Courses

Learn 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 gardening 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.

This course will cover:

• Garden design, planning & layout
• Crop rotation
• Bed preparation
• Planting techniques for different plant families
• Maintenance, seedlings, harvesting
• Nutrient and biomass strategies
• Integrating animal systems
• Marketing, value-adding and box schemes
  

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.

Allsun produces CSA-style fruit-and-veg boxes for local families and restaurants for 7 months of the year, in addition to eggs and other on-farm products. All products are grown organically with no chemicals whatsoever.

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. See reading list below.

This masterclass is suitable for: Folks who have been 'growing their own' for a while and want to move to commercial or community-scale production, conventional vegetable growers looking to move towards organics, farmers looking to diversify their on-farm income, and those who've done lots of reading and are ready to get growing.