Wanted: School garden instructor for after school programs in Central Lake

We're hiring again! If you can work well with K-5 students, have a green thumb, and want to earn a little part time cash, this is for you. Please consider this exciting new job!

ISLAND is partnering with the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), MSU Extension and Central Lake Elementary to start a school garden and run after school programs for Central Lake Elementary students.

Here's the basic info:

Phase one of this project involves a 6-8 week session, 3-4 days a week from about 3:15 to 6:15 pm. You will create and implement a simple but exciting hands-on curriculum for between 5 and 20 kids in grades K-5. The goal: to set up a brand new school garden, plant a fall cover crop, garlic and other plants, and run sustainable gardening classes at the school. You will also work with teen or adult volunteers and school staff.

ISLAND wants to hire you as the instructor/program leader. You will have complete control over the program (within the bounds of the project goals) and would check in with ISLAND staff for an hour per week in person and regularly by email.

The position pays $12/hour for between 10 and 20 hours a week (to be determined). Work hours are from about 3:15 to 6:15 on 3-4 weekdays as well as prep time hours on your own schedule. Some additional funds are available for materials and other project costs. No benefits, sorry.

This position will hopefully expand to include more projects and additional hours. The position starts October 5th (yes, that soon!) and will run through late November/early December. We may plan additional winter programming (maple syrup?), and then the regular program will start again in March and run through May.

Please email Brad Kik at brad@artmeetsearth.org if you're interested, or call (231) 480-4515.

Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird

Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird
This Friday, September 25th, at 7pm

Left Foot Charley in the Grand Traverse Commons, Traverse City 

Sliding scale admission $5-15 

A portion of the proceeds will be donated to ISLAND

This is a rare opportunity to see Dan Kahn and the Painted Bird, (their full band, together and here in Michigan) since several of the band members live out of country.

Many were blown away by Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird's performance at Harvest Gathering this past weekend. 

They have been described as musical theater, and are a mix of punk cabaret + radical yiddish song + gothic american folk + klezmer danse macabre.

"Kahn writes like the rainy ghost of Woody Guthrie hitched a ride with Tom Waits to New Orleans" — Detroit Metro Times.

 

 

ISLAND's First Annual Community Canning Party

On Tuesday September 15th ISLAND hosted its First Annual Community Canning Party. We canned six half bushels of tomatoes and one half bushel of dilly beans. All the veggies were grown by local farmers. The equipment was borrowed from several sources, including from the Martha Wagbo Farm and Education Center. It was a great success and lots of fun! We will have more canning events in the future, so check back if you are interested.

Fungi and Fermentation Skill Swap

The Institute for Sustainable Living, Art & Natural Design (ISLAND) and the Martha Wagbo Farm and Education Center are proud to partner for the upcoming Fungi and Fermentation Skill Swap.

The skill swap will take place Sunday, October 4th from 1 pm to 5 pm at the Wagbo Farm, located three miles south of East Jordan at 5745 North M-66.

Join us as we explore the wide world of fungi and fermentation. Anyone with an interest in local foods; wild-crafting; food preservation; or tasty, healthful meals will greatly benefit from the workshops offered here. There will also be local vendors selling fungal and fermented goods.

Experienced instructors will lead workshops about fungi and fermentation, including:

Mushroom cultivation with Jim Ruster of Mitchell Hill Farm
Paper-making with polypores taught by Franny Bluhm
Fall mushroom hunting led by Michigan Mushroom Hunter's Club Vice President Jim Provci
Dyeing wool with mushrooms taught by fiber artist Julie Hurd of the Lake Charlevoix Weavers Guild
Cheese making taught by Amanda Kik of ISLAND
Sauerkraut preparation by Mark Maier
Composting with Mike and Monika Fiebing of Bella Terra Farms
Kombucha with Pepper Bromelmeir
Mead making with Nels Veliquette, beekeeper and fourth generation farmer in Northern MI
Wine making with Brian Hosmer
Live ginger beer and kefir with Nirinjan Singh and Kimberly Dante of Anahata Balance
Whole Grain Home Brew with Jerome Grskovic, BJCP (Beer Judge Certification Program) beer judge


Sponsored by Eden Foods, and support from the following: Field and Forest Products, and Pleasanton Bakery, Tandem Ciders, Leelanau Cultured Veggies, Black Star Farms, Mushroom the Journal.

Cost is $20 for pre-registration by Friday, October 2nd, or $25 at the door.

For a complete list of workshops and vendors, or to register, please visit http://www.ARTmeetsEARTH.org or contact Yvonne at ISLAND 231-480-4515 or info@ARTmeetsEARTH.org.

Thanks Josh!

Woah. If I'm ever walking around with my fly open or I have mustard in my beard, please let me know! We just got a phone message from Josh, letting us know he was checking out our website, and apparently one of our links had changed.

We quote from the Sustainable Living Network and then link to them: www.sustainableliving.org - except that now, for one reason or another, that website has been re-inhabited by Dow Chemical. Because Dow is sustainable now, yay! Right?

Thanks to Josh's heads up, we've removed the link. Instead, we invite you to visit this link instead : the art of Paul Phare relating to Dow and it's blatant greenwashing.

The Art of Tracking

Date-- Saturday, August 29th to Sunday, August 30th
Time-- Saturday: Check-in starts at 1 pm; Classes go from 2 pm to 9pm
Sunday: Breakfast starts at 8 am. Classes go from 9 am to 5 pm
Cost-- $30 for three meals and camping, $25 for two meals without camping (breakfast excluded.) Registration is limited! Reserve a space today!

The Institute for Sustainable Living, Art, and Natural Design, (ISLAND) and the Martha Wagbo Farm and Education Center are partnering to bring you a valuable resource in outdoor education—tracking knowledge. The Art of Tracking will be held at the Wagbo Farm just south of East Jordan at 5745 North M-66. Activities will be lead by Paul Raphael, an experienced tracker who has worked with celebrated outdoorsmen such as Jon Young and Paul Rezendes, and has taught tracking classes across the United States and Europe.

At The Art of Tracking, you will learn how to fully engage your senses so that animal trails and sign can be readily observed, how to understand the meanings of bird calls, and how to interpret animal behavior through tracks and gaits. Snacks, drinks, and three meals (dinner Saturday, breakfast and lunch Sunday) are included. Overnight camping is available at the Wagbo Farm—please call Wagbo at 231-536-0333 or email wagbo@torchlake.com for more details.

This event is limited to just 15 participants, so please register by Monday, August 24th by following this link or calling ISLAND Directors Brad and Amanda Kik at 231-480-4515. Supervised older children are welcome. Please note that your registration is not complete until we have received your payment.

For further general information, visit the ISLAND events page. Or contact Intern Maria Wesserle at 231-480-4515.

Wish List

Do you have this stuff cluttering up your pole barn? Have these skills to share? Can you help? Here's what we're hankering for:

• yurt and/or yurt parts
  
• black planter/buckets, 5 gallon size, for the tree nursery
  
• 50 gallon food grade plastic drums
• building materials
• free or discounted accounting
• new or gently used Mac for our staff
• new or gently used solar panels
  

Beehive Basics

Workshop on beekeeping basics and preparing for your first hive(s) next spring!

August 5, 5–7 PM, at the Institute for Sustainable Living, Art & Design, Bellaire

For more details and directions to the property contact Yvonne at ISLAND

231-480-4515
ArtMeetsEarth.org

Patch Design

You ask, we answer! Lindy wanted to know what we meant by "initial patch design." The short answer is that our design process follows the permaculture principle of "design from patterns to details," which means that while we've done lots of large scale work on the property plan, such as choosing where to put buildings and gardens, we haven't done much small scale, plant-specific design. Now that we're actually beginning to plant trees, that has to change. The process we're using is called "patch design." Read on if you want the nuts and bolts.

A "patch" is essentially a garden plot, though it may not always look like a standard raised bed or have paths running along side it. Every plant in a patch, if it's well designed, will follow one or two important rules. These rules apply no matter the shape size or style of the patch.

Rule #1 is pretty much a golden rule - no two (or more) species should be forced to compete with each other. The permaculture name for this is a "resource partitioning guild," and it means that to design a patch we need to look at root structures, sunlight, nutrient needs, water needs and the ways that the plants reproduce. Some of this is obvious to any gardener - you wouldn't likely put your tomatoes in the shade or mixed in with raspberries. The tomato plants might survive, but they would hardly flourish.

There are some exceptions - the classic forestry exception is to closely space trees so that the competition drives them directly and rapidly up, toward the available light, making for straight, high quality timber logs. Another is to put pressure on a expansive plant to control it's ability to spread.

At the same time, though, many gardeners, in an effort to keep competition to a minimum, space plants far apart in bare soil, which just creates opportunities for nature to fill those niches - mostly with weeds, right? So we're always fighting nature's opportunists, who are just trying to do their job. With a permaculture patch, we're doing our best to design with a wide variety of plants (a polyculture) so that all of those niches are filled with plants WE want. So we minimize competition within the patch but fill all the spaces that nature could exploit. No more weeding!

Rule #2 is optional, but a big bonus - plants within a patch should support each other and the larger environment. This is often known as a "mutual support guild" and is what really starts to make a permaculture plot shine. Many folks will recognize the three sisters planting (corn, beans, squash) as a mutual support guild which has the added advantage of providing food for us. Imagine different sets of "three sisters" (or five sisters, or twenty sisters) plantings to benefit butterflies, or hummingbirds, or soil quality. That's what we're working on.

In this specific case, we're building a patch that has two interlocking support guilds inside of it. We have a red pine plantation which we will slowly remove, leaving acidic soil in it's place. Our patch design is focused on building soil, using lots of big leafy nitrogen fixers and dynamic accumulators (who bring up phosphorous, calcium, magnesium, etc. from deep in the soil and release it as they shed their leaves or other herbaceous mass). It's also focused on supporting our new beehives buy providing lots of pollen and nectar sources. All of these plants, shrubs and trees need to flourish in acid soil and in the partial shade created by the pines that aren't removed yet. They also need to minimize competition and support each other, as well as build healthy soil (which should slowly begin to rebalance towards neutral pH) and support lots of bees, spiders and birds.

We spend a lot of time looking at plant databases and catalogs. Each plant is a puzzle piece which may or may not fit into the big picture! Dave Jacke's Edible Forest Gardens Vol II has been a constant companion.

Hope that helps! We'll have more details about our specific plant choices soon!