This is a stand alone introduction course to making food forests

Saturday 12th & Sunday 13th August 2023

Imagine your garden or community space looking as lovely as a woodland edge. Imagine that on top of looking wonderfully wild, it produces an abundance of nutrient dense food and will ultimately need very little digging, weeding, manual watering or pest control - all in harmony with animals and other beings (eco friendly and vegan). This is ‘an edible forest garden’.
Forest gardening is a way of growing food where nature does most of the work for you. Modelled on natural woodland, crops are grown in different layers from high and medium sized canopy to roots, ground cover and climbers. And its not just food and medicine you will get from the forest garden, there are many more yields.
Through careful planning plants are chosen which have beneficial effects on each other, attract beneficial insects and create a healthy biodiverse rich system that maintains its own fertility. Once established, your main task will be harvesting!


====== WHAT TO EXPECT =======
This workshop gives you the tools you need to design your own forest garden.
You will learn about the basics of designing a forest garden. You will get to understand
- How to select the right plants for your environment
- Where to place them to ensure they thrive
- How to ensure you have the right nutrients cycling to ensure good crops
- History of forest gardening
- Why make a food forest
- Layout of a forest garden
- Multifunctional pathways
- Creating abundance and resilience
- Low maintenance food growing
- Patterns in nature for forest gardens
- Understanding and maximising edge

We invite people to bring vegan food to share for lunch. Please also bring drinks and snacks. If everyone tries to bring enough for 2 people, there will be an abundance.


=== TEACHERS ===
Rakesh Rootsman Rak – An experienced Permacultre designer teacher, forest garden specialist, yoga teacher, homeopath and reggae DJ. Rakesh has been designing and teaching permaculture to individuals and communities since 2009, and has taught hundreds of permaculture, forest gardening, eco village design, sociocracy, community building and related courses. His design portfolio ranges from large forest gardens through to many urban community food growing gardens, private farms and back gardens as well as designing collaborative businesses, urban water retention systems and even computer software and documentation systems. Rakesh is also passionate about sharing his journey of self empowerment (learning how to make all the things you need for yourself rather than relying on the system to provide for you), this includes eco architecture (low impact housing); capturing and storing energy (electricity, heat, lighting, etc); fuel efficient heating systems (rocket heaters and stoves); water capture, purification and recycling systems, natural beekeeping and so on. He is one of the founders of the Children in Permaculture, Youth in Permaculture and a student support network called Roots n Permaculture. So be prepared to go off on inspirational tangents occasionally.
http://rootsnpermaculture.com/

Feedback and testimonials for Rakesh https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AaNC_tGBvG7AdwQXAT07PPf5HXhIAsy1w18rNt6WN9A