Market Garden Masterclass
Date and time
Location
Gundaroo, Allsun Farm
1318 Dicks Creek Road Gundaroo AustraliaRefund Policy
Description
Dive straight into the nuts and bolts of how to run a thriving, diverse organic market garden, taught by long-term, established and successful market gardeners. Suitable for those with some prior growing knowledge who are keen to make a livelihood from growing great vegetables.
Join Joyce Wilkie and Michael Plane of Allsun Farm for three days of hard-won knowledge and on-the-ground experience of what you need to know and do in order to produce great organic vegetables for profit or community gain.
- Growing area design, planning & layout
- Water supply + irrigation for Australian small farm conditions
- Crop rotation. And then more crop rotation
- Bed preparation + making
- Planting techniques for different plant families
- Maintenance, seedlings, harvesting
- Nutrient and biomass strategies
- Integrating animal systems
- Marketing, value-adding and box schemes
- Microfarming tools for different scales of operation
This course will involve both theory and hands-on components, with students getting a chance to understand how Allsun Farm works from top to bottom in terms of crop rotations, marketing and integrated animal systems.
Over its 25 years of operation, Allsun have done everything from CSA-style fruit-and-veg boxes for local families and restaurants to seedling supply and tool supply in addition to pastured eggs and other on-farm products. All products are grown organically with no chemicals whatsoever.
This masterclass is suitable for:Confident gardeners investigating what it takes to move to commercial or community-scale production, as well as conventional vegetable growers looking to move towards organic techniques and landholders looking to diversify their on-farm income.
Assumed knowledge:Students should have a good working knowledge of growing vegetables on at least a home scale. Knowledge about the basics of soil pH, nutrient cycling and organic pest management would be an advantage.
We recommend you read the following books prior to class, in order to hit the ground running…
The New Organic Grower – Eliot Coleman
The Winter Harvest Handbook – Eliot Coleman
Organic Gardening (7th edn) – Peter Bennet
Joyce Wilkie and Michael Plane are passionate about growing vegetables, pastured poultry and creating and supporting fantastic small farms.
They run Allsun Farm and ‘Gundaroo Tiller’, an innovative tool and equipment company for microfarming. Following early careers in earth sciences and education, they have farmed for over 30 years near now farm at Gundaroo, NSW.
As they get older they are concentrating their efforts on growing more growers.
About the venue:Allsun Farm is a small ‘garden farm’ that has been supplying both locals and top Canberra restaurants with organic produce for 30 years.
Focussing on low-tech and solar energy solutions to growing good food, Allsun Farm grows its crops with a combination of movable greenhouses, perennial crops and annual vegetable beds. How to get there, where to stay…
Your course includes a stack of market gardening resources, including Allsun’s famous Growing Annual Vegetables CDROM, and their crop rotation cards.
You’ll also be fed with local organic goodness during course hours for lunch + snacks.
Check out photos from our previous Market Garden Masterclasses here…
Booking your place:You can pay for your course below with your credit card, or contact Trev in our office to arrange payment. We’re happy to answer whatever questions you might have.
Please ensure you read our refunds policy prior to booking your course.
- Design + setting up a best-practice farming enterprise
- Design for biologically intensive cropping systems
- Alternative machinery for small scale growing – what’s essential, what’s not
- Minimum tillage techniques within a permanent bed system
- The use of best hand tools in the market garden
- Best practices for organic weed management
- Managing pests with integrated pest management
- Developing a systematic approach to effective crop rotation
- Extending the season – techniques and planning for longer yields, and more stable livelihoods
Jean-Martin Fortier (JM) is a farmer, writer, and educator specializing in organic and biologically intensive cropping practices. He is passionate about demonstrating how small farms can play an important role in the rebuild of the food system.
His internationally recognized 10-acre micro-farm in Quebec, Canada is a perfect example of this: At les Jardins de la Grelinette, only 1½ acres are cultivated in permanent beds, yet the farm gross more than $100 000 per acre with operating margins of about 60 per cent, enough to financially sustain his family. The focus at la Grelinette has been to grow better-not bigger- in order to optimize the cropping system, making it more lucrative and viable in the process.
Jean-Martin’s acclaimed book, The Market Gardener, tells the story of how he and his wife, Maude-Hélène Desroches, started their farm and how they successfully operate it.
In his work, JM places a strong emphasis on intelligent farm design, appropriate technologies and harnessing the power of soil biology as key components of successful farming. A storyteller who can weave the technical aspects of farming with anecdotes from his farm, JM has facilitated more than fifty workshops and conferences in Canada, Europe and the United States.
Organised by
We’re dedicated to awesome homesteading skills for city & country: keeping life simple, organic and deliciously real.
We do this by providing free online resources & offering world-class training in permaculture and regenerative agriculture that gives you the skills and confidence to create permanently sustainable systems.
If you have any questions about our courses, or if you don’t want to pay with paypal, you can always call us on 02 5300 4473 and we’ll happily sort you out.
Email: info@milkwood.net
Website: https://www.milkwood.net
Phone: 02 5300 4473