Zachariah Ben is a sixth-generation farmer and traditional sandpainter based in Shiprock, New Mexico. He is of the “Giant People” born for the “Red Running Into Water” clan. His maternal grandfather’s clan is the “Red House People” and his paternal grandfather is of the “Salt People.” With more than a decade of experience in traditional Navajo agriculture, Zach works with his partner Mary on their farm and business in New Mexico. Read more

In this two-hour workshop session, led by community members Lauren Zitney and Nicole Civita, we will explore Roles for reWorlding, a framework developed within otherWise to help communities name, value, and practice the diverse orientations that make collective change and transformation possible. Instead of centering productivity or conventional leadership, this framework honors the often overlooked capacities that sustain collective life: from knowledge carriers, healers, and pattern-workers, to menders, protectors, builders, and subverters. Read more

Using wood that we provisioned earlier in the winter in our chainsawing workshop, we will begin to prepare for spring food production by inoculating our logs with shiitake mushroom mycelium. Developing a strong relationship with our fungal kin is a key practice in forming diverse, resilient community food networks because they are so quick, easy and passive to grow. Understanding general fungal biology and cultivation is also a great skill to develop for a variety of applications from recycling/composting various forms of organic excess, rehabilitating polluted landscapes, creating biomaterials such as certain forms of synthetic leather or insulation, art, medicine and more. This workshop also invites us to notice the many different time-scales that various forms of life are operating on. In just a few days a dormant log can suddenly be exploding with visible fertility. Watching your mushrooms colonize and then fruit allows you to bear witness to an… Read more

Adam Alexander has spent many years searching out communities that have still conserved their rare, endangered garden crops. His travels have taken him all over the world, from Albanian villages to Ethiopian farmer collectives, and he’s written two books on his research and the importance of locally-adapted, community-sovereign seeds; The Seed Detective and The Accidental Seed Heroes. In his own garden he experiments with his own landrace varieties, and he’s currently growing heritage Syrian vegetable seed to be returned to the Middle East as part of a programme to revive traditional horticulture. Whether with newly developed strains or old, long-stewarded, “undiscovered” varieties, we should do everything we can to bring diverse and locally adapted fruits, vegetables, and grains to our diets and our landscapes. Join us for this otherGardens gathering as Adam shares his experience with some of these seeds! Read more

Our Placedness cycle takes us next to a special aspect of place: Terroir. Terroir is the unique flavor and properties a food or drink develops depending on the unique regional conditions in which it was grown. When we experience or aspire to placedness, in many ways we’re aspiring the deepening of our relationship with cultural and physical terroir. Read more

Understanding how to care for trees is an integral part of developing diverse perennial food systems. Perennial plantings are a powerful approach to reclaiming the essential labor of local food production, because there is the possibility of continuous growth and harvest, without as much input of labor. A few key agroforestry skills for caring for our largest perennial kin are pruning, grafting and coppicing trees. Pruning keeps the tree healthy and encourages fruiting. Grafting allows one to grow a diversity of varieties from one plant, and allows one to trade and forage varieties from various sources. And coppicing allows one to harvest fire (and other forms of) wood without the devastating effects or intensive processing of logging and full tree felling. Read more

What might become possible in our communities if we took local imagination as seriously as we take local infrastructure? How might rural places – and the people rooted in them – become catalysts for the kinds of futures we long for but rarely pause to articulate? Join Radically Rural and otherWise for a 90-minute online session with Rob Hopkins, renowned imagination activist, co-founder of the Transition Town movement, and author of How to Fall in Love with the Future. Rob’s work invites us to consider a simple but transformative idea: that vivid, sensory, grounded imaginations of better futures can sharpen our sense of agency right now – especially in times of uncertainty or erosion. Read more

In this workshop, we will come together for a weekend to learn a creative approach to framing a small bespoke wooden structure that will allow us to piece together salvaged windows into a workable greenhouse. Discarded and cracked windows that can no longer serve as working windows in a house due to problems with insulation or even just aesthetics can find new life sheltering our seeds. We will discuss sourcing windows, cleaning them up, and putting them together. Read more

In this workshop, we will sit with their hum and consider not just the practical steps to caring and being cared for by these special creatures, but also the context of their existence in this modern landscape, and the perennial, eusocial way that they belong together, within the hive and the ecosystem, season after season. Read more