Post Oil Solutions will launch the 5th year of its workshop series, (Re)learning to
Feed Ourselves, on Sunday, January 10, with an overview of what it means to be
eating from our gardens, not only during the height of the growing season and at
harvest time, but the rest of the year, as well. This initial offering will set the
stage for a series of workshops that will follow throughout 2010 that is designed to
both encourage, as well as teach people how, to work toward this goal.

The workshop will begin promptly at 1:00 PM at the Rotch Building, School for
International Training, Brattleboro.

Our fee is a sliding scale, $2/$20, with no one refused for lack of funds.
Pre-registration and pre-payment are required, however: please call 641.715.3900,
ext. 85789 to leave your registration information. Please note: Unregistered
admissions at the door will be charged $20, firm, and admitted only if there is
room.

Vermont's traditional gardening season lasts from Memorial Day through Labor Day,
and as the season progresses there is an abundant supply of local food. With the
arrival of frost and freezing weather the outdoor gardening season comes to an end.
To ensure an on-going supply of produce from your garden this workshop will examine
a wide variety of preservation and low-tech growing methods to provide a strategy so
that one can eat from the garden all 12 months of the year. Topics to be covered
include boiling bath and pressure canning in Mason jars, freezing, vacuum freezing,
drying, lacto-fermentation (sauerkraut, kin-chi), root cellars, cold rooms, cold
bulkheads, salt and oil preservation, cool greenhouses, traditional cold frames,
"hoop" cold frames, overwintered crops in the garden and planting fall crops for
early spring harvest. Over the course of 2010, Post Oil will be offering in-depth
workshops on most of these topics.

The workshop will be led by Post Oil's garden guru, and designer of our (Re)learning
series, Robert King. Robert has worked with many "master gardeners" over the past 40
years. His interests include sustainable agriculture as found in Rudolf Steiner's
Bio-Dynamic scientific/organic methods, Shaker agriculture, and low-tech appropriate
technology (including hand tools).

Additionally, we are offering a companion "textbook" to accompany our workshops.
Published by the University of Maine, Smart Gardener: A Learning Guide for Home
Vegetable Grower is an invaluable 72-page learning guide that will teach you how to
make the most of your home vegetable gardens, large and small. Each of the 12
lessons focuses on a specific aspect of gardening know-how, such as soil, seeds,
garden design, mulches and weeds, and is a very useful supplement to our workshops.
We will be selling this at the workshop for $6.

For information about additional workshop offerings in the months ahead, please go
to www.postoilsolutions.org.