**Toby Hemenway's "Building Perfect Garden Soil" Workshop 7/19-TLC Farm**

Learn from world-renowned permaculture expert Toby Hemenway at Tryon Life Community Farm’s inspiring sustainability education center!  This full-day workshop will begin by showing exactly what makes up a perfect garden soil for growing sturdy, healthy plants that lets gardeners avoid pest and disease problems. We'll look at the key players in fertile gardens: the marvelous creatures that build our soil, and we'll learn how to keep them happy and abundant. We'll also see how to make great compost, and cover many other techniques for soil building, such as sheet mulch, compost teas, cover crops, and more.

And check out: Designing a Food Forest (Aug. 2) Food forests are life-filled places that not only provide food for people, but habitat for wildlife, carbon sequestering, biodiversity, natural soil building, beauty and tranquility, and a host of other benefits. This workshop will cover the basics of designing, planting, and maintaining a many-layered woodland garden of fruit and nut trees, perennial and annual vegetables, and flowers.

Each workshop runs from 10 am- 5 pm, and costs $60 (or register for both for $100).  Pre-registration is required. For workshop details and registration information, visit www.tryonfarm.org, email [email protected] or call 503-245-3847.

About Toby Hemenway: http://patternliteracy.com Toby Hemenway is the author of the first major North American book on permaculture, Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, and an adjunct professor at Portland State University. He is also Scholar in Residence at Pacific University.

After obtaining a degree in biology from Tufts University, Toby worked for many years as a researcher in genetics and immunology, first in academic laboratories including Harvard and the University of Washington in Seattle, and then at Immunex, a major medical biotech company. At about the time he was growing dissatisfied with the direction biotechnology was taking, he discovered permaculture, a design approach based on ecological principles that creates sustainable landscapes, homes, and workplaces.

A career change followed, and Toby and his wife spent ten years creating a rural permaculture site in southern Oregon. He was associate editor of Permaculture Activist, a journal of ecological design and sustainable culture, from 1999 to 2004. His current project is developing urban sustainability resources in Portland, Oregon, where he now lives. He teaches permaculture and consults and lectures on ecological design throughout the country. His writing has appeared in magazines such as Whole Earth Review, Natural Home, and Kitchen Gardener, and he is on the board of directors for TLC Farm.