The Annual Farm Your Garden Tour is Here!
This is an open-house style garden tour. You need not start it at 10am. Tickets are available at the Chamber of Forest Grove and Cornelius, The Crafty Fox, and Corner Antiques (debit/credit welcome). Buy your tickets early and save 5$ off the day of ticket price of 15$. Maps to the gardens will be given out to advanced ticket holders as well as day of event ticket purchasers from The Forest Grove Senior and Community Center, starting at 9:45 am. From there you can guide yourself to all of the local area kitchen gardens, using an easy to read map. There will be a wonderful recipe quest as you tour. At each kitchen garden, all map holding participants will receive one copy of each gardeners favorite recipe to try when you get home. New flavors, new ideas, new friends all will await you on Saturday, July 12th 2014 in Forest Grove. All proceeds to benefit the Dairy Creek Food Web.
What, you may ask, is a Kitchen Garden? In the days gone by it was a garden hidden out back away from the formal display gardens because it was deemed to unsightly, it was a garden of utility…it fed the entire household! It was a working garden often walled off for protection from the winds of winter with a hothouse, fruit trees, berries, vegetables, herbs each placed to have the best advantage to the warmth of the sun. Chicken or cow manure redeemed the soil in the spring and fall leaving it rich in nitrogen for the next crop. As time rolled on land became more expensive house plots became smaller leaving less and less room to divide the formal display gardens from the utilitarian food-producing kitchen gardens so now they are often integrated together. This teaching tour will demonstrate how to achieve a scheme that feeds a household and is beautiful to boot! Each garden offers a different perspective on how to create an accessible, immediate food source with space you have in your own yard.
And two workshops at Nana Cardoon Farm:
BEAN, GRAIN & EDIBLE SEEDS: Homestead Scale
Sunday, July 13 – Instructor: Harry MacCormack
This class will be held at Nana Cardoon in Forest Grove
Harry has been working with grains, beans, and seeds on a homestead scale for 40 years. During the past 7 years the research plots at Sunbow Farm have been a large part of the drive to create the Southern Willamette Valley Bean and Grain Project. Some of the plot plantings have included black, pinto, soy, lentil, red and garbanzo beans, over-wintering peas, 3 rye varieties, 2 triticale varieties, 4 wheat varieties, 2 varieties of quinoa, amaranth, buckwheat and sunflower and will all be demonstrated during this workshop.
Workshop Focuses:
- -Field preparation, rotations, moisture, temperature
- -Over-wintering, advantages and disadvantages
- -Varieties for Fall and Spring planting, some very old
- -Nutritional measurements, the WSU work we participated in, and current measurements protein etc.
- -How much is needed for a person, family, community: or how many pounds to expect from a 20’ x 20’ plot
- -Harvest how to
- -Threshing by hand and/or machine; machine designs
- -Storage
- -Creative uses of beans, grains, seeds
- -Potential community supported markets and storage
SEED SAVING
Sunday, July 27 – Instructor: Harry MacCormack
This class will be held at Nana Cardoon in Forest Grove, OR
Harry MacCormack and Sunbow Farm have been saving seed from many varieties of plants for 4 decades. Homestead scale seed saving is challenging and fun.This class will cover what he has learned.
Workshop Focuses:
- -Ancient Seed Saving Traditions
- -Why save seed? (when it appears so much is commercially available)
- -Open Source, open pollination; can hybrids be redeveloped?
- -Planting your garden(s) for seed collection.
- -Water(how much, how little) and other moisture concerns.
- -Plant identification, marking, how many plants?
- -Record keeping
- -How to actually collect various kinds of seed
- -Dry down tricks
- -Cleaning: equipment you probably need and might already have.
- -Tricks when processing various seeds.
- -Establishing a seed collecting community.
Learn more about our instructor, Harry MacCormack, Sunbow Farms, Corvallis at www.sunbowfarm.org
CLASS TIMES:10-3pm
FEE: $30 per person. Cash or Check.
LOCATION: Nana Cardoon, Forest Grove, OR
REGISTER: contact Charlene Murdockcharlene@nanacardoon.com. Directions will be provided upon registration.
A beautiful lunch is provided for $5. Please indicate if you would like a lunch.
Richard White
Nanacardoon
206-794-1903
Richard@nanacardoon.com
Dairy Creek Community Food Web 