Salvaging Abundance Together: A 4-Part Permaculture Workshop Series with Ben Zumeta of Old Growth Edible Landscapes & the Wild Rivers Permaculture Guild.
Free to participants with the support of Dirt and Glitter—a local art, activism, dance, and design empowerment organization.
Overview: Our Wild Rivers region is a beautiful, bountiful place. The very sources of our challenges–wildfire and flood risk, watershed and soil degradation, unemployment and people in need of purpose–can be each other's solutions. Permaculture is a toolkit of ethics based design methods drawing from nature and ancient cultures to reconnect beneficial feedback cycles to meet our needs while being better ancestors and stewards. This workshop series will help students identify and use abundant–often free–materials to grow food, harvest water, and protect our human habitat from fire and flood, all while helping biodiversity flourish.
Please sign up ahead of time on the Dirt and Glitter Website— dirtandglitter.org/design —or using the QR code on the flyer. This will help us plan and make the workshops as educational and productive as possible. Signing up will also help us plan food, tools, and PPE for participants. Drop-ins are ok, but not ideal. Feel free to ask questions via PM or posting below.
Workshop #1: An Introduction to Permaculture: Planting Seeds of Restoration, Resilience and Community
Saturday, April 4th, 2026 – 12pm-2pm
Where: Taa-'at-dvn Chee-ne' Tetlh-tvm' — Crescent City Food Forest at the College of the Redwoods' Del Norte Campus (at the corner of Washington and Arlington)
Description: This introductory workshop explores how ethics-based permaculture design can enrich our lives as we care for the Earth and people. We will cover:
- planting seeds and trees
- making raised beds, including air-pruning perennial plant nursery beds
- building healthy soil
We will focus on accomplishing the above even if free and salvaged materials are all we have at hand. These activities will be the basis for discussion of other practical steps we can take in this revolution disguised as organic gardening. All skill and knowledge levels are welcome. Already an expert? Come help teach a beginner!
What to Bring:
- Closed-toed shoes comfortable for walking uneven ground. (Rain boots are best in Spring)
- Weather appropriate clothing (rain jackets are always a good idea).
- Gloves and safety glasses (we will have some to share but bringing your own would help)
- Seeds you would like to share or get advice on planting. This can include fruit and nut tree seed.
- Salvaged or up-cycled seed starting containers to bring starts home
- Gardening tools (optional, label so they go home with you)
- An open mind, positivity, and your ideas.
Workshop #2: Salvaging Abundance: Turning potential pollutants into fertility and filtration
Saturday April 18th, 2026 – 12pm-2pm
Description: Many natural resources can become pollutants when over abundant and underutilized. Wood and underbrush in regrowing forests are a classic example. We can help forest and watershed health while turning potential smoke into soil by thinning the overpacked understory and using it in our gardens. This workshop will cover how to do so, including:
- identifying the source species of woody debris and woodchips, and best uses of each
- hugelkulture, a woody debris based raised bed that holds water while also improving soil drainage and fertility
- woodchip mulching best practices
- other uses of woody debris, including animal bedding, biochar, water absorbing and filtering drainage structures, and other watershed restoration uses
Woody debris is just one example of this principle, and we will discuss other abundant materials we can salvage to turn potential pollutants into improved human habitat. This will also be a primer for workshop #3.
Where: Taa-'at-dvn Chee-ne' Tetlh-tvm' — Crescent City Food Forest at the College of the Redwoods' Del Norte Campus (corner of Washington and Arlington)
What to Bring: same as workshop #1
Workshop #3: Fire on the Mountain: Shaded Fuel Breaks for Fire Protection and Biochar Production–Nature's Forever Fertilizer
When: May 9th, 2026 — 10am-2pm
Where: My place at 2750 Low Divide Road. 5mi up Low Divide from HWY 197, the last property before 6 Rivers NF road 17n21.
Description: In collaboration with the Del Norte Fire Safe Council crew, we will be working on a shaded fuel break that protects surrounding homes and forms a strategically important firebreak for everything downwind of the Myrtle Creek watershed (Jed Smith and the world’s tallest trees, the towns of Gasquet, Hiouchi, & Crescent City). Participants will learn how to:
- Make a shaded fuel break that protects structures and the largest, healthiest trees while leaving diverse native mosaic areas with a better chance of longterm healtb
- Connect with the Fire Safe Council crew for help or advice doing so at your home
- Use woody debris for making biochar, a soil amendment used by native people of the Americas for millennia. Biochar increases soil fertility, water retention and filtration for centuries. It is also useful for livestock, reducing feeding requirements and bedding odor while improving health of animals and the compost made with their waste. Participants will get inoculated biochar from previous burns to take home, so bring buckets or bins to fill.
Participants will get inoculated biochar to bring home for their garden, compost, or livestock.
What to Bring:
- Closed-toed shoes comfortable for walking uneven ground.
- Weather appropriate clothing (rain jackets are always a good idea). If you'd like to be involved with burning, cotton or wool clothing, leather gloves and boots are best. Plastic based clothes melt surprisingly easily, so are discouraged around fire!
- Water bottle
- Gloves and safety glasses (we will have some to share but bringing your own would help)
- A bucket or bin for bringing biochar home with you
- A truckload of woody debris (<2” diameter) if you'd like us to make biochar with it for you (no treated or painted wood, nor plywood)
- An open mind, positivity, and your ideas.
We will provide things to cook over the biochar kiln for lunch, and snacks. Please pack a lunch if you have any special dietary requirements.
[/b]Workshop #4: Be the Beaver You Wish to See in the World: Water cycle restoration with woody debris, inspired by and in homage to beavers.[/b]
Saturday, May 16th to build upon previous workshop. 10am-2pm
Our continent has been short at least 40 million of beavers since the 1800's. Each pair of these industrious ecosystem engineers hydrated a couple acres of wetlands and forest with their work, stabilizing the water cycle of North America. Now, with less than 1/10th of their historic population, we must do the beaver's work, and in doing so try to help them return. We can encourage their return to finish the job better than we can by giving them a habitat foothold. Our NW California-SW Oregon Wild Rivers region may be the most important to restore in all of North America, as our forested coastal mountains prime the continent’s hydrological pump to support life across the continent. We will cover how to use the larger woody debris from fire mitigating shaded fuel breaks to build beaver dam analogues and other water retention-infiltration structures. Doing so can rehydrate forests, mountainsides and aquifers–feeding springs, creeks and rivers through dry summers. I also believe this site at the Myrtle Creek headwaters is a potential strategic inflection point for watershed health downstream and fire mitigation downwind.
Where: Instructor Ben Zumeta's property at 2750 Low Divide Road. 5mi up Low Divide from HWY 197.
What to Bring:
- Closed-toed shoes comfortable for walking uneven ground. Rain boots help working around water.
- Weather appropriate clothing (rain jackets are always a good idea). Long sleeves and pants are a good idea.
- Gloves and safety glasses (we will have some to share but bringing your own would help)
- Water bottle
- An open mind, positivity, and your ideas.
- We will provide lunch and snacks. Please bring something you can eat if you have special dietary requirements.
Thanks for your participation, collaboration, and help spreading the word.
