Integrated Pest Management
The Small Scale Organic Orchard
Fundamentals of Successful Organic Gardening
Tips & Techniques 1 - Planning Your Garden, A Conversation With Master Gardeners of Project Grow
This is a Q&A panel of Project Grow gardeners led by Joet Reoma, Eric Meves and others. Main topics gardening by Michigan calendar, identifying vegetables by family and season, cultivating soil health throughout the season, anticipating common gardening tasks and problems as well as gardening as part of self growth, garden constraints by chosen site and using an ecosystem approach to organize gardening,
Tomatoes and Chilis in the Organic Garden
Secrets to growing healthy and productive tomato and pepper plants will be revealed in this class. Pruning, pinching, mulching and the use of proper vine support will be presented. Common diseases and their control will be discussed. New developments in the breeding of heirloom tomatoes and the vast array of chili varieties will be reviewed.
Register here
Instructor: Royer Held
Ages: 18 - Adult.
Fee: $15
Seed Starting Indoors
This is a Q&A discussion by a panel led by Marcella Trautmann (heirloom seeds), Kirk Jones (Project Grow's Managing Director) and Joanie Stovall (seed distribution). Main topics include tips for propagating plants, starting seeds by last frost date, encouraging seed germination, tools for indoor germination, and best practices for seedling survival.
Growing Raspberries and Blackberries
Learn how to plant and maintain a healthy and productive bed of raspberries or blackberries. Available varieties will be presented and discussed. Understand why more canes don’t mean more fruit and what to do to improve your yields. Pest problems common to cane fruit and means to control them will be reviewed. Proper mulching, fall care, and measures required to control unwanted spread of canes will be covered.
Raised Beds - Cultivating Edibles on Tiny Space
This class covers tips & techniques for cultivating edible plants in small plots. Led by Joet Reoma. Topics include The ideal raised garden bed, filling beds with organic materials, ecological limits of small space gardening and best gardening practice for tiny raised garden beds.
Soil Health - Using Cover Crops, Green Manure & Fungi in Small Plots
Led by Joet Reoma, Eric Meves, and others. Topics include mimicking nature in small space gardening, soil health and compacting nutrients into a small space, choosing cover crop and green manure plants, and integrating fungi (mushrooms) into raised garden beds.
Seed Potatoes, Potato Seed and Sweet Potato Slips
Learn all about the origins of potatoes and sweet potatoes and the different ways they can be grown. Special attention will be paid to the cultivation of indigenous potato varieties from Bolivia, Peru, and Chili. While the Michigan growing season is too short for sweet potatoes to produce seed, there are many varieties that may be grown in a Michigan garden with great success. Sweet potatoes are grown from slips, which are rooting shoots that start to grow from the tuber. You can start your own slips, or purchase them from mail order nurseries. Learn how to successfully start your slips and grow them in the garden.
Ages: 18 - Adult.
Fee: $15
Best Practices in Community Composting - A Conversation With Master Composters of Washtenaw County
This is a Q&A discussion by the County’s MCCP Faculty led by Nancy Stone, Chris Simmons, Liza Perschke, Jesse Raudenbush, David Corsa, and Joet Reoma. Topics include history of composting from known past To present, the best hot and cold composting methods, composting in a school system, creating a community composting education center (CCEC), placement and operation of composting center, and new trends in scalable ecological composting methods.
Pollinators and Their Flowers
Honey bees are important pollinators, but they aren’t the only ones! Not only that, but they were introduced to America from Europe. Find out about all the other pollinators that are visiting your garden and how to keep them happy and well fed. We will explore the relationship between flowers and pollinators, how it evolved and how native plants and pollinators depend on each other.
Instructor: Royer Held
Ages: 18 - Adult.
Fee: $15
Register here
Gardening Techniques That Affect Soil Health - CANCELLED
A Conversation With Washtenaw Master Gardener and Permaculturist Joet Reoma. The given or implied gardening tip is cultivate soil health. Under this gardening tip are some gardening techniques such such as, tilling, working the land without plan, mulching by mulch type, hoeing, cover crops, raised bed gardening, crop rotation, and companion-high density spacing. - CANCELLED DUE TO LACK OF PANEL & HEALTH REASONS. TO BE RESCHEDULED, TBD. Contact: joet@projectgrowgardens.org, 734-972-8875.
Please register here
Sweet Peas!
This will be an outdoor in person class about sweet peas (the peas grown for fragrant flowers, not edible peas). It will discuss the history of domestic sweet peas and focus on the cordon method of growing sweet peas for cut flowers. The class is limited to 20 people. If it is raining on June 26th, we will email everyone who has registered and reschedule the class for June 27th. Please register here.
Instructor - Kirk Jones
- Please wear a mask at this event.
- There are no restrooms available to the public at Dawn Farm so please plan accordingly.
- We will meet at a wooden bench surrounded by yews beyond the dumpster in the corner of the Dawn Farm parking lot.
Tomato Tasting
Project Grow held our first tomato tasting in 2001 and have held one every year since except for one year when late blight took out the tomatoes and in 2020 because of the pandemic. But, the tomato tasting will be back in 2021!