Thank you to the kind heartedness and generous support of Jeff Hanavan and Kate Lunde of Soul Song Farm in Chester, VT for sponsoring this talk and the field intensive scheduled for Saturday, March 11.
Date: Friday, March 10, 2017
Time: 7:00pm-9:00pm; doors open at 6:30pm.
Ages: Adults, tweens and teens.
Cost: $8 online before March 8th; $10 at the door as space remains
Location: Newsbank Conference Center | 352 Main Street, Chester, VT
Always wanted to have a beautiful orchard or just a few trees to grow fruit on a small scale, but just didn’t have the experience or confidence to try?
Michael Phillips, an organic fruit tree and berry growers guru, can help.
Learn about the community orchard movement that he helped found at Grow Organic Apples and be fully immersed into the holistic approach to orcharding.
Join us for Phillips’s talk on “Growing Healthy Fruit Trees and Berries, The Biological Way” on Friday, March 10th. Michael will give a 90-minute talk followed by audience Q & A. Books will be available for purchase and signing; light refreshments will be served.
Program Details
Phillips stresses that every farm and homestead can enjoy the timeless pleasure of a fruit orchard. Yet it can be challenging to produce healthy trees and nutritious, great-tasting fruit when back yard gardeners, orchardists and consumers are looking to avoid spraying harmful and expensive chemicals on their trees.
The answer is to create a more holistic orchard, one that emphasizes biological health and diversity – from the microscopic fungi in the soil to the beneficial insects, companion plants, and the birds and wildlife that together form a complete and living orchard ecosystem. In other words, he says, “It’s time for us to start working with nature, rather than fighting against it.”
“Gaining confidence to do this right is key,” he says. “You simply need to get over that proverbial hump that somehow you’re going to screw this up and waste both time and money.”
Phillips talk will help give beginners the type of inspiration and knowledge they’ll need to take a deep breath and get started, as well as provide deeper answers for those with some experience looking for scientific organic approaches.
He’ll discuss the inner workings of the berry and fruit ecosystem, as well as orchard biology, and organic health management. He’ll reference connections between home orcharding and permaculture; the importance of native pollinators; the world of understory plantings; cover crops and biodiversity; and the newest research on safe, homegrown solutions to pest and disease challenges.
Holistic orcharding involves a wide breadth of knowledge and timeliness, yet one fact stands clear—we can have beautiful apples, peaches and the like, all grown without chemical intervention.
Phillips's expertise and enthusiasm for healthy growing shines through, as does his ability to put the usual horticultural facts into an integrated ecology perspective. Exciting times lie ahead for those who now have every reason in the world to confidently plant that very first fruit tree!
Meet Michael Phillips
Winner of the American Horticultural Society Book Award, Michael Phillips is renowned for helping people grow healthy fruit using herbal protocols. The “community orchard movement” that he helped found at www.GrowOrganicApples.com provides a full immersion into the holistic approach to orcharding. His Lost Nation Orchard is part of a medicinal herb farm in northern New Hampshire. He is the author of The Apple Grower and The Holistic Orchard which recently received Garden Book of the Year honors from the American Horticultural Society. His work has been compared with Sir Albert Howard and J.I. Rodale’s classic books on organic gardening. Michael’s latest, Mycorrhizal Planet: How Fungi and Plants Work Together to Create Dynamic Soils, will rock you!