Emilie Tweardy

Sunday, June 26th, 2016. The Shenandoah Permaculture Institute of Virginia is teaming up with Polyface Farms to offer a "Soil to Self Field Day"!!! We are really excited about this opportunity to work directly with the Polyface, tapping into the innate goodness of Permaculture practices and their positive impacts on our health. We will be focusing on a few specific Permaculture techniques for health, and how we can build it from the soil to ourselves.

Topics will include: An introduction to Permaculture with a site tour of Dancing Star Farm,
Intro to Fermentation - with an emphasis on fermenting vegetables for health,
Permaculture Medicine and Herbal Medicine (growing and tincturing) as well as a "first aid" herbal medicine walk.

Lunch and dinner will be provided by Polyface Farm and Shenandoah Permaculture. Click here for more information and to register for the Soil to Self Field Day

The Virginia - Based Shenandoah Permaculture Institute is offering a 10-Day Intensive PDC this August, from 8/12 - 8/21.

The course will be hosted by ShireFolk Farm, a 64-acre, very young Permaculture farm that is just moving out of observation mode. This will be a really exciting opportunity to shape the future of the farm, and learn Permaculture in a diverse space that is a working farm, yet still quite a blank slate.

The teaching team brings to the table a strong focus on Permaculture Health, as well as an emphasis Social Permaculture. Check out the PDC Description and web registration, and come learn with us this August!

The Shenandoah Permaculture Institute - check out the website - ShenandoahPermaculture.Com is hosting a few courses and workshops in the coming months.

In June - They're excited and honored to be collaborating with the infamous Polyface Farms to host a Permaculture Health Field Day, starting out at Dancing Star Farm in Churchill, VA (near Staunton) and finishing the day at Polyface, complete with delicious local meals provided by Polyface. It's going to be an awesome day! This is happening on Sunday, June 26th. Web registration isn't quite up yet, but check back in the next week or so.

In July - There's going to be a rather casual but very educational 2-day work party and campout at ShireFolk Farm that will be a Learning In Action format, focusing on four things: Composting Toilets, Composting Hot water for an outdoor shower, Mushroom logs, and Food Forest Guild planning and implementation. Sa-weeet! This one is dirt cheap - $50 for two days of hands-on learning, with food and camping included. Registration coming online within the next week.

In August - August 12th - 21st They're offering a 10-day Intensive, also at ShireFolk Farm. I think this is the first intensive PDC in Virginia in a loooooong time, so we're all pretty psyched about it. All of the info for this one is up on the website and Registration is now Live!!. This course is offered on a sliding scale from $1595 - $1295. One half-priced scholarship is also available - Fill out the contact form on the website or get in touch via Facebook for more info.

We hope to see some of you this summer!

Hey there, I'm Emilie Tweardy with the Shenandoah Permaculture Institute. There are definitely lots of Permies around, it's exciting! Check us out at www.ShenandoahPermaculture.com. We taught a PDC at the University of Richmond this Spring, and are teaching another one next Spring (in the long format - over the course of about 6 weeks), but we are teaching a 10-day intensive this August, and we've got a couple of workshops coming up between now and August. In particular, maybe come check out our Campout July 9th and 10th in Palmyra. Should be a fun and casual time to meet some cool folks. It's a work-party/educational/campout format. We'll have details on the website soon. We're also collaborating with Polyface for a workshop in late June - again, check the website.

But aside from all that, courses and such, if you're just looking for Permaculture connections, PM me and we can meet up some time. My husband and I run ShireFolk Farm www.shirefolkfarm.com in Fluvanna county, but we sell in the Richmond area at Goochland Market on Tuesdays and Manakin on Saturday mornings. Stop by and say hello sometime! There were a lot of great folks at the last University of Richmond course, So I have great hopes for the Richmond area Permaculture scene growing into the future! Cheers!

Wow you folks are all so awesome! Thanks for the replies Sorry I've been slow answering your questions, between getting ready to move, working full time, travelling for a wedding, and inspections to finalize purchase details it's been a really busy spring for us so far!

The pasture is not subdivided, and has historically been cut once and then grazed for the rest of the season, although I don't think the previous farmer was very responsible about rotating his stock. The last few years he's just let a neighbor hay it, getting 3 cuttings.

What we're thinking is this: We've made friends with a neighbor already who's agreed to help us hay it in exchange for about 1/3 of the hay. In this way we can learn the equipment and process under someone with experience. We'll also have lots of hay to use in all of the establishment-phase stuff we have coming up. We'll definitely do a single cutting, and then we're hoping to figure out some grazers to keep on a strict rotation. Only downside there is that we aren't able to give ourselves over to the farm full-time this year, so we would need (this season) to find someone else who's interested, and obviously we have standards about how we want it grazed/rotated, etc. We will have some chickens rotating on the pasture this year as well, but not enough to utilize it fully. So we're crossing our fingers that we'll make some friends that are into mob-grazing and need some extra space! If we don't end up with grazers, I think we'll probably drill-seed some sort of cover crop, or pasture improvement species, but the jury's still out. I think we have decided though not to let it fallow. Since it is such a huge resource we want to make sure we're taking good care and keeping options open.

I'm so excited to get out to the farm! We close on April 23rd, and are planning to homestead it this year while we observe, and it's so hard not to get ahead of myself dreaming about the long term farm paradise of my dreams when I know I need to be patient and really take it slow and just keep my senses tuned-in in the short term. But we'll have chickens and pigs this year (the remaining balance of our acreage is hardwoods so we'll get a few and rotate them through the woods) and *hopefully* some grazers, and a nice garden (turns out there's ~50 row feet of abandoned asparagus!!!) and enjoy life on the farm. As we get our plan laid out I'll keep posting for feedback and ideas. Thanks again everyone! We are new to the area and even though this community isn't directly local it feels great to have a community that is so responsive and positive. Cheers friends!

Ian - I'm all about fermenting!! Any specific questions or troubleshooting feel free to PM me, and I'll do the best I can to answer. There are a few basic rules, but it's really pretty simple for the most part. The easiest way to get started is to get a little digital scale (you can find them for $10-$15) and weigh out your veggies.

Easiest veggie recipes=
Vegetables chopped + 2% salt by weight. (Ex. chop cabbage and weigh it, then mix in 2% of that weight in salt.) Massage, weigh down and cover. Try to keep the solids below the liquids (ie, use a plastic baggie full of water to weight the solids down/use a weight of another kind)

Vegetables chopped + saltwater brine. Easiest recipe I've found for this is 2tbsp. salt in 1 qt. water. I forget the percentage this comes out to, but it works well. Again, weigh vegetables down so they sit below the brine line.

Shortcut called the "burp and shake". In lieu of an airlock, or if you don't want to try and weigh down the veggies, here's an easy shortcut: Ferment in a jar that can seal with a mason jar lid (band+ring type). Leave it very slightly open so it can offgass, then vent the air once or twice a day and shake it afterwards, then close it back up loosely, so the gas can continue to escape. By keeping it almost-closed you'll keep the majority of bad bacteria from charging in. Venting/burping it will let the gas out (although if the lid isn't twisted down hard it should be able to vent on it's own - but you should still give it an extra burp to let off pressure) Shaking it makes sure that all of the contents get covered in salt regularly, so no bad bacteria can grow.

Tip - the smaller you cut things the faster they'll ferment (more surface area for bacteria and less thickness for them to penetrate) and the more even/consistent the product will be. Often people struggle with their first kraut because it's too chunky.

Try these methods with your favorite veggies, you'll be surprised how easy and delicious this is! And once things have fermented to a sour state they'll keep a loooong time in the fridge. Have fun!

I want to hear the "elevator speech" that presenters may have/give. How do you do justice to the field in a conversational summary? I've been in the permaculture world for a little over a year, and I still struggle to give a concise explanation (particular to the complete layperson) when people ask me, "Permaculture, what is that?"

My husband and I are buying a farm with 30 acres of previously-hayed pasture, along with all of the necessary haying equipment. It's a part of a 63 acre parcel, and the hay isn't why we're interested, we want to use it in the future as pasture in our diversified grazing system, and we'll see what happens when the vision coalesces. But my question is what to do THIS season. We're in zone 7a outside of Charlottesville, VA. Here's the question:
While we're observing and getting used to our land, designing our dream, etc., what is a good use for this land? We're not terribly interested in haying, though it's certainly a viable option to either hay it ourselves or arrange with a neighbor to do so. We're not real psyched about haying it, and we won't have enough animals to efficiently graze that area this season. So, what is the best use here? Let someone hay it while we figure our ideas out... experiment with haying ourselves.... find someone who wants to responsibly graze it with their animals (my favorite option)... What happens if we just let it grow? Does anyone have any suggestions for a creative use? If we just let it grow without grazing, could it be a problem in the future? I feel like it'd probably be really tough to deal with next year if it just grew wild this year.. but I don't have experience with cultivated hay. Any thoughts?