Don’t delay! This will be the first time in three years that Dave Jacke’s Design Intensive will be taught in the U.S. Scholarships available, see below.

Edible Ecosystems Emerging:
Food Forestry for the 21st Century

A 9-Day Forest Garden Design Intensive with Dave Jacke
October 2 – 11, 2015 – Feathered Pipe Ranch, Montana

Forest ecosystems exhibit many beneficial properties we humans would be wise to emulate in our culture, agriculture and horticulture:

• They maintain, renew, fertilize, and propagate themselves without human inputs.
• They build, store, and conserve clean air, clean water, nutrients, soil quality, and biodiversity.
• They exhibit stability, resilience, and adaptability.

These qualities emerge from the dynamics of the forest as a whole system, not from any one or more of the elements that comprise the forest alone.  To design productive edible ecosystems that express these same qualities, we must understand forest structures, functions, patterns, and processes, and use this knowledge wisely.

In this nine-day intensive course, you will dive deeply into the vision, theory, and practice of designing wholesome, dynamic, and resilient edible ecosystems using temperate deciduous forests as models. Dave Jacke and his teaching team will offer lectures, site walks, and experiential exercises to help you understand how the architecture, social structure, underground economics, and successional processes of natural forests apply to the design of edible ecosystems of all kinds. You’ll learn a variety of ecological design processes while designing a range of food-producing ecologies at the Feathered Pipe Ranch, while also providing detailed polyculture designs for an actual Public Edible Forest Garden Park, currently in the installation phase in Helena, MT. We’ll also engage with issues of garden management, economics, and the deep paradigmatic shifts required to succeed at co-creating “humanatural” landscapes and cultures. You will leave inspired and empowered to design food forests at home for yourself, and your friends, neighbors and clients.

INSTRUCTORS :

Dave Jacke is the lead author of the award winning two-volume book Edible Forest Gardens. Dave has been a student of ecology and design since the 1970s, and has run his own ecological design firm –Dynamics Ecological Design in Greenfield, MA – since 1984. Dave is an engaging and passionate teacher of ecological design and permaculture, and a meticulous designer. In addition to extensive teaching, he has consulted on, designed, built, and planted landscapes, homes, farms, and communities in the many parts of the United States, as well as overseas. A cofounder of Land Trust at Gap Mountain in Jaffrey, NH, he homesteaded there for a number of years. He holds a B.A. in Environmental Studies from Simon’s Rock College (1980) and a M.A. in Landscape Design from the Conway School of Landscape Design (1984). Read more at http://www.edibleforestgardens.com/.

Scholarships available, see the website below for details.