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2008 Sustainability Tours
Click on a tour to the right or explore the list below to see the 2008 schedule. More tours will be posted for June onward soon. 1 Workshop: Drumming, Dancing, Digging Move over Johnny Appleseed, there's a new tour in town. Daily Acts partners with Common Vision in Petaluma for this tour. It's part of their fifth annual Fruit Tree Tour, a 20-city, 70-day tour extravaganza planting over 1,000 fruit trees at urban schools and community centers from Los Angeles to Sacramento. Traveling in a veggie-oil-powered caravan, 25 earth educators from Common Vision will teach community members about sustainability through a daylong program that includes planting up to 75 fruit trees at the community sites, a 45-minute green theatre performance, drumming and earth-conscious hip-hop. The four Petaluma fruit tree planting sites on this tour are part of the freshly sprouted Daily Acts Homescale Model Program: energy efficient, water conserving, food producing models of sustainability. These four sites link together as part of a larger group in an integrated multi-site community design. Common Vision and Daily Acts empower people to make real, enduring changes in their neighborhoods. We are not just planting trees, we are planting ecosystems right here where we live. Join our celebration and get lit, get skilled and get to know yer peeps with drumming, dancing and digging. Vince Scholten with a Sebastopol-grown Banana start 2 Workshop: Living Earth Wall Finishes This amazing full day is like two workshops in one; pairing the wide-ranging experience of natural-builder Janine Bjornson, of clay, bones, and stones, with the creative insight and perspective of designer-artiste Gavio. A complete design and install process, there is a veritable gold mine of ideas, knowledge and laughter to be gleaned here. With Gavio, you'll explore interior spaces and finishes in a design context rather than as random choices. You will gain a soulful understanding of how the materials, colors, textures and energies in your home are all elements in supercharging your space into functioning as a living ecosystem. We'll follow the actual process of designing the earthen finish you'll be applying as part of a complete living ecosystem retrofit at the 1920's Petaluma bungalow of Daily Acts Founder, Trathen Heckman, and wife, Mary. You'll be lit with enthusiasm to begin designing your own space with confidence and a spirit of adventure. To make it all real, you'll also learn to make your own clay Alis, a beautiful traditional finish for adobe buildings suitable for use on both conventional and natural wall surfaces. Janine shares a wealth of knowledge gleaned from many years of experience shaping dwellings that are healthy, inspiring and beautiful. In addition to being lovely, Alis is non-toxic, inexpensive, easy to make and fun to do! You will learn how to mix, apply, and polish the Alis, and see the beauty of transforming a space naturally. This workshop is a hands-on focused approach to learning. Be prepared to actively participate. Bring your sack lunch, layered work clothes, notebook and smile. All in all, it's a rich day that will leave you filled with inspiration, information, and fistfuls of earthen finish fun for your home and your life. *Due to the extensive nature of this workshop, please allow for ending as late as 7pm. 3 Workshop: The Alive Home: The Art of Designing Your Living Environment Saturday, April 12th, 10am to 2:30pm, $45 Are you ready to dwell in greater harmony and connection to place than ever before? Would you like your home to support you in realizing your vision? Learn how to retrofit your home for the new world by retrofitting the way you conceive of it. This half-day workshop will inspire you with the ability to recreate your home as a living ecosystem, an organic, dynamic process which makes your home space an expression of your full spirit. Permaculture, Feng Shui, color theory, design science and your deepest sensibilities all become accessible creative tools you can apply in an ongoing practice of using your home to enhance your relationship with your world. A distillation of designer Gavio's years of experience exploring human spaces as living ecosystems, this workshop is packed with insight, laughter, interaction and valuable perspective for renters, owners, and future builders alike. Bring a notebook, questions, and light lunch to eat while we learn. 4 Tour: Sustainable City Vistas and Urban Forage Come on a two-mile walking tour of San Francisco neighborhoods and see the abundant potential of cityscape luscious organic living, ducky entertainment and urban forage. Guided by Permaculturist Extraordinaire Kevin Bayuk, we'll visit community gardens, including "Garden for the Environment," the veritable greenhouse for propagating inspired eco-heros in S.F. Next we'll tour Kevin's urban backyard, emphasizing perennial polyculture foodscaping. Along our walk, we'll showcase de-concrete direct actions we can all take part in to recharge our aquifers, clean city air, provide habitat, and grow food, fiber and FARMaceuticals as well as share ideas on finding wild edibles in the city parks. As part of the tour, we'll pause to enjoy a potluck picnic lunch in Golden Gate Park. 5 Workshop Series: Personal Ecology Why not a well-lived, well-loved, well-designed life with your mind, body and emotions consistently in service to the ideals you hold most dear? It is time to radically elevate our personal and planetary evolution by shifting our consciousness and healing our ecosystems. The unprecedented calamities we face are an opportunity to get clear and empowered to bring our visions to fruition. In this workshop, you'll be developing an inner compass to find and serve your unique purpose and thrive through sacred, balanced service to your life and world. We'll develop or refine spiritual practices and practical tools rooted in the principles of Permaculture, habits of effectiveness and your most vital insights and experiences. Shifting attention from what we do to personal leadership of who we are is central to developing our compass. We'll use journaling, meditation, Chi Gung stretches, nature observation, study and self-inquiry to discern our priorities, make good choices, build healthy relations, overcome challenges and stay inspired and in action towards living our vision. This series is led by Trathen Heckman, Director of both Daily Acts and Green Sangha. Trathen. who's spent years collaborating with amazing green leaders and citizens, says, "Developing my compass is the single most enriching thing I've done to increase the quality of my life, relationships and work in the world. I believe this type of truth-finding is as vital to our survival as the air we breathe. You are amazing and whole and were born for this time. Are you ready to live accordingly?" * Free Personal Ecology Talk and Info Session: Tues. April 8th, 7-9pm Getting aligned in place and time. 6 Workshop: Greywater-fed Urban Oasis Greywater. Let's meander through the residential water cycle to-gether! We'll quickly move from a whole system's perspective of how greywater fits into a residential oasis on to the practical design options for down-home and permitted greywater systems. As the winter rains end and the long dry season is upon us, we seek to keep our garden hydrated without precious virgin tap water. In this hands-on workshop we will flow through all phases of greywater design including site assessment, collection plumbing, treatment, and dispersal. This workshop takes place at the home of Trathen Heckman of Daily Acts and will include a site tour featuring a variety of inspiring design elements and over 200 varieties of food, medicine and wonder-filled plants. To the best of our knowledge, this will be the first permitted single-household greywater system in Sonoma County, with MANY more to come. This workshop is led by Scott Stoller, who's been designing ecological wastewater treatment systems for the past five years, working primarily with municipalities and wineries. Recently, he began consulting in the areas of stormwater management, river and wetland restoration. Scott is a certified Permaculture designer, holds a Master's in Ecological Engineering from U.C. Berkeley and is a Professional Engineer registered in California. After this day, you'll be filled with the inspiration and skills to start recapturing the precious water at your home!
This fantabulous tour de water will introduce you to the big picture of where our water comes from, where it goes, why that is so vitally important, and specific cost-saving actions you can take to conserve and treasure this essential resource. We'll begin at the heart of the matter with Rich Emig, Sebastopol Superintendent of Public Works and Sue Kelly, Sebastopol Engineering Director. They will guide us on an exclusive tour of one of the city's wells and enlighten us about groundwater, water distribution and how they deal with contamination, plus they'll answer your questions. At our next stop, Scott Mathieson of Laguna Farm Community Supported Agriculture will inspire us by distilling scads of wisdom and water-saving wonders found in his beyond organic crops. Examples include drip irrigation systems with timers, mulching, soil building and plantings that use less water. Farmer Scott regularly reports more flavorful food while using less water. Yum! Our final destination is water-wise Florence Lofts, a green live/work townhouse development in downtown Sebastopol. Architect and Developer Steve Sheldon will demonstrate his cutting edge greywater system, the first permitted greywater system in a development in our county, which saves an estimated 150,000 gallons of water each year. Other water-savvy features include permeable paving for ground water retention and bioremediation of stormwater run-off. You'll go home with a full load of new ideas to improve your relationship with water. * Free for Sebastopol Residents 10 Tour: Food, Fuel & Fruitful Living Saturday, June 28th, 9am to 4pm, $35 We begin this fine day with farmer Scott Mathieson of Laguna Farm. Scott has farmed here for over 18 years, ever adjusting his standards to go WAYYYY beyond organic, including tractors run on recycled veggie oil, straw bale insulated food storage, bio-dynamics, wind and solar power, water-saving strategies and so much more!! A short distance away, Catchtail Gardens is a three-acre parcel of pure wonder being revitalized from years of sheep grazing to a lush Permaculture food forest by owners and visionaries, Deborah Grace and Djubaya. They'll reveal some of the myriad layers of ingenuity and insight packed into this small farm to rebuild soil, reclaim water cycles and grow an amazing wealth of living green. As an added treat to our palates, Daily Acts teams up on this tour with Slow Food Russian River, West County's chapter of the international eco-gastronomic non-profit. Slow Food Russian River will host a convivial meal mid-day featuring a special tasting of local, surprising and delectable preparations. Filled with visions and flavors of foods grown in fields and backyards, we're now off to the western ridges of Sebastopol to see how Nor Cal Growers/Sebastopol Banana Company owner, Vincent Scholten, grows 55 varieties of bananas, fruit trees and other exotics in green houses! To close this grand day, be prepared to bee inspired as Katia Vincent, bee specialist and owner of BeeKind in Sebastopol, shares the glory of beekeeping and lays on the inspiration for us all to tend a hive or ten! 11 Tour: East Bay Cohousing Crawl: A Walking and Public Transit Meander Sunday, June 29th, 9am to 4pm, $45 Here is a mind and soul enriching day of exploring innovative, affordable and sustainable urban cohousing models. See Berkeley Cohousing's turn-of-the-century-farmhouse, a bay-friendly drought-tolerant garden, and the central green created by moving parking to the periphery. Learn how thrice-weekly common meals help keep people connected. Witness how a falling fence supports new neighbors' presence and participation. Marvel at the mutual support and ongoing education that helps this community minimize waste. Then discover how other cohousing communities in the vicinity were able to retrofit existing infill sites and create the opportunity for community, leveraging the system's condo structure and conventional mortgages. See the solar-powered common house that paid for itself, urban chickens, bees, café connections, naysaying neighbors converted to new allies, and Permaculture applications galore. Is community really "The Secret Ingredient in Sustainability?" You be the judge. It's a delightful tour of Oakland/Berkeley/Emeryville cohousing neighborhoods that will invigorate you with some easy walking between sites, along with a boost from local public transit to reach one or two others. This tasty tour is hosted by cohousing experts and visionaries: Raines Cohen who's been helping people create and thrive in community for a quarter century and Betsy Morris, PhD (City and Regional Planning), who is rich with experience in group development and participatory process. They reside at Berkeley Cohousing and have miles-long lists of accomplishments behind them. A tasty lunch and public transportation costs are included. 12 Tour: Permaculture Paradises Found! Saturday, July 12th, 9am to 4pm, $35 With mid-summer's lushness upon us, we'll visit two of the most sustainable sites in the Bay Area. We begin the day in western Marin County at the Permaculture Institute of Northern California (PINC), past home to internationally recognized Permaculture teachers and community developers, Penny Livingston Stark and James Stark. We'll see how they transformed this residential yard into a lush food forest and Permaculture site extraordinaire. The next stop, Commonweal Garden in Bolinas, is the current home of Penny and James. They co-founded the Regenerative Design Institute, which works in collaboration with Commonweal, a health and environmental research institute. Join Matt Berry, garden manager, wildlife biologist and primitive skills instructor to see how they are transforming this 17-acre farm into a Permaculture model demonstrating how human beings can live in harmony with the earth. These two sites collectively feature organic gardens, ponds, greywater systems, greenhouse production, an herb spiral, solar panels, waterfalls, chickens, ducks, goats, an earthen wood-fired oven, earthen plasters, a yurt, light straw clay walls, vaulted straw bale cottage, and a cob building with a dragon-mouth pizza oven. Plus, we'll poke around in buildings under construction that demonstrate cordwood, cob, light clay and strawbale techniques. This is an excellent opportunity to expand your Permaculture understanding while soaking in the life-affirming experience of countless amazing eco-design solutions. Saturday, July 19th, 9am to 4pm, $25* To kick off this tour of some of Sebastopol's water wonders, we visit lovely Catchtail Gardens, a three-acre Permaculture paradise with some remarkable water conserving features. Witness the six consecutive catchments that spill into each other, diverting water from the ditches and feeding the 150 redwoods, thus pouring an estimated 12,000 gallons of water annually back into the aquifer. Even more amazing is the harvesting of topsoil - over 50 cubic feet diverted from the salmon habitat annually and reused in the garden. For a look at one of Sebastopol's most treasured water resources, we land at the Laguna de Santa Rosa, a fabulous 14-mile wetland. Brock Dolman, Director of Occidental Arts and Ecology Center's Water Institute and Permaculture Design Program, Co-director of the Wildlands Biodiversity Program and ecologist featured in the Leonardo DiCaprio documentary The 11th Hour, will guide us on a short tour and discussion about the Laguna and the importance of water conservation, water reuse and effective stormwater management. Then, for mighty inspiration found in a smaller package, our final destination is the internationally renowned Energy Farm of the Post Carbon Institute (PCI), home of Julian Darley, Founder and Director of PCI and Executive Director, Celine Rich Darley. We'll tour the abundant gardens and water applications, learn about low-water food production, and explore their water-catchment and cleaning system designed especially for the in-town backyard. This incredible day will leave you breathless with the possibilities for improving your life by improving your relationship with water. *Free for Sebastopol Residents. 14 Workshop: Biodynamic Composting Rudolf Steiner's Biodynamic Agriculture is the oldest organized system of organic agriculture in the West; learn its fundamental theories in this hands-on composting class. Chas Moore, who runs a Culinary Arts School, Seeds to Sauce, teaches methods to produce restorative transformational compost, that serves not just as a practical medicine for the garden, but as a manifestation of our deeper spiritual beliefs—allowing for a healing of not just the earth, but ourselves. A tablespoon of well-made compost contains over six billion micro-organisms, and it also contains insights into Eastern and Western perspectives, the human body, overcoming death and disease, and the miracle of nature. 9 Workshop: Food Cultures Culture refers to more than its root meaning, "to tend" the field; this class will focus on tending to our nutritional needs through fermented foods. It is crucial to return to living foods and the health benefits found in fermentation. Learn from Chas Moore a holistic understanding about our food culture; this hands-on cooking workshop will teach you how to make your own delicious fermented foods and beverages, that connect us both to the history and future of live-cultured cuisine. Chas runs Seeds to Sauce (www.seedstosauce.com), a garden-based Culinary Arts School integrating ecological, healthy, local food systems with heart-centered philosophy. 15 Tour: Greenhouses & Greywater: On the Edge of the Continent Saturday, July 26th, 11am to 2pm, $35 Join us as we head to the Outer Sunset in San Francisco to explore true metro-opulence as found in a pair of urban oases. Experience the wisdom of the watershed garden model, indulge in reclaimed-materials greenhouse delight, get the scoop on composting toilets, and dial in on bio-fuels. This is a day-deep dose of sustainable urban wisdom from two of the true masters, Ben Jordan and Deverie Gehlen. We'll take in a "triple dug" garden, an amazing automated "urine charge" siphon system that dilutes household pee with water and adds it to the drip irrigation, a picture of designing for abundance in steep, sandy hillside conditions, harmony and fertility through worms, amazing creativity in reused materials and so much more. Presenters Ben and Deverie are truly among San Francisco's Permaculture gurus, and this is a grand opportunity to sit with them. We'll share a delicious potluck lunch at our first site.
Saturday, August 2nd, 10am to 2pm, $20* Participate in our CityScape Makeover celebration, as we transform a public Sebastopol lawn into a California native, diversity-building, low-water-use landscape. In this four-hour, hands on workshop, you will learn about sheet mulching, drip irrigation systems, natural soil amendments, and native plants that build habitats for bees, butterflies and a host of other beneficial beings. Inspired and empowered, you can take these skills home with you, invite your neighbors and friends, add in some fruit trees, veggies and herbs and have your own lawn removal party. Rick Taylor, owner of Elder Creek Landscapes will guide this enriching celebration. *Free for Sebastopol Residents. Sunday, August 3rd, 10am to 2pm, $35 Wow! This ever-so-special day is the famed "Brock Walk," with Brock Dolman at the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center (OAEC). OAEC is an amazing 80-acre nonprofit organizing and education center and organic farm, home of the intentional community, Sowing Circle. Into its second decade, this organization has consistently been addressing environmental, social and economic crises with innovative, practical solutions, style and beauty. Brock Dolman, Director of OAEC's Permaculture, Basins of Relations, and Wildlands Biodiversity Programs, will satiate you with his wealth of knowledge and practicality as we meander through gardens containing over 3,000 varieties of heirloom annuals and 1,000 varieties of edible, medicinal and ornamental perennials. Witty and reverent, Brock will complement the diverse flora with pepperings of natural history, wildlife biology, native California botany, watershed ecology, habitat restoration, education about regenerative human settlement design, ethno-ecology, ecological literacy activism and more. It's a mouthful to say it, truly transformative to experience it! 18 Tour: Cohousing Communities Coalesce! Rendezvous at 40 Oaks Cohousing Community for a delightful day of creative lifestyles and visions made real. Resident Claudia Cleaver, architect/designer of green and natural buildings, will tour us through the layers of sustainable design. These houses are cutting edge, using straw bales, Rastra, natural plasters, concrete floors, recycled and reclaimed materials and more! Satiated with beauty, style and functionality, we’ll head to FrogSong Cohousing of Cotati where residents will host us through a few homes and the lovely Permaculture food gardens. This downtown community creatively combines lovely home sites and storefront rental properties for communal income. Get exposed to consensus decision-making process, ask questions, discuss the practical steps to beginning a cohousing community and learn from those already doing it. We’ll linger at FrogSong for a tasty potluck lunch. Last, but certainly not least, we’ll caravan to Yulupa Cohousing in Santa Rosa. This unique endeavor represents Sonoma County’s most recently finished cohousing project. Yulupa Cohousing models a density of 29 homes on 1.65 acres, a viable alternative to endless “urban sprawl.” Due to the passing of the amazing co-housing architect and visionary, Michael Black, on April 9th, 2008,Yulupa community members will lead the tour. Michael was the architect of Yulupa and Two Acre Wood Cohousing in Sebastopol and is known for his consensus-building and conflict resolution models and unusual designs. An opportunity exists to purchase the Black unit at Yulupa. Please contact Michael’s wife Alexandra Hart at 707-579-9223, if interested. It’s a day packed with images of life embedded in community and creative solutions. 19 Workshop: MycoDynamic Gardening What is MycoDynamic Gardening? It's a philosophy and practice of integrating beneficial mushrooms into the ecology of gardens and landscapes, along with a variety of complimentary, innovative gardening technologies. This workshop will include both verbal presentations and hands-on activities, as we delve into home mushroom cultivation and such topics as ecological regeneration strategies and Permaculture principles. Presented by Mia Rose Maltz, who teaches Permaculture, bioremediation, and mycorestoration, and has studied extensively with the renowned Paul Stamets of Fungi Perfecti. Touree, member, and all around Daily Acts do-gooder, Janet Waring hunkering down with the MycoDynamic Gardening Workshop 20 Tour: Community & Urban Sustainability: San Francisco's Visitacion Valley Saturday, August 23rd, 10am to 2pm, $35 One can think of sustainability in terms of connections - relationships between resources, landscape, plants, animals and us. This tour of the area of San Francisco once known as the "Valley of the Windmills" will lead through homes, community gardens and park land. Along the way, we will visit habitat gardens with native and drought-tolerant plants, backyard farms with food crops, fruit trees and ponds. Learn how easy it is to conserve water with rain-catchment and greywater systems. Animals play a big role in our world as companions and partners as well as resources – fowl have been part of farming going back millenia; are they appropriate in an urban environment? We think so, and you will see them as an integral part of urban gardens in crowded city blocks. Community may be the single most important reason the human species has survived. Nothing in our world will be sustainable if we can't live peacefully along side each other. Revel in finding this "little pocket of enlightenment," where neighbors have lived side-by-side in harmony for fifteen years, supporting and helping each other. Soak up the art integrated into this cityscape, and hear histories of an early settler neighborhood's transformation with stories from past and present. We'll share a grand potluck picnic lunch along the route. 21 Workshop: Food Preservation: The Canning Party Saturday, August 23rd, 9am to Completion, FREE Chas Moore and JoEllen DeNicola invite you to join a day of canning the local harvest. This hands-on party, where you watch how to "put up" foods without white sugars, is intended for experienced canners to share their knowledge along with first time canners. The day includes a potluck lunch and a can of preserves. We will can whatever is in season so it will be a surprise to us all. This is not a formal class so there is no fee. Donations are welcome in the form of ripe fruits or vegetables and canning jars. Please contact Chas and JoEllen about your donation. Please bring cutting knives, notebooks, aprons, and extra smiles! 7 Workshop: Kombucha to Compost Fermentation and compost! Join in the fun of watching Mother Nature do all the work after you quickly and easily give a hand in the fermentation process. We start with our gut; what are all those amazing microorganisms doing in our gut? How do fermented foods, like Kombucha Tea, enrich the gut? A demonstration and tea tasting of Kombucha Tea helps you get rolling. AND YES!! It's Composting Time. Compost completes the cycle of the Web of Nutrition. Understand all the intimate details of how food scraps, worms, and paper over time create rich compost which nourishes your soil so you can once again eat nutritious foods. JoEllen DeNicola has 25 years of organic gardening experience and is passionate about helping people reconnect with their food. She is a certified Permaculture Designer who teaches workshops and provides consultations on nutrition and gardening. Please bring a quart Mason jar for your Kombucha mother, your notebook, and food to share for a potluck lunch. Recipes, handouts and Kombucha Mothers are available for all participants. 22 Workshop: Natural Cleanup: Full Spectrum Remediation Strategies Saturday, September 13th, 10am to 2pm, $45 Bioremediation is a process accomplished by natural living systems that detoxify polluted water and soil. These living systems include plants, fungi and microbes like bacteria. In this workshop we will explore some methods, applications and organisms capable of bioremediation. Join us as we incorporate living systems into our Permaculture design, cycle nutrients and transform waste into food. This information-packed workshop is led by Mia Rose Maltz, co-founder of the RITES Project (Return Intention Towards Ecological Sustainability) and bundle of permi-wisdom who's studied mycology, mushroom cultivation and mycorestoration for many years. 23 Tour: The Glory of Green Building Saturday, September 20th, 9am to 4pm, $35 Want to learn what green and natural building are really about? Come see how innovative designs combine with sustainable building materials to improve quality of life and enhance the environment. We'll begin at a beautiful straw bale art studio owned by nationally recognized landscape artist, Clark Mitchell. It was built by Michael Jacob, founder of Talia Developments, and designed by Lance Cerney. This whimsical studio features operable clerestory windows providing indirect lighting and cool summer days, a water tower, radiant floor heating, colored concrete flooring, and salvaged lumber. For a taste of commercial greening, we'll visit the Environmental Technology Center (ETC) at Sonoma State University, where Pete Gang, Architect, LEED-AP and teacher at the ETC, will share his wealth of knowledge about this supremely green building. Design features include active and passive solar energy, rammed earth, energy demand reductions, cleaner air and water, improved indoor air quality, and more! Traveling to Penngrove, we'll visit Troy Silveira and Tina Wilder's home, which is always a tour favorite. Spurred by high costs and a strong desire to be creative and sustainable, these two innovators extraordinaire have transformed their urban landscape. Being ardent recyclers, it was natural to use reclaimed materials for construction and maintenance purposes. We'll see reclaimed timber framing, a living roof, urbanite (broken concrete) and stone walls, outdoor shower, edible landscaping, light straw clay meditation hut, cob construction and much more. It's an enriching day of wondrous ideas built into the real world.
Saturday, September 27th, 10am to 2pm, $20* Get empowered by this fun and informative Permaculture/eco-design workshop that'll help you get a grip on water use inside and outside. Inside the house we'll explore domestic water use and a host of easy techniques for minimizing waste of this precious resource. Outside, we'll get lit on small-scale techniques for harvesting and storing rainwater for reuse and soil percolation, installation of drip irrigation systems, and design concepts to move you towards a more sustainable landscape. You'll be refreshed by the ways seemingly small changes can radically improve our quality of life. Workshop leaders include Rick Taylor, owner of Elder Creek Landscapes and Trathen Heckman, Executive Director of Daily Acts. *Free for Sebastopol Residents. 25 Workshop: Advanced Food Cultures: Exploring Further Fermented Foods Sunday, September 28th, Noon to 4pm, $50 For those who have begun to experience the health benefits and pleasure of creating delicious fermented foods, this workshop offers a chance to delve deeper into food cultures. Join Chas Moore to explore the myriad of health benefits derived from fermented foods. Enjoy a tasty light lunch of assorted cultured items, before experiencing how to make tempeh and miso. We'll share stories about how fermented foods have been an important part of cultures around the world and how to bring them into our own local, organic and healthy food systems. Bring ferments you're already making to share with the group along with any questions, problems and joys of discovery. Chas Moore has spent a lifetime cultivating his own relationship with food - from the haute kitchens of France to the organic gardens of California and is the owner/teacher of Seeds to Sauce. 26 Workshop: Food Preservation: Creating Delicious Dried Foods Saturday, October 4th, 9am to 1pm, $40 From Socrates to our grandmothers, food dehydration is an art that has been practiced to preserve the harvest. Dehydration keeps food tasty and healthy, preserving their precious vitamins and minerals. Low temperature drying is easy to master, whether you are drying herbs, vegetables or fruits. And dehydration is economical! It costs pennies to dry your favorite herbs and have them at arms reach for winter. Come chop, pulverize, slice, and puree foods for dehydration. Recipes will include Savory Seeded Crackers, Cinnamon Apples, Nut Burgers, and Fruit Wrap Ups. Please plan on spending time in the garden visiting the plants that feed us. Please bring your notebooks, aprons, layers of clothing, and a potluck lunch to share. JoEllen DeNicola has 25 years of organic gardening experience and is passionate about helping people reconnect with their food. She is a certified Permaculture Designer who teaches workshops and provides consultations on nutrition and gardening. 27 Workshop: Designing for Diversity Saturday, October 25th, 10am to 5pm & 7 to 9pm And Sunday, October 26th, 9am to 1pm, $140 In this rare west coast visit, renowned ecological designer Mark Cohen provides an interactive primer in wholistic thinking plus design principles to establish inspiring, hopeful reference points. From the lens of Permaculture and cultural ecology, we'll explore practical strategies to achieve food security, energy independance, water systems, shelter and ecological restoration at homescale and bioregional levels. This day-and-a-half course takes place in downtown Petaluma at a newly planted food forest featuring water catchment, greywater and a diversity of Permaculture SOULutions that feed and infect neighbors, strangers and friends. We'll also tour other sites in Petaluma that are part of Daily Acts Homescale Model program. An optional slide presentation on tropical forest ecology as it relates to the design process happens from 7 to 9 pm on Saturday. "I can't recommend Mark and his fertile insight enough. He is an amazing designer and person with a rare lens into what is possible when we move from ego-centric to eco-centric in living rich lives that enrich life." -Trathen Heckman Mark has over 20 years experience in organic farming, gardening and beekeeping in temperate and subtropical zones with 15 years growing medicinal mushrooms and herbs. An Organic Certification Inspector, he teaches natural history and cultural ecology and is founding director of Belize Agroforestry Research Center. |
To learn more about upcoming tours, please contact Ellen at 707-789-9664 or To Start in 2008: 1.Workshop: Drumming, Dancing, Digging 2.Workshop: Living Earth Wall Finishes 3.Workshop: The Alive Home 4.Tour: Sustainable City Vistas and Urban Forage 5.Workshop Series: Personal Ecology: Four Saturdays: April 19, May 24, June 14, July 6 from 9:30am to 4:30pm, $425, $375 if paid by April 5th 6.Workshop: Greywater-fed Urban Oasis 8.Tour: Water Wise & Well Fed 10.Tour: Food, Fuel & Fruitful Living 11.Tour: East Bay Cohousing Crawl: A Walking and Public Transit Meander 12.Tour: Permaculture Paradises Found! 13.Tour: Water-Savvy Stars 14.Workshop: Biodynamic Composting 9.Workshop: Food Cultures 15.Tour: Greenhouses & Greywater: On the Edge of the Continent 16. Workshop: CityScape Makeover 17.Tour: West County Delight 18. Tour: Cohousing Communities Coalesce! 19.Workshop: MycoDynamic Gardening 20. Tour: Community & Urban Sustainability: San Francisco's Visitacion Valley 21. Workshop: Food Preservation: The Canning Party 7.Workshop: Kombucha to Compost 22.Workshop: Natural Cleanup: Full Spectrum Remediation Strategies 23.Tour: The Glory of Green Building 24.Workshop: Your Water's Worth: Sustainable Household Water Use 25.Workshop: Advanced Food Cultures: Exploring Further Fermented Foods 26.Workshop: Food Preservation: Creating Delicious Dried Foods 27.Workshop: Designing for Diversity and Sunday, October 26th, 9am to 1pm, $140 |
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