Tag Archives: forest gardens

Garden Tours 2021

Please join us for a few garden tours on Saturday August 21 from 10-2 and on Tuesday August 24 from 6-7:30pm. Attendance is free but registration is required so we can adequately plan logistics for an expected high turnout in a tight space. Register with The Resilience Hub for August 21 and register with MOFGA for August 24. Hillside gardens may be challenging for people with mobility issues. No dogs. Park on the side of the road or in the car park if you can find a spot. We are expecting high turnout and we will cycle small groups through the garden tour. If you miss a tour, stick around and we will repeat it.

We have been practicing permaculture design for clients since 2009 and began construction of our homestead in 2010. We are about 11 years into our co-evolutionary dance with this landscape and look forward to sharing our successes and failures. The aesthetic we are cultivating here is one of woodland ecosystem with a mix of trees and shrubs along with perennial meadow polycultures. Much of it is edible, medicinal or important for wildlife. It’s pretty much an edible jungle. We’re trying to demonstrate a vision of regenerative landscape management that takes us away from lawn and tillage agriculture and toward a perennial horticultural vision of hunting, gathering and gardening using the forest and other patterns in nature as our inspiration. Along the way the landscape has rewilded, and so have we to some degree. We’d love to tell you about it in unvarnished terms. See you then!

Resilience Hub event page for Sat Aug 21 10-2

MOFGA’s Gather and Grow: Tour Jesse’s Permaculture Gardens
August 24 @ 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
Free
Join us for a tour of a permaculture homestead designed and built by Jesse Watson of Midcoast Permaculture Design.
Jesse’s tour will highlight the joys of eating wild meadow plants, his pollinator gardens, water catchment systems and the aesthetic of woodland and meadow ecosystems that he evokes in his spaces. We’ll also take a look at his perennial forest garden and annual plantings.
This event is free but registration is required.
REGISTER HERE.
Questions? Please email alibby@mofga.org

Morgan Bay Zendo Applied Design course

Applied Permaculture Design for the Morgan Bay Zendo

This course is unique because:

  • It’s an exercise in applied permaculture design — learn by doing it!  The goals for this project are already clearly stated and we have a base map in hand.  This allow us to systematically work through a landscape analysis and design process using the Regrarians adaptation of the Scales of Permanence.
  • You will gain a systematic understanding for how to analyze the ecological context of your site, how to design, and what steps to take first during the installation phases
  • This is a home-scale application to a community center, incorporating multi-strata home gardening techniques to add resilience and perennial crops to the system.
  • Using Art of Hosting techniques, we will facilitate the design as it emerges out of the creativity of the group.
  • We will dive into a thorough treatment of the design process so that we can dispel the anxiety of not knowing where to start
  • 12 contact hours

The Zendo is located in the coastal town of Surry, Maine, and offers an opportunity for people to practice Buddhist meditation whatever their background or faith may be. Zendo practice includes elements from Zen, Ch’an and Vipassana schools of Buddhism.

In addition to the meditation hall itself, there is a complex of buildings, housing a meeting hall, kitchen, apartment, showers, and toilets. Four small cabins and a field for tent camping are located within a short distance of the main buildings and provide sleeping accommodations during retreats. A pond, moss garden, and wooded paths complement the facilities. Improvements are ongoing and are undertaken largely by volunteers.

The workshop will focus on design and implementation of edible perennial polycultures at the Zen center, using permaculture as the basis for our design. Permaculture is a design method and set of techniques for creating resilient human habitats while increasing ecosystem health. It is a synthesis of wise human behavior taken from both modern and ancient sources of inspiration.

Students often come away from our workshops with new ways of seeing, thinking, and acting in the world. We strive to give participants in our workshops a positive vision for the future and practical tools to make it so.

Topics to be covered include:

  • Designing for Resilience & Sustainability
  • Home/Garden/Farm Applications
  • Introduction to the food forest concept
  • Permaculture design methodology
  • Reading the landscape and data collection
  • Landscape analysis using the Scales of Permanence
  • Tree Crops & Perennial Food Systems
  • Installation and maintenance using instant succession
  • Dispel Feelings of Not Knowing ‘Where to Start’
  • Community engagement practices

This course is good for beginners and seasoned gardeners alike. Orchardists, nursery people, and gardeners interested in perennial crops will take a special interest in this alternative way of designing a perennial-based system.

Link to testimonials: http://resiliencehub.org/pdc-testimonials/

Registration and lodging information:

For tickets, click here.

The workshop will take place at the Morgan Bay Zendo located in the coastal town of Surry, Maine

Arrival is scheduled for Saturday morning June 23.  Class runs 9-5.

The course ends Sunday afternoon June 24.  Runs from 9-4.

The workshop fee of $250 per person includes tuition and one meal. Expected number of course participants: 10-15.

Regular Fee: $250

Forest Garden tour this weekend!

This Saturday, April 29 we will be hosting a forest garden walk and talk.

We’ve been foraging in the forest garden just about every day this week!  This is a great time of year for perennial vegetables because they start yielding so early.  We’ll make a gluten free fritatta as a snack for the garden tour this Saturday with ingredients sourced from the garden.  One of my favorite spring greens is stinging nettles.  They’re a little challenging to harvest, but once you cook them up, they are positively gourmet!

Here’s a quick reminder about some upcoming events:

Spring Permaculture Garden tour – this Saturday April 29, 10-1.  Free to all.  You’re invited to a garden tour of our homestead where we’ll talk about the goals for our site, the design, some of the challenges and successes we’ve seen over the years.  Feel free to bring a gluten free snack to share, but not required.  Kids are welcome, dogs are not.  We’ve been dividing and potting up some of our plants and we’ll have a selection of perennial vegetables and ecosystem plants for sale.  It’s still on the early side for a garden tour, so we may repeat this event in a few weeks.  Send us an email if you’d like to come so we know how many to expect.

Intro to Permaculture on Hurricane Island.  May 13-14.  Don’t forget about the Intro to Permaculture course coming up on Hurricane Island in May!  It will be a great way to get an in-depth introduction to the permaculture design method in an off-grid setting for the weekend on a beautiful island in Penobscot Bay.  Check out this flyer for that as well, and you can register for that class here: http://www.hurricaneisland.net/permaculture/

Looking forward to it!

Excelsior!

Hurricane flyer-2017