a gift to be able to do this together and to cultivate this shared skill as a family. Both parent and child will make their own bow and arrow.
DATE: July 26-28, 2019
AGES: 8+ with accompanying adult
LOCATION: Sugar Hollow Camp
COST:$380 (1 child + 1 adult) each additional family member: $220
INFO: Basic tent camping is included, with options to sleep in our tent cabins or to bring your own tent. Participants will bring and cook their own food and are welcome to use our primitive camp kitchen with supplies.
Family Knife Making -or- Leather Working Camp
Come get your hands in gear making your own stainless steel knife with sheath, or leather bags. Yes, you can do it all and you can use bags that you’ve made your self, or a beautiful hand crafted knife. This is for real and this is your chance to do it!
DATE: August 2-4, 2019
AGES: 8+ with accompanying adult
LOCATION: Sugar Hollow Camp
COST: $345(1 child+1adult) each additional family member $175
INFO: Basic tent camping is included, with options to sleep in our tent cabins or to bring your own tent. Participants will bring and cook their own food and are welcome to use our primitive camp kitchen with supplies.
https://livingearthva.com/
7.
Sacred Plant Traditions Classes
Charlottesville, VA
The Wonderment of Plant and Animal Medicine Presented by KARYN SANDERS
July 13 – 14, 2019
INFLAMMATION & INSULIN RESISTANCE taught by Mimi Hernandez
Wednesday, July 17
9am – 4pm
SACRED and SPECIAL HERBS from Mimi’s Lineage
Thursday, July 18,
9am – 4pm
For More Information and Registration
https://sacredplanttraditions.com
8. Virginia Native Plant Society
Native Plant Walks
All walks 9:00-11:00 am, Meet by the kiosk near the parking lot at Ivy Creek Natural Area. All walks are free and open to the public. Walks are co-sponsored by the Ivy Creek Natural Area
Saturday, July 20th -- Join us for an Ivy Creek plant walk led by Mary Lee Epps. This is a time when many wetland plants flower such as rose-mallow (a spectacular hibiscus), pickerel weed, button bush, monkey flower, arrowhead, and arrow arum are blooming. We may also find various milkweed and St. Johnswort species and false foxglove in bloom.
Saturday, August 17th -- Tana Herndon will lead a walk to look for late summer meadow flowers including spotted horsemint and slender ladies'-tresses orchids and beginning blooms of fall flowers including thoroughworts and early goldenrods. Depending on water levels along the reservoir, we might also find cardinal flower and swamp milkweed.
Saturday, September 21st -- Join Phil Stokes to see the fall blooming goldenrods and asters as well as the showy fruits of spicebush and Jack-in-the pulpit. We may also see chinquapin and hazelnut fruits. Meet by the kiosk near the parking lot. Free! All are welcome.
Saturday, October 12th (note this is the second Saturday of the month rather than our usual third Saturday for walks) -- Join Mary Jane Epps, Assistant Biology Professor at Mary Baldwin University and Jefferson Chapter member, to hunt for mushrooms and other fungi and learn about how they interact with plants and animals to shape the ecology of our forests. Fall is the peak mushroom season in our area so there should be lots to discover.
Saturday, November 16th -- Jefferson Chapter member Nancy Weiss will lead a forest ecology walk. This will be an opportunity to learn more about how various tree, shrub, and herbaceous species in Ivy Creek’s forests have changed over time. See how to read the influence of man and so imagine how the forest looked 80 years ago.
Virginia Native Plant Society, Jefferson Chapter
Facebook page
9.
The 26th Annual Southeastern Permaculture Gathering
August 2-4, 2019
Join us in the Southern Appalachian Mountains near Celo, NC
for our Landmark 26th Annual Gathering!
The Southeastern Permaculture Gathering is a convergence of permaculture enthusiasts
to learn new skills, serve the earth, create community & celebrate life.
http://www.southeasternpermaculture.org/
