Garden Talk: Beautiful Urban Permaculture for Human and Environmental Health

Recorded May 5, 2024.
Join Certified Permaculture Designer and columnist Laura Marie Neubert for a practical, inspiring, and actionable follow-up to ‘Starting An Urban Permaculture Garden’ that includes a brief overview of the basic principles and ethos of (rural) permaculture. Laura Marie will simplify complex ideas, and celebrate the basic but critical relationships between soil biology, human biology, and healthy ecosystems, while walking participants through her beautiful West Vancouver permaculture garden. Learn simple how-tos and what-not-tos for gardens of all shapes and sizes - from sunny gardens to shady balconies. Intended to inspire, motivate and empower, by offering a basic understanding of how permaculture principles can cut through the noise and confusion related to industrial agriculture, broken food systems, and climate change.
Topics covered will include:
- how did we get here
- high cost of cheap food
- soil biology 101
- healthy soil = healthy food
- no-dig raised and container beds
- fungi is a food group
- in-bed worm composting
- rainwater management (swales and rain gardens)
- mini berry and fruit orchards
- re-wilding with native edibles
- increasing biodiversity
- capturing and storing energy
- guild planting
- garden to table menu planning
- recommended reading
Laura Marie Neubert is a West Vancouver based Urban Permaculture Designer, writer, photographer, and edu-documentary film-maker. Her Garden To Table column appears regularly in the North Shore News. Following a successful but stressful career in corporate communications, she returned to university, studying permaculture design, silvopasture, forest farming, mushroom cultivation, and other regenerative land use systems at UBC and Cornell. Her goal is to educate and inspire people - by example - to invest time and energy in their health now so that they can avoid investing later in sickness. Laura Marie is married, has three grown children, and when she isn’t working in or writing about her garden, she is cooking, preserving, reading, or working in the community.
For more information about our upcoming programs, visit westvanlibrary.ca.