Growing Power Workshop!

Hey y'all.

It's been a crazy weekend here at Growing Power. There was a conference here beewhich 80 or so people attended...from all over the country. The group was pretty well diversed - a whole mix of people interested in urban farming, starting their own non-profit similar to Growing Power, wanting to learn about different sustainable (permaculture.esk) activities: composting, vermaculture, aquaponics, hoop.houses, sprouts / marketing and bee keeping. The two workshops I attended were composting and hoop house construction.

Will Allen's composting workshop at Growing Power.

That's a farmers arm... Will never works out...

Fortunately they let us interns participate in the breakout sessions rather than spending the day shoveling and mulching and other hard-labor activities. But I actually crave shoveling a little each day...even in this sub freezing weather. I thought I'd be much colder than I am... but we're moving around so much that we actually break a sweat! That and I live right on-site, so I can go home on any one of my breaks and have a warm stew from the crock pot waiting to warm me up / re-energize me.

Composting / vermiculture was the workshop I participated in today, led by Will Allen himself. We had a great group activity talking about starting up a business in our local communities and having no money to start whatsoever. We had to take into account it was a poor area, with high crime rate, and we want to help ex-offenders get jobs and also help out the children. What would we do? We talked about fund raising to get some initial startup capital, then making composting using all free/cheap local community waste-resources. It starts by collecting high carbon material such as wood chips, hay, newspaper and cardboard then layering it in a bin with high nitrogen materials (food waste, manure, grass clippings.) The bin should not be sealed because you want it to be an aerobic (not anaerobic) process. 50/50 is a good ratio of carbon to nitrogen material, although Growing Power uses and recommends 75/25% ratio (more carbon than nitrogen) as this decreases the smell, flies and rodents. The more carbon in the winter will also help retain the heat better.

Here are some pictures from the composting workshop.

Digging for worms!

Compacting the compost bins. Awesome.

Then I did a hoop house construction session yesterday…which is great as I plan on building a few this spring in Holyoke. Here's some pictures of that:

We bent those steel poles using a simple jig that we made using 2x4s and flat pieces of wood.


Katie and Jordan - great people - Growing Power staff and new friends


One of the workshop attendees...it was freezing cold so none of us wanted to take our gloves off to do this part.


I thought this picture summed up the day pretty nicely.

Jon being Jon.

Vermiculture and aquaponics to come later! Hope everyone had as good a weekend as I. 2010 is looking to be a year of eventfulness! I came home tonight super inspired from today's workshop. Keep asking questions and writing comments – I'm thoroughly enjoying them!