Earth Repair: Here and Abroad

Judith D. Schwartz

​

Around the world, people are finding that even the most harsh and damaged environments can be restored. Judy will highlight what she’s learned from reporting on ecosystem restoration, across various ecological and social landscapes—and how these lessons can be applied in our region.

Judith D. Schwartz is a journalist who focuses on nature-based solutions to global challenges. The author of “The Reindeer Chronicles”, “Water In Plain Sight” and “Cows Save the Planet”, she lives and writes in Bennington, Vermont.

The Might of Tiny Victory Gardens

Acadia Tucker

​

Cultivating your own food is a meaningful way to promote resilience in your household and, by sharing your knowledge— along with the fruits and vegetables of your labors—with neighbors, it can do the same for your community. But what if you don’t have a yard? 

Container gardening allows just about anyone to grow a decent amount of food, no backyard required, and leads to many benefits. While growing food in pots may not do much to mitigate climate change like cultivating in backyard gardens, it can help us adapt to it by building stronger communities, supporting local pollinators, and expanding the reach of organic, regenerative agriculture. 

In this session, we’ll talk about the tools and instructions needed to grow your own tiny victory garden both indoors and out. One that can supply you with as much, or as little, food as you’d like, grown in a way that helps the planet and build more resilience into your life. 

Acadia Tucker is a regenerative farmer, climate activist, and author. Her books are a call to action to citizen gardeners everywhere, and lay the groundwork for planting an organic, regenerative garden. For her, this is gardening as if our future depends on it.

​

Before becoming an author, Acadia started a four-season organic market garden in Washington State inspired by farming pioneers Eliot Coleman and Jean-Martin Fortier. While managing the farm, Acadia grew 200 different food crops before heading back to school at the University of British Columbia to complete a Masters in Land and Water Systems.

She lives in Maine and New Hampshire with her farm dog, Nimbus, and grows hops to support locally sourced craft beer in New England, when she isn't raising perennials in her own backyard. She is also the author of Growing Perennial Foods: A field guide to raising resilient herbs, fruits, & vegetables and Tiny Victory Gardens: Growing food without a backyard.

Dr. Gabriela Pereyra is a Venezuelan/Uruguayan transplant to NY. Her immense love for plant ancestors started at an early age, when she began to learn anything and everything about them, especially their relationship to people in agro-ecosystems. Gaby's current responsibility as Land Network Weaver at the Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust (NEFOC) is to seed and strengthen relationships, networks, collaborations, and knowledge exchange among Black, Indigenous, and other land stewards of color. Over the past 15 years, Gaby has worked alongside farmers and land stewards from the Americas, Africa, and Europe, learning about the magical trade-off of carbon, nitrogen, and water between the soil, plants, and the sky. As a descendent of immigrant and refugee ancestors and as an immigrant herself, her commitment is to the re-connection of communities and land, under land tenure models that support human beings and non-humans beings, to create more equitable possibilities for our future ancestors.

Growing Fruits & Nuts: Twenty Years of Tree Crop Trials in the North Country

Keith Morris

​

Join Keith Morris of Willow Crossing Farm (VT) for a special focus on Fruits and Nuts for the Northeast - in an organic/ecologically regenerative context.  

We’ll look at dozens of multi-purpose and underutilized species from Kiwis and Korean Nut Pines, to Figs and Filberts, Peaches and Pecans, and more. We’ll explore the history and ecology of these potential crops and share a no-holds barred assessment of our successes, failures, challenges, and potential for regional collaboration. We’ll also discuss hedgerows, living fencing, riparian buffers, floodplain planting, windbreaks, hydric soils, and pasture/alley crop, or other agroforestry opportunities on the horizon - and the potential for ‘carbon farming’ and farm resilience with perennials and protracted planning. 

Keith Morris has been applying his lifelong love of nature and culture and experience as an activist to permaculture and ecological design since 1996. Since 2000, he has worked professionally as a designer, builder, and grower of ecologically regenerative, socially just, and culturally appropriate whole-systems in cities and country sides around the world.

​

He teaches at the University of Vermont, the Yestermorrow Design Build School, Sterling College, Paul Smiths College, Burlington Permaculture, and has worked for USAID ‘Farmer to Farmer’ in Nigeria and Ghana.