Planting Joy! Event Recap.
This past weekend we had the pleasure of hosting an organic vegetable gardening workshop at MA Center San Ramon called Planting Joy! We had a wonderful group of attendees from around the Bay Area, all sharing one thing in common: the desire to learn how to grow healthy, Mother Earth-friendly food!
Our focus for the course was to learn to grow healthy, organic summer vegetables, even in small spaces, and we utilized our raised bed vegetable garden as a demonstration. We were able to cover a lot of topics in the workshop, namely:
- soil, compost, organic fertilizers, and bed preparation
- no-till gardening
- planning a summer garden
- vegetable growing calendar
- succession planting, crop rotation
- care, maintenance, and harvesting
- pests and diagnosing problems
- end of season care
It was a vibrant, interactive group, with lots of questions and discussions shared over chai at the break and throughout the workshop. We were able to showcase our composting system, our little vermiculture (worm composting) operation, and the general construction of our raised garden beds that keep most mammals out.
For small-space gardening, we demonstrated square-foot gardening as well as container gardening and vertical gardens. We discussed the importance of seeing your garden as an extension of your family, caring for it, and nurturing it so it, in turn, will give back so much to ourselves and our families. It was a viewpoint shared and valued by the entire group!
All participants then donned garden gloves and helped us get our heirloom tomato and basil seedlings into the beds, and everyone enjoyed the hands-on experience, with laughter and joy throughout the process. As a special bonus, at the end of the workshop, the attendees all got to take home an heirloom vegetable seedling of their choice (tomato, cucumber or cilantro). Also, a comprehensive Learning Guide containing all of the resources was sent to each participant.
Overall, it was a great day and the feedback from the attendees was very positive. We enjoyed hosting the workshop and the interaction between participants, and we look forward to making sure Planting Joy! becomes a regular annual course on our Green Friends calendar.
Many thanks to Amartya for this excellent recap.
More classes are coming. See the Announcements page.