Circular Gardening (in and around Tuakau)

February - guests Bernhard Scholl and Ursula Gérard. 

Bernhard Scholl
Born and raised in Germany at Lake Constanze 
Founder of the "Terrazze Sante“ project in the Swiss Alps close to Lago Maggiore with an online campus with various courses about „Healthy Gardens - Healthy Humans“ which he runs with his wife Ursula Gérard (author, book coach and consultant)
20+ years of market gardening:with nutrient-dense, deliciously tasting veggies, fruits and herbs, using bio-dynamics, permaculture, food forest principles, working the fields with horses, electroculture and beyond.
10+ years of landscaping:using holistic and integral principles to create harmonious gardens as a place for people to rejuvenate and recharge
20+ years of teaching: using nature communication, the horses as a partner in gardening, cooperation with nature spirits, bringing back fertility back to the land

Ursula Gérard
Ursula Gérard is an author, consultant and co-founder of Terrazze Sante, an online learning platform for everything around healthy gardens & healthy humans.She supports entrepreneurs to reach a wider audience by writing books for them or by creating online courses for them, to co-create the kind of future we want to live in.

Ursula grew up in Germany and completed a masters degree in German literature & philosophy at the University of Berlin. She was working for 11 years in the US supporting innovative entrepreneurs to create business plans and get their company off the ground. She was also working as a consultant with AT&T Business Translations to support hi-tech-firms to get their manuals and software translated into 11 different European languages.

Here she is translating Dr. Vandana Shiva when she was visiting in South Tyrol, Italia, a few years ago:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iznJQJKVOgA

What's Circular Gardening?
It's keeping everything on site (including all the weeds), and making exquisite compost from it. 

It's also growing medicinal herbs to bring health to the plants in your space - bit by bit creating a closed loop system that needs nothing brought into it. 

The result - you can cancel your garden waste collection, stop trying to hide the weeds in corners of your section, stop burning green waste, and most importantly, stop buying compost made from goodness knows what. 

You can also say farewell to all the mysterious potions that promise to rid you of every pest and disease - biodynamic methods offer natural remedies where the most important tools are observation, followed up with a sensitive approach to preventing issues based on what you notice in your ecosystem.

It's kind of like raising children, putting on an extra layer when it's cold outside, and making lemon honey drinks for a sore throat. If you tend to reach for natural remedies for human health, then you might as well do the same for your garden.

There's no greenwashing here, just best practice (biodynamic) gardening applied to the home garden, lifestyle block, workplace, community centre or small business. 

Blue Borage models a unique approach to gardening, and it's truly circular. 

How the workshops run: 

We start with a meet & greet, some Q&A about common weeds and composting questions in your garden, and then we get into action.

This is both theory and practice, and the goal is for you to go home (or back to work) and refine your own composting and gardening systems to be more circular.

Most of the workshops in 2024 will be focused on getting all the plants established in the Sharda Food Forest to make the Biodynamic compost preparations. There is a range of fruit trees needing some underplanting as we clear the weeds away from that part of the garden. 

February's session is a little different: I've booked a room at the Tuakau Library where we can sit around a table and hear from Bernhard & Ursula and their impressions of farming in Aotearoa New Zealand. We'll talk about the potential for worm farms in public spaces such as the Tuakau Library, and see how their brand new worm farm is looking inside. 

At around 12pm we'll head to the Soil Farm in Whangarata, where Katrina will give a tour of her composting operation, answer any questions, and open up the parallel compost piles that were started i November. 

We'll have a shared lunch in Whangarata (please bring something that can be served in the garden) and wrap up by 2pm. 

What to bring: 

- Bring your lunch, or something to share for lunch and we'll stop for Q&A while we eat and discuss any theory that's relevant to the topic of the day. 

- Gumboots, or sturdy shoes suited to gardening on uneven slopes with blackberry and other invasive weeds. 

- Wear suitable clothes for gardening. We will go ahead in light rain. 

- Gardening gloves.

- Notebook and pen to take notes.

- You are welcome to bring an afternoon snack and stay afterwards to enjoy the bush walk and forest area around Sharda. It's ideal for meditation or artwork.