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Fungi for Fun, Fertility, and Food! (10/3)

(Making oyster mushroom buckets…)

When: 11:00 AM – 2:00 PM October 3rd, 2009
Where: TBA
Taught By: Leonard Barrett and Friends
Course Fee: $35

Register here.
What You’ll Leave With: Your Own Oyster Mushroom Grow Kit, The Basic Information Needed to Grow Several Other Mushroom Species, Resources for Further Learning

The name says it all: Everyone can (and should be) growing fungi for fun, fertility, and food!

In this workshop, we’ll explore various methods of growing edible fungi, and discuss how they can be integrated into your life in a way that’s fun, builds your soil fertility, and tastes wonderful with olive oil and garlic.

Our hands-on activities will show you how to grow oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus ostreatus) on three different substrates: logs, straw, and one of Portland’s most plentiful ‘waste’ resources, coffee grounds. After a little bit of talking about how mushrooms live and reproduce, we’ll help everyone build their own oysters-on-coffee-grounds grow kit to take home.

We’ll also discuss several other species and how to grow them.

Come get cozy with nature’s recyclers!
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September 10th, 2009 | Posted in Education, Food, Past Events
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Block Repair: Neighborhood-Scale Permaculture for Urban Revitalization

We are currently looking to partner with committed groups of neighbors to engage in Block Repair.  This process will assess the challenges and opportunities of food production, rainwater harvesting, and community building on the scale of one to several city blocks.  Within this scope we will be able to capitalize on the diversity of community members, ecological niches, and resources not available in any single household.  The resulting design will be an integrated blueprint for growing food, relationships, and hope for bright green future.

Whether you are new to the concepts of permaculture and regenerative design, or have long been a part of the choir, we invite you to take the next step in increasing your self-sufficiency, whatever it may be.  If you would like to find out more about Block Repair, please email inquiries@barrettecological.com for more information, or to schedule a consultation.

It will take our collective intelligence and creativity to look back on this phase as a time when we successfully transitioned away from oil dependence and curbed climate change.  This is both an offering, and a call to action.  We look forward to partnering with you, our community and clients, to engage in creating more vibrant and resilient human environments during the coming years, in Portland and beyond.

Be well, and be in touch.

December 17th, 2008 | Posted in Ecological Design Articles, Food, Global Environmental Crisis
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Measuring Local Organic in ‘Food Feet’

So where’s your next meal coming from? Over the last few years, lots of folks have found out.

In recent memory, we’ve heard about the 500 mile diet and even the 250 mile diet.  But now that we’ve come across the the 50 mile diet, things are really starting to get exciting.  For those of us who live in urban centers, the concept of a 50 mile diet lends some hope to the oft-mentioned vision of returning to foodsheds characterized by small cities with thriving rural hinterlands.  Indeed, for those of us blessed to live in the Willamette Valley, there is much reason to be hopeful.

So what’s next in the quest for ever more local food? ‘Food Feet’!!! Nevermind trying to calculate how far a longhaul trucker might have traveled to deliver your salad greens or eggs, you could be counting the steps from your backdoor.

October 18th, 2008 | Posted in Ecological Design Articles, Food
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