Growing Community in Southwest Michigan
The next phase in the CORE Winchell public food forest is coming this season and we need your help! But because this is Permaculture, we also want to help you. We’re making large-sized plots available for urban gardeners who want land access. You grow whatever you want for the season, but also help us...
Documentation of the growth habits / forms of some of the woody perennials at my (PJ’s) forest garden, with a snowy backdrop and a 6-foot “yardstick” to show scale, with notes about planting years. I have dry, sandy soil and a lot of these things didn’t get much care or watering—plus many have been...
Visit two different forest gardens on two very different sites in Southwest MI—throughout an entire growing season! Forest Gardens or “Food Forests” are a way of growing food by imitating nature: plants on many layers, cooperating rather than competing. It doesn’t mean growing food in a dark forest—more like a semi-open woodland featuring many...
Since many of us have fruit trees growing, and most trees some require annual pruning for optimal health, I thought it would be a good idea to have a place to collect info on what people have, so that we can exchange ideas, comments and scion wood with each other. This is purely voluntary...
4 of us met on a Saturday morning in mid-April to plant oats and barley in some fields that Steve had worked up previously. Beautiful weather, nice soil, great conversation, good food and lots of fun, as always with this group. We’re experimenting with growing our own grains organically in permaculture-minded systems, on a...
Dale, Tomme and Sam teamed up to organize this wonderful event at the Riverview Launch in Kalamazoo, just in time for spring. Ann Fraser from Kalamazoo College gave a very good presentation on the importance, habits, and life cycles of native bees (and other pollinators), and afterward we all got to assemble cool little...
Our March Van-Kal Permaculture meetup was at Rachelle’s place. We spent a couple hours outdoors pruning a really overgrown old apple tree (Thanks to John and Josh for the pruning guidance and Tomme and Steve for their skill and daring in tree-climbing). We also had an excellent meal and conversation indoors. A great time...
Bill Mollison is a name that should be familiar to most people who’ve had any exposure to Permaculture, as he is the co-originator of the term and practice (with David Holmgren), and probably its most widely-published author and widely-traveled teacher and promoter. He was 50 years old when the seminal Permaculture One was published...
Martin Crawford is a pioneer in temperate-climate forest gardening, taking up the work of Robert Hart but applying it at a larger scale, with better plant spacing and arrangement, an academic fastidiousness, and much larger number of species. He has been publishing the excellent Agroforestry News from the UK since 1992, and more recently...
Mark Shepard may be the first person in the U.S. to apply Permaculture at the scale of a 100+ acre farm, with tree crop polycultures as the primary focus. He took up the lessons of J. Russell Smith and put them into practice on a hilly, beat-up farm in SW Wisconsin in the mid-1990s....
