COMING SATURDAY APRIL 24th
Prepare Your Garden for Spring the Regenerative Way

April 24th (rain date 4/25)  10:30am – 12 noon
Private residence in Oak Bluffs
Learn how to set up systems in your yard for water catchment, mushroom growing, compost making / turning, sheet mulching, shrub pruning, and seed starting.

TO SIGN UP FOR WORKSHOPS
Email: emily@igimv.org

Prepare Your Garden for Spring the Regenerative Way
April 24th (rain date 4/25)  10:30am – 12 noon
Private residence in Oak Bluffs
Learn how to set up systems in your yard for water catchment, mushroom growing, compost making / turning, sheet mulching, shrub pruning, and seed starting.

How To Plant A Fruit Tree the Permaculture Way
Community Greenhouse, Oak Bluffs
May 22nd Rain Date May 23rd 10:30am – 12 noon
Use a variety of guild plants to support productive healthy fruit trees with sheet mulch and wood chips.

Regenerative Backyard Gardening Practices
IGI Community Garden
June 5th. Rain date June 6th.
Learn planting methods to support soil health using compost and mulch, as well as how to prune and stake tomatoes. Compare different gardening methods including correct watering, adding soil amendments, and how to prep for next year’s gardens

We filmed a talk about making your own backyard compost,
at Island Grown Initiative

Plants from the Community Garden in Oak Bluffs. Plants
Sale for members starts Saturday & Sunday May 16th & 17th, 10am – 4pm.
For the Public…Saturday & Sunday 23rd & 24th 10am- 4pm

Imagined Gardens Episode #4 You are never alone when you have plants!

A chapter called “Trees” from Herman Hesse’s book “WANDER”
and a video of the chapter, read by Linda Birmingham

“In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws… to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree.”
Herman Hesse

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts… Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.

For a lyrical kindred-spirited counterpart, visit one of Earth’s greatest forests with Pablo Neruda and astronaut Leland Melvin, then savor Amanda Palmer’s reading of Mary Oliver’s spare and splendid poem “When I Am Among the Trees” and this cinematic love letter to the wilderness, inspired by the great naturalist John Muir, who saw the universe as “an infinite storm of beauty.”

From: BrainPickings.org

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CLICK TO SEE VIDEOS FROM THIS EVENING

FRIDAY MARCH 15TH        IMAGINED GARDENS AND LANDSCAPES

This sixth annual event is a Multi-Arts Evening, featuring visionary designs, ideas and visual arts by farmers, gardeners, holistic health practitioners / clinical herbalists and visual artists who are engaged with projects that benefit the environment and expand our notions of gardens and landscapes.

G I M M E S H E L T E R How to save yourself and the planet by planting a Food Forest Garden in your backyard ROXANNE KAPITAN – Gardening Evolution from the Bronx to Microbial Connections. Roxanne is the Landscape Manager at Oakleaf Landscape Inc. REBECCA GILBERT – Edible Forest Evolution and more at Native Earth Teaching Farm FILM – PERMACULTURE PARADISE – REBECCA SANDERS -“Seed Love” … sowing, saving and sharing them with community. She will be bringing the seed library cabinet and sharing the contents with the audience. Rebecca grew up on a small dairy farm in New Hampshire, studied plant and soil science at Umass Amherst, joyfully landed in the Friendship Garden at The Farm Institute in 2012, and helped launch the Martha’s Vineyard Community Seed Library with friends in 2014. She loves sharing nature’s beauty and bounty with children, and believe that thriving organic gardens, edible landscapes, and food forests hold the key to restoring health and balance in our lives and on our planet. RUNAR FINN – Why we should plant trees