This course will be all worms! Learn how worms can determine your soil health and how to cultivate them. We will also be demonstrating how to build and easy worm bin with minimum inputs.
Instructors: F.A.R.M. & Texas Worm Ranch
Skills Taught
- Build/ install infrastructure
- Build soil health & productivity (e.g., make compost, plant and manage cover and catch drops, integrate crop and livestock production, install crop rotations, add organic amendments if and as required)
- Monitor ecological impact of all production activities
- Implement conservation practices & measures (e.g., buffer strips, water quality management projects, wildlife habitat improvement, strip cropping)
- Cultivate soil
Now that you have multiplied your worm collection, use the castings for compost tea. Compost tea is a great way to love your plants naturally. Compost Tea is a Liquid Gold fertilizer for flowers, vegetables and houseplants. … Very simply, it is a liquid, nutritionally rich, well-balanced, organic supplement made by steeping aged compost in water.
Skills Taught:
- Benefits of compost tea
- How to improve crop growth with compost tea
- Nutrient retention and availability of soil
- Build stronger soil structures with compost tea
Following discussion, we will demonstrate how to build a compost tea brewer!
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As we move toward the development of our market gardens to meet our customer needs it is important that we prepare our soil, prepare our planting spaces, plant the appropriate crops, plant companion crops to reduce insect stress and maximize our garden space for successive plantings and profit.
This class will provide a discussion of the benefits of cover crops, which crops to plant, when to plant them, and a planting demonstration.
Instructors:
- Koen Stokes – Horticulturist, Veg’d Out Urban Farms
- Doug Havemann, Army Veteran, Co-Owner, Mesquite Field Farm
- Melissa Havemann, Co-Owner, Mesquite Field Farm
Skills Taught:
- Farm tool safety
- Crop planning
- Seed supply calculations
- Compost development
- Soil amendment requirements
- Farm implement usage (small scale planters)
- Soil preparation
- Planting bed preparation
- Watering methods