Arboretum to offer healthy soil workshop April 16 and 17

Healthy Soil, Healthy Garden: Unlocking the Soil Foodweb with Compost A Workshop with Dr. Elaine Ingham, PhD At the Arboretum, 301 North Baldwin Ave., Arcadia, CA 91007 Saturday, April 16 & Sunday, April 17 9:00am-5:00 pm Tuition: $275 (2-Day Workshop Includes Lunch, Tea, and Snacks) Reservations required; please call 626.821.4623 for a reservation or email jill.berry@arboretum.org For millennia cultures around the world have been combining their veggie scraps, “yard waste” and manure in various ways to yield composted fertility for their soils. Today with so many techniques to choose from, what actually works? How do we identify healthy compost? For the first time we can finally answer all of these questions. Soil that produces award-winning broccoli will have radically different microbes than an old-growth forest. Learn how to produce healthy compost, compost tea, and extracts that will produce more results in your garden than any fertilizer ever could. Reap a bountiful harvest. Get off fertilizers and herbicides. Increase soil water retention from 30-50%. All with the help of your nearly invisible microbial workforce! Join us! …with Dr. Elaine Ingham in a fun and informative 2-day workshop, where you’ll get a lucid understanding of the critters in your soil. Grow your gardening practice leaps and bounds by working with microbial critters: the key to healthy, living, organically-rich soil! Day 1 (4/16)- An Introduction to the Soil Foodweb. The Introduction class covers all the basic information required for understanding and implementing a successful biological approach to growing. Day 2 (4/17)- Compost, Tea, Extracts. Find out how compost is made by the pros in soil regeneration. Attendees will learn how to properly manage thermal-compost, vermi-compost, and compost tea to guarantee disease-suppressive, soil-building, nutrient-retaining composts and compost teas, and how to consistently produce biologically active and effective compost. Class is suitable for beginners to advanced practitioners. Participants receive a certification of completion. This course will give you the tools you need to make healthy, site-specific compost for beautiful results every time! Dr. Elaine Ingham is recognized around the world as a leader in soil microbiology and research of the soil foodweb. She is an energetic, easy-to-understand speaker who explains what life in the soil is all about. With decades of experience as professor, researcher, and soil benefactor consulting in the field, she’s helped thousands of homeowners, growers, and influential companies understand healthy soil via healthy organisms. Elaine transmits sophisticated information in a down-to-earth way. Her mission is to show that the key to making any plant thrive, from the turf on golf courses to vegetables in the garden, is to team up with suitable soil microbes. Elaine has astounding results to show for it. For more info see: http://www.saypermaculture.com/ & http://www.soilfoodweb.com/ www.arboretum.org