The Medicine Garden

Are you ready to cultivate medicinal plants for yourself and community? Are you looking to utilize Permaculture design methods to create resilient thriving gardens?  Come learn from Caroline's experience creating and stewarding our 10 year old forest garden. The heart of our community, our forest garden is full of medicine and food plants that support the health and wellness of our community. It is truly a Food and Medicine Forest - a thriving forest garden ecosystem in suburban South Austin. Since 2011 this garden has grown alongside our community.

This course will walk you through the process of starting and tending a forest garden with a focus on medicinal plants. It includes cultivating soil and plants and working with the flows of nature and human systems.  I will introduce specific plants, their needs, how they work within the garden ecosystem and broad strokes on their herbal actions and how they work to support our health and wellbeing. Plus follow up activities between classes to help move you along your personal design process.

Beginners welcome! Watch our segment on Central Texas Gardener to see what we are up to around here.

Cost : Sliding Scale - $300 - $450. Pay what works for you. Thank you!

Monday - Wednesday evenings 6 - 7:30pm on Zoom

October 3th - October 26th

Bonus In Person Day - Saturday November 5th 10 - 12:30 pm -  In person hang time - seed swap plus plants from our medicine garden and plant remedy spritzers from our medicine garden! Garden Party!

Class 1  

The Medicine Garden Ecosystem

~What is a medicine garden and how is it different from an annual edible garden.

~Community herbalism and garden activism

~Introductions

Class 2  

Flows and the art of Observation

~Get oriented with the natural flows - sun, water, wildlife, people

~Create your own goal/context for your medicine forest garden

Class 3 

Soil and Water -

~ Growing the Living Soil - no-till, succession, as above so below

~ Small Scale Earthworks to utilize water

Class 4 

~ Plants for the soil - medicinals to grow healthy soil

~ Utilizing medicinal cover crops

~ Growing healthy soil takes time - a soil succession story

~ Working with the seasons to utilize the rain when it comes

Class 5 

~ Design Basics - creating an easy functional scale design to get the job done.

~ Scaled designs to help us see the bigger picture and support our budgets and time

Class 6 

~Plants and succession through the seasons and years - working with perennials and annuals

~Plants for pollinators - Blooms for every season

Class 7 

~Propagation stations for small scale needs

~Seeds, cuttings, division and a bit on grafting

Class 8 

~Design shares and celebrations

~Be the Fulcrum - Break ground - A Declaration!

Bonus In Person Day - Saturday November 5th 10 - 12:30 pm -  In person hang time - seed swap plus plants from our medicine garden and plant remedy spritzers from our medicine garden! Garden Party!

More inperson time: Weekly volunteer days at the new Mutable Earth/Cultivate location begin in October!